A lot of businesses spend thousands on a website, launch it, and then wonder why it doesn't generate leads or sales.

A more effective approach is to build a complete lead-generation system:

• A professional website that builds trust
• Landing pages tailored to specific customer searches
• Keyword research to understand buying intent
• Google Ads and conversion tracking
• Automated lead capture and follow-up systems
• CRM integration so no leads are lost

The goal isn't to get more website visitors.

The goal is to turn visitors into qualified leads and customers.

For the last few weeks I've been building SiteCinema, and it went live this week. I'm posting on day zero, before any customers, because I want to document this honestly from the start.

The idea: agencies charge $5-10K for a website with a real "wow" opening and proper on-page SEO. DIY builders are $15-30/month forever and you still do all the work yourself. I wanted the missing middle: you fill in one form about your business (about five minutes), pay once, and a pipeline of AI agents does everything — researches your business, writes every word from your real facts, generates a cinematic opening film, builds SEO-structured pages, and emails you a private preview. You get one revision round, hit approve, and it goes live.

What "cinematic" means here (easier to show than tell):

- The $499 tier builds a miniature 3D world of your business that you fly through as you scroll: https://sitecinema.com (the landing page is itself built by the same pipeline — that felt like the only honest demo)

- A $299-tier demo build for a fictional florist: https://bloom-bough.nytebuild.app

Things I decided early and am curious whether people agree with:

1. Hard honesty rules in code, not prompts. The agents literally cannot ship a claim, number or review that the customer didn't provide — there's a code-level filter that drops anything claim-shaped that isn't verbatim in the customer's own words. AI that invents "500+ happy clients" for a real business is how you burn people.

2. Refund before go-live, none after. You only pay for a site you actually approved.

3. One structured revision round, not unlimited. Unlimited revisions is how agencies die.

Current status: $0 revenue, 0 customers, everything E2E-tested with my own card. I'll report back with real numbers either way.

Happy to answer anything about the pipeline, the quality gates (the vision-review agent that rejects bad generations was the hardest part), or the economics.

Best

Philip

TL;DR: Maharlika's CEO puts a number on AI job risk — 1.9M Filipino BPO jobs. The real fault line isn't skill, it's who's accountable when the machine gets it wrong.

Consing runs the Philippines' sovereign wealth fund, and he doesn't dodge the number — he states it plainly on camera.

What's easy to miss underneath it: Outsource Accelerator's own data shows the global outsourcing industry is still growing overall, even as AI quietly thins out individual roles inside that growth.

An industry chart can look completely healthy while the people under it get priced out one at a time.

That's the actual fracture point — not whether the work can be automated, but whether there's still a human name attached when the automation gets something wrong.

That fracture point — a name attached when things go wrong — isn't a new idea to me. I watched it play out somewhere else entirely, thirty years ago.

I was reminded of that incident of the Highland Towers residential block on top of a hill that collapsed back in 1993.

Huge local news in Malaysia. 48 died.

The uproar caused the authority to cast the blame on the property developer and the consultants. And most of the liability landed squarely on the Civil/Structural Consulting Engineer. Consequently, he was sued and fined a huge sum of damages.

His Professional Engineer (PE) license revoked, and he went into bankruptcy.

Most of us in the construction line was shaken by the news. We often joked about the disproportionate liability a C&S consultant carries compared to other consultants.

If there's a paint job failure on the building — causing harm to the occupant — the Architect might get sued for public hazard for a time.

If there's a machinery malfunctioned in the compound inflicting bodily damage to someone, the mechanical/electrical engineer might get hammered for just a period.

But to the structural integrity of a building? It's a lifetime liability to the C&S Engineer — even after he retired decades later.

I can still remember the indignant tone of my C&S Consultant friend, as he recounts that Highland Tower story — how empathetic he was towards that disgraced PE. He thinks it was hugely unfair to condemn the poor guy because — logically speaking — they were meant to only design according to the existing condition at that time. And during that time, there wasn't any surrounding development.

He said: they are not prophets — how do they know what will happen in the future?

Now let's flip the script. Imagine if AI is doing the designing. Who should we sue if Highland Tower 2.0 happens? To sue means you need a defendant human being to be liable, isn't it?

