Happy Thursday, and welcome to a new season of the pod!

I recently gave a live talk (my slides) at our EcomFounders AI Summit about the setup I've built with Jet, my Hermes agent, my second brain, whatever you want to call it. I pulled 4 of the biggest takeaways.

Vendor of the Week

Anrok — Take sales tax off your plate for less than $2/day.

Sales tax is one of those jobs nobody really owns until it becomes a problem. Usually, it starts with a notice inside Shopify and someone in finance digging through old orders to work out whether the brand should have registered months ago.

Collecting tax at checkout is the easy part. The annoying part comes later, when the state expects the right return and the money to match!

Anrok takes that problem over once you connect your Shopify store in minutes. It monitors where you’re selling and takes responsibility for whatever each state requires until the return is filed and paid. This is boring software, which is kind of the point. Nobody wants a better sales tax workflow; they want the workflow gone!!

Other services are priced like an a-la-carte menu… every registration costs more and every filing costs more. Anrok’s new plan is $50 per state each month, all in. That works out to less than $2 a day.

If your brand is getting close to $1M in revenue, this is probably where the spreadsheet stops feeling cheap and starts feeling risky.

See how Anrok would handle your states.

Inside My AI Chief Of Staff Setup

Most people are stuck in stage one: opening a chat window, exporting data, asking a question, starting over next session. No memory, no context carried forward, no real leverage. I walked through what it looks like to build past that, an agent that actually knows your business.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Key takeaways from this ep:

1. A chat window isn't a chief of staff. The real unlock is an integration layer: your Gmail, Slack, Shopify, Stripe, reviews, everything feeding in every 15 minutes so your agent has actual business context, not just whatever you paste in that session.

2. Give every agent a narrow job and a real personality. I run 20 separate agents: a copywriter, a creative strategist, an e-commerce ops manager, a health and wellness bot. Each one only knows its lane. That's what keeps the output sharp.

3. Build a cockpit, not just a chatbot. Morning briefs, daily report cards, flagged anomalies like a refund spike or a competitor's new ad picking up spend. You should wake up already knowing what happened, not have to go dig for it.

4. Keep it local so you're never locked in. Everything lives on a Mac mini, not inside one company's ecosystem. When the next model comes out, and it will, your knowledge moves with you.

That's all for today

If you're still doing everything inside a single chat window, that's the one thing to change this week.

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Get some rest, drink some water, and I'll see you Sunday.

Nik