The six sessions 🎯 · from what a stranger finds to a system you keep
The running case is Ines Calloway, a constructed mid-career data analyst who forecasts demand for a regional grocery chain and wants the right people to find her. She is invented for teaching, and every page says so. Alongside her, every build-along runs on your own name and your own work.
A reputation is a search result
Before anyone reads your profile, they search your name. Ten results, four kinds, two honest counts, and the one result you will add first. Build-along: the audit on your own name.
🧭 Session 2 · coreYour niche: the onliness test
Positioning for one person: the line about your work nobody else could sign. The competitor swap, Kevin Kelly's arithmetic for a small niche, and a measured checker for your line.
🛠️ Session 3 · coreVoice and proof: show the work
Proof over claims. Austin Kleon's ten rules for showing process, a ladder from claim to artefact someone else used, and voice as a set of choices. Build-along: one real piece of work, made public.
🎛️ Session 4 · bench nightThe consistency bench
Does posting more grow engagement? 302 real accounts and 22,657 answers counted in your browser: the cross-creator chart, the survivor trap, the same creator against themselves, and a break button.
🏡 Session 5 · deeperPlatforms and formats: owned and rented ground
Where your readers actually read, the audience you own against the one you rent, digital sharecropping, and choosing a format for the reader rather than the platform's fashion.
🌱 Session 6 · deeperA system you keep
A cadence you can sustain, an idea bank that refills itself, and a quarterly re-run of the session 1 audit so the before and after are evidence. Final scorecard.
Your passport 🎫
Clear all three quiz questions in a session and it gets stamped. Six stamps means you can audit your own first page, write a positioning line you can defend, turn real work into public proof, read a "post more" chart for what it does and does not show, and run the whole thing on a cadence you can keep. Stamps live in this browser only.
What this is not, so you land in the right place 🧭
| If your question is | Go here instead |
|---|---|
| How do I name a company, set its positioning and build its visual identity? | AI Branding ↗ |
| How do I produce, repurpose and edit content at volume, with or without AI tools? | AI Content ↗ |
| How do funnels, segments and channels work as a marketing system for a business? | Marketing ↗ |
| How do I say it well, in a meeting, an email or a talk? | Communication ↗ |
| I want people who look me up to find work worth trusting, and I want to know which advice about that is real. | you are in the right place |
A reputation for one person. What a stranger finds, what you want them to find, the proof that gets it there, and the evidence on cadence. Company branding, content production and marketing systems are taught next door and linked from here rather than repeated.
What is honest here 🧾
Creator advice travels with numbers that have no method behind them. Each claim on these pages carries its status, and where nothing citable exists, the page says that instead.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Every bench figure: the correlations, the busiest and quietest thirds, the survivors, the shuffles | Really computed in your browser from 302 accounts and 22,657 answers in the public Data Science Stack Exchange data dump (April 2024, CC BY-SA), names and ids removed |
| The positioning-line checker | A heuristic. It counts words in four printed lists; it does not judge a line, and it says so on the widget |
| Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans | Read at source, both the 2008 original and the shorter rewrite on the same page, which frame the differently, plus the challenge he published on his own site |
| Buffer's finding that more LinkedIn posts lift reach per post | Read at source; company data on its own users, taught as the disagreement with the bench, not as a verdict |
| "Post daily to grow" | No source found. Taught as advice without evidence |
| "Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room", Jeff Bezos | Attribution unverified. No primary source located |
| Ines Calloway, her search results, drafts and calendar | Constructed, for teaching |
The knowledge map 🧠
The whole path at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.