Sell Your Agent Startup to the Incumbent With the Missing Data
Use a three-step exit test to decide when an incumbent's data layer is the only missing input your agent startup cannot build alone.
Playbooks
Step-by-step operating guides from founders who did the thing.
Poker's Engine Used to Cost a Server Rack. Now It Costs a Coffee.
For seven years, the only way to own the program that beat four poker pros in a lab was to have a university. Now the same class of engine is a prepaid key and a cloud invoice. Here's what changed — and what it does to the players who adopt it.
Run the buy-the-workaround test before your next build-versus-buy call
Map the workaround your team already uses, check where data and permissions live, and ask vendors what their roadmap covers before deciding to build, buy, or lock in.
After Fin's Salesforce deal, audit three AI support agent contract terms before renewal
Treat the Fin-Salesforce deal as a dependency event, then re-price your support stack with a renewal audit.
Audit your Jira automation before the December 3 step meter starts
Run a short pre-metering audit of your Jira automation, then choose slim, buy, or accept before the invoice lands.
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Pulley's Dec 8 Cutoff: 11-Week Cap-Table Checklist
When a cap-table vendor disappears, the job is reconciling your equity ledger against source documents and choosing a destination before the cutoff.
Re-cost your books stack before Xero's October 2026 price hike
A one-sitting checklist to re-cost your books stack before Xero's October 2026 US price change, then lock, negotiate, or switch.
AWS Glue 6.0: turn a forgotten line item into 30% savings
A short audit separates the jobs that keep the old rate from the ones that can move to a cheaper runtime.
Route AI Spend When Astra Costs 2.5x Sol
A solved-task cost checklist for deciding when GPT-6 Astra's premium pays off against GPT-5.6 Sol and cached routes.
Re-route your AI bill after DeepSeek's peak pricing
A practical checklist for moving batch inference, fixing cache misses, and re-running unit economics when token rates change.
Keep Customers and Ops Running When Outlook Goes Down: A Founder's Incident Playbook
When a core SaaS dependency fails, your job is to preserve trust and keep revenue-critical work moving with a prebuilt fallback.
Run a vendor dependency audit before an automation vendor exits
Treat every automation vendor as a priced dependency: export data, map breakage, price replacement, and set a risk price.
A Founder's Checklist for Accounting Software: What to Test in QuickBooks Before Migrating Books
A four-point check tells you whether QuickBooks can support the current books or whether migration is the cheaper path.
The CRM math that tells you when HubSpot is worth the bill
Count active pipeline, price the bill, subtract startup savings, and require payback within 30 days.
Cloudflare Vendor Check: Keep It a Default, Not a Dependency
Use Cloudflare as a default edge stack, but keep DNS, WAF rules, startup benefits, and AI wallet exposure portable.
The Payroll Vendor Check I Run Before Choosing Gusto for a Small Team
Run a five-point check on payroll accuracy, benefits, AP, AR, and migration cost before choosing Gusto for a small team.
How to unstick an Airtable integration before support becomes the bottleneck
Classify the stall as automation, rate-limit, permission, or support-eligible, then take the matching path with evidence.
A bank-fraud readiness checklist for startup payments
A practical bank-fraud readiness checklist for founders and early finance leads: payment authorization, bank account controls, lender reporting, customer trust, and incident response.
Use a Candy Recall to Audit Supplier QA and Crisis Response
A candy recall is a compact audit prompt for consumer brands: trace the defect, label, distribution, and remedy before your product is the recall.
Decide if an AI agent marketplace is worth your distribution bet with this 4-point test
Use a four-point test to decide whether an AI agent marketplace can carry discovery, billing, trust, and margin for subscription software.
How to Govern Agent PRs and Keep Open-Source Trust
Treat agent pull requests as governed inputs: classify blast radius, require evidence, guard performance, and keep open-source trust visible.
Build a Repeatable ChatGPT Skill Stack for Ops, Sales, and Product Decisions
Treat ChatGPT like a permissioned internal service: package prompts, tools, and review gates into repeatable skills for ops, sales, and product decisions.
Run a 30-Minute AI Dependency Audit Before Your Next ChatGPT Outage
A short dependency audit turns a model outage from a scramble into a checklist: impact, fallback, owner, status, and last test.
Make Your AI Product Auditable: A Founder's Checklist
A practical checklist for making AI agents, vertical AI, and enterprise workflows auditable, attributable, and safe enough for enterprise trust.
Position Self-Healing Infrastructure as a Standalone AI Ops Layer
Self-healing data infrastructure becomes a standalone AI ops layer when the product closes failures, not just detects them.
Cut Narrow AI Inference Costs by Training a 1.5-Hour Transformer
A tightly scoped transformer can replace frontier inference for narrow, high-volume AI features when you test on held-out data and target a real cost win.
Run a 72-Hour Outage Plan for Small Companies
A 72-hour outage plan for small companies: protect critical loads, set remote-work triggers, and communicate with numbers, not promises.
When Microsoft 365 Fails: A Founder's Checklist for Keeping Customer-Facing Workflows Running
A 60-minute founder playbook for M365 or Outlook outages: 10-minute fallback, confirm scope, switch comms, protect deadlines, log owners.
Own the Price, Not Just the Inventory: A D2M + AI Playbook for Cutting Fashion's Margin Leakage
A repeatable price-ownership stack for D2M fashion operators: cost floors, SKU-level forecasts, price bands, and weekly margin leakage reviews.
Run a 30-Minute California Disruption Review Before a Low-Probability Weather Event Becomes a Forecast
A weak tropical signal is not a forecast to panic, but it is a useful deadline to pressure-test people, supply, coverage, and customer commitments.