By Rolf Versluis · Published September 1, 2026 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.

Didn't want to 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. I rented a server. Gave the agent the login. That was my part.

It set up the server, installed the OS, built the whole site. Then told me what pictures to take. I did the photos, the product pages, picked a payment processor and wired up Stripe and Apple Pay.

crestvieworchards.com is the store. I don't touch it anymore.

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

I spent a couple of weeks watching what other pasture-raised chicken operations were doing: what people charge, what breeds work in our climate. Cornish Cross for the popular choice. Freedom Ranger for the slower-growing bird.

I stood in the brooder. 400 chicks huddled around a heat lamp. What to tell a customer about feed or storage? Didn't know. The agent figured it out before I had to. FAQ page. Response emails. Pickup-day workflow. All done.

A couple more weeks for the build. I picked Medusa for the storefront, open-source. The agent did most of the work. I handled the parts that required me to log into the payment processor, upload farm photos. The storefront wasn't as complete as Shopify. I had to write the checkout flow myself.

Stripe and Apple Pay took a few more days. API calls were the agent's job. I approved the charges account.

Didn't sign up to run a chicken farm. Signed up to see if an agent could build something real. The first customer question caught me off guard: how do you label pasture-raised meat? Regulations. Pickup-day logistics. Questions about feed, processing, storage. I would've done the chickens, sold them by word of mouth, taken checks. That's what took the real time, not the code.

Most of the work is the same every time. Five percent is the part that's yours. Same pattern whether you're selling chickens, scheduling appointments, taking service requests, or running a membership.

A website built in five minutes doesn't know what your business is. Three months. And it actually works.

If you've got a small business and you've been putting off the online piece because you don't want to learn another piece of software, that's exactly the kind of problem I work on. localhermesagent.com.