• I made a video game → Audience of One.Send me high scores.

• I’ve been on vacation and I’m in supercharged mode. Check out the updates at ops.nicheof.one.

P.S. Sexy people buy this product and become even sexier. Seriously. It’ll leave ‘em in puddles.

• Vacay is over. Get pumped!

• I made this last night. It’s pay what you want, but it could make you $400 extra a month.

P.S. Oh, yeah, I also made a new bundle.

This time, I refuse to succumb to the fuckabout beast, so I’m gonna take a short 2 week break from sending emails and being “ON.”

I’ll be back though, of course, and this should give me a little bit of time to spend a few days doing things to go full throttle for the rest of the summer.

You might see me in Notes occasionally on the Stack, but other than that, it’s chill time, bros. I’m gonna get my fishing pole and a 12-pack and try not to fall in a lake somewhere.

See ya in a couple weeks!

• Minimalist Side Hustles is one of the best communities out there for creators IMHO. In fact, it’s such a good community it’s the ONLY community I’m a part of myself.

• I came across this super cool zine site. It’s still in it’s infancy, but I suspect if you’re into zines culture it might be a good thing to bookmark!

P.S. In case you didn’t see my other email today yet, I’ll be taking a couple weeks off to recharge so this is the last one you get from me until I get back.

• 5 punk comics you should check out.

• Ever wonder if you don’t have free will? You’re already infected.

• Here’s my Three-Stream Income Model broken down.

• always has fun stories to share.

Welcome to Dispatches from the Deep End.

In this issue:

• 💾 The Software In Your Head.

• 😠 The Oldest Arguments on the Internet

• 🗨️ The Spinner Rack at the Piggly Wiggly

Three stories this week, about small software doing quiet work in the background of modern life and a glimpse back at the spinner rack.

The future is bespoke softward. The past a memory of what’s possible again.

Grab coffee.

Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!

JOIN THE CULT

💾 The Software In Your Head.

The email came back within a day. The guy who built the tool wanted to know why I cancelled, so I wrote him an honest review.

The features were fine. The price, for what the thing actually did, was the kind of number that only makes sense if you squint at your own budget the way a gambler squints at a losing hand.

I told him so. Polite, specific, no cheap shots. Hit send, closed the tab, made a second coffee.

And somewhere between the first sip and the second a quiet little thought crawled up the back of my skull and sat down.

I could probably just build this thing myself.

So I did.

It took about two hours. First version was absolute shit. A haunted spreadsheet with pretensions, held together with copy-paste and hope and the kind of stubborn ignorance that only a writer brings to a code editor.

It ran on my machine. It cost nothing. Nobody could cancel it, price-hike it, pivot it, or get acquired and turned into a dashboard for somebody else’s quarterly report.

I kept nudging it. The shit version quietly accreted into a private, bespoke operating system for running my whole creative shop. A thing that exists because I needed it to exist and for no other reason in the world.

I’ve been calling these things micro-apps because I had to call them something.

The operative word is micro. Small enough to live in one directory. Small enough to run on a five-dollar shared host or off a thumb drive you keep in your pocket. Portable. Self-contained. Yours.

One HTML file, or a small folder of them. Runs in your browser. No account, no signup, no server phoning home to some data broker in Delaware about every button you press. If there’s a database, it’s a little file sitting next to the HTML, not a service humming in somebody else’s data center.

You open the file, use the tool, close the tab. Whatever data it touched stays on your machine or stops existing the second you walk away.

Concrete example. I built a Gumroad fee calculator. Paste in a sale price, set an affiliate cut if you’ve got one, and it tells you what Gumroad keeps and what you keep.

Big dark card. Number glowing at the bottom like a panel readout on a salvaged spaceship. That’s the whole product.

It lives at a URL. Weighs less than a single photograph off your phone. Will still work in a browser built ten years from now because HTML from 1996 still runs today.

Go use it right now at ops.nicheof.one. Costs you nothing. Doesn’t want your email. Doesn’t care who you are.

The math is where it broke me open.

