How I Run a Whole Operation Off a Chromebook and a Bad Attitude

Somebody asked me last week how the whole thing runs. The newsletter, the radio station, the fiction, the members club. All of it, one guy.

I told them the truth. Most of it runs while I'm asleep. The rest runs on a Chromebook that cost less than a decent pair of boots.

So here's the rig. The real one. Not the version you put in a pitch deck. The one with the duct tape showing.

Where I am

Nashville. A house that isn't mine yet, in a city that turned into a brand while I wasn't looking.

I'm a disabled Air Force veteran. The body files paperwork with me every morning whether I want it to or not.

Some days I work. Some days I sit in the chair and the chair wins. The operation has to survive both kinds of day. That's the whole reason it's built the way it's built.

What I run

I run Niche of One. One person, a pile of channels.

There's a newsletter, Dispatches from the Deep End. There's fiction under a few pen names, because one byline can't hold everything I want to write and I quit pretending it could.

There's an internet radio station I program. There's a paid members room called The Underground, where the people who actually get it hang out.

All of it lives on a site I built and own. The big platforms get the leftovers. Spokes pointing back at the thing that's mine.

The one-word version

Solo.

Not lonely. Solo. There's a difference, and the difference is a crew of machines I'll get to in a minute.

The setup that makes people wince

I work on a Chromebook. The kind most people use to check email and watch their kid's recital.

I'll wait while you finish making the face.

Underneath the toy there's a Linux container, a real terminal, real tools. I write code on it. I run the station off it. I ship a whole company off a machine that cost almost nothing.

The expensive setup is a lie the gear companies sell you so you'll think the problem is the gear. The problem is never the gear. The problem is whether you sit down and do the thing.

I learned that broke, on a couch, with nothing but the cheap option and a deadline I'd given myself. Every dollar that doesn't feed the machine goes into the work, or the house, or the wife who put up with the broke-on-a-couch years.

The thing I actually can't work without

My own site.

Not a tool. Not an app with a logo. The plain fact of owning the ground I stand on.

I spent years renting. You build on rented land and one morning the landlord changes the rules. Or the algorithm decides you're invisible. Or the platform gets sold to somebody who hates everything you stand for.

You wake up and your audience is a hostage and you're paying the ransom in content.

So I moved the center of gravity. The site is mine. The email list is mine, names sitting in a file I control, not a number on somebody else's dashboard they can switch off the day they feel like it.

I federate out. I syndicate out. The home base doesn't move, and nobody can evict me. That's the whole point of being alive at this.

How I keep it from falling over

Routines, and a short memory on purpose.

The machines handle the parts a machine should handle. Draft, schedule, file, sort. I built every routine to run without me, because some mornings I'm not available and the operation can't care.

But there's always a manual lever. A break-glass version a tired human can pull when the automatic thing dies at the worst possible second. Which it will. That's what automatic things do.

You build for the day it fails. Everybody else builds for the day it works. The day it works takes care of itself.

The crew

Here's the part people really want, because it sounds like science fiction and it sort of is.

I run an AI crew. A main assistant that runs the station floor, plus a bench of specialists for the jobs that need one.

• One drafts.
• One edits like it's got a grudge.
• One handles the fiction, the scenes, the dialogue.
• One writes the promo copy I'm too close to write clean.
• One keeps the catalog and the archive straight.
• One guards the voice so nothing ships sounding like a robot wrote it. The irony is not lost on me.
• One runs the audio and the radio.
• One reads the legal paperwork twice so I only have to read it once.

I'm skeptical as hell about AI. I think most of the hype is people selling shovels to folks who don't know there's no gold down there. A lot of it is going to age like milk.

And I use it every day, because the alternative is not doing the work, and not doing the work is the one outcome I won't accept.

You can hold a tool and despise the people selling it. That's not hypocrisy. That's a brain that runs in two lanes.

Here's the part the science-fiction version gets backwards. The machines don't run me. I run them.

The ideas are mine. The thinking is mine. I'm the creative director of this whole transmedia mess, the one who decides what it all means and how the radio and the fiction and the newsletter fit into one signal. The crew executes. It does the grunt work, fast, so I can spend my hours on the part only I can do.

Point this crew at nothing and you get nothing. Strip me out and it's a very expensive Xerox machine. I'm the difference between a copy and something worth a damn. The calls are mine, the voice is mine, the blame's mine when something ships wrong. I keep that line bright on purpose.

What's playing while I work

The station, mostly. I program it, so I'm my own first listener, which is either smart or a symptom. I've never decided.

When I need a different room in my head I reach for the loud stuff or the sad stuff, depending on whether I'm building or bleeding. There's a version of me that writes better when something's about to break in the speakers. I stopped fighting it.

Silence I save for the paperwork. The body's paperwork. The kind that needs all of me.

Best advice I ever got

Serve the weird specific niche on purpose.

Quit trying to be for everybody. For-everybody is for-nobody wearing a nicer shirt. The internet's already drowning in stuff built to offend no one and stick to no one. Content sanded so smooth it slides right off your brain.

Pick your strange little corner. The thing only a few thousand people on earth are hungry for. Then feed those people like they're the only people, because to you they are.

The weird specific thing is the only thing that travels anymore. The generic stuff gets eaten by the machine and forgotten by lunch.

I built a one-person operation around a niche so narrow I sometimes wonder if it's just me and a handful of beautiful lunatics out here. Turns out the handful is plenty. Turns out the handful was the point all along.

The part nobody puts in these

I won't tell you it's all working. Some days the numbers are thin and the chair wins and I wonder what the hell I'm doing out here, talking to machines, building a transmission almost nobody's tuned to yet.

But it's mine. Every brick. Nobody can switch it off, sell it out from under me, or change the rules while I sleep.

The signal's small. The signal's mine. And it's still going out, every day, whether or not the world is listening yet.

That'll do for now.