Most people ask the wrong question about AI. They want to know what it can write for them. The question that moves money is quieter: which of the tools you already pay for will your AI agent be allowed to reach?
Your software is splitting into two piles. One pile your agent can reach into, pull data from, and run on your behalf. The other pile is a locked box. Almost nobody sorts their stack on purpose.
How we got the subscription trap
Walk it back a few years. You used to buy software the way you bought anything else. One payment, a disc, and the thing was yours. Office, the design tools, the accounting program, all of it sat on your machine and you owned the license. It had flaws, but it was yours.
Then the whole industry switched to renting. Every tool became a monthly fee. The honest reason was not better software. It was smoother quarterly earnings. A one-time release gives a company one big sales quarter and then a long slide until the next launch, and investors hate that gap. A subscription erases it. Now revenue is steady, predictable, and easy to grow: raise the price ten percent and revenue climbs ten percent, whether the product improved or not.
You feel the result as subscription fatigue. Even a business that barely touches software ends up carrying a stack of recurring bills, paying every month for tools it uses twice a year. I ran a gym for sixteen years, about as far from a software company as you can get, and we still carried thousands of dollars a year in subscriptions, most of them idle most of the time.
Most owners miss the real opening. Everyone hears “AI raises profitability” and jumps straight to replacing people. Wrong target. The easier win is replacing the pile of subscriptions you resent, taking back the ownership, and getting tools that work directly with your own AI. That goes straight to your bottom line, and it gets better the stronger your team is.
The two piles
Start sorting your software into two piles.
The first pile is the tools your AI can work with natively. I can sit in one window and say, go into the accounting software, pull my profit and loss, export the balance sheet to a PDF, and draft the email to my accountant. The agent goes and does it. The big accounting platforms are a good example of companies that are ahead here. They moved.
The second pile is everything that does not connect. Asking your agent to touch it feels like pulling teeth. Website platforms are the worst offenders right now. They make real money hosting sites and selling the tools around them, and most of them are slow to open the door to your agent. Some are catching up, some are decent, and at least one of the big names is still clunky and behind. You will know yours the moment you try to get your agent to update a page and hit a wall.
That gap is not a minor annoyance. It is a compounding cost. One owner asks a question and has the full picture before coffee. The other is still logging into six sites and stitching numbers together by hand, donating an hour a week to software that will not cooperate, and falling a little further behind every month.
MCP: the standard outlet
The reason any of this works is a standard called MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Skip the acronym and picture a wall outlet. Before standard outlets, every device needed its own custom plug. Then everyone agreed on one shape and anything could plug into anything. MCP is that outlet for AI. A company builds one door, and your agent can walk through it, pull the data, run the task, and hand back the result.
That turns into a simple habit. Before you fight a tool, look it up. Does the payroll company have an MCP server? If yes, connect it, and now your agent can run payroll, pull hours, and draft the tax summary for your accountant from the same window where it does everything else. Most forward-thinking companies already have this. Some do not. Go through every login your business pays for and check.
When it all connects, you run the business from one window. The books, payroll, expenses, invoices, the file share, the whole Google suite, the website, all reachable from one place. One spot, one agent, one question.
Triage: green, yellow, red
Here is the work for this week. Pull your bank statement, find every software subscription, and sort each one into three piles.
Green. Your agent works with it beautifully. A subscription you have carried forever just became far more useful, and now your agents are in it every day pulling better data than you ever pulled by hand. AI made it better. Lean in.
Yellow. Some of it connects. You can pull a little data, aggregate a few things, but you cannot do everything you want yet. Do not rip it out. Watch it, test it, keep your options open.
Red. No connection, no door, and it is blocking you. This is the pile to plan around. Not a panic, just a plan: what would I replace this with, and what would it take.
The escape hatch
The red pile used to be a dead end. Not anymore.
