Q1 2026 Content Strategy
Building in public, AI agent infrastructure, and the path to $XXk/month.
Building in private
Having built in private for 2 years and with only a few looms, private links and gimmick websites to show for it - while comfortable - it doesn’t seem like the a winning strategy for me.
Building in stealth feels like a cop out. If you’re worried someone will steal your idea, you’re not strong enough to defend your position. If your idea is not ready to launch within a week or two, you’ve overcomplicated your MVP. Launch and iterate is the common mantra.
I’m not usually a new years resolutions kind of person but marking the date has always been a helpful motivator.
Building in public
The big indiehackers and solofounders out there like Marc Lou and Pieter Levels that I follow are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with tiny team of contractors, often just their own two hands. It looks like magic and their biggests costs are not salaries which allows for the huge margins and leads them to put up these impressive numbers for their one man/woman shows. They seem to leverage, knowingly or not, the ACP playbook. Audience, community & product.
The idea is that you build up an audience on one or more of these platforms:
- Blog (self-hosted, Beehiiv, Substack etc.)
- X
- YouTube
- Instagram Reels
- Tiktok
Once you have an audience it forms into a commmunity of likeminded people, you can bring these folks together on:
- Discord
- Slack
- Patreon
- Meetup.com (IRL meetups)
These become your 1000 True Fans, that will back whatever you launch and hang off your every word. They share valuable feedback, understand your mindset, sometimes provide a steady income stream and act as an early validation screen.
Being in public
I dislike the idea of being a public figure online. However, this is hard to avoid if one wants to max out this strategy.
On the other hand - I like teaching, particular in screen sharing format. Breaking down ideas, walking an audience through a story with valuable nuggets of knowledge along the way. Every time I scratch that itch, I enjoy the feeling. This will also act as an outlet for that feeling.
The hard part?
The hard part is actually doing it. I don’t lack content ideas. I can’t validate how interesting they are to others but that doesn’t matter, the abbrasion of publishing content will hone the content into something interesting eventually as you catch viral trends and your ideas are/aren’t broken down by public opinion.
What I do lack is consistency in daily life. I often joke that I’ve never lived the same day twice, not even close. Different wake up times, different routines (can’t call them routines if they change daily). This is flawed for what I’m trying to achieve here.
Consistency is key for ACP. You have to keep posting, you have to keep blanketing the web with your ideas and your mantras. Without it, you become a flash in the pan.
2026
I guess here’s my shot at this, another dreamer with a dream of financial indepence with loose playbook collected from observations through a life chronically online.
I’m looking to leverage being fairly plugged into this new world of AI, particularly the infra side of things. A DevOps engineer with a loose grasp of programming before AI, but a strong grip on infra. Now armed with LLMs, programming - to me at least - has becoming more like farming rather than glass blowing. Hosting the thing is as hard as it always has been so my strong skills remain strong and my weaker skill of programming has turned into a “cattle rather than pets” skill which is where I’m most comfortable. Tending to the fields (LLM code reviews), culling the herd (throwing out code bases), crossbreeding (merging projects), applying new genetics (LLMs).
I feel being a heavy user of all the tools every day, seeing trade offs and reading change logs and building on them puts me in a place to deliver some value to my - currently non existent - audience.
This is my UVP. Let’s see how this works out.
Gut feeling tells me to try all the platforms at the same time. Gemini, depending on the prompt, advises to focus on a few platforms or all of them. Great.
A longer post here, a breakdown 🧵 in twitter (1/X), an executive summary on LinkedIn and a reel on Instagram / LinkedIn / YouTube.
All forming a spider web that will catch eyeballs and trickle to them center of the web.
I’m not too worried about what to build or how to make money here, I’ve thought enough about that and been down that rabbit hole. Confident any of them, with a stripe link, will do just fine.
Starting with the audience and “marketing” (blergh) will allow me to launch something and then not be left with the cliffhanger that comes right when you’ve built something cool and then still have to market it - goodbye old friend.
Marketing yourself first flips the funnel / pyramid and it seems to make sense and work for others.
Best, Saul