Writing
What worked, what broke, and what I would do differently.
From the videos
Best Mileage Tracker App? I Asked AI and It Said Buy OneI asked AI to build a mileage tracker for my business. It said buy one. Here's how to decide build, buy, or leave it alone, and the free tracker I used.
Is Claude Max Worth It? What My AI Chief of Staff Really CostsIs the $100 Claude Max plan worth it with an AI chief of staff on it? Real numbers from 100+ jobs in two days, plus five pieces to build your own.
Claude Code Deleted 48,000 Files. Here's How to Build So It Can't.Telling an AI not to delete files is not a safety feature. Four guardrails that make deleting impossible, and what to do running Claude Code on a Mac.
Why Your Vibe Coded App Breaks After the Demo (and the 5 Fixes)Vibe coding apps that look great in the demo and fall apart later? Five reasons it happens, from localhost links to context rot, and what to do about each.
How to Validate an App Idea With AI (Before You Build It)Most AI tools say yes to every idea. Here is the process I use to get a real no before I build: experts, a synthetic audience, and one grumpy skeptic.
More from the videos
I Built My Own Check Printing Software With Claude CodeInstead of buying check printing software, I had Claude Code build it. The five rules I followed, the routing number it got wrong, and when to just buy.
Claude Found the Excel Mistake That Overbilled a CustomerA wrong row in one Excel formula overbilled a customer $46.92 and nobody caught it. How I had AI check a small business's math, and how you can too.
Marketing
It Was the Offer, Not the Ads: Why More Spend Won't Fix ItMore ad spend doesn't fix a broken offer, it just loses money faster. Here's how to tell if your bottleneck is the offer instead of the ads, and why brand is the real CAC killer.
Diagnosis-First Marketing: Find the Real Bottleneck Before You Spend a DollarMost marketing problems aren't marketing problems. They're diagnosis problems. Here's the financial teardown that finds whether your bottleneck is the offer, the creative, the channel, or the agency.
The 5 Stages of Customer Awareness, and Why Your Ads Keep MissingMost ads propose marriage on the first date. Here's Eugene Schwartz's 5 stages of customer awareness, mapped to the story your ad should actually be telling at each one.
I replaced three vendors on one projectA market research firm, an ad agency, and a web dev shop. One person and some AI did all three, faster and cheaper.
Surveys are mostly BS. Here's what I use instead.People tell you what you want to hear. Real answers come from people voting with their wallets. Synthetic audiences get close.
I asked 1,000 fake customers before I built anythingHow close synthetic audiences actually are to real people, and exactly where they lie.
Building software without being an engineer
Why your vibe coded app breaks after the demoFive reasons it works on your laptop and fails for everyone else, and the fix for each.
You don't need to code. You need the right order.The problem was never that I can't code. It's that I didn't know the right order, or what an AI could do for me before the building part.
The exact process I use to build software without knowing how to codeA marketer's step-by-step system for validating, building, and field-testing real software with AI, without writing code. The stages, the rules, and the two moves that do most of the work.
"You're an editor. Figure it out." So I built Split-Test-O-Matic.A boss told me to figure out an impossible edit. Instead I built the tool that does it, Split-Test-O-Matic. It turns one day shoot into hundreds of ad variations. This is the origin story, and I'm putting my name on it.
A photo of an Army manual became a working app by lunchThe one-shot only works as well as what you feed it. With a whole field manual to work from, it went fast.