If a tool will not open its door, you route around it. Your agent can build the thing, a clean landing page written on your own machine in minutes, or a simple internal tool that does what you need and nothing else. Or you self-host the open-source version and own it outright, no subscription and no gatekeeper.
Websites are the easiest place to start. Build your site in code, keep it in your own folder backed up in three places, and host it for free or close to it. Drop your current site into your AI, recreate it, and you own it a hundred percent with no monthly fee. Then it gets more powerful, not less, because your agent can read the site for search and local visibility in real time, spin up a campaign landing page, or point you at a new market, all on command.
I think about the software we ran at the gym. The version from eight years ago did everything we needed. Then the company took on outside money, and the only way to justify it was to keep shipping features nobody asked for while the price climbed year after year. Today I would rebuild the simple version that does exactly what I need, save thousands a year, and take it straight to the bottom line. More and more owners, including people who are not technical at all, are already doing exactly this.
Own the system
This connects to what I wrote on Tuesday about becoming a super user: own the folder, rent the engine. Your brain, your rules, your files live locally and belong to you. The AI is the engine you plug into them.
That carries more weight than it sounds. A wave of these companies is heading toward going public, and public companies face the same earnings pressure that built the subscription trap in the first place. Pricing will move. If your whole operation lives inside one company’s locked box, you are exposed. If you own your folder, you point a different engine at the same files and keep working. The open and free models are improving fast and trail the leaders by months, not years. Most small businesses do not need the absolute cutting edge to run their business well.
So this week, take the test. Pull the statement, sort the stack, green, yellow, red. The owners who do this build an efficiency lead that gets harder to catch the longer it runs. The ones who keep renting locked boxes keep paying more for less.
— Jeff
Jeff Binek runs CBus AI Agents in Dublin, Ohio, building AI systems for small businesses across Central Ohio. More at cbusaiagents.com.
Full transcript
Auto-transcribed and lightly cleaned. Speaker is Jeff Binek throughout.
All right, guys, what’s going on today we’re going to be talking a bit of market dynamics software and Maybe even a little bit of theory This is something I’ve had the opportunity over the past probably two or three weeks to be doing a bit of a deeper dive into And I get this information a lot from a handful of different sources, right? I’ve tried to curate the content that I’m getting in a mix of two different people The first group of people are AI native people people who are working for companies Anthropic XAI Google Or maybe used to work at those companies and have gone off and started something on their own and they’re doing podcasts circuits or writing blogs They’re writing ex articles actually is a really good way to kind of keep up to date
The other group is actually investors and And people who are going on to investing podcasts or finance podcasts and talking a little bit more on the cutting edge and how they kind of see these Pictures going around the world like how things are changing consistently and the reason I think their viewpoint is very very important Is two things one they have a lot of skin in the game, right? It’s really easy for an AI company to get in there Somebody works for an AI company to get in there and start talking about, you know Oh, how great all of our stuff is and how it’s going to revolutionize this that and the other and of course they think that But when an outside firm who has an investment firm has done a bunch of research talked to all the managers of all of these different companies and can talk about the Things going on across an entire industry or across multiple companies. They know multiple different managers
Owners companies, etc They’re going to be giving you a much more broad viewpoint But they’re also going to a lot of times be talking about their book right or that’s kind of the the term in investing circles is talk your book right They’re going to be talking about where their money is and a lot of these people are putting substantial sums of money So their money is where their mouth is right they’re not going to be investing in something unless they really really believe that it is the future And it’s hard to get an edge in the investing world right now So that’s kind of where this has come up I’ve also been viewing it through my lens of the companies that I work with where I’m making recommendations where I have frustrations where the owners have frustrations and why those frustrations come up And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today is how this world of software
Has sort of evolved but also kind of where we’re at and what things are looking like future moving So just kind of a brief overview of this and we’re going to go through the slides here in a second if you guys are watching on YouTube We’re going to go on some some different tangents, but I just want to kind of give my brief history And how I remember things for myself right now if you can go all the way back all right I am a original real floppy disk put it in the thing lower the thing to lock it in and you’re playing Oregon trail In the library and it’s like the greatest thing ever because you know you’re in second grade And you’re you know your teacher has let you use the computers to play Oregon trail for a half an hour And you are over the moon because you know you’re losing ox for crossing the river and
