Automation On Steroids

We’re revamping The Method.

We want to grow our list by 5,000 new subs before year's end.

To do this, we’re focusing on content marketing + AI to create captions and images from our old posts.

This means exporting every post we’ve published (203 in total) as a PDF to train our AI.

We were going to hire a VA to do this (roughly 12 hours at $23.50 NZD min wage - $282).

Instead, I’ve set up Claude AI to do this in less than 15 minutes for $39 NZD, and it’s worked near perfectly with only one check-in from me.

Here’s the process:

1. Go to Claude.ai and sign up

2. Upgrade your plan to Pro ($39 NZD per month)

3. Click Claude Code

   

   Screenshot of Claude

4. Go to the install instructions page - link here

5. Open your computer’s terminal (Command + T for Mac) / (Windows key + R for PC)

6. Copy and paste the following into your terminal:

# Install Claude Code
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

# Navigate to your project
cd your-awesome-project

# Start coding with Claude
claude

7. You can now type in your terminal and ask it to do tasks as if it were your own mini-developer or VA

8. Ask it to create a folder to save all of the work it is doing in the terminal:
    
   “Please create a folder to save all of the work we’re doing together.”
   

9. Now that you’ve got a folder to save your work, you can prompt it as if it were a VA or a dev.
   
   Here is exactly what I typed into my terminal to get it to scrape all of our old posts:
   
   “I need you to go to https://themethod.beehiiv.com/ and please scrape all post and save them as individual PDFs per post please.
   
   These will be used as transcripts for how we write as a tone of voice and feedback into our AI to train it. If the above method doesn't seem logical please find an alternative that will be better.”
   

   

   The script Claude wrote to scrape the site

   
   It initially declined my request, stating it wasn’t allowed to scrape other websites.
   
   I then told it I was the site owner, and it just accepted that as proof and went to work.

If you are a business owner, having your own developer for your projects is incredibly useful.

Claude built this Python app for face detection in under 5 minutes without me even looking at it after my initial prompt.

Here’s the code it ran below.

Any menial digital tasks you’ve been doing can now be outsourced to an AI agent for a fraction of the cost of what it used to be.

Business is about outsourcing low-value tasks to others; now we can do this faster and more efficiently than ever before.

September

Every January I write next year’s financial projections. For years I tried to walk a linear path to those numbers: February, then March, then April - each month a small step up.

But that’s not how business works.

Chasing the month in front of me pushed me toward menial, incremental work—tweaks to ads, tiny service improvements—changes that need months to show up on your PnL and rarely tell you if you’re actually on or off track. Over the years with this approach, regardless of how aggressive or conservative my projections were, I’ve only ever hit June numbers. Thousands of micro‑steps for not much gain.

So instead, after setting my projections in January, this year I decided to aim straight for September.

Our September revenue goal at Compound is $73,000. With that number in mind, I asked: what are the least amount of moves we can take to get there?

Here were mine:

1. Increase lead volume.
   I hired a marketer with a single mandate: produce a weekly vlog. The bet was that if we did that well, everything downstream—shorts, posts, emails, local awareness—would compound and leads would increase. So far, that’s held: the vlog anchors the rest of our marketing and our lead volume is way up.

2. Maintain conversion rate.
   Instead of “trying harder,” I tightened our sales processes: automated as much of the funnel as possible and added weekly reporting. Not sexy, but it reduced variance. Fewer dropped balls, faster follow‑ups, and clearer visibility. Roughly speaking, this worked, our conversion rate has stayed where we needed it.

3. Introduce new revenue streams.
   Based on our gyms capacity, our revenue goal wasn't possible with just standard gym memberships. So we prepared for then launched in-house Small Group Training and Personal Training. Previously, personal trainers, as contractors, offered these services. These new memberships/offers increased our revenue surface area without us needing to find a new audience to sell to. We’re now in the early stages of scaling these new memberships.

As of writing we've just nudged past our March numbers, so still work to do, but our biggest bump to revenue will come from scaling up our new membership offers and we see this happening quickly over the next few months. Monthly revenue from new offers is currently $4,800, but will reach $16,000 by years end.

And yeah, other issues have popped up along the way that we've had to address:

• Courses were part of our extra revenue projections and we've canned them.

• We had to do a sprint to improve our gym's layout and get new gear to handle a bigger membership base

• We had to do a price increase for all memberships and phase out some legacy memberships due to further demand/supply issues.

But essentially most of the big work that set us up to hit our targets was handled with two sprints - about 8 weeks of focused work. And now we're letting time do the rest.

The result is a hell of a lot less small steps and faster growth. As of writing we're on track for 40% YOY growth in FY26.