I’m evolving. Slowly. I’ve always been a back of the adoption curve kind of guy, so over the last few years, as AI has stormed the castle so-to-speak, I’ve taken my time with it.
Being placed on permanent sabbatical in September of 2024 meant that I’ve missed the whole AI ultimatum put on employees by employers to adopt AI in their daily tasks. My AI adoption hasn’t been coerced which has allowed me to explore on my own schedule and focus its use on projects of my own interest. That’s how the idea of Tinkering started.
Two questions
When I started tinkering, I was asking myself “how can I do or solve something with AI.” The framing of that question pushed me in a direction to opening up an AI chat agent, typing prompts, and getting results. It was fun, exciting, and powerful.
It allowed me to create three different software apps: bwak.news, bwak.email, and also bwak.money.
Bwak.news moves email newsletters out of your inbox into a feed. Bwak.email is a new way to bring email alias management to your email accounts. Bwak.money is a budgeting tool designed for those who use credit cards to earn points and pay them off monthly.
These projects reinvigorated my love of software development and introduced me to product development.
At the same time, I’ve been reading about the rapid changes in agentic development and using swarms of agents to accomplish so much more, and that got me curious. I needed to find a way to see what all the chatter was about.
This simple thought introduced a second question to ask: “If I could hire a staff to help me run bwak.news, who would I hire?”
Well, I knew I had a sign-up and conversion problem. I had an initial wave of signups, but no conversions. I knew my efforts to get more signups were becoming futile and ineffective. So, with this in mind, I simply started asking AI to help me hire a sales and marketing staff who could help me develop a strategy to gain sign-ups for bwak.news.
I didn’t want an unsupervised AI approach though. I wanted to keep myself as a human in the middle in order to stay authentic to who I am and the brand I’m building.
Why not a real agency
And here’s the funny thing: I could absolutely go and hire a physical agency to do this work for me. As an entrepreneur, it would be a logical step. But I’m not here to turn bwak.news into some massive revenue-generating machine and the cost to hire an agency would devour my modest $1,000 start-up budget.
Instead, I’m here to teach myself how to bring a product to market. The goal isn’t to build a profitable business overnight. The goal is to enjoy the journey and learn what it takes to not only build a business, but also bring a product to market. Surprisingly, these are two different but related tasks.
So, given the breadth of AI and the low bar of entry I’ve chosen to make AI integral to that journey.
I went on a hiring spree. Err, I mean, I went on an AI Agent creation spree with the express purpose to help me find and lure prospects to signing up for bwak.news.
Meet the team
Before diving in, let me explain what a hire is. A hire is a skill I created in Claude and personified for my own edification and reference. The skill is invoked via a scheduled job that runs on my MacMini for now. The execution of a skill via Claude on a schedule is the AI agent I hired.
The agents work overnight, Scout starting at 1 am, Page Writer on Tuesdays at 1:30 am, Pitcher at 2:00 am, Notes at 3:30 am, Scorekeeper Mondays at 4 am, and Helios at 4:30 am. Helios writes the daily briefing from the output of the other agents that I read when I wake up.
No one talks to the agents; they run on their own and drop their output into files that I store in my file vault.
Each morning, before feeding the chickens and other barn animals, I sit and read my daily briefing.
On most days, walking through the daily ops note takes about 15 to 20 minutes. The note is setup where I make all the decisions. Nothing goes out that I haven’t written. I send every pitch, post every Note, and write every comment on my own. Before I publish anything, I run it through Grammarly to check for spelling and grammar.
Each Monday, Radar gives me a list of article pitches that I work separately from my daily routine.
Finding partner prospects (Scout)
Greg Roche over at The Introverted Networker (Greg-The Introverted Networker), who took an early interest in bwak.news, generated 147 referrals out of the 274 from all my efforts by mentioning the app in his newsletter. His warm lead and trusted voice did more for my product’s promotion than all the articles I wrote to date. His warm referral has become the rally cry for my strategy on finding new subscribers.
This prompted my first hire, Scout, whose job is to find other newsletters and directories whose readers would make good bwak.news users: people subscribed to more newsletters than they can keep up with.
Making pitches (Helios, Pitcher)
Scout finds the prospects. I subscribe to their newsletters or directories, and then I watch. And read. And interact with the prospective newsletters.
Scout has found 42 prospects so far and I’ve subscribed to 28 to date. That’s a lot of newsletters and articles to read, so I hired a chief-of-staff, Helios to help track the publications and read the articles with me. Helios’s job is to read an article, and hold it up against my area of expertise and rate if an article is worth commenting on or engaging with, i.e., will I have something valuable to add to the conversation.
Helios doesn’t write the comments, it only finds the articles, hands them off to me with why it thinks it’s a good fit for me to engage with and then I do the rest.
This is a daily ritual I’ve adopted and has really taken shape over the last week.
These actions only serve as a means to develop a relationship with the person behind the newsletter. The goal is to make enough comments and interact with the newsletter enough so when I’m ready, I can make a pitch to the owner on why I think bwak.news aligns with their audience and see if they’d be interested in a partner deal.
I haven’t made any pitches yet, but when I do, Pitcher, my new hire, will be right there with me with all the data from our research and prospecting.
I’ve set minimum requirements around who to pitch which include observing the newsletter for at least a month (ideally get at least 4 editions) and make at least 3 meaningful comments.
Only then, will I allow Pitcher to put together the data I need to write a short simple, hopefully warm pitch to the operator.
I won’t have any pitch candidates until after Oct. 31 when I will have satisfied the requirements.
Posting on social media (Notes, Radar)
Building a business and a personal brand requires regular posting on social media channels. I hired two AI Agents Notes and Radar to help with this.
Notes watches over all my tinkering and makes suggestions for quick articles to post on Substack and LinkedIn.
Radar leverages a curated list of industry news sources, commentators, and newsletters related to my areas of interest (AI, technology, and operations) to help generate longer form articles to post on LinkedIn and Substack.
This has been the toughest hire yet and there has been a lot of trial and error to get meaningful output from Radar. Hopefully, I’ve dialed it in and starting on Monday, I’ll begin the process of publishing pieces from Radar regularly.
Showing up in search and AI answers (Page Writer)
Page Writer is helping create the SEO pages that are being used to feed Google and AI crawlers. It’s doing weekly research on what those readers search for and coming up with ideas for the content that will help improve my listing on Google and hopefully get our foot in the door for AI recommendations.
This hire is a black box to be honest and I hired it just to get started, but need to spend a lot more time pushing buttons and pulling strings to make it effective at its job.
Measuring results (Scorekeeper)
And what good would any of this work be if I didn’t have a set of key performance indicators to measure against? I hired Scorekeeper to do just that. Identify the KPIs, gather the metrics daily and weekly. Feed the results along with commentary on what’s moving the needle, areas I need to focus on, or celebrate wins from prior campaigns.
Why it’s fun again
It feels really f**king cool to have this team.
Before, all the work fell on my shoulders and was too much and became a non-starter for me. With the sales agents, that is changing. I have excitement again, I have direction, and I have the help I need to get this push started in earnest.
And the best part of all, starting a business, building a product from scratch, marketing the product, and making sales is all new to me. And with it, comes a whole host of problems that require solving.
The jury is still out. What I described here is where I’m at now. Swimming in the proverbial deep end of problems is exciting and scary at the same time. Working toward results in a systematic form is priceless.
Fascinating article. Love your “positivity”. Good luck.
This is a great recap of what you’re doing to help grow through newsletters. I didn’t realize you’d gotten that many clicks through the Introverted Networker. Happy that helped define a target niche for bwak.news. Love seeing this progress!