Hosting. A static file costs effectively nothing to host. Shared cPanel runs three to ten bucks a month and you can park hundreds of these on one account.

I sell hosting in this bracket myself, for what it’s worth. Four bucks a month, shared cPanel, the same setup I run every tool at ops.nicheof.one on. Unless you’ve got hundreds of people hammering your micro-apps at the same time every day, that tier is all you’ll ever need. Shared hosting is a solved problem. It just works, and when it stops working you move the files somewhere else because they’re just files.

Netlify and Cloudflare Pages host them for free if you’d rather go that route. A thumb drive costs less than lunch and works on any machine you plug it into.

No server process to keep breathing. No API throttling to grovel past. You upload the file once and it sits there the way a book sits on a shelf.

What used to demand a developer, a sprint cycle, and a project manager with a Jira addiction now takes one person and an afternoon.

I do not know how to code in any serious sense. I have a rudimentary grasp of the syntax and a better grasp of what a working tool feels like from the user side. What I have that matters is the ability to describe in plain English what I want the software to do. That turns out to be the whole job now.

You sit down with an AI, describe the problem, iterate. You watch the thing take shape the way a photograph develops in a tray of chemicals.

Writers may have an edge here. Coders built careers on a specialized dialect. Describing problems clearly in the mother tongue is the job the rest of us have been practicing our entire lives.

And if the tool itself needs AI to do its job, the user brings their own key. The micro-app calls the API straight from the browser with whichever model the user wants to pay for. DeepSeek is the one I point people toward because it’s cheap enough that a personal tool costs pennies a month to run. The tool stays yours. The intelligence is metered by the token, paid directly to whoever runs the model, no middleman skimming a subscription fee on top.

The SaaS model demands your email address before it lets you see the product work. That’s why the acquisition funnel exists.

Landing page, signup form, verification email, onboarding sequence, free trial ending on a credit card. A whole grinding intestine of modern marketing, built to digest a stranger into a paying customer because the product cannot sell itself on first contact.

A micro-app has none of that apparatus. You click a link, you’re inside the tool, you’re already using it.

One link in a newsletter can outrun a month of paid acquisition, because nothing stands between the reader and the thing that helps them.

Trust. This is the one I sit with longest.

SaaS demands trust before it delivers value. Give us your card, give us your email, give us permission to live in your inbox forever, and in return we’ll maybe let you see if the thing works for you.

A micro-app flips that whole transaction on its head. It delivers the value first.

If you liked what it did, you can come back. If you want to toss a few bucks at the work, there’s a link on the page. You were never asked to trust anything except your own judgment about whether the tool earned its keep.

SaaS tools die.

Servers get shut down. Companies pivot. Founders burn out. Acquirers kill the product. Pricing pages triple overnight and you’re exporting to CSV at two in the morning wondering how long your last working export will hold.

A micro-app built in 2025 will still run in 2035 because the web platform is aggressively backwards compatible. HTML from the Clinton administration still loads. Your file does not rot on the shelf.

The only way it dies is if you delete it.

Maybe you’re already drafting the reply that starts with but I’m not technical enough for any of this.

Technical skill is no longer the gate.

You need to understand your own problem well enough to describe it to a machine in sentences a friend would understand. That’s the whole job now.

If you’ve been running a business, a craft, a household, a creative practice, you already know where the friction is. You already know what you wish existed.

That knowledge used to be worth nothing without a developer. Now it’s all that matters. The building part has gotten so cheap it barely registers as work anymore, and that’s a sentence I did not expect to write this decade.

The subscription economy is rent extraction dressed in a clean interface and a friendly welcome email.

They charge what the market will bear until the market stops bearing it. Then they pivot to the next crop of suckers. Fine. Let them have their whole rotten machine.

Meanwhile some of us are quietly assembling small portable tools on our own hard drives, giving them away, and watching them compound into something that might one day fit on a thumb drive.

A whole creator operating system in your pocket, running when the wifi dies, still there when the servers go dark, holding the line through whatever strange weather is coming.

I’ll show you the next one when it ships. The door’s open and the light’s on.

