Hey there 👋,
Seeing as my AI workers have made me redundant from everything in this newsletter except this opening monologue, I've had time on my hands to discover a new love.
Padel.
I’m full-on obsessed with the game and even more so with the lifestyle around the clubs.
Coffee, wifi, padel = bliss.
In fact padel clubs are the new coffice.
So I am building around it, because apparently that is the only way I know how to enjoy anything.
Padel.Living is my ranking on the top indoor clubs of Europe based on how much time I want to spend there. Why that counts as an investment rather than a hobby is at the bottom of this email.
Do you play padel?
I have a suspicion that the overlap between people who build/buy businesses and people who play padel is bigger than it has any right to be. Both attract the same person. Competitive, allergic to a slow morning, happy to spend money to avoid a bad experience.
In this week's issue...
Own the work. Don't do it.
Everything here is a one-time purchase you install and own. No retainers, no agency on the payroll.
✅ Redundancy Audit — score how automatable your job is — FREE
✅ Freelance Audit — score your services, not your job — FREE
✅ Business Appraiser — what an online business is worth — FREE
✅ Buy Box Builder — what you can buy and whether you should — FREE
✅ Operator Packs — domains, letters, websites, ecom, SaaS — from $79
✅ Agency Playbook — “I need business income." 10 workers — $299
✅ Productize Playbook — “I need to stop selling hours." 9 workers — $299
✅ Acquire Playbook — "I'd rather buy than start." 15 workers — $299
Not sure where to start? Reply with what you're trying to achieve and I'll point you at the right one.
🚨 ESCAPE
AI led the reason table for the fifth month running, 10,970 cuts in July, a third of everything announced that month. Across the year it's 112,713 cuts, roughly 24% of the total, up from a standing start when Challenger began tracking it as a distinct reason in 2023. And it is almost entirely one sector. Tech announced 149,023 cuts this year, up 67% on 2025, and is now 31% of every job cut in the US, while eighteen of the thirty industries Challenger tracks are cutting less than last year.
Challenger's read on why the language keeps moving: "Naming AI in a layoff announcement can win over investors while pushing current and prospective employees away." And as regulation arrives, companies get more careful, which makes the true number more opaque rather than more accurate.
Which is the whole reason not to wait for the statistics to tell you. By the time the number is clean, the decision was made about you rather than by you.
🏠 Zillow: 500 (7%), largest cut of the year as the self-described AI-native firm reorganises for efficiency and scale growth. Link
☁️ Nutanix: ~390 (5% global), streamlining structure to reallocate toward AI, modern apps and customer-facing priorities. Link
💳 Visa: 2,600 (7%), mostly tech and product teams, with CEO citing AI accelerating how work gets done and freeing capital for higher-growth bets. Link
🏦 Chime: 150 (10%), explicit AI-driven efficiencies and flatter squads to move faster as a public company. Link
🧑💻 ServiceNow: several hundred (low-single-digit % ongoing), rightsizing after acquisitions while hiring AI skills and managing headcount flat for the year. Link
🔧 The Freelance Commodity Audit
I've spent months telling employed people their job is a bundle of tasks and some of those tasks are already gone. I left out the people it hit first.
The freelancers.
Upwork writing projects fell 32% year over year in 2025. Biggest drop of any category on the platform. Translation, basic copywriting and simple graphic design took it worst. Real estate listing copy down 52%. About Us pages down 59%, which is funny until you remember someone was eating off that. Entry-level project availability is now under 9%, down from 15%. Freelancers highly exposed to AI saw earnings fall as much as 14%.
Nobody sent them a letter. No consultation period, no meeting, no payout. The enquiries just stopped arriving and everyone assumed it was them.
That's the bit that gets me. An employee at least gets a process. A freelancer gets silence and blames their own marketing.
So I built a separate tool rather than bolting a branch onto the Redundancy Audit. Different problem, different words. Employed people search "is my job safe". Freelancers search "why has my pipeline dried up". They were never going to arrive at the same page.
The Freelance Commodity Audit scores your book, not your job. Every service line you sell, rated against what the market has actually done to it, weighted by what share of your income it is. Then your real effective hourly rate, worked out from your own numbers rather than the day rate you quote. That one tends to sting.
