I didn’t plan any of the best things that happened to my business this fall.

Life By Decade has two new Founding Members, bringing the total to three. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t been playing with AI.

I think there’s something in that for anyone with a message worth sharing.

It started with a Digital Marketing Proposal.

While we were talking the proposal through, Life By Decade came up, and she wanted to try it. She’s now a Founding Member.

Then a product manager from Kit interviewed me.

Kit is the email marketing platform I use to send this newsletter. They were doing customer research, and I was invited to talk about how I use it.

Then the conversation went in a different direction. The product manager’s parents are turning 80, and when Life By Decade came up, he saw it as a way to capture their story.

Neither of these was a sales conversation.

Nobody saw an ad, and nobody clicked through an email sequence. They talked with me, and I had something real to show them, along with genuine enthusiasm for what’s emerging.

That’s the part I keep coming back to, and I’m honestly mind-blown by it. Life By Decade exists because I had an itch I wanted to scratch, and AI made it possible for me to build a real, working app myself. I never could have imagined that. And it keeps evolving.

Because it actually works, people don’t just hear about it. They can try it for free and experience it for themselves.

So here’s a mistake I think many experts make.

They describe what they know instead of letting people experience it. They also expect emails and/or Meta ads to do what only a conversation can do.

Don’t get me wrong. Email matters. (You’re reading one.) But the relationships themselves are built in conversation.

AI has changed what it costs to make something real. A quiz, a short video, a simple tool, or a website that actually shows what you do used to take weeks and real money. Now the bigger question is what you want people to experience.

Why I’m using AI to provide a new way to do branding and websites.

For many people, your website is the first experience they have of your work. Lately, I’ve been designing and building sites with AI tools, the same way I designed Life By Decade, henrynovak.com, and the relaunch of combridges.com.

If you’re curious about how this AI creative director is now approaching websites and visual branding, just reply to this email. I’d love to talk.

And this Friday, you can see Live By Decade.

Life By Decade LIVE! is this Friday, November 6, at 10 a.m. PT. I’ll demo the app, walk through the new features, and leave plenty of time for your questions.

Come if you’re curious about preserving your own life story. Come if you want to see what someone who doesn’t write code can build with AI, and how the app keeps changing based on input from the enthusiastic people who are using it.

Register for Free

Use AI well. Stay human. Build what matters.

Jon Leland, AI Creative Director