Cookie-Led Growth: Find Your Cookie

  

 

Cookie-Led Growth: Find Your Cookie:

The Outside-the-Box Playbook for Growing a Software Startup

You can't out-spend the funded. So out-create them.

Every growth guide is written by someone who had a war chest. Burn millions on ads, buy a growth team, brute-force your way to scale. That's not a playbook — that's a budget. And if you're bootstrapped, it'll bury you.

Cookie-Led Growth (CLG) is the opposite. It's the discipline of finding your cookie: one weird, creative, relationship-driven growth mechanism that lands your best customers at a fraction of the cost of paid ads — and compounds. Named as a deliberate riff on Product-Led Growth, CLG is what you do when you can't buy growth and have to engineer it instead.

Justin Smith bootstrapped Contractor+ into a fast-growing software company with zero venture capital. In this book he opens the kimono — real plays, real numbers, no theory:

• The cookie box: how a Crumbl-style box of fresh-baked cookies, hand-delivered to the right doors, out-converts a $750 cold click.

• The directory hack that landed the first 1,000 users with one gloriously sneaky trick.

• Mobile-led growth: turning $3.60 installs into a ~$120 effective CAC — and the retention trap nobody warns you about.

• The four numbers (CAC, ACV, tenure, LTV) that decide whether a channel lives or dies — with the exact math on the page.

• How to build a growth machine — routing, payroll, an ambassador app — in an afternoon, with AI.

• The viral flywheel that makes your biggest customers recruit your smallest ones.

This isn't a mindset book. It's a field manual — hand-drawn diagrams, honest unit economics, and a dozen concentrated experiments you can run this week, from bootstrapped all the way to the exit.

Stop copying the funded playbook. Go find your cookie.

Click here to get Cookie-Led Growth: Find Your Cookie

on Amazon / Kindle / Kindle Unlimited 

Claude AI for Business: The 10X Playbook

 

Claude AI for Business: The 10X Playbook:

Master Cowork, Claude Code, Skills, Projects, Artifacts, MCP, Plugins, and AI Agents to Automate Work and Build a Smarter Company

Claude isn't a chatbot anymore. Stop prompting — start delegating.

Most people type a question into Claude and copy the answer. That's using a fraction of it. Claude is now a stack for thinking, creating, remembering, connecting, delegating, automating, and orchestrating real business work — and this is the playbook for running it like an operator, not a tourist.

Claude AI for Business: The 10X Playbook takes you from your first good answer to a governed, automated Claude Business OS — beginner to builder, everyone levels up. Written by a founder who runs an agentic AI workforce in production, it's a complete implementation system, not a prompt dump.

You'll master the whole stack:

• Projects, Memory & Context Engineering — give Claude your company's brain so it stops starting from zero.
• Artifacts & finished deliverables — real spreadsheets, decks, docs, dashboards, and mini-apps.
• Skills, Connectors & MCP — teach Claude your procedures and safely connect your tools with least-privilege permissions.
• Cowork — delegate a complete job, schedule recurring work, and run reliable multi-agent workflows behind a human approval gate.
• Claude Code — for operators and founders, not just developers: build tools, automate operations, work in parallel.
• Department playbooks for executive, marketing, sales, customer success, operations, finance, product, and engineering.
• Safety & governance — prompt-injection defense, permissions, evidence, and an ROI scorecard to prove it worked.

Signature frameworks — the Capability Ladder, the BRIEF delegation method, the Governed Business-Agent Pattern, and Proof-Before-Scale — give you a memorable path, plus a living companion vault of workbooks, 101 Power Moves, 50 BRIEFs, and an exhaustive, proven Skill library.

By the last page you'll have built a personal AI chief of staff, at least three recurring Cowork workflows, a governed connector stack, a live dashboard, and a 30-day rollout your whole team can run.

Stop prompting. Start delegating.

An independent, unofficial guide. Not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Anthropic. "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic.

Click here to get Claude AI for Business: The 10X Playbook

on Amazon Kindle / Kindle Unlimited 

Resolution in the Fog

 

 

Resolution in the Fog

Resolution in the Fog is a novel set in Japan and Taiwan, following a narrator and two companions named Mariko through Zen, Tai Chi, music, cities, relationships, and loss shaped by attention and timing.

Click here to read Resolution in the Fog Chapter 1

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The Perpetual Raise:

A Crowdfunding Strategy for Founders, Operators, and Investors Who Care About the Payday

Everyone celebrates the raise. Almost nobody asks the only question that matters.

Did the capital create real enterprise value — or did the round just create a higher number on paper?

The startup world worships the mega-round: raise as much as you can, as early as you can, at the highest valuation, from the biggest names. The Perpetual Raise is the opposite discipline — a capital operating system for founders who want to keep control and actually reward the people who backed them.

The sequence is simple and ruthless: Raise. Deploy. Prove. Report. Reprice. Repeat. Exit. Raise the smallest meaningful amount that funds the next milestone. Deploy it fast into the highest-confidence use. Prove the result. Then — and only then — reopen at better terms.

Justin Smith built Contractor+ on under $750,000 raised from the crowd and zero venture capital. In this book he shows founders, operators, and everyday investors how the new rules of capital actually work:

• The real legal lanes — Reg CF, Reg A, and Reg D 506(c) — explained at a strategy level, without the legalese.

• Raise-to-deploy vs. raise-to-survive: the moral line most founders blur — and how to write a use-of-proceeds you can be graded on.

