Corné van Willigen

Broken tech stacks cost SMBs real money. I built the AI infrastructure that replaces the mess. Co Founder

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Small human team, a bunch of agents. The agents do the boring repeat stuff at 3am. The people decide what's actually good. Thats the whole setup.

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Your 20% off sitewide Black Friday email looks exactly like everyone elses. Pick one product and tell people why you actually love it.

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Big companies are forming AI committees. Steering groups. Six month pilots with a slide deck at the end.

A small business owner can try something on Monday and kill it on Friday. Thats the advantage nobody talks about.

You dont need a strategy doc to find out if an agent can sort your inbox or draft your quotes. You need one week and the guts to say this isn't working..

The mistake I see is small companies copying the big ones. They wait for the perfect plan, the perfect tool, someone to tell them it's safe. Meanwhile the whole point of being small is you can change your mind on a Tuesday.

How we do it: agents take the boring repetitive work, a person looks at the result and decides. If it doesn't save time in a week, it goes. No committee needed

What's the last thing you tried for a week and then dropped?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

What's one thing you automated in your business and then went back to doing by hand? And why

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Before Black Friday, pull everyone who bought in the last two weeks out of the discount email. Send them a plain thank you instead. Nobody likes seeing the price drop right after they paid full price

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

I read AI news every day. Its part of the job.

And honestly most of it doesn't matter if you run a business with 5 or 50 people.

New model, new benchmark, new funding round, someone on here saying everything changed again.. Your customers didnt change this week. Your margins didn't either.

The rule I use now is simple. I only care about a news item if it changes what my customers do, or what my team does on a normal workday. Everything else is entertainment.

Our agents go through the pile every morning and sort it. That's the boring part and they're good at it. A person still decides what actually matters, and most days the answer is almost nothing

So no, you're not falling behind because you skipped the latest launch.

What's the last AI news story that actually changed something in your business?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Everyone wants an AI agent. Almost nobody can describe the job they'd give it in one sentence

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

If your Black Friday sale is a surprise, you're training people to wait for the next one. Tell your list the date now so they can plan. Writing more on this over at Emercify this month

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

What's the last thing you learned in your business that no AI could have told you?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Google's AI Mode now shows book and quote buttons for home service pros, through Housecall Pro, Jobber, Angi and Thumbtack. Being findable used to be enough. Now your scheduling software decides if you even get on the card

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Who on your team actually uses the AI seats you pay for?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Everyone talks about AI making the old work cheaper. Write faster, design faster, answer the same tickets faster.

Thats fine. It's also the least interesting part.

The useful question is what you can do now that you simply couldn't do last year. Not a slightly cheaper version of the same report. Something that was too slow or too expensive to even try.

We still have a real team here. Agents handle a lot of the repetitive bits, first drafts, the sorting. The people decide whats worth doing in the first place.

I keep catching myself using the tools to go faster at things I already knew how to do. And then wondering why the week feels the same..

The win isn't a shorter list of the same jobs. It's adding a thing that used to be impossible

What's one thing you can do in the business now that you couldn't justify a year ago?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Whats the most boring task in your business that you'd happily pay to never do again?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

AI won't fix a business nobody wants to buy from. It just helps you find out faster.

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

I think about hiring differently now.

A few years ago I'd look at how fast someone could get through a pile of work. Emails, product descriptions, reports. Thats mostly not the question anymore. Agents do the boring repetitive part for us and they're pretty good at it.

What they can't do is look at a draft and say this is wrong, our customer would never say it like that. Or this number looks off.. go check it.

That's the job now. Our team spends less time producing and more time judging. Reading, cutting, deciding what goes out and what doesn't. It's honestly harder work than it sounds

So when I talk to someone new I care way less about speed and way more about taste. Do they notice when something is off. Do they push back on me.

People who are great at that are worth more than ever, not less.

What do you look for when you hire now?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Before you write your Black Friday emails, read your last three subject lines. If they all start with a percentage, your list already knows whats coming and stopped opening. I write about this stuff every week in Emercify.

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

If your AI setup only works while you're watching it, it's not a system yet. It's a hobby.

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

What's one task in your business you'd never hand to AI, even if it did it perfectly?

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Store owners, try this once. Email only the people who bought from you twice in the last 90 days. That's your real list, the rest is hope

[Corné van Willigen @Qorne]

Prompts aren't a moat. Knowing your customer better than anyone else is.