Standing References

The rule set fed to any AI tool generating design output, web pages, components, decks, graphics, so it produces premium human-crafted work instead of generic AI slop. Distilled from 400+ shipped Brand Identity Kit Generator component rounds, folded together with Anthropic’s frontend-design skill and the open-source taste-skill system (July 2026).

Structure: Part 0 forces a declaration before any code gets written, three 1-10 dials (Variance, Motion, Density) plus one named Signature element plus a one-screen color/type/layout plan. Part 1 is a six-axis self-critique (Philosophy, Hierarchy, Execution, Specificity, Restraint, Variety) scored 1-5, anything under 3 must be revised before it’s shown. Part 2 is the anti-AI-tell list, no emoji icons, no gradient text, no invented metrics, no left-border accent stripes, no default-AI palettes (editorial beige+brass+oxblood, near-black+acid-accent, broadsheet) or default-AI fonts (Inter, Fraunces, Instrument Serif). Part 3 locks tokens: one accent color per page, one radius scale, off-black/off-white never pure. Parts 4-10 cover hero composition, layout safety CSS, motion rules (transform/opacity only, house ease cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1)), interactive states, copy voice, and accessibility floors. Part 11 is the verification ritual, an 11-step checklist run before any design is called done, ending in a brand-swap test and a 360px-to-1400px width drag.

The plan and runbook for Attio as the single customer brain: one record per human that knows who they are, what they bought, what they’re worth, how warm they are, and what to offer next. Baseline at write time: 11,658 contacts, 2,347 companies, 759 paying customers, $735,007.53 tracked revenue, 98 VIPs driving ~79% of it, 439 paying customers sitting in Win-Back.

Five intelligence layers stack on top of the clean spine: Layer 2 (revenue truth from Stripe + PayPal, Subscription Status/MRR/Churn Risk), Layer 3 (Gmail engagement state), Layer 4 (lead scoring + Next Logical Offer, an upsell ladder from AI Writing Starter Kit at $19 up through VIP/Premium), Layer 5 (future: transcript intelligence and social signals). Autonomy model is explicit: the agent runs hygiene, enrichment, tagging, and note-taking automatically; anything touching send, pricing, new offers, $1,000+, or schema changes escalates to Andrew. Cadence: daily revenue sync (~6am), Monday health sweep, Friday pipeline report, monthly reconcile. Section 7 logs hard-won tool gotchas: Attio’s filter API has no is-empty operator, Stripe’s MCP hides customer email (raw API GetCustomers is the workaround), PayPal can’t be attributed per-person at all.

One view of everything that costs money to run, split into predictable fixed subscriptions versus usage-based costs that can spike without warning. Fixed subscription floor: roughly $300-450/mo (Claude Max, ChatGPT, Notion Business, Canva, Gamma, Suno, Attio, Cloudflare base). Usage-based sits on top, variable, and Stripe processing runs ~3% of revenue on every sale.

The watch list, ranked by surprise risk: Cloudflare (R2 + Workers + D1, base $5/mo then usage), scheduled tasks that call paid APIs while nobody’s watching (morning-briefing 7am, stream-prep 9pm, toolbox-extract 4am), Gemini/Nano Banana 2 image gen (~$0.067-0.15 per image, no hard cap by default), Apify (compute units plus per-result fees, credits don’t roll over), Attio (seat $29-69 plus usage credits), Stripe fees (2.9% + $0.30), Notion Custom Agents ($10 per 1,000 credits, no rollover), Zapier (meters by task, 750 on entry Professional tier), and direct API-key usage separate from flat subscriptions (Opus $5/$25 per million tokens, Sonnet $3/$15). Recommends hard spend caps on Gemini/OpenAI, billing alerts on Cloudflare and Apify, and mapping every scheduled task to what it actually calls.

The GTM and monetization plan built on a two-engine split: Engine 1 is cash, agent-run, ~2 hours/week of Andrew’s time (approvals, QA, escalations). Engine 2 is product, Andrew-run, Brand With AI plus the blogging system. Starting point was roughly $8k/mo; the target was $15k/mo profit inside 60 days, then a 12-month ramp to a $1M run-rate by around month 11.

The hero move is the Automated Blog Engine: a done-for-you, brand-aware, AI-produced blog sold at $997/mo (or $1,500 setup + $497-797/mo), targeting 7 low-touch clients to add $7,000/mo at ~82% margin, dogfooding the same blog-system tech DH is already building for itself. Combined with Club growth (+$3,500), Podia evergreen (+$2,500), a packaged BrandBuilderBot (+$2,500), and a monthly paid workshop (+$1,500), the day-60 total lands near $25k/mo revenue, ~$20.5k profit at 82% margin. The escalation boundary is explicit: pricing, new offers, cold-outreach targets, and anything above roughly $1k commitment goes to Andrew; everything else (daily content, nurture, CRM hygiene, reporting, article production) runs on autopilot. The 12-month phase table tracks $18-23k (months 1-2) up to $96-116k (months 10-12) run-rate.