Historical Archive · June 2026 (Full Month)

Pain

I own an appliance store. I compete with best buy in that market. Some of their delivery staff also deliver for me. ​ Best buy started the geek squad to assist customers with installing technology in their homes for a fee. Great idea in 2002 when there were only a couple smart companies to learn. Now its overwhelming and they lack training locally. The customer has also become less forgiving and more demanding! ​ The geek squad is failing and their trying to push off their services onto their delivery crews. And these delivery crews are meat heads that dont own any of the tech themselves past a smart phone and a big TV.

Pain

I run growth for a small SaaS team, roughly 12 people. We went all in on AI for content and outreach automation around February. The idea was simple, replace two part time contractors with a stack of AI tools handling research, drafting, personalization, the whole pipeline. First two weeks looked incredible. Output tripled, quality was decent enough, and the cost per piece dropped to almost nothing. I was showing the numbers to my cofounder like we'd cracked some code. Then the invoices started coming in. We had about seven different AI services running, each one doing its thing, and the token consumption across all of them was way beyond what any pricing calculator had predicted.

Pain

I'm a reasonably intelligent person, I've built teams, managed budgets, closed deals, figured out hard things under pressure, and yet every single time I opened QuickBooks I felt like someone had quietly rearranged my brain spent half a year assuming the problem was me, that I just needed to learn it properly, that everyone else had figured something out that I hadn't, so I watched tutorials and read help articles and paid for a session with a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who spent 90 minutes showing me things I already knew and charged me $180 for the privilege and the software still crashed during reconciliation and lost my work, still batched my Stripe payouts in a way that made matchi…

Pain

Eight years running ads for my store. Last month I'm reconciling numbers for my accountant and the Facebook total and the Shopify total just won't match. Not a little off. A third of my "sales" existed nowhere except inside Ads Manager. So I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I started checking. Turns out those numbers were never real to begin with. Most of what Ads Manager shows you isn't measured, it's modeled. A guess wearing the costume of a report. When an outside agency actually cross-checked Meta against Google Analytics, Meta swore it caused 87% of the sales. The real figure was 67% (it's the Seer Interactive incrementality study, go look).

Pain

We've been a Meraki shop for 10+ years now but I think we'll start ditching all Meraki switches and APs in the next year because I can't justify the costs to clients anymore. I always struggled to sell the switches because 2K€ for a very basic 24x1G PoE switch has always felt like 4x what it should cost. Then we had the APs licenses prices go +50% during COVID. Now the new Catalyst Wireless replacements for Meraki MR36/46 APs are TWICE the list price of the units they replace (which were already in the +600€ range for a single basic 2x2 AP with a 5yr license).