This morning, I woke up in Kangaroo Valley, Australia, with no newsletter and no content system. Tonight I'm sending you this from all three.
The domain's been sitting there since last year, waiting for me to do something with it. Site designed, email infrastructure wired up, first edition written... done.
One day. One person. A whole lot of AI.
And honestly?
That's the whole thesis of what I'm building here.
My name's Mike Carr. I'm a freelance copywriter. I write million-dollar campaigns for finpub and ecom brands. VSLs, sales pages, email sequences, upsell flows, the works.
I've been living off freelancing income for close to five years now.
No team. No VA. No agency behind me. Just me, my laptop, and a growing stack of AI systems I've built to run everything.
I'm also a digital nomad. Right now, it's Aus. Before that, it was New Zealand, Madeira, Poland, a bunch of other places I'll tell you about.
I manage clients across the US, Europe, and APAC... which means my calendar looks like a crime scene and I've gotten very good at async communication.
Or I've gotten very weird. Probably both.
Here's the thing that made me start this newsletter…
A few months ago I looked at my setup and realized I'm not really a "freelancer" anymore. I'm running a one-person agency.
I've got multiple clients across different industries. I've got systems handling my research, my project management, my prioritization, even parts of my actual writing workflow. I built all of it myself with AI. Not by following some course or buying some template... but by solving real problems as they came up.
This week alone: I broke a client's day 1 hotlist sign-up record on a VSL launch. That felt damn good. But I also found myself paralyzed by competing priorities across all my projects, so I sat down and built myself a custom priority decision engine. I call it the ONE THING app. You feed it your projects, your deadlines, your mental state... and it tells you what to focus on right now. Not a to-do list. A decision.
That's what I keep doing. I hit a wall, I build a tool, the wall disappears.
Then I hit the next wall.
Most solo operators I know are stuck in one of two places. Either they're drowning... taking on too much work because they're scared to say no, grinding 12-hour days, burning out. Or they're undercharging... doing great work but leaving money on the table because they haven't figured out how to deliver more value without more hours. I've been in both of those places. I figured out how to get out of them, and I'm still figuring it out, and I want to show you how in real time.
That's what The One-Person Agency is.
Every week, I'm going to show you what I'm actually doing. Real client case studies -- anonymized, but with real numbers and real strategies. The AI tools and apps I'm building for my operation. How I manage clients across time zones while living out of a suitcase. And honest takes on what's working and what isn't, because plenty of shit doesn't work and I think pretending otherwise is a waste of your time.
No theory. No guru energy. No "in today's edition we'll explore the synergies of..." None of that. Just what's happening in my business, week to week, as it happens.
If you're a freelancer, solo consultant, or small agency owner who wants to do more with less... this is for you. If you're curious about AI but you're tired of people telling you to "just use ChatGPT" without showing you what that actually looks like inside a real client workflow... this is especially for you.
I don't have all the answers. I finally pulled the trigger on launching this thing today, and I'm still not sure the emails won't end up in spam. But I'd rather show you the messy reality of building this than wait until it's polished, perfect, and boring.
Mike