THE BLOG
The Blog Archive
Featured
Not Everything You Build Needs a Launch... Most of it is How You Get Good
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.
Kim Doyal 5 min read
AI Building
The Stripe Notifications That Proved She Could Build An App Without Coding
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.
September 10, 2026READ MORE
AI Building
Bring Your Own AI, Skip the Platform Sales Fee
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.
September 7, 2026READ MORE
Business Growth
The Loudest Problem in Your Business Is Almost Never the Real One
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.
August 30, 2026READ MORE
AI Building
The Best Thing I Ever Built Still Wasn't the Right Message
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.
August 24, 2026READ MORE
Business Growth
You Have More Digital Products to Sell Than You Think
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.
August 18, 2026READ MORE
Content Strategy
Search Changed Fast. Here Are Three AI Traffic Tools Built for What's Next.
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.
August 16, 2026READ MORE
Business Growth
When Will Your Feed Become a Ghost Town?
Twenty minutes from my house, there's a town that once had 10,000 people and now has a couple hundred. It taught me more about building a business on a platform you don't own than any marketing playbook ever has. A few predictions, and one confession about the exit door I built and still don't use.
August 9, 2026READ MORE
Content Creation
I Can Write Four Posts Before Lunch... That's the Problem
In 2018, I hand-drew the pages of a content planner that went on to do close to half a million dollars. Today I could generate fifty layouts before lunch, and none of them would tell me which one was worth making. Producing got cheap. Deciding didn't.
July 31, 2026READ MORE
AI Building
What You Built Works... You Just Don't Want to Open It
I launched SPARK Lab minimum viable and then didn't want to log into it. It wasn't broken, it was flat, and flat is the harder problem because it doesn't tell you where to go. Here's the filter I ran on my own product, and the four prompts so you can run it on yours.
July 27, 2026READ MORE
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