Last week I got more done than I have in any single week of my life.
I launched a community resource website for my local area with 150 different resources. I built it in about an hour while I was mostly paying attention and taking notes as secretary in a PTO meeting. Then I emailed everyone listed on it to say, “Hey, look what I built, you have a free listing here, go share it,” and it had 50-some shares locally within the first couple of hours.
I also finally published something that had lived in my brain for about five years: a 365-day devotional of sorts called Dang Good Days. It isn’t faith-based, but it gives you a place to sit, reflect and set your intentions for the day. Claude and I built it in about a day, including the KDP listing and the cover image, and now someone can have a physical book with my name on it printed and shipped to their house.
And I kept going. I rebuilt seven automations from n8n using Claude. I built about five animated trainings. I rebuilt tinyoffer.com and my Allie Bjerk site on WordPress. I researched 37 of my competitors, found their sales pages, offers and ad libraries, and analyzed what they were doing. And on Sunday morning, with my cup of coffee, I designed software that tracks every buyer back to the ad they came from and reports it straight into my Ads Manager, including which ads bring in the highest lifetime value. I used to pay another company $10,000 a year for that.
Here’s the part I didn’t love: my revenue didn’t go up last week. It actually went down a little. My ads slowly stopped performing, and I didn’t notice because I was busy with everything else.
AI busywork feels amazing (that’s the problem)
I also had massive anxiety that week. Every night when I went to bed, I felt this uneasiness about everything I was building. I felt annoyed with my family, because I wanted to get back in with Claude and keep cranking things off my to-do list. I posted a story with a picture of my three monitors and probably six different Claude extensions running, and said I honestly didn’t know if this was good or really bad for my productivity.
I’m seeing the same pattern with my coaching clients and community members. Look how much I’m building. Look how much I’m creating. And the tools really are incredible. The copy is improving a ton, and letting AI drive on your desktop, click buttons and act like a VA is so cool.
But a lot of it is another form of busy work. Back in 2016, my busy work looked like going to Starbucks, writing 15 long posts, and rotating them through Facebook groups. Group A, group B, group C, group D. It kept me busy and never did a whole lot for my business.
Right now we can eat as many candy bars as we want. We feel crazy productive while we skip the broccoli and skip the workouts. So it’s worth asking yourself honestly: are you selling more? Are you showing up and connecting with other humans? Do you have more clarity on how you’re making money and what your next funnel or launch looks like?
More output, still one human brain
AI lets us make progress on several things at once. We see drafts, research and plans, and tasks get checked off really quickly. But we still have to decide what matters, give the agents direction, check their work and handle next steps.
Our output is multiplying, and we still have just one human brain. So now you have five projects in motion instead of one, and every single one comes back to your brain to ask: did this get finished, am I proud of the quality, and would I actually say this?
My effort went down because of AI, but my managing work went up. It feels like I have a bigger kitchen with more cooks in it, and I’m still the one planning the menu.
The constraint I kept building around: video ads
Even with all that productivity, I still had one major constraint in my business, and it’s way outside my comfort zone. Video ads.
When I sit down to do ads, it’s so much easier to make an image ad in Canva or have ChatGPT or Claude make a carousel. Those don’t convert for me. People can see the AI patterns, and trust breaks a little. The pattern interrupt has become the pattern. Have you noticed how many ads say the word “quietly” right now? They all look the same because they’re all made by AI and they’re missing the context only a human can add.
When I look at the ad accounts of people spending $100K a month, the majority of their ads are video. If I want my ads converting really, really well, it has to be my face. It can’t be an AI avatar from HeyGen.
And video ads come with a pile of tasks my ADHD brain doesn’t love. Write the script. Put on makeup. Get the lighting right. Make sure no kids run into the room and the dogs aren’t barking. Find the microphone, and then wonder if it’s the right one, because a guy once made fun of me in the comments for holding a mic. All those unmade decisions kept me from the one thing that could really lead to scaling.
There’s more underneath it, too. I used to spend $70,000 to $80,000 a week on ads for my live webinar, and it returned 2x to 3x. But at that reach you also get people making fun of your face, commenting on your body, calling you a scammer or a snake oil saleswoman, and making assumptions about you without knowing you. Scaling means giving up some control, which I talked about last week. So part of me knows that if I record those ads and they work, I’ll increase spend, I’ll be busier, and I’ll be putting myself out there to be made fun of again.
When I talk to peers doing hundreds of thousands a month, the biggest difference between their business and mine is volume: more traffic, more ads, and more team members helping them deliver.
The thing you’re afraid of now is temporary
Before Tiny Offers (I call it BTO), I was terrified of being on camera. I was a freelancer building websites, and when people asked for a quick Skype call before starting a project, I’d say, “Nope, I don’t do Skype.” I could see how many jobs I was losing because of it.
So around 2013 or 2014, I posted in Facebook groups: “Hey, I’m an extrovert, I work at home, who wants to do a coffee chat? No pitch, no selling, nothing weird.” Thirty people booked with me. I wanted to cancel every single one, and I didn’t cancel any of them.
I barely talked about myself. I asked about their businesses, their families and their challenges. And those 30 people became massive advocates for my business. Any time someone in a Facebook group asked who runs Facebook ads, they tagged me, without ever having seen my results. The thing I was afraid of became my biggest source of business for the next year, and I spent about two years managing ads for clients before launching my own tiny offer, then a live webinar, and $7 million later, here we are. Now I love the camera.
Find your one thing
There’s usually one constraint in your business you’re avoiding while you build everything else. Maybe you don’t like how you look on video or how your voice sounds. Maybe you’re telling yourself you can’t work with people in a group, or you can’t hire because you don’t trust anyone else to do it.
It might be a season of planting. But there’s usually one thing that, if you could just go do it, would open up so much on the other side. Name it, put it in front of you, and get it done.
Mine is recording video ads, and I’m going to go record them. If you don’t see video ads from me in my Facebook Ads Library by the time this episode goes live, send me a message and tell me to get my stuff together.
If you want accountability, cheerleading and a group of women building online businesses and running ads, come hang out in Tiny Offer HQ. It starts at $33 a month with a 7-day free trial.
Listen to the full episode
I tell the whole story in this week’s episode of Start Tiny with Allie Bjerk, including the 30 coffee chats I almost canceled and what I’m doing about my video ads. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube.
If it resonates, send it to one or two friends who’d like it.