We nailed the productized offer at LetterOperators, and the new owners are crushing it. So I ran one on a “competitor” who does the work themselves:
The answer here isn't bidding harder or niching down. Those are ways of competing for the requests that are still coming, and there are fewer every quarter. The answer is the repeatable thing you already do the same way every time, sold at a fixed price, delivered by a worker you build once. It's usually hiding in the small jobs you've been turning down as not worth quoting for. It’s why I just launched the third playbook, productize (details in the Build section below).
One rule I put in the audit tool and won't be taking out: it never says redundant. Nobody made you redundant. Your market moved. Different event, different advice.
💰 ACQUIRE
My workers read every live Flippa listing between $20,000 and $200,000 this week, across ecommerce, SaaS, content, newsletters and YouTube. A bit over 130 of them.
Around fifty were confidential, so you cannot see what you are buying without signing first. Roughly twenty-five named ones failed on a red flag: dropship stores priced under 1x because the traffic is rented, two tools built on somebody else's intellectual property, and four listings whose headline numbers contradicted their own verified financials. One claimed 1.1 million subscribers and $30,000 a month; Flippa's verified data said 925,000 and $8,503. Six more I dropped because I showed them to you last week.
Ten made the board. These are first glances, not teardowns.
💰 The deal board
🧠 Twixify, AI rewriting SaaS, $189,378 Buy It Now at 1.1x ($14,068/mo profit). Pick of the board, and read the keywords before you read the pitch. It ranks for "gpt zero", so what you are buying is a tool for getting past AI detectors, and revenue fell from $60k MRR to $10k while nobody touched it. The seller offers a six month buyback guarantee, which is either real confidence or a very cheap thing to promise. Link
🔭 Beyond The Stars, faceless space YouTube channel, $89,000 at 0.5x ($14,937/mo profit). That price is six months of profit. 2,400 videos and 108,000 subscribers throwing off $14,937 a month is a content mill running hot, and nobody sells one at 0.5x unless they can see where the chart goes next. Ask for the last ninety days, not the last three years. Link
🤖 AssistLayer, AI customer support SaaS, $130,000 at 1.7x ($9,793/mo profit). Flippa's own analyst note on the listing says the revenue arrived through crypto and buyers should verify attribution independently. Everything else reads beautifully: 96% margins, 1% churn, 82 paying organisations. The entire deal is whether those 82 organisations exist. Link
🎥 AuraShorts, faceless YouTube Shorts channel, $70,000 at 1.5x ($6,851/mo profit). 1.7 billion lifetime views converted into $6,851 a month, which is what Shorts actually pays. You are not buying a channel with a billion views. You are buying a monetisation rate that YouTube can change on a Tuesday, on a channel eight months old with nothing to prove it survives one. Link
📱 AI Simplified, AI tools YouTube channel, $50,000 at 0.8x ($5,306/mo profit). Down from $120,000 to $50,000 while I was building this board, which tells you how the seller's month went. 27,000 subscribers producing $6,000 a month means this is brand deals, not AdSense, so the only question that matters is whether the brands are buying the channel or the person fronting it. Link
🎧 MusicMate, AI SaaS for DJs, $153,000 at 3x ($4,269/mo profit). 12% monthly churn means the subscriber base turns over roughly twice a year, and the ask is three years of profit. Somebody has to keep refilling that bucket every single month, and at $153,000 that somebody is you. Link
🦍 Gorilla Ai, video to blog SaaS, $37,993 at 1.2x ($4,114/mo profit). A SaaS running 30% margins is not a SaaS, it is a reseller. $13,531 of monthly revenue leaves $4,114, so find out where the other 70% goes before you look at anything else. Six years old and priced at 1.2x is the seller telling you what he expects from year seven. Link
🪴 Aqvina World, high ticket outdoor living store, $28,350 at 2.1x ($1,250/mo profit). The asset is 35 authorised dealer accounts, and dealer accounts get granted to a person, not to a Shopify store. Get written confirmation from the brands that they transfer, because without them you have bought a theme and an ad account. Link
🥖 Mon Epicerie Francaise, twelve year old French grocery store, $39,500 at 2.7x ($1,347/mo profit). Twelve years trading and still $1,347 a month, which means nobody ever pushed it. Shipping perishable French food internationally on 32% margins leaves no room for a bad month, but the domain, the suppliers and the customer list have been paid for twenty times over. Link
📨 Marketer Gems, six year old marketing newsletter, $30,000 at 5.9x ($423/mo profit). Two dollars a subscriber for 15,000 US marketing professionals opening at 59%. It earns $745 a month, which is nothing, and that is the entire thesis: this is an audience nobody has ever tried to sell to. Buy it as a list, not as cash flow, or do not buy it. Link
No content or affiliate site made it this week. The three that had the cash flow were quoting revenue charts that stopped in 2021.
