You don't have to be an AI expert to build an AI business

Whitney missed one email from her kids' elementary school and ended up making lunches for a month.

The school had sent a deadline to sign up and pay for lunches. It got buried. By the time she found it, she had acquired a new daily task. Four kids apparently wasn't enough to keep her busy.

Now she's building Motherboard, an AI agency to help parents keep track of family life.

The idea started with a pretty reasonable request: could something please read all these messages and tell me what I actually need to do?

There's the school email. The group text. The app you downloaded for one activity. And, unfortunately, GroupMe, which Whitney describes as “Satan's group messaging platform.”

Important updates arrive, followed by everyone confirming that they've seen the important update. Somewhere in there is a deadline you need to remember.

Whitney knows this problem well. She also has very little interest in spending her evenings learning to build AI agents.

“I'm not gonna be the expert at building an AI agent,” she said. “I wanna do what I'm best at and what someone else can't do.”

I think a lot of people building AI tools underestimate how reasonable that is.

We tell people they can build anything now. Then we hand them a blank chat window and expect them to figure out what to build, which tools to use, how to connect everything, and whether the answer is right. That's a heavy ask for someone who came here because they already had too much to do.

Whitney described asking AI a question and getting an answer to something else. She doesn't know how to reliably make it do what she wants. Learning that would take time she could spend doing the work she actually wants to do.

But she can tell you exactly what a useful result would look like for another parent. She knows the messages they're missing and the stress of wondering whether they've forgotten something. When she talks to friends and family about Motherboard, they recognize the problem immediately.

That's a useful place to start a business.

With Motherboard, we're working with Whitney on the technical side through Workloop. She's bringing her understanding of the problem and the people she wants to help. The goal is a service parents can use to catch the things that need their attention, with someone they can talk to when it gets something wrong.

What I like about Whitney's ambition is how specific it is. She wants to solve this problem for people like her, build a small business, and potentially create a handful of jobs. She'd also really like to stop opening GroupMe.

“I don't need to take over the world,” she told us.

If there's a task you understand well enough that other people already ask you for help with it, I'd like to hear about it. That's the kind of person we want to build Workloop with.

Helping a few families stay on top of everything is a pretty good start. Getting their school lunches back would be a bonus.