TL;DR: A 5-person team at Gusto shipped a full AI product in 10 weeks — no Figma, no Jira, no docs. The lesson isn’t about their tools. It’s about the question they asked before they opened a single one. That question is the one most of us never ask.

Grab your kava. This one’s going to sting a little. ☕

I want to tell you about a team that built a complete AI product in 10 weeks.

Five people. No Figma. No Jira. No documentation. No project manager.

Just Claude Code, a permanent Zoom call that ran for ten weeks straight, and a question they asked themselves before they started:

Which of our tools are actually serving the work — and which ones are just making the process feel legitimate?

That question changed everything.

Here’s the part that stopped me when I read this.

The CTO — Eddie Kim, who runs a company with $1 billion in revenue and 500,000 small business clients — went back to writing code himself. A designer with zero engineering background hit the 94th percentile for shipping code. They replaced planning documents with something they called the “trash-can method”: write it, review it together, throw it away. The writing and reviewing was the decision. The document was just the container.

The result: a new product, live, in 10 weeks.

Now here’s what I want you to sit with.

Most of the tools in your stack are not there because they make your work better. They’re there because they make your work look organised. Figma makes designs look professional. Jira makes planning look structured. Docs make decisions look documented.

None of that is the same as shipping something good.

And this isn’t just a tech company problem. I see the same thing in creator stacks all the time. The content calendar that takes longer to maintain than the content it plans. The project management tool nobody opens. The scheduling platform that adds three steps to a process that used to take one.

We accumulate tools the way we accumulate excuses. Slowly. Convincingly. Until we can’t see the work anymore for all the scaffolding around it.

The Balkanish AI Way doesn’t mean using every tool available.

It means knowing which tools are yours — and which ones you’re just performing.

In Croatia, we have a phrase: kako se to radi. “How it’s done.” The unspoken agreement that this is the way, because it’s always been the way. Warm, communal, completely useless when you’re trying to build something new.

Gusto’s team didn’t have a kako se to radi. They had a blank screen and a question. That’s the whole difference.

Three things worth doing with this:

Name your Figma.

Every creator has one — the tool they use because it feels professional, not because it actually moves the work. Write it down: “My Figma is ___.” That’s the first honest step.

Try the trash-can method once.

This week, instead of writing a strategy doc — write it, read it out loud, then ask: do I actually know what to do now? If yes, you don’t need the document. The thinking was the work.

Ask the 10-week question.

Not “what should I build?” What would you actually build if you stripped away the tools, the process, the planning cycles, and just started? That answer is usually more honest — and more interesting — than anything a roadmap has ever produced.

The full story of how Gusto did this — including the exact two-tool agent stack, how they shipped to production from day one, and what happened when a non-technical designer started writing code — is worth reading in full.

Read the full breakdown here.

And if this made you think of the one process in your own work that costs you the most time — the one you keep meaning to fix — hit reply and tell me. I read every single one. And the most interesting answers might just become the next Drop.

Ajde. ✍️

Anita 🧡

P.S. — If you’re building your own AI stack and want it to actually work for you instead of the other way around — the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic is still free and still the right place to start. Because the tools only get as good as the context you give them.

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Grab your kava. This one’s practical. ☕

A few months ago, my brand looked different.

I had visuals I liked. A swan. Clean design. Nothing wrong with it. But something didn’t sit right — it didn’t fully reflect where I was going. The more I wrote, the more Balkan I became. The more I leaned into my roots — the language, the philosophy, the pomalo energy — the more I realized my visual identity hadn’t caught up with my actual identity.

Brands evolve. Mine did too. And last Tuesday, something happened that made it click.

I saw a tool recommended on Instagram. Taste Skill. Saved it, forgot about it, the usual. Then I had a free morning, opened Creao AI, and thought: ajde, let’s try it.

Four hours later I had a complete brand system — logo, color palette, typography, a 10-page guidelines PDF. And a symbol that stopped me when I saw it.

A letter B, built from cross-stitch geometry. The same pattern as traditional Croatian lace. Čipka. My grandmother’s craft. In my logo.

I didn’t ask for it. It came from everything my AI already knew about me.

That’s the part I want to explain properly.

What is Taste Skill?

It’s a free tool that lives on GitHub — a platform where developers share resources publicly. Most of GitHub is for coders. But Taste Skill is different.

It’s what’s called an “anti-slop” framework. You install it into your AI tool — Claude, Manus AI, Creao AI, any agent that accepts custom skills — and it changes how your AI makes decisions. Instead of defaulting to generic output — the beige, the safe, the leaf-in-a-logo — it pushes toward specificity and intention.

In Creao and Manus, installation is simple: you add the skill and the tool immediately suggests what it can do, including a brandkit option. No code. No complicated setup. You pick what you want to build and go.

Find it here: github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill — 30.8k people have bookmarked it. That’s not a coincidence.

But here’s what Taste Skill actually needs from you:

The skill is the framework. You are the content.

When I ran the brandkit that morning, Creao AI already knew me well. Not because I’d introduced myself once — but because over weeks of working together, I’d given it real context. My positioning. My audience. What I stand for. What I refuse to be. And most importantly: my brand voice and a complete brand guidelines document.

That’s why the output was specific. That’s why it landed on čipka. The AI made a connection I hadn’t consciously made — because it had enough real information about me to do so.

If you open a fresh AI session tomorrow and run this skill with zero context, you’ll get something generic. Not because the skill doesn’t work. Because the AI has nothing to work with.

So what does “giving your AI context” actually mean?

This is where most people get stuck — and where I want to be practical.

Your AI needs to understand your brand voice. Not your job title. Not your niche keywords. Your actual voice — how you sound, what you believe, who you’re really talking to, what you’d never say even if it performed well.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago: Your Brand Voice Isn’t a Style Choice. It’s an Excavation. That piece explains why most people’s AI content sounds generic — and what’s actually underneath it.

The short version: before you can give your AI good context, you need to excavate your own voice first. That process has a few layers:

Layer 1 — Diagnose the gap. Most people don’t know where their voice is leaking. The AI Voice Gap is a free ten-minute diagnostic that shows you exactly where. It’s the starting point — and it’s free.

Layer 2 — Build the foundation. Once you know what’s missing, you build it. Your Brand DNA. Your Voice System. The one document that lives in every AI session you open — and changes everything that comes out of it. This is what I’m building out properly as a guided workspace. More on that soon.

Layer 3 — Give it to your AI. Store it in Claude, in Manus, in Creao. Every session starts from the same foundation. No more explaining yourself from scratch every time. No more generic output.

That document is what made the čipka B possible. Not the skill alone. The skill + the context together.

The result — and yes, I’m sharing it:

The čipka B. Dark sage green, cross-stitch geometry, a letter built the way lace is built — stitch by stitch, with patience.