You know, that’s that’s the exciting year old that’s software right is kind of where things started Uh, that’s that’s kind of where my brain goes So if we go through this evolution We have the these you know big revolutionary softwares that kind of started to come out as a subscription service The first one that I can remember is AOL So AOL was a you know a software that you would use to connect into the internet They I believe would do it by minutes at first and so you’d have this recurring subscription cost to use the service Eventually these things started to turn into like okay now. We’ve got some websites Websites at first were struggling to figure out how they were going to monetize them
They had all these big booms and bust you have the big 2001 a 2000 2001 Kind of like web boom right where these things went up and everybody had you know Pets.com always the popular version of this right Flies up like ridiculous stock everyone invests a ton of money and then everyone realizes like oh, we’re not there yet Now the funny part about that was the investment thesis wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was just poorly timed right The idea behind it was correct that Web and web services and software companies were going to actually be the winners right The problem was everyone tried to frontrun it and everyone got it wrong right like you weren’t Picking the Amazon’s and you weren’t seeing the Googles and you couldn’t necessarily see those companies born out of it yet It’s almost like the failures and the sacrifices and why they failed and sacrifice had to happen the way they happened
So that future software companies could have just changed course and figure out how to monetize properly And then obviously we we are where we are now where most of the biggest companies in the world are Generally software companies right now you’ve got a couple of really good hardware companies that have started to come in And take a big market share But when we start thinking about where software is going to go I think there’s still a huge chunk of the market the stock market the American economy the world economy that is pretty heavily invested in software and I think that that’s the number one thing the more that I do this the more that I see that area is actually rife for Disruption and so what you’re starting to see now I think is some people starting to recognize that
Starting to maybe pull money away from pure software companies and starting to invest more in either hardware companies Or some of these more future looking things which we’ll talk about in a second So When we think about this like when we think about SaaS right software as a service. Okay This has been the big thing. I also think that the culture and I’ll just I’ll speak for myself But I do think this annoyance is shared amongst everybody and here’s the I can give 10 examples of this right But I’ll give the most obvious one for me which is like windows Adobe is another one that comes to mind Trying to think of things that like you know a Microsoft office right where things that you used to be able to buy a CD
You would put it into your computer you would use the software you would pay one time And now you had the software and you could use you know the operating service you could or the the operating system You could use the software you could use Mike you know Docs and or sorry you could use word and excel and you know Adobe acrobat and Audition and premiering like you you had access to these things right and It worked right now there were some problems with it right updates and you know changing codes and you know So what these companies all had the idea around was this idea of you know software as a service So we’re gonna switch to a subscription model and now every single thing that you can possibly think of is a monthly subscription cost
And the real reason that they did this if we’re all being honest with each other is quarterly earnings right they did this because Before you had to have one big massive dump or drop so you would drop a new You know Microsoft operating system a new version of windows and it would drop as the CD and you would get just Millions of dollars of sales all in one quarter and that quarter would look absolutely incredible And then that sales would get worse the next quarter worse the next quarter worse the next quarter as you got further away from it And then there’s this big like wait For all the companies to unveil their new product okay, and
In that interim time people didn’t know how to invest right is your next product gonna be good as anyone even gonna want it right And what it did was it smoothed out These quarterly earning statements for these stocks, okay So now companies can go on and they can say oh we have this many subscriptions This was our subscription revenue. This is how many people we have and then if we want to make more money next quarter or more money next year All we have to do is raise our subscription cost by 10% and now our revenue went up 10% year over year And that’s how every one of these companies and you guys were probably like me you have subscription fatigue And what that is is those are all the pieces of software that you use, okay, so that’s Spotify if you’re if you’re a company
