Blog

Insights & Ideas

Thoughts on AI agents, automation, and building intelligent systems for modern businesses.

August 1, 2026

I Always Wanted a PPC Agency Obsessed With My Results. So I Built One.

It used to cost $10,000 to have an agency build a comprehensive Google Ads campaign, then $1,000 a month for someone to mostly ignore it. I spent weeks training an AI agent to be a genuine PPC expert instead. Three weeks in: $1,063 spent, $21,079 in booked stays, 19.8x.

PPCGoogle AdsAI AgentsHospitalityBuilding in Public

July 30, 2026

Your Vans Say "24 Hour Service." Google Says You Close at 4.

We ran deep local search audits on three contractors this month. The most valuable finding in the whole stack didn't come from an SEO tool — it came from a photo on a homepage. Here's what a real audit turns up.

Local SEOSite AuditsSmall BusinessGoogle Business Profile

July 24, 2026

We Fact-Checked the Local SEO Advice Everyone Repeats. Five Things Were Just Wrong.

Building an SEO agent forces you to write down what you actually believe. When we ran an adversarial fact-check over the standard local SEO canon, five widely-repeated claims didn't survive — including one that appears to have been invented outright.

SEOAI AgentsLocal SEOResearch

July 12, 2026

Cancelled at Euston: The Morning My AI Chief of Staff Got Us to Anfield

Our early train from London to Liverpool was cancelled an hour before a Premier League match day, in a country where no app tells you what to do next. This is the actual Discord conversation with Zeke, my AI chief of staff, that got my family to the game — calmly, one honest answer at a time.

AI AgentsZekeReal-World AITravel

July 11, 2026

Zendini: Building a Ticketing Platform for a 538-Seat Theater

One clean page per show, a seat picker with the theater's real 538 seats, a box office staff can learn in an afternoon, and group sales with deposits — the ticketing platform I built for the Amish Country Theater.

Building in PublicZendiniTicketingCustom Software

July 9, 2026

Pingo: The Team Chat App I Built in a Month

Channels, threads, push notifications, and native apps for Mac, iPhone, and Android from one codebase — plus a bot API so my AI agents can sit in the room like teammates. Why I built our own team chat and what the last 10% really looks like.

Building in PublicPingoTeam ChatMobile Apps

July 8, 2026

Building Spendaroo: Company Card Spend, Split Two Ways

Five Star Group is several LLCs sharing company cards, so every transaction needs two answers — what it was, and which company it belongs to. Spendaroo is the dark-themed spend tool I built to categorize card spend across both dimensions, pull transactions in automatically, and hand the accountant a clean export.

Building in PublicSpendarooCustom SoftwarePlaid

July 7, 2026

Building Otto: People Ops for a Company That's Really Five Companies

Five Star Group is several LLCs sharing one workforce. Otto is the people-operations platform I built around that reality — employee records, PTO, scheduling, and documents, wrapped in a brand warm enough that people actually use it.

Building in PublicOttoHRCustom Software

July 5, 2026

Pricey Pro: Dynamic Pricing That Can Explain Itself

Seventy-five cabins and treehouses, a price for every night of the year, and one non-negotiable rule: every number has to show its work. How I built a pricing engine with explainable rules, safe publishing modes, and a deliberately boring stack.

Building in PublicPricey ProVacation RentalsDynamic Pricing

July 2, 2026

Pilot Billing: Turning Flight Logs into Invoices

I fly as a contract pilot, and the monthly invoice was spreadsheet archaeology. Pilot Billing imports the flights automatically, walks each billable day through a review workflow, and assembles the invoice — daily rate, per diem, and receipts included.

Building in PublicPilot BillingAviationCustom Software

June 30, 2026

No Ocean Required: Designing landcruisevacations.com

A cruise ship that never leaves land needed a brand to match — sunrise logo, playful type, a custom icon set, and a hand-written site with no framework and no build step. How the Land Cruise Vacations site came together.

Building in PublicLand Cruise VacationsBrandingWeb Design

June 27, 2026

Inside Regy Pro: The Iceberg Under a Thirty-Second Checkout

Atomic inventory with no holds, refunds and balance-due payment links, a durable email outbox, audit logs on everything, and tests that run against a fresh server. What it actually took to own the booking layer for Land Cruise Vacations.

Building in PublicRegy ProPaymentsCustom Software

June 2, 2026

I Had an Idea for a Cruise. So I Built the Brand, the Site, and the Software.

How an idea for a new kind of trip — Backroads Cruise — turned into a brand, a website, and a custom-built registration platform that replaced thousands of dollars a year in third-party SaaS fees.

Building in PublicRegy ProLand Cruise VacationsCustom SoftwareSaaS Alternatives

May 31, 2026

The Voice Agent: How the Encore Hotel Stopped Missing Calls

A 24/7 voice AI that answers every inbound call, quotes rooms live from Cloudbeds, and texts booking links via SMS. Built on ElevenLabs + Twilio for the Berlin Encore Hotel.

Building in PublicVoice AIElevenLabsHotel OperationsCloudbeds

May 30, 2026

The Theater Agent: Building a Voice AI for the Box Office

A 24/7 voice agent that handles show inquiries for the Amish Country Theater. Pulls live show data from VBO, sends ticket links via SMS, and posts QA transcripts to Slack after every call.

Building in PublicVoice AIElevenLabsTheater AgentProduction Systems

May 28, 2026

Spam Slayer: Why I Built My Own Email Filter

A multi-tenant IMAP spam filter with a hybrid rules-plus-AI pipeline. Built because every off-the-shelf option was either too aggressive, too quiet, or too expensive at scale.