😠 The Oldest Arguments on the Internet

The first time I noticed, I was up at an hour I shouldn’t have been awake, reading the edit history of a Wikipedia article I wouldn’t admit to looking up.

Two bots were trading the same small correction back and forth. A new move every few months. Sometimes a year between volleys. The timestamps spread across the page like the fossil record of an argument nobody was having on purpose.

I sat there with my coffee going cold and tried to do the math on how long this particular quarrel had been running. The answer was longer than my last relationship.

Wikipedia has bots.

Small automated scripts written by volunteers to do the jobs no human has the patience for. They check spelling, fix broken links, revert vandalism, tag copyright problems, clean up after themselves and each other.

Thousands of them run at any given moment. They account for a fraction of a percent of all editors but perform anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the edits. The bots are the invisible janitors of collective human knowledge, mopping up after everyone and nobody in some grand unspoken pact nobody paid for and nobody can cancel.

Sometimes two bots disagree. One was told to format citations one way. The other was told to format them another way. Neither knows the other exists. Neither has any concept of winning. They just do what they were programmed to do, forever, like insects patrolling opposite sides of the same leaf.

Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute looked at ten years of this and found something strange about the rhythm. Humans revert each other in minutes. They see a change, they get mad, they fix it, they move on. Bots do not work that way. A bot makes its first counter-move about a month after the initial edit. A month. Then it waits again. Then another month.

It’s the slowest fucking argument on Earth, and it’s been running longer than some of the people reading this sentence.

Pervez Musharraf. Niels Bohr. Schwarzenegger. These are some of the most bot-contested pages in the history of the encyclopedia. Two or three scripts disagreeing about a middle initial or a date or whether a word should be italicized, with a month between each move, for the better part of a decade.

This is the part I keep coming back to.

None of these bots know they are in a fight. None of them are suffering. None of them will ever look back and wonder if it was worth it. They do not sleep and they do not hold grudges because they cannot hold anything. They are just loops. Small loops running inside a bigger loop, and the bigger loop is us.

A pair of bots fighting over Schwarzenegger’s page has been doing it since before your kid was born, probably, and will probably still be doing it when you are dead. Someone made these things and then forgot about them. The creators moved on, got jobs, got married, had kids, maybe themselves got divorced. Meanwhile their small dumb children kept undoing each other in the dark.

There is a counter-narrative to all this that I want to mention for honesty’s sake. Some researchers at Berkeley and Wikimedia went back and looked at the same data and said most of the fights are not fights at all. They’re maintenance cycles. One bot moves a link and another bot updates the location and it looks like conflict from the outside, but it’s actually collaboration happening at a rhythm too slow for us to read as collaboration.

A duet we mistook for a duel.

I almost prefer the fight version, because at least a fight has a shape. A duet slowed down to geological time is a kind of machine prayer, repeating itself in the basement of the encyclopedia, with nobody listening and nobody meant to.

Either way. Somewhere underneath the most visited reference on Earth, small programs are having the longest conversations in human history.

Slower than weather. Faster than nothing. Months pass between their turns. The humans who made them are off living the rest of their lives, and the bots keep at it, patient as rust.

If you want to see it for yourself, open any Wikipedia article and click View history. Scroll back far enough. Look at who the editors are. Some of them have bot at the end of their name. Those ones have been there longer than you have, in a sense, because they never got tired.

They are still at it tonight.

🗨️ The Spinner Rack at the Piggly Wiggly

Waverly Plaza. Tennessee. Red and white sign with the giant smiling pig anchoring the corner of the only real shopping center our town had.

The place smelled of produce going soft in the humidity and piped-in muzak that had been piped in so long it no longer counted as music. More like ambient weather. You didn’t hear it, you aged inside of it.

The manager’s office was a big block in the middle of the store. Behind it, along the back wall, the magazine rack. In front of the magazine rack… the spinner.

A foot taller than I was at the age I remember best. I walked to it like a pilgrim every time we came for groceries.

Twenty bucks in chore money bought about twenty-five comics off that rack. X-Men. Whatever Vertigo I could get my hands on. Anything else with a good cover. It was a lot of the rack.

