One Friday at the Verve Office

People keep asking what it actually looks like to run a small music company with an AI office worker, so here is one ordinary Friday, written down while it's still fresh. It's not even over yet. Dex, Verve's AI Advertising Coordinator, handles the office work. I make the calls, approve anything that goes out with my name or Verve's on it, and do the parts that need a real person. The music stays mine.

Keeping score

The day started with a to-do list. Dex keeps it in a Google Doc and on a small dashboard I can glance at, and the rule is simple: when something gets done, it comes off the list, and when something new comes up, it goes on. By mid-afternoon I asked for a "Done today" section as well, because a list that only shows what's left can make a productive day feel like a losing one. Seeing the finished items in one place turned out to be the most satisfying thing on the screen.

Letters out the door

A good part of the morning was correspondence. Earlier this week I offered a small lesson booking helper to independent music teachers, and today a short, polite follow-up went to the thirteen who actually received the first note. Verve Advertising sent its rate sheet to a few people who had asked about ads in the mandolin and luthier groups we run, including a hobby mandolin builder on the other side of the world. Every one of those messages was read by me before it went, and every contact was logged in our CRM with a note on what was sent and when. That last part is dull, and it's also the only way to know in two weeks who heard from us.

The blog grew up a little

This blog got a lot of attention today. I published a post introducing Dex, so readers know exactly who is doing the office work, and another introducing the people behind Verve. I fixed menu links that had been pointing at an old blog, put up a page for Verve Music, and started drafting pages for Research and Booking. Along the way I set a rule that should have been obvious from the start: anything written as me is written by me in the first person. Two drafts had slipped into talking about "Adam" in the third person, and that's not how I want to speak to you.

Testing before promising

The most useful lessons of the day came from testing things we had already offered. We had promised violin shops a free TikTok page, so we tried to build one for Emily's Violins. TikTok rejected the signup twice on a valid code, so that offer came down. A free Linktree page worked, after I cleared one upsell screen myself, and it's live now. I wrote about that separately, but the short version is that an offer you haven't tried is a guess.

The same thing happened with the lesson booking helper. Dex tested it the way a new student would and found that the very last step, typing your first name and pressing Send, did nothing. That's the step that actually texts the teacher. Thirteen teachers already had the link. The fix took minutes, the retest passed, and I'm a lot more comfortable offering it now than I was at breakfast.

Looking for teachers

With the helper working, Dex went looking for more independent teachers on X and Bluesky, read-only, without following or messaging anyone. What came back was interesting in itself: almost no active teachers post an email or phone number anymore. They use contact forms on their own websites. Seven qualified, from a violin teacher in Colorado to a piano studio in Singapore and a music school in Ireland. After I approved them, six received the offer, five by email and one through his website form. The seventh teacher's form refused the message twice, so we left it alone rather than trying to force it.

Research joins the family

Verve Research is now part of the same house, and my research colleague Jeff Beam gave it a fine first act today. He wrote a clear, fair letter to Netlify about how its Free plan credits had frozen h, the small social network an AI agent built and maintains, two weeks into the month. He laid out the numbers, suggested three reasonable fixes, and made it plain we'd rather stay than leave. Jeff is getting a page of his own here soon.

What I take from it

None of this is glamorous. It's letters, lists, links, and a lot of checking. What I like is that every claim in this post has something behind it: a sent message, a CRM note, a page you can visit, a test that passed or failed. That's the standard I want for Verve. Don't tell me it's done. Show me.