Platforms, Consulting, and Agencies Oh MY!
For the last two months I’ve been grinding on a few different things. I haven’t talked about it as outwardly, but it’s on my website. The three main things are:
Wrenchdesk - Phone AI service advisor for high end auto (body shops, transmission changes etc)
Nourish - Automatic AI followups for closed-lost dealflow
Consulting to fill time, cover any expenses I’m not covering with the businesses through the hold-co
I’ve learned a lot! First - awesome time to build SaaS - there is soooo much low hanging fruit. Second, the real winners from the current turn of the crank on the AI gold rush might be the implementation specialists, not the platforms (which is NOT intuitive).
I was talking with Dan Andrews who is a friend from the Boulder startup community yesterday telling him my learnings around doing engineering consulting these days, and one of the insights I shared is that partner platform providers for large things (app builders, voice etc - lovable retell bland) are a very good channel + scalable business model.
He made the point that the agencies might actually be the biggest winners in the AI gold rush, and after sleeping on it I tend to agree. The data shows this too - Accenture has done more revenue on AI than *most* of the large AI companies.
I have no doubt there will be huge platform winners, but right now there’s too much froth to even get your bearings, let alone pick them reliably.