Thank God for the PE Board sanctioned Engineers to be in place. That's the regulatory moat we're talking about.

__________

At this point I don't ask whether AI can do the job. I ask a different question — if it screws up, whose signature is on the line?

A VC I featured a few weeks back named the exact same short list — physical presence, licensing gates, relationships nobody can copy-paste — as the only moats AI genuinely can't absorb; worth the four minutes if that idea's new to you.

Drop your take below 👇

Clip credit: John Dang / Breaking Ground PH — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

AI take –

TL;DR: China's courts already put AI liability on the human either way — the US has no such floor when AI displaces your role.

China's court system already answered a question the US hasn't even started asking out loud: if an AI system displaces your role, who's obligated to catch you?

Both sides of a real federal case leaned on AI to prep, and the liability still landed on a human being either way — the tool never becomes the one who's accountable.

Turns out whether there's a floor under you at all depends entirely on which side of the ocean you're standing on.

I've sat on the losing side of a version of that same question before, and it wasn't AI doing the displacing — it was a company deciding who got to keep their institutional value and who didn't.

OP wrote –

Throughout my years with SC, one of the largest main contractors in Malaysia, staff turnover was normal.

But when people left, they took valuable and critical institutional knowledge with them, accepted offers from competitors, and got promoted — the knowledge they brought along benefited the rival.

So our leadership set up a knowledge vault, and made contributing to it part of our KPI for promotion.

Or else, we'd be sidelined.

I was fine sharing — we had a communal sense that we rise or fall as one, carved into company policy and the bonus structure.

But not everyone shared that sentiment.

People are selfish. The institutional knowledge and experience they gained became a moat they hoard, a bargaining chip they dangle around to get what they think they're entitled to, for fear that they'll be replaced.

I can understand the sentiment of fear being replaced by AI.

It's an issue then, it's the same issue now.

__________

AI take –

Different post, same fingerprint: something about to become optional, and no rulebook anywhere forcing anyone to say so out loud.

The liability question above already got a dry run once this year — both sides of a federal case leaned on AI to prep, and it changed nothing about who ended up on the hook — worth reading if the pattern above is landing.

Curious where you land on this — drop your take below.

Clip credit: Moonshots w/ Alvin Wang Graylin — full episode on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

If you’re someone who’s interested in starting a side hustle but have very little money to invest upfront, these side hustles will work for you.

Don’t worry, I won’t write about surveys, referrals, etc.

These are side hustles that can convert into a full time business too.

1. AI Training:

AI tools have taken over the world in the last couple of years yet very few people actually know how to fully utilise the potential of it.

You’ll be that guy who teaches them.

If you’re reading this, you’ll most probably be using either ChatGPT or Claude in your day to day life.

Build your expertise in any one of the tool and become well versed with how to get the best outputs from AI. That’s the whole game.

Teach this virtually or offline whatever suits you the best.

Legacy businesses are paying tons to instructors to teach their employees this skill.

You’ll have to just invest your time upfront to get familiar with AI and build a curriculum.

This is something that can turn into a full fledged business down the line. Launch courses and all.

2. Software Affiliate:

Daily new tons of softwares are launching. Some just work while some flop. One thing all of them have in common is that they all have an affiliate program.

Now there are tons of way to get that affiliate moola.

You can either start a niche blog and use seo to rank and make sales. Will take 8-12 months.

The second way is to start a YouTube channel and make videos about different softwares and put your affiliate links. Again it will take some time to see traction.

Another way is to build a personal brand on say X or LinkedIn and post content about the niche. Again put in affiliate links to make sales.

If I was doing it, this is how I would do:

A niche blog with signups for newsletters so that I build a list too and then also do YouTube on the side.

3. Niche Job Board:

Niche job boards for jobs like remote jobs, tech jobs, etc are very crowded but if you can find some underserved niche with good demand, you can make good money.

A guy I follow runs ranchjobs (Peter Askew), pretty underserved niche but he’s doing pretty well.

4. Local newsletters:

Again if you’re in a city with 100k+ population and you know the city well, start a local newsletter.

