Contract Breakdown: $15k for a 6-month build, then a 12-month contract for running and maintaining it. That second number is only the AI-specific portion. My wife and I also do graphic design and marketing for them and I left all of that out. Works out to about $2,500/month across both phases How I got it: My wife and I already had a different contract for marketing related work and graphic design at the company and they found out I was using claude code for our agency and wanted to bring it into their businesses. I spent 4 meetings probably 8 hours total, just figuring out where this fits and building a map of the businesses before we all settled on the smallest, most neglected businesses in their portfolio. The idea here is that the business we settled on is a complimentary brand to their flagship, selling mostly the same product but different label and instead of B2B wholesale, it is the DTC and seasonal buying club version only with practically no wholesale component. So they call this the “red-headed” stepchild that got bought right before covid and just kind of runs with the same employees of the flagship but minimal attention. So the plan was to make it the AI sandbox, and peelback the labor of the flagship employees and see if this could really free up their time, while maintaining at least the same commitments they already had. The Big Opportunity that isn’t SaaS or a Tech Job: A lot of small business employees and owners have never even heard of an API or CLI or how useful it is, nor a budget for someone who does. So this is the biggest risk and opportunity. Figuring out how to illustrate that you can now connect all of their platforms, in my case: Shopify, the email CRM, Meta Ads (marketing campaigns), etc instead of having a bunch of ambiguous work being done by 4 different people taking months to build this launch plan and execute it, when it has verifiable rubrics and campaigns already built and thousands and thousands of customers on their email list etc. Now, the opportunity here is that AI isn’t “replacing people” its that we can fundamentally free people from monotonous, time consuming and laborious work that is more noise in the business than growth signal, programable work. The workflow: So I took what was basically 4 different people working on this one seasonal launch and built the domain expertise into methodology files, a knowledge base with a wiki layer, and all of the credentials to their platforms into one Claude Code working directory and gave claude.md its role, and rules and routing information and now I run this based on one spreadsheet source of truth that has all of the information gathered pre launch, like hosts, locations, dates, marketing budget etc and can tell claude to basically read the list and flip all the switches on the website, to bring the pages online, update all the variant meta fields, pull and update the email campaign for the sales window to draft for review right into the reviewers Monday(.com) board, builds the meta ad campaign based on the prior years success, and set that for review and (I do some analytics to suggest new direction if necessary) but it is pretty simple and what now takes me one prompt, does what took 4 people 5 months essentially from may - august because I know how to generate tokens on these platforms. So you dont need to be a SWE to generate value and I think the biggest opportunity is that this stuff is now so accessible to non CS majors and you can structure this as contractor work kind of similar to a web design + retainer and just stack a bunch of small businesses together that you just have the AI of your choice (I built my wiki layers so that even small local models can flip the switches and access whatever I need) and just build a portfolio of “dirty jobs” businesses that you can solve their easy problems and not command some 250k a year salary, just get 1.5-2.5k a month from each because its like an hour of work a week at this point. I think Mark Cuban was doing an interview somewhere and basically said the same thing I just told you but I was in the midst of my build when it came out. There are like 33 million small businesses out there and find the ones that are chaotic but somehow still manage to bring in 2 million+ in revenue and you can easily save them a lot of admin time. Just pitch it as “Freeing your employees to do more growth focused work, or client facing work”. Hope this was interesting and let me know if you have any questions. submitted by /u/FarmatCatawissaCreek
Originally posted by u/FarmatCatawissaCreek on r/ClaudeCode