# LetsBe Biz — Product Vision

**Date:** February 25, 2026
**Author:** Matt (Founder)
**Status:** Version 1.1
**Purpose:** North star document. Every technical decision, feature, and priority is tested against this vision. If the architecture doesn't deliver this experience, the architecture changes.

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## 1. The One-Liner

**LetsBe gives every small business their own private AI team that runs the business while the owner focuses on what they're actually good at.**

Not AI-assisted tools. Not a chatbot. Not a workflow builder. A team of AI employees that operate 25+ business tools autonomously — on a server the business owns, with data that never leaves their control.

**Tagline:** "Where power meets privacy."

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## 2. The Problem

Small business owners are drowning. They're running their entire operation across 10-30 SaaS tools — each with its own subscription, login, data silo, and terms of service. They're the marketer, the IT person, the bookkeeper, the scheduler, and the salesperson. They work 60-hour weeks doing admin work instead of the thing they're actually good at.

Even the ones who've consolidated onto self-hosted tools still need someone to operate them. Configure the CRM. Send the newsletter. Manage the calendar. Process the invoices. Handle the IT issues. That's either expensive human labor or deep technical knowledge most owners don't have.

The current landscape forces a choice: powerful but fragmented (SaaS), private but complex (self-hosted), or AI-powered but not private (cloud AI). No one offers all three.

**What we replace:**

- 10-30 SaaS subscriptions (€500-2,000/mo)
- A part-time virtual assistant (€1,500-3,000/mo)
- An occasional IT contractor (€100-200/hr)
- All with better privacy, better consistency, and 24/7 availability

---

## 3. The Vision

### 3.1 What It Feels Like

When someone describes LetsBe to a friend, they say: **"It runs my business."**

Not "I have a cool AI tool" or "I use self-hosted software." They say: "I tell my AI team what I need and it handles everything. Marketing, IT, scheduling, invoicing, customer conversations — all of it. On my own server. And it never sleeps."

The experience is closer to having employees than using software. You don't configure workflows or build automations. You talk to your team. "Send the monthly newsletter with our best content." "Follow up with everyone from last week's demo." "Why is the website slow?" The AI team figures out the how — which tools to use, in what order, with what data — and does it.

### 3.2 The Proactive Team

LetsBe doesn't wait to be asked. The AI team is proactive by default — within the boundaries the user sets.

**What proactive looks like:**

- Morning briefing: "Here's what happened overnight. Your IT Agent restarted Nextcloud after a memory spike at 3am. Your Sales Agent qualified 2 new leads from Chatwoot. Your Secretary scheduled 3 meetings for this week. Here's what needs your attention today."
- The Marketing Agent notices blog traffic dropped 30% this week, investigates via Umami, identifies the underperforming posts, and drafts a recovery plan — without being asked.
- The IT Agent detects a certificate expiring in 7 days, renews it, and reports what it did.
- The Secretary sees a new Cal.com booking, checks for conflicts, sends a confirmation email with the meeting link, and adds a reminder.

**The user steers. The AI does.** Over time, as trust builds, the user increases autonomy levels and the AI team operates more independently. The product gets more valuable the longer you use it.

### 3.3 On-Demand When Needed

Alongside the proactive behavior, users can talk to any agent at any time:

- "Draft a proposal for the Acme deal" — Sales Agent pulls deal details from Odoo, AI drafts the proposal, creates a signable document in Documenso, sends to the client via Stalwart Mail.
- "Clean up old files on Nextcloud and tell me how much space I freed" — IT Agent handles it, reports back.
- "What were our top-performing blog posts this month?" — Marketing Agent queries Ghost + Umami, synthesizes the answer.

The interaction is natural language via the mobile app, or via WhatsApp/Telegram for people who prefer to stay in their existing messaging apps.

### 3.4 The "Oh Shit" Moments

The product sells itself through moments of surprise — when the user discovers the AI team can do something they didn't expect:

- "Can you monitor my website uptime and text me if it goes down?" → It already is.
- "Can you send invoices to my clients every month?" → Yes. It pulls data from Odoo, generates the invoice, and emails it.
- "Can you figure out why my email deliverability dropped?" → IT Agent checks DNS records, SPF/DKIM config, Stalwart logs, and reports back with a fix.
- "Can you create a weekly social media calendar based on my blog content?" → Marketing Agent reads Ghost, analyzes what performed well via Umami, drafts a week of posts in the user's brand voice.

These moments create the stickiness. Each one deepens trust, increases autonomy, and makes the product harder to leave.

