Three years ago I opened Make.com and barely understood what I was looking at. I dragged boxes around and hoped something connected. In the last 30 days I had about 280 working sessions with Claude, and a lot of what runs my business now started as me describing what I needed.
I'm a real estate broker. I've been running businesses for more than 30 years. I'm not an engineer and I won't pretend to be one.
The old way
You need a program. You go find a site, sign up, learn it, put in a card, and then you bend your business around how somebody else decided it should work. Do that for every small job in a small business and you end up with a stack of subscriptions that each do most of what you wanted, and none of them talk to each other.
What I build now
A few things that came out of those conversations this year.
I didn't want to pay for a workout app, so I built my own. I replaced my scheduling subscription with my own booking page. I needed to unlock a PDF without uploading a client document to some random website, so I made a small app that does it right on my laptop. My inbox gets sorted before I wake up by an assistant I built, and I still decide what goes out. Last week I canceled a graphics subscription and started rebuilding those templates myself.
My wife uses it to write books.
None of that needed a developer. It needed me to sit down and have the conversation.
If you tried it once and quit
That's okay. A lot of people I talk to tried an AI tool once, got a strange answer and decided it wasn't for them. Three years ago I was right there.
Start with one task that annoys you every week. Describe it the way you'd explain it to a new assistant: what comes in, what you do with it, what done looks like. Then go back and forth until it works. That back and forth is the skill.
Not loyal to a brand
I sincerely believe this is how small businesses will run. Right now Claude is the best tool for how I work. If that changes, I'll switch, and everything I learned comes with me. Describing a problem clearly works with any of them.
What's one program you pay for every month that you wish just worked the way you do?