Six projects,
start to finish.

A one-room studio needed a site that felt like the room itself — calm, personal, unmistakably not a chain. Brittany Franco has been a licensed esthetician since 2013 and opened TuneUp in 2023; the site had to carry that, and get people to a booking.

Five pages, hand-written HTML and CSS, no framework and no page builder. I photographed the space at three times of day so the light on the site matches the light you walk into. Booking hands off to Vagaro, where her calendar already lived.

The constraint that shaped it: she is the business. Stock photography of a generic spa would have undone the whole point, so every image is the actual room, the actual products and the actual esthetician.

Every five minutes it checks the market, and it only buys while Bitcoin is above its 200-day average. When that rule says no, it sits in cash. Three strategies sit behind it: buying dips inside an uptrend, buying breakouts to new 20-day highs on heavy volume, and a trend ensemble that scores each coin on nine lookbacks from five days to a year and sizes the position down when the coin is volatile.

The thinking: don't trust a strategy because it sounds right. Before giving the bot more room, I built a backtester that replays Coinbase history since 2021 through the bot's own code, with real fees and slippage. The verdict was blunt. The setup it launched with lost money in replay, and dip-buying was the main reason. Only the trend ensemble came out ahead, so that became the next build, behind a go-live check that has to pass before it can be switched on.

The rest is about surviving bad days. Stop-losses live on Coinbase itself, so a crashed computer never leaves a position unprotected. Each trade can lose at most a fixed slice of the account, a bad day pauses buying, and a deep drawdown stops everything until I look. Trend orders rest as post-only limit orders to pay the lower maker fee, then fall back to a normal order after an hour. Two coins are locked out in code, and the bot can never sell them.

It works like a marketing assistant for my two businesses. Claude is the brain: it plans campaigns, writes the copy, finds prospects, keeps a project board and talks with me in a chat panel. The contact forms on this site and on Mike's Lights post to a small Cloudflare Worker, and a hot lead sends me an email and a text.

The thinking: an AI that can send email needs rules it can't talk its way around. Every outbound action passes a guard written in plain code. Nothing goes out unless it belongs to a campaign I approved, and if the campaign changes after approval it drops back to waiting for me. Claude may add one short personal line to an approved email, with no links, prices or promises. Daily sending caps ramp up slowly, a sending domain pauses itself on a high bounce rate or any spam complaint, and every message carries a working unsubscribe.

It also knows what it shouldn't do. It won't guess at homeowners' personal contact details. It asks me which route I want instead. And it costs nothing new to run: the brain runs on my existing Claude plan with a daily cap, and everything else sits on free tiers.