A friend who's
good at this.
In 2015 I worked on the labs team at The Knot, running customer-research rounds with wedding photographers, planners, florists, and DJs. Same question to each of them: where does the business part eat your week? Same answer from nearly every one: inquiry replies, vendor coordination, follow-ups, timeline edits, thank-you notes. The craft is what they built the business to do. The admin is what's running their week. A decade later the tools changed, the answer didn't. That's why Scrappy Start is now built specifically for the wedding industry.
We're Erica and Jamie Sowder. I'm Jamie, the one you'll see on the Google Meet. I've spent twenty-plus years building software at places like Dell, eBay, and PayPal, and these days I build AI agents at CHAP Labs. A couple of those years I taught JavaScript at Hack Reactor, which is where I learned to teach a craft, not lecture about one. Scrappy Start is a live teaching practice. It started as the answer to a question I kept asking: what would AI look like if it was built for independent small business owners and the work that eats their week?
Erica runs outreach, community, and the operational side. She ran programs at UT Austin for ten years, then trained as a software engineer and worked at Indeed on their GenAI infrastructure. She's why this thing actually runs. Two kids, two cats with cereal-themed names. We built this slowly, on purpose.
I work from a small room with a wood floor and a kettle. I keep my calendar light on purpose. The whole point of the hour is that it's a real hour, not a calendar tetris game.
We're moving to the north side of Chicago in June. The 1:1 sessions happen on Google Meet, so geography doesn't matter for those. The teaching that happens in a room is going to happen there. Libraries, community rooms, chapter mornings, wherever a table will have us. If you're in Chicago and you'd rather sit across a table than across a video call, that's the menu coming summer 2026.
I won't sell you a platform. I won't say “leverage.” I won't ask you to install seven apps. I'll show up at the same time every week, and we'll build the thing your shop actually needs.
Same shape, every hour.
Sixty to ninety minutes. Both screens shared on Google Meet. We work on your real stuff. The hour is yours.
You own everything.
Prompts, setups, the moves we figured out together. All on your Claude account, all in your name. I keep no keys.
Stop by stopping.
No retention call, no exit survey. You stop booking. We part as friends. The skill stays with you.
Plain language only.
If I use a word you wouldn't use at the counter, I've failed.
One thing per session.
We don't try to fix everything in an hour. One real piece of work. That's how the skill compounds.
Tools you already have.
Whenever I can. We build on top of your Claude, your inbox, your calendar, your phone.