Book club for men. Like Fight Club, but with books.
Four things shipped this week. Two are the work. One came from a viral seafood boycott. And a burn-on-read tool became a client asset overnight.
“Book club for men. Like Fight Club, but with books instead of fights.”
Said that to a friend at game night Friday. Half joking. He laughed. Got quiet for a second. “That actually sounds kind of good,” he said.
That’s Crown and Compass. Saturday mornings, a few guys, one book. Currently Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes. No system. Just show up and talk about what you read.
This week I built it a proper website.
Dark background. Garamond type. Amber accents that feel like firepit light. A 4-agent Claude Code session ran the full redesign in about two hours. There’s a compass rose in every section divider. One CSS rule, site-wide. It doesn’t announce anything. It’s just there.
I have a line in my brand doc that says: “The faith is in the foundation, not the facade.” I wrote that for Ascend Systems. Fits Crown and Compass better
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Also built a patriot-owned business directory this week. Fifty-seven businesses, Mapbox with clustering, navy and crimson color scheme. Three Claude agents split 45 businesses between them and spent a session finding websites, phone numbers, descriptions, locations. Geocoordinates pulled from Nominatim. Photos scraped from each business’s OG image.
It exists because of a viral X thread about Jimmy’s Famous Seafood. Someone got canceled. The internet got angry. A list of alternatives circulated. That list is now a searchable database with a map.
I have no idea if it’ll get traffic. That’s true of most things I build.
Thursday I built Deadrop. Burn-on-read messages. Paste something sensitive, get a link, the link works once and disappears in an hour. About two hundred lines of code on Cloudflare Workers.
Friday I white-labeled it for Ascend Systems. Separate Cloudflare Pages deployment, separate KV storage, Ascend’s burnt orange, their logo. Nothing shared between the public version and the client deployment.
That was the first time a side project became a business asset in the same week it was born.
Ascend is the real play. AI phone answering as the door opener, full business automation as what you’re actually selling. I’ve sold this before in a different form. I know the market. The website is live, the architecture is mapped, the GHL demos are designed. The only thing between here and first client is one call with my partner Neil.
Waiting is too passive a word for it. Preparing is closer.
Crown and Compass is Saturday mornings and one honest book. Ascend is everything I know about running a small business, built into something sellable. The patriot directory and Deadrop are interesting. Good for the craft. Also homework.
Build fast, Fail Faster and learn the most.