My brand finally looks like what I’ve been writing. The Balkanish AI Way — not just as words, but as a visual identity that carries the same heritage.

It took one morning. And weeks of context work before that.

If you want to try this:

Start with your voice. Before any tool, before any skill — your AI needs to know who’s speaking.

I wrote about why that matters here:

Your Brand Voice isn't a Style Choice

It covers the first layer — but only the first. Voice is one piece of a bigger foundation.

I’m currently building a product that walks through the complete process — from brand DNA to voice system to the document your AI actually works from. It’s not ready yet. But it’s coming. If you want to know when it lands, stay on the list.

For now: the

The AI Voice Gap

is where to start. Free, ten minutes, no fluff. It shows you exactly what your AI is missing about you.

Build the context. Then run the skill.

Ajde. ✍️

Anita
babicadesigns.blog

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The Baka knows App

Grab your kava. This one’s playful. ☕

Can I tell you something slightly embarrassing?

Last spring, I opened my content folder and found 47 drafted posts. Forty-seven. Some finished. Some half-baked. Some just a title and a feeling I couldn’t remember anymore.

And I had absolutely nothing to publish.

Ma daj. How does that happen?

It happens because I had content. I just didn’t have a wardrobe.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Most content advice sounds like this: “Post more. Be consistent. Find your niche.”

So you spend six months creating in all directions — a bit of AI, a bit of inspiration, a bit of whatever showed up in your head at 11pm — and then wonder why nothing sticks.

Here’s what’s actually happening: you’re buying individual pieces. Random. Unconnected. No outfit in sight.

A wardrobe isn’t a pile of clothes. It’s a system. Everything in it works together. You can pull something out on a Tuesday morning in five minutes and still look intentional.

Your content should work exactly the same way.

Kava je na stolu — and so is every new post. Subscribe free for AI strategy, brand voice, and a Balkan perspective on building something that actually sounds like you.

The Capsule Content Wardrobe

A capsule wardrobe has three types of pieces. So does a content system that actually runs itself.

The Staples — your white shirts, your good jeans.

These are your 3–5 evergreen topics. The things you could write about forever. The things people come to you for. Mine are: AI tools, brand voice, and systems. That’s it. Everything else hangs on those three.

The Statement Pieces — the sequined jacket you wear once a season and everyone remembers.

These are your bold, personal, slightly-risky posts. The real stories. The hard truths. The posts where you show up as a human, not a content creator. They don’t come out every week — but when they do, they land. Ništa generic about them.

(My Eggs Are Not Small and Pandore was a statement piece. You’ll know yours when you read them back and feel slightly exposed.)

The Fast Fashion — the impulse buys you regret by Thursday.

These are the trend-chasing posts you wrote because everyone else was writing them. The fifth “what the new AI model means for creators” article. The reactive piece you pushed out in 48 hours because the algorithm felt urgent. They feel necessary in the moment. They age in about a week.

You know the ones.

The Rule That Changes Everything

A capsule wardrobe works because of ratio.

80% Staples. 15% Statement Pieces. 5% Seasonal.

And polako — zero fast fashion. We’re curating now.

That ratio is your content calendar. Not a spreadsheet with twelve colour-coded columns. Not a Sunday planning session that takes longer than writing the actual posts. Just: mostly evergreen, occasionally bold, rarely trend-chasing.

And here’s the part that made me put down my kava:

You already have the staples. You just haven’t named them yet.

Try This Now ✂️

Set a timer for ten minutes. Grab something to write on.

Step 1 — Pull out your wardrobe
List every topic you’ve ever posted about. Every draft title. Every “I should write about this someday” note. Just the topics — no judgment, no editing.

Step 2 — Sort the pile
Mark each one:

• ⭐ Staple — I could write ten posts about this and never get bored

• 💎 Statement — personal, bold, not for every week

• 🌀 Fast Fashion — I wrote it because everyone else did

Step 3 — Find your three staples
Circle the top three ⭐ topics. These are your content pillars — but we’re calling them staples now, because “pillars” sounds like architecture homework and this should feel like getting dressed.

Step 4 — Build one outfit
Take one staple, one statement piece you’ve been sitting on, and one practical tip that supports your staple. That’s a week of content. Three posts. One coherent look.

The Honest Reality

This framework doesn’t write the posts for you. Jebiga — I know.

But it does something more useful: it stops the blank-page panic.

When you sit down to create, you’re not asking “what should I post?” You’re asking “which piece from my wardrobe fits this week?”

That’s a much more answerable question. And it means those 47 drafts finally have somewhere to go.

What are your three staples? Drop them in the comments — I’m genuinely curious what’s in your content capsule.

And if you want to check whether your voice stays consistent across all three — that’s exactly what the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic is built for. Five minutes. babicadesigns.com/shop/AIVoiceGap

— Anita

P.S. If this made you open your drafts folder and wince a little — you’re welcome. 😄 Forward it to the creator friend who has 47 unfinished posts and nothing to publish. They know who they are.

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The Baka knows App

TL;DR: Most brand voice advice gives you a list of adjectives. That’s not your brand voice — that’s a costume. Your real voice was already there before any strategy document. The work is excavation, not construction.

Every brand voice exercise ends the same way.

You sit down with a worksheet, a coach, or a ChatGPT prompt. You answer questions about your audience, your tone, your values. You come up with five adjectives. Warm. Direct. Strategic. Approachable. Authentic.

You put them in a document. You tell your AI tools to “write in this voice.”

And the content comes out technically correct — and completely lifeless.

Here’s what nobody says out loud: those adjectives aren’t your brand voice. They’re a description of the brand voice you wish you had.

The problem with constructing a voice

Most brand voice frameworks treat voice like something you design. You research, you decide, you document, you implement.

It makes sense on paper. It rarely works in practice.

Because the creators whose content actually stops the scroll — the ones who sound like nobody else, the ones readers would recognize in three sentences without a name attached — they didn’t construct their voice. They excavated it.

They went inward, not outward.

They looked at what they were already carrying, not what their audience wanted to hear.

Pomalo. Not as a content strategy. As an orientation.

What I found when I stopped constructing

This year I did something that had nothing to do with content strategy.

I looked at my DNA results. I sat with my birth chart. I thought about the village where my father was born — a place between the Adriatic sea and the Velebit mountain you can only find if you already know it exists.

And I found my brand voice there.

Not in an audience research document. Not in a competitor analysis. In the things I had been carrying so long I forgot they were mine.

The Balkan directness that doesn’t soften hard truths but somehow makes them easier to hold. The Adriatic patience that knows some things only come when they’re ready. The ancestral stubbornness that refuses to call good work small — no matter who says piccole.

None of that is on a brand voice worksheet.

All of it is in every piece of content I write.