---

## 4. Customer Personas

### 4.1 Lead Persona: The Solo Founder

**Name:** Sarah. Runs a consulting firm. 1 person, maybe a part-time VA.

**Her day:** She's good at consulting. But she spends 60% of her time on admin: scheduling meetings, sending follow-up emails, managing her website, creating invoices, handling IT issues when something breaks, posting on social media when she remembers to. She uses 12 different SaaS tools and pays €800/mo for them. She knows she's underinvesting in marketing but can't afford to hire someone.

**Her pain:** "I'm doing the work of 5 people and none of it well. I can't afford a marketing person, an IT person, and a VA. But I'm drowning without them."

**What LetsBe gives her:** A full team for less than she pays for her current SaaS stack. Marketing Agent handles her newsletter, blog, and social. Secretary handles her calendar, email triage, and follow-ups. IT Agent keeps everything running. Sales Agent qualifies leads and manages her pipeline. She focuses on consulting — the thing she's actually good at.

**What makes her say "take my money":** The demo. She watches the AI send a newsletter using content from her blog, check her site's uptime, and schedule a meeting — all in 3 minutes. She realizes this replaces €800/mo in SaaS + 20 hours/week of admin.

### 4.2 Secondary: The Agency Owner

**Name:** David. Runs a digital marketing agency. 8 employees, 12 clients.

**His pain:** He manages client work across 15 different tools. Each client has their own stack. He needs operational leverage — not another tool, but something that handles the operational overhead so his team can focus on client deliverables.

**What LetsBe gives him:** Each client gets their own LetsBe instance (or he uses one powerful instance). The AI team handles cross-client operations: scheduling, reporting, content distribution, IT maintenance. His human team focuses on strategy and creative work.

### 4.3 Tertiary: The Privacy-Conscious Business

**Name:** Dr. Weber. Runs a small medical practice in Germany.

**His pain:** GDPR means he can't use most cloud tools for patient-adjacent data. He needs scheduling, email, file storage, and basic CRM — but on infrastructure he controls. He has zero IT knowledge.

**What LetsBe gives him:** Everything on his own server, in a German data center, with secrets that never leave the machine. The AI team handles the IT complexity he can't. He talks to it like he'd talk to an office manager.

---

## 5. Product Principles

These are non-negotiable. Every feature and decision is tested against them.

### 5.1 Secrets Never Leave the Server

Infrastructure credentials — passwords, API keys, tokens, certificates — are redacted before any data reaches an AI model. The AI reasons about which credentials are relevant without seeing the values. This is enforced at the transport layer, not by trusting the AI to behave. It cannot be turned off.

User-entered data (messages, business content) flows to AI models transparently. We protect system secrets, not user choices.

### 5.2 Simple by Default, Powerful When Unlocked

Any person — regardless of technical skill — can use LetsBe on day one. The default experience is clean, guided, and jargon-free. No one sees markdown files, config schemas, or model names unless they go looking.

Power users who want deeper control can unlock advanced settings: per-agent model selection, autonomy level tuning, custom agent creation, raw configuration editing. This requires a credit card (for metered premium model usage) and signals the user understands what they're doing.

Two layers of simplicity:

- **Basic mode:** Three model presets ("Basic Tasks," "Balanced," "Complex Tasks"). Autonomy toggles with plain-English descriptions. Agent personality set via guided questions, not file editing.
- **Advanced mode (credit card required):** Full model catalog. Per-agent configuration. Direct SOUL.md editing. Custom agents. Unlocked autonomy options. Premium AI models with per-usage billing.

### 5.3 External Communications Are Gated by Default

The AI team operates business tools autonomously for internal operations — reading data, generating reports, managing infrastructure, organizing files, analyzing performance.

But any action that sends information to someone outside the business — emails to clients, published blog posts, sent newsletters, campaign dispatches — is gated by default. The user sees what the AI prepared and approves it with one tap.

Users can explicitly unlock autonomous sending per agent or per tool after they've built trust. This is a deliberate opt-in, not an autonomy level side effect. Even at the highest autonomy level, external comms start gated until the user unlocks them.

**Rationale:** A misworded email to a client is worse than a delayed newsletter. We err on the side of protecting the user's relationships.

### 5.4 Destructive Actions Always Require Confirmation

Deleting data, dropping databases, modifying firewall rules, revoking access — these are gated at every autonomy level, for every agent. No exceptions. One-tap approval in the app, with a clear description of what the AI wants to do and why.

