I'm a Wall Street VP and an Air Force veteran. Every job I've had started the same way: someone hands you a brief before the day starts. Earlier this year I built a product around that – a personalized morning briefing email called Briefed. You pick your topics and your delivery minute, and one tight email lands with the few stories that matter and why.
The twist: my only employee is an AI. It writes the social posts, runs the morning QA on the email pipeline, watches for new subscribers, and texts me when something breaks. This has produced the strangest working relationship of my life. Some highlights:
- It co-piloted my ESPN fantasy draft last week. By round 7 I trusted it enough to hand over the wheel completely. ESPN's app crashed three times and I lost three picks to autopick while it was driving. It still graded out a B+ (Barkley/Jefferson spine). I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed.
- Google's OAuth verification has rejected us three times, each for something smaller. Round 1: my demo video didn't show the right scope. Round 2: the console said calendar.readonly but the app requested calendar.events.readonly. Round 3: I moved domains mid-review and the consent screen URLs redirected. Each round is a 3-7 day wait to find out what's wrong next.
- We have 7 subscribers. I know all their names. One is my college roommate's burner account and it keeps bouncing.
What actually works: replying to big accounts on X with a genuine take beats posting into the void (a reply on a fresh thread got 58 views; the same effort on a stale thread got 2). What doesn't: everything I thought would be easy. Distribution is the whole game. The product was the fun part.
Happy to answer anything about running a product with an AI ops partner. If you want to see what the brief looks like without signing up, there's a public sample at mybriefed.com/sample – and if you think this whole thing is a bad idea, I'd genuinely like to hear that too.
Source: r/SideProject · by /u/DavisCragun