Constructed vs. excavated — how to tell the difference

Constructed brand voice sounds like:

• Adjectives that could describe a hundred other creators in your niche

• Content that’s technically on-brand but doesn’t feel like you wrote it

• A voice that works in some formats but disappears in others

• Writing that requires constant effort to maintain

Excavated brand voice sounds like:

• Something people would recognize as yours before they see your name

• Content that costs you less effort, not more — because it comes from somewhere real

• A voice that gets stronger under pressure, not weaker

• The thing people mention when they say “I don’t know what it is, but I love how you write”

The difference isn’t talent. It’s depth of source material.

Where to start digging

You don’t need a DNA test. You don’t need a birth chart.

You need three questions and enough honesty to answer them properly:

1. What do you carry that you didn’t choose?

Heritage, upbringing, culture, language, the way your family dealt with hard things. The humor that was in the room before you understood why. The phrases that cut straight to the bone in three words.

2. How do you actually work — not how you think you should?

Are you a planner or a recognizer? Do you think linearly or in flashes? Do you write early or late? Do your best ideas come from systems or from stillness?

3. What would you never say — and why?

Your brand voice is partly defined by what it refuses to be. The corporate softness you won’t perform. The urgency language that makes you cringe. The personas you’ve tried on and shed.

The answers to these questions are your real brand voice document.

Everything else is formatting.

The gap worth closing

Here’s what I’ve noticed working with creators on brand voice:

The problem is rarely that they don’t have a voice. It’s that there’s a gap between the voice that’s already there and the voice that’s showing up in their content.

Sometimes that gap is small — a few adjustments and it closes fast.

Sometimes it’s structural — the content is built on a persona that was never really theirs.

Either way, the work starts with knowing where you actually stand.

That’s what the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic was built for — to show you exactly where your current content diverges from your real voice, before you spend another month producing content that almost sounds like you.

Start there. Then we dig.

Start the AI Voice Gap Diagnostic

Anita 🧡

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The Baka knows App

The number was 62.6%.

I was sitting with my phone in my hand, looking at a DNA ethnicity report, and the number just sat there. 62.6% Balkan. And beneath it, the genetic group: Kroatien — Lika-Senj und Primorje-Gorski Kotar.

Not just “Croatian.” Not a vague Adriatic somewhere. The algorithm pointed its digital finger at the exact strip of land between the sea and the Velebit mountain. The exact region where you turn off the coastal road in Sveti Juraj and drive toward a village called Pandore.

I know that road.

My father was born there.

Pandore isn’t on most maps. It’s the kind of place you find by knowing it exists, not by searching for it. A few houses. The smell of pine and salt in the same breath. The mountain on one side, the Adriatic glittering below. When the Bura wind comes — and it always comes, Senj is famous for its Bura — it arrives from the Velebit, passes through places like Pandore, and hits the coast like it has something to prove.

People from this region are like that. They tend to have something to prove. Or rather — they tend not to need to prove anything to anyone, which looks like the same thing from the outside.

My Baka. The strongest woman I knew. Takva je bila — that’s how she was — which in Croatian is both a description and an entire eulogy.

She sold eggs. That was part of what she did, like most women of her generation in that part of the world. You kept chickens, you sold eggs, you made do. Nismo niš imali, samo ono što smo stvorili našim rukama. We had nothing. Only what we created with our own hands.

At some point she was selling her eggs to Italian traders. The coast had that kind of traffic. And one of them, inspecting the merchandise, said something she never forgot:

“Piccole.” Small.

Her eggs were piccole.

I can hear exactly how she responded — across time, across language, with the full weight of Lika-Senj in her voice:

Ma jebem ti piccole. Moja jaja nisu mala.

I have been thinking about Baka a lot lately. You might know that already, since I mention her in my articles quite often.

Not because I’m sentimental — though I am, more than I usually show — but because I’ve been thinking about where things come from. Not metaphorically. Literally. What is actually in the foundation.

I’ve spent much time building BabicADesigns. Finding language for what I do. Arriving at “the Balkanish AI Way” not as a marketing decision, but as the only honest description of how I work.

And then a DNA test points at the exact land my father came from, and beneath the percentages, the ancient origins appear: Thracian. Illyrian. Slavic. Steppe nomad. The people who built oral wisdom traditions. The people who were never fully assimilated by any empire. The people whose women, in some lineages, rode into battle.

And I thought: of course.

Of course the brand sounds like this. Of course pomalo is a strategy and not an apology. Of course I build things with soul and genuinely cannot do it any other way. Of course when someone says my work is too niche, too specific, too much — some ancestral voice says:

Ma jebem ti piccole.

There’s a version of brand-building that tells you to research your market, find your gap, build to what’s missing.

I did some of that. It’s useful.

But there’s another version — the one nobody talks about much — where you build from bone. Where you don’t decide what your brand sounds like; you excavate it. Where the question isn’t “what does my audience want?” but “what have I been carrying all along that was always meant to be shared?”

Baka carried eggs down to the coast and wouldn’t let anyone call them small.

I build content systems and apparently can’t let anyone call the work shallow.

Nismo niš imali, samo ono što smo stvorili našim rukama.

We had nothing. Only what we made with our hands.

That’s still the deal. It was always the deal.

If you’ve ever felt like your work is too specific — too personal, too rooted in something that feels untranslatable — I want you to consider that the untranslatable part might be exactly the thing.

Not despite it. Because of it.

Pandore is a village you find when you know it exists.

So is good work. So, honestly, is the right audience.

Pomalo. The road turns where it turns.

Puno ljubavi,

Anita

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TL;DR: Planning gives you consistency. Recognizing gives you quality. Most content advice is built for planners. This one is for the other kind.

Every content strategy course, every productivity guru, every “grow your newsletter” thread eventually says the same thing:

Plan ahead. Batch your content. Fill the calendar.

And they’re not wrong. For some brains, this is exactly how it works. The calendar fills up, the content goes out, the audience grows. Clean. Logical. Repeatable.

Then there’s the other kind of creative.

The one who fills in the content calendar and then sits in front of it on Tuesday feeling absolutely nothing. Who “procrastinates” on a piece for two weeks — and then writes the whole thing in one sitting at 11pm because suddenly, without announcement, it was *ready*. Whose best work never happened exactly when it was scheduled. Whose most resonant ideas arrived sideways, between other things, when they weren’t trying.

If that second description sounds familiar — this is for you.

The problem with planning-as-default

Planning is a tool. A useful one. But content strategy has turned it into a personality requirement.

The assumption underneath most advice is that the gap between having an idea and publishing it should be as short and predictable as possible. That consistency is a function of scheduling. That if you’re not batching and planning, you’re being chaotic.

What this misses entirely is a different kind of intelligence.

Not slower. Not lazier. Different.

