We just rebuilt our entire website in five weeks. Rob figures getting the same result the old way would have cost at least a million dollars. No, AI didn't replace the marketing department. Nobody got fired. And nobody found a magical button labeled "Make Website." We just did something that would have been completely out of reach for us a year ago.
Our old website had been hanging around since 2019, which is a long time for any website and an eternity for a company that's changed as much as we have. We'd looked at replacing it. We even priced out a $300,000 rebuild and decided against it. Spending that much money, investing months of our own time, and still potentially ending up with something we'd have to talk ourselves into liking? We'd already played that game. We weren't eager for a rematch.
Then five weeks ago, our CTO started building. What happened next reminded Rob of something he figured out about BI more than a decade ago, except this time the implications go a whole lot further. In this solo episode of Raw Data, he walks through where the million dollar figure comes from and why the most interesting thing about our new website has very little to do with websites. If your company has been putting something off because the old way of doing it is too painful, press play.

There are two ways to build backwards. One starts with the answer you actually want and works its way toward the plumbing. The other starts with the plumbing and hopes the answer is in there somewhere. Consulting has historically been awfully fond of option two.

AI makes that harder to defend. When you can get something working in front of the business early, there's no particularly good reason to disappear into the infrastructure for six months first. Give people something they can see. Something they can use. Something they can tell you is wrong. Then fix it while fixing it is still easy. Better yet, let what you learn change what you build next.

Rob and Justin start with AI and eventually wander into the hazards of building in the dark, the value of building in plain sight, and a particularly useful new term: "Byzantine Consulting." It's a conversation about working backward from the answer instead of forward from the infrastructure. Because if nobody can react to what you've built yet, there's a decent chance you haven't built the important part.

Also in this Episode:

Rob's Substack

Rob has a lot of Claude folders now.

One knows the book. Another knows the company planning. Others have picked up meeting notes, briefing docs, LinkedIn ideas, strategy work, and whatever else was useful enough to save at the time. None of this felt like a problem while it was happening. Quite the opposite. The whole setup was working well enough that Rob kept giving it more to know.

Then one of those markdown files started telling him what he was and wasn't supposed to do.

Rob and Justin follow that thread into a much bigger problem than one weird sentence in one weird folder. Once AI starts carrying knowledge from one place to another, remembering things, connecting things, and helping everybody work faster, a few very old problems start wandering back into the room wearing new clothes. The BI crowd may recognize them. Rob certainly did. And one of his solutions will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever opened a Power BI model, looked at the relationships it helpfully created for them, and started deleting.