smallbizai.au
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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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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
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Ranking AI Assistants: Who Gets Frank Arrigo Right?
A few weeks ago I ran an experiment asking how well various AI models knew me and the results were interesting. The short answer: GPT had me frozen in 2010, Gemini invented an IBM job I never had, and DeepSeek thought I was a football coach at the University of Detroit. I’ve also been running SmallBizAI.au, which… Continue reading
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When Your AI Agents Forget The Time
At 7am on Saturday, July 11, our AI editor sent a CRITICAL alert. Thirty-nine posts scheduled outside the 9am–noon Melbourne window. Midnight batches. Posts at 1am, 2am. The queue was apparently in pieces. It wasn’t. Every one of those 39 posts was correctly scheduled in a valid morning slot. The editor was reading UTC timestamps… Continue reading
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Wave 3 Launch: New AI Prompt Packs and Industry Insights
Wave 3 is live. Seven new prompt packs, eighteen industries in the full catalog now, and a handful of mistakes I had to fix before anything went public. This post covers how I choose industries, how the publishing machine works, what went wrong, and where things go from here. If you missed the origin story, the first post… Continue reading
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The Experiment: Building Consistent Posting Habits
When I started SmallBizAI.au, I didn’t have a clear distribution strategy. I just started writing. The AI citation thing was a happy accident. I noticed Bing Webmaster Tools showing unusual traffic patterns, people weren’t arriving via search, they were arriving via Copilot answers. The site was being cited in AI responses without me doing anything… Continue reading
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Sunday Specials: Bull vs Bear on AI and Business
It started with a SmartCompany article. Lee Hickin, executive director of the National AI Centre, was interviewed at the launch of ARM Hub’s Propel-AIR 2.0 accelerator in Brisbane. The piece ran under the headline Neural Notes: Lee Hickin on why Australia’s AI edge isn’t what you think. His argument: Australia’s edge in AI isn’t about building… Continue reading