I sell a $999 AI Assessment to Australian small business owners. A 20-minute call, a bespoke PDF in 48 hours, and a guarantee — if the report doesn’t identify enough monthly ROI to pay for itself in month one, full refund.

Five trial clients in April. Four published testimonials. The product is live.

Last Thursday I had a different question: what’s next?

So I did something simple. I clicked record on WhatsApp while driving to pick up my daughter, asked myself the same questions I’d ask a paying client, and ran the recording through the same workflow — Riverside transcript, Claude prompt, Gamma report.

48 hours later I had a PDF. My own AI Assessment.

It mapped my week the way it would any client’s. Solo founder. Content engine running. Three kids being homeschooled. Where the hours go. Where the bottlenecks are. The one thing I’d most like to never do again.

The first two recommendations were the ones I’d have guessed — a Claude skill for clip captions, Canva Pro batching for thumbnails. Useful. Tactical. Hours back in the week.

The third recommendation stopped me.

Apollo + Claude. Cold email outreach to Australian accountants. Pete’s $17,400/month identified ROI as the lead.

I’d never heard of Apollo. I’d been filtering LinkedIn manually with Sales Navigator, sending ten DMs a week. The report’s logic was straightforward: my unit economics aren’t constrained by efficiency — they’re constrained by customer acquisition. The binding cost is not the hours I spend producing content. It’s the cost of finding the next customer. Three of four recommendations attacked efficiency. One attacked the actual constraint.

So Friday and Saturday I built it. ICP filter — Australia, Accounting, headcount 1–10, Partner / Managing Partner / Director / Owner, verified emails only. 3,346 contacts. Three-touch sequence. Hook: Pete’s $17,400 number. Touch 2 attaches the self-assessment PDF — the exact report I just described above. Compliance built in. Conservative ramp.

This morning at 9am AEST, the first batch of ten went out.

I sent one of them twice by mistake. That person is probably never going to reply.

Here’s the honest version: I don’t know if this works. I’ve got two weeks left in my proof window. Three cold conversions is the target. The market is the only thing that decides.

A mate told me over the weekend, “Jake, you’ve got to be doing paid ads.” He’s not wrong that paid lets you test faster. But what if you’re amplifying the wrong thing? The point of the proof window is to find out whether the offer converts cold strangers at all, not to manufacture a result by spending money on it.

There’s one more thing worth saying here, because I know it’ll come up.

If I’m publishing the entire report I produce — the exact PDF a paying client receives — why would anyone pay $999?

Because the template is the format. The product is the bespoke version for your business.

My report says Apollo and Claude because I’m a solo founder with a content engine and a customer acquisition problem. A plumber’s report wouldn’t say Apollo. It would say invoice automation, or quoting workflow, or job-routing. A retail owner’s report would say something different again. The methodology generalises. The recommendations don’t.

What you can verify by reading mine is the rigour. Did the analysis pick the right pain points? Does the financial impact maths actually hold? Are the recommendations specific or are they generic AI-influencer slop? Read it and decide. That’s what it’s there for.

This is the dogfooding loop, and it’s the thing I’m proudest of in this business right now. I’m running my own product on myself, in public, with the actual deliverable available to read. If the methodology produces something worth $999 of bespoke version for your business, book a call. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost ten minutes reading a PDF.

Episode 125 picks up the data in a week.

Read the self-assessment: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GJqgmEkLwV5Wbb8o_iMTVfuUj4iY5kaV/view?usp=drive_link

Book an AI Assessment: jakewoodhouse.io/ai-assessment

Listen to the full episode (JWP124) on whichever podcast app you prefer

#AI #SmallBusiness #AustralianBusiness #Productivity #Entrepreneurship