We’ve been quietly moving along, upping our game, finding new clients, building. Point solutions to get started, then leading to broader builds and monthly retainers. Today, I’m proud to report Blue Fractal Group is generating $50k of recurring monthly revenue, plus project work. We may not break $1M in 2026 but we’re gunning for that goal. A far cry from the $5k assessment projects we were doing a year ago. bluefractalgroup.com We are a small team of 3. Looking ahead to 2027 we are about ready to add one or two people to the team. Could that be you?

It's been a few months since my last post, but happy to report I've been busy with business development and project work. Today I closed my 4th client ($32k project) which put me over $100k in sales this year. Of that, a little over 20% will be recurring revenue in 2026 (licensing fees for one client, and a 12-month maintenance contract for a different client). Not bad for starting from absolutely scratch in March. I followed the approach touted here: started by building things for myself, then for others for free, then posting about my learnings to LinkedIn, and eventually getting my first paid client, which led to referrals. Now I'm looking at 2026 opportunities and growth through a very different lens, and I will start building a team. Thanks for all the support of this community!

We're building some great tools for clients, at the moment focused on processing files and using AI to extract specific content. In the last few days we are running up against rate limits - we're using Claude API at the moment because it the API handles PDFs better than OpenAI. I'm concerned about the client experience if they can't run a volume of files (it's not a huge volume, but not trivial either). Are others running into rate limits and if so how are you solving this issue?

I'm very happy to report my first AI client who hired me to do an Audit has now hired me to build the first round of AI-based automations! They signed the proposal yesterday and we will start work next week. We'll begin with just the first two tools from a list of over 30 possible AI automations identified in the audit. The audit was the perfect way to understand their opportunities, where is the lowest hanging fruit, and most importantly - get the client to think about the value in annual dollars saved. Once they put a value on the tools to be built, it became very easy for them to understand the ROI and close the deal.

Closed my first deal doing an AI Audit for a construction company. I'm now turning that Audit into a series of paid development projects to build tools for the client based on relative ROI. Will post again if/when I get those to close. I'm growing my reputation and soon I'll be able to charge more for the Audit - but this is my first paid gig for AI work and wanted to share the news!