My gym could never afford what big companies have. AI changed that.
Today we launch the new Autosterea. A new company, a new website, and the same team with new skills. Here is the launch film. Then I want to tell you why this matters so much to me.
I know the pain first hand
I own Persistence Athletics, a CrossFit gym in Belltown, Seattle. I love it. It also taught me what it means to be small in a world that is built for the big.
A big company has a marketing team, a data team, engineers, and an analyst who checks every dollar. A small business has the owner, late at night, after the real work is done.
I lived that. My gym paid $3,600 a year to rent software that held our own member list, and we owned none of it. We spent $6,668 on Google Ads and got two free trial signups, while the dashboard said it was working. Our most expensive equipment worked three hours a week.
None of this was because we did not care. The help that would fix it cost too much for a business our size.
That is the quiet unfairness in business. It is not only about the best idea or the hardest work. It is about capital. A big company pays a team to build what it needs. A small business makes do. It pays for ten tools that do not talk to each other, and its people copy data from one to the next by hand.
What changed
This year, AI changed what a small team can do. I saw it first at my own gym. In one weekend, we replaced the software we rented, and now the gym owns its data. Work that once needed a team of engineers took one weekend.
Then we changed our whole company. Every person on our team, in the US and in India, learned to work with AI. People who did the work by hand now direct the AI that does it, and they check what it does.
That is when I understood. What big companies buy with money, a small business can have now too. Not a chatbot in the corner of a website. Real systems, built into the real work: bookings, billing, follow-up emails, reports.
What the new Autosterea does
Big companies hire forward deployed engineers. These engineers sit inside the business, learn how the work really happens, and build AI right into it. We are that team, for small businesses.
We sit with you and watch your week. We find the one job that takes the most hours, and we build that first, on your real data. Then the next one. Our aim is that about 80 percent of the routine work runs on its own. Your people check the rest and do the work only people can do. And we stay, to keep it running and make it better.
The gym, the salon, the clinic, the shop on the corner. We build for them because we are one of them.
Why I believe this is a turning point
When help becomes this affordable, more people can start. I believe AI will bring millions of new small businesses in the next few years. Many will be one or two people, with the power of a full team behind them. I want Autosterea to be there first, to help them start right and grow.
Then comes the next step: physical AI. Today AI works on screens. In the next five to ten years, it will also work in the physical world, with robots that help in the stock room, the kitchen and on the gym floor. We have already started, and you can follow it in our robotics journal. When that time comes, small businesses should not be the last to get it. They should be among the first.
Why it matters
For me, this was never only about software. A small business is someone's life. It is the owner who misses dinner to do the books. It is the coach who wants to coach, not chase payments.
When the routine work runs on its own, they get time back. They save money, and they make more of it. They get the life they started the business for, and the life they deserve.
That is what we want to give millions of small businesses and the people who run them: the same power a big company has. Not one day. Starting now.
This Diwali, the festival of new beginnings, we start a new chapter. Thank you to our team, our clients and everyone who helped us get here.
If your week is full of work a system should do, come and talk to us.