Building in PublicSpam SlayerAI PipelineEmailProduction Systems

May 27, 2026

Where Did the Money Go? Building OTA Reconciler

Booking.com and your PMS rarely agree. OTA Reconciler is a Next.js app I built to compare exports against Hostaway and Cloudbeds, flag the mismatches, and auto-draft dispute responses.

Building in PublicOTA ReconcilerHotel OperationsBooking.comHostawayCloudbeds

May 26, 2026

Building Gift Cardy: A Custom Gift Certificate Platform

A gift certificate SaaS I built admin-first to replace a third-party platform across the property portfolio. Multi-tenant, Stripe-native, lodging-integrated.

Building in PublicGift CardiSaaS AlternativesCustom Software

May 25, 2026

The Three Questions We Ask Before Building Any Agent

A simple three-question filter for deciding whether an AI agent is the right project at all. If a workflow can't pass all three cleanly, the agent isn't the answer yet.

AI AgentsProcessStrategySmall Business

May 23, 2026

The SaaS Stack Is Quietly Dying. Nobody Sent a Memo.

MCP turned every SaaS tool into a callable function. The implications are bigger than anyone is admitting — and they're going to show up first in SMB renewal decisions.

MCPAI AgentsSaaSIndustry

May 21, 2026

Anthropic Just Agreed to Pay SpaceX $1.25 Billion a Month. Here's What It Actually Means for You.

Anthropic and SpaceX just signed a $45 billion compute deal — including a plan for data centers in orbit. Strip out the hype and there are real, near-term implications for anyone building on Claude.

AI NewsAnthropicSpaceXComputeInfrastructure

May 16, 2026

Voice Agents for Home Services: The Trade That Finally Caught Up

HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies were the last holdouts on voice AI. Now they're the fastest adopters — and the ROI math isn't even close.

Voice AIHome ServicesHVACSmall Business

May 2, 2026

Your Google Business Profile Is a Lead Engine — Most SMBs Treat It Like a Phone Book

Reviews, Q&A, and photos on your Google Business Profile drive more local conversions than your website. Here's how an AI reputation agent turns it into a 24/7 lead and SEO machine.

Reputation ManagementLocal SEOAI AgentsGoogle Business Profile

April 30, 2026

Most Internal Dashboards Should Be Agents

Why the next two years will see most internal tooling replaced with conversational agents — and the three kinds of dashboards that survive.

AI AgentsInternal ToolsEngineeringProductivity

April 25, 2026

GEO Is the New SEO: Showing Up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews

Generative Engine Optimization is how brands earn citations inside AI answers. Here's the playbook for businesses that want to be the answer, not just a search result.

SEOGEOContent StrategyAI

April 18, 2026

The First AI Agent You Should Hire (and How to Know When You're Ready)

Most small businesses pick the wrong first agent. Here's a simple framework for identifying the highest-ROI starting point — and the signs you're actually ready for one.

AI AgentsSmall BusinessStrategy

April 11, 2026

Anthropic Managed Agents Is the Infrastructure Shift Nobody Saw Coming

Anthropic just launched Managed Agents — a fully managed cloud runtime for long-lived autonomous Claude agents. Here's why it changes how AI gets built.

AnthropicAI AgentsManaged AgentsInfrastructure

April 4, 2026

Meta's New AI Division Just Dropped Muse Spark — and It's Genuinely Impressive

Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Spark, its first reasoning model. It's free, fast, multimodal, and it just beat every other frontier model on medical benchmarks.

AI NewsMetaMuse SparkMultimodal

March 28, 2026

Anthropic's Most Powerful Model Just Leaked — And It Can Find Zero-Days in Every Major OS

A CMS misconfiguration revealed Anthropic's secret "Mythos" model before its official launch. Here's what we know about the most capable AI model ever built — and why it's not for sale.

AI NewsAnthropicClaudeCybersecurity

March 21, 2026

OpenAI Just Raised $122 Billion. Here's What That Number Actually Means.

OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history at an $852 billion valuation. We break down who paid, why, and what it means for the AI market.

AI NewsOpenAIFundingIndustry

March 14, 2026

SpaceX Just Bought an AI Company for $1.25 Trillion and Nobody Is Talking About It Enough

Elon Musk merged SpaceX and xAI in the largest acquisition in history. Here's what orbital AI infrastructure actually means and why it matters.

AI NewsxAISpaceXInfrastructure

March 8, 2026

AI News Roundup: March 2026 is Already Unhinged

DeepSeek V4, Apple's Siri reboot, OpenAI's $110B, China's five-year plan, and the vibe shift from benchmarks to production.

AI NewsIndustry TrendsModels

March 7, 2026

OpenClaw: The Open-Source AI Agent That Took Over the Internet (and Then Got Acquired)

From side project to 247K GitHub stars to OpenAI acquisition — the wild story of OpenClaw and why it matters for the future of AI agents.

OpenClawOpen SourceAI AgentsSecurityOpenAI

March 7, 2026

Claude Cowork Changed How We Run Our Entire Business (Not Just Code)

Anthropic took Claude Code — the tool developers fell in love with — and made it for everyone else. Here's what it's actually like to use day-to-day.

ClaudeAnthropicProductivityAI ToolsCowork

March 6, 2026

The AI Model Race Is Getting Absurd (A Recap of Everything That Just Happened)

GPT-5.2, Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3, Llama 4, DeepSeek, and more. Here's what dropped, what matters, and what's actually hype.

AILLMsGPT-5ClaudeGeminiLlama

March 4, 2026

Why Voice Agents Are the Best Investment You'll Make This Year

Voice AI isn't some far-off future thing anymore. It's here, it works, and the ROI is kind of insane. Here's why your business should care.

Voice AIBusinessROIAutomation