Build the brain first
One source of truth your people and your AI both read. Build that before you touch a single tool, because most people get the order backwards.
AI doesn’t fix a mess. It just runs the mess faster.
I learned that running a company where the knowledge was everywhere and nowhere at once:
- Deal data in one tool, comms in another, the legal in a third. None of them talking.
- SOPs, docs, customer history, scattered across a dozen surfaces.
- Two hundred thousand documents, for any practical purpose lost to time.
They’re only worth as much as your ability to find the right one at six on a Sunday morning, prepping a pitch. Which is to say, not much.
That’s not a tooling problem. It’s an unsolved-job problem.
So here’s the order I actually work in:
- The problem. What are we really solving, and why.
- The information layer. The surfaces it touches: data, people, systems, what it depends on.
- The shape of the answer. What good looks like. What could break it.
- The tools. Last. Always last.
Most people run that backwards and build the wrong thing fast. Problem to solution. The tech is just the bridge.
The thing you build first is a brain. One source of truth your team and your AI both read and write. Ours:
- Plain, well-structured markdown. AI speaks it natively, and it doesn’t rot like a doc graveyard.
- Standards at the core: templates, naming, rules. So it stays legible as it grows.
- We call ours Library. The name doesn’t matter. The architecture does.
A brain first, integrations second. You don’t connect a dozen tools. You give them one place to meet.
The systems and engines you build sit on top of it. The automations, apps, and agents everyone wants to skip ahead to come last. None of it holds up without the business sitting underneath.
Then it compounds.
Mine updates itself now. A call ends, it lands in the brain, it’s there for good. Six on a Sunday, before a call I’ve been dreading, the bullets are already waiting, because the substrate kept itself current while I slept.
Three of us run CoBuy like a team of twenty, off that one brain.
Here’s the part I like most: what I’m doing right now is the thing I’d do for you. The brain isn’t something I pitch. It’s what I used to write this.