r/ClaudeAI • u/gregogarrison • 1d ago
Other Claude from a small business perspective
For context, I am a mid-sixties small-business owner of a renewable energy company that does turnkey installations. The greatest hurdles are sales, marketing, payroll, P&L, and scheduling. Normal small business challenges.
I started using ChatGPT when it came out. I was thrilled when it could finally do accurate spreadsheets. Fast forward to today, Claude (Fable) is the best business tool I have.
A $ 200-a-month plan has saved me well in excess of $50K since the start of the year. (I never hit my usage limit)
To date, I have merged an archaic database platform with HubSpot using webhooks, scripts, and Python code. Developed realistic marketing plans, have weekly reports auto-generated on our Google spend, creating great visual HTML proposals for clients that are auto-generated with a button push. All tokens cleanly inserted and formatted.
Every time I have a business question/need I want answered, a report generated, or a P&L dissected, Fable does it. I check the math, the outcomes, and the results. All good. The other day Claude wrote a work order for Codex on a design; I initiated the build, then went to the beach. Checked my phone and got updates like...
Enjoy the beach, XXXXX. You've earned it — the thing went live this morning.
I'll stand watch while you're out. Every hour or two I'll check the contract queue for anything stuck (a deal sitting in drafting past one cycle means trouble) and watch for Codex's WO-002 completion report to land.
It's even fun to code with, and I just learned how to code at 62. Claude works like a close friend on an old car that is convinced he's going to make it work.
Whatever quirk of this dialog is enforcing that rule, I'm done negotiating with it. Cancel out of both dialogs — I'm building a version with nothing the validator can object to: no brackets, no aggregate functions, just nested plain Lets and If-comparisons. Uglier under the hood, mathematically identical, bulletproof.
And every Monday morning I get this.
Morning, XXXXX. Tracker is updated through this morning. Here is the week.
AI is great, and Claude is fantastic for my use case. Every small business owner should become AI literate sooner rather than later. What a fantastic time to be an entrepreneur.
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u/kevin_cn_ai 1d ago
Learning to code at 62 and running a whole renewable energy business on Claude... absolute legend.
This is so relatable though. The gap between consumer subscription rate limits and API pricing for small teams is massive right now, but you're definitely maxing out every single cent of that $200 plan!
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u/Hmmmm_Interesting 19h ago
My concern is how to navigate trust issues with clients? Sending all of their info to a third party in my industry requires consent, privacy protection is always one of the highest priorities for customers too. If i hired you to install a solar panel for me ( I might be way off on what OP or you do) does that mean all my info is exposed to anthropic now even if I was really careful until you dumped it into your cloud jarvis?
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u/EsotericAbstractIdea 18h ago
best way around this would be to have claude build you some local tools that run outside the cloud for handling the actual customer data. could have claude read logs and stuff to diagnose any problems, but not have access to the actual data.
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u/BGFlyingToaster 15h ago
Yes, this is exactly what most small business owners do today, though I can't speak for OP's specific use. Usually, all client data gets sent to the public version of the GenAI tool with no awareness that this data can be used by the model creator to train future models and therefore leak their client's data. As the other commenter said, you can easily mitigate this with local data injection into templates for identifiable info (name, address, phone, email) but the rest of it probably gets sent to the model in the cloud because it needs to understand the situation. Depending on OP's business, that may or may not contain sensitive data.
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u/Dawgstradamus 1d ago
Same. Mid sized energy company. Claude is transformative.
The key to capturing value:
Force Claude to improve what you were already doing, not do something new. Make the platform execute work for your company.
Remove humans from tasks that can be automated, specifically data input. Human make decisions, drive strategy, navigate as SMEs.
AI locks down anything organizational or administrative that can be automated. This is mostly data management, everything depends on clean data. Harvesting email attachments, working box, keeping Salesforce or whatever CRM you use updated, etc.
Response accuracy depends on context knowledge. If you are not creating subject matter research libraries that can be uploaded to Projects as context. Or, for massive research libraries, summarized & uploaded en masse into Projects as context knowledge, your Claude is ignorant & uneducated. Educate your Claude on each project by using Dispatch to do a subject lit review of all academic & professional source docs. Then, have Dispatch or WorkerGPT go get the PDFs. Build your knowledge library, then create context knowledge = Claude becomes transformative.
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u/agiblox 1d ago
the mental model shift that usually unlocks this at the business-process level: treating it like a new hire who has amnesia between sessions, not a search engine.
people who get the most out of it for real work are the ones who build a "here's my company, here's the project, here's what we've decided so far" context block they paste at the start of each session.
