A few weeks ago I told you I was slowing this newsletter down to go build software. A bunch of you wrote back asking the obvious question: build what?

So here it is, out in the open, still half-finished.

I spent 15 years building software in tech before I ever bought a salon. This is the first time I'm building it for the kind of people who work in mine.

The first rule I wrote down, before a single line of code, was this:

A haircut is a human-to-human connection.

AI can make it easier for that human stylist to connect with more human customers but even if someday a robot can cut hair or book your appointment like it can today, it can’t give you confidence that your deepest needs are understood and help you build trust in that stylist.

The thing I'm building is called Dime by Hundred Dollar Empire. It's a management system for independent salons and single owner/operator stylists, and I'm starting with the part that quietly eats owners alive: marketing.

Picture a stylist who rents a single suite in a salon loft. She's on her feet all day doing the work she trained years for. That's her job, and she's great at it.

Then she gets home, and the second job starts. The one nobody warned her about.

Shoot the content. Edit the content. Post it to Instagram, then TikTok, then wherever else. Figure out what's working. Boost something. Set a budget. Read a dashboard she never asked to learn.

There are entire agencies that do nothing but this. Most independent stylists can't afford one, and don't have the hours to become their own agency at 10pm after a full day on their feet.

That gap is the whole reason Dime exists.

Think about why someone becomes a stylist in the first place. It's the craft. The chair, the transformation, the person who walks out feeling like themselves again. Nobody falls in love with ad budgets and platform algorithms.

It's the same in a lot of professions. Mechanics get into it to fix cars. Doctors go to medical school to treat people, not to fight with insurance companies.

I know doctors who joined big group practices for exactly that reason. The contract negotiations and the endless back-and-forth with insurers got so heavy that they traded away real freedom in how they practice, just to hand the business side to someone else.

Stylists make the same trade. Plenty of them go out on their own, then end up back inside a salon where somebody else runs the business. The relief is real. It just comes at a steep cut of their income.

I want Dime to break that tradeoff. Let it handle the business of your salon and scale the human-to-human connection.

The whole point of Dime is to level the playing field. Big-tech-caliber automation, the kind that used to live only inside companies with huge budgets, at a price Main Street can actually afford. You shouldn't have to give away a piece of every haircut just to escape the parts of the job you never wanted.

I started this with a few hypotheses, and everything I build gets checked against them.

Nobody in this chain wants AI to run the whole show. Not the customer, not the stylist, not the owner. A salon visit is personal. It's a real relationship between one person doing a craft and one person sitting in the chair. You can't automate that, and you shouldn't try.

Authenticity is the product. A stylist's marketing is a promise about the specific work she does and the specific room she does it in. That's exactly why I won't build AI that generates a fake, glossy salon that doesn't exist. You've seen those ads. Then you walk in, the place looks nothing like the picture, and you feel a little lied to. Your marketing should be made of your real salon and your real work, not a rendering of a room no one has ever stood in.

Local service businesses got skipped. Almost all the AI marketing tooling out there is built for e-commerce and mass-market brands selling a product to everyone. A local salon is the opposite of that. It's personal, it's regional, and it needs tools built for how it actually works.

AI shouldn't be a black box you're told to trust. Your customer relationships are the most personal thing you own. I'm not going to ask you to hand them to a system you can't see into and hope it has your back. You stay in the conversation with your clients. Dime's job is to clear the busywork out of the way so that conversation happens more often, not to fake it on your behalf.

Here's the line I keep coming back to. The goal isn't to replace the human parts. It's to delete the tedious parts.

Call it the Backstage Rule. The stylist stays on stage: the craft, the client, the brand in her/his own voice. The software runs the backstage, the unglamorous overhead nobody got into hair to do:

None of that touches the craft. All of it gives the owner back the hours the craft actually deserves.

I'll tell you why this takes real time instead of a weekend.

There's a lot of noise right now from big companies announcing shiny new AI integrations. Press releases about connecting their software to Claude and other AI tools. It sounds impressive.

Then you actually try to build something real on top of it, and you find out the new stuff is too thin to do the job. The years-old plumbing they've offered all along is still the only thing that actually works. A lot of these announcements are a flag planted for the headline, not a tool anyone can build on.

So we're doing the slower, unglamorous work of making automations that hold up in a real salon, starting with mine. We're making good progress, and I'll have more to share soon.

If you want in early, I'd genuinely love that. You can register your interest for early access, or to be a development partner who helps shape it, on the contact form here: register your interest.

I'd rather build this in front of you than roll it out polished and pretend it was easy. Hit reply and tell me: what's the one part of running your business you'd hand off tomorrow if you could? That's the list I'm building from.

Michael

I’m building out a suite of products and services to help people like you consider buying or starting then scaling a local small business. If you’re interested in learning more, let me know.