The intelligence that doesn’t force ideas — it tends them. That doesn’t set a deadline and perform — it watches for readiness. That knows, with a kind of bone-level certainty, when something is ripe and when it isn’t yet.

Pomalo. Not as an excuse. As a precision instrument.

What “recognizing” actually looks like

Recognizing isn’t passive. It’s not waiting for inspiration to show up at your door with a gift basket.

It’s active attention. You’re holding the idea lightly — checking on it, adding to it, letting it absorb things from your life — without forcing it into a format before it wants to be there.

Baka didn’t rush the coffee. She didn’t rush the advice. But when she spoke, it landed every time. *Pamet u glavu* in three words did more than any 47-slide framework ever managed. Because it was said at exactly the right moment, to exactly the right person, with exactly the right weight behind it.

That’s not luck. That’s calibration.

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How to tell the difference: ripening vs. procrastinating

This is the question I get asked most when I describe this approach:

”But how do you know you’re not just avoiding it?”

Fair. Here’s what I’ve learned to look for.

You’re ripening when:

• The idea is still alive in your head — it hasn’t gone quiet or boring

• New material keeps arriving without effort — examples, angles, a sentence that appears in the shower

• The resistance feels like not yet, not not this

• When the moment finally comes, writing flows instead of fights

You’re procrastinating when:

• You actively avoid thinking about it

• The idea feels staler every time you return

• You’re waiting for something external — a better mood, a cleaner desk, a sign

• The “right moment” keeps moving to next week

The distinction is in the texture of the waiting. One is charged. One is flat.

Using this strategically (without losing your mind)

If you’re a recognizer, the worst thing you can do is try to become a planner. You’ll produce technically correct content that sounds like a version of you wearing someone else’s clothes.

But you can’t run a publication on pure instinct either. So here’s the actual system:

Keep a ripening list.

Not a content calendar — a living document of ideas in different stages. Some are seeds (just a phrase, a question). Some are almost ready (you could write them this week if the moment came). Check in regularly. Don’t force anything up the list.

Set soft deadlines, not hard ones.

Instead of “this piece publishes Tuesday 9am,” try “this piece is ready sometime this week.” The constraint is still there — the pressure isn’t artificial.

Protect the 11pm moments.

When something wants to be written unexpectedly — write it. Or at minimum, capture it at the level of detail it’s offering. These aren’t accidents. They’re data. Your creative system is telling you something is ready.

Notice what you’re avoiding vs. what you’re tending.

Sit with an idea for thirty seconds. Does it have energy? Does it pull you toward it slightly, even with resistance? Or does it feel like homework? One of those is ripening. One of those is the wrong idea for right now.

The part about consistency

”But what about showing up consistently? What about the algorithm?”

Here’s my honest answer: consistent presence matters. It does. And there’s a version of this approach that uses planning — not to force ideas, but to create the containers that make recognizing possible.

I have publishing days. I have formats. I have a rough sense of what’s coming. What I don’t have is a piece pre-written three weeks out that I have to publish whether or not it’s alive.

The calendar holds the rhythm. The recognizing fills it with something worth reading.

There’s a reason your best work often surprises you. Not because you got lucky — but because you waited until it was actually ready.

Ko čeka, dočeka. Baka knew.

Plan the container. Recognize the content.

The audience can always tell the difference.

---

-Anita 🧡

Was this useful? If you’re a recognizer, I want to hear how you work. Drop it in the comments — or just reply to this email. I read everything.

P.S. Ko čeka, dočeka — and Baka has been waiting. If you haven’t visited her yet: 👇🏼

The Baka knows App

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My grandmother never read a book about productivity.

She never took a course on mindset, never downloaded a habit tracker, never optimized her morning routine. She woke up before dawn, made coffee, and said things that cut straight to the bone — in five words or less.

“Pamet u glavu.” Use your brain.

“Bez muke nema nauke.” No pain, no learning.

“Nemoj reć hop prije nego što preskočić.” Don’t say hop before you’ve jumped.

That last one is hers. My Oma’s. I’ve been carrying it for thirty years and I still use it more than any framework I’ve ever studied.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately: we are drowning in systems. Content systems. Business systems. AI systems. And most of them are just elaborate ways of saying what Baka already knew. In fewer words. With better coffee.

How a late-night rabbit hole became an app

It started, as most things do, with me going somewhere I didn’t plan to go.

I found Google’s new AI Studio feature — you can now describe an app and Gemini builds it. I sent a screenshot to Claude at 23:00 and said something like: maybe we can build something simple.

What if Baka was the AI?

That was the idea. Not a productivity app. Not another tool. Just daily Balkan grandmother wisdom — real proverbs, family sayings, the kind of one-liners that have no business being as useful as they are — delivered every day, shareable, in three languages.

We named it Baka Knows. Obviously.

What happened next is the part I didn’t expect. I thought we’d sketch something quick. Instead, I found myself arguing about whether the design was Balkan enough (it wasn’t), whether the colors had soul (they didn’t), whether an emoji Baka was acceptable (it was not, we needed a real one with a marama and reading glasses and a coffee cup that says Baka on it).

I found myself writing humor I’d been carrying since childhood. “Bez Vegete — sve je tužno. Sa Vegetom — sve je moguće.” Without Vegeta seasoning, everything is sad. With Vegeta, everything is possible.

Three languages. Čipka lace borders in SVG. Wine red and gold because Baka’s kitchen didn’t do pastels. A share card that generates a 1080x1080 image so you can post her wisdom directly to your Stories.

I built an app. For my baka’s voice. At midnight. Because it felt right.

The thing I actually want to tell you

Here’s what the whole thing cracked open for me.

We talk a lot about authentic voice in content. But authentic voice isn’t a style guide. It’s not a tone document. It’s the stuff that was already there — before the strategy, before the brand, before anyone told you what your content was supposed to look like.

For me, that’s the Balkans. It’s the directness. The humor that doesn’t soften the truth but somehow makes it easier to hold. The wisdom that comes not from optimization but from having lived through things and refusing to dramatize them.

Baka didn’t say “embrace the discomfort of the growth process.”

She said “Plači koliko hoćeš, samo ne ovdje.” Cry as much as you want. Just not here.

Same thing. Completely different energy.

The best content you’ll ever make is the stuff that comes from that place. Not the trend. Not the framework. The thing you’ve been carrying so long you forgot it was even yours.

Try it yourself

Baka Knows is live. One daily wisdom, four categories — life, work, love, food. Croatian, German, English. And yes, you can share it directly to your Stories with the Baka photo included, because what’s the point otherwise:

The Baka knows App

One thing worth knowing: not everyone gets the same wisdom each day. Baka personalizes. Because she always knows what you specifically need to hear.

Come back and tell me: what does Baka have in store for you?

