The Spark Archive
I Rebuilt My SaaS in a Weekend (Here's What 6 Months of AI Learning Made Possible)
I rebuilt SPARKlinks from scratch in a weekend — not patched, not fixed, rebuilt. Four days from first prompt to a live app with authentication, a dashboard, and a referral system. Here's the real process behind the build and what six months of daily AI practice actually looks like when it all comes together.
There's No Such Thing as Being "Behind" in AI (And Why That's Liberating)
I had coffee with a brilliant entrepreneur last week who apologized for "being so behind on AI." She's running a successful consulting business, has two kids, and is managing aging parents. Her idea of being "behind" was not having played with ChatGPT for writing her newsletter yet.
The Marketing Shift Manifesto: Why Yesterday's Playbooks are Dying (And What's Working Instead)
Last week, I opened an email that made me set down my coffee and reply. Jessica Stansbury, someone who's been in the trenches of online business for years, had sent a message that captured everything I'd been feeling but hadn't quite articulated.
Google AI Series Part 3B: The Motion & Sound Studio for Creators
In the last post in the Google series, Part 3A, we covered Google's visual creation tools—images, graphics, and typography. The tools that replaced stock photo subscriptions and enabled us to create Pixar-style characters in minutes.
Google AI Series Part 3A: The Visual Creation Studio
For a long time (in AI years), if you wanted AI-generated images, you went to Midjourney. If you needed stock photos, you paid for Deposit Photos (often via AppSumo) or spent 45 minutes scrolling through Unsplash, hoping to find something that didn't look like every other blog post.
Your Content Doesn't Need to Impress Everyone (Just the Right People)
For a split second, I almost changed something that was working. I was looking at my Pixar-style 3D images, the bright, colorful, slightly whimsical graphics I use in all my content, and I had this fleeting thought: Is this too childish?
Google AI Series Part 2: Building Your "Second Brain" with NotebookLM
A few weeks ago, I was trying to refresh my memory on an ads training system I'd used months earlier. I had all the materials—worksheets, training documents, strategy guides.
Google AI Series Part 1: Mastering the "Brains" and the Office
Most people's experience with Google AI goes something like this: They go to gemini.google.com, type in a prompt they'd normally send to ChatGPT, get a slightly different answer, shrug, and go back to their old workflow.
Clone the Best Parts of Yourself (With Google Gems)
You know that moment when you catch yourself doing something for the tenth time and think, "I know there's a better way." That was me before Gems, copy-pasting the same brand voice instructions into yet another chat window.
The AI Burnout is Real: Why I'm Ditching the Hype for the Long Game
Here's the thing that's bothering me about the AI conversation right now: people are treating it like an infinite, high-stakes sprint with no finish line. When I was 23, I was a retail manager at a national bookstore chain.