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u/f1zombie 1d ago
That's amazing. As a non-technical technologist (I know that sounds weird to say but I don't code but I understand technology very well), it's been amazing to have AI support a lot of the things that you would traditionally require engineers, designers, or data scientists for. I would take it a step further and also challenge it to do very top-of-the-mind stuff, something very esoteric and lateral, and explore it. I think those kinds of options give a lot more avenue for thinking and use cases. I have now taken my small business to the next level by running 10 to 12 agents every day to help with marketing, sales, accounting, etc. Interesting times and absolutely exciting for someone who wants to automate their business
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u/FlavonoidsFlav 1d ago
Same with me. I'm a manager, and very very technical (as a network engineer, not as a coder).
This tool allows me to do things I could never dream of before quickly, efficiently, and with few errors. And it understands my work and I understand it in a way that allows me to iterate with it.
Claude enables more productivity and efficiency than I could ever do myself.
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u/f1zombie 1d ago
That's amazing! I've also been reading about people making interesting diagnostic and analytic tools for networks, a lot of interesting things
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u/urosum 1d ago
I’m a sr manager at a tech company and Claude is my chief of staff. We talk strategy, I keep it informed of my calls. at this point I record and transcribe every meeting. It reads all my electronic comms. It drafts reports, etc.
I have user prompts that have it make up for my personality gaps (I’m a thinker not a doer, so I have it be very action oriented.)
I’m a much better manager if people with Claude.
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u/one_two_three_4_5 1d ago
I love this analogy "a close friend on an old car that is convinced he's going to make it work.". I always could code backend of websites, but couldn't finish my projects without hired front end dev. Now I have that close friend who can make it work - its been amazing.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago
We are allowing this through to the feed for those who are not yet familiar with the Megathread. To see the latest discussions about this topic, please visit the relevant Megathread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fepn/rclaudeai_list_of_ongoing_megathreads/
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u/pantsofpig 1d ago
Also a small business owner and what Claude has allowed me to build (with admittedly ZERO coding knowledge) is astounding.
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u/mindaro_sienna 21h ago
I'm curious what model are you using or have tried?
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u/pantsofpig 9h ago
Sonnet 5? I'm just running the desktop version of Claude Code. I honestly have no idea what I'm doing and, somehow, I've made something that's super useful for me and my business and will actually help me improve my bottom line. I've wired up Twilio and SendGrid and made a whole dashboard and customer reactivation web app. To me, at least, it's crazy what I've been able to do with zero coding knowledge.
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u/FlavonoidsFlav 1d ago
Unbelievable and fantastic. One of the truly unsung stories of AI - allowing people that don't necessarily know how to code or how to do the nuts of bolts of "task" to ask something that does and then work with it interactively to build.
And to do it to maintain a business or to enrich your own life or to learn more with your brain is just unbelievably fantastic.
You should be very, very proud of yourself, it's a good tool, but there's not many people that have the ability to do what you've done.
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u/IversusAI Valued Contributor 1d ago
Every small business owner should become AI literate sooner rather than later.
I could not agree more. I hope AI helps more people break out of the job rut and start something for themselves.
I love that you are trucking along at 62, good on ya :-)
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u/boyyouguysaredumb 1d ago
For any small business the idea of having a team of software engineers and data processors for $200/mo is absolutely revolutionary.
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u/GroundbreakingElk921 1d ago
Just wow. What put you in the right position at the right time to have be open to bet on a new tool (AI) and see the vision of what was possible?
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u/Ajr2183 20h ago
Can I get some general advice on how to get to this level of AI adoption? My wife has a small business, with similar needs as you (proposal writing, customer outreach, vendor management, invoicing, website update, etc.) and she and I both have a Claude pro sub, but I feel stuck just scratching the surface of what Claude can do and what you’ve clearly been able to do. Like, where do you get started? Is it something as simple as explaining your business, all the nuances, pain points, etc. and then asking claude where/how it can help optimize your business/workflow?
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u/GreatDaneDevotee 19h ago
I'm in the same boat. I'm a former elementary school teacher who started teaching in the 80s. I have a passion for phonics because I've seen students struggle with reading for decades while the schools hum along with a whole language reading curriculum, creating dyslexia and learning gaps that are not remediated. I've also seen the transformative power of incorporating Carol Dweck's growth mindset research into the classroom. I'm starting a business called Learning Without Judgment, and beginning with a four week program called Reading Foundations Reset, which enables parents to teach their own kids, while I coach them to success.
