The Small Ball Manifesto?
Small Ball is a growth partner for small and medium-sized US businesses. We invest, consult, and drive leads. Here’s why we just sold our (limited) life savings to go all in on this.
Why Now
The advancements in agentic AI over the last few months are terrifying people, and the media frenzy that’s been taking place in tandem is only escalating their fears. Let me first and foremost say: you’re not crazy, and it makes sense if you’re afraid.
X is full of 24-year-olds in Miami running OpenClaw farms that run companies for them, Tech billionaires are painting an abundance picture without addressing the practical difficulties on the road to getting there, and every other week, a highly-respected person writes a blog that moves markets based on future predictions of high unemployment and low consumer spending. Most importantly, this is all happening while the leading AI labs are making progressively better models.
Let’s get the bad out of the way before we get to the good. As all of you know by now, mass-scale job displacement is coming…it’s actually already started and will continue. Blue-collar jobs, experience-based work (hospitality, retail, etc.), and highly-regulated, white-collar industries are safe from this disruption in the short-term, but for the 40% of us remaining who make up the US workforce, change is coming overwhelmingly quickly.
In the midst of all this chaos, Noah and I have noticed little embers of a trend forming: former members of traditional white-collar America are so scared about the future that they’re shifting towards entrepreneurship.
The realization came a few days ago: people are starting to feel like the biggest risk is not taking a risk.
Why Us
I’m not a particularly smart person. I was a "B" student through middle school and high school. I dropped out of college to work for a politically-incorrect lifestyle website that’s relevancy peaked in the early 2010s, and my fiance’s record in our arguments mirrors Floyd Mayweather’s. If asked about his intelligence, I’d bet my life Noah would have a similar answer. It’s why, besides being at each other’s sides professionally for most of the last half-decade, we’re friends.
But at this moment in time, the emerging class of small-business owners and micro-entrepreneurs doesn’t need intelligence; AI has democratized that. They need new customers, help navigating the AI landscape, and capital/introductions to people who have it. Through six years of falling on our faces and learning from our mistakes, Noah and I can provide those three specific things:
Lead Generation: We’ve driven hundreds of thousands of leads across sixteen D2C industries, ranging from home services to fintech and law. We’ve also had large-scale success in organic social media growth, email, and e-commerce.
AI Strategy: The AI landscape is genuinely confusing, and most of the people selling clarity have a product to push. We don’t. We’ve stress-tested the major platforms extensively across real business applications and can identify the specific tools and workflows that move the needle for each department within a given business. Note: We will not work with people looking to cut their staff.
Investment: We’re willing to take our own bets, and we’ve also been in the Venture Capital space for years. We know investors in the industry who are always looking for companies with good fundamentals and the ability to scale. If a company has been able to grow with our help, and capital is needed for a founder to get to the next level, we can write a (tiny) check ourselves, try to find an investor with deeper pockets to join the cap table, or enter into a revenue sharing model where our team’s investment into a company is the marketing costs/personnel needed to scale.
The Heroes We Back
Most importantly, these founders, new and old, need confidence and people who will have their back. Traditional Bay Area tech founders get red-carpet treatment. Why shouldn’t the 36.2 million+ small and medium-sized business owners across the United States?
These people are the heroes who build the great products and services at the heart of American commerce. A founder is a founder, whether they’re in Western Missouri or San Francisco; it doesn’t matter to us.
We will invest our time and money across industries — from local blue-collar businesses to niche tech companies — with one focus: undervalued markets. Like Billy Beane finding undervalued players the big teams overlooked, we’re trying to do the same thing for founders sitting in markets institutional money hasn’t noticed yet.
Blue-collar companies and local service businesses are a great fit for our model. We can give a local tire shop that has well-paid, motivated employees the cutting-edge tech it needs to compete with Mavis without the corporate overhead, the Uber driver the custom tools he needs to start his own rideshare company without giving up a whopping 40 percent on his service, or the local gym owner the marketing needed to beat out a National chain.
For a long time, companies like Mavis, Uber, and Planet Fitness have been able to eat up significant market share from local competitors, in large part by having better tech, stronger customer acquisition tactics, and greater capital resources. With tech further democratized and our experience in marketing and Venture Capital, the playing field is leveled for our partners.
From here, winners in service categories will be awarded based on the one factor that now matters most: product. If our experiences as customers have taught us anything, it’s that local service providers almost always offer a better product than their National counterparts because they care greatly about their customers.
What About White-Collar Workers?
Before I make this case, I want to get the elephant-in-the-blog out of the way: your output expectations and responsibilities will change, and change is a little scary, but you’ll be okay.
With more information at your fingertips, what used to be three or four jobs in any given department will likely become one. A copywriter will be expected to participate heavily in UX design, CRM, and video editing. A software engineer will be expected to own product decisions they once handed off. A financial analyst will be expected to present, communicate, and consult in ways that used to require a separate hire.
Yes, it’s overwhelming. Yes, it sounds dystopian. Yes, it’s probably happening a little too fast. Don’t shoot the messenger.
"But where will those people go?" New companies.
Innovation doesn’t just solve problems, it raises the floor of human tolerance. As each generation of technology removes friction, it recalibrates what counts as friction in the first place. Psychologists call this "hedonic adaptation."
Nobody thought searching a filing cabinet was painful until desktop search existed. Nobody thought desktop search was painful until Google existed. Nobody thought finding a document on Google was painful until AI could simply hand it to you. The pain point is a moving target, which means the market for solving it never closes. Every solution plants the seed of the next problem, and the next founder.
The idea that cheaper infrastructure won’t result in more companies being built assumes there’s no pain left to cure and no new value left to create. Look around. Document your day. I don’t know about you, but the last time I checked, I wasn’t in Heaven, and I have it pretty good.
A Stampede Is Coming
A stampede of businesses is coming. They’ll solve problems we didn’t know we had with solutions we couldn’t have imagined. For the first time since the 1980s, small operators have a real edge, and for the first time maybe ever, the barrier to becoming one is nearly gone.
The democratization of intelligence doesn’t just create more entrepreneurs. It creates better companies, built by people who actually care about the customers they serve.
Those are exactly the founders we’re looking for, and if that’s you, we’d love to talk.
And if our predictions about AI happen to be wrong and we’re all being extracted for what resources left we can provide the tech oligarchs, will someone let them know we have a couple dietary restrictions between the two of us?