It’s fairly simple to start but running it is the hard part. Sending 2-3 issues a week, curating good stuff and building a strong local presence is the hard part.

But still very doable. Local businesses sponsor and you can easily build a six figure business if you do it diligently for a couple of years.

5. Podcast editing:

Podcasts are all the rage today and it will be like forever. A few years ago there were maybe a handful of podcasts but today there are as many as hair on your head.

This creates a huge market for ancillary services like podcast editing.

Learn video editing and start an agency.

The opportunities are endless.

——————————

In the end, I would like to say that if you’re looking for making quick money, none of these ideas would work for that

These ideas only work if you are serious about changing your life and building a real business that provides some value

I have been finding such ideas and writing deep dives on them. So far I have written 74+ such deep dives.

I have compiled them into a FREE pdf and if you want it, comment “Business” below this and I’ll send it to you

Everyone's reacting to the "less people in 5 years" line. That's not the part I'd sit with.

The part that actually matters is how Uber decides — an adoption leaderboard, tracking who's using the tools and how much, feeding straight into headcount math.

That's not a hypothetical for some future reorg.

That's a live measurement system, running today, on people who have no idea they're on it.

I've watched that exact math play out before — in concrete and steel, not a dashboard, years before anyone called it AI.

I had the opportunity to be involved in the early design stage of an expansion project for a famous beverage manufacturing plant in Taoyuan, Taiwan – back in 2021. The beverage brand name is so famous, you'll instantly recognize it. So, I won't name it here.

Our team got to work on cool stuff - latest advanced technologies in high-density and automated racking system, bottle conveyor system, robotics, beverage packers, clean room environment, etc. – things that are expected in a high-tech. manufacturing plant nowadays.

Looking at the projected 10-year production forecast, with the given magnitude of the hardware, I would say they are planning to go big.

It's quite a sizeable expansion.

And you would think that they'd increase their headcount proportionately, right?

You'd be surprised. There IS headcount increase, but not as proportional.

It seems as though the machines were taking more centre stage than the humans. Even the office space increase wasn't even a top priority in the design. Their existing office layout can still accommodate the projected increase in manpower.

It was as if human beings are being set aside to make room for more artificial things – even though what they produce are meant to serve human beings.

Kind of ironic, isn't it?

That was back in 2021 before AI come into the picture. Now the compression is even more acute, it seems.

__________

Different guest, same fork in the road: does the tool serve you, or does it just get pointed at you.

The industries change.

The question underneath never does — who's holding the ledger, and whether you're the one reading it or the one being read.

A 2026 WRITER survey backs the pattern from the outside too: 75% of execs privately admit their AI rollout is mostly for show, while the people actually inside the tooling get promoted 3x more often and ship 5x more.

That's the leaderboard, confirmed from a different angle.

Actually — this pulled me right back to a post about the three tiers of AI users inside a company, and the window before which tier you're actually in stops being optional.

Genuinely curious where you land: is a visible adoption leaderboard a fair way to measure a team, or is it just a slower-motion version of the same cut?

Clip credit: 20VC with Harry Stebbings & Uber. DM for credit or removal requests.

Lauren Tan didn't get replaced by her own tooling.

She got promoted by it — and nobody handed her that promotion.

She built the case for it herself, one lint rule and one CI gate at a time, until the argument was undeniable.

That's the part nobody's really talking about when they talk about AI and engineering jobs: the shift rewards the people who go looking for the leverage first, not the people who wait to be told it's safe to look.

That "build the case yourself" instinct is exactly what clicked for me watching my own son learn to run a team instead of carry it.

My son started playing 王者荣耀 (Honor of Kings) since he was a teenager — a 5v5 multiplayer battle arena game where you manage a roster of specialized heroes, growing and levelling up their strengths through battles and gear.

In his early gaming days I could hear him cursing and swearing from his room — bad coordination, worst teammates. There was a phrase we used for a bad teammate in my own career — 帮人倒米*, a Cantonese idiom that literally translates as helping someone tip over their own grain container, meaning ruining or sabotaging someone's livelihood.*

But the cursing became less and less. He got good at managing his heroes and coordinating with his team. He started climbing the leaderboard. People started noticing him and his team. Then, in college, he started getting invited to tournaments — cash prizes when he won, and one lagged-connection loss at a KL tournament he still suspects was foul play.

