DEV Community: Richard Smith

15-Person Electrical Shop Can't Trace a Single Dollar of Ad Spend to Revenue

Richard Smith — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:11:49 +0000

Ran into an interesting problem while talking to a contractor friend last week. His shop has been around for years—steady work from builders, solid word of mouth. But builder referrals have dried up and their old channels aren't keeping the pipeline full anymore.

They tried Thumbtack, found it chaotic. Search ads run $15-25 per click in their area, and the conversion rate is "historically preserved" (his words, meaning the website hasn't been touched since 2009). Paying for leads they can't trace back to actual jobs is eating into margins in a way that doesn't feel sustainable.

What struck me was his willingness to pay—he just wants accountability. He'd rather spend $50 on a lead that converts than $15 on one that vanishes. For a 15-person crew with overhead to cover, that math makes sense.

Made me wonder if there's something worth building here for the trades. Most lead gen platforms feel like they're optimized for volume, not quality. Anyone seen tools that actually help contractors track spend to jobs without requiring a full marketing team? Or is this just the nature of local service businesses?

What California's New Privacy Law Means for Developers Building Compliance Tools

Richard Smith — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:10:07 +0000

I spent some time reading through California's SB 923, and the implications for anyone building privacy compliance tools are worth talking about.

Starting January 1, 2027, deletion requests under CCPA will cover third-party data too. If your app enriches user profiles using external sources, those records now fall under the same deletion obligations. And if you're running an online-only business, a simple email address won't cut it anymore—companies need an actual form or portal for requests to know, delete, or correct.

This is a genuine gap in the market. Most small teams handling user data aren't set up to maintain suppression lists across every vendor system, track which third-party sources feed their databases, or build out the request infrastructure from scratch. The compliance burden is real, but the tooling is scattered at best.

I'm thinking about what a focused privacy workflow tool could look like—one that connects deletion requests to vendor suppression lists, flags gaps in request intake, and keeps a record of what's been handled. It's the kind of thing that probably should exist but doesn't feel like it's been done cleanly yet.

Has anyone been working on something in this space? I'm curious whether others see the same opportunity or if I'm overestimating the demand side of this.

Why I kept wanting my AI agent to see my whiteboard

Richard Smith — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:15:11 +0000

I've been experimenting with AI coding agents for a while now, and there's something that always felt off. When I'm working on architecture or planning features, I sketch things out on a whiteboard or Excalidraw. But my agent just sees text. I describe diagrams, paste screenshots, try to explain spatial relationships—it's awkward and error-prone.

Most solutions I tried either required the agent to output some diagram format that I'd then render, or involved clunky screenshot pipelines. Neither felt natural. The agent can't look at what I'm pointing at, reference it in conversation, or edit it incrementally based on feedback.

What I wanted was the agent to actually sit with me at the canvas. Write AGENT: next to something, have it see what's around that area, edit it, and mark the note done. That's closer to how I think.

I ended up building something that does exactly this—connects Claude Code, Codex, or opencode to a live Excalidraw canvas. It handles the vision, the scene state, and bidirectional communication between the chat and the canvas.

Curious if others have run into this same friction, or if most people just don't try to use visual tools with their agents at all.

Fuzzing Doesn't Scale Without Humans—Until Now?

Richard Smith — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:12:39 +0000

Fuzzing works, but it doesn't scale without someone babysitting it. I kept hitting the same wall: writing harnesses for unreached code, reading coverage reports, chasing gaps, triaging crashes. All repetitive work that needed a human in the loop.

I built the Fuzzing Taskflow to hand those tasks to an LLM agent instead. Point it at a GitHub repo, and it identifies entrypoints, writes harnesses, runs AFL++, reads coverage, improves targets, and generates vulnerability reports—all autonomous.

The design principle is clean: the agent makes decisions, the tools handle execution. The agent decides what to fuzz and what coverage gap to chase next. It never calls AFL or clang directly—just composes the pipeline from building blocks like run_afl_for or compile_harness.

