The Kartel
I like karting. But it’s an expensive hobby. So when I wanted a new project to use as an experiment in AI-powered business formation, a question sprung to mind: how do you make your hobby into a legitimate business expense?
The Kartel is a business networking group based around on-track action. The group has over 40 members meeting twice a month. And the whole thing was built on almost zero budget in a tiny amount of time.
What did I learn?
It’s for projects like this that AI tools like Claude and particularly command line tools like Claude Code are particularly useful.
On my way home from a karting trip I started chatting with Claude about the idea and possible brand names. Between us we came up with (rather excellent) The Kartel and found that the domain name was available - https://the-kartel.com. I registered it straight away.
I asked Claude to start work on a website for The Kartel that would allow people to apply to join. I gave it some parameters in terms of style, copy, and the sorts of information I would want to capture. By the time I got home I had a first draft.
When I got home I opened up my laptop and started up the command line tool, Claude Code, which can interact directly with your machine and with web servers and services like GitHub, a place to store repositories of code. I set up The Kartel as a new project and stored my new webpage as a starting point.
Claude Code helped me find the optimum place to host my new website and to set it up. And since then we’ve been through multiple iterations of the site, adding features to allow me to manage members and events.
The total cost so far, excluding my time, has been £13 for some additional credits for Claude, and £7.50 for the domain name.
Falling Friction
I often tell people in my talks that the friction involved in innovation has collapsed over the last 20 years. But AI tools reduce that friction even further. And they concentrate the power into fewer hands as well.
20 years ago this wouldn’t have been a viable project. It makes me no revenue, though I think it has enormous value to the kart tracks. 20 years ago I would have needed the support of - at the very least - a graphic designer and web developer to make it, if I didn’t have those skills. And perhaps a copywriter too. Now I can do it all by myself.
There is a note of caution here though: I could only make this work because I’d done a lot of this stuff before. I couldn’t write the code that Claude has written. At least not without hundreds of hours of effort. But I know enough to know when it has made mistakes. And when it has made mistakes, I know how to help it to diagnose and correct them. In short, not everyone could do this. But those with some level of knowledge and understanding can now be super productive.
Market Fit
After just three LinkedIn posts to promote it, The Kartel has over 40 members and is still growing. I’m now looking to take it to other cities. Working on it has been a great illustration for me of both the power that creative AI tools offer, and their limitations. And, of course, the risks they present to employment in certain industries. Though again there is a caveat on that: AI tools can still only take you so far. I’m now at the stage of having to manually review some of the code to ensure it scales and iron out bugs that the AI has failed to fix. And there are lots of refinements I’d want to make to the copy and the design that are beyond the ken of the machines.
We’re not quite done with human coders and creatives yet.