6.8%. That's what a $2M network-agency retainer costs when you rebuild it with 1 senior person and 4 AI agents.
I went line by line. Every item repriced to between 5.5% and 8.2% of the agency fee.
80% of agency hours are billed at junior and mid-level rates. Much of it is resizing, recaps, status reports and scheduling.
Spreadsheet template included. Plug in your own agency's numbers.
Distributed security is brutally hard. Customers will forgive a permissions bug or a sophisticated attacker.
What permanently updates their trust weights is information latency: what you told them during the crisis, and the exact timestamp of when you told them.
8/10
First, a golden distinction for any // all tech crisis comms:
When you announce an outage, customers wait.
When you announce a breach, customers act.
2/10
I run crisis comms for tech companies through SELF.
If you want to plan ahead, or you want someone on-call if it hits the fan, I'd love to chat through it with you:
https://www.thisisstudioself.com/capabilities/crisis
10/10
If you run a platform that holds other people's secrets, put this in place before your bad week:
⚬ Pick one person to own the words (separate from eng).
⚬ Tell customers within an hour of telling vendors.
⚬ Give scope as a ceiling ("up to 1.85%"), never "a subset."
⚬ Warn customers before vendor revocation emails hit their inbox.
9/10
You can't deploy new environment variables if you can't build. Free and Hobby users were locked out for over 27 hours.
If builds are down, tell users to revoke at the provider level first and give an ETA for deploys. Don't tell them to run while tying their shoelaces together.
5/10
A few other unforced errors in the comms stack:
⚬ Two timelines: Saying you spotted it Oct 21, then later saying Oct 20 without explaining the gap (letting HN/X assume the worst).
⚬ Anchoring: Calling 100,000 workspaces "a subset of users."
⚬ The email: Sending a breach notice at 22:37 UTC that literally cut off mid-sentence.
6/10
Why does this happen to good engineering teams?
Because during an incident, a hundred people pile into the Slack channel and nobody owns the comms response.
Legal wants to say nothing. Engineering wants to explain everything. Meanwhile, an outsider's theory is upvoted to the top of Hacker News while the team rewrites a Google Doc again and again (and again)
7/10
Imagine finding out your infrastructure host got popped because Stripe and Anthropic suddenly nuked your production API keys, 40 minutes before your host said a word.
Worse: on-chain researchers tied wallet drains starting at 19:36 UTC to keys stored on Railway. Over two hours before the public disclosure.
The Catch-22: Railway told every customer to urgently rotate every secret...while builds were still paused.
4/10
At 09:25 UTC, Railway knew enough to ask Stripe and Anthropic to revoke customer keys. Yet they kept calling it an "outage" on the status page until 21:59 UTC.
For over 12 hours, customers sat waiting when they should have been rotating production secrets.
Because Railway told vendors 12 hours before telling customers, users found out from third parties first.
3/10
I went down a rabbit hole reading the post-mortems and status logs from the Oct 21 Railway breach.
On the systems side, I don't have much to say re: the engineering response.
On the comms side, it's a different story...
🧵
1/10
I spent most of this year trying to be someone instead of trying to do something.
Every few weeks I’d have a fresh identity crisis:
• What does my work mean?
• What do my tools say about me?
• Am I wasting my life?
Meanwhile, the actual work just sat there waiting for me.
I couldn't be more excited about what I'm doing next:
Most of your team aren't contributors. They're witnesses.
SLA Marshall figured it out in 1944. 15-20% of soldiers fired. Everyone else performed being a soldier.
The tools didn't fix that ratio. Slack and Jira made the theater more convincing.
Visibility isn't accountability. Activity isn't output.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/collaboration-is-a-lie-ownership
Big agencies win your business with ideas, then bill you millions for coordination.
You aren't paying for creativity. You're paying for 19 layers of middle-management routing, three weeks of sync calls, and a $400k invoice to update slide typography.
Why I'm building a 1-person, $1B agency - and why the holding company model is mathematically cooked:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/why-im-building-a-one-person-billion
The passive income grift worked perfectly, just not for the people who tried it.
I met a guy drop-shipping jade face rollers. $1.20 on Alibaba, $29.99 on Shopify. He never spoke to a customer. Five months in, he was $800 down.
700,000 Shopify stores opened between 2019 and 2021. About 90% failed within a year.
The boring thing still works. Find a real problem, solve it for real people, keep showing up.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/passive-income-destroyed-a-generation
Stop asking what your passion is.
Ask what kind of misery you're willing to tolerate for the next ten years.
People will happily torch their bank accounts, friendships, and multi-million-dollar companies just to avoid saying three little words:
“I fucked up.”
Never underestimate what someone will burn to the ground just to protect the story they tell about themselves.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/never-underestimate-what-someone
AI writing detectors are junk. OpenAI shut down its own classifier after it performed worse than a coin toss.
People are using them to end careers.
Hachette pulled Mia Ballard's novel after one viral video and amateur forensics. Her career was gone. There was no verdict.
Dumas had 73 collaborators. He is canon. Reddit would burn him down today.
I want no part of it.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-ai-writing-witch-hunt-is-idiotic
I call it the Long Later: the years between hearing that AI will change everything and seeing it happen.
You can either spend them waiting or building.
If you've wasted ten months questioning every business idea you have, stop thinking and start something. Anything. One paying customer will teach you more than another month of second-guessing.
Claude Code won't fix your life.
Evernote, Roam, and Notion didn't either.
An overflowing archive isn't thinking.
Meta-work is just procrastination with better aesthetics.
You already know what to do.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/ai-tools-wont-fix-your-life