I've been thinking for a long time about the problems with my part-time search to buy a small business. Here were my 4 biggest pain points (and what I'm doing about it). 1. Clarity I wasted a lot of time just figuring out what I wanted. Only when I picked an industry did things really click. A buy box isn't just industry, geography and financials. It's also about risk, reward, and the life you want for yourself and your family. Without a clear picture of what you're trying to achieve, you can get distracted and lose deals to searchers who specialize. Everything flows from clarity. I was surprised by the diversity of SMB M&A. Sign shops, banquet halls, sushi restaurants, vet practices, moving companies, engineering firms. I even evaluated an aquarium once. Each one is a different life, a different sales conversation, and a different strategy. Today I'm seeing 20k decent listings across 20+ industries across all SDE ranges. You have to pick. 2. Speed SMB deals are HOT. A good brokered deal gets dozens, if not hundreds, of inquiries in its first few days. Because it takes work to screen and contact, part-time searchers are at a serious disadvantage. I'm tracking at least 1k new deals with $250K+ of SDE every month, about 30 a day, across 100+ sites. And if you only check the big marketplaces, you’re missing potentially as many as 1 in 7 deals with $500K+ SDE which are only listed on broker sites. If you only check on weekends, you're by default no longer first in line. Plus higher chances of something falling through the cracks. Plus not spending that time with your family. 3. Insight The market is crazy opaque. Nobody is tracking how it all fits together, or your personal journey through it. It's hard to know if a listing is stale, re-listed, had a price cut, has a deceptive price due to CRE or WC, or is priced reasonably. It's hard to know which SBA lenders to call, or what the broker is really trying to say between the lines. It's hard to see the big picture and keep track of it over time. About 1 in 4 deals is cross-listed. 6 in 10 have been on the market for at least three months. Of those 6 I've tracked long enough, about 1 in 9 already had a price cut of ~20% on average. E.g., one Missouri manufacturer with $425K SDE went from $2M to $1.6M June to September, but today's listing doesn't show that so you'd never know. Prices are all over the place, for both deals and loans. Two SBA lenders can price the same acquisition loan almost 2 points apart, and only 1 in 9 of these loans is fixed rate. 4. Power Given all of the above, it's tough to power up your workflows without generating slop. You can build a lot in Claude Code these days, but without an intelligence layer to plug into, you'd spend time building partial solutions or reinventing the wheel when you should be searching. Cold, Claude doesn't have the context to help you: It doesn't know about SMB deals, have market intel, know where to source deals, know what to say to a broker to get a response, how to map adjacencies, what to exclude from your buy box, how geography shapes your search, or what else your favorite broker has listed right now. Claude definitely won't know what deals are fresh vs stale, since (true story!) some brokers only mark deals as "pending" by changing the listing image to "pending_2.jpg" without any corresponding edits to the title or copy. Almost every broker website has a similar quirk. It's the difference between getting a few results vs getting a response like this: "David, there are 17 live listings in your custom buy box today, 6 priced below the national median. 5 you have already contacted. Want me to submit the inquiries on the remaining 12?" Then you can just say "yes" and get back to work. So here's the deal -> I took these learnings and am building a tool called shortlst(.co) to give part-time searchers the leverage to stay competitive. It isn't a CRM, because you don't need a new one. It's the intelligence layer underneath. Check it out, or DM me with questions. Cheers, David