At Escalis.ai I help small and midsized companies put practical AI to work: narrow, honest, and paid back quickly. The fair question any client can ask is simple. Do you use this yourself? I do, every day. Not Yet is my travel memoir, published in episodes on Patreon and at notyetmemoir.com. It is written, built, marketed, and run almost entirely with AI, by one person, mostly from a laptop on the road. Here is exactly how, tool by tool, with nothing hidden.
One rule holds the whole thing together: the final word is always mine. Nothing goes out that I have not read, reworked, and signed off on.
The workbench: Claude Cowork
I do almost everything inside Claude Cowork, on the Max plan, about a hundred dollars a month, and for what I get out of it that is money well spent. I started with Claude Chat, and it was good, but I kept hitting the wall. The conversation would fill up, I would open a fresh one, re-explain everything from scratch, and copy documents back and forth by hand. Cowork does away with all of that. I keep my folders of episodes, photos, and voice and text notes on my computer, and it reaches in and works from the real files. It reads whole episodes straight off the laptop, runs my whole sound-like-Frank pass across every one of them, and builds me a clickable list of the paragraphs, captions, and links to check, one by one.
Writing the episodes
The writing works the way it always has. I dictate each episode as voice notes, the way it actually happened, and hand over the photos. Claude turns that raw, spoken Frank into clean prose. Then I read every line, push back, and rework it until it sounds like me and nobody else. If it does not sound like Frank, it does not go in the book. The machine drafts and organizes. The voice stays mine.
Building the website: Claude Code
There is a second side to this, Claude Code, the engineer. The Not Yet website and the interactive Storymap, which lets you travel the book song by song and place by place, came out of the two of us working as a team: my ideas and my direction, its hands on the keyboard. This site, Escalis.ai, was built the same way. Clean and lightweight, no bloated backend, no agency invoice. Just a clear idea and a tool that can build it.
Getting it online: hosting, email, and the plumbing
A website sitting in a folder is not a business. The unglamorous part is getting it live and making the email work, and this is where a patient partner earned its keep. Together we chose a host, set up and subscribed to Hostinger, and uploaded the whole thing: every HTML page and the full picture libraries, hundreds of images, live on the internet. Then the same for email, standing up professional Microsoft 365 business mail on my own domains, frank@escalis.ai and the rest, with the DNS records, the aliases, and the setup across my laptop and phone all sorted out. No IT person, no agency. Just the two of us working through it step by step until it was done and working.
A tool I built with Claude Code: the social image toolkit
Claude Code does not only build websites. When I got tired of resizing and watermarking photos by hand for every platform, I had it build me a small tool that does the whole job in minutes. One photo goes in, a full set of social-ready, correctly shaped images comes out.
- Watermarks the picture and exports it in every format I need: 1:1, 4:5, 9:16, and the original.
- Precise crop control: trim a set percentage off the top and the bottom to fix the height.
- The same for width: trim a set percentage off the left and the right.
- One photo in, a full set of social-ready images out, each in the right shape for its platform.
It is a small thing, but it saves me real time every day. It is also exactly the kind of narrow, practical tool I build for clients, alongside pieces like the interactive Not Yet Storymap: not a big platform, just the one job you keep doing by hand, handed to software.
Legal, privacy, and the fine print
A project like this throws a thousand small decisions at you, and plenty of them touch law and privacy. I used Claude to think through the terms and conditions, the privacy policy, the questions around Panama residency and a company structure, and the everyday privacy rules I hold myself to: pseudonyms in the writing, names and details changed, no photograph of anyone without their knowledge, and a plain disclaimer that this is a personal memoir and not advice. It helped me understand the ground and ask better questions. But I want to be clear about the line I draw. For anything truly legal, I still sit down with a qualified legal advisor. AI gets me ready for that conversation. It does not replace it.
Pricing and strategy
I publish on Patreon on purpose, and the main reason is a boring one that matters. Patreon is a Merchant of Record, so it handles the whole transaction with the reader, including any sales tax or VAT, wherever in the world they live. I do not have to register for tax in a dozen countries. For a one-person operation writing from the road, that alone is worth a lot. Around that I had to make real choices: free episodes against paid ones, the tiers, whether a reader subscribes and follows along or buys a collection and keeps it for good. I thought those pricing questions through with AI in front of me, weighing the options out loud, before I set them. I did not have to learn Patreon on my own either: we worked through how it actually works, the tiers, the collections, the Shop, gifting, and the merchant-of-record side, so the storefront was set up right the first time instead of by trial and error.
Social media, done daily
Cowork prepares my posts. Draft captions for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, and Patreon Quips, each matched to the platform, with the right image named from my library and the link in the right place. It reads comments and drafts replies. Every morning it hands me a short pack I can act on in about fifteen minutes. Nothing is ever sent on its own. It proposes and reports back, and I decide whether to post it, change it, or scrap it.
Daily updates and task scheduling
Some of this runs on a schedule now, without me touching it. A task wakes up on its own, does the work, and sends me an update: the daily marketing pack, a check on how a post did, a reminder of what is due. I come back to a short summary instead of a blank page. It is the difference between a tool you open and a small team that keeps working while you are out at dinner.
Reading the numbers
Numbers only help if someone turns them into a decision. Each week I hand over the website traffic from Plausible and the reader numbers from Patreon Insights, and Claude reads them and tells me in plain words what actually moved: which posts brought people in, which pages they read, where they dropped off, whether a free episode pulled new subscribers. Not a wall of charts, a short read of what happened and what to do more of next week. I still make the call, but I make it looking at the real numbers instead of a hunch.
Always a second opinion
I do not lean on a single voice. Just as in business and in life you ask a trusted third person what they think, I run things past other tools on purpose. I often check legal and strategy questions with Google Gemini, where I find it strong, as a second opinion. Microsoft Copilot handles voice-to-text transcription well. Grok Imagine, Grok's image-to-video tool, turns a single photo into a short video that moves. Different tools for different jobs. But the writing, and the final word, stay with Claude and with me.
Why this matters for your business
Look at what that adds up to. One person, mostly on the road, runs a whole publishing operation: the writing, the website, the legal groundwork, the pricing, the marketing, the scheduling, the daily follow-up. Not with a big platform or a back office, but with a few practical tools and a human who reads everything before it goes out. That is exactly what I set up for clients at Escalis.ai. Narrow scope, honest advice, real work that pays for itself, and you stay in control.
Everything you just read was built and run by one person, with AI as the engine and my hand on every decision. It is not hands-off and it is not magic: it is intense, coordinated work, done well, every day. The next chapter is how I run the commercial side, the hunt and the follow-up, with Grok Bot: that is in a separate case study. If you would like to know the person behind it, here is my one-page CV.