There’s probably hundreds of these right you have a Google subscription a Microsoft subscription You have a drop box or a share file subscription You’ve got all of your CRM subscriptions your website subscriptions any applications any products that you guys have to use all subscriptions, okay, and I know for Friendship, which is not a Software heavy business like a gym is not a software heavy business But we still had probably a thousand to two thousand to three thousand dollars of subscriptions that we would have to use All the time and I remember just like months and months going by where like we wouldn’t use that service We wouldn’t need it at all and we were paying the subscription costs all because at one time we would need to use it a ton right
And that’s super frustrating when you used to own the software right you’d own the license for that It made sense for me to pay one time cost of a hundred dollars to own the entire Adobe suite And then just be able to use that when I needed it okay and over time out or my money back But now with the subscriptions and the way that they work a lot of times is a losing proposition Okay, so that entire context is important for us to go into this conversation with Because not only that fatigue but that frustration with the actual business model is what we are going to be able to start Chipping away out and I think that if you guys are looking at this as an investor I think it’s very interesting to think about but if you guys are looking at this as an operator and a business owner I think this is like
Such an opportunity for you to drive things to your bottom line to make more profit to have more ownership To have more control and like same thing. I think all these people are thinking oh my gosh, you know AI everyone keeps talking about how AI is going to increase profitability how AI is going to increase productivity How it’s going to do this that and the other and everyone has taken that to mean. Oh, they’re going to replace people Know what if we can just replace all of these software subscription services that total 45,000 dollars a year Or a lot more for companies that are software native right if you guys are a software or a tech company You guys are probably way north of that 10 15 25,000 dollars a month So we’re talking about replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars Improving quality of use improving ownership and allowing things to work natively with our own AI agents
So we’re faster and more efficient with these things like this is where I have started to get really excited About the future and the cool part about this is like The more team you have and the better people you have the better this is going to be for you So this actually I think helps retention. So something I’m always kind of thinking about as I work with these small businesses Right So let’s start talking from a small business perspective, right There’s two piles of things that we are I’m starting to look at software in terms of two different piles The tools where our AI can work with them natively where it can connect and I can be working in VS Code or in Claude Or even you know in whatever system you guys are natively working in okay
Whatever AI, I guess you know agent system you’re working in um And I can just be in my agent window and say You know, hey, I want you to go into my QuickBooks pull down my P&L I need to send a quick snapshot of my balance sheet over to my CPA pull that down for me You know export it all into a PDF and then draft a Email to my CPA for me right and my agentic system can just go out fetch that and do that Okay, and Intuit is a pretty good example right now of a company that is I would say ahead of the game from a software Software subscription service again huge annoyance. I know if Grant’s listening is gonna be he hates He hates into it. He hates that QuickBooks is all online now is all the subscription service again
That was a company used to just be able to buy the floppy disk and or buy the CD put it in and you owned QuickBooks, right? So but they are doing a good job of integrating okay and then the other bucket of our or the other pile Is the software subscription companies that we have that are not integrating with our AI system or our AI tools and so It’s like pulling teeth for us To say you know, oh, I want you to go in so I’ve had this experience now a couple different times with WordPress and Wix I find that actually web providers website companies who are making a boatload of money off of people Hosting their website and using their software to create a website and we’ll circle around to this in a second They are like way behind and these companies are To me, I would say especially annoying
And I’ll tell you why as somebody who’s spent a boatload of time building websites, okay? They know That writing code in HTML and writing websites from scratch is a very hard proposition for 99% of people especially business owners They also need that know that business owners need to not only be able to run websites But be able to do all of these other things from like an SEO and a geo perspective to be able to be found locally And those things are integral to them running a good business And if they don’t have those tools their website again is effectively worthless So if we take WordPress as an absolutely egregious example of this, okay Their software is outdated antiquated not good, okay?
