Waymaker Agency · Field Notes

Growth, AI, and what actually moves the numbers.

How to find where customers drop off, put AI to work on marketing, product, and design, and fix the part that matters most. Written from the operator's seat.

The Wealth Experiment · $99 founding cohort

Two Mondays to a Side Hustle

Learn AI tools for validation, planning, design, coding, testing, and marketing. Ashley Kays will build a product live and show you the process step by step, with time to practice on your own small project.

October 26 & November 2, 2026
Mondays, 7–9 p.m. Eastern · $99 USD total
Zoom or in person in West Palm Beach · 10-minute break each evening

Practice between Mondays and bring questions, ideas, or blockers to any office hour. Teaching and demos include 30-day replay access. Software subscriptions and usage charges are separate.

Optional Zoom support · Included · All times Eastern
Setup & orientation: Thu, Oct 22, 7–8 p.m.
Office hours: Tue, Oct 27, 7–8 p.m.; Thu, Oct 29, noon–1 p.m.; Sun, Nov 1, 4–5 p.m.

See the schedule & register — $99 →

Registration is open. 20 live seats for this founding cohort. Invite a friend from the workshop page; each person registers separately. Hosted by The Wealth Experiment.

21 articles

AI Trends

Your first ten AI assistants: a practical operating team for a small agency

Give research, planning, production, and quality review clear jobs so you can take on more useful work with less repeated setup.

Ashley KaysOct 10 5 min

AI Trends

Build a small AI-powered service people can actually use

Turn one skill into a tightly scoped service, test it with real people, and use AI to make delivery easier to repeat.

Ashley KaysOct 10 4 min

Positioning & Messaging

SEO + AEO Can Get You Found. What Happens Next Creates Revenue.

SEO and AEO can help the right person discover you, but rankings and AI citations are not the finish line. Here is the system I use to connect discoverability to conversion, follow-up, activation, and revenue.

Ashley KaysOct 8 8 min

Business Growth

ROAS, ARR, GRR, AOV: The Numbers That Help You Run a Better Business

Understand the numbers behind profitable growth—from ad spend and order value to customer retention and cash—with clear formulas and hypothetical examples.

Ashley KaysOct 7 18 min

Business Growth

How We Plan Paid Traffic Around the Customer Journey

A paid campaign needs a clear path from the first click to a useful customer action. Here is the order we work in — the sale, the path, then the keywords — and the six places paid clicks most often leak before anyone becomes a customer.

Ashley KaysOct 4 6 min

AI Trends

What Actually Happened in AI in September 2026 (and What to Do About It)

September 2026 brought new frontier models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, a pulled release over safety concerns, and the first ads inside ChatGPT that open a conversation with a brand. Here is what happened, and the three things I would actually do about it this month.

Ashley KaysOct 3 8 min

AI Strategy

Use AI to Find Where Your Marketing Leaks — Not Just to Make More of It

The default way small teams use AI for marketing is to produce more: more posts, more emails, more ad variants. The higher-leverage move is to use it to find where people are already dropping off. Here are five practical ways to do that this week.

Ashley KaysOct 3 7 min

Product

AI as Your Product Partner: How to Develop a Product With AI Without Losing the Plot

AI can now help with almost every step of building a product, from customer research to working code. The founders getting the most out of it treat it as a capable partner with no judgment of its own. Here is a stage-by-stage way to work with it.

Ashley KaysOct 3 8 min

Design

AI as Your Design Partner: A Working Method for Designing Products With AI

AI can generate a hundred screens in the time it takes to sketch one. That is useful if you know what you are looking for and dangerous if you do not. Here is the method I use to design with AI as a genuine collaborator.

Ashley KaysOct 3 7 min

Lifecycle Marketing

The One Thing I'd Change First in Your Signup Experience

Ask for a signup review and you'll usually get a list of twenty things. That list is rarely useful. Here's how I narrow a signup experience down to the one change worth making first — walked through on a composite example.

Ashley KaysOct 1 6 min

Business Growth

Before You Buy More Traffic, Look at What Happens After the Form

When leads aren't turning into customers, the reflex is to buy more leads. Usually the cheaper fix is on the other side of the form: the handoffs between a submission and a sale. Here's how to trace them.

Ashley KaysSep 30 6 min

Lifecycle Marketing

Your Welcome Email Is Not Your Onboarding Strategy

Most onboarding problems I'm asked to look at are really one email doing the job of an entire journey. Here's the difference between welcoming a new signup and actually getting them to value — and how to find the gap in your own product.

Ashley KaysSep 30 6 min

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The Growth Fix

Find your biggest leak. Fix it first.

One fixed-price session to trace your journey from first touch to paying customer, name the biggest drop-off, and fix it with you.

Get my Growth Fix — $997 →Book a call →