Build in Public
365 days building TestVentures and the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund in public. AI ops, grief, real numbers. Starting from zero.
48 posts published
04707:07 CEST and the kettle is on. I open one tab and it is not Gmail. It is a markdown file my daily digest wrote overnight, and yesterday it told me 1,792 named crawlers read giveready.org in 24 hours and zero of them submitted a nonprofit. A daily self-learning loop on a marketing funnel, three numbers, one diagnosis, one shipped fix, tomorrow's number as the test, runs on any funnel with a top, a middle, and a bottom. I run it on GiveReady's agent-discovery funnel and on the TestVentures search funnel.
May 13, 2026A friend WhatsApped me Monday morning. He's been running AI tools every day for three weeks. Verdict, his words, not mine: "I'm just clicking buttons faster. Am I actually automating anything?" I went looking through six weeks of my own work to answer him honestly. Two things on my list. The discipline that gets the second category there is Christopher Penn's 5Ps.
May 12, 202656 regression tests passing in 1.5 seconds. Three months of bank data, byte-identical to a hand-built CSV. And before any of it ships live, a CTO-caliber engineer still reads every line.
May 11, 2026Day 44 of 365. Kirsten does a So Cal surfer impression every time I say "vibe living". Yeah brah. Fair enough. This week the vibe living meter caught a legacy relationship I had to cut, regardless of the financial exposure. The Royal Enfield earned its first ride of the season.
May 10, 2026Day 43 of 365. Yesterday I wrote about the corrections log. Today the skill that feeds it. On April 22 I ran a brutal Sedaris-bar critique against four of my own posts. The lowest score was 2.8 out of 10. The skill that came out of that morning is still the single best piece of voice infrastructure on this site.
May 09, 2026Day 42 of 365. Yesterday I caught myself scrubbing the same three words from a Claude draft I had scrubbed the day before. Shape. Frame. Lane. The corrections log is the durable artefact of publishing daily with an AI as co-author. Without it, every post drifts toward AI-fine. The work is in the gap between AI-fine and yours.
May 08, 2026Day 41 of 365. Yesterday Claude agreed with every contradictory idea I floated, while Scott Galloway made the case AI is a hype bubble and a friend told me builders are quietly switching models. Eight rules I am running on now, plus the corroboration that says my friend was not imagining it.
May 07, 2026A cron fires at six-oh-six every morning, pulls twenty-four hours of agent traffic off the live worker, and prints a morning page with yesterday's top hypothesis at the top. This is what B2A marketing looks like when you run it as a self-learning loop in public, plus the seven-step you can copy.
May 06, 2026Day 39 of 365. A 22-year-old reader messaged me about his head getting in his way. The reply walked through the mixing-board meters, the yellow aspen leaf, and the place I now call ground zero.
May 05, 2026Day 38 of 365. The vibe coding craze is real and the leverage is real. The trap inside it is also real. The story of the KPI dashboard I lost three months on, the friend whose weekend project gives me cringes, and the 5 out of 10 skill of knowing when to call in the experts.
May 04, 2026The thin harness, fat skills framework moved from theory to live in the field. An enterprise client sent a full architecture at 5:21am — the fat skills are theirs, the harness is mine, and the operating contract for fractional AI ops became unmistakable.
May 03, 2026I asked an enterprise client over Trello if the task was done. The reply came back yes, but there is another part I am doing manually in this other application. I had no idea what other application. Here is what that taught me about ai workflows for operations and where the strict async rule has to bend.
May 02, 2026First substantive task from an enterprise client. Demo tomorrow morning. Tonight's job is seeding test data by hand into a Claude artifact so a research team can see the shape of the workflow before anyone has to commit to a build.
May 01, 2026A friend mentioned x402 payments on a Saturday morning. A week later I had a small nonprofit donation platform built and a $150K grant application in flight. This post is me coming out about GiveReady, why the demand side of small-charity funding is broken, and why I am building it whether the grant lands or not.
April 30, 2026A legacy client wants me to break our contract and run on trust. The other party is savvy, the contractors caught in the middle have my respect, and I have most of a week to navigate it without getting pulled back into the practice I left. The first move was sitting down with the coach.
April 29, 2026Speccing a personal AI assistant on the plane back from Madrid. No wifi, twenty years of street smarts, and a Mac mini in the cart before a single line of code.
April 28, 2026An old sailing mate wrote me yesterday after my LinkedIn note. Second person this week asking how to make the jump. There is a framework gap between the philosophy shelf and the how-to-start-a-business shelf, and I am writing my way toward it in public.
April 27, 2026A Sunday BIP, pre-written from a flight on Thursday because the family is driving from Switzerland to the southwest of France this weekend. The lifestyle business is a one-way door. Once you have tasted it, you do not go back.
April 26, 2026A weekend in Madrid with my son Somers. Bad golf, talk of commodities trading, and the question I keep landing on as a father. The same lens runs on TestVentures. Small team of specialists, 50 to 100 clients, stay in front of the wave.
April 25, 2026Ran a two-week Facebook ad in Kenya for our $10,000 travel grant for young adults. Forty qualified people wrote in asking how to apply. Zero of them applied. The real demand-side problem is not attention, it is belief.
April 24, 2026Two weeks ago I started investigating payment rails for the family adventure fund. Yesterday I submitted a charity grant application for a B2A donations platform I built in the gap. Here is how I am writing about it without burning it.