Drop it in the comments. I want to collect them. 🧡

-Anita

Creator System Series documents how I build fun and playful things with AI — the tools, the experiments, the things that work and the things that absolutely don’t. ← Previous: #5 | If Your Substack Were a Café

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The Baka knows App

Last week I sat down with my kava.

My AI had drafted three posts overnight. I read them before I was properly awake.

Good writing. Correct topics. The right structure.

And something about them felt like meeting someone who had studied you very carefully and still got you slightly wrong.

I’ve been writing since before I could explain what writing was. My first book in a language that isn’t even my mother tongue, because the story needed to be in English. I know what my voice sounds like. I know it the way you know your own handwriting — you don’t have to think about it, you just know.

This wasn’t it.

Not bad. Not wrong. Just — not mine. Like a very careful impression of me, wearing my clothes.

Three weeks I fed it everything. Notes, old posts, book excerpts, brand guidelines. Every time it came back a little closer. And still, every time, something essential was missing.

Here’s what I finally understood: the tool had learned what I do. Not who I am when I do it.

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It had my topics. My structure. Maybe some of my vocabulary. It didn’t have the rhythm. The specific angle I always come from. The word I’d never reach for in a million years. The way I move between ideas when I’m really in something.

That doesn’t live in a bio. It doesn’t live in a values list. It lives in the patterns underneath the words — the ones you’ve chosen ten thousand times without knowing you were choosing them.

I’ve been building the map for those patterns. Mine first, because I don’t sell what I haven’t lived.

Now I’m opening five spots to build yours.

Brand Voice Audit

You send me your last five published posts — the ones that actually sounded like you. I spend a few hours in your writing, reading for pattern, not content. You get a Voice Fingerprint document, one page, operational, ready to use in any AI setup. Plus a walkthrough so nothing gets lost between document and practice.

Forty-eight hours. Five spots. June only.

→ Book here

Want to be first in for what I’m building next? Join the list — and tell me what your AI gets wrong about your voice. Your answer will help shape the product.

→ Join the Waitlist here

Anita

Next Tuesday: why I’m building something. And why the existence of Coca-Cola never stopped Pepsi.

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Substack Creator Voice Quiz

I had a moment last month that I haven’t told you about.

I was sitting at my desk at 9 PM on a Tuesday — not because I had to, but because I’d convinced myself that “one more thing” would make the difference. The content calendar was full. The posts were scheduled. The system was running. And I was running on empty.

So I closed the laptop. Made a kava. Sat on the balcony and did absolutely nothing productive for forty minutes.

And somewhere between the second sip and the sound of the neighbours arguing about parking, I thought:

When did I start building a business that needs me to be tired to feel like I’m doing enough?

There’s a version of success that looks like this: full calendar, constant output, a to-do list that bleeds into the weekend. Impressive from the outside. Exhausting from the inside.

And then there’s the version nobody puts on a vision board — the one where Tuesday afternoon is yours because Tuesday afternoon is when you think best. Where you don’t answer emails before coffee. Where your most important creative work happens in the morning, because that’s when you’re actually alive.

That second version? That’s the one worth building toward.

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We talk a lot about building businesses. Systems, strategies, funnels, frameworks. And all of that matters. But underneath all of it is a question we rarely ask directly: does this business actually fit me?

Not the idea of me. Not the hustle version. Not the version that can produce seven pieces of content a week without blinking.

Me. With my energy cycles. My slow mornings. My need for silence before I can write anything worth reading. My tendency to do my best thinking on a walk, not at a desk. Ok, sometimes at a café.

The solopreneur model was supposed to give us freedom. And it does — but only if we design it that way. Only if we consciously build the work around the life, not the other way around.

Pomalo means little by little in Croatian. My Baka used to say it the way other people say breathe. Not as instruction — as permission.

Pomalo.

You don’t have to have it all figured out by next Monday. You don’t have to scale this quarter. You don’t have to be more consistent, more visible, more everything.

You just have to know what kind of days make you feel like yourself — and build more of those.

That’s the real foundation. Everything else gets built on top of it.

This week, one question worth sitting with:

If your business had to fit around your actual life — your real rhythms, your honest capacity, your genuine priorities — what would you change first?

You don’t have to answer it out loud. But you do have to answer it.

Anita 🧡

The Soulful Balkanish AI Way

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Substack Creator Voice Quiz

TL;DR: Most creators spend 70% of their time making content and 30% getting it seen. The content flood is real, it’s only getting louder — and creating is no longer the hard part. Getting seen is. The 30/70 Rule flips the equation. One piece becomes six. That’s not a hack. That’s a system.

You spent three hours writing that post.

The hook was sharp. The insights were real. The formatting? Chef’s kiss. You hit publish, shared it once to Instagram, and… nothing.

Ma daj. You know this feeling.

Here’s what I learned the hard way: the problem was never the content. It was what happened — or didn’t happen — after I published it.

Here’s a number that should wake you up: over 50% of all new online articles are now written by AI. The content flood isn’t coming — it’s already here. And it’s only getting louder.

Which means one thing has shifted permanently: creating content is no longer the hard part. Getting it seen is.

And yet, most creators — heart-led, talented, strategic — still operate on the 70/30 model. Seventy percent of their time goes into creation. Thirty percent, generously, into distribution. Then they wonder why growth feels slow.

Polako. Let me show you what flipping that looks like.

The 30/70 Framework

The 30/70 Rule: Spend 30% of your content time creating. Spend 70% distributing, repurposing, and amplifying what already exists.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing the right things with what you already made.

Here’s the framework, broken into three moves.

Move 1 — Create Once, With Intention

Your 30% is not for volume. It’s for depth. One well-crafted piece — a Substack article, a long-form video, a cornerstone post — becomes the source. Everything else flows from it.

The question to ask before you create anything: What is this piece really about? What does it bring? What changes for the reader after they read it? If you can’t answer all three, you’re not ready to write it yet.

Move 2 — Distribute Into Every Corner

Your 70% starts here. That one article becomes:

• A Substack post (the original)

• 3–5 Instagram carousel slides

• A TikTok hook pulled from the strongest line

• A Pinterest pin with the key insight

• A short question post that links back to the answer

• A Substack Note with a pull quote

Šest komada od jednog. Six pieces from one. That’s the Balkanish way of working smart.

Move 3 — Amplify, Don’t Just Post

Distribution is not scheduling. Amplification is the layer most people skip entirely. It means:

• Engaging in the comments

• Replying to every share

• Sending the article directly to three people it would genuinely help

• Linking back to it in your next piece

• Letting it live longer than 24 hours

Content that is only published is not content that is working. Content that is amplified compounds.

The 30/70 Cheat Sheet

Here’s your quick-reference. Save this. Screenshot it. Stick it somewhere visible.

