idopmstuff

Yes I fired him, and I offered him the option to take 50% off his bill or chase me for payment. He chose the former.

I sent my business and personal returns through Claude this year before signing, and it turns out they were a horror show of unforgivably stupid mistakes. Pretty infuriating considering what my now former CPA was charging me.

He amortized the goodwill of businesses I acquired over 5 years instead of 15 (incredibly basic stuff, which Claude flagged with *CRITICAL ERROR*). When I asked about it, he said he had caught the error in his review but forgot to save after he fixed it. I don't know if there's a good response to making that kind of a mistake, but if there is, it's definitely not that one.

"With urgent questions swirling over whether LLMs can ever usher in a return on investment — let alone AGI"

It will always remain weird to me that a publication called Futurism is so outright negative towards our newest technologies.

I own a dozen brands that sell primarily on Amazon, and I have to say that this whole issue seems quite overstated, especially with regard to its impact on consumers. I don't get the impression that the person writing this actually sells things on Amazon, which seems to be par for the course with these critiques.

People love to complain about Amazon fees, but when I read things like "In 2014, this was about 19% of sales. But today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon. Half!" I wonder why people who are so lacking in subject matter expertise decide to write these articles.

The main reason that Amazon charges so many fees is that they provide a truly mind-boggling amount of infrastructure for you. The main reason the percent you pay to Amazon has gone up is because they've added more services. The author of the post notes that only the referral fee is mandatory, but doesn't manage to quite put together why going from only referral fee to a bunch of extra services means that Amazon now takes more of every dollar.

Once upon a time, you'd list your stuff on Amazon, and when someone ordered a product, you'd ship it yourself. Then Amazon decided to allow third party sellers to use Amazon's storage and fulfillment. Now suddenly the percentage of each sale's revenue that went to Amazon doubled! And yet, this was 100% positive for merchants, because Amazon's storage and fulfillment prices are cheaper than almost any alternative. When you move from a 3PL to Amazon's fulfillment, you pay Amazon more, but your profit margins increase. (There are exceptions for some product types, but the overwhelming majority of the time you save money.)

Of course, Amazon's fulfillment centers started running out of storage, so they'd limit how many units people could store there. That meant larger sellers would still have to maintain their own storage solution for anything that wouldn't fit at Amazon. But then Amazon introduced AWD, an upstream storage solution where you can store basically an infinite amount of stuff still packed by the case, and it ships to FBA warehouses when needed. More money for Amazon! But AWD is cheaper than basically any 3PL's storage, so more money for me too.

Amazon then introduced a service that let you book freight in the US with them to get things to their warehouses. Then they introduced freight to get things into the US from overseas. Then they introduced even cheaper AWD warehouses in China. You're not required to use these things, but Amazon wins a lot of business with them because they're cheaper than competitors.

This is not to say that everything Amazon does is great or that all of their fee increases have been net positive. First they introduced a fee if your products sit in FBA warehouses more than six months, then they introduced a fee if your inventory gets too low relative to demand. These are annoying! (Though also I have almost never been affected by them, because the amount of inventory Amazon wants you to have is basically the optimal amount from a planning perspective anyway.)

There's advertising, which, yes, is very annoying to have to pay for, but y'know what? You have to pay for that on your own site too! I have one brand where I do a healthy business on my own Shopify site, but I keep less of every dollar on there than on Amazon because I have to spend more on Meta ads to get a sale than I do on Amazon ads.

People love to hate on Amazon (and, again, lots of valid reasons for this!), but at the end of the day they collect an enormous amount of money because they provide an enormous amount of value.

> How do you inspect the quality of the products you're selling?

I buy them off of Amazon. But that doesn't really matter that much compared to the history of reviews.

> And yet we all know Amazon sellers juice their sales metrics and ratings with scammy practices, and now I see selling their brand is part of the incentive.

You just read that online and have the most superficial understanding possible. I know what I'm doing, and it's trivial to avoid this kind of thing.

> And more, you are AI-generating listings and images for your acquired brands. You're filling Amazon with slop, and automating the process.

Bad criticism. There's nothing wrong with an AI-generated listing if the content accurately represents the product. I have purchased brands that had horrendous images because the seller tried to Photoshop them but wasn't good at it. Replaced those with high-quality AI images, and everyone wins - the customer better understands what the product is, and I get more sales. It's only slop if you just think everything AI-generated is slop regardless of what it is or how it's used, and if so that's too intellectually lazy of a position for me to try to disabuse you of.

> You should seriously reflect on your role in polluting these marketplaces.

Help me out with that. What's my role? I buy brands that sell high-quality products, increase the quality of the content and marketing, and make money selling them. The sellers of these brands are frequently people who started them on the side but don't have the time to continue, and I get them a fair price in exchange for their businesses.

So what is the pollution that I'm causing?

> Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.)

Yeah, the most recent brand I acquired had enough customer contacts via FB/IG comments and messages, plus email, that I had Claude build out an application for me where it pulls those in as they come, drafts a response including any actions that need to be taken, and lets me edit or send. It takes any edits as feedback to refine its playbook, so its gotten pretty good now. Handles things like warranty claims (get picture of the damage plus order number, create replacement order, send email confirming replacement order) plus most common questions. Still entirely human in the loop, but I'm going to let it start handling common cases autonomously soon.

On the topic of starting an autonomous agent-run business from scratch, I had Claude set up a bunch of websites that pull publicly available (but somewhat annoying to access) government data, display it in easy to read format and send weekly emails. It's now running on its own with a couple levels of management - first, it does a weekly review of Google Search Console/GA4 and updates or creates new content to try to improve things from an SEO perspective. Then second, once a day it tracks all of the problems that have arisen over the past day (usually issues pulling the data or issues with the prose the models write), corrects them, and then tries to improve the system to stop them from recurring.

I'm not really keeping tracking of it at the moment - too much other stuff to do right now - but it's getting a trickle of subscribers and is slowly rising the SEO ranks, so for now I'm content to let it sit and see if it ever gets to the point of being monetizable.

Of course I do. No one buying a business would do it without that information. I get their P&L before I even get on a call with them, and during the due diligence period I get access to Shopify, Amazon, etc. to get first-party data to validate their claims.

So let's say we make up a new word, machilligence to serve as a parallel term to intelligence but strictly for machines. How is the world different in that case vs. if we call it intelligence?

Or I guess to put it another way, if we want to coin a new term for the intelligence-esque thing that AI has, but the key differentiator is that it's an AI thing and not a human thing, then what linguistic value does the new word have? If I said "Claude is intelligent" then the fact that we're talking about AI "intelligence" is already captured in the sentence anyway; no new word needed

I suspect you mean this as an insult, but it's not too far off. That was one of the main points of the business - each one is simple to run, so I can manage a lot of them. And that was before AI got really good.

Anyway, I'm sure the app you makes that lets you get a phone number that can send image messages is very complex, and I think that's very nice.

Blind seems too far here - Claude's increasingly able to diagnose visual issues on its own. I used to have to check every single image it generated, but now it's at the point where it'll catch most bad ones and regenerate them before it gets to the review step. Still misses some, though.

Well that's not very nice!

And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.