April 23, 2026An old colleague I hadn't really crossed paths with since 2015 reached out yesterday offering help from his team for free. Buried in the same note was the thing that actually stopped me — my first fan ever. And he told me the people I'd been writing to already exist as a subculture. They have a name. The FIRE movement. I'd never heard of it.
April 22, 2026Shipped the first pillar page of the 365-day BIP — a 2,400-word piece on what a fractional Chief AI Officer actually does, with the chiefaiofficer.com story told in full for the first time.
April 21, 2026Three weeks ago I announced a 365-day build-in-public campaign from professional rock bottom. This morning, first revenue landed — $9,200 monthly, likely recurring. What changed, and the one rule I refuse to break.
April 20, 2026Finishing PDG on hormone therapy with castrate-level testosterone, half-strength legs, and a broken bamboo pole — the Arolla decision and why I continued.
April 19, 2026Saturday morning. By the time this publishes I'm on a glacier, racing the Patrouille des Glaciers. This post shipped itself. The business model is simple — finish the task at hand, or nothing gets done. Pre-pay to start. One task in the queue. Work it until it's done.
April 18, 2026First real task kicked off with the enterprise client today. I can't say much about who or what. But the shape of the problem is worth writing about — their CFO spends twenty hours a month reconciling across accounting systems and jurisdictions. Build lite, codify as a skill, close the loop, verify the thing stays in sync.
April 17, 2026Yesterday I wrote about fat skills and thin harness as theory. Today I had to use it on two real fires — and the rule held. Solve it once, then make sure future-you never has to solve it again.
April 16, 2026Here I am 19 days into starting a new service and I hit admin hell. This is the stuff I really don't like about being an early stage founder — but it's the stuff that needs to be dealt with in order to move the company forward.
April 15, 2026Garry Tan posted a tweet last week that put language around something I'd been doing without a name. Fat skills, thin harness. It's the reason a marketing guy like me can credibly apply for a technical infrastructure grant with ten working days on the clock.
April 14, 2026Today I get my first PSA blood test after 184 days of aggressive hormone therapy for prostate cancer. Between the ADT, a keto diet, and caffeine re-entry, I've made some of the most irrational decisions of my life. All of them feel right.
April 13, 2026I've been hearing about build in public for years and never actually followed one. Nobody is following this one either. But tomorrow I need to onboard a client, so today I'm borrowing the playbook from a guy who runs 35 design clients solo at $5K a month. Here's how I'm adapting Designjoy's model for fractional AI ops.
April 12, 2026Yesterday I explained why the fractional model flips the agency incentive. Today I had two conversations that proved it. A head of legal floated a massive EU compliance project like it was a burden. A nonprofit founder needed a website, a business plan, and a payment system. Both conversations ended the same way — yes, I can do that too.
April 11, 2026I ran a software agency with 75 people across 12 time zones. It was a beautiful lifestyle business — until I saw why the incentives were backwards. Agencies are built for the supplier. Fractional AI ops is built for the client. Here's the difference.
April 10, 2026I built a working prototype in 48 hours. Then I tried to onboard an actual charity and hit a wall that had nothing to do with code. Charity governance is a bigger problem than I expected — and it might be the most important thing I work on this year.
April 09, 2026Today, 3 years ago, our lives changed permanently. This post is about a poem my son wrote when he was 13, and a thin voice that's starting to speak to me.
April 08, 2026We built the AI coach. We designed the check-in. We set up the daily review. Now it's time to put it to work on real decisions. I ran three live business opportunities through my coach last week. One seemed random. One was an entrepreneur's dream. One looked safe. Here's what happened.
April 07, 2026You designed the day. You check in every morning. But are you actually doing what you said you'd do? The daily review is the part most people skip. It's also the part that tells you whether you're flying to LA or drifting to Winnipeg.
April 06, 2026You designed your perfect day. Now what? Without a daily check-in, you're a pilot flying from London to LA who's off by half a degree. You won't end up in LA. You'll end up in Anchorage.
April 05, 2026Three weeks ago I quit a high-paying job because of a vibe from my phone that was making me sick. Then I quit a co-founder role. Then I designed my perfect day 12 months out. Here's where building an AI co-pilot actually starts — and it's not where you think.
April 04, 2026A prospect bailed on Google Meet mid-call and pulled me into a three-way WhatsApp. My transcription was gone. Except it wasn't. Here's why Granola is the one SaaS I'm not cutting.
April 03, 2026I set up an AI voice agent called Amy for a prospect's after-hours calls. She scores about 8 out of 10 against a human. Factor in that she never misses a call, and it's closer to 9.
April 02, 2026I cycled through three jobs in 90 days. Then something clicked. Here's how a 10-day silent retreat in India became the thing I'm building my entire business around.
April 01, 2026After building a vault for the business, I built one for the mission — the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund, four years of writing, and a manuscript. Here's how it works.
March 31, 2026Every Cowork session starts blank. Corrections, decisions, project context — gone. I lost the same fact five times. Here's how I'm fixing it with Obsidian.
March 30, 2026I pivoted the offer twice in a week. The second pivot happened on a ski tour in the Swiss Alps. Here's what I learned about where the real AI ops need is.
March 29, 2026I launched this offer 5 days ago. Already made one pivot. Here's what happened and why I have a warm prospect on Day 1.
March 28, 2026365 days. Zero followers. Zero revenue. I'm documenting everything — the AI workflows, the client work, the grief, the numbers — starting today.
March 27, 2026Follow the BIP
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