What This Changes

When you flip to 30/70, something shifts in how your week feels. You stop the frantic cycle of what do I post today? You stop publishing into silence. You start to see that your best ideas have a longer shelf life than you gave them credit for.

You also start treating your content like the asset it is — not a daily obligation, but a growing library that works for you.

Srce, that’s the difference between a content hamster wheel and a content system.

Your Move This Week

Pick one piece of content you published in the last 30 days that didn’t get the reach it deserved.

Now ask honestly: Did I actually distribute it — or did I just publish it?

If the answer is “just published,” you’ve found your starting point. Take that one piece and run it through the three moves above.

One week. One piece. Six distributions.

Ajde — let’s see what happens. ☕

Tvoja, Anita

The Soulful Balkanish AI Way

P.S. — If you’re thinking “this sounds great but I don’t have time for all that distribution” — I hear you. I’m building a system that makes the 70% almost automatic and you can concentrate on the important stuff. Not ready yet. But when it is, you’ll hear it here first.

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Substack Creator Voice Quiz

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My Substack will always remain free to read. But if this article gave you a little "aha" moment or made you smile today, or if you just want to support my work without committing to a subscription, you can leave a little something in my tip jar.

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Grab your kava. This one’s playful. ☕

I’ve been thinking about this for a while — how we describe what we do on Substack. We say things like “I write about AI and branding” or “my newsletter covers personal growth.” And it’s fine. It’s accurate. But it doesn’t feel like anything.

So I tried something different. I asked myself:

If my Substack were a café — a real place, with a door and a menu and a smell when you walk in — what would it serve?

And what came out was... honestly kind of magical.

The Idea

Every Substack has a vibe. A rhythm. A thing it does for the people who show up.

Some feel like a morning espresso — sharp, fast, wake-up energy. Some feel like a long Sunday brunch — slow, layered, you stay for two hours. Some feel like a late-night bar — honest conversations you wouldn’t have in daylight.

So what if you turned that into an actual menu?

Your articles become dishes. Your series become house specials. Your free content is the daily coffee. Your paid content is the tasting menu. Your “About” page is the chalkboard outside that makes people walk in.

And the place itself? That’s yours. Your café lives wherever your soul lives. A rooftop in Tokyo. A bookshop in Edinburgh. A beach bar in Bali. A harbour-side terrace in a small Croatian town where the bura wind makes your napkins fly off the table.

Ajde, guess which one is mine 🤓

My Example: Café Nehaj

My Substack café sits on the harbour in Senj, Croatia. Stone walls. A faded awning. The Adriatic on one side, the Velebit mountains on the other. The bura is blowing — always — but inside it’s warm. The menu is handwritten on a chalkboard. The owner (that’s me) is probably in the corner with a third kava, pretending to work.

Here’s what’s on my menu:

☕ House Coffee (free, always)

The Drop — one idea, one shift, every Tuesday. Strong, no sugar, gets you moving.

🍽️ Daily Special

The Gentle Note — a slower, more personal letter. Like a homemade soup that takes longer to make but warms you differently.

🎲 The Experiment Table (seasonal)

Creator System Series — the weird, playful, “wait, I can do THAT?” dishes. Sometimes they work beautifully. Sometimes they’re a beautiful mess. You come for the surprise.

🧁 The Pastry Case (take away)

PromptPower Deluxe, Brand Audit Tool — things you grab on the way out. Practical. Portable. Ready to use.

📖 The Bookshelf by the Window

Marlene & Alberto — my novel. Not on the menu. Just there, if you want to sit and read for a while.

🎵 The Playlist

“Kava, AI i Ti” — playing softly in the background. You don’t notice it at first. But it sets the mood.

Now It’s Your Turn

I made you a prompt. One prompt. You copy it, paste it into your AI of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Manus — doesn’t matter), answer a few questions, and it builds your entire Substack Brand Café Menu.

The result? A visual, a concept, a way to describe your Substack that actually feels like something. Something you can share. Something people remember.

The MasterPrompt: Your Substack Brand Café Menu

Copy this. Paste it. Let AI guide you through it.

What To Do With It

Share it. Post your café menu (or the visual) in your Substack Notes. Tag me — I want to see where your café lives and what’s on your menu ☕️

Use it. Put your chalkboard sign in your bio. Use your menu descriptions in your “About” page. Let it inspire how you talk about your content.

Play with it. Invite your readers to visit your café. Do a “Coffee Date” in your chat. Make it a thing. Make it yours.

Your Café Is Waiting

Copy the prompt. Open your AI. Answer honestly — and have fun with it. This isn’t homework. This is play.

And when you’re done — share it. I want to see your café. I want to know where it is, what’s on the menu, and what song is playing when I walk in.

Maybe we’ll do a Substack Café Crawl one day. Visit each other’s worlds. Bring our own kava.

One experiment. One prompt. One world.

Ajmo. ☕

Tvoja,

Anita

The Soulful Balkanish AI Way

P.S. — If you missed the last experiment, I built a Creator Voice Quiz that tells you your Creator Voice type in two minutes. Storyteller, Guide, Provocateur, or Dreamer. Take it — and then imagine what kind of café each type would run. The Storyteller’s café definitely has mismatched chairs and a cat.

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Grab your kava. This one’s practical. ☕

You know what I stopped doing six months ago?

Googling “best prompts for [thing].”

Not because prompts don’t matter. They do. But because I realized I was solving the wrong problem. Every time I opened AI and typed a beautifully crafted prompt — and got back something generic, flat, sounds-like-everyone-else — the problem wasn’t the prompt.

The problem was that AI had no idea who I was. Ništa. Zero. Blank slate, every single time.

The Shift That Changed Everything

Prompt Engineering is about the question you ask.

Context Engineering is about what AI already knows about you, your business, your voice, your audience — before you ask anything.

Same prompt. Two completely different outputs. One from a stranger. One from someone who gets you.

Here’s a real example. If I type:

“Write me a newsletter intro about AI tools for creators”

Without context, I get LinkedIn-speak. Polished, generic, could be anyone.

With my full business context loaded? I get something that sounds like me — slightly irreverent, strategic, with a Balkan edge and a coffee reference that probably shouldn’t be there at 11 PM but jebiga, that’s who I am. Because AI knows that’s how I write. It knows who I write for. It knows what I’d never say.

The difference isn’t talent. It’s setup.

The Problem Most People Have

You open AI. You ask something. The output is... fine. Generic. You tweak it. You try again. You add “make it more casual.” Still not right. You give up and write it yourself.

Sound familiar? Da, znam. Me too, for way too long.

That’s because you’re asking AI to guess who you are. Every. Single. Time.

Context Engineering means you tell it once — properly, thoroughly — and then every conversation from that point forward starts at 80% instead of zero.

The starting point? What I call your Business Brain.

