What I actually do in a day building voice agents for SMB customers. The tools, the time blocks, the rituals, the things that make the work compound — and the things I had to stop doing to make any of it work.
People ask me what I actually do all day. The honest answer is "less than you'd expect, and more on the things that matter." Here's a representative weekday at TrainYourAgent in May 2026 — the tools, the time blocks, the rituals.
This is not a productivity manifesto. It's a snapshot of what's working right now for a solo operator running a small voice-AI shop with no team. An earlier version of this line attached a revenue figure to that description; that figure was invented and it has been deleted, along with the post that expanded on it. I will publish a revenue number when there is one I would show an auditor. Some of what follows will be obsolete by Q4. Some of it will compound for years.
6:15 AM — Coffee and the inbox triage
I'm up before the kid. First 15 minutes is coffee + Superhuman, processing overnight email. Not replying — sorting. Three buckets:
- Customer issues — anything that says "agent didn't book," "agent said something weird," "billing." These get a 90-second reply with an ETA, then go on the work list.
- Sales / inbound — anyone who booked a Cal.com slot or replied to a sequence. Calendly reschedule links, prep notes.
- Everything else — newsletter signups, Stripe receipts, Vercel deploy emails. Archive batch.
Inbox at zero by 6:30 every morning, six days a week. The rule is process, not respond. Responses happen in batches during the day.
7:00 AM — The dashboard check
Two browser tabs, every morning:
- Sentry + PostHog — any alerts on production agents from the overnight. ~3-4 days a week there's nothing. The other days it's usually a single agent that needed a prompt tweak.
- Stripe + Supabase admin — MRR check, new signups, churn. 30 seconds.
If a customer's agent had a bad call overnight, I listen to the recording and fix the prompt before the customer ever notices. This is the single highest-leverage thing I do all day. Customers who tell me "your agent answered every call perfectly" are customers I never lose.
7:30 AM – 11:30 AM — Build block
Four hours, phone in another room, Slack closed, IDE open. This is where actual product gets built. Current rotation looks like:
- Mondays — new customer build kickoffs (~half the day)
- Tuesdays — feature work on the platform (
/start flow, new vertical templates, etc.)
- Wednesdays — content / blog / SEO (this post was a Wednesday)
- Thursdays — customer iterations (prompt tuning, integrations, edge cases)
- Fridays — refactor + cleanup + automation work
Tools in this block:
- VS Code + Cursor — primary IDE. Cursor's tab-complete is too good to pass on.
- Claude Code in agent mode — for any task longer than 20 minutes
- GitHub PRs — even solo, every change is a PR with a self-review
- Vercel + Supabase + Fly.io — the deploy targets
- Linear — single-engineer Kanban, mostly to keep "things I forgot" out of my head
11:30 AM — Sales call #1
I take one or two sales calls a day, never more. Calls are 30 min on Cal.com. Format:
- 5 min: their context (what they do, current phone setup, biggest pain)
- 10 min: live demo against their actual scenario
- 10 min: scope + price
- 5 min: next step (build kickoff or follow-up)
I close ~40-50% of qualified calls. The qualifying happens before the call (pathway routing, form questions, my own LinkedIn check). Unqualified people don't get on the calendar.
Tools:
- Cal.com for booking
- Fathom for transcript + summary (auto-posts to my CRM)
- HubSpot Free as the CRM
- DocuSign if it's a same-day close (rare but happens)
12:30 PM — Lunch and the longest walk of the day
90 minutes, no laptop. Walk + lunch + family time. The hardest discipline I've built. Used to skip it. Skipping made every afternoon worse and every Wednesday I'd realize I hadn't talked to my wife in three days. Now it's a hard block.
I do read on the walk — usually one essay from a builder I respect. Currently going through old David Cain, Patrick McKenzie, Brian Lui posts. Operator-brain food.
2:00 PM – 5:00 PM — Customer block
This is the part of the day that pays the bills. Three hours of customer work:
- Prompt tuning based on yesterday's call recordings
- Integration work (Hubspot, ServiceTitan, Cal.com webhooks)
- Customer Loom recordings (5-10 min, sent same-day, showing them what changed)
- Slack replies in their channels
A typical afternoon I'll send 4-6 Looms. Customers eat them up. The Loom replaces the "weekly check-in call" everyone else's vendor schedules. They feel cared for; I don't lose a 30-min slot of calendar.
Tools:
- Loom (obviously)
- Slack Connect for active customer channels
- Postman for hitting their APIs
- Bland / Vapi / our self-hosted Pipecat depending on which platform the customer is on
5:00 PM — Sales call #2 (sometimes)
If there's a second sales call it sits here. Same format, same close rate. After 5:30 the day is done for paid work.
5:30 PM – 8:00 PM — Family time
Hard block. Phone face-down. Watch is off. The work will be there tomorrow.
8:00 PM – 9:30 PM — Build-in-public hour
This is the hour I write, ship public artifacts, or work on the parts of the business that don't have an immediate dollar attached. Recently:
- Blog posts (this one)
- Twitter / LinkedIn — one substantial post per platform per day, mostly the same content
- Programmatic SEO experiments
- Newsletter prep — TrainYourAgent ships weekly on Wednesday morning
It's not glamorous. It's the compound-interest hour. Almost nothing I do here pays off in the same week. Most of what I do here pays off 90 days out, and pays off again 18 months out.
The tools, in one list
For the people who skipped to the bottom:
- Cursor + Claude Code — IDE + agent coding
- Linear — single-eng kanban
- GitHub — every change in a PR
- Vercel + Supabase + Fly.io — production
- Sentry + PostHog — observability
- Superhuman — email
- Cal.com + Fathom — sales calls
- HubSpot Free + Stripe — CRM + billing
- Loom + Slack Connect — customer comms
- Notion + Apple Notes — anything that needs to be written down
- beehiiv — newsletter
What I had to stop doing
Three things I stopped, in order of how much time they returned:
- Group chats with other founders. Slack DMs with friends-of-friends in similar businesses ate 90 min/day. The signal-to-noise was bad. I'm in two Discords now, both with hard mute on every channel except announcements.
- Looking at metrics more than twice a day. Stripe MRR, web traffic, signups — checking these is dopamine, not work. Twice a day. Morning, after lunch. That's it.
- Saying yes to "quick podcast appearances." A 30-min podcast is a 90-min commitment by the time you account for prep, recording, the social post, the follow-up. I do one a month if it has the right audience. Three years ago I'd do six.
The compounding rituals
Three things I started, in order of how much they paid back:
- Every customer call recording listened to within 24h. Catches problems before they're complaints.
- One Loom per week to every active customer, even if there's nothing to report. Single biggest retention lever I have.
- A weekly Friday "what compounded this week" note in Notion. 10 minutes. Forces me to notice the small wins that would otherwise blur.
That's the loom of the day. Boring, mostly. Repeatable, mostly. Compounding, hopefully.
If you want to talk shop, book a call or follow the build-in-public thread. I'll usually reply same day.
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