
A friend once told me I change tools more often than she changes underwear. She wasn't wrong. When I finally considered compromising on Skool, the research confirmed what my instincts had been telling me all along.

I walked out of the Wealth Expo in 2006 with a box of binders and no one to ask when I got stuck. I have that same "things are changing" feeling about digital products right now, and this time the product can be the support.

Instagram turns sixteen next month, and I've been working online longer than the app has been alive. Somewhere in there social media stopped being fun. I keep the account alive anyway, because Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and that made it an ad surface: when I run paid traffic, people click through and look. So I built an Instagram carousel automation in Runable that reads my Substack archive, designs the slides, writes the caption, and posts it every morning at 6am. Eight minutes to build. Full prompt included, no opt-in.

Someone reached out to be listed on a directory site I built and never promoted. That message did more for me than any launch I've run, and to explain why, I have to tell you what I finally noticed about the last 18 months of building: I was having more fun than I'd had in years, and I didn't want to own most of what I was making.

She was standing in her kitchen when her phone started going off. Stripe, Stripe, Stripe. Ellen Britt spent twenty years in emergency medicine, became a homeopath, and then decided to see if she could build software. Nine months and several apps later, here's exactly how she did it... the stack, the pricing, and the customer support system you can copy tomorrow.

I've had a ThriveCart lifetime license for seven years. Last month I went to add a coupon, found it behind a Pro upgrade, closed the tab, and built the checkout myself in twenty minutes. That twenty minutes is the story... the reason you've been renting software is that building it was out of reach, and that's no longer true. Here's the shape I keep seeing, why bring-your-own-AI kills the revenue share, and three prompts to find your own version.

My kids and I had an order of operations for the Christmas village we built every December, and you couldn't put the buildings first. Turns out that's the same problem I see in almost every business I look at: leaning on something you don't control, and naming the wrong one.

Five builds, with different names, different logic, and different outcomes. The fourth version was the best-executed thing I'd made, and I rebuilt it anyway, because a lead magnet can be beautifully built and still not carry the right message.

I ran a full inventory on my own business and found 70+ digital products and assets across four layers. Most were invisible because my definition of "product" was too high. Here's the framework, the prompt, and how to run it yourself.

The click is disappearing, and half the web is machines now. That's not a reason to stop creating... it's a reason to think about the bot as a filter, not your audience. Here are three AI traffic tools I built for exactly this world.