I build software for small businesses. Most of the time I'm rebuilding the slow, creaky systems they already run on, because the slow part is almost never the work. It's the waiting.

I learned that the hard way. I watched a colleague try to open our quoting tool one afternoon. He kept hitting hoop after hoop just to get in, and he finally said, “I can't do this anymore.” I saw his face. It stuck with me, because I realized my team had probably been living with that for years. A freight quote that should have been quick was taking us 24 to 48 hours, and the rates felt like a mystery box. Around the same time our overseas ops team was panicking because the same 16-year-old app had a database falling over on them.

So one Saturday I sat down to find out where all that time was going. I put 20 AI agents on it, each one good at something different, and pointed them at the whole quoting process with one question: where does it actually get slow? The answer surprised me. The work was never the slow part. Building a quote took about an hour. The other day and a half was waiting. Waiting on partner agents to email their rates back. Waiting for our overseas office and our US side to sync up across the time zone. And at the very end, even a finished quote sat waiting for someone to review it before the customer ever saw it.

So I rebuilt it from the database up, and a two-day quote became about an hour. It started in freight, but the waiting is everywhere I look.

You can book a 15-minute call, email me at chan@chanchum.com, or follow along on X.