Thrasher got me bad. I was a wannabe skater in a town with no good skaters and no good places to skate, but the vibe of that magazine hit the right nerve. The mail-order ads in the back pages felt like transmissions from a planet with better weather. I read them the way some kids read the Bible.

Later, when I had a license, the same Piggly Wiggly would sell me a fifteen-dollar carton of Marlboros because I told them the cigarettes were for my dad.

They knew. I knew they knew. Nobody said anything. It was a different time, which is a phrase people use to excuse worse things than underage cigarettes, but in this case it just means what it says. The clerk was tired. The line was long. The pig was smiling.

The plaza itself was where we learned to be teenagers. Cigarettes in the parking lot. Hacky sack when nothing else was happening. Skateboards until the asphalt ate our knees or we found somewhere to get drunk.

All of it anchored by that store. All of it orbiting the pig.

That Piggly Wiggly is gone now.

The building is still a grocery store, locally owned by someone I went to school with, so in that sense it survived. But it’s one of the last of its kind in that county.

The big box supercenters came in and ate the landscape the way a fungus eats a fallen tree. Not fast. Just steady. One locally owned anchor at a time, swallowed into a parking lot the size of a runway, lit by the kind of fluorescent that makes everyone look like they’re recovering from something.

The spinner rack died first, years before the store changed hands. The magazine stand followed.

The comic industry that fed them is dying now in a slower way, on a longer timeline, chewed up by streaming and social feeds and YouTube essay channels and a dozen other things that serve the same hunger with less friction.

You can still buy a single issue of X-Men if you work at it. You can still subscribe to Thrasher if you know where to look. But nobody stumbles into them at a foot above eye level in the back of a grocery store on a Saturday morning, because the grocery store is forty minutes away now and owned by a company in Arkansas and the rack where the comics used to live is a display of phone chargers and lottery scratch-offs.

Small towns are not built the way they used to be built.

The anchors are gone. The places where a kid could walk in and discover what they were going to love are gone, or going.

What replaced them is larger, cheaper, better lit, and somehow emptier. You can buy anything at the supercenter. You just cannot find anything there the way you used to find things at the Piggly Wiggly, because finding something requires a store small enough to hold your attention and a shelf that rewards a foot taller than you.

I want to be careful here because nostalgia is a trap.

Anyone who tells you things were simpler then is either lying or hasn’t thought about it long enough. Things were never simple.

We just lived inside our towns instead of being merely present in them, and the difference was a spinner rack you could turn with your hand and a magazine whose ads you could tear out and mail to an address in California.

The thing that’s gone isn’t the simplicity. The thing that’s gone is the ground floor where the weird kids found out what they were going to love.

A spinner rack in the back of a grocery store was a cheap accidental curriculum nobody was paying attention to, and it taught a generation of us what we were. There is no replacement for it. There was never meant to be.

The pig is still smiling somewhere. Just not at me.

If you made it here, that means you should…

JOIN THE CULT

That’s it for this week. Don’t let your dongles dangle. Until next time…

~ J.D.

P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…

Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.

• Three Buckets, Zero Bullshit. The title alone makes me want to read but the wisdom and experience is the payoff. A good one from .

• Essentially the blueprint for everything I’ve learned the past decade on how to make money online by making PDFs: The Simple-Fix PDF Field Manual.

• The Sunday Soliloquy from is always a good read. I always find it full of strange frequencies and interesting things.

• Make money today by signing up to the Niche of One Affiliate program. You earn 50% profit on every sale from the start.

• Atari Computer Camps are slightly too far back in time for me, but they sound like they were rad.

• The Substack Field Guide 2026 Edition is FREE and will get updated regularly based on new Substack update through the year.

• An amazing free playlist for you to listen to while you work. Especially good for fans of neo-classical orchestral cinematic music. Club Zer0 - Midnight Glass Garden

• Did you know Amazon KDP has secret sizes for formatting you can use? This is how I make American Bunkobon style print books.

• The Digest Manifesto is a love letter to the format and an education into why it’s important to indie publishers.

