My friend Aaron mentioned, kind of in passing, that he’d started selling water purification systems in Houston. He didn’t have a website. He didn’t have a name picked out. He had a phone number and a truck and the knowledge of how to install a whole-home filtration rig without flooding somebody’s laundry room.
I opened a terminal. By dinner, Provision Water Co existed.
This post is about what “existed” actually means, because I think the specifics matter more than the vibe.
What got built
In a single Claude Code session I ended up with:
- A business name that wasn’t already trademarked in Texas
- A logo concept and a two-color brand palette
- A Next.js marketing site — home, services, service areas, about, contact, blog — deployed to a vercel.app URL
- A research-backed email to Aaron explaining positioning, three pricing tiers, and the two neighborhoods in Houston with the worst water hardness reports
- A handful of Rick Burgess video memes, custom-cut, sent to my phone over Tailscale so I could text them to him
That last one is the part I keep laughing about, so we’ll come back to it.
The site itself
Nothing exotic. Next.js App Router, Tailwind, a SITE config object so the phone number and service region aren’t hardcoded in twelve places. A hero section with a stock water photo and a “Get Free Water Test” button. Service areas for the Houston suburbs. A contact form that actually posts somewhere.
The thing I care about isn’t the code. It’s the loop. I never opened the Vercel dashboard. I never opened a file manager. I described what I wanted in the terminal, watched the agent spin up the project, scaffold the pages, wire the routing, and deploy it. When something broke, I said “the header is cutting off on mobile” and it fixed the header.
The whole codebase is maybe 1,500 lines. The difference between this taking three hours and three weeks isn’t the line count. It’s that I didn’t context-switch once. No IDE, no browser tabs, no “let me just check Stack Overflow.” One window.
The research email
This is the part that would’ve taken a real agency a week.
Before I wrote Aaron’s positioning email, the agent pulled public water quality reports for the Houston metro, cross-referenced hardness numbers across zip codes, and flagged which suburbs had the worst scale problems. Then it drafted a three-tier offer — basic softener, whole-home filtration, reverse osmosis add-on — with pricing anchored to what his competitors publicly list.
I read the email before sending. I changed maybe two sentences. The rest was tighter than anything I would’ve written by hand at 4pm on a Wednesday.
None of this is magic. The reports are public. Competitor pricing is public. But the “sit down, gather it, synthesize it, turn it into an email a friend will actually read” part — that’s the part that used to not happen, because I’d get to step two and go make coffee.
The Rick Burgess memes
Okay, here’s the fun one.
Rick Burgess is a radio host Aaron and I both quote constantly. I figured a congratulations-your-business-exists-now moment deserved a custom meme. So I asked for a few: Rick’s face, a caption about water filters, MP4 out.
# roughly what I asked for, multiple times, with variations
"make a short video meme using rick burgess clip X with caption Y,
save to ~/memes/, then push to my phone over tailscale"The agent pulled the clip, rendered captions with ffmpeg, saved the output, and pushed it to my phone over Tailscale. I texted them to Aaron one at a time, like a man who has too much time and not enough dignity. He responded with voice memos of him laughing.
Total marginal cost: a few cents in compute. Total marginal value: a friend who now knows his business launch was taken seriously enough to generate a dedicated meme pipeline.
What this actually is
I don’t want to oversell what happened here. Provision Water Co is a vercel.app URL and a starter site. Aaron still has to do the work — run the ads, pick up the phone, install the systems, keep people happy. The site doesn’t sell water filters. He does.
But the bar for “having a business on the internet” quietly collapsed. It used to take a designer, a developer, a copywriter, and two weeks of back-and-forth. Last week it took me an afternoon and a terminal, and the bottleneck wasn’t the work — it was how fast I could describe what I wanted.
I keep thinking about how many people are one conversation away from this. Someone in your life is already running a business out of a pickup truck and a phone number. If you can sit down for an afternoon with the right tools, you can hand them a whole launch kit before they even finish their sandwich.
Do that. The memes are optional, but highly recommended.