Coffee on the second-storey deck with Kirsten, two mornings in a row. Three trees in the front yard with little red berries on them. The birds are flying to the branches and eating. We put up a bird feeder a few weeks back so Edgar, our French bulldog, would have something to watch. The feeder is totally inactive. The trees are not.
I am an ex-Forester. I used to cruise timber in Maine and Montana. I have been looking at these three trees for years and not once have I been curious enough to find out what they are. I will know by tomorrow morning, because I should know.
We have started calling this deck the Deck Shala. A shala, in the yoga tradition, is a dedicated practice space, the kind the old Mysore school in India is famous for. Sanskrit, "hall" or "home." The word does not mean studio. It means the room you come back to. Kirsten and I are both yoga people. I do not do it nearly enough, but at fifty-plus and athletically inclined, yoga has to be in the regime. The Deck Shala is now becoming a morning ritual for us as we move from chilly rainy mornings of spring, to the 30 plus degree dog days of summer, come early.
This is where I started Sunday. Dirty chai fading keto style, the trees, the birds, Kirsten. And this morning note.
A message had landed overnight from someone that is starting to help me out on the AI employee project. She had read my last two build-in-public posts and they had got to her. She opened with condolences for Finn. For such an obviously impactful event in a person's life, rarer than you would think.
She said it takes enormous courage to share something that intimate in a space like LinkedIn, where most people only post the professional side. She herself does not even list her freelance work there. Reading about rebuilding from scratch on my own rules made her think about her own situation. She had recently turned down a client because the first exchanges had been rude and disrespectful, and she had decided that was not where she wanted to be. In a competitive market where the client usually picks, that makes her life harder. But she would rather work with fewer people and work with people who have values.
Then the last line. "I am glad I made that choice, because then there are people like you. And that is worth a lot more than any contract."
I read it twice, as three more birds landed on the branch in front of me for the funny red berries.
The BIP energy had been fading. AI slop on every LinkedIn feed. Sixty days of writing, and not a single direct cold lead from it. I am a one-person fulfilment operation on an enterprise contract that does not yet pay the full-time price the hours suggest it should. To build the sales pipeline I actually need would take close to a week of full-time work I do not have, because I am the only one delivering the current work. Stuck in the wedge: not enough revenue to go full time on the build, working full time on it anyway.
It felt like I had been writing into the void, wondering if anyone was actually reading. Yelling into the void of AI slop that clutters everyone's LinkedIn feed and promotions inbox.
Solo founders running AI ops for solo founders, wearing every hat, wondering whether the writing is worth the hour a day: the writing is the filter. Clients sometimes. Collaborators more often. The right ones recognise the voice and write back. The wrong ones never click.
This person is not a prospect. She is a possible contractor. Someone I might want to fold into the team that is starting to form around the AI employee build. The test is live next week. We are forking openclaw and pointing it at Apollo, with the voice bible loaded in. Two months in, I have a running corrections log of every voice edit and a Sedaris-style cull that runs on every draft before ship. That is the voice bible we are about to load into the AI employee. If she does the work well and the AI employee starts bringing in prospects, she becomes part of the team and helps make the AI employee better month over month from the revenues that it should generate. If by Day five the draft does not sound like me, the iterations start and we keep doing it until we get it right.
The BIP did its job this weekend, just not in the way I had been measuring it. It put a note in my inbox from someone whose values match mine.
The trees are called Mulberry trees, or Mûrier en français.
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Monthly Revenues $11,800 | Clients 2 | Prospects (AI employee live next week) | Team: Me + Jan (CTO)