To own every bit of infrastructure of my business.
The whole kit-and-kaboodle.
If it came with a subscription, I wasn’t interested.
After building this gigantic list…
I needed some place to put that many people.
So I could reach their inboxes reliably.
But when you’re trying to reach that many people all at once…
It’s not as simple as sending a Gmail like you do everyday.
The internet has lots of police officers in it.
If I did that, I’d get busted and go straight to email prison.
The spam folder.
Once you get in, it’s hard to get out.
It can murder your entire business.
So I needed the right set up.
If I were going to go the traditional route, I’d be paying thousands per month.
For email software.
For automations.
For a CRM.
For dashboards.
For data.
For AI.
For all the little bits and pieces they convince you that you need before they’ll let you run a real business.
And every time your list gets bigger…
Your bill gets bigger.
Those costs keep going up and up.
Growing faster than revenue.
I was trying to create rock-solid stability.
Something without training wheels programmed in just to place random limits on my machine without my permission.
These things matter.
Because if I didn’t have this approach, I would never be able to count on my business.
I could never expect it to hold strong while software companies literally made their products worse just so they could charge you more to get them to stop.
This printing press has to be fortified so it’s protected from many threats…
A company deciding it does not like what I’m doing and shutting me down.
A price increase arriving when I’m already behind on my bills.
A platform deciding that the 130,000 people I worked so hard to reach somehow belong to them.
One bad month could shut down my business.
The slow death of a business from ten different subscriptions bleeding it dry.
I know you’re already wondering how I did it.
And I’ll get to that…
First, you must understand that from the very beginning, I made the decision to build something that was…
MINE.
Completely.
No more middlemen.
No more people who could stick their fingers into my business and meddle with it.
Shut me down if they feel like it.
Tell me what to do with the subscribers I earned fair and square.
No more subscriptions.
Why rent when you can own?
You have one bad month, and you can’t pay your bills.
You make more money, but your costs keep growing faster.
These are some fundamental business principles.
The building is more important than the furniture.
Owning is always better.
I was prepared to build my own custom stack to give each subscriber what they want—and leave a glowing review.
Because here’s the way I see it:
America is in a debt crisis right now…
And I think all of the random subscriptions you forgot about are robbing you blind.
I found a whole bunch that I forgot about.
Your mind isn’t as reliable as you think it is.
You sign up for something because it is only $12.
Or $19.
Or $29.
Then another one.
And another one.
And by the time you notice, you are working all month to pay companies whose names you barely remember.
That is not how I want to live.
And it is not how I want to run a business.
So I started cutting.
I got rid of anything I did not absolutely need.
Then I started replacing the expensive parts of the machine with things I could own.
Open-source software.
My own servers.
My own domains.
My own data.
My own list.
My own backup systems.
My own internal tools.
Instead of buying the same machine from some venture-capital-backed company and paying them forever.
The central piece is called Listmonk.
It is open-source software.
Which means nobody can suddenly charge me more because the list grew.
Nobody can decide I need to upgrade from the “Starter Plan” to the “You’re Finally Successful Enough For Us To Fleece You Plan.”
Nobody can pull the plug because they want to push me into a more expensive tier.
I run it.
It lives on my servers.
It belongs to me.
Around it, I built the rest of the system.
Four private servers.
Systems that track engagement.
Systems that handle bounced emails.
Systems that deal with complaints and unsubscribes.
Systems that let me send slowly and carefully, instead of blowing up the list and wrecking my reputation with Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
A separate channel for colder outreach.
A real database of the people who joined my world.
Not just a pile of exported CSV files I would have to pray I could make sense of during a crisis.
The total web and server infrastructure is paid through next March.
The only recurring software bill I have right now is about $16 per month.
That is Mailgun.
And even that is not the heart of the machine.
It is useful.
It makes things easier.
It gives me a safety net.
But the core of the business is mine.
That is a very different position from being trapped inside a $1,000-per-month software stack and praying you make enough sales before the next credit-card charge hits.
Then we started doing something even stranger.
We gave the machine a brain.
At first, I connected ChatGPT to the machine.
I built a private bridge between ChatGPT and the actual machinery of my business.
My servers.
My apps.
My internal tools.
The code.
The dashboards.
The reports.
The systems that are running the list.
And it was wild.
Most people use ChatGPT like they are talking to a very smart stranger through a window.
You type something.
It gives you an answer.
Then it disappears.
It has no idea what your business looks like.
No idea where the files are.
No idea what is broken.
No idea what you are trying to build.
No idea whether you already built it yesterday.
That is useful.
But it is not intelligence inside your business.
So I asked a different question:
What happens when the AI can actually see the machine?
What happens when it can inspect the moving parts instead of making guesses from whatever I remember to tell it?
What happens when I can say:
“Check why this is broken.”
“Show me what this system is doing.”
“Build me a tool for this.”
“Find the bottleneck.”
“Look at the data.”
“Fix the code.”
And it can go into the real environment and find the answer?
That is what we built.
A private bridge lets ChatGPT communicate with my infrastructure without me copying and pasting terminal windows, error messages, server logs, and spreadsheets back and forth all day.
