Side projects
Things I build on my own time.
Before you go any further, know that I am a reputable person, a father, and a career man. This is just a market I found, and it is insane and it is fun.
Oliver Ahn ↗
No judgement.
What you are about to find is unhinged. That is not an apology, it is closer to the tagline.
Oliver Ahn started as a way to play with AI properly. Not read about it, not watch somebody demo it. Actually run it, at length, on something real, until I could see for myself where it works and where it quietly falls over.
Then I found an author whose catalogue had me crying laughing. Every title more deranged than the one before it. He writes for a very specific readership and he is extremely good at it, and underneath all that absurdity there is real craft in how those books are titled, packaged and shipped.
So I wanted to know whether the mechanics travelled. Same energy, same speed, but written for the readers and in the voice I actually know. That became Oliver Ahn.
It has turned out to be the most useful thing I have done for my own work. I learned a genre I did not know existed. I built the automations that draft, format and publish. I worked out which titles people are genuinely searching for and wrote to those rather than to a keyword tool. I learned how to build a site that actually gets found, and how to take a book from nothing to published.
It is also just very fun. It also taught me exactly where AI stops being useful, which is the part that shows up in client work.
Five things we learned
- The decline is invisible while it happens. Quality does not fall off a cliff, it sags. Read any thousand words and they seem fine. Read forty pages and everything sounds the same.
- It defaults to the middle of the road. Left alone the model writes the most average version of anything. For a service page that is fatal.
- Generation stops being the bottleneck immediately. Editing becomes the whole job. Anyone pricing on how fast they can produce pages is pricing the part that turned out to be free.
- It cannot know your business. The details that make a local page rank are the ones only you have.
- Volume with no reason to exist is worth nothing. We can produce a book a week. That does not make a book worth reading.
I still use AI in client work, and I am specific about where: research, first drafts, structured data, the tedious middle of a technical audit. I do not use it to fill your site with pages, because we have seen precisely what that produces at volume and I would not sell it to you.
Diary of a Divorced Dad
A community site for men rebuilding after divorce. I keep it separate from me on purpose. It is not my blog and I am not the star of it, it belongs to the dads using it.
It is also a test of whether the ordinary playbook still works from a standing start, with no name and no reputation to lean on. Posts mapped to real search demand rather than keyword volume, monetised with display ads and affiliate links, no bought links and no shortcuts.
Ask me and I will show you the numbers.
And two things that are not experiments
The books I wrote myself, without AI. One came out of the months my dad had Alzheimer’s. The other collected everything else.
The paintings. Thirteen of them, and no, I would not call myself good at it.
Tell me what is not working
No audit funnel and no discovery call about a discovery call. Tell me what is broken and I will tell you whether I can fix it.
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