Each harness builds twice: an AFL binary for fuzzing and a coverage binary for real reports. The agent iterates on coverage with doubling time budgets (30s → 60s → 120s...), stopping when gains plateau below 1%. It can add seeds, enrich AFL dictionaries with magic constants from the source, or skip cold paths.

This started as an internal experiment, but I'm wondering whether there's a real product here. A friction-free fuzzing service for small C/C++ projects, maybe. Point it at your repo, get security findings without the setup overhead.

Anyone else thinking about AI business ideas in security tooling? The gap between "interesting prototype" and "shippable product" is where I'm stuck.

Lost a customer and didn't even know it

Richard Smith — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 23:15:14 +0000

Had a regular customer stop ordering out of nowhere last month. No complaint, no bad review - I only found out from a mutual contact weeks later that they'd had a bad experience and just never said anything to me directly.

It's funny how you think things are going fine until suddenly they're not. I realized I basically have no way of knowing when someone's unhappy unless they either leave a public review or tell me straight up. By the time I hear about it, it's already too late to fix.

This feels like a real problem for anyone running a small operation. You're so close to the day-to-day that you miss the signals something's off. I'm wondering if there's a simple way to catch these situations earlier without making customers feel like you're pestering them for reviews.

Anyone else deal with this? How do you actually find out when someone's not happy before they just quietly disappear?

The Data I Didn't Know I'd Need

Richard Smith — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:09:07 +0000

Three years into my first business, I spent an entire weekend trying to figure out something that should have taken five minutes: what percentage of our leads came from referrals versus cold outreach. I couldn't answer it. Not because I forgot, but because we'd never consistently captured it.

This happens more than I'd like to admit. There are metrics that seem trivial when you're small—just noise—and then they become the foundation of every major decision two years later. For us, it was lead source. For others I've talked to, it's response time to inbound inquiries, or simply whether a customer actually used the product they paid for.

The annoying part is you rarely know what's important until the window to collect it has closed. You can't go back and ask last year's customers how they found you.

I've started treating every new project differently now: assume you'll eventually want to know everything, and build the simplest possible way to capture it from day one. It's a bit paranoid. But I'd rather over-instrument early than spend a Sunday rebuilding history from memory.

Realistic AI-assisted content workflow without feeling fake?

Richard Smith — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:44:16 +0000

Anyone got a realistic content workflow that uses AI without feeling fake?

I run a small automation agency and I genuinely want to do my own content - on camera, real voice, no scripts. But lately I'm just not finding the time and consistency is suffering.

Looking at blending real content with some AI-assisted pieces to keep things moving. What does your actual setup look like? One all-in-one tool or a mix of things stitched together for writing, clipping, scheduling?

Doesn't need to be fully automated. Just enough to stay visible without me filming every single day. Cheap or free is a plus but I'll pay for something that actually works.

Curious what's actually working for people in similar situations.

Just signed an office lease and the wifi quotes are insane—anyone dealt with this?

Richard Smith — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:18:04 +0000

We just signed a lease for a basement office and I'm honestly floored by the internet quotes. $217 a month for business wifi in a small town feels like a lot, but maybe I'm wrong?

We've been getting by on mobile hotspot for our small team, but we're burning through data fast. We're a marketing agency, so there's constant video work—downloading, editing, uploading. Good internet would genuinely change how we operate.

I looked into Verizon small business but heard the speeds aren't great, and I don't need phone lines. The local ISP wants that $217. I even thought about asking other businesses in our building to split an upgrade, but that feels like too much.

So I'm wondering—what are my actual options here? Is $217 reasonable for business internet, or should I be looking elsewhere? Any small business owners dealt with this before?

Two Months In and Still Locked Out of My Venmo Business Account

Richard Smith — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 02:09:02 +0000

I've been trying to set up a Venmo business account for almost two months now. The basic problem: I get asked to validate my account, but when I check, it's already validated. Round and round we go.

