Thirty Days, One Question
I just spent a month with land investors, trades business owners and operators running homestead farms. Different rooms, different industries, different revenue numbers. Same question every single time.
How do I actually use this stuff.
A year ago that question came with a smirk and a comment about hallucinations. Now it comes with a notepad open and a workflow already in mind. Something shifted while I was on the road, and being in thirty days of these rooms back to back made it impossible to miss.
The Question Got Specific
At the homestead farm, the operators were running real pieces of the business with AI they had built themselves. An operating system stitched together from the tools they already used, designed around how their farm actually runs. Animal feedings. Customer follow up. Order intake. Inventory. None of it looked like a polished SaaS demo. It looked like a family running a real business with real animals and real seasons, using AI to handle the parts that used to eat their evenings, so they could spend that time outside teaching their kids the value of hard work and what it means to be connected to the land.
That is the version of this technology I keep thinking about. Not the demos. Not the hype. A family on a farm, building their own systems, getting their time back.
At the Land Mastermind, I gave a talk on how AI is changing what a land business actually looks like under the hood. Big shoutout to Austin Marvel for putting on an epic event at Jerry Norton's farm in Tennessee.
The conversations afterward were not about whether AI was real. They were about which workflow to encode first. One investor pulled me aside and said his acquisitions team was drowning in lead intake. Another asked about a dispositions agent that would write listings the way his best closer talks. A third was already running a Claude based pipeline for due diligence and just wanted to compare notes.
On the webinar, completely different audience, the same questions came back.
How do I get my expertise out of my head. How do I connect this to what I already use. How do I stop paying for ten tools when I could build the one I actually need.
The early curiosity period is over. The people who are still skeptical are the ones who have not actually sat down with a real tool yet. Everyone else has moved past the slop and the fad debates and is trying to figure out where to start.
The wave is not coming for tech companies. It already arrived for everyone else.
Why Y Combinator and Sequoia Are Right
For the last decade, software meant SaaS. Pick a category, find a horizontal tool, pay a seat license, learn the dashboard, work around the parts that do not fit your business.
Y Combinator and Sequoia have both been writing about this shift for the past year. The thesis is that the next generation of software will not be horizontal SaaS sold to everyone. It will be vertical, specific, and often built by the operator who actually does the work. The death of horizontal SaaS, the rise of vertical AI agents. Salesforce is listening and released Headless 360 last month, traditional UI is dead.
I see this in every client conversation now. The people who used to be SaaS buyers are starting to ask whether they should just build the thing themselves. Not because they want to be developers. Because the leverage to build is finally available to a domain expert who has never written a line of code.
Claude Code. Cowork. Managed Agents. The MCP stack. A single operator with deep expertise and a willingness to learn can now ship the kind of system that used to require a Series A and a team of engineers.
That is the part most people are still missing.
Build the Operating System
The mistake I keep seeing is treating AI like a feature. People want a chatbot bolted onto their existing process. That is not where the wins are.
The wins are in the operating system. The connective tissue between the tools you already pay for. The encoded version of the playbook in your head. The system that runs the way you would run the business on your best day, every day, even when you are on a plane between conferences.
This is what I have been showing in every conversation for the last month. It is what we are building inside PassTheKeys, where we are capturing the knowledge in a business owner's head before they exit, and turning it into a system the next operator can actually run. We are opening up beta access this month. If you are an owner thinking about a transition in the next few years, or you just want to see how this works, you can apply at passthekeys.ai/beta.
It still cracks me up that I am running a business that sits at the intersection of the hardest asset on the planet, land, and the most disruptive technology any of us will see in our lifetime, artificial intelligence. Ten years ago that sentence would have sounded like nonsense. Today it is just the work.
If you have an idea, anything is possible right now. The constraint is not the technology anymore. It is creativity, and the willingness to actually start.
I am back at the desk this week. Heads down on the build queue, which is longer than it has ever been.
If you want to see what this actually looks like in practice, I am hosting a free webinar on May 20th: How to Set Up Your First Personal Assistant in Claude Cowork. We will go from zero to a working assistant connected to your real tools, live, in one session. Register at webinar.growthboost.ai.
In the meantime, if your site is not showing up in AI search yet, the free SEO and AEO audit at audit.growthboost.ai is the fastest way to see where you stand.
See you next Tuesday.
Nick
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