Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper "There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools" "If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing" "The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"

How I’ve Used AI to Generate a Few Hundred Thousand Dollars in New Revenue in 4–6 Weeks I have a story about how I have used AI coupled with changed human behavior to drive a significant change to business results in my business and very much increase the top line. I am a vocal critic of useless masturbatory vibe coding and applications of AI which do not actually meaningfully change business outcomes in any way (If you’re new here) But I’m also simultaneously an avid user of AI, praying that somehow the gods of superintelligence will rescue my meager profit margins and save me from the permanent underclass. Here’s something I’ve done over the past 4–6 weeks that has added a few hundred thousand dollars in top-line revenue to our business. The Problem My current cardinal sin as a business owner is that I allow proposals to stack up. I do site visits, and I’m unable to turn around a bid in a timely manner. The way you ACTUALLY solve this problem is by simplifying your service offering as a business, so you can provide pricing on the spot and do a one-call close (aka sit down at the kitchen table and hammer out a contract with a client). I’m dumb, and I’ve designed a business that is too complex to be able to provide that (at this time). As a side note, caveat: I’m working on rearchitecting everything so that we get there, but we’re not there right now. At the moment, we’re living the experience that most contractors fit into: 1. You get a call. 2. Somebody says, “Hey, can you come out and look at this and give me a price for how much it would cost to do it?” 3. You go out, look at the job, take some measurements, and write down the scope. 4. You try and figure out how much it’ll cost, and then you go back to the client with the pricing. This takes forever, is super inaccurate, is a horrific experience for everybody involved, and is the reason why it’s hard to get contractors to come out and it’s hard to get proposals out of them. It’s not because they hate money or because they’re bad at their job. It’s just that trying to reinvent the wheel every single time you put a proposal together is an impossible exercise. As the contractor or service provider, you’re terrified of providing the wrong price because, if you give the wrong price, it ends up being, at worst, a bad experience. It is, at best, a bad experience for the client, and at worst, it’ll put you out of business and into litigation or something of the sort. So you get stuck on perfection, and as we all know, perfection is the enemy of good, and the bids pile up. We get 5 to 7 leads a day, and there are times when I’m running 3 to 5 sales meetings per day. As you can imagine, if there’s any level of complexity to those jobs, it’s just an impossible exercise. You end up having clients calling you every single day, texting, asking, “Where’s my proposal?” They think you’re ghosting them when, in reality, you’re just trying to do your best to somehow deliver projects while also pricing new projects and figuring out how to keep everything together at the seams. Here’s how I’ve used AI (credit where credit is due) to go from perfection paralysis to a good-enough output, and how it’s driven multiple six figures of revenue for us here at West Coast Deck. The Tools I’m not using some sort of crazy technology stack. I’m not even using any of these MCP connectors or API connectors. I still don’t know what an MCP is. I don’t even know what an API is, so I don’t have the ability to figure any of that stuff out. Which means that if I can do this, you guys can probably figure it out too. The tools I’m using are as follows: * Quo w recording * A Plaud Pin Pro * A ChatGPT Pro subscription * A PolyCam subscription * A Company Cam subscription * A Stanley Fat Max 30 ft. tape measure Here’s What I Do The first thing is, I capture all transcripts of phone conversations and email traffic that we’ve had with the client. Next, I drive to the site. I park outside, and I turn on the plot plan. I start narrating. I say, “Here’s the address. I’m at 123 Main Street. This is Tom and Judy’s house. They have this type of deck project with this type of scope. I’m about to walk into the site and do a job walk and review the work.” Then I start the meeting. I tell the client I’m using AI tools to record, and then I essentially do a very verbal job walk and interview with them. I ask them a lot of questions about what they want to get done, and then I intentionally regurgitate back to them everything that they’ve said. I discuss my findings on the job site with them. I talk through different things. I pull measurements with my tape measure, say the measurements out loud, and talk through the universe of outcomes and options. I talk about materials. I try to be as verbal as possible, knowing that my AI recorder is capturing everything. Now, here is part of why I think this has been so effective for our business. The forcing function of me going through all of the options and being super verbal helps to create expectations with the client, help them understand what will happen, what might be possible, and what the general job scope is. It’s forcing me to be overly communicative with prospects. Before I leave the job site, I take a Polycam 3D LiDAR scan of the entire backyard, which is useful for taking measurements and referencing later if I need to look at details. I also then open Company Cam, and I do a video walkthrough where I reiterate everything that we just reviewed with the client on video. It’s like triPLICATE information: recording what scope is, what needs to happen, and what the next steps are. After the Site Visit The next step is: 1. I say goodbye to the client. 2. I go out to my truck, sit down, and talk to the Plod pin a little bit more about anything that wasn’t appropriate to discuss in front of the client or that maybe I missed and that I need to capture. 3. I end the recording. 4. I transfer the data from the Plod pin into the Plod app. 5. I copy the transcript from the recording into ChatGPT. At that point, I’m also adding any previous transcripts from Quo, any pictures that they’ve sent us, any videos that they’ve sent us historically, and any additional information. There are three more things that happen in the process: 1. I send a recap email to the client with next steps. 2. I generate a scope of work and proposal. 3. I reference our historic library and universe of proposals for pricing. My Super Scientific AI Prompts Normally, you have to buy my course to get my super scientific AI prompts, but I’ll give them away for free here. The first prompt is this: Please write a site visit recap email based on these transcripts and information, and send it to the client. Took me months and months to come up with that prompt. Should make you millions of dollars Even just that little step has made a huge difference in the customer experience. Literally 5 minutes after the site visit, they get a super detailed email from me recapping everything, talking about next steps, and what the project experience will be like for them. The next prompt is also probably worth millions of dollars. Please feel free to steal it. Please write a construction proposal based on the site visit transcript and all the information. Reference my previous proposals. And it spits out something that honestly is plenty good enough to sit down and review as a client. The next step is: you can ask it to reference pricing from previous proposals, or you can just look at your price book and manually input pricing into the detailed proposal. The Results I can’t wait for all the comments from people saying, “Oh, you should do this better.” That’s part of why I post this kind of stuff, because I want people to tell me how to do it better. We already have a V2, V3, and V4 of this planned, but this has first concept already resulted in a couple hundred thousand dollars in initial sales in just 4 to 6 weeks. Anybody could figure this out. It does not take any sort of AI wizardry. It’s just basic, rudimentary tools that are available to anybody. Provecho! (Happy hunting)