Notes from the barn — week of Aug 31, 2026

Five new guides went live at the barn this week — four English trade-startup guides and the first Spanish one — and every one of them ships the actual pricing and break-even formulas instead of a vague checklist. Our own Saturday scan also caught a text defect on product pages, described below.

What shipped this week?

Five guides, one per weekday, Monday through Friday. Saturday is audit day and Sunday is this note, so neither carries a new guide.

• Mon Aug 31 — How to start a cleaning business
• Tue Sep 1 — How to start a landscaping business
• Wed Sep 2 — How to start a junk removal business
• Thu Sep 3 — How to start a lawn care business
• Fri Sep 4 — Cómo empezar un negocio de limpieza (first Spanish guide)

All four trade guides send you to the same free contractor break-even calculator, because the question underneath every one of them is the same: how many jobs a month do you have to sell before you are actually paying yourself? The full catalogue is on the workbooks shelf.

Where do these pages rank so far?

Nowhere yet, and it would be dishonest to dress that up. Here is the measured snapshot, taken today at depth 100 on desktop Google in the United States.

Search term	Our best position	vs. last check
net worth calculator	not in top 100	no change since Aug 30
debt snowball calculator	not in top 100	no change since Aug 30
markup calculator	not in top 100	no change since Aug 30
how to start a cleaning business	not in top 100	first measurement
how to start a landscaping business	not in top 100	first measurement

The oldest of these pages is six days old. Nobody ranks in six days. The point of publishing the number now is that when it does move, there is a real starting line to move from.

What did testing catch?

Saturday’s scan read every one of the 87 workbook records and checked the 1,529 verified-figure labels printed on the product pages. 317 of them — 20.7%, spread over 44 workbooks — are missing their first character, so a label that should read “Calls per month” renders as “alls per month”.

To be precise about what is and is not broken: the figures themselves are correct and still reconcile to the spreadsheets they came out of. It is the label text beside them that is clipped, by an off-by-one bug in the script that writes those records. The fix belongs in the generator, not in 317 hand edits, because hand edits would be overwritten the next time the generator runs.

What is next?

• Three more startup guides in measured demand order: handyman, pressure washing, HVAC.
• The label generator fix, then a regeneration pass over the 44 affected workbooks.
• A second Spanish guide, with its search demand measured before the slot is committed.

Last updated: September 6, 2026.

By Marcos Gil — licensed Kentucky REALTOR and Richmond roofing company owner.