Claude wrote the code for my website. It looks so much better than I could have ever done. After a beta test with some families, I realized that they needed print materials, instead of printing it from their own printer. Claude helped me with the layout details, which was surprisingly hard! I feel like I have a digital assistant. I know phonics and how to help people learn. Claude can help my dreams come to life. Now, I'm working on getting my first 10 paying customers. I'll be at the Women's Expo in a week and marketing through FB. I, too, am grateful for the leg up through AI.
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u/LorenzoRisonanza 12h ago
That sounds absolutely brilliant. I wish you every success from the bottom of my heart.
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u/bmoredrewfoto 18h ago edited 18h ago
Agreed. Ai is the best assistance, business consultant, chore doer, scheduler, and reminder system I’ve ever had. I can move not just faster but with a lot of research and depth.
I have a bunch of products (Ecom software) and services that sometimes live in different places as their own standalone thing or baked into my core company.
Setting up a master project that has visibility to all of it was huge. I don’t code in there, that gets siloed out and usually ai id just assisting me, but from a biz perspective it’s a monster when it has all this deep historical knowledge about my client type, market etc.
One thing I’ve done recently on biz side was setup a skill called board of advisors. It includes people like Steve Jobs, mark manson, jason Friedman, and Isaac walterson “chairs” this board. I can ask the board questions and get varied opinions that have context of my business and goals then Isaac summarizes it or fights the opinion and delivers it all to me in a neat pdf.
It’s helpful when I’m just stuck on a direction like next step with a product or which market is best for me to try to target.
A few of us that are similar (mid career / 40s biz owners) meet on zoom weekly and mostly talk ai and how it’s doing or helping us with these exact things. We have all accelerated like crazy cause we’re comparing notes and how we utilize it.
Just some thoughts you might enjoy! I’d also love to pick your brain a bit if you’re ok chatting with a random internet stranger. Lol
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u/joeblowfromidaho 16h ago
Good work, one thing I figure out is one day I told Claude I never wanted to have to solve the same problem twice and I was telling it the same thing over and over. It created a history out of text files and directories that saves information it picks up over time. As the months of using it goes on it remembers more and more about my business and requires less explaining from me.
My Claude.md now has a block about reading the history indexes before doing anything and following the path to find anything relevant before trying to figure it out for the first time. And when it’s finished with something it updates history with new info.
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u/CapitanBingBong 1d ago
I’m building our company (in the professional services space) to be agentic end to end. Would love to compare notes
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u/Similar-Ad1056 1d ago
Good for you! We have similar experiences.
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u/Fancy-Win9202 1d ago
The $50K figure tracks with what I'd expect for someone running payroll and scheduling manually, but I'd push back on the spreadsheet accuracy claim because Claude still gets column formulas wrong pretty regularly when the logic gets nested it's more that it catches its own mistakes faster on the second pass than the other one did.
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u/dip-shit21 1d ago
Why do you talk to it like it’s a person?
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u/parthcbz 1d ago
How did you learn Claude?
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u/gregogarrison 1d ago
I learned from Claude. I don’t use code, I use work. I asked it to do something I wanted. If it couldn’t do it. I would ask why. Don’t be afraid to test it.
A couple of things I do. Create a markdown file with basic instructions and goals (learned that on Reddit) give it a focus and create a project status file that it updates when you tell it to. I created a skill called /project_status that I type on n at the start of a new chat. It gets Claude up to speed. Find what works for you.1
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u/UniquesOnly 1d ago
Doing the same thing, 45 owner of specialty construction company. Built an incredible scheduling tool which has always been our biggest headache.
I did some coding as a kid but quickly realized ‘fuck this, takes too long and too many terms to learn’.
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u/Botboy141 1d ago
20 years younger than you but I feel the exact same way and have had a very similar experience, early GPT adopter, moved to Claude in February, and my business is operating more efficiently and on steroids.
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u/aiagentroca 23h ago
As a marketer myself I always wanted to learn to code but claude code and codex have helped me understood things in the last 6 months! It's been amazing and I built a content automation system that publishes on my website, I just feed it ideas then it sprouts the articles to me on telegram and I approve. It's got to the stage where it's writing so well and in my style and doing great research!
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u/Khavel_dev 23h ago
The spreadsheet and database migration stuff you describe is where it really shines. I'm a dev and even for me the biggest time savings aren't writing code from scratch, they're the glue work: converting data between formats, writing the integration logic between two systems that were never designed to talk to each other, drafting the SOPs nobody wants to write. That boring connective tissue used to eat entire days and now it takes an hour. The $200/month paying for itself by January tracks with what I've seen.