Squarespace is an example of another company that I’ve used I’ve built websites on both that is significantly better in terms of usability and helping Non coders make websites, okay WordPress then started doing this idea called plugins or add-ons Where you could start plugging in what I would call our essential features to a website And again, this is just one of those things that like people have started doing which I just think is such Bad business practice it lacks integrity to me To say like this is not an included service, okay, and I know like BMW has gotten hammered on this right where it’s like oh if you want to use cruise control That’s an additional so you know upgrade in your subscription service to your BMW if you want to be able to start your car
You know use the remote starter that’s an additional subscription service Like go screw yourself that is such a just dick move right you you built the car with the functionality And now you’re just gonna hamstring everybody like I just I absolutely hate those people like hate whoever sat in that office and had that idea Those people just need like a triple punch in the face they are such losers and I hate them right Take all of that, okay And like those like those ideas those people those companies those are the ones where like we’re gonna use AI and just completely Delete those people from the business world as they deserve to be deleted because that’s how they chose to run their business Okay, so let’s take that as our two buckets, okay companies that are integrating well with your AI and companies that are not okay Sorry, I got off of my I get I get hot talking about that stuff all right
So um, let’s start kind of thinking about this right what we want to do and I talked about this in my blog post on Tuesday I highly recommend reading that it’s a very important post to become a super user and Claude But we need to own the folder set, okay And I think a lot of people who are still using web-based AI are running going to run into this issue And it’s gonna be a nasty wake up call if and when it happens, okay There is a future that’s not too distant where these AI companies are going to have to start to make decisions On a financial perspective, right, but also what’s best for their company on how they are going to operate how they’re gonna monetize especially with these Upcoming IPOs, okay, so I know just this year you’ve got Databricks you’ve got
Claude or Anthropic you’ve got XAI and SpaceX you’ve got A handful of other smaller companies all trying to go public this year That’s when then these quarterly earnings calls start going public and live That’s when then they have to start figuring out how they’re monetizing how they’re driving revenue, okay So What you’re going to start to see is we need to be engine agnostic, all right There are a lot of open source models right now that are effectively free to use that we can shift our model over to if Let’s say Anthropic or let’s say because I’m using Claude and I use Claude the most right now
Let’s say they just change their pricey model and it becomes one of these egregious price gouging you know crazy things To be able to continue to use their service. Hey cool. I own my folder set. I own my brain locally on my External hard drives on my computer. I own them. They’re mine. I can point any system any engine any AI To that brain and just continue working now the intelligence might not be as good And I might see some drop-offs or some changes in that capacity But what we’re going to see over time is the free open source versions will catch up to where the high end paid Versions on are now and they might just be on a six to 12 month lag
Okay So we’re getting there, right and where this future can kind of go is if you want to be on the cutting edge You’re going to have to pay to use you know, Grok or Claude or Gemini Whoever is at the absolute cutting edge. You’re going to have to pay and maybe pay a lot to be able to use those Really, really high ends and you’re going to be able to do stuff that other people won’t But not everybody needs that right as a small business who’s maybe not trying to do You know reinvent the wheel or try you know trying to get people to Mars We probably don’t need the same compute power that the SpaceX team needs to be able to launch data centers in space and people to Mars And do like advanced telemetry and all that stuff like we probably don’t need the same compute power
To for us to be able to like whip up a CRM to help send blast emails to our clients, right? So This is why we need to build things the way that I’ve been trying to encourage you to think about building them We need to own those folders. That’s have those things locally have a series of markdown files and you know, Claude MD and you know our brain trust files there That can then be shifted and moved However and whenever we need them okay Now If our software that we already use in our organizations Is not native they are behind the curve at this point if they don’t have
