Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:
Opportunity → AI House Manager
Framework → The Automation ROI Matrix
Tool → Lightfield
Trend → Tech Employment Decline
Quote → Don’t Worry About Being Hated
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🔗 Houck’s Picks
My favorite finds of the week.
Fundraising
Growth
ICYMI
💡 Opportunity: AI House Manager
I bought a house in January after over a year as a nomad.
Going from having no furniture, electricity bills, or really anything other than what could fit in my backpack to dealing with a faulty hot water heater and building new routines and systems was a big shift.
It became obvious pretty quickly that a lot of the tasks we do around the house, often on repeat, could be managed by software.
And, honestly, what’s a better investment than freeing up your time to spend with family or other people when you’re in your home?
Do you really want to be handling all of those tasks yourself?
Similar to how we had the (terribly named) “internet of things” companies back when “smart home automation” (man, these were really bad…) was a thing but wasn’t really that smart, we’ll likely see a wave of these types of companies over the next couple years again.
The most obvious one is in-home robots, but there are also likely a lot of other opportunities in this space (many of which won’t require any additional hardware to worry about).
🧠 Framework: The Automation ROI Matrix
If choosing what to automate with LLMs feels overwhelming, or you don’t know where to start, try this week’s framework.
The Automation ROI Matrix, from Boom Automations founder Luke Pierce, maps the decisions across the classic two dimensions any consultant or product manager will be familiar with:
Impact vs effort.
Here’s how it breaks it down:
High impact, low effort → Automate it now. These are quick wins like data entry, internal notifications, etc. Quick to build but save considerable time (or, less commonly, money).
High impact, high effort → Plan and build. These are custom dashboards or agents. The time and financial savings are huge but the projects are large or complex and require proper scoping and a fair amount of dev time. Worth the investment though.
Low impact, low effort → Automate it later. These are your nice to haves. Not going to move the needle, but good to do. Think of them like quality of life enhancements.
Low impact, high effort → Skip it. These are complex projects that don’t actually save much time or money. Think rare edge cases or custom tooling for places you don’t really need it. Don’t waste your time here.
🛠 Tool: Lightfield
Your CRM is a guilt trip. Lightfield is a natural language CRM that updates itself and surfaces your follow-ups so you never fall behind.
Founders are using it to answer questions like “Why are we losing deals?” and “What should we do next?” — with answers backed by real conversations.
Just launched on Product Hunt and already #1 today. Thousands of founders have switched. Set up in 4 minutes → try Lightfield free for 3 months using code FOUNDINGJOURNEYT13
📈 Trend: Tech Employment Decline
I got a quick look inside the operations of a $50 billion company recently that’s fully outside the tech world.
I won’t give any identifying details but suffice to say the company is paying US salaries to many people to do work that could either be done by VAs for a fraction of the cost or, in many cases, fully automated with a week’s worth of vibecoding.
These companies are not yet reducing their workforce due to AI — not because they don’t want to, they simply don’t know how.
But tech companies are different.
Tech companies and startups are the first to adopt new technologies, take risks, and operate in hyper-competitive environments where efficiency is not only rewarded but essential.
I share this because Goldman Sachs recently posted data that shows the tech world is now shrinking as a percentage of overall employment in the US for the first time in at least 20 years.
The post-COVID peak of around 2.5% of all employment aligns perfectly with the release of ChatGPT near the end of 2022.
AI wasn’t expected to come for the tech workers first, but that seems to be where we are right now.
💬 Quote: Don’t Worry About Being Hated
The philosopher Meek Mill famously said in the seminal Ima Boss that “scared money don’t make no money” and, honestly, it’s true.
The fastest way to not achieving what you want is to be scared of what will happen if you actually do.
People hating you, not understanding it, or otherwise working against you are just the price of admission.
Uber learned this while making transportation easier for billions of people globally.
I learned this when building an IRL coliving company during COVID that people loved enough to get tattoos of our logo.
Anything truly novel and great is going to be disruptive. And disruption is a lightning rod for detractors who like to boo from the peanut gallery.
Own your vision and your journey.
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