Growing the Next Flower
The story of what comes after a book that sold around 75,000 copies
Nine years ago, I wrote a beginner's guide to building websites. With the revised edition, it sold somewhere around 75,000 copies.
Not everyone who read it went into the web. Still, I think a fair number of people stepped into the craft because of that book. I find myself thinking about them.
Back then I truly believed it: learn to build for the web, and you can feed yourself by your own hand. And it was true. One computer, anywhere, your own skill winning the work. That was, genuinely, one shape of freedom.
But the ground is shifting under that belief.
AI drafts the design, writes the code, and sometimes builds a whole site overnight. It’s only natural that a client starts to wonder, “if AI can do it, why outsource?” I don’t think the craft becomes worthless. But we’re nearly at the point where being able to make it is no longer, by itself, a reason to choose you.
This isn’t someone else’s story. It’s mine.
I’ve run a web studio for twelve years. The work, thankfully, keeps coming. But I can no longer believe the flower that once bloomed will keep blooming forever.
So I’ve started growing the next one.
Three things, concretely.
The first: turning fifteen years on the job into a product — distilling the craft of web direction into a tool. Working with AI, a prototype came together in six days. I’m still building it.
The second: changing the shape of my income — moving from a life lived on one-off commissions toward a hybrid that mixes in recurring revenue. Still only halfway there.
The third: recording and sharing this experiment itself.
Honestly, there’s nothing here I can call a success yet. The studio work continues, thankfully — but even that, I can’t see far down the road. Everything is mid-experiment. Everything is still in the struggle.
I write anyway, because silence feels like the more dishonest choice.
Among the people who entered this craft after reading that book, some must be asking themselves, right now, what do I do from here? For someone who hit the same wall a little earlier to say nothing to them — that would be a kind of desertion.
What I found isn’t an answer. It’s a direction.
Turn your professional knowledge into something beyond commissioned work. Put your skill to use for yourself. Hold more than one pillar of income. Know what your life costs, and travel light.
I gathered all of it under one name: Self-Sufficiency 2.0 — a way of living where you make your income and your life with your own hands.
Tomorrow, I send that experiment out into the world as a book. That story — tomorrow.