You know MCP or some way For your AI agents to be able to just go grab data or upload data or push things live Right like I use Netlify to host my website and their CLI and their MCP that allows my AI to just work natively That means I can push websites like what you guys are watching these slides on right now is just on my website and I can push that stuff live in Moments from my cell phone Which is remotely into my AI system right like I can I can do all that stuff I can push things live to my website. I can say hey build me a perfectly optimized Google ad landing page for this new ad campaign that we want to run I can do it from my cell phone
And it can go in my AI agent can go in the Netlify and push the website live and I can have it all hosted and ready to go okay That is an example of a system that works natively not all softwares are going to do that right Wix is trying to catch up to speed They’ll let you do some stuff word presses behind clunky outdated Um, you know Shopify is pretty good Squarespace somewhere in the middle But like not every service not every hosting service and I web service is going to allow you to do that So again, what I would encourage you to get to is Own your html website like build your website in code from scratch and just own it in your own folder set It’s backed up three or four different places and it’s hosted live right you have a GitHub back up
You have all this stuff like and you’re you own it right you don’t have to pay WordPress You don’t have to pay Squarespace or Shopify you don’t have to pay any of those rips or fees because guess what Next year they’re going to raise the rates on you. It’s gonna go up The rip that they take on transactions is going to go up There’s all of these things now that you can just create your own code for and your agents can work with you And then they can push things live in real time and you just don’t need those services anymore I think that’s such an easy place for everybody to start especially if you already have a good website that’s hosted locally like If you put that website right into Claude Download those files and put it right into your agent
You can basically recreate your website that you own a hundred percent of you have no ongoing subscription costs No ongoing costs at all Hosted it Netlify for free or for nine dollars a month And all of a sudden you took this thing that was costing you Hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year and you had to go to some third-party company and rely on them to host everything And now you just took complete ownership of it forever and you cut your costs and you just take that straight to the bottom line And in reality what’s going to happen is your website is going to be ten times more powerful because your AI agents are going to be able to Analyze and read your site for SEO and geo in real time and be able to say hey You know, I want to be able to run this ad campaign or I want to be able to create this landing page
I want to do better for local SEO We’re going to go national or you know, I want to start hitting in Indianapolis, Indiana. We’re looking at a new location It can do all that stuff in real time for you and none of those other web providers allow you to do that So as we start kind of Moving on to this idea or this mental framework What I want to start getting to is all of our systems are hooked up And dialed in with our agent and our agent knows all of that right it has all the connections But it also knows our entire organizational frame We use this you know a new lead comes into the website they go where they go into this CRM the CRM is connected in and I can
Text message and back email and back we can set up automations we can do whatever I can do all that stuff just right from one window I pull up my VS Code and now I have access to everything all of our QuickBooks all of our Gusto all of our payroll all of our expenses all of our invoices Everything just from my one VS Code window Okay, all of my file share all of my entire Google suite all right there I can you know edit Google sheets. I can update the website and do it all from one terminal and that’s what I say here There’s a new way. It’s one spot one agent you know or one question and we are often operating and running our entire organization from one place That’s where we’ve got to get to but we need software that allows us to do that. Okay So MCP is the standard outlet for AI all right, so if we start thinking about this like
It’s a good practice for us as we start looking at building out our AI systems and integrating those with software Of going on to Google and just saying you know does Gusto have an MCP setup or an MCP hookup Do they have that answers? Yes, great And then you can go into your AI agent system and say hey, I want to hook up to Gusto So I can run payroll and get down information on hours and all this other stuff from my employees What’s my tax burden, right? I want to send this out to my CPA where you know some COVID happens again We need to operate for PPP help me set up the paperwork and tax documents for that All that stuff can be done, okay Some companies are there most of your forward thinking good companies are going to have this setup already
But not everybody does once you know that Your entire organization if you have a subscription if you have a login You need to go through and do the practice of getting the MCP server set up Telling your agents and organizing your agents in a way so that they know Where all those things are and that they are set up and hooked up So um This is like as we kind of Take this next step right as we start to go through this process