### 5.5 The Product Gets More Valuable Over Time

Every interaction teaches the AI team something: the user's preferences, their brand voice, their client relationships, how they like meetings scheduled, which content performs well for their audience. Over time, the AI team becomes uniquely tailored to that business. This accumulated context is the deepest form of product value — and the strongest retention mechanism.

### 5.6 All Tools Included, Always

No per-tool pricing. No feature gating behind tiers. Every subscription includes the full suite of 28 business tools. Price scales with server resources (more tools need more horsepower), not with feature access. This keeps the value proposition clean: one subscription, everything included.

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## 6. The Customer Journey

### 6.1 Discovery → Signup

The website tells the story: "Your AI team is ready. Tell us about your business."

1. **Landing page:** A chat input — "Describe your business." Hero messaging about the AI workforce. Not a feature list — a vision of what changes when you have an AI team.
2. **AI conversation (1-2 messages):** Gemini Flash (cheap, fast) classifies the business type from a natural-language description. "I run a freelance design studio" → Freelancer bundle.
3. **Tool recommendation:** Card-based UI with business type bundle pre-selected. Full catalog visible with toggles. Live resource calculator shows required server specs.
4. **Server selection:** Only tiers that meet the resource requirement are shown. The cheapest visible option is the right option. No underpowered choices.
5. **Domain setup:** User brings their domain or buys one (Netcup domain reselling). Each tool gets a subdomain (crm.yourdomain.com, mail.yourdomain.com).
6. **Agent configuration (optional, skippable):** Template-based per business type. "What's your brand voice?" "How do you like meetings scheduled?" Quick personality setup for each agent. Can be done later.
7. **Payment:** Stripe. Pay first, then provision.
8. **Provisioning:** Status page showing real-time progress. "Installing your tools... Configuring your AI team... Almost ready..." Email with credentials and app download links.

### 6.2 The First Hour

The user opens the app and their AI team is waiting.

**Quick wins based on business type:** The system suggests 2-3 immediate actions tailored to the user's setup — "Want me to set up your email accounts?" "I can check if your website is loading properly." "Let me import your calendar." These are low-risk, high-visibility wins that demonstrate the AI team's capability immediately.

After the quick wins, the user explores freely. They chat with agents, test capabilities, and start building trust. The early experience is designed to produce "oh shit" moments — the user discovers the AI can do things they didn't expect, and the relationship deepens.

### 6.3 First Week

The AI team is learning the business. The user has had several conversations, approved a few actions, and started to see the daily briefings. Key milestones:

- At least one agent has performed a useful autonomous action (IT Agent fixed something, Secretary scheduled a meeting)
- User has sent at least one message via WhatsApp/Telegram to their AI team
- The morning briefing has shown something the user didn't know (a failed backup, a trending blog post, a new lead)
- User has increased at least one agent's autonomy level from Training Wheels to Trusted Assistant

### 6.4 First Month

The AI team is part of daily operations. The user checks the morning briefing like they'd check email. They've built workflows they rely on — weekly newsletter, monthly invoicing, daily analytics checks. They've customized at least one SOUL.md (via the friendly UI). The AI team knows their brand voice, their scheduling preferences, their key clients.

**This is where switching costs kick in.** The configured, trained, personalized AI team is now uniquely valuable to this specific business.

### 6.5 Three Months

The trifecta is realized:

- **Time saved:** 10-20 hours/week of admin work is now handled by the AI team. The user spends their time on high-value work.
- **Capabilities unlocked:** The user is doing things they couldn't before — running analytics, sending professional newsletters, managing a CRM, monitoring infrastructure — because the AI handles the complexity.
- **Cost replaced:** 5-10 SaaS subscriptions cancelled. The VA contract isn't renewed. LetsBe replaced €500-2,000/mo of fragmented spend with a single subscription.

---

## 7. What LetsBe Is Not

Clarity on boundaries prevents scope creep and misaligned expectations.

- **Not a workflow builder.** Users don't drag and drop automations. They talk to their AI team in natural language. The AI figures out the workflow.
- **Not a chatbot.** The AI team doesn't just answer questions — it does things. It operates tools, manages infrastructure, sends emails, processes data.
- **Not a raw hosting service.** We don't sell VPS access or server management as standalone products. The infrastructure exists to power the AI workforce. Legally, we're an infrastructure provider — we deploy open-source tools under their upstream licenses on servers customers own. But the *experience* is talking to your AI team, not SSH-ing into a box. Users who want server access have it (full SSH, all credentials), but most never need it.
- **Not for enterprises (yet).** V1 is built for businesses with 1-50 people. Larger organizations have different needs (compliance, multi-department, SSO across hundreds of users) that we'll address later.
- **Not a replacement for human judgment.** The AI team handles operations and execution. Strategic decisions, client relationships, and creative direction stay with the human. The AI amplifies the human, it doesn't replace them.

