Not “AI for X.” The contractor who copy-pastes two spreadsheets every Friday. File the ritual. Vote the ones that still hurt. Generate a product brief before you write a line of code.
8-person e-commerce brand, $4M/yr
Every Friday a contractor opens two Google Sheets — one from the warehouse, one from finance — and copy-pastes SKUs until the totals match. If a row is yellow, he slacks the ops lead. Takes four hours. Nobody trusts Zapier after the last overwrite.
Sales engineer at a B2B SaaS
Zoom ends. I open a Notion doc of 'things I remember', then fill 14 HubSpot fields so the AE can send a quote. The transcript exists. I do not trust it. I trust my scribbles.
Founder of a 12-person agency
Search 'invoice' in Gmail, open each PDF, type vendor / amount / due date into QuickBooks. Miss one and the bookkeeper yells. I have a color-coded star system that only I understand.
Ops + support hybrid at a DTC brand
Stripe says paid. Shopify says fulfilled. Warehouse CSV says maybe. Customer email says never arrived. I build a timeline in a doc and guess who eats the cost.
Office manager, 4-doctor clinic
Insurance portal A does not talk to EHR B. We print the chart, highlight codes, upload to the payer site, then put a sticky on the monitor that says 'call Friday if silent'. Friday is always silent.
Newsletter writer, 42k subs
A brand emails. I open Notes, find last year's number, add 15%, send a PDF media kit from 2024 with the old subscriber count. Then I update a spreadsheet I always forget exists.
Support lead, consumer fintech
Intercom tag → open a Google Doc of 40 macros → paste → find-replace first name → hope the last refund policy is still current. We bought an AI tool. It hallucinated a discount. Legal made us turn it off.
Product marketer, devtools company
Before every launch I scroll #shipped, copy bullets into a Notion page, ask three PMs what actually went out, then paste a sanitized version into the marketing site CMS by hand.
Chief of staff, Series B
Pull MRR from Stripe, seats from the admin DB, churn from a Looker tile that breaks if you filter last quarter, paste into slides, then discover the CEO already edited a copy named 'BOARD_REAL_final2'.
People ops at a 60-person startup
Recruiter duplicates the Word file, hunts for the last candidate's salary, misses a name in the footer, emails as PDF. Comp band is in a Slack bookmark. Legal reviews every single one.
Residential agent, 2-person team
Walk a house, talk into my phone, forget to tag the listing, later try to remember if the basement smelled like cat. CRM fields stay empty until Sunday night panic.
General counsel (the only lawyer)
Sales drops a customer NDA in a shared drive. I open it, compare clauses to our paper in another PDF, leave comments in an email thread titled 'nda??'. We have signed three versions of the same mutual NDA this year.