$ status: building-in-public

$158 sites. 124 pitches. $0. >now automating in n8n

18 y/o builder documenting how to make real money with no-code automation. Templates, teardowns, and the stuff nobody else shows you.

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caseymcdougal.dev/now
const status = {
  age: 18,
  location: "Tennessee",
  sitesBuilt: 158,
  pitchesSent: 124,
  revenue: 0,
  lesson: "distribution beats automation",
  now: "building in public"
};
Last updated: April 1, 2026 →
the pivot

From code to no-code automation

158 sites taught me that the real money is selling the idea of automation. Not the code.

01.

Built everything in code

Scraped leads, generated demo sites with LLMs, batch deployed, sent 124 pitches. The system worked perfectly. The conversions didn't.

158 sites deployed
02.

Discovered n8n

Visual workflows. Drag-and-drop automation. Agencies pay thousands for what takes 23 minutes to build. That's the gap.

The real leverage
03.

Now teaching it

Free templates, teardowns, and weekly notes on how to build and sell no-code automations. All documented in public.

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projects

What I've built

Systems, experiments, and the code behind them.

Code

Vantage Pipeline

Full automation: scrape → generate → deploy → pitch. 158 sites, $0 revenue. The system that taught me the lesson.

Node.jsFirecrawlGemini
Live

Build in Public

Real-time updates, threads, wins and fails. The main event happens on X. This site is the archive.

X/TwitterDaily
free kits

A library, not a launch.

Free workflow kits for builders. One email unlocks every kit. Current and future. No upsell, no funnels.

kit_01live

158 Sites, $0: The Vantage Teardown

The full autopsy of my failed lead-gen pipeline. Every workflow, prompt, and pitch, plus a written post-mortem of why it broke at conversion, not code. The failure is the moat: you can't drag-and-drop scar tissue.

inside the teardown:

[01]
The full pipeline (n8n + code)
Workflow exports, scraper config, deploy script. Fork the whole thing

Firecrawl → Gemini → batch deploy. The exact node graph and the glue code that templates leave out: rate-limit handling, retry logic, dedupe, the JSON schema I landed on after site #40.

[02]
The prompt vault
Every LLM prompt I shipped, every variant, with notes on what broke

Industry-classifier prompts, copy-generation prompts, the one that hallucinated phone numbers, the one that finally stopped. With diffs so you can see how I got from v1 to v9.

[03]
The pitch graveyard
124 real pitches, redacted, annotated with what I'd change now

The cold emails, the DMs, the follow-ups. Subject lines, open rates where I have them, replies (rare), and the one near-close that taught me distribution beats automation.

[04]
Where it actually broke
A written post-mortem. Not "iterate faster," real failure modes

The technical pipeline worked. The business pipeline didn't. This is the section that nobody on n8n.io can write because they didn't ship the failure first. Bottlenecks, false signals, the tells I missed.

[05]
Site #1, redo
If I started over tomorrow. The pipeline I'd actually run

The smaller, slower, distribution-first version. What I'd cut, what I'd keep, where I'd put the human in the loop, and the one metric I'd watch instead of "sites deployed."

n8n export124 pitchespost-mortem+ raw workflows
kit_02live

PonderUI — one-shot sites for any niche

A private Claude Code skill that one-shots glass + neuo landing pages with a hard anti-AI-tell filter. Pick a niche, run it, ship a site that actually looks shipped. Built to turn taste into cash, fast.

Claude Code skillglass + neuoanti-AI-tell filtersubs only
kit_03live

Daily AI Digest Kit — your own curated AI newsletter

A cron that emails you a curated AI digest every morning. $0/month, deploys in five minutes, runs on Vercel's free tier. No n8n, no Zapier, no paid scrapers — just one Next.js file and a deploy button.

Next.js cronHN + RSS + GitHubClaude Haiku$0/mo
kit_04live

Newsletter Writer Kit — your notes, your voice, shipped weekly

A Monday cron that reads your notes from the past week and emails you a newsletter draft. It doesn't write FOR you — it assembles what you already wrote, quoting your actual sentences. Edit, don't blank-page.

Next.js cronGitHub notes repoClaude Sonnet 4.5~$0.25/mo
kit_05open call

What should I build next?

The library grows from real builder problems. Reply on X with the workflow you wish existed. Most-requested becomes the next kit.

request →@caseymcdougal
connect

Find me elsewhere

I don't check DMs everywhere, but I read everything.

X / Twitter

@caseymcdougal / daily updates, threads, wins and fails

GitHub

caseymcdougal / code, experiments, open source

Instagram

@casey.mcdougal / photos, life, the offline stuff

Facebook

casey mcdougal / old friends, family, hometown stuff

Email

caseysandersmcdougal@gmail.com / slowest response, but I read everything