Building things that compound.
Velocity Point, the holding company, is paused. Second Ring, the first product, is live. Sister sites are below.
Velocity Point
Velocity Point was the holding company. The thesis is simple: the cost of building software has collapsed, and the old org chart — product manager, designer, engineer, marketer, ops — collapses with it. One person, well-equipped with AI agents, can now do the work of a small team.
The plan was to build AI-native products for small businesses — vertical by vertical, one at a time, with a small team that stays small. Each product would earn its keep or get shut down. That test never started. Velocity Point never had paying customers, and I have paused it. The first product is Second Ring.
Second Ring
An AI answering service for service businesses — plumbers, HVAC techs, electricians, lawyers. When a real person can’t pick up, Second Ring does: takes the message, books the appointment, texts the customer back. The phone stops being a thing that drops revenue when you’re under a sink.
Also on the web
Smaller sites I have put on the web. None of them is a Velocity Point customer. Velocity Point is paused and is not taking them on as products.
OraLee Branch
A site for Dr. OraLee Branch — research, community work, writing.
Dennis Lawler
A personal site for my father, Dennis M. Lawler — decades of stories worth archiving.
Voicemail Is Dead
A pointed argument, dressed up as a site: voicemail is a relic, and there’s a better way.
Revenue Point
An idea for dead-lead reactivation: companies with a database and no one working it. It never had paying customers, and it is paused with Velocity Point.
Three decades of plumbing.
I spent three decades in enterprise integration — EDI, middleware, the unglamorous plumbing that lets large companies actually operate. Orders in one system, invoices in another, inventory in a third; my job was to make them talk.
When large language models made it possible for one person to do what used to take a team, I pivoted. Hard. The integration instinct didn’t go away; it just pointed at a different kind of problem.