THE AI-FIRST FIRM · ISSUE 4 · SEP 11, 2026 · ~7 MIN READ
I paid for 200 hours I couldn't see
I said you’d get the good, the bad and the ugly. Today is the painful and the ugly, and I felt this one in the bank account.
TLDR
→ The bill for work you can't see, and the connector I'm excited about
→ 296 items in my junk folder and 5 of them were real
→ The 4 moves I'd make starting a firm from nothing, and the bonus one
→ Claude shipped, OpenAI answered, and Claude is up again
You're reading this on the web. The AI-First Firm goes out free every other Friday, and you can have the next one in your inbox.
🔧 Behind the Build: expediency is not always the answer, and I hated learning that
I've been trained my whole career to want to see the thing done. Somebody shows me progress, I want to see it working, and I want it this week. OK so maybe I’m also just impatient.
Which is why the last stretch has been uncomfortable in a way I did not expect. Over 200 hours went into patching security holes, chasing glitches and cleaning up the backend of things I built.
It appears that isn’t cheap! Was every hour of it mandatory for what are fairly simple apps? No. But many of these are turning into much more than simple apps and a lot of them are going to touch client data, which is exactly where this becomes mandatory. So, would I do it again? Yes.
It makes you question things. Not our AI hire, but the spend. When the work is invisible, all you have is trust, and whether he can bring it down from an extremely technical place into something I can actually follow and understand. That was a challenge for a minute. We're finding the sweet spot.
Now the good…
We're building an app to connect our apps, it's called YBL Relay. Every time we put together a new internal tool, somebody had to sit down and wire up a separate connection so Claude could talk to it, then do the whole thing again for the next tool, and again for the next person. It's the kind of small time you don't notice until you're doing it 5 times a month.
Now it's 1 connection with all of our apps sitting behind it. You connect it once, and from then on Claude can reach all of our internal apps. When we build the next one, nobody sets anything up. 3 of our apps are on it now, and more are going on as we speak. If you've used Zapier, it's that kinda thing, except the things behind it are ours.
I'm real excited about this, and it's the first thing we've built whose whole job is to make the next thing easier.
Wiring up every app by hand, or wiring up once. That's the whole change.
There is no demo for 2 weeks of cleanup.
What to take from it. Expediency is not always the answer, though plenty of apps are simple, useful and shouldn't take long at all. The line for us is client data, and once you're anywhere near it the boring work stops being a choice.
TOGETHER WITH FLOAT
Close your books up to 8x faster.
We run on Float at YBL, and so do a good chunk of our clients. It's the intelligent financial operating system for Canadian businesses. Banking, payments and spend management in one place. You open an account in minutes and CAD and USD cards work instantly. You earn 2.5% interest and up to 1% cashback. The part that matters for a firm is Float Intelligence. It codes the transactions and matches the receipts, which is what closes the books up to 8x faster.
Join 10,000+ Canadian businesses running on Float.
Want to sponsor this spot? Just reply.
Worth Taking #004: send Claude into your junk folder
A simple but useful one this week. 296 items in my junk folder, and 5 of them were real… and important.
The junk folder is the dumpster you stopped looking at a while ago, which is fine right up until it isn't. 3 of mine were companies who'd found my sponsor page and wanted to buy a spot (yikes). 1 was a client handover with a filing deadline in it (double yikes). 1 was a bounce telling me a reply I'd have sworn I sent never landed (sigh).
Easy fix. First, connect your email to Claude or ChatGPT, because none of this works until you do. Then set a scheduled task to read the folder once a day (or however frequently) with this as the instruction.
Read everything in my junk folder from the last 24 hours. Ignore retail, cold outbound and conference promotion. Tell me only about messages from a real person about my business, anything with a date or a deadline in it, and any bounce or delivery failure. For each one give me the sender, 1 line on what they want, and whether it needs a reply today.
296 items. 5 of them mattered. One of those closed 49 minutes after somebody finally read it.
It ain’t perfect but, it helps!
And if your email address is on anything public, somebody replying to it has never written to you before, which is the exact thing the filter is built to stop.
Now Playing
New video went up yesterday. If I had to walk away from every bit of this and build a firm again from scratch in 2026, it's the 4 moves I'd make, and I admit on camera that I got 1 of them wrong for most of the last 16 years.
The bonus one underneath all 4 matters arguably more than any of them, and it isn't a system or a tool. It's the communities you put yourself in. That's not an understatement, they've changed my life in more ways than one. BONUS, Chad Davis (AutomationTown) and Logan Graf (Counter) gave me discount codes, they're in the YouTube description.
📰 In Other News
- Claude put out Fable 5.1, then 2 days later OpenAI came back with GPT-6 Astra, and I've seen some seriously impressive things out of Astra.
- I keep hearing about Grok Bot and it's always the same thing, how easy it is to use. Which leaves me on a question I don't have a clean answer to. What matters more from here, deep technical capability like OpenClaw, or something your whole team will actually open on a Tuesday? For a firm I say ease every time. The most capable tool nobody touches is worth nothing at all. Am I using it? Nope. Not yet..
- I've started building Chrome extensions to make the tools we already pay for behave the way I want. A couple of hours, and the software fits your firm instead of the other way round. After years of just accepting how things are, this is glorious.
🔭 What’s Coming
Claude 101 for Accountants
My Claude 101 workshop at Intuit's Toronto office with my good friends at Quanto is only 6 days away, the room's full, and I am PUMPED! Check out this hype reel from when the YBL team was the guinea pig on the workshop at Intuit's office.
Toronto sold out in 4 hours and we're choosing the next cities off the waitlist. Calgary, Vancouver and New York are running highest right now, and I wouldn't assume yours is out of it.
Get your name down and tell me where, because this is moving faster than I planned it to.
💬 Question For You
What's the 1 thing you'd hand off to AI tomorrow if it just worked? Reply and tell me, I might feature your answer in the next issue.
See you in two weeks.
Mike
PS - We hit 71 Amazon boxes in a single week. A record, and not one I was chasing. Turns out rebuilding an entire house happens 71 boxes at a time. If somebody in your world would get something out of this issue, send it their way.
Mike Libbey is CEO of YBL, a fully virtual Canadian accounting and VCFO firm. On YouTube (@MikeLibbey) he shows the tools he has built and what running a firm actually takes, and he posts every weekday on LinkedIn. He is quietly building TaxPilot for Canadian tax firms on the side. Reply to any issue, he reads them all.