Updates

A build log. Every real milestone gets a dated entry: what shipped, what broke, and what I'd do differently. Each entry also appears on its project's page.

October 2026 Oct 6 Hometown Coloring Book Why I'm building Hometown Coloring Book Why I’m building a local advertising business around free family coloring books, with systems for production, sales, and district expansion.

September 2026 Sep 23 Fantasy Joes What happened with Fantasy Joes The ranking game improved and search traffic grew, but the paid contests didn't become a business. Here's what I built, what happened when people used it, and why I moved on.

July 2026 Jul 4 Fantasy Joes Turning Discord servers into a distribution channel for Fantasy Joes The week I built partner attribution for Discord, made the channel measurable in the growth dashboard, and rebuilt the comics pipeline to reject its own bad art.

Jul 3 Fantasy Joes How I turned the game's own duel data into 145 SEO pages Fantasy Joes is a game where people pick between two NFL players. That means it already knows how the crowd would answer "player X or player Y" — the exact question people search before a draft. Here's how I turned that byproduct into 145 comparison pages, and the parts that were harder than they look.

Jul 3 This site I rebuilt this site with AI agents, and the hard part was making them write the truth Rebuilding nickdahlhoff.com in a day with a fleet of AI agents — and why the real work was writing rules that kept them from making things up in my voice.

Jul 3 Fantasy Joes How I security-audited my own money feature before turning it on A solo builder with no security team, stress-testing a real-money feature with AI before shipping it — why the bar is different for money, how the audit was structured, and what it cost.