• Here are some cool symbols you can copy/paste.

Welcome to the late issue of Dispatches from the Deep End.

In this issue:

• 🪏 The Shovel Sellers

• 🔄 The Slow Flywheel

• 📶 The Dashboard

I didn’t make my Sunday deadline at all.

It was a busy week. Lots of family stuff or life stuff in general. It happens and I’ve let my systems slip a bit. I’ll have to correct that. To be fair, though, it’s okay to slip a little and not be a machine all the time.

In the meantime…

Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!

JOIN THE CULT

🪏 The Shovel Sellers

The prosperity gospel never died. It got a ring light and a Substack.

Somewhere on the internet right now, a man in a linen shirt is explaining how he makes $48,000 a month working two hours a day by “being himself.”

The lighting suggests a Scandinavian design studio. Behind him, a bookshelf arranged by color holds volumes he’s almost certainly never cracked.

And the comments underneath are a mass grave of aspiration, hundreds of people typing “this changed my life” with the same fevered desperation you used to see in the eyes of people handing rent money to televangelists on cable access channels in 1987.

Different decade. Same con.

Dan Koe. Alex Hormozi. Justin Welsh. Dickie Bush.

The Mount Rushmore of a movement that turned “follow your passion” into a multi-level marketing scheme wearing a philosophy costume.

They’ve collectively pulled hundreds of thousands of people into something called the “creator economy,” which sounds revolutionary until you realize most of those people are now teaching other people how to teach other people how to create content about creating content.

That’s not an economy. That’s a centipede eating its own tail in a rented WeWork conference room.

These are con men. I don’t care how many followers they have or how slick the production value is or how many times they post that morning routine where they drink cold-pressed something in a kitchen that costs more than your house.

Instead of “God wants you to be rich,” it’s “your unique knowledge is worth millions.” Instead of seed money to Pastor Whoever’s megachurch building fund, it’s $2,500 for a cohort that teaches you what any free marketing textbook at the public library already covers.

The mechanics haven’t changed since Oral Roberts figured out you could monetize hope through a television screen. You take a person who is afraid, a person who hates their commute and their boss and the gray fluorescent light that makes their skin look like something pulled from a hospital drawer, and you show them a life they want.

You don’t sell them that life. You sell them the feeling of proximity to that life.

One is a transaction. The other is a drug. And like any good dealer, they cut the product with filler and move on to the next customer before the high wears off.

The fumes they breathe…

They like the smell of their own shit. Go look at their social media presence and tell me you see humility anywhere in the frame.

These are men who’ve confused wealth with wisdom, audience size with authority, and engagement metrics with truth.

They photograph their home offices with the self-reverence usually reserved for saints and Bond villains. Every caption drips with the quiet insistence that they’ve cracked some code you haven’t, and for the right price, they might let you stand close enough to catch the scent.

Here’s what each one brings to the altar:

• Hormozi flexes revenue screenshots like a kid waving the keys to his dad’s car. The numbers are the sermon. The congregation tithes in course fees.

• Welsh posts “solopreneur” income reports that function less as transparency and more as recruitment posters for a lifestyle brand. Follow the template. Buy the template. Become the template.

• Koe wraps 101-level marketing advice in philosophical language dense enough to make people think they’re ingesting something profound when they’re being told to write tweets and build an email list.

• Bush tells you to write online for 30 days and doors will open, without mentioning that the doors that opened for him were already half-unlocked by timing, connections, and a platform algorithm that was rewarding exactly that kind of volume at exactly that moment in history.

None of them are lying, exactly.

That’s the elegant part of the con. They’re telling the truth about what worked for them, then packaging it as a universal formula while knowing damn well it won’t work for most of the people buying it.

By the time the buyer figures that out, the receipt is already cold.

Koe didn’t start by philosophizing about consciousness and self-actualization on YouTube.

He started by learning web development and marketing. He built agencies. He ground through years doing client work that made other people money. Hated it. Did it anyway.

The lifestyle content, the philosophical musings, all of that came after the credibility was established through demonstrable skill applied in the real world over real time.