🪓 BUILD
Last week I described a worker I hadn't built yet: you give it the way you actually deliver a job, and it builds the thing that delivers it. I said if enough of you replied, it would be the next thing I made.
Enough of you replied. It ended up bigger than one worker.
The Productize Playbook
Nine workers, the playbook document, and a two sheet toolkit. $299 with a year of Pro, same shelf and same price as the other two.
The centre of it is one worker. You give it the SOP for something you already deliver the same way every time, and it marks every single step as one of three things. RULE means a worker can do it: fixed input, fixed output, no thinking required. JUDGMENT means you decide, and the worker's job is to bring you the decision rather than make it. WAIT means the step is blocked on something outside the building, a client reply, a payment, a file that hasn't arrived.
Then a second worker builds the RULE steps into an installable skill and stops dead at the first JUDGMENT. It doesn't guess. That refusal is the whole design, because a worker that quietly improvises on the judgment calls is how you lose a client rather than an hour.
The rest fills in around it: designing the offer if you don't have one yet, pricing it as an outcome instead of a day rate, moving your existing hourly clients across without losing them, the page that sells it, and a teardown worker that reads a competitor's productized service in the same RULE / JUDGMENT / WAIT vocabulary.
Before shipping it I ran all nine, in order, on one book. A solo SEO consultant with five clients and £71,400 a year. Every screenshot on the product page is from that run, and the outputs are worth more than anything I could tell you about them.
Two things it did that I didn't expect.
It refused to oversell itself. The worker it built worked out that it cannot run prompts on ChatGPT or Gemini, said so at the top of its own file, and handed that phase back. So the saving came out at 44%, not the 90% a worse tool would have claimed. Twenty-four hours a job down to thirteen and a half, with the biggest single block of grind untouched and named.
It told him the migration wouldn't be enough. His five existing clients buy the new offer once each. That's five sales against the twenty-nine a year he'd need to replace his income. The pricing worker put that in bold rather than burying it, which is the opposite of what a product wants its own tool to say.
The teardown it ran on FATJOE is on the product page in full. Real company, published prices, scored properly. It's the fastest way to see whether the thing thinks or just formats.
Here's the line I have to keep holding, because the two playbooks sit one step apart and it would be easy to blur them. The Agency Playbook is for people who need to build business income. The Productizing Playbook is for people who need to stop selling their time.
📈 INVEST
Everyone is investing in padel right now. Almost nobody is doing it the cheap way.
The numbers on padel, from Playtomic's global report: 58,300 courts, close to 20,000 clubs, 19.4 million players. Roughly 8,000 new courts went in during 2025 alone, and the projection is 91,000 courts by 2028. The UK has compounded at 86% a year since 2021.
The capital has noticed. The Pro Padel League raised $15 million in March led by an NBA co-owner, Qatar Sports Investments has been funding Premier Padel since 2022, and private equity has worked its way down from the leagues into the clubs, with operators now offering 12% preferred returns to fund court builds.
I want to bring a padel club to my home city in Slovakia but first I need to fully understand this market and connect with the top padel club owners out there.
To do this I’m building out padel.living a photo-led guide to the indoor clubs in Europe, written from my actual visits, with a lifestyle/work score on each one. Somewhere in this there is a sequel to Coffee Shop Entrepreneurs waiting to be written!
💀 COMMUNITY
Employed, freelancing, buying, or automating yourself out of what you already own. The community has a channel for each, and they're the same four sections you just read.
Cheers!
Richard
The obvious bit: nothing in this email is financial, investment, or legal advice. The deal reads are produced by AI workers from public listing data, unverified, and I hold no position in anything listed. Valuations are opinions, multiples move, and no verdict here replaces your own due diligence. If you're buying anything, verify the numbers yourself before money moves.