What I will find is that there are if we look at this bottom one there are a handful of Website software subscription companies that are closed out and You feel like or I feel like as I’m trying to build for these small businesses. I’m trying to build something cool and unique I feel like I’m fighting to try to Update things to make things better to help them out to you know They have a vision in their mind of oh, we’ve got all this data. We got all this stuff I want to be able to push this live or I want to be able to pull down this information and draw reports and build graphs and create a dashboard for this And I would be able to do all this up But the system where all of it sits is closed to me
And now we either have to find some pain in the ass work around Or we have to just shut the idea down because of some third party company that hasn’t caught up to the times So we need to understand what those are in our company and where they sit in that in that kind of trajectory Now here’s where I Want you to think about going and again. This is like if you guys haven’t been working in the system This is going to sound like overwhelming But trust me when I tell you my companies who these are like not tech people they are not coders They’re not anything like that. They’ve already started doing this. Okay, the closed tools
You’re going to start to look to create your own local version of Or find a better way to do it with your own local AI system Okay, so let’s just take the example Let’s say we use QuickBooks for all of our tax organizing and that’s our software Okay, and let’s say they did not have the MCP hookup and they didn’t have a connection within my AI agentic system What I would start to do is maybe using Google Sheets or Excel or something like that I would start to work with my agent to basically recreate my own version of QuickBooks And again, you could do this anyway If you’re paying a boatload of money to QuickBooks now my QuickBooks is like 20 bucks a month
So it’s not a big deal but If you guys are much bigger company like a you know ccorp multiple locations multiple entities all that stuff Maybe you are spending a lot of money there And there’s a lot of functionality in those big systems that you don’t need You’re paying for them to update stuff that you’re not going to use So then you can just start picking and pulling all of the little functions Okay, I want this to be able to pull down my credit card statements Can I MCP and pull down my credit card statements from my bank account like sure, okay
And you can start doing all this linking and connecting you can create your own software for your company that you own And again take out a subscription cost Now that’s not a great example because QuickBooks does allow you to do that So that’s going to be something we’re going to push to the future that maybe we’ll do sometime in the future Maybe we won’t What we want to do is take the stuff like websites I was telling you about the things that are closed to you Where our agent can’t talk to it our agent can’t do the tasks or has can’t do the ideas Because the system doesn’t allow us to work with them
And I’ve seen this with CRMs Especially I’ve seen it with websites I’ve seen it with little pieces of code Even things like now some of the design sweet and Adobe is like they’re kind of getting there Some people are using things online Fig was a good example of this trying to get there quickly And so this is how I’m kind of recommending people triage this Green software is stuff that like my AI agent can work so well with it right now That I actually am getting so much more out of this subscription that I’ve been holding forever
That now I’m using it all the time and my agents are in there every day And I’m using it a ton because now my agentic system helps me use all this stuff together in one place And I’ll be able to pull better data from there And so that’s like green it’s made better by the use of AI Yellow is maybe there’s some connections maybe I can kind of pull down data And I can kind of aggregate certain things But maybe I can’t do everything that I want to do And red is they are not ready at all There is no connection
It’s not good and they’re blocking me from it And in that case those are the things we’re going to try to delete And recreate specifically what we need from them on our own locally And this is where like things are trippy for people because you can just write your own software Right like you can just host your own web-based platforms for your team Again, and it’s a lot easier than you think it is So if we’re kind of going through this like mental process right the the thing I’ll kind of end on here Is I want you to think about owning your system All right, and if we circle back real quick to like an investing thesis right from that lens
I think what you’re starting to see is a lot of these top investors Have started to recognize this And there’s a lot of companies out there that are just pure software and pure subscription companies I think they face a really really tough road ahead it’s not impossible for them Because I think a lot of them have really good motes right like they have So much data and they have so much it’s like the app that people just always go to So take like Instagram for example like I hate Instagram. I think Instagram is a terrible app Right, I think AI is going to make it significantly worse already really bad so many sponsored posts all the time You see more sponsored posts than you see posts of your friends