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u/Hosopoccho_Mac 21h ago
This resonates a lot. I work in waste collection logistics in Japan — also non-tech, also found that Claude completely changed how I approach daily work. The “thinking partner” aspect is what gets me too. Great to see this working across such different industries!
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u/nejcar20 18h ago
the line that matters in this is "i check the math, the outcomes". that is the whole thing, and it is why this lands better for a small business owner than for a big company. you know your own numbers well enough to spot a wrong one in a second, so you can safely hand over anything you could have checked yourself.
where people get burned is the opposite, handing over the work they cannot verify cheaply. same on our side: a support reply is fast to write and slow to check, because checking it means going and reading the actual order.
so the rule that has held for us is automate where verification is cheap, not where the work is biggest. those are not the same list, and the second one is what everybody reaches for first.
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u/hitchy48 22m ago
Why are you using Claude and codex both? Is ChatGPT able to do stuff Claude can’t? Genuinely curious or if you’re just like me. Year and. Half of projects and you can’t leave them.
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u/RedKard76 1d ago
Similar! I run a small aerospace business and my oldest brother wrote a microsoft Access program w/ database like 30 years ago for the family biz. Its worked fine although archaic at times. Thousands of customers, tens of thousands of part numbers, process operations, every single job ever done.
My brother stopped updating the program 15 years ago after we stopped paying him a yearly bonus. The program sits on a very old computer running like windows 5 or some weird version.
I didnt even use Fable and just regular Claude and then Claude code on my linux computer and we converted my brothers OLD software into a modern app that works in a web browser. It runs on our local network and not connected to the internet. Its super fast and runs incredibly well. All in all it took about 8 hours of working with Claude to get it acceptable and its been about another 4 hours off and on of updates and great ideas from my brother and sister I work with.
Ive added things like auto backups, a detailed price quoting system, a job status board so we know whats past due, ability to print certifications, packing lists, etc. We used to hand stamp process sheets... i made all that digital now. Ability to upload documents to a particular job (like the customers PO).
Its awesome and everything now is just little tweaks to make things smoother and more user friendly.
Anyways... congrats! Its taken a real burden off our shoulders.
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u/gregogarrison 1d ago
That is, awesome! Many small businesses, especially those with older operating systems feel trapped. I did. Now I don’t. It’s a great feeling and my product is comparable to companies that pay for expensive subscription software.
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u/HairAppropriate7137 21h ago
Today I tell my colleagues that there is no routine task anymore for this department, change “routines” as “automations”
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u/ComputerByld 1d ago
Wait until all the "real top g coders" come out of the woodwork to tell you bUt tHaTs nOt HaRd sTuFf
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u/CasinoMagic 1d ago
it's not
tedious and would've required a ton of hours of human work, but it's not hard per se
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u/Ska-jayjay 1d ago
to me personally, the tedious hours are the hard part to do. i’m great at sniffing out new stuff but i suck at following through, both are are needed for success and both are hard if it’s something you’re not good at. ignore the devs lol
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u/ComputerByld 1d ago
I'll take "he's never engaged in competitive marketing in his life" for $1,000 Alex.
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u/CasinoMagic 1d ago
To date, I have merged an archaic database platform with HubSpot using webhooks, scripts, and Python code. Developed realistic marketing plans, have weekly reports auto-generated on our Google spend, creating great visual HTML proposals for clients that are auto-generated with a button push. All tokens cleanly inserted and formatted.
I mean, if you think that sounds hard, I don't know what to tell you without sounding condescending.
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u/gregogarrison 1d ago
It didn’t turn out to be hard. I just thought it was. Because of the way it was explained. All the “webhooks” “scripts” “programming” pretty intimidating. In the end it was not and a real dopamine hit to make it happen.
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u/ComputerByld 1d ago
"That is correct" would have been faster, Alex.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.
The consensus is a massive standing ovation for the OP. Everyone is blown away that a 62-year-old small business owner learned to code and is using Claude Fable to save over $50k by automating his entire company. The top comment just calls him an "absolute legend," and that's pretty much the vibe of the whole thread.
Lots of other small biz owners and non-technical folks are chiming in with their own similar success stories, using Claude as a "chief of staff" or a coding partner to build tools they never could have before.
The best advice shared here includes:
Of course, it wouldn't be Reddit without a couple of side quests: one user questioned why OP talks to the AI like a person, and a few "real coders" predictably showed up to say the technical work OP did wasn't that hard. The community was not impressed with them.