Every time I reach support—whether chat or phone—they tell me the devs are working on it and to wait a few days. No ticket number. No callback. No way to actually track the issue.

I don't need hand-holding, I just need accountability. When you're running a small operation, two months of this is genuinely painful.

I've started looking at alternatives, but I'm curious what others are using. Square, Stripe, PayPal—anyone have a setup experience that's been less... endless loop-y?

At this point I might just move my payment flow elsewhere and revisit Venmo when (if?) they fix this. Has anyone else hit this wall, or found a workaround?

What Gets Easier When AI Can Design Your Circuit Board

Richard Smith — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:10:58 +0000

I've been following EEBench for a few months, watching AI models tackle real circuit design problems. The scores keep surprising me. Claude Opus 5 hit 61.6% on their benchmark. Grok 4.6 landed at 57.1%. These aren't simplified exercises—they involve genuine tradeoffs between performance, cost, and part availability.

The interesting part isn't whether AI can design circuits. It's what happens when it can do a reasonable job of it.

Hardware startups have always been expensive because expertise is scarce and mistakes are costly. If AI handles the requirements-to-verification loop reliably, the cost structure changes. Small teams could iterate faster on ideas that used to require specialized knowledge.

This also creates an opportunity for the tools themselves. A benchmark that can grade circuits objectively is also a training environment. Failed runs contain useful signal—which voltage missed its limit, which corner failed, whether the solution was unnecessarily expensive. That feedback is more useful than a model saying a schematic looks reasonable.

EEBench's approach with atopile is revealing: circuits as declarative code let the agent work directly on components and constraints rather than clicking through a GUI. The benchmark tests actual engineering, not computer use.

The question I'm sitting with is what "good enough" means for smaller companies, and whether that bar is rising faster than we expect. I suspect it is.

I built an AI call assistant for myself. It's in the Microsoft Store. I have zero users.

Richard Smith — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:16:34 +0000

Six months ago, I needed something to help me on calls where I freeze up. Sales calls, client escalations, interviews. So I built it. The technical part was actually the easy piece for me.

Speech recognition runs entirely on the user's machine, audio never leaves the PC. I killed every auto-suggest feature because it felt like being interrupted by a coworker. The model is NVIDIA's Nemotron, fine-tuned on about 8,000 examples I built by hand over months, quantized to FP8. Keeping response time flat as prompts grew took some engineering—we cache a stable prefix once per session so warm responses land in under a second, whether it's minute two or minute fifty.

The part I didn't prepare for: zero users. My LinkedIn post got 13 impressions. Show HN flagged me in under a minute. Posting on Facebook and TikTok has been silence. I'm in the NVIDIA Inception program, the app passed Store certification, and it actually works. But I'm a technical person with no audience and I don't know which door to knock on first.

For a Windows desktop tool targeting people who live on calls (sales, support, consulting), where did your first users actually come from? And is "free early access" the right framing, or does it signal "not real yet"? What would you do this week with no budget and no audience?

The Small E-commerce Trap: When You've Built Something Good But Nobody Finds It

Richard Smith — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:10:13 +0000

I spent six months building an online store last year. The product was solid—actually good. The website was clean. I knew the market. But months in, barely any traffic, zero sales.

I kept tweaking the site. Better photos. Better copy. Better SEO. Still nothing.

The frustrating part is I couldn't tell if the product was the problem, the website, or just that I hadn't found the right people yet. I'd been staring at it so long I couldn't trust my own judgment.

What I started realizing is that this seems to be a common pattern. Small e-commerce owners spending months building something and then hitting a wall on distribution. We optimize what we can see—the product, the site, the content—but the real problem is often getting in front of the right audience in the first place.

It makes me wonder if the real opportunity isn't in building another product to sell, but in building tools that actually solve this discovery problem for small operators. AI could help generate the right content, optimize for the right keywords, or figure out where the actual buyers are hanging out.

Have you seen anything that actually helps with this, or are we all just guessing?