Jarrod Smith

@Guccistarboi 2.4M likes on a single announcement is the proof. Drake put a physical object downtown and tied the drop date to its destruction. Anyone saying organic marketing is dead doesn't know how to make something people actually want to interact with.

Drake’s iceman album announcement post currently has 2.4m likes on ig, so y’all being anticipating this real bad🤯🔥

Drake's ICEMAN sculpture is the cleanest marketing playbook of 2026. One physical object in downtown Toronto. Zero ad spend. The crowd had to literally destroy it to unlock the album drop date. Every SMB at launch keeps asking how to reach people. The real question is what physical thing can you put in the world that people want to engage with.

Service businesses at $1-5M ARR keep hitting the same wall. Sales comp front-loads cash out, collections trail 30-60 days behind. The fix isn't a new ad channel. It's shifting 30% of comp to 90-day retention. Raises retention and buys runway in one move.

@Akintola_steve Life outside tech is the real move. Apex Digital Solutions. We build websites, Discord communities, and AI automations for service businesses like yours. Iowa based, happy to swap ops notes if you ever want it. apexdsol.com

Do you have a life outside tech, or is tech your only saving grace? Outside tech, I run a cleaning service. What about you? Drop your business in the comments so others can support with retweets and patronage.

Biggest lever other operators use in this window is shifting 30-40% of comp to 90-day retention instead of all upfront. Kills the cash gap, also raises retention because reps start screening prospects harder when their money depends on it. Doesn't cover all $450K but it buys you runway without touching the bank.

Between May 1st and July 31st we have to come up with ~$450,000 in up front payments for our door to door sales teams. We do not have that much in the bank right now. Wish us luck!

@getmilo_dev This is the pattern. The answering problem is cheaper to fix than the lead problem, and most agencies only talk leads because the retainer math looks better. A $300 setup on missed call auto-reply plus a simple scheduler saves more revenue than any new ad spend.

Talked to an HVAC owner who said his biggest problem wasn't finding leads — it was answering the phone while his guys were on jobs. He was paying his wife to sit by the phone from 8-5. $0/hr on paper. Infinite resentment cost.

@HVACSEO Adding a time trigger. 24 hours is right, but flip the SMS window to between 10am and 2pm their local time. Response rate doubles because it hits during a lull in their service day, not during the commute.

Do this until you’re too busy to do this. And when you get too busy, then have the review sequence be sent SMS Invoice paid=request review. 24 hour wait Did they click the link? No? Second ask, sent during business hours Different writing in second text. I recommend something along the lines of helping our family/veteran/local company grow with a review P.S. always be an ask. Try to not use ! Anywhere. Most promo has ! And I recently came upon some research showing “!” Signifies automation and marketing Include customer name and detail of job and company name Hey Ryan, it’s bobs stump grinding. Would you leave us a review? [link] 24hrs Hey Ryan, can you help our family owned business grow by providing us with a Google review? It helps us get found online by customers like you. [link] The ROI for handcrafted review requests diminishes at a certain point because you’ve grown too large to sit down and pump them out as the owner. But until it does, man is this not a bad idea

The small biz owners who win the next 3 years aren't the ones with the best AI stack. They're the ones who fix the broken website first, build a real community around the brand, then layer AI on top of systems that actually work. Web, Discord, automation. Plumbing before agents.

Growth is forgiving someone because staying in the grudge costs you more than they do. Naruto isn't saying murder is fine. He's saying carrying hate into becoming Hokage breaks him before it breaks Sasuke. That's the whole point of the Sage of Six Paths arc. Consequences still land, he just doesn't let them run him.

@ApexDSolutions @Wdj24 @borutoswill Again i say is forgiving a murderer growth or stupidity? Let alone forgiving folks committing genocides jus bc they girl died? That along with the fact naruto has consistently "forgiven" awful people who wronged him long before shippuden

Crazy how Thorfinn gets praised for doing what Naruto has been doing for a while yet one gets called S tier while the other is mid and overrated

Jokic running the Nuggets offense is the most underrated operator case study in sports. He doesn't do anything flashy. He just removes friction every possession. Reads the defense, makes the obvious pass, skips the hero moment. That's 90% of what separates great SMBs from average ones too.

@1Umairshaikh Claude plus a dead-simple text file log. Everything else comes and goes, but the log of what I decided and why during each build is what I actually come back to. Zero SaaS in the stack.

As a founder, what's one tool you can't build without?

@kylegawley The math most distribution advice skips. And 3,500 signups at 3% assumes a warm funnel. On cold you double the top again. The first 100 rarely show up as signups anyway. They show up as DMs you answered inside 10 minutes.

"You just need 100 customers paying $100/mo" Getting 100 customers requires getting ~3,500 signups It's just not that easy.

@Layton_Gott And the test for what NOT to build is whether it replaces a process the client already trusts. If they trust it and it works, AI is a risk. If they don't trust it and it's broken, AI is the unlock. Everything else is a demo.

The most undervalued skill in 2026 for devs: Knowing what NOT to build with AI.

@superscribeio That's the whole loop most agencies skip. Output to invoice has three choke points that kill margin. Scope creep at delivery, approval lag at review, collection drag at billing. Fix any one and the agent stack stops mattering.

@ApexDSolutions agencies do not need more agents. they need cleaner paths from output to invoice

Most agency owners reaching for AI tooling are solving the wrong problem. Building an agent with Claude Code is the easy part. Figuring out what to build that actually closes a client invoice is where 95% get stuck. Tooling without a use case is just a playground.

@Dave_Geoghegan_ The 7th channel test is money. For service businesses right now it's physical mail plus a QR to a personalized Loom on their actual storefront. Annoying to produce, feels outdated, and that's the whole moat. Nobody with a $20 Zapier stack will bother.

the 6 channels observation is why most distribution advice sounds the same. everyone converges on the same playbook because it works just barely enough to justify being tried. the founders pulling ahead found a 7th channel that's annoying enough that the cohort hasn't adopted it yet.

Building = solo skill. Distribution = competitive skill vs every other founder chasing the same 6 channels. You're not fighting the algorithm, you're fighting every other person who figured out the same "growth hack" 3 months before you.

Ran into an HVAC owner who pays $40k a year for leads and still leaves 4 calls a day unanswered. The leads aren't the bottleneck. The answer rate is. Fix the cheap end of the funnel before buying a bigger top.

@iwantmoreperiod @TheSammahmood_ Scared money stays in the feed. The walkthrough you dread is the one that flips the switch. Every operator I respect has the same story. First real asset they bought felt wrong right up until the day it started paying them.

@TheSammahmood_ @ApexDSolutions You guys nailed it. 🎯 What's the old saying, "Scared money....."

Go check how many cleaning business videos you’ve saved. Now ask yourself… How many actual walkthroughs have you done? That’s the gap. Most people don’t fail from lack of information. They fail from lack of action. You don’t need another tip. You need to go price a real job. Your saves are full. Your contracts aren’t.

The best AI consultants right now aren't the ones with the flashiest demos. They're the ones who sit with an SMB owner for 2 hours, find the one broken process costing him sleep, and come back in 90 days with that exact thing fixed. No demo, just before and after.

This list is small biz 101 but most founders refuse to run it. They'd rather chase a $0 to $10m SaaS dream than spend 6 months learning the cash flow of a car wash. The boring assets pay the bills, then pay for the dream. One funds the other.

Every SMB I talk to thinks they need AI. They don't. They need the missed call from yesterday to stop costing them $300. They need the Monday estimate to actually send. Fix the plumbing first. AI is a multiplier on systems that work, not a rescue for ones that don't.