smallbizai.au
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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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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
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My Love Letter to Code Snippets in WordPress
In June 2012, an Australian developer named Shea Bunge got annoyed at their web host. It wouldn’t let them edit their theme files directly. So they built a plugin to work around it: a simple interface for adding PHP to WordPress without touching functions.php. They called it Code Snippets. Each snippet gets a name, a toggle, and a text… Continue reading
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Why I Wrote a Book on Building An AI Team
For months I kept getting the same question. In replies. In texts. Over coffee with people who’d read the site or seen a post somewhere. “This AI team stuff sounds great, but how do I actually set it up for my business?” I answered it in posts, in threads, in one-on-ones over a coffee. Eventually… Continue reading
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My AI Team Makes Mistakes. Here’s What I Do About It.
I have four adult kids. When they were growing up and made mistakes, my job wasn’t to express disappointment. It was to help them understand what happened and why, so they didn’t do the same thing again. Same deal when I was leading teams at Microsoft, Telstra, AWS. Someone makes a mess with a customer,… Continue reading