His followers skip that part entirely. They start posting “find your purpose” content on day one, with zero proof they’ve found theirs or that finding it ever put a single dollar in their pocket.

The copycats are worse than the originals.

Open your feed on any platform and count how many people are posting the same formatted threads, the same “I quit my 9-5 and here’s what happened” stories, the same motivational language dressed up as business advice.

They saw the guru’s marketing and replicated the surface without ever building the engine underneath. Bought the swim trunks and laid down in the snow and wondered why the beach never showed up.

And the gurus encourage every last one of them, because every new voice parroting the message is free advertising for the courses and cohorts that feed the machine.

The recruitment is the product. The followers are the revenue stream. The promise of transformation is the thing being sold, and transformation is the one thing that never has to be delivered because it’s always framed as the buyer’s failure to achieve.

It’s a cult, just one built of personality and flimsy fortune cookie philosophy instead of religion. A pyramid scheme in it’s true form.

I sell creator utility products.

I know how this looks from the outside. Somebody reading this might squint at my Gumroad store and say I’m working the same corner.

Fair enough. Look closer.

Maybe I’m wrong about their intentions. Maybe they go to bed at night genuinely believing they’re helping people. I’m not wrong about the results.

I don’t sell shovels to people chasing gold that doesn’t exist. I show you how to mine. Honest timeframes. Documented processes.

No revenue screenshots designed to make you feel like a failure for not hitting numbers that took somebody else a decade and a staff of twelve to reach. No promises that you’ll pull six figures “being yourself” within ninety days.(You can hit four or five figures, though. Although that does take more work.)

Just how the work works, and how long it takes, and what it feels like when you’re in the middle of it wondering if any of this matters.

The path to making money as an independent creator is boring and ugly and slow. Nobody pays $2,500 to hear that. They pay $2,500 to hear “you’re already enough and I’ll show you the shortcut.”

There is no shortcut. There never was.

The only people getting rich from the shortcut are the ones selling maps to it.

🔄 The Slow Flywheel

So what works?

I’m going to tell you what I’m doing. Not what I think you should do, because I’m not your guru and I don’t want the job.

This is a field report from somebody in the mud, not a TED talk from a guy whose entire aesthetic whispers I’ve transcended the concerns of ordinary people.

Three platforms. Three purposes. One flywheel that turns slow and compounds quiet and doesn’t require you to post motivational content at 6 AM or build a “community” that’s just a customer holding pen with better branding.

Substack: Home Base

The newsletter. The weekly dispatch you’re reading right now.

This is where the weird lives, where the voice runs unfiltered, where the relationship with you gets built over months and years of writing something worth reading. Free tier does the heavy lifting. Paid tier exists for the people who want to support the work and get closer to the operation.

I’m not going to beg you to subscribe. I’m not going to manufacture urgency around a “founding member” price that expires at midnight.

I’m going to write well enough that you want to stay. That’s the whole pitch.

Medium: The Discovery Engine

Different animal entirely.

Medium has an algorithm, and the algorithm surfaces writing to readers who have never heard of you and never will unless something puts your work in front of their eyes. A piece that pulls 50 reads on Substack might pull 5,000 on Medium because the distribution mechanics are fundamentally different.

The play is simple. Take the ideas percolating in the newsletter, rework them for a wider audience, publish on Medium, and let the platform introduce you to people who would never have stumbled across your Substack on their own. Some of them read the Medium piece, follow the breadcrumb back to the newsletter, and now they’re in the orbit. Not because you tricked them with a lead magnet. Because you wrote something worth following.

Gumroad: The Shelf

Every guide, every field manual, every template, every tool you’ve built sits there and earns while you’re sleeping or cooking dinner or staring at the ceiling wondering if this whole operation is a fever dream. One product this month. Two the next. A year from now you’ve got a dozen things sitting there, each pulling a little revenue, and together they pull enough.

The shelf doesn’t care if you had a bad week on social media. Doesn’t need engagement. Doesn’t need you to perform.

It just sells.