---

## 8. Business Strategy

### 8.1 Pricing Philosophy

**Simple, all-inclusive, scales with resources.**

One subscription. All 28 tools included. Unlimited agents. Price scales with server tier (more tools need more horsepower). AI token usage has a generous included pool with the base models. Premium models and overage are metered separately.

| Tier | Price | Target | Includes |
|------|-------|--------|----------|
| Lite (hidden) | €29/mo | Price-sensitive, few tools | 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, all tools, included AI pool (~8M tokens) |
| Build | €45/mo | Default marketed tier | 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, all tools, included AI pool (~15M tokens) |
| Scale | €75/mo | Agencies, power users | 12 vCPU, 32GB RAM, all tools, included AI pool (~25M tokens) |
| Enterprise | €109/mo | Full 28-tool stack | 16 vCPU, 64GB RAM, all tools, included AI pool (~40M tokens) |

**AI model tiers:**

- **Included (base subscription):** 5-6 cost-efficient models with generous monthly token pools. Cover 90%+ of daily usage. No credit card needed beyond the subscription.
- **Premium (credit card required):** Top-tier models (Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, GPT 5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro) available at per-usage metered rates with sliding markup (8-25% — lower on expensive models to encourage adoption).
- **Founding members:** 2× included token allotment for 12 months ("Double the AI"). First 50-100 customers.

**Performance Guarantee upgrade:** Dedicated CPU cores (+€5-50/mo) for customers who need guaranteed performance under load.

### 8.2 Target Market

**Horizontal with vertical templates.** We don't build "LetsBe for restaurants" — we build "LetsBe for businesses" with a restaurant template that pre-selects the right tools and pre-configures the agent personalities. Market broadly, give each vertical a tailored first experience through business type bundles in onboarding.

**Lead persona:** Solo founders and freelancers (Sarah). Broadest market, most relatable pain, easiest messaging. "Your AI team so you can focus on what you're good at."

**Secondary:** Small agency owners (David). Higher willingness to pay, deeper operational pain, higher tier selection.

**Tertiary:** Privacy-conscious businesses (Dr. Weber). Strongest differentiation story, clearest competitive positioning in regulated markets.

### 8.3 Go-to-Market: First 50 Founding Members

Multiple channels, high-touch in the early days:

- **Social media marketing:** Content that demonstrates the "oh shit" moments. Short videos showing the AI team in action — "Watch this AI send a newsletter, schedule a meeting, and fix a server issue in 60 seconds." Target self-hosted communities, solo founder forums, and privacy-conscious audiences.
- **Interactive demo (Bella's Bakery):** A live sandbox with fake business data where prospects can chat with the AI team and watch it operate real tools in real-time. Not a video — a hands-on experience. One shared VPS (~€25/mo), session timeouts, rate limiting.
- **Google Ads:** Targeted keywords — "self-hosted business tools," "AI business assistant," "private business software," "alternative to [SaaS tools]." Low volume but high intent.
- **Content marketing:** Blog posts on the privacy-first AI opportunity, comparisons with SaaS stacks, tutorials on what autonomous AI can do for small businesses. SEO play for long-term organic discovery.
- **Self-hosted communities:** Reddit (r/selfhosted, r/homelab, r/smallbusiness), Hacker News, privacy forums. These audiences already value self-hosting — LetsBe adds the AI layer they didn't know they wanted.
- **Founding member program:** 2× token allotment ("Double the AI"), direct access to Matt, early influence on product direction. Positioned as exclusive: "Help shape the product and get double the AI power for a year."

### 8.4 Competitive Position

LetsBe occupies an empty quadrant in the market:

|  | **SaaS (cloud)** | **Self-hosted (private)** |
|---|---|---|
| **Workflow automation** | n8n Cloud, Make, Zapier | n8n†, Dify, Flowise |

*† n8n is a competitor only — NOT in the LetsBe stack. Its Sustainable Use License prohibits managed service deployment.*
| **AI workforce (operates tools)** | OpenAI, YC startups | **LetsBe (alone here)** |

No competitor combines: privacy-first infrastructure + pre-deployed business tools + autonomous AI agents + secrets firewall + cross-tool workflows. Each piece exists in isolation elsewhere. The combination is the product.

