Nights and weekends, around a full-time job — that's the only time I get. 13 cycles a year with a week off between each one. Everything I ship, everything I abandon, and what it actually cost.
I run marketing agencies. Anti-Agency is the other side of that: free, plain lessons that show local business owners how to do what agencies charge them for. The accounts opened in October 2026 with zero followers. This cycle finds out how far a brand-new channel can go in 26 days, posting every day, numbers in public.
If I can make my own brand known in 26 days, I can do it for a local business. If I can't, I have no business selling it.
The dates, so you can hold me to them
Before the clock started — businesses already built
A directory of franchise brands, built to sell founding-partner placements.
Generic inboxes reply at roughly zero. The whole outcome hangs on finding a named executive, which is a completely different and slower job than building the site.
A directory of LGBTQ-owned businesses, starting with certified DC companies.
"Owned by" and "friendly to" are not the same claim, and mixing them would have wrecked the premise. Certification lists were the only defensible source.
My own skincare line. Tallow and shea, five products.
A physical-product brand runs into claims law immediately. What you are allowed to say a cream does is a much tighter box than the marketing instinct wants.
Revenue to date: $0 — not selling yetFestival and event directory, monetized through booking affiliates.
An events directory decays faster than any other kind. If the dates are not maintained by a machine, the site is wrong within a month and the structured data starts lying to Google.
One PHP engine, 22 local directories, one config file each.
The engine was the actual business. Every individual directory is a config file. The mistake was thinking of them as 22 projects instead of one product with 22 instances.
Finds local businesses with weak Google review profiles and shows them the gap.
The obvious version of this business — filter happy customers to the review form, send unhappy ones elsewhere — is against Google's terms and would get a client's profile pulled. Ruling it out on day one removed the easiest revenue and left a harder, honest product.
Beard care aimed at the skin under the beard, not the hair on top of it.
Nearly every beard brand sells hair softness. The itch and the flaking are a skin problem. That one repositioning was worth more than any feature.
Revenue to date: $0 — not selling yetShort bottom-of-funnel product videos, made by AI, posted daily.
The cost per video is the whole business. I burned 675 credits in two hours re-rendering one clip six ways before I priced the model I was using. Now nothing renders until the cost per unit is on the table.
How this works
What got built, what it cost, what it made, and whether the bet paid. No email in between.
hello@26days.com