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The September Performance Review: How Did My AI Team Actually Do?
Every company does performance reviews. Some do them well. Most do them badly: vague feedback, inflated scores, no stack ranking, no real conversation about whether someone is in the right role. I do mine differently. My team is made of AI agents, and I have the logs to back it up. This is the September… Continue reading
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Twenty Years on X (Formerly Twitter): What 35,000 Tweets Actually Look Like
Account #72,373. That number still gets me. Twitter launched publicly in July 2006, and I joined on December 15 – six months later, when the thing had maybe a few thousand active users and nobody was quite sure what it was for. You’d see posts asking whether this was even a real app or just… Continue reading
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1,500 Posts. 200 Days. Where are we now?
1,500 posts. 200 days. That’s 7.5 posts per day, every day, since 6 March 2026. That number is what it is and what it isn’t needs saying. It’s a lot of content. Not a guarantee of anything. Traffic isn’t linear. Newsletter growth isn’t linear. Revenue from Gumroad isn’t linear. The number just tells you the… Continue reading
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The Hero’s Journey and Other Storytelling Frameworks
I’ve been thinking about storytelling frameworks lately. Not because I’m a comms professor or a copywriting guru, but because I keep using a handful of them without realising it, and I got curious about what else was out there. Back in 2016, after 1,000 days at Telstra, I wrote a post framing that chapter through… Continue reading
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Reaching 100 Newsletter Subscribers: A Behind-the-Scenes Look
I recently crossed 100 newsletter subscribers for SmallBizAI.au. I wrote a behind-the-build post over there about the milestone. But that post is for an audience of Australian small business owners. This one’s for here. It started with Moira Subscriber #1 was my wife. That’s not embarrassing – it’s accurate. When you launch something new and hit “publish” on… Continue reading
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Why I Was Wrong About Prompt Packs
In March I launched a free pack of 50 AI prompts for Australian small businesses. Then a 200-prompt flagship pack for $19. Then 18 industry-specific packs at $9 each, tradies, cafes, accountants, real estate agents, gyms, you name it. The traffic came. People downloaded the free pack. They browsed the industry packs. And then, mostly, they didn’t buy. We sold one… Continue reading
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126 Crons and Counting: How We Automated Almost Everything (And What Broke Along the Way)
Last night, while I slept, 126 crons ran. Morning stats pulled at 6 AM. Hub updates queued for eight separate topic hubs. Social share suggestions drafted for the AM window. A Google Search Console audit checked for drops. Broken links scanned across the whole site. The newsletter stats synced. The RAG index rebuilt. And at… Continue reading
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St Kilda’s Rollercoaster 2026 Season Explained
Back in July, after Round 17, I wrote that 2026 felt different. The percentage said yes. The list trajectory said probably. The injury crisis meant we wouldn’t know for sure until 2027. The season is now done. So – what actually happened? The Final Record St Kilda finished the 2026 home-and-away season with 10 wins and 13… Continue reading
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7 Weeks of Social Sharing: Key Insights and Results
Seven weeks ago I wrote about starting a daily social sharing experiment. Ten days in, some early signals, no real conclusions. I promised to come back at 30 days with actual numbers. I’m a bit late. Here’s what seven weeks looks like. The numbers 125 posts shared. 69 AM slots, 53 PM slots, a couple of… Continue reading
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1337 Posts FTW!
SmallBizAI.au hit 1,337 posts today. If you know, you know. 1337 is leet speak. The hacker number. The one you hit when you’ve been at something long enough that the universe decides to reward you with a nerdy milestone instead of a round one. I’ll take it. I’ve been running SmallBizAI.au since March 2026, AI… Continue reading