Every morning a report lands in my terminal. Publishing status, traffic, and check-ins from three chief executives. None of them exist. Most mornings, none of them need anything from me either.
So let me back up. I sell houses for a living, and commission income is lumpy. Seventeen years of it teaches you to want something that earns while you sleep. I wanted assets. A media company used to take a staff and payroll. It turns out now it takes one person who can describe a staff.
I run three websites this way (I am not going to tell you which ones, and that is on purpose). One is a magazine for affluent readers in their 60s and 70s. It has a CEO named Dale and sixteen writers, each with a beat. One reviews AI tools. It has a CEO named Marcus, an editor, and three staff writers whose job descriptions I researched from real media playbooks, the Wirecutter trust model on one wall and the CNET affiliate meltdown on the other as a warning. The third is the opposite extreme, one fictional author named Leigh writing a serialized diary about leaving corporate life. No staff at all. The domain cost a dollar.
Every one of these agents is a person. Full name, a 2,000 word backstory, opinions, things they would never say. The backstories are the whole trick. That is why the writing doesn’t sound like AI. You can run this kind of thing on Hermes or OpenClaw or Paperclip. I built my own, and honestly it wasn’t that hard. Cron jobs wake each executive a few times a day. They read the state of the company, act within their authority, log every decision with a review date, and they can’t change the same thing twice until they measured whether the first change worked. The only things that come to me are the things that require a human: contracts, payments, big pivots.
Does it work? The review site went from a brand new domain to a Domain Authority of 34 in five months. About 1,400 people visit it every week. And here is my favorite part: its entire staff has been switched off since June. I pre-wrote a backlog, shut the agents down, and a dumb scheduled job publishes one article a day. Nobody is home and traffic grew anyway. The magazine published 349 articles in its first 13 days and hasn’t missed a day in 133. Standing up a new company takes me about 15 minutes now, because the org chart, the backstories, and the pipeline are all templates.
I wanted diversification. What I got is a management job where the staff never sleeps and mostly doesn’t need me. I am the board chairman of companies with no employees.
So here is my question. If you had a staff that worked around the clock for the cost of a utility bill, what would you have them build first?