Đà Nẵng · Hội An · one hour, one coffee
AI coffee meetup —
just buy me a coffee
I'm usually at my favourite coffee shop in Đà Nẵng or Hội An with an americano for an hour or two every day. I keep meeting business owners who are skeptical about how their business can be improved with AI — or who've already invested in it without a positive result. And I get the skepticism: there's plenty of hype out there. But with the right understanding of your business and the right expertise, the benefits can be huge. So here's the deal: you buy the coffee, and I'll spend the hour showing you where AI genuinely helps.
Why
Giving back, over coffee
Here's what I keep noticing over my americano: business owners here run their places brilliantly, but the work behind the counter — receipts, books, spreadsheets — still eats hours of their week. Most have tried AI and walked away unconvinced, because it was aimed at the wrong problem or oversold from day one. The businesses I've seen benefit from AI aren't the ones with big IT budgets — they're the ones who understood their own numbers and had someone show them where AI actually fits. That's the gap I want to close. I've been building software for 30 years and I use AI every day; I'd rather spend my morning coffee hour helping a neighbour close it than scrolling my phone.
✓ What you'll get
- General discussion about AI and how it is being deployed
- Analysis of how your business can benefit from AI
- No pressure, no obligation
✗ What you won't get
- A pitch for AI customer chatbots, voice calls, or AI-generated content
- An AI bro claiming that AI will fix everything
- Follow-up pressure afterwards
Who it's for
Whatever business you run
Every business is different — and AI isn't one-size-fits-all. Whether you run a café or a larger company, most share the same pile of behind-the-scenes work: paperwork, bookkeeping, spreadsheets, reports. Here's a taste of what AI can take off your plate.
Café or restaurant
AI tracks purchases and stock, keeps your accounts tidy, and turns daily sales into reports you can actually use.
Hotel or homestay
AI handles booking paperwork, reconciles channels, and keeps guest records organized.
Salon or spa
AI runs the appointment book, tracks no-shows, and does the weekly accounts.
Clinic or pharmacy
AI organizes patient records and expiry dates, and handles the paperwork that eats your evenings.
Tutoring or language center
AI manages enrollment, attendance, and invoices — and helps draft lesson plans and materials.
Retail shop
AI tracks stock and suppliers, prices what's left, and prepares your sales reports.
Logistics or delivery
AI builds manifests, tracks deliveries, and does the billing.
Real estate
AI keeps listings organized, qualifies enquiries, and handles the paperwork.
Tourism or travel
AI reconciles bookings, tracks payments, and keeps itineraries straight.
Accountant or tax advisor
AI reviews client files for gaps and drafts the routine work, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Financial or insurance advisor
AI builds comparisons and models on the fly — instead of expensive software that isn't quite right.
Law firm or notary
AI summarizes case files and drafts routine documents, so billable time goes to the work that matters.
The menu
What we'll talk about
Not customer-facing gimmicks — the behind-the-scenes work that quietly eats your time and money. The conversation usually touches on a few of these.
Paperwork & accounting
Invoices, receipts, tax records, bookkeeping — AI that reads, organizes, and summarizes them so you don't have to.
Custom systems, not off-the-shelf
A small tool built exactly the way you run your business — instead of paying a lot for a product that isn't quite right.
Custom AI dashboards
A live overview of your business operations — sales, stock, bookings, cash — in one place, built to match how you actually run things.
Making sense of your own records
Sales, stock, client files, call notes — AI that finds the problems and opportunities you'd miss by hand.
The weekly grind
Spreadsheets, reports, reconciliations — the repetitive work that eats your evenings.
Gap analysis for professionals
For accountants, advisors, and lawyers: AI that checks each client's situation against everything that should be done.
In practice
The quiet ways AI pays for itself
The most valuable AI in a business is rarely customer-facing. Here's what one professional-services firm does with it behind the scenes.
Take a financial advisory practice in town. It doesn't use AI to talk to clients — it uses it to run the business better. After every client call, an agent reads the notes and checks them against everything that client should have planned or filed. It routinely catches gaps a busy advisor would miss. The same firm has built its own portfolio-comparison tool and a cashflow-modelling tool — on the fly, for a few dollars — instead of specialist software that costs a fortune and still isn't quite right.
Reads the paperwork
Client notes, invoices, records — AI reads and checks them so nothing falls through the cracks.
Finds what's missing
Gaps in plans, filings, or follow-ups that should have happened — but didn't.
Builds its own tools
Custom comparisons and models, built instead of bought — software that fits exactly.
Save money
Don't waste money on AI
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with AI is overpaying for it. The big brands have the best models, but they are a huge waste of money.
The big brands
Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT are world-class models — and priced that way. Their top tiers can cost a hundred times more per token than models that do the same everyday work. For paperwork, records, and documents, you're paying for brand markup and lock-in — not better results.
Open-weights models
DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Moonshot's Kimi, Z.ai's GLM, and Xiaomi's MiMo — the leading open-weights models — do the same everyday work at a fraction of the cost, often an order of magnitude less. The best of them, like Qwen 3.8 and Kimi K3, now rival the premium brands on everyday tasks. For most back-office tasks, you won't notice any difference in the results.
Three rules to avoid wasting money
Start small
Begin with an affordable model. Move to a premium one only if it genuinely fails at the job.
Match the model to the task
A 30-second job doesn't need a frontier model. Lower-cost open models handle most back-office work fine.
Don't buy the hype
Beware of expensive "AI-powered" subscriptions — a small custom tool often costs less and fits better.
How it works
Three steps to an hour over coffee
Message me
On Telegram or Facebook Messenger. Tell me what your business is and what's on your mind — a sentence is enough.
Pick a coffee shop
I'd suggest my regular spot — in Đà Nẵng or Hội An. If you have a favourite, we can meet there! No fixed times; whenever works.
Talk it over
About an hour. Bring a spreadsheet or a process you hate — you leave with ideas you can use.
Practicalities
Details
Cost
A coffee. That's the whole fee — no contract, no obligation.
Where
Anywhere in Đà Nẵng or Hội An — my regular spot, or your favourite if you have one.
When
Whenever suits you — no fixed slots, we'll find a time that works.
Language
English — friendly and plain, no jargon.
Bring
A spreadsheet you hate, a pile of paperwork, or a process you do by hand — we'll look at it together.
Format
A chat, not a meeting — no slides, no script.
Who you'll be talking to
Jonathan Brown
An engineer with 30 years of experience building production systems across games, enterprise web, and blockchain — and the author of Choreographr, an open-source AI agent. He's been based in Vietnam since 2015, and he teaches the AI workflows he uses every day.
Fancy an americano?
Message me on Telegram or Facebook Messenger — tell me your business, pick a café or let me suggest one, and we'll take it from there. Bring a problem you've been solving by hand; we'll figure out whether AI can take it off your plate. If we talk and it's not for you, that's fine: the coffee was the whole deal.