Hi all,
Three friends of mine launched products this year. None of them writes code.
A fraternity brother, a guy I went to high school with, and a client who became a friend. I want to tell you about all three at once, because the pattern only shows up when you put them side by side.
Seth: the idea he told people about at parties
Seth and I were in the same fraternity in college. He's carried an idea for years: a teacher taught him a way to pray — say what you're grateful for, say what you're struggling with, ask clearly for what you want — and Seth figured that in a world this full of bad news, seeing what other people are hoping for, and what's actually coming true, would be a powerful form of good news.
He doesn't write code. It "just seemed insurmountable," so it stayed "the kind of thing I would tell people about at parties and say I was going to do, but just not get to."
Then he had Claude coach him through a stack he'd never touched, step by step. Version one was garish purple and could store exactly one prayer. He showed his wife. She was unmoved. He shelved it, came back when the tools got better, and finished it.
TenThousandPrayers.com is live. He's in his late forties and blunt about the counterfactual: "I likely never would have even attempted it without AI tools."
Isaac: 25 years in cars, zero in web development
I grew up with Isaac and went to high school with him. My clearest picture of him from back then was driving around in his VW bug. He's spent about 25 years in the car business since, out in San Luis Obispo, with no development background and no design background. Until recently, even simple design work meant hiring someone.
He got to page 71 of Future Proof and stopped reading to go experiment. (I'll take it.) Five months later he has two live sites. TheVINHound.com is an AI-powered used-car search, born from his own frustration trying to replace his Model S and finding nothing that could search the whole web for one specific car. 805CarGuy.com is his new concierge business, where he works for the buyer instead of the dealer. Both built in Claude Code, in his spare time.
His business partner asked whether all this was making him less connected to the real world. Isaac's answer was the reverse: it lets him do things he otherwise wouldn't be able or bother to do. His words — "a more organized father, a more present husband, and a more efficient entrepreneur."
He also stole my own analogy back from me. I compare most people's AI use to owning a Ferrari and using it to charge their phone. Isaac, being a car guy: "my Scuderia is out every day."
Tim: the advisor who finally built his own thing
Tim booked me for an EY program a while back. He's an accomplished speaker himself, though we mostly bonded over the Dodgers. He's also spent 25 years at a firm whose entire job is helping other companies grow and scale — until his neighbor Jami invented a party game at a cul-de-sac game night, and Tim finally did the thing he'd spent a career coaching other people through.
Nicholas Street Games is named after that street, and Letter Me This! is shipping now. Tim is not a designer or a developer. He built the marketing site, the print-ready packaging, a companion dice-roller app, and an AI game master named Nickie who settles rules arguments mid-game.
His favorite build is the one no customer will ever see: checkout wired straight through to shipping, so an order comes in and a thermal printer by the window wakes up and prints the label. On watching the first one: "it felt like the company had a heartbeat."
And the line I haven't stopped thinking about. Tim has advised clients on AI for years. "There is a meaningful difference between understanding something conceptually and experiencing it firsthand." Couldn't agree more.
What the three have in common
Not one of them was short on ideas. Seth had his for years. Isaac had wanted in "for so long." Tim has had the itch his whole career.
Each was short on exactly one skill. That skill used to be a wall: you spent years acquiring it, you paid someone who had, or you didn't build the thing.
That wall is coming down. The interesting part isn't that AI writes code. It's that decades of knowing your industry cold just became the scarce ingredient, and the missing skill became the cheap one. Tim said it best: thirty-five years of business instinct, finally aimed at his own company, paired with tools that fill in the skills he doesn't have.
So do me a favor. Hit reply with the thing you've been telling people at parties you're going to build. One sentence is plenty. I read every one, and I suspect a lot of you are one missing skill away from something good.
Best,
Dr. Michael "House" Housman