So it’s a bad product already and then now the the paid posts and sponsored posts are all going to be AI And it’s going to flood you and it’s going to be more so I think people are going to be less likely to be on there I think it’s a huge headwind from it. I don’t know how they fix that right I think more people are just going to be dumping more money to them in the short term But eventually people will just realize like this just isn’t working anymore So they’re going to stop spending on ads on the platforms um And then I think all of these subscription software companies that are started to charge egregious prices right I even think like our CRM for
Friendship is a company called pushpress and Their functionality 10 years ago. I don’t know eight years ago. Maybe that’s too long to eight years ago Was plenty to run our gym today and plenty to run our gym Really forever forward Now they got you know invested in by venture capital and they were super excited about all the stuff But then what does that mean? Okay, so now we have to start pushing all of these different updates and all this stuff And like honestly none of them have Mattered much right like they don’t do anything. They’re just bells and whistles to show Oh look at the new development that we have like cool. Oh, and by the way your rates are going up 25% this year
Right, so something that used to cost us like 40 bucks now costs us 250 bucks over eight years right because it’s just been like oh Well, we took on all this venture capital mice And now we have to show increased revenue and to show the increased revenue look at all these new features that we are pushing all the time And you’re like, but it’s all crap. I don’t need it, right? So in my mind now the way that I look at this is like Could I just recreate the really super simple like version one Of pushpress that just does exactly what I need and gives me the reports exactly the way that I need them and nothing else And the answer is yeah really easily And if it’s gonna mean that I can save five grand a year or ten grand a year Why would I not do that
As an owner and it might not be like my priority But when I get a little time in the a is get a little better and I’m just slowly step wise working towards this Why why would I not just recreate it And again, I think when you start looking at that as just a person or an investor just looking at the economy That’s the kind of stuff where I think people are like oh man like so much is gonna change and just nobody has any idea and I can see a future where it’s like You you have an idea for an app or you have something that like you want to create you just go to your agent You create the mobile app you put it right onto your phone It’s you know just a locally hosted thing and
Your AI agent can interface with it and it’s like you’ve just got it and you own it You’ll need to put it on the app store. You’ll need to sell to other people It just does what you want it to do And because the AI is gonna be so good at creating these things it’s gonna work like a charm So this is where I think things are going and this is where I think the revolution to me is really starting to hit is This is going to be very very disruptive In ways that I think are really really good for the user so for the clients And for the business owners and employees right and I just think it’s better economics
But it’s gonna shift a little bit from these mega corpse these soft that you know these SaaS companies that I think have gotten Honestly, just cocky and egotistical with their price raises and they’re they’re gatekeeping You know every one of them is like oh you want you want that feature Here’s our next year like let’s take Amazon for TV It’s like oh you want prime video like how about prime video with less ads a little more How about prime video with no ads a little more how about prime video in high definition with no ads a little more It’s like You guys are just dicks right like just you’re just dicks like I mean I get it from the business end of things but like They have coming to them. I think something that’s going to be very disruptive and I’m not entirely sure that they are ready for it. So
So that’s where I think kind of things are going and again I think all of that is good right if you are the user or so in that case if I’m just the Amazon prime viewer And I just pay my subscription cost and I can just watch Prime video right without commercials like a norm like it just used to be normally Then like I get a better experience. I’m a happier customer. I’m more sticky because of that right That’s the way that the operation should work. And so I’m hopeful that this will all help us get there All right, so That’s it for today. We ran a little bit long and I hope that this all kind of makes sense to you guys
But if you guys are a business owner kind of looking at these things This is the kind of stuff that how I want you to start wrapping your brain around How these things will interface and kind of what you can do and why it’s important to host your own stuff locally And triage the actual software subscriptions that you guys are keeping. Thanks