• The Iceberg of Capital Cost — the platform fee you see, and the interest, dilution, investor-acquisition cost, and control you don't.

• Eleven real crowdfunding case studies — RAD Intel, Legion M, RISE Robotics, Miso, Gumroad, Monogram (crowd → Nasdaq → acquisition), Boxabl, Knightscope, Arrive AI, BackerKit, Solectrac — the wins, the warnings, and the line between a markup and a payday.

• The Investor-Whole Doctrine: customers first, investors second, founders last — and why that order is a point of pride.

• The Milestone Stack and a five-year architecture for building a company an acquirer actually wants.

This isn't hype. It's a field manual — hand-drawn diagrams, honest numbers, and a doctrine you can run this quarter.

Investors don't get paid from screenshots. They get paid from cash. Go earn your next round.

Click here to get The Perpetual Raise

on Amazon / Kindle / Kindle Unlimited

The High-Growth Contractor

 

 

The High-Growth Contractor:

The No-BS Blueprint to Go From $500K to $1M, $10M, and Beyond

You don't have a lead problem. You have a system problem.

Most contractors aren't running a business — they're running a stressful job with trucks, missed calls, half-written estimates, and no idea which jobs actually make money. The High-Growth Contractor hands you the operating manual.

Justin Smith built Contractor+, the operating system contractors use to run and grow their businesses. In this no-BS blueprint he shows you how to stop thinking like a technician and start running like an operator — and scale from $500K to $1M, $10M, and beyond.

Inside, you'll build:

• The Two Pipelines — sales and production — so no lead, estimate, or job ever falls through the cracks.
• The numbers that tell the truth — the handful of metrics that reveal what's actually profitable. Revenue lies; margin doesn't.
• Speed-to-lead — why the contractor who answers first usually wins, and the 5-minute rule that makes it automatic.
• Estimates that sell — good/better/best, financing, and follow-up that turns quotes into signed jobs.
• Financing as a growth lever — how "as low as $/mo" turns more nos into yeses and lifts your average ticket.
• The Local Trust Machine — reviews, Google, and local SEO that make you the obvious, safest choice.
• Neighborhood Domination — the step-by-step playbook that turns every finished job into your next three.
• Plus paid ads without burning cash, the review & referral flywheel, production that protects profit, and who to hire, when.

It closes with a 90-Day Growth Reset — an exact, week-by-week plan to install the whole machine.

Part growth manual, part sales training, part wake-up call. If you're good at the work but tired of chasing jobs, this is the book that turns your trade into a business.

Stop chasing random jobs. Build the machine.

Click here to get The High-Growth Contractor

on Amazon / Kindle / Kindle Unlimited

   

ChatGPT for Business: The 10X Playbook:

100 AI Workflows to Save Time, Grow Revenue, Automate Operations, and Build a Smarter Company

Most people use 5% of ChatGPT. This is the other 95%.

You've been typing questions into a chatbot. Meanwhile ChatGPT quietly became a business operating layer that can research, analyze, create finished work, connect to your tools, and run tasks on a schedule. This is the playbook for using all of it — like an operator, not a tourist.

ChatGPT for Business: The 10X Playbook is not a prompt collection. It's a complete implementation system that turns the way you work into repeatable, AI-powered business systems — beginner to builder, everyone levels up. Written by a founder who runs an agentic AI workforce in production.

Inside, you'll master the full 2026 stack:

• Stop prompting, start briefing — the Universal 10X Brief that turns vague requests into professional work orders.
• Projects, Memory, Files & Deep Research — give ChatGPT persistent company context and documented, cited research.
• Finished work — data analysis, Canvas, docs, spreadsheets, decks, and Sites, done to your templates.
• Agent Mode & ChatGPT Work — hand off multi-step jobs across your connected apps, safely.
• Skills, Plugins & Workspace Agents — productize your best workflows into reusable, shareable systems.
• Department playbooks for marketing, sales, support, operations/finance, people, and product.
• Accuracy, security & ROI — evals, prompt-injection defense, permissions, and a scorecard that proves it worked.

The signature frameworks — the Five Levels of Leverage, the Master Workflow Pattern, and the Universal 10X Brief — give you a memorable path, plus a companion vault of 100 workflow cards, a Business OS workbook, and a Skill library.

Finish the 30-Day 10X Challenge and you'll have a personal ChatGPT Business OS: ten production-ready workflows, one for every department, a reusable Skill or agent, a scheduled workflow, and an ROI dashboard.

An independent, unofficial guide. Not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI.

Stop prompting. Start operating.

Click here to get ChatGPT for Business: The 10X Playbook

on Amazon Kindle / Kindle Unlimited 

THE WHISPER IN THE JAR

    

 

THE WHISPER IN THE JAR

Prophecy always demands a witness. She was seventeen when she learned that the gods do not send visions to help. What she saw, she could not unsee. What she warned against, she only hastened. And what she became, no one had a name for. Across the burning cities of the ancient Mediterranean, she walked. She lived among scholars who feared her, slaves who hid her, senators who used her. She loved quietly. She lost everyone. She kept writing letters to a girl who could no longer read them. And when she could bear no more witnessing, she sealed herself inside a clay jar and waited for the world to forget her. The world forgot. Until someone came looking. A literary historical novella in the tradition of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. For readers who love quiet, philosophical fiction set in the long shadow of the ancient world.

Click here to get THE WHISPER IN THE JAR

on Amazon / Kindle / Kindle Unlimited