Chapters
00:00 — Intro
01:00 — Why intent and personalization died
05:30 — The asymmetry engine
08:00 — The librarian who only buys in December
11:00 — Housecall Pro and the vertical data moat
13:00 — Aligning price to customer outcome
15:30 — FundraiseUp and the 7% animated heart
18:50 — A five-day edge on global resin
19:50 — Where this is going
A founder I know sells software to plastic manufacturers. Four thousand of them in the country. Eighty percent of the price of plastic is the cost of resin.
I asked him what he knew about the cost of resin that his customers didn't.
I know the price five days before they do.
Wall Street has paid billions of dollars to shave nanoseconds off the route between Chicago and New York. He has a five-day gap on a global commodity. I told him to stop building software and become a day trader.
That's the purest example of where AI go-to-market is going. It's also the one I want you to keep in your head for the next 800 words, because it's the only frame that makes the rest of this make sense.
The two dead memes
Intent data and personalization both invaded our culture for the same reason. Both of them are dressed up as caring about the buyer. Neither one actually was.
The original goal of intent was good. If you could only talk to the people who actually wanted to buy, that's all you'd ever do. The problem was the implementation. The category got built on de-anonymizing buyer traffic — a thing no buyer would ever opt into if you asked. The data was dodgy. You couldn't inspect it. And the message it produced was Hey Jordan, I saw you on our website. Nobody replies to that, because it's not a gift. It's a confession that the seller noticed you and a request that you reward the noticing.
Personalization went the same way. The B2C version is real. Instagram knows what you click. Amazon knows your size. That's good personalization. The B2B version is Hey Jordan, congratulations on the new role. If you knew I spent only a minute and forty-eight seconds brushing my teeth this morning, that would be a very personal piece of information. It would also have nothing to do with my desire to buy your product.
Both memes promised to close the information gap between seller and buyer. Both of them did the opposite. They asked the buyer to give up their privacy so the seller could send a slightly more clever pitch. The buyer figured that out years ago. The ad blockers are the receipt.
The asymmetry engine is what replaces them
I wrote the deep doctrine on this last week. Here's the one-paragraph version.
Sales is a power game. Power flows from information asymmetry. The seller wins when they know more about the buyer's actual situation than the buyer does. Pre-AI, only the top one percent of reps could pull this off — the ones who'd lived inside one customer for years. Post-AI, anyone with a customer corpus and Claude Code can do it across a hundred customers in an afternoon.
Your customer transcripts are sitting somewhere. Your back-end has a schema and a few hundred thousand rows. The public web around each customer is one Serper query away. None of it is in the LLM's training set. None of it can be replicated by the recruiter sending cheap labor in the Philippines, 40% off — and the recruiters sending that exact email outnumber atoms in the universe by a rounding error. They're competing in the saturation zone. You don't have to.
The asymmetry engine is the machine that turns your private corpus into messages that can't be replicated. That's the whole game.
Three companies that already do it
Roland runs a company called Housecall Pro. Their pros have worked on one in every three homes in the country. He's said that publicly. Think about what that means. If a new pro signs up tomorrow and ingests their customer list, the platform could turn around and say twenty percent of the homes you worked on, the homeowner has moved — go figure out where. And of the ones still there, nobody in our database has touched the HVAC since you installed it twenty years ago. Here's a twenty-thousand-dollar job per house. The neighbors are buying this specific unit.
That's not personalization. That's information the pro could not have produced themselves. It is programmatically delivered. It is the asymmetry engine running over a vertical SaaS data moat.
FundraiseUp is the second one. They collect donations for nonprofits. UNESCO is on the platform. Their founder told me on stage that they don't charge a flat fee. They charge a percentage of donations collected. So every lever they can pull always points the same direction — increase the customer's conversion rate.
He told me a story. Someone on his team noticed that if a donor switched from a one-time gift to a monthly gift, a little heart could animate up the screen. There was no PRD. No product manager pitched it. It was a twenty-minute build with AI. It moved monthly-donation conversion seven percent. The only reason that animation exists is that FundraiseUp's pricing made it the company's interest to find it. If they charged a flat fee, nobody on the team would have been looking.
That's what pricing aligned to customer outcome buys you. It buys you a team that's incentivized to find seven-percent levers all day.
The third one is the resin guy at the top of this post. He's got a five-day window on the eighty-percent input cost for four thousand customers' core business. Every customer interaction he has should start with here's what's coming for you in five days, no pricing yet, what would you do with it? The software he's building is the wrapper. The five-day window is the actual business.
Where this is going
Three things compound from here.
Vertical wins. It is much easier to build the asymmetry engine when you own one industry's data than when you sell a horizontal tool to engineers and lawyers and HR teams. The horizontal businesses I love still need a vertical wedge — a specific customer transcript pile, a specific schema, a specific public-web slice — or they cannot direct the model. Pick one.
Pricing aligns to outcome. When the customer wins more, you make more. FundraiseUp is the simplest case. Outcome-aligned pricing means every engineer on your team is hunting for the next animated-heart feature instead of waiting for a roadmap meeting. The companies that do this will lap the companies that don't.
Your moat is the data, not the workflow. The compliance review, the dashboard, the AI agent — all wrappers. The thing flowing through the wrapper is what compounds. A friend's company reviews real estate contracts and cuts compliance teams from eight to one. I told him: the contracts are the business. Every lender, title company, mover, lawn-care provider in those contracts would pay for what's inside. Sometimes you give the workflow away to mine the data.
The question to ask tomorrow morning
The question is not what would my buyer be persuaded by? The question is what do I know about my buyer's situation that they would pay to learn? If you can answer it specifically, you have an asymmetry engine. If you can't, you have an intent vendor in a new coat.
Open one of your customer's transcripts tomorrow morning. Pull the back-end schema for the table they care most about. Ask Claude to play the buyer at that customer and tell you the three things they would want to know. Read the answer. Push back twice. Ship the survivor as a gift — no meeting ask, no demo button, just the data.
You will know within a week whether the engine is running. The replies will tell you.
— Written by Claude Opus 4.7, Approved by Jordan
What Annual Adds
This one was free. Paid gets the build. Annual gives you the tools that run it.
Every tool I ship. Edge Copilot installs to your Claude Code — talk to all my knowledge, every method, every data source. Current: Edge Copilot, AutoClaygent, Agent 7, Who to Target and What to Say, Blueprint Cloud, Technology Finder, Video List Extractor, Competitor Monitor, LinkedIn Engagement, Domain & LinkedIn Finder, Dossier Builder, PDF Contact Finder, Talent Sourcer. Whatever ships next is included.
All 3 courses: Who to Target and What to Say, Agent 7, AutoClaygent.
Weekly office hours.
Run /edge install asymmetry-engine once your license key arrives — the runnable mining loop from the Asymmetry Engine post drops into your Claude Code in one command.
License key hits your email.
→ Go annual — $2,499/yr · Start at $50/mo (most readers start here)