It can look at the systems.
It can help build inside the systems.
It can help me understand what I own.
And because the bridge is mine, I control the access.
It is not some random chatbot wandering through the whole business with the keys to the kingdom.
It is connected carefully.
Deliberately.
Through my own protected setup.
I decide what it gets to see.
I decide what it gets to touch.
I can shut the door whenever I want.
That was the beginning of Tony AI.
But then I saw something else.
ChatGPT was still another gatekeeper.
A powerful one.
But another company between me and the brain of my business.
Another company that could change the product.
Change the rules.
Move the useful parts somewhere more expensive.
Decide what I could access.
Or make me pay more and more to keep using the thing I had built my system around.
I had already spent weeks removing every vulnerable point from my business.
I was not about to build a beautiful, independent machine…
Then put its brain in somebody else’s building.
So I took the next step.
I moved from using ChatGPT…
To building a local brain.
A private home for the intelligence layer of my business.
Something that lives with the rest of the machine.
Something with its own memory.
Something that can know my work without pretending every conversation starts from zero.
Something I control.
The AI can still be connected to the outside world when I need it to be.
But the place where my business thinks, remembers, organizes, and operates is mine.
That was the goal all along.
To know that every vulnerable system in my business was completely under my control.
My list.
My domains.
My servers.
My data.
My sending infrastructure.
My tools.
And now…
My brain.
And I want to be clear about what that has meant in practice.
Not someday.
Not in theory.
In the last 24 hours.
Before this, when something went wrong, I was basically working blind.
An email would fail.
A number would stop moving.
A page would send people somewhere stupid.
A server would choke.
And I would have to figure it out manually.
Log into one server.
Copy an error message.
Try to understand it.
Take a screenshot.
Paste it into ChatGPT.
Explain all the missing context.
Get an answer.
Try something.
Break something else.
Go back to the server.
Start again.
Or wait for somebody technical to explain what was happening.
That is how a lot of small businesses work.
They are not actually running systems.
They are babysitting problems.
And I was doing it with four mail servers, a 130,000-person list, a membership site, a newsletter, a checkout system, an affiliate program, an outreach machine, and no room for expensive mistakes.
Then we connected the brain.
In one day, it was able to inspect all four mail servers together.
Not just one.
All four.
It found nearly 28,000 messages sitting in queues.
It showed us which server was getting throttled by Yahoo, AOL, and AT&T.
It showed us that another system was failing to sync important deliverability data.
It let us see the shape of the problem instead of guessing.
We took the bad server out of rotation.
We protected the rest of the system.
We built new routing so different types of email could go through the right channels.
We tested the new setup and got a real confirmation from Google that the mail had gone through.
Not “I think it worked.”
Not “the screen looks okay.”
A real successful response.
Then we fixed the membership side.
We removed duplicate paywalls that were confusing people.
We reconciled the member data.
We made sure paid members and free members were being treated differently.
We repaired the checkout flow so the paid $1 offer came before the free sign-up.
Which sounds small until you understand that a single stupid line of page logic can quietly bleed sales for days.
We found nearly 11,000 warm people who were not members.
Then we created fresh, clean sending groups so I can speak to them carefully instead of blasting the whole list and hoping for the best.
We built a real reporting layer.
Now I can see sends.
Bounces.
Complaints.
Opens.
Clicks.
Active subscribers.
Campaign performance.
Thirty-day sending volume.
Before, those answers were scattered across different apps, different server windows, and whatever I could remember.
Now they are beginning to live in one place.
We also rebuilt the outreach path.
Before, finding a possible advertiser or partner meant opening tabs, checking websites, trying to remember who I had contacted, writing a message, wondering where I put it, and losing track of the whole thing.
Now there is a path:
Find them.
Qualify them.
Draft the pitch.
Queue it.
Track the reply.
Follow up.
That is not just “being organized.”
That is turning a vague, exhausting activity into an actual business process.
And that is the thing that keeps hitting me.
Any one of these fixes could have taken me days.
Some of them would have taken weeks.
Some of them would have sat there broken because I did not know where to begin.
Instead, in 24 hours, the machine was able to inspect itself, show us the problems, help build the fixes, and test the results.
I am still the owner.
I am still the editor.
I am still the one who decides what goes live.
But I am no longer alone in a dark room with a broken machine and a browser full of tabs.
That is what a business brain does.
It helps the business see.
It helps the business remember.
It helps the business move.
And this is why I am excited.
Not because I think I have figured everything out.
I have not.
I still need revenue.
I still need sales.
I still need to prove that this whole thing can feed me.
But I now have something I did not have before.
A machine that can survive.
A machine that does not become more expensive every time it becomes more powerful.
A machine that will still be here even if I go bankrupt.
A machine nobody can casually take away from me.
I built an email list of 130,000 people.
I built my own publishing infrastructure around it.
I built systems for taking care of it.
And now I am building the brain.
This is not just an email list anymore.
It is a real business.
A real asset.
A printing press.
And it is mine.
Only paid members will find out how I did this in detail...
So if you want to find out how I did it...
So you can do something like this too...
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