Nick Stice

We just shipped 292 commits in 5 weeks for CactusComply. Here's what we've been building: CactusComply helps Arizona small businesses file their Transaction Privilege Tax (TPT) — the state's version of sales tax. Most small biz owners are doing this manually on spreadsheets or paying accountants hundreds per filing. We're changing that.  What we shipped recently: - eFile Integration — Automated SOAP submission directly to Arizona's eFile gateway. Real-time job tracking. Confirmation emails via Loops. No more manual uploads to AZTaxes.gov. - Smart Location Management — Auto-detected county via Census Bureau geocoding for dual-county cities. ADOR location codes pulled from merchant locations. Jurisdiction mismatch validation catches errors before they reach the state. Per-filing location selection for multi-location businesses. - Transaction Intelligence — Row-level deduplication with transaction hashing. Location alias matching. Date range mismatch warnings. Re-enrichment for mismatched transactions. Dynamic county rate lookups. The boring stuff that prevents costly filing errors. - Email Automation — Loops.so integration with dynamic contact properties, filing event triggers, and transactional emails for eFile confirmations. Engagement tracking via webhooks. - POS Integration Design (Square, Clover, Toast) — Just spec'd out the TurboTax moment: you log in and your sales data is already there. Auto-import based on your filing frequency. Auto-sync keeps connections alive so even quarterly filers never have to reconnect. No CSV exports. No manual uploads. Just review and file. Building tax compliance software isn't glamorous. But when a restaurant owner can file their TPT in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours — that's the win. More coming soon.  #BuildInPublic #Startup #TaxTech #RegTech #SaaS #SmallBusiness #Arizona #TPT #FounderLife #IndieHacker #AI #DevLife

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After exiting Drivably - Acquired by ACV Auctions (NASDAQ: ACVA), I came to Utah to look for the companies Trent Mano is asking about. What startups were all substance, no hype? What startups were simply creating motion, not heat or noise? Local awareness of your startup can be driven by community ties (e.g. you have local investors), product type (e.g. you're building consumer or startup B2B SaaS), or actual traction (this is or should be your real goal). Hype, heat, and noise can help you secure your initial product, investors, and customers. Some social awareness is desirable: you want awareness with the customers who will give you ARR, the investors who will give you runway, and with the talented people who will build the company when you're not in the room. But too often, heat and noise are the unintended byproducts of systems designed to produce something else entirely. Light. Motion. Acceleration. What kind of systems are we trying to build here? For many startups, broad social awareness is NOT what gets you to the magical product, true fans, and TAM dominance. What gets you there is focus. Focus on uncomfortably narrow, intensely specific groups of people that no one else is focused on the way you are. It requires getting used to flying under a general purpose radar. Getting used to explaining, "So what exactly do you do again?" For much of Savi's life, we've been so far under the general purpose radar, we weren't just in stealth mode, we were in exile. Turns out, exile is the perfect place to build something dangerous for a small group of people. Exile is where Savi sat down with fast-growing Utah brands and operators like Swig, Gourmandise, and Savory Fund, and designed and built the vision AI operating system for restaurant and retail. Exile is where we found Next Coast Ventures and other investors that shared our conviction about AI transforming Main Street businesses. So, get on the radar that matters for you. Focus on the small, sub-scale groups of people that matter to your startup. And maybe your time off-the-radar will be the reason you get on-the-radar in the ways that matter.

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Most Central Valley businesses are running full tilt by the time Monday hits: so why not use a few quiet minutes this Sunday to boost your tech basics? Here’s a quick scenario: You walk into the office Monday and a key tool isn’t working. Do you have an up-to-date checklist for handling quick IT issues before they snowball? You’d be surprised how much smoother the week runs with a simple, 10-minute weekend system check. Think about logins, password reminders, backups: those small details that keep you up and running. Want a one-page “Sunday System Checklist” to keep things simple? Just ask and we’ll send it over. #SmallBusiness #CentralValley #ITSolutions #Productivity #SystemsSaturday

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A critical labor shortage persists in the construction industry, with the Associated Builders and Contractors estimating a need for 439,000 new workers in 2025 alone. At the same time, younger generations are looking for tech-forward careers that offer growth and purpose. This disparity represents the industry's biggest challenge and our greatest opportunity. This is about more than just filling job openings. It’s about fulfilling a long-held dream, to fundamentally reshape how the construction industry engages with its future workforce. Today, we're proud to announce the launch of the BuilderFax mobile application, a tool built from the ground up to address this challenge head-on. #BuilderFax #ConstructionCareers #NextGenTalent #WorkforceDevelopment #SkilledTrades

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Excited to join Midday Connect tomorrow to talk broadly about how investors actually think when evaluating founders and companies and what we think about Symphonic Capital! If you can't make it, I recently wrote about what we look for specifically—how we back AI companies closing gaps in healthcare, finance, and workforce. Written with stories from four of our portfolio founders. Read "AI as Infrastructure" here: https://lnkd.in/eDNqG7K2

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Customization Is Cheaper Than Confusion Confused crews waste time. Generic tools kill buy-in. Every missed step costs you money. Custom workflows aren’t bells and whistles—they’re how teams align, move faster, and stop asking “how does this thing work?” Because clarity isn’t nice to have. It’s operational fuel.

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Most contractors don’t fully understand how much revenue is being left on the table by not optimizing their referral channel. I joined Lance Bachmann on Build It To Sell It and we talked about how businesses are 25x’ing referrals by making them automatic, not optional with ReferPro. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gMsvdQrG

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The real edge isn’t using new tools, it’s integrating them faster than anyone else. In this episode, Eric Jorgenson, CEO of Scribe Media, explains how top builders aren’t just “trying out” new tech; they’re rebuilding their workflows around it. Software engineers adopted Copilot and never looked back. Operators like John Divine weren’t just early adopters, they reorganized their teams around language models before most people even logged in. The biggest shift? Founders now see scale as the default, not the dream, because they’re working with tools that multiply their output. → How far have you restructured your organization to take advantage of what’s already here? #TechFluency #OperationalLeverage #WorkflowDesign #TheAIReport 

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