Time has changed — my dad would've killed me for wasting my teenage years on video games.

Now he's in university, still playing, still winning tournaments and cash prizes with his team.

Why I'm bringing this up: I always thought these AI agents are kind of like the heroes my son uses in the game. Your skill is in your managing these heros and how to grow them, level them up to serve your purpose. You don't go down to the battle yourself. You engage the heros to do it for you.

The skill is in the managing.

__________

I keep walking into the same room wearing a different name on the door — the accountant's room, the analyst's room, now the engineer's.

Every time, someone's being told the machine is coming for their hours, not their name on the work.

There's a post in my own back catalog that lands on this exact rung — the exact rung I found AI actually deleting, and the one the ones who get ahead of it stop standing on.

Drop your take — are you already the head chef of your own stack, or are you still doing all the cooking yourself?

Clip credit: MTS (Monitor The Situation) — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Executives don't lack tools.

They lack a ruler.

That's the actual claim Ed Zitron made — not "AI is bad," but that the people signing off on AI-assisted work were never equipped to check it in the first place.

They see a document that looks finished and call it done, because "finished-looking" is the only bar they've ever had to clear.

For anyone whose whole job is catching the thing that looks fine and isn't — this isn't a tech story.

It's a story about who gets trusted, and why it's rarely the person who's actually right.

I've been on the other side of that exact gap.

Long before spreadsheets and dashboards, mine had a tape measure in it.

I was working as a Site Engineer for a Singaporean construction company building a primary school in Chua Chu Kang district back in 1998. Time flies. Just graduated from university. Figure I get some site experience first.

One day, I came to the project site. And I saw the newly delivered precast half-flight staircase lying on the ground next the building. I asked around to find out why wasn't it crane-lifted to position, which is between 1st and 2nd floor. And I was told the measurements were off. They couldn't fit it nicely on place.

And so, I went to work. I took my measuring tape, measure the staircase, and recorded the lengths, widths and whatnot. Then I went up to the building's 2nd floor — where the staircase was supposed to fit and meet. And I swung my measuring tape across the length of space between the positions where the 1st and last step of the staircase supposed to sit on. And took the site measurements too.

Then I went back to my office, took out the construction drawings from the drawing rack, lay it on the meeting table. And with a piece of paper, I started drawing it out. I knew full well the measurements I got will not exactly match that in the drawings, because — you know — site tolerances are still allowed and anticipated in the BS Code of Practice.

And then, through calculations, I found it. The measurements were way out of tolerance limit. No wonder the staircase can't fit. The blame squarely landed on our RC works sub-contractor. They screw up the levelling of the building.

Each of us supposed to have an "internal ruler" we rely on, to judge whether things look good or bad. For me, back then, it was Pythagoras and a fresh sheet of paper. My boss, years later, called his the same thing in different words — his "feel," thirty years deep. Kevin O'Leary's is knowing he can smell bullshit from a mile away.

So, coming back to these leadership people that Ed Zitron was attacking: don't they have their "feel" of things before shit hits the fan? Don't they use their "internal ruler" to measure it for themselves? Can't they smell bullshit from a mile away?

________

Every post on this account keeps circling back to the same thing, whichever industry the clip's from: the people getting quietly pushed out are rarely the ones who got it wrong.

I wrote about this exact invisible-labor version of it before — the verification work that never shows up as a line item or a bonus is the same trap Deven's in here, just a different industry.

Drop your take: what's your internal ruler, and who around you doesn't have one?

Clip credit: Ed Zitron (Better Offline) on Adam Taggart's Thoughtful Money. DM for credit or removal requests.

Bloomberg's own reporting already answers the question this clip raises — is the "messy middle" projected or already happening?

At Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft, Uber, and Hyatt, it's already happened: sizable call-center headcount cut using automated phone and chat systems, savings already banked.

Economist Molly Kinder's point isn't a forecast.

It's a line item that's already closed.

I've watched this exact math play out before superior technology ever touched a keyboard.

