By Rolf Versluis · Published [DATE] on Uncommon Knowledge in Business and Life

One of the things I tried this year was raising and selling meat chickens. Pasture-raised, processed on the farm, sold direct to people in north Georgia. The kind of small farm business that has been around for 100 years.

The part I did not want to do was build a website.

So I told my agent about it. We talked about what I wanted. Pasture-raised chicken, two breeds, pickup at the farm or weekly dropoffs in Alpharetta and Woodstock. Online ordering. Credit cards. The agent did the research, came up with a schedule, and built the whole thing.

I rented a virtual private server. I gave the agent a login to it. That was my entire contribution to the technical side.

Agent set up the server. It installed the operating system, configured the firewall, set up the website. It told me what pictures I needed to take. It put the pictures in place. It wrote the copy for the product pages. When I said I wanted people to be able to check out with credit cards, the agent researched the options and picked one. It installed the storefront software. It wired up Stripe as the payment processor. It got Apple Pay working.

crestvieworchards.com is the store. People order chicken, pay with a credit card, and pick it up at the farm or one of the dropoff spots. I do not touch the website. The agent does.

What this actually took

Whole project took a few months. Not because any one piece was hard. Because there were a lot of pieces.

The research phase took a couple of weeks. The agent looked at other pasture-raised chicken operations, looked at what people charge, looked at what breeds work in our climate. It came back with a recommendation: Cornish Cross for the popular choice, Freedom Ranger for the people who want a slower-growing bird.

The website build took a couple more weeks. The agent picked Medusa for the storefront, which is another open-source project out there. I had to do some of the work because the Medusa storefront application is not really as complete as a hosted service like Shopify. The agent did most of it. I did the parts that required me to log into the payment processor or upload farm photos.

The Stripe and Apple Pay integration took a few days once we knew what we were doing. The agent handled the API calls. I approved the charges account.

What I learned

What surprised me about this project was not the website. It was the parts I had not thought about.

When you sell food direct to consumers, there are regulations. There are labeling rules. There are pickup-day logistics. There are questions from customers about feed, processing, and storage. The agent handled all of those. It wrote the FAQ page. It drafted the response emails. It set up the pickup-day workflow.

I would not have built any of this myself. I would have done the chickens, sold them by word of mouth, and taken checks. The website was not the bottleneck. Knowing what to put on it was the bottleneck.

I expected to do most of the work myself. The agent ended up doing most of it. More than that: it taught me what a chicken business website needs to have.

What this is good for

If you run a small business that needs an online presence, this is the work I do. The agent does the technical side. You do the part that only you can do, which is the business.

Same pattern whether you are selling chickens, scheduling appointments, taking service requests, or running a membership. The 95% of the work is the same. The 5% that is yours is the part that makes it yours.

I am not pitching "AI builds your website in five minutes." That is the wrong framing. A website built in five minutes is a website that does not know what your business is. What I am pitching is the other way around: the agent sits with you, learns the business, builds the thing that fits the business, and keeps it running after.

crestvieworchards.com has been live for months. People order chicken. The agent handles the checkout. I get a notification when an order comes in. That is the whole workflow.

If you have a small business and you have been putting off the online piece because you do not want to learn another piece of software, that is exactly the kind of problem I work on. localhermesagent.com.