Hey there 👋,
Eighteen months ago I was selling custom GPTs to UK charities for £5K a pop.
The charities got something useful. I got paid. But I always knew it was limited. ChatGPT and the early GPT tools were good at answering questions and generating text. What they couldn't do was sit down at a computer and actually do the work. The charity still needed staff in the chairs. I was selling a smarter search engine, not a worker.
So I stopped. I thought the opportunity wasn't quite there yet.
There's a thesis from Sequoia that I think is basically correct. The next $1 trillion company will sell work, not software. Guillermo Flor put the number to it recently: for every $1 spent on software globally, around $6 gets spent on services. The entire SaaS playbook was about capturing the software dollar. The AI playbook is about capturing the services dollar, at software margins.
Not "AI for accountants." The AI accounting firm.
Not "AI for charities." The charity that has AI doing the actual admin work, with a human reviewing the outputs.
The difference between then and now is that this is no longer theoretical. Claude Cowork is about three months old. It lets you run AI workers locally on a client's computer, executing real tasks, without their staff needing to be in the chair. Staff get freed up to do the higher-level, more human parts of their work. The things that actually need a person. Or, if the timing is right, they get to walk into the redundant sunset. Step back from the repetitive work entirely and let the system run it.
That's the shift. Eighteen months ago I could hand someone a tool. Now I can hand them a worker.
So I've restarted. Under the same name: Why Not Bot (website built in Claude Code, about to update it in Claude Design).
The play is UK charities again to start, then SMEs here in Central Europe. I take the tasks charity staff actually do on a weekly basis, write them as skills in Claude Code, and have Cowork run them as scheduled tasks. The team gets a visual artifact dashboard showing exactly what completed, what's in progress, what flagged for human review. It's a managed service, not a tool sale.
My last online business was LetterOperators. Done-for-you newsletter services. I needed a real business partner to run it with me because the operational load was too high for one person. I found the best one I could have with Maciej, in fact the only business partnership that truly worked for me in over 15 years in business. The dependency on another human, their time, their attention, their bandwidth, was always the constraint.
Claude is not just a partner now. It's the whole team. It handles the work, follows the documented processes, runs the recurring tasks, flags what needs a human decision. One operator with a properly set-up Claude stack can do what used to take a small team. That's the agency of one model, and it's what Gary Henderson at Gary Club has been building toward. Gary built a $2.5M annual recurring revenue agency before turning that system into a platform others can run with. I've just joined his AI Agency of One community, specifically for the sales frameworks and the network of people actively closing in this space.
None of this requires being technical. It requires showing up, documenting what a business actually does each week, and turning that into something Claude can run. You manage the relationship and the quality. The AI handles fulfilment. Your margins look like software. Your service looks like a team.
The Redundant community on Skool is where I will be discussing this in detail. How to identify tasks worth turning into skills. How to set Cowork up to run them reliably. How to price and sell this as a managed service. How to make renewal automatic.
If you're a business owner, you use this to make yourself redundant from your own operations. If you want to build a practice around it, you do that too. Most people reading this can do both.
The paid community is at skool.com/redundant. That's where the real work happens, including everything I'm building with Why Not Bot as I go. It’s now 150 members strong with new people signing up at just $29/m each week.
Cheers,
Richard (@richardpatey)