Today I shipped the first pillar page of the 365-day BIP. The blog stream is what most people see on the site — one post a day, diary voice, whatever I shipped or learned that afternoon. The pillar is something different. It's a 2,400-word cornerstone article at the root of the site, built to rank on Google and pull people in from cold search.
Daily posts are the reality-TV feed — the reason people come back. Pillars are the reason they arrive in the first place. Every daily BIP post from today forward can link up to the pillar, and the pillar links back down to specific daily posts that flesh out a point. That's how search authority compounds. One cornerstone, plus daily evidence.
The first pillar is titled: Fractional Chief AI Officer: What It Is, When to Hire One, and What It Costs.
It opens with a story I've been sitting on for two and a half years. The founder of chiefaiofficer.com hired my dev team while I was in India on a Vipassana retreat, approved four months of work, then refused to pay. I told him my son had just died and I needed the money. His response was roughly: "Had I known, I wouldn't have hired you — I have a rule against hiring people going through tough times." Thirty months later he still owes me tens of thousands.
And two and a half years later, I've come full circle to the thesis he was selling: every company serious about AI is going to need fractional or full-time AI leadership. He was right about the thesis. He was catastrophic at the execution.
The pillar covers five signals it's time to hire a fractional CAIO, what a real Tuesday looks like on retainer, the difference between CAIO / CTO / AI advisor (don't hire the wrong one), seven red-flag questions to screen a candidate, and a full FAQ with pricing and timelines.
Read it → /fractional-chief-ai-officer
Writing the chiefaiofficer.com part was harder than I expected. I've told the story privately to maybe three people. Publishing it with the domain named is a different thing. The point of BIP is that it's honest, so the story had to be there, in public, with the cautionary lesson intact. If the man reads it someday, maybe it lands differently than the Telegram messages. Maybe not. Either way, it's out of me now.
Monthly Revenues $9,200 | Clients 2 | Prospects — not too worried about