At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.
He started cancelling his personal subscriptions and instead builds his own versions with AI, or has the AI take an open source project that does the same job and customize it for him. What he still pays for is the AI, YouTube, Spotify and Starlink.
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
Since the AI got access to his Strava through an MCP, it has become his running coach. He says his progress is clear and he may reach 150 km of running in one week, but the sessions are so strict he feels like he is doing maths.
A man fed an expanded spec sheet into AI Sites and got a working booking website for his rehearsal space in 30 minutes. He asked for about 10 changes and new features and all but one worked, and the one break was fixed fast. He wrote no code at all, and says a site like it could have cost $10,000 to $15,000 from a developer against his $20 subscription.
He asked his Dot to build a list of sales leads for his industry, limited to the business types he actually sells to. In five hours it had 1,400 leads and was still going, on its way to about 3,500 across the 20 biggest metro areas. He had paid $223 for about 350 leads before, and the Dot's list was cleaner.
Ahead of a Nov 14 Disney cruise, he credits the AI with tracking the staggered booking milestones — excursions opening in August, online check-in, and a late-night Royal Gathering character meetup — so none of the windows are missed.
Set up the Figma MCP with AI to match web pages exactly to Figma designs across about 40 pages, where feeding screenshots had done poorly, and it did what he needed.
He set up a message bus between his server, his desktop and his laptop. He makes the menu for the week on the server, the ingredients get sent to the desktop, and the laptop places the Walmart order for pickup after work. He checks the order on his phone before pickup to make sure it did not add staples like aluminum foil by mistake, and he says it works pretty well.