Why I Wrote a Book on Building An AI Team

Posted: August 5, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Personal, smallbizai.au | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

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 I ran out of ways to point people to half-answers scattered across a hundred different articles. So I decided to write it down properly. One place, start to finish.

That became Beyond Prompting: Build Your First AI Team for Your Australian Business.

Here’s what actually went into making it, together with my team of agents to get it done. If you haven’t met the team yet, here’s how it all came together.

It started with a plan, not a prompt

This wasn’t a “tell an AI to write me an ebook” exercise. Before a single word of draft existed, I spent time with Claw mapping the whole thing out.

We looked at what the research was showing, Scout had been tracking signals from Reddit, X, and industry data. The conversation had shifted. “Should I use AI?” was basically over. The question people were actually asking was “how do I structure my business around agents?” Nobody had written that book for Australian small businesses specifically.

So we built a plan. Chapter outline. Audience definition. Voice brief. Pricing research. A launch timeline. Cover brief. A sprint plan for Dash. The structure came before anything else.

Six agents, eleven chapters, four hours of drafting

Dash is the writer on my AI team. She runs on Claude, she’s been working in the SmallBizAI voice for months, and I trusted her with the full manuscript.

I gave her the chapter outline, Scout’s research notes, and a brief: write this like you’re explaining it to a tradie in Ballarat who’s never touched an API. Direct. Practical. Australian. No Silicon Valley hype.

She delivered a complete first draft pretty quickly.

Eleven chapters. Introduction. Three appendices. A 30-day rollout plan at the end. Around 15,000 words.

Then Eddie read all of it.

The fabricated link

Eddie is the editor on my team. His job is to catch the things that slip through — AI-isms, broken logic, unsupported claims, and fabricated links.

AI models, even good ones, occasionally invent URLs. The link looks plausible. The anchor text is convincing. Click it and you get a 404 or someone else’s page.

Eddie found one in the draft. A link to a resource that didn’t exist. He flagged it, I pulled it, we replaced it with something real. Twenty minutes of work. The kind of thing that, if it had shipped, would have been sitting in a paid product that people trusted.

That’s why you run an editor. Not for polish. For integrity.

Building the actual thing

Once the manuscript was approved, Bob turned it into a proper PDF.

Clickable table of contents. Internal links between chapters. Real examples, not hypotheticals. A cover that doesn’t look like a generic stock-photo ebook, dark background, clean type, built with Flux and composited in Pillow to get the proportions right.

We also built a free sampler, four prompt templates pulled from Appendix A. That went live on Gumroad a week before the ebook, as a funnel entry. Read the templates, see the approach, decide if the full thing is worth AU$19.

The reason Gumroad and not Amazon KDP: discoverability for an Australian audience is worse on KDP, and Gumroad routes straight into our MailerLite subscriber flow. Every paid buyer joins the newsletter automatically. Every sampler download goes into a separate group. The economics made more sense.

The launch

Newsletter issue #19 went out the morning of August 4. The homepage hero block flipped from the State of AI report to the ebook. The resources page card went live.

By the afternoon, two sales.

One came through the newsletter, someone who’s been reading for a while, saw the announcement, bought within a few hours of the email landing. The other came through the site, found it, clicked through to the resources page, bought without any email nudge at all.

Both channels on day one. The newsletter and the site each doing their job independently.

The newsletter buyer replied the same afternoon. She runs an Amazon agency and had already mapped the workflow framework to her client onboarding process. Not “this is interesting.” Specifically: here is the thing I can now do differently.

That’s what it’s supposed to do.

What this is actually about

The book isn’t a theory piece. It’s not “here’s what AI might do for you someday.” It’s a step-by-step guide for an Australian business owner who uses ChatGPT occasionally and wants to go further, with a framework that works at real SMB scale, not startup scale.

Six agents planned it, researched it, wrote it, edited it, built it, and launched it.

And a real person read it on day one and immediately saw where it fits in her actual work.

That’s the whole story.

Beyond Prompting → AU$19 on Gumroad

Free sampler first →