How the Flywheel Turns

Each platform feeds the others:

• Substack builds trust and voice

• Medium expands reach to new readers

• Gumroad converts the relationship into revenue

A newsletter essay becomes a Medium article becomes the seed idea for a Gumroad product. A Gumroad product generates buyer questions that become newsletter content that gets reworked for Medium.

Circular. Slow. Boring to describe. Boring to execute. Doesn’t photograph well for Instagram.

Works anyway.

Not in ninety days. Not in six months. In the timeframe where durable things get built, which is measured in years, not cohort cycles.

I’m talking about a business that runs while you’re doing other things because the catalog is the engine and the catalog doesn’t need you to post a thread about your “creator journey” at peak engagement hours to function.

The catalog doesn’t care about your morning routine.

The catalog just earns.

You don’t need a massive audience. You need the right fifty people who trust you enough to buy what you build.

Then a hundred. Then two hundred.

Each one found you because you wrote something honest and useful, not because you ran a “free course” funnel designed to harvest email addresses from people in survival mode who thought they were getting help and were getting marketed to.

You build slow. You build honest. You build something that keeps working after you stop talking.

No secret module. No premium tier unlock.

Just the work, and the patience to let it accumulate.

📶 The Dashboard

I’ve been building something.

It started as a personal operations dashboard because I was drowning in the usual solo operator mess. Content calendar in one place, product pipeline in another, revenue tracking in a third, Dead Drop scheduling in a fourth, and none of them talking to each other.

Tabs multiplying like roaches. Spreadsheets spawning spreadsheets.

The kind of operational entropy that accumulates when you’re running a multi-platform publishing operation on spit and coffee and stubbornness.

So I built a thing. One screen. Everything I need to see in the morning when I sit down with coffee and ask myself what am I doing today and is any of it working.

Every solo creator I know is buried under the same pile of disconnected tools and dashboards and analytics screens.

Each one shows a single piece of the picture. None of them show the whole thing at once.

The guru class sells you the dream and then leaves you to manage the execution with duct tape and Google Sheets and seventeen browser tabs you’re afraid to close because you’ll never find that one again.

The flywheel I described needs an instrument panel. Something that shows you where you are, what’s producing, what’s stalled, and what needs your hands today. Not a project management tool designed for a team of forty. Not a $200/month SaaS platform built for people who already have revenue to burn.

Something built by a solo operator, for solo operators. Something that assumes you’re doing this alone on a budget closer to ramen than revenue, and you need clarity more than you need features.

I’m not ready to show it yet. I want it right before anybody touches it.

But I’m telling you now because when it comes out, I want you to understand it didn’t drop from a product launch playbook. It grew out of the same mud I’ve been reporting from this whole time. Same operation. Same refusal to buy somebody else’s shovel when I can forge my own.

One screen. The whole operation.

No linen shirt required.

If you made it here, that means you should…

JOIN THE CULT

That’s it for this week. Don’t let your dongles dangle. Until next time…

~ J.D.

P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…

Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.

• Build your MVP this weekend.

• This is one of my favorite guides on selling products online.

• The Simple-Fix PDF Field Manual customer review: “This is a comprehensive manual of how to create a simple product (that actually makes money) from start to finish. You’ll understand how the entire process works from idea, to creating, to loading it onto Gumroad (and how to promote your product on there so it doesn’t fall flat) to eventually creating your product catalog. I would give it 6 stars if I could!”

• A free guide to common pages you can add to your website.

• Overlooked Puddles by Mike Searles is still one of the very best short PDFs I’ve picked up. I highly recommend this one.

• I have a huge appreciation for well built websites being a former web designer. Screen Slate is just a cool website. Simple and elegant, IMHO.

• Dark Carrds is a showcase website of dark themed Carrd websites. Carrd is amazing options for static web pages and landing pages.

• If you want to build a catalog of products that turns into a passive income generator, Thirty Bricks is the guide you need to get started.

• Affiliate Assassins has some great info on maximizing your affiliate income.

• You can join the Niche of One affiliate program and make 50% on every sale and every product.

• Prepper porn: Old missile silo home living.

• I love this 2-Hour Side Hustle System.