I couldn’t set up my own AI workflow.
I’m a startup founder, product guy, designer and tech investor. I live in this world. I talk to AI founders every single day. And when I wanted to build my first openclaw setup, I called my buddy Mattias to help me do it.
I knew, I have been there before. I was about to buy two Mac minis and spend 2 weeks figuring this out myself before i realised. Mattias is my man and I will be up and running in no time while sparing me a few new grey hairs.
That’s not a confession. That’s the whole thesis.
Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business this week. One click. Stripe, HubSpot, Canva, Docusign, all connected in a heartbeat.
15 agentic workflows running payroll, chasing invoices, nurturing leads. Out of the box with full historical context of the business.
This is their third vertical play in 2026. First enterprise. Then legal. Now SMBs.
I know Legora is hitting €235M this year and they’ll be fine. But the signal is clear. Anthropic isn’t building a chatbot. They’re building distribution infrastructure. And they’re moving fast.
The numbers nobody talks about.
Almost half of US GDP comes from small businesses. Most of them still run on spreadsheets and gut feel.
Once you’ve automated your invoicing, your receipt handling, your lead follow up, you’re not going back to doing it manually.
But will Claude actually be the interface SMBs use?
No. Not a chance. Not for the masses.
And I know this because I am the masses. I’m a reasonably technical person who couldn’t do it alone. My accountant Jenni can’t do it alone. My cousin Bojan running an electrician company in Helsingborg definitely can’t do it alone.
The service layer is the product
The platform is free. The money is in making it work for real people.
Think about what happened with Shopify. The platform exists. Anybody can set up a store. But a massive ecosystem of agencies, consultants and integrators makes real money because most people don’t want to set up a store. They just want a store that works.
Generalist AI-for-SMBs is dead. The big winners will be vertical operators who know the ICP and the workflows cold.
Agencies, people, who sell trust and outcomes, not seats.
Consultants who configure agentic pipelines for specific industries.
The ones holding peoples hands through the setup? They’re going to Disneyland with their families.
So where do startups still win?
Not in the horizontal layer. Anthropic just ate that. OpenAI will follow. Google will follow. The platform play is over for startups. Sayonara.
What’s left is deeper. Weirder. More specialised.
The startup that handles payroll and compliance for German companies hiring across EU borders. The one that automates VAT reporting for Nordic e-commerce sellers who operate across three jurisdictions. The one that knows the difference between a K10 and a K12 and why your accountant cries every April.
That level of domain specificity is where Anthropic won’t go. It’s too small for them. Too weird. Too local. And that’s exactly why it’s defensible.
If you’re a founder building the vertical layer that Anthropic won’t touch, the deep weird specialised stuff, I want to talk to you.
If you’re an operator who just realised Claude can do 80% of your back office but you need someone to set it up, I want to talk to you too.
The plumbers who connect the pipes are going to make a killing. The pipe manufacturers are already taken.
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