Owning a small business in 2026 is louder than it has ever been. Your customers are talking — on Google, on Reddit, on niche forums you'd never think to read, in YouTube comments, in a Yelp review someone wrote six months ago that's still ranking. Your competitors are talking too. So is every operator in your category, every supplier, every loose AI-curious neighbor with an opinion.
The problem isn't that the information is hidden. The problem is that the information is everywhere, and the cost of paying attention to all of it — really paying attention — is somewhere between a part-time job and a small mortgage.
The interesting question isn't "what are my customers thinking?" The interesting question is: "of the ten thousand things they said online this month, which three should change what I do on Tuesday?"
— The thesisThe consultant economy is broken for the small operator.
For most of the last fifty years, the answer to that question was simple: hire a consultant. Six thousand dollars, a quarterly engagement, a forty-page deck, and a recommendation that you should probably do more of what's working.
That worked, kind of, when markets moved at the pace of quarters. It does not work when markets move at the pace of hours. By the time the consultant has scheduled a kickoff, your nearest competitor has launched a new menu, two influencers have reviewed it, and the trend that prompted the engagement is over.
The deeper problem is that consultants are generalists in your specific business. They've worked with "people like you." They have not spent six years running your specific operation. You have. The expertise lives in your head. The thing they can do that you can't is read the open web at scale and tell you what's actually moving.
What we're building, and why this shape.
Recon is one bet, made in three pieces.
One. The right cadence is thirty days. Quarterly is too slow. Weekly is too noisy. Monthly is the heartbeat of a small business — payroll, rent, P&L. Insight should match the rhythm.
Two. The right output is five things. Not a deck. Not a dashboard. Five things, ranked, each with a single sentence on why and a paste-and-run prompt on how. If we can't get it down to five, we haven't done the work.
Three. The right tool is already on your computer. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — they're free or close to it. The bottleneck was never the AI. The bottleneck is knowing what to ask. That's the prompt. That's the deliverable. That's Recon.
We're not building a SaaS. We're not building a dashboard. We're writing letters, every month, that happen to contain the most leveraged AI prompts you'll use that month.
— The productWhere we are, honestly.
This is the founding memo. Recon is pre-launch — the engine works, the first sample reports have started going out to early prospects across industries from small wineries to contracting to non-profit, and the LLC is in formation. There are no paying clients yet. If you become one, you'll be among the first ten or twenty.
I'm building Recon because I believe — five years from now — every small business in North America will have a relationship with one or two services that watch the open web on their behalf and translate what they see into direct, dated, do-this-now recommendations. The form factor will keep changing — voice, email, direct API into the operator's tools — but the job will be the same.
Recon's bet is that the right form factor is a letter, in the long human tradition of letters. Six pages, opened on the first of the month, read with coffee. Five things to do. A signature at the bottom. Permission to ignore four of the five.
If that sounds old-fashioned, that's because it is. The reason it works is the same reason a doctor's note works, a tailor's note works, a banker's note works. Someone who knows your situation specifically took the time to write to you specifically. That hasn't been replaced by software in six hundred years. I don't think it will be next year either.
20-year retired Marine pilot · high-volume fast-food entrepreneur
Systems & process · California