Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

If you listen to the tech bro podcasts (full disclosure: I do), the pattern emerging is clear: we're in the infrastructure phase of the AI revolution. The Nvidia hype last year. OpenAI and Anthropic racing to be trillion dollar companies while hemorrhaging money. And now data center fights around the country.

It reminds me of previous tech cycles. And the winners in those earlier cycles were companies that simply applied new tech in a way that ultimately reduced costs or increased sales.

It’s a story as old as the gold rush.

Let's get into it.

History often rhymes.

In the 1850’s the California Gold Rush lured thousands to leave their farms, shops, towns and go west, young man for the prospecting ideal of striking gold. Samuel Brannan was arguably the first minted millionaire from that gold rush and he earned it not by striking gold - but by selling picks and shovels to the dreamers. Brannan squandered his gold rush lead while Levi Strauss built an empire from the same start.

We’ve watched recent gold rushes with websites ("we don't need one"), then e-commerce, then mobile, then crypto and now AI. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The pattern is always the same: early movers look like weirdos, then they look like geniuses, then everyone else scrambles.

One of the more interesting early moving examples right now, is people in the trades leveraging AI. At first I thought it was a few outliers, but there is mounting evidence of a fantastic trend. Mike Rowe has been right about the trades all along.

Smart people in the trades are applying AI to their daily jobs in ways that will create incredible moats around their businesses. They don’t care if the tools aren’t fully developed. It doesn’t bother them that we need more data centers. They are simply taking charge of their future and improving how they work.

My X.com feed has started to surface really interesting examples:

The best part is that none of these guys knew how to code.

They ran businesses that were too small for big software like SAP, Salesforce or ServiceNow. And the tools they did buy couldn’t solve their real problems. So they took it upon themselves to solve them by explaining it to AI. And walking step-by-step through their domain expertise until they had solutions.

These businesses will shed whatever extra software tools they used in the past. A plumber using Claude Code isn't "learning to code." He's building a quoting tool that works the way his business actually works. Because the one he's paying $1,200 a month for doesn't.

Todd Saunders has collected over 200 examples and shares their stories on his feed. But the one that I saw first was Cory LaChance, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he talks to Claude and works with Terminal.

LaChance didn’t just solve it for himself, he turned his solution into a new business revenue stream. TakeOffTrak allows customers to automate their own piping takeoffs.

Nathan Spearing runs Transform NC, a remodeling company in North Carolina. He created his own AI agent to handle email, qualify leads, create estimates, track projects, and manage his calendar — all while he’s on a job site.

He didn't build it because he’s a tech guy. He built it because he was drowning in texts, losing leads, and spending evenings on paperwork instead of with his young family.

Today he teaches other contractors to do the same thing. Not with some generic SaaS — but by creating their own agent that learns their businesses, clients and their way of doing things.

Here's the thing – you don't need to be in the trades to see the pattern.

Every one of these guys did the same thing you can do — they took deep domain expertise, explained the problem to AI, and walked it through step by step until they built a solution.

I wrote a longer article for non-technical entrepreneurs that highlights 7 tools you can use to do exactly this.

The pick-and-shovel play of this gold rush isn't selling AI how-to courses. It's being the person who knows what to build with them. You've spent decades learning how things actually work.

That knowledge just became the most valuable input in the room.

Now go launch something 🚀

Crossing the Chasm has sold over a million copies and is widely considered one of the most influential business books of the past thirty years, particularly in technology and venture capital circles.

The early adopters mentioned in this Launch Key issue have given their businesses a tremendous advantage by jumping that chasm now.

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

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Even if they don’t use AI, the blue collar guys are making money literally using picks and shovels while they build all the data center infrastructure that AI will require.

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