YOUR PLAN IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR EXECUTION.
Finding a way to earn money online can seem like one big sales job - fake "guru's" with rented Lamborghinis promising you that you can be making 10K a month with their "3-step done-for-you system". Ever notice the absolutely mad claims they make? "Just 6 months ago, I was performing sex acts for food, and now I've retired the grandchildren I don't even have yet!"
Of course, we're now living in the information age. The knowledge is out there, and you can learn how it's all done without having to put your hand in your pocket. Learnig the ropes is just the first step though - and can be time consuming in its' own right - doing takes more. But does it have to?
Artificial Intelligence is now a part of our world. It's everywhere. Seriously, try and go a day without seeing "AI" somewhere. It's an incredible tool in the online age, and for most, it's just "clever Google". If you move a little deeper than that though, you'll see there's a LOT more that can be done than deciding what to make from the leftovers in the fridge...
I am not a guru. I'm just a guy with a day job and a dream. I am building a system to test the promise of the AI age, and I've called it "Minion" - my personal army of sorts (which makes the whole military / coding geek vibe of the project vaguely explicable). Minion exists solely to provide an answer to one question: Can you actually build an automated empire from your bedroom?
To do this, I'll be testing the processes laid out in a number of online groups, in YouTube videos, from free webinars, and basically anywhere I can find free info. I've vaguely ideated a few 'brands' to use for these tests, and I'll be documenting the progress here - no crazy claims, just unfiltered honesty. I'll let you know what works, what doesn't, and anything of note I learn along the way - all after the day job from the "comfort of my own home" (and why not, that's the promise the gurus always mkre right?)
I SLEEP, IT WORKS.
Whilst AI is amazing, it does have it's limitations - namely us; if you're not interacting, it's not working. But there's another way - local AI. Imagine having an AI that lives on your desktop, using software it taught you to build, working continuously. How would that change your life?
Sounds expensive right? Sure, it can be, if you want it to be - much like doing the weekly shop in a Ferrari would be (although I hope to let you know about that in due course). Much like going to the shops can be done in a 20 year old Toyota (or whatever you prefer to consider cheap), a local AI can be done without great expense as well
And this brings me to my "Minion". I'm not a rich man, so I'm working on the basis of "do what you can, with what you have, from where you are". I'd love to be writing this from a mansion in the Hollywood hills, but I'm not. So here's where we are - a refurbished Dell desktop that cost me $100, and a refurbished laptop that cost $300. That's it. Nothing spectacular to get going.
So what does Minion do (aside from create a whole load of "minoni" typos)? Minion is a local AI platform, built with far more time than I'd planned vibe coding, and powered by some of the cheapest technology known to man. It's an agentic framework, designed around the concept of a full-service marketing agency - it's coded around a number of different "job descriptions" that define what each role in the system is. Sounds more complex than it is - in essence, it's a 'business in a box', and I am the 'human-in-the-loop' to put its' outputs into the "real world" (well, the internet, but that's close enough!)
Minion isn't just a chatbot. It is an operational framework. It handles the volume, the repetition, and the data processing. I sleep, it works. Hopefully - if it does, you'll see every step of the journey. If not, we'll all have learned some things.