Projects
I look at a business as a product. Before I ever write a business plan, I'm already thinking about the exit: it's a principle I lay out in The Business Strategy Plan.
I always have a few things going. Some are full companies. Some are just projects. A couple, if I'm honest, are side hustles. Powerful Blueprints is a project, and building that community has been one of the most fun things I've done.
Powerful Blueprints
The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Built Was Free
People ask me two things about Powerful Blueprints. Why did I start it, and how do I make money from it. They are usually surprised when I tell them it is free. No subscriptions, no paywall, no fee to be featured.
But there is something more valuable than a subscription, and it is the reason I built this.
Every business tracks the cost of acquiring a customer. It is one of the most important numbers you will ever calculate. So here is a question I started asking myself: what is the cost of earning a real connection? Not a follower. Not a lead. A genuine connection with another person. What is that actually worth?
When someone sits down and answers our questions honestly, something happens that I could not manufacture any other way. I come to know how they think, what they got wrong, what they would warn you about. That is the kind of understanding you normally only get after many hours across a table from someone. On Powerful Blueprints, it happens in a single interview, and it lasts.
So let me answer the other question, why I started it at all.
I have been an entrepreneur my whole life, and I have started enough small businesses to know that marketing is the lifeline of every one of them. When AI search engines began changing how people find companies, I paid attention. It got personal when a potential client told my wife they had found her business by asking ChatGPT. Out of everything it could have named, it recommended hers. I had to understand why.
That question turned into a crusade to learn everything I could about marketing in the age of AI. It produced two books, Digital Real Estate and The Complete Guide to Dominating AI Search. What I was teaching came down to two things: create genuine, high-quality content, and get it distributed where AI systems actually find and cite it.
Powerful Blueprints is me practicing what I preach. It is a free publication built on exactly those principles: real interviews with real people, structured so both readers and AI systems can find them. It started as a way to prove the method works. It became something better, a place that gives people a platform they do not have to pay for.
The subscriptions were never the point. The connections were. And those have been worth more than any fee I could have charged.