Happy Friday.
Most small business owners have heard the word "AI" around 4,000 times and done absolutely nothing with it. That's not a criticism. That's a business.
IN TODAY'S EDITION, TL;DR
The consulting play hiding in plain sight: AI audits for small businesses
A valuation tracker that should exist but doesn't
Meta wired 720 human brains to MRI machines and gave the output away for free
The clip economy is eating traditional media alive
The Friday Idea
💡 An AI audit business you can start this weekend with no product, no funding, and no technical degree.
The Problem: Did you know there are 33 million small businesses in the US. Most have no AI tools. Not because they're resistant. Because nobody has explained it in plain terms. Ask a local law firm or a mid size HVAC company what they're doing with AI. Blank stare. Maybe a vague reference to ChatGPT. They've heard the word a hundred times. They've done nothing.
🛠 Solution: You become the AI audit person. You just tell you where the money is leaking. Two hours on site or Zoom. You walk through their workflows and deliver a written report: where AI can replace manual work, which tools fit, what to do first.
The Business Model
Audit: flat fee per business. Two to three hours of your time including the written report.
Retainer: monthly implementation support after the audit. Optional but an easy upsell once you've identified a pile of solvable problems.
The math is simple. Start with audits. Add a handful of retainers. This is a six figure business with a laptop and a Google Doc template.
The Validation Filter
Why Start This Now?
The adoption gap is massive. Large enterprises have 3-4x the AI adoption rate of small businesses. McKinsey pegged enterprise AI adoption at over 50% in 2024. Small business adoption sits closer to 13%. That gap is your market.
The knowledge barrier is the #1 blocker. In a 2024 US Chamber of Commerce survey, small business owners ranked "not knowing where to start" as the top reason for not adopting AI. Not cost. Not trust. Not time. Knowledge.
33 million small businesses in the US. Most have fewer than 10 employees. No IT department. No innovation budget. Nobody internally who owns this problem.
The window is open but not permanent. Every month more generalist consultants figure this out. Right now it's still early enough to own the niche.
The Idea Scorecard
How to Test This in a Week
Post in r/smallbusiness. "Would you pay for a two-hour AI audit of your operations? Trying to understand where demand actually is." The replies will tell you everything.
Find one warm lead. You know a small business owner. Do their audit free in exchange for a 20-minute debrief and a testimonial. One case study is your entire sales funnel.
Build your intake doc. Ask Claude for a 20-question AI operations audit framework for small businesses. That's your product. Takes 30 minutes.
Charge for the second one. Two people paying before you've systematized anything means you have a business.
Napkin Note Ideas
The Idea: A business valuation tracker that runs in the background for years before you sell.
The Problem: A business takes 20 or 30 years to build. The decision to sell takes 90 days. That's when most owners find out what their business is actually worth — and what's been quietly killing the multiple for years. Customer concentration too high. Owner too involved. Margins too thin. All fixable. None of them fixed, because nobody named them early enough.
The Solution: A lightweight SaaS that connects to your books and produces a monthly valuation score based on the factors buyers actually weigh: revenue diversity, margins, owner dependency, customer concentration. A dashboard breaks the score into components and flags what's costing points.
The Business Model
Two tiers: solo operators and businesses past seven figures. Priced to be a no-brainer monthly expense.
Brokers and M&A attorneys refer clients years before a sale in exchange for a cut when the engagement starts. That's your distribution channel built in.
Scale the subscriber base and layer on deal room tools and buyer matching to raise the ceiling per account.
Weekly Gems Worth Reading
Meta quietly open sourced an AI model trained on 720 MRI-scanned human brains that predicts, frame by frame, how your brain reacts to a video
Anthropic just launched Claude Opus 4.7, their best model yet (of course they’d say that). We still want Mythos though…
Ed Elson's article on The Clip Economy and how short-form clips are reshaping attention and media is a great read.
That’s all guys
That's Friday. An audit business you can start Monday, a SaaS idea for the exit-planners, and Meta quietly handing neuromarketing to anyone with a laptop. Lot to build this weekend.
Talk Monday.