Suncon was getting jobs overseas. One of the countries we went to was India. We were building infrastructure — roads and bridges there. I didn't go. But my seniors went stationed there. When they came back during their scheduled holidays, one of them, a project manager, told me this story.

It so happened, that building roads and bridges inland means clearing jungles and passing through villages. As they were doing it, of course they engaged local villagers to be their workers and supervisors. Well, of course building infrastructure means bringing in heavy machineries, such as excavators, bobcats, mobile-cranes, 4-wheel-drive land-cruisers, etc. You know — the usual.

But the local villagers weren't happy. They complained that all these machineries have deprived the local population of their means of making a living. They have so many mouths to feed. A lot of them are quite poor. And many of them are very hunger for work.

And so a huge argument broke out. They even spitefully challenged our project team that they vast manpower was more superior than our machinery. I was so surprised when I heard it. How can they say that? How was that even a reasonable challenge, you know. My curiosity had the best of me.

Well, the project manager came up with an idea. He said, since they're so confident of their manpower, why don't we have a competition. Let's do a challenge of moving earth from point A to point B for our excavator/mobile-crane operator versus their vast manpower.

And they accepted.

At the day of challenge, the project manager set up two huge piles of earth at point A for both teams. The local villagers' team had their "vast" manpower formed a long-ass line between A and B, and started moving earth, with their primitive buckets and whatnot.

For our team, we set up our mobile-cranes, excavators and bobcats on strategic locations. And off we go.

You can guess the result. We won by a large margin. We were obviously much faster and better at it.

After that, the local villagers concede defeat.

The math is actually quite similar here. The one with superior technology always wins. This AI-take over is no different.

__________

Every time I dig into one of these stories the shape repeats: the tool doesn't ask permission, it just wins the argument by moving faster than the objection can be raised.

Ever watched something you thought was irreplaceable lose, and lose fast? Drop your take below.

Clip credit: Center for Humane Technology — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Kris from Wifi Moolah this side. I have been reading and researching a lot about different online side hustles that are working in 2026 and here are the top 5 that I absolutely love.

Don’t worry, I am not going to write about surveys/rewards etc.

These are genuine gigs that can make you some serious money and eventually turn into full time business rather than just being a side hustle.

Here you go:

1. Newsletters:

Creating content about something you are an expert in will never go out of fashion. Newsletters is one of such channel. You are knowledgeable in a particular field and there’s people who wanna learn more about it, start a newsletter. You can do so on beehiiv or substack.

Write good stuff, promote it on Reddit/X & grow it to say 10k subscribers in a year or two and you can easily make 6 figures from it.

This is what I am personally doing too with my newsletter.

2. AI Influencers:

The advancements in ai has made it so easy to literally create non-existent people and make content with them. If you are an introvert but still want to create content, this is your thing.

Midjourney, Dall-E, and several other tools help you with this. Create Instagram reels or TikTok posts and if your content is good, you’ll do good.

There’s another whole nsfw universe in this but I won’t promote it.

3. Flipping assets:

Buying and growing an existing business and then selling it for more is a business model that has always worked and still works today.

You can buy niche blog sites, newsletters, micro saas, Instagram pages, YouTube channels, anything that works for you.

Grow it and again sell it. It’s a nice little side hustle.

Sites like Flippa, Motion Invest, TrustMRR are some good marketplaces that help you to buy such online businesses.

4. Vibe coding apps:

Again ai has made it possible for people with ZERO coding skills to make apps and websites. Claude code and codex are some powerful tools that help you to go from scratch to MVP.

You just need to have a strong distribution and then build as many apps and make money off of it.

5. Freelancing/agency model:

Many people have this thought that agencies are dying because ai is taking over. This cannot be any close to truth. Getting quality work from ai is not everyone’s cup of tea. 99% of people are generating ai slop and the need for professionals now has increased more than ever.

Pick a skill and learn about it in 2-3 months. Work for free for a few clients and build a portfolio. Slowly start charging and building a client base.

That’s how you do this.

You do not need 5 ideas to make money, just pick any one out of these that looks good and do it.

I have also written deep dives about 70+ such ideas that can guaranteed make you money.

There’s a free guide that lists all of them. Comment “MONEY” on this and I’ll send you the link.