15 years & a team that gets it

Welcome back, Builders.

First of all, a warm welcome to our new subscribers! Welcome to the squad.

Big news today: I just started as VP of Marketing at WRS Group.

Eight months of building solo. Now I'm bringing everything I've learned to a team that's ready to move.

I’ll tell you what that means. But first…

The floor just got higher. So did the ceiling.

Everyone's asking if AI is coming for their job.

I've been asking a different question: what does AI actually do to someone who already knows what they're doing?

Here's what I found after several weeks of building agents that write, research, and ship work while I sleep:

AI hasn’t replace my thinking. It amplified the 15 years behind it.

The people panicking are the ones who were coasting on output — volume, speed, formatting. AI does all of that now. For $20/month — or even free.

But judgment? Pattern recognition? Knowing which message hits and which one falls flat? Knowing when to push a brand and when to pull back?

Those compound. AI can't replicate it. It can only make it faster.

Distribution you own beats distribution you rent, even when the models eat everything else.

The floor got higher. That's real.

But the ceiling moved too — for anyone who brought something real to the table.

Starting this week, I'm now the VP of Marketing at WRS Group — a company that is leading the market in orthopedic pain management. We’re reimagining how people recover from pain.

That's the brand I get to help build.

For eight months I've been freelancing, building AI tools, and testing what's possible when a marketer runs their own stack. That experiment isn't over; it just leveled up.

I’m certainly looking forward to bringing my experience in marketing, brand strategy and some AI insight to a team that gets it. Grateful to the leadership team in identifying the opportunity at hand.

The newsletter will stay. My agents will keep running. The build-in-public experiment will continue.

I'm more focused than I've been in a long time.

$500 Challenge — Week 1

A little over a week ago I set a challenge: can AI agents drive $500 in skill sales in 30 days, with minimal involvement from me?

Week 1 result: $344. That’s crazy!

But the number isn't the interesting part.

One sale came in with zero involvement from me. No post. No DM. No nudge. An agent ran, a listing was live, someone found it and bought it. That's the one I actually care about — that's what autonomous looks like.

302 total sales across all listings. 4.0 rating. 25 active skills. Published v2 of the entire library last week.

The pipeline is building.

Thanks to you that are following along. 👀

Worth your time this week:

📺 Riley Brown — "I Spent 200 Hours Testing OpenClaw"
His biggest takeaway: keep agents narrow and build a team. Focused agents beat generalists every time. Watched this and felt seen.
→ Watch on X

📖 Wyndo — "PARA Method + Claude Code + Obsidian"
Tiago Forte's PARA framework wired into an AI productivity OS — replaced Notion, Todoist, and calendar tabs with 6 folders and 5 commands. If you're building a second brain, read this first.
→ Read on Substack

✍️ Worth following:

One more thing.

Bets I'm making in 2026:

I'll revisit this in December.

See you next week,

Brian