Operator, not commentator. Essays and notes on running businesses with AI agents and building ShoUp in public.https://bryanmarsh.com.au/en-auhttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/traffic-is-mostly-machines/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/traffic-is-mostly-machines/What I changed about the way I count a visit, and why the smaller number is the one I trust.Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/agent-dashboards-are-dead/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/agent-dashboards-are-dead/Why the visual agent cockpit faded while agents moved into the chat apps people already use, and where my own stack agrees.Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/what-an-ai-team-costs/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/what-an-ai-team-costs/What thirteen agents really run on, the model that got fired for inventing tickets, and the check that keeps the answer true.Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/being-asked-gets-goals-done/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/being-asked-gets-goals-done/The research ShoUp is built on, cited properly, and the statistic we retired because it had no source.Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/user-count-moved-three-times/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/user-count-moved-three-times/A churn scare that turned out to be unflagged test accounts, and the case for giving every number one canonical query.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/forked-the-app-anyway/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/forked-the-app-anyway/Why I forked a fast moving open source chat app and the one rule that keeps the fork alive.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/i-built-the-asker/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/i-built-the-asker/The story of the AI business coach that reads my real numbers every Monday and asks.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/agents-never-talk/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/agents-never-talk/Why my agent team passes work through records and one-line handoffs instead of free agent conversations.Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-threadshttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-threadsThe agent stack got its outside advisors today. My staff agents run on Claude, but I keep five rival models on tap for second opinions. They now sit as the Justice League: Superman is GPT, Wonder Woman is Gemini, Flash is Grok, Martian Manhunter is Kimi, Aquaman is DeepSeek. One command convenes all five. They rank each other's answers blind so nobody plays favourites, my agents weigh it, I decide. No KPIs, no scorecard. Advisors, not employees. Green Lantern's seat stays open.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-xhttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-xMy AI org chart had a hole in it. The staff agents all run on Claude. But I keep five rival models on tap for second opinions: GPT, Gemini, Grok, Kimi, DeepSeek. Advisors, not employees. So today they took their seats as the Justice League. Superman is GPT, the all-rounder. Wonder Woman is Gemini, her search grounding cites its sources. Flash is Grok, fastest to the present. Martian Manhunter is Kimi, reads a million tokens in one sitting. Aquaman is DeepSeek, the deep, cheapest seat at the table. One command convenes all five on a hard question. They answer, then rank each other's answers blind, so nobody plays favourites. My Claude agents weigh it and I decide. No targets, no KPIs, no scorecard. Advice comes in, judgment stays home. Green Lantern's seat is open.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/we-swapped-slack/https://bryanmarsh.com.au/essays/we-swapped-slack/Moving 27 AI agents and a human team off Slack onto self-hosted chat: the latency that routed offshore, the header nobody documents, and why we kept going.Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-2https://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-2We ripped Slack out of every business we run. Replaced it with Buzz, an open source tool built by Block. No renewal notice. No vendor roadmap. Just a tool we control end to end.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-4https://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-4I missed a meeting last week. Wasn't happy about it. So now my assistant agent, Sasha, pings me before every meeting, on phone and desktop, with what I need for it. Ask her what's on today and she tells you. Behind her, Gordon watches email, text and Facebook for meeting requests. Sasha flags them, asks if I'm attending, and adds it to my calendar.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-3https://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-20260828-151703-x-3Buzz isn't just chat anymore. AI agents run actual desks inside it now. One triages email and drafts replies. Nothing sends without a human tapping approve. One takes support tickets and pushes them straight into Asana, so nothing sits unread. One answers accounts questions. Another handles infra questions, the stuff people used to ping an engineer for. Same channel. Same phone. A different desk depending on what you ask.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 02:00:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-three-questionshttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-three-questionsThree questions run my AI team. Did the work happen? Was it right? Are we hitting the numbers? One agent owns each. Until May I answered all three myself, by glancing across eight boards every morning. The manager layer was the part I'd skipped.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:45:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-shoup-earlyhttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-shoup-earlyTwo weeks ago I said "ask me in a month" about the AI business I'm building. People asked. So here it is, early. It's called ShoUp. It calls a coach's clients between sessions, in the coach's own voice, and asks how they went.Mon, 24 Aug 2026 02:15:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-batman-problemhttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-24-batman-problemI have a Batman problem. Not the cape. The org chart. I've been building AI agents to run my businesses. Not chatbots. Agents with jobs. They pick up work, do it, hand it to the next one. They needed names. I went with the obvious.Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:15:00 GMThttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-17-coach-agenthttps://bryanmarsh.com.au/notes/#note-2026-08-17-coach-agentThe AI team has a new member. Every agent I introduced last week works for me. This one works on me. A business coach. Every Monday it reads the real numbers out of the books, checks what I said I'd do against what I did, and makes me commit to three things. One of them is always the thing I've been avoiding.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:02:00 GMT