### 8.5 The Moat

The competitive moat builds in layers, each harder to replicate than the last:

**Layer 1 — Integration depth (engineering barrier):** 24+ tool API adapters with cross-tool workflows, error recovery, edge-case handling, and secrets integration. This is 6+ months of compounding engineering work. A competitor can read the blueprint, but building and testing Odoo's XML-RPC quirks, Chatwoot's webhook timing, and Nextcloud's WebDAV idiosyncrasies only gets solved by doing it. Each adapter is tested against real tool versions with real data — not something you can shortcut.

**Layer 2 — Speed to market (time barrier):** Being first with a working product while competitors are still building. Every week in market is a week of real user feedback, bug fixes, and refinement that a competitor starting from zero doesn't have.

**Layer 3 — User accumulated context (permanent barrier):** Each user's SOUL.md configurations, agent memories, workflow patterns, brand voice training, client knowledge, and operational preferences make their instance uniquely valuable. This isn't data you can export to a competitor. It's months of accumulated learning that the AI team has absorbed through daily use. The longer someone uses LetsBe, the harder it is to leave — not because we lock them in, but because the replacement cost of rebuilding all that context is enormous.

Integration depth creates the initial barrier. Speed to market exploits it. User accumulated context makes it permanent.

---

## 9. Three-Year Vision

### Year 1: Prove the Model

Launch with the founding member program. 50-100 customers using the full product. Validate the core value proposition: that an AI workforce on private infrastructure genuinely saves time, unlocks capabilities, and replaces costs for small businesses. Iterate rapidly based on real usage data. Identify which agent roles, tool integrations, and workflow patterns deliver the most value.

**Success metric:** Founding members are measurably getting 10+ hours/week back and have cancelled multiple SaaS subscriptions. Retention rate above 90% after 3 months.

### Year 2: Scale and Deepen

Grow beyond founding members. Hundreds of customers. The product is self-service — signup to AI team ready in under 30 minutes. Deep vertical templates for the top-performing business types. Community skills marketplace where users share their best agent configurations and workflow templates. Mobile app is polished and feature-complete.

**New capabilities:** Data migration tools (import from Google Workspace, M365), more messaging channels, community-contributed agent skills, white-label option for agencies managing multiple clients, BYOK (Bring Your Own API Key) for advanced users who want to plug in their own AI model keys while using our orchestration layer.

**Success metric:** Self-serve signup-to-value pipeline working. Month-over-month growth. Unit economics are positive including AI token costs.

### Year 3: Platform

LetsBe becomes the operating system for small businesses. The marketplace of tools, skills, and templates creates network effects — each user's contributions make the platform better for everyone. The platform supports third-party tool integrations (user-created adapters), opening the ecosystem beyond the core 28 tools.

**Expansion paths (choose based on traction):**

- **Vertical depth:** Specialized compliance and tooling for regulated industries (healthcare, legal, finance in EU).
- **Upmarket:** Larger teams (50-200 employees) with multi-department AI workforces, advanced RBAC, and dedicated support.
- **Geographic:** Multi-region infrastructure (beyond EU). Local compliance, local data centers, localized agent personalities.
- **Partner channel:** MSPs and IT consultancies reselling LetsBe to their client base. White-label program.

**Success metric:** Platform effects visible — users discovering and installing community skills, templates reducing time-to-value for new customers, third-party integrations being contributed.

---

## 10. Vision Validation Checklist

This checklist is used to test every architectural and product decision:

- [ ] Does this make the product feel like "it runs my business"?
- [ ] Does this serve the solo founder (Sarah) on day one?
- [ ] Is the default experience simple enough for a non-technical user?
- [ ] Does this protect secrets at the transport layer?
- [ ] Are external communications gated by default?
- [ ] Are destructive actions always gated?
- [ ] Does this make the product more valuable over time?
- [ ] Does this deepen the competitive moat?
- [ ] Can a user explain this to a friend without using technical jargon?
- [ ] Would this survive a "can it do this?" → "oh shit, it can" test?

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## Document Lineage

| Version | Date | Changes |
|---------|------|---------|
| 1.0 | 2026-02-25 | Initial vision document. Synthesized from Foundation Document v0.7 and founder interviews. Product experience, customer personas, principles, customer journey, business strategy, 3-year roadmap, validation checklist. |
| 1.1 | 2026-02-26 | Updated tool counts (30 → 28), Poste → Stalwart Mail references. Added BYOK to Year 2 roadmap. Clarified infrastructure-provider positioning in "What LetsBe Is Not." |

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*This document is the north star. The Technical Architecture, Foundation Document, and all future specs are measured against this vision. If they don't deliver this experience, they change.*