The Business Brain: Your AI’s Memory of You

Your Business Brain is a single document that contains everything AI needs to know about you and your business to give you output that actually sounds like you and serves your goals.

Not your CV. Not your LinkedIn bio. The real stuff — the things that make your work yours.

Once you have this, you paste it into your AI’s memory/personalization section (every major AI tool has one — ChatGPT, Claude, Manus, Gemini). From that moment on, every conversation is contextual. You stop re-explaining yourself. You stop getting generic output. You start getting you.

The Business Brain Prompt

Here’s the prompt. Copy it. Paste it into your AI. Answer the questions it asks you. Save the result as your permanent context.

What To Do With It

Once AI gives you your compiled Business Brain document:

1. Save it in your AI’s personalization/memory section. In ChatGPT, that’s Settings → Personalization. In Claude, it’s your Project instructions. In Manus, it’s your Project files. Every tool has a version of this.

2. Update it when things change. New offer? New audience shift? New content format? Update the Brain. It’s a living document, not a one-time thing.

3. Notice the difference. Next time you ask AI to write something — a caption, an email, a content plan — notice how much closer the first output is to what you’d actually say. That’s context at work.

Why This Is the Starting Point

This is Layer 1. The foundation. Once your Business Brain is set, you can build on top of it:

•Project-specific folders for different clients or content series

•Saved writing samples so AI learns your actual style (not just your description of it)

•Format templates for recurring content (so “write a Drop” means something specific)

But none of that works without the Brain. It’s like trying to furnish a house that doesn’t have walls yet.

Start here. Build the walls. The rest follows. Polako — but start today.

Your Turn

Copy the prompt above. Open your AI tool of choice. Answer honestly — not the polished version of you, the real one. Save the result.

And if you want to go one step deeper — if you want to know what your Creator Voice actually is before you try to describe it — I built something for that too. The Creator Voice Quiz gives you your voice type in two minutes. Storyteller, Guide, Provocateur, or Dreamer. It’s the shortcut to question 5, 6, and 8 in the prompt above.

This week’s shift: Stop asking better questions. Start giving better context.

Ajmo. ☕

Anita

The Soulful Balkanish AI Way

P.S. — If you do the Business Brain exercise today, I genuinely want to hear how it went. Hit reply. Tell me what surprised you about your own answers. I read everything.

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We were sitting in a café — my boyfriend and I, the way we do best — when the couple at the next table started speaking English. Irish, clearly. We joined in naturally, the way you do when you’ve lived between languages long enough that switching feels like changing shoes.

And then she looked at me and said: “Are you from Croatia?”

I blinked. “How did you know?”

“The way you say your L’s. It’s very Croatian.”

I laughed out loud. Born and raised in Germany. Schooled in German, dreaming sometimes in German, working every day in English for over a decade — and it’s still there. The L. The Balkan, quietly present even when I’m not thinking about it.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since.

Because I grew up with two worlds running in parallel. My parents came from Croatia — both of them, proper Gastarbeiter generation, building a life in a small German town while making sure we never forgot where we came from. Croatian school. Croatian at home. German everywhere else. I was never fully one thing or the other. I was both, always.

And now I write in English. I build my content in English, I talk to AI in English, I think about my business in English — mostly. But underneath all of that, I think in something in between. A kind of language I’ve started calling, half-jokingly, Balkanish. It’s not a real word. I know. But it’s a very real thing.

It’s the moment I catch myself explaining a strategy and saying ajmo under my breath before we dive in — let’s go, no overthinking, we move. It’s the way I approach content planning with the same mentality my mama used to approach a Sunday lunch: nothing goes to waste, everything has a purpose, and you feed everyone before you close the kitchen.

It’s the fact that for me, every conversation about AI and business still starts with kava. Coffee. Not a dashboard. Not a funnel. A warm cup, a real question, and a little bit of time to actually think.

I’ve been leaning into this more lately — the Balkanish-ness of how I work. Because I noticed something: when I let it in, the content gets better. Not more polished. Better. More honest. More me.

AI doesn’t erase your accent. If you use it with intention, it amplifies it. The Croatian L is still there. The ajmo energy is still there. The Sunday lunch logic is still there. Whatever makes you you — that doesn’t disappear when you open a chatbot. It shows up in every prompt you write, every angle you choose, every word you keep and every one you delete.

So wherever you come from — whether your identity shows up in a specific humor, a philosophy you inherited from your grandmother, a way of seeing problems that nobody else in your field shares — that’s not a liability in the age of AI. That’s your edge.

Ajmo. ☕

Anita 🇭🇷

BabicADesigns

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My Substack will always remain free to read. But if this article gave you a little "aha" moment or made you smile today, or if you just want to support my work without committing to a subscription, you can leave a little something in my tip jar.

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Last Tuesday, I was building a content strategy for a client. The brief was clear, the audience was defined, the goals were sharp. So I opened my system, gave it everything — tone of voice, audience pain points, brand positioning — and let it draft.

What came back was… fine. Technically correct. Well-structured. The kind of thing you’d nod at in a meeting and say “yeah, that works.”

But it didn’t land. Something was missing.

So I closed the laptop, made myself a kava, sat on the balcony for ten minutes, and thought about what I actually knew about this person that wasn’t in any brief. The thing she told me in passing. The way she laughed when she described her audience. The tension I noticed between what she said she wanted and what she actually needed.

I came back, rewrote the whole thing in twenty minutes, and she replied within an hour: “This is exactly it. How did you know?”

I knew because I was there. AI wasn’t.

There’s a version of the AI conversation that goes like this: AI will replace everything. Your creativity, your expertise, your voice. All of it, automated away by something faster and cheaper.

I’ve been working with AI every single day for years. And I want to offer you a different version — not a reassuring lie, just an honest observation from someone who lives inside these tools.

Here’s what I’ve actually noticed AI cannot do. No matter how good the model. No matter how clever the prompt.

It cannot carry your specific history.

Every perspective you bring to your work was shaped by something. The jobs you’ve had, the places you’ve lived, the things that didn’t work and the things that surprised you. When I write about AI strategy, everything is filtered through eighteen years in international business — through export logistics and cross-border systems, through building things in offices in England and France and Croatia with people who saw the world very differently from each other.

AI can write competently about strategy. It cannot write from that lens. Only you carry yours.

It cannot read your specific audience.

You’ve been watching your people. You know which posts got real responses — not just likes, but actual replies. You know what your readers are really asking when they comment. You know what lands and what doesn’t, and you know it in a way no tool can access — because it lives in the pattern recognition you’ve built over time.

That knowledge? That’s the difference between content that performs and content that actually connects.

It cannot make the judgment calls.

When to be vulnerable. When to hold something back. When to say the thing that might lose you followers but deepen trust with the ones who stay. These are not decisions an algorithm makes well. They’re the decisions that build a brand with soul — and they will always belong to the person behind the brand.

So what does this mean, practically?

It means AI performs best when you’re clear about what only you can bring. The clearer you are on your own perspective, your audience, your values — the better AI works as your creative partner.

It’s not a replacement. It’s an amplifier. And it amplifies whatever you give it.

So give it the real stuff.

That’s actually the most freeing thought I’ve found in this whole AI conversation. The investment you make in knowing yourself, developing your thinking, and staying genuinely close to your audience — that’s not wasted effort in the age of AI.

It’s what makes everything else possible.

Ajmo. ☕

Anita 🧡

BabicADesigns

What’s the part of your work you know AI could never replicate? Not the obvious stuff — the weird, specific, only-you thing. I’d love to hear it.

You know that feeling when someone describes you — and you’re like, “wait, that’s not…” and then two seconds later you think, “…okay, maybe that is me”?

That happened to me this week.

With my own quiz.

A quiz I built. With my own questions. Based on my own framework.

And it still surprised me.

Let me rewind.

I’ve been thinking about voice a lot lately.

Not the “find your niche” kind of voice. Not the “be consistent” kind.

The real one.

The one that makes someone stop mid-scroll and think: her. I want to read her.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed — and I’ve been on Substack long enough now to see the pattern:

The creators who grow aren’t the ones with the best strategy.

They’re the ones whose voice you’d recognize even without their name attached.

You read three sentences and you know it’s them.

That’s not a niche. That’s not a content pillar. That’s something deeper.

And I wanted to find a way to name it.

If you’ve been with me on this journey — from Cassette Tapes to AI vibe checks to My baka’s voice showing up at 2 AM — you know this series has been building toward something.

Each piece was a layer.

Where we come from. How we adapt. What stays.

This one is the next step: Who are you when you write?

Now. The inspiration.

You probably already know Pinkie from AI Meets Girlboss. If you don’t — go follow her. She helps creators build recognizable Substack brands using AI, and she does it with this energy that’s equal parts strategic and playful. She’s one of those people who makes you think “why didn’t I think of that?”

Her Substack Runway — the interactive sketchbook where creators generate fashion illustrations of themselves and add them to a gallery — has been everywhere. You’ve seen the posts. You’ve seen the portraits. Maybe you’ve already added yours.

I did mine weeks ago. Loved it.

And then one night — coffee number three, brain still buzzing — I thought:

What if I did something similar, but for voice?

Not what you wear. But how you write.

Not a fashion portrait. But a creator voice portrait.

A way to find out what makes your writing yours — and then generate an AI image that captures it.

So I built it.

7 questions. No fluff. No “pick your favorite aesthetic” nonsense.

Real questions. The kind that make you pause and think before you click.

At the end, you get your Creator Voice type.

I’m not telling you what the types are.

Nema šanse.

(That’s Croatian for: absolutely not.)

Because the moment your result appears — that little “oh” — that’s the whole point. I’m not spoiling it.

What I will tell you: each result comes with a personalized AI portrait prompt. You copy it, paste it into ChatGPT or Midjourney or Gemini or whatever you use, upload a photo of yourself, and generate your own Creator Voice portrait.

Pixar style. Your face. Your energy. Your type.

And if you want — you can upload it to the gallery. Your portrait, your name, your Substack link. All in one place.

Here’s what happened when I took it.

I was so sure I knew what I’d get.

I mean — I wrote the questions. I defined the types. I know myself, right?

Apparently not.

I got a result I didn’t expect.

And my first reaction was: “No way. That’s wrong.”

My second reaction, about thirty seconds later: “…oh. Oh no. That’s accurate.”

My baka would have laughed. She always said I see myself differently than the world sees me. “Ti misliš jedno, a radiš drugo,” she’d say. You think one thing, but you do another.

Turns out, even your own quiz can hold up a mirror you weren’t ready for.

Here’s my card:

Your turn.

Take it. See what comes up.

Generate your portrait if you feel like it. Add yourself to the gallery if you want.

Or just take the quiz for fun and tell me what you got in the comments. I’m genuinely curious.

Find your Creator Voice

One system, one story, one voice at a time. 🧡

P.S. — If you missed the earlier parts of this series:

#1 From Cassette Tapes to AI Tools

#2 The AI Vibe Check

#3 The Night My Grandmother's Voice Showed Up

It was a Tuesday afternoon. I had my coffee. My laptop. And a client — Ingo Schmidt, owner of Frimontage, a staffing and recruitment company — who had just said something that made me put the coffee down.

“Anita, every time I need to send a candidate profile to a client, I spend an hour on it. Every single time.”

One hour. Per profile. For a company that places candidates every week.

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I just thought: we can fix this.

Four Hours. One Working System.

Using Manus — the same AI agent I use to plan my content week — we built FRIMO Recruiting from scratch. A complete lead and applicant management system: live dashboard, candidate pipeline, client management, matching module, AI-generated emails, and a performance profile generator.

The foundation took 4 hours.

Not 4 weeks. Not 4 months. Four hours to go from a blank screen to a working system with a real database, real data, and a real interface Ingo could open on his laptop the next morning.

What came after was refinement — adding features, testing, polishing. But the core was running before dinner.

What the System Does

One dashboard. Everything that matters.

Instead of opening five different spreadsheets every morning, there’s one screen:

•164 candidates — 81 active, 15 matched, 6 with open follow-ups

•14 active clients — 58 companies in the database, 40 acquisition contacts

•25 active placements in progress

What needs your attention today? One look, and you know.

Every candidate has a full profile: personal data, skills, availability, documents — and a complete activity log. Every call, every email, every note, every meeting, every reminder. Tracked. Searchable. Never lost again.

The Feature That Changed Everything: Performance Profiles

This is the one that made Ingo go quiet.

A performance profile is the document that gets sent to a potential employer when you’re proposing a candidate. It’s the first impression. It has to look professional, be accurate, and represent the candidate well.

Before: Open Word. Copy the template. Fill in all the data manually. Format it. Check it. Export as PDF. Send. Minimum one hour. Every single time.

Now: Open the candidate’s profile. Click “Generate Performance Profile.” The system pulls all the data — name, age, qualifications, experience, skills, availability — formats it automatically with Frimontage’s branding, logo, and layout, and generates a professional PDF. You can still edit it before sending. But the starting point isn’t a blank template anymore. It’s a finished document.

Under one minute. Every time.

When you’re placing multiple candidates a week, that’s not a small detail. That’s hours back in your week. Every week. For a small company where Ingo is essentially running everything himself — that’s not a nice-to-have. That’s survival.

The Matching Module

Candidates and clients don’t just sit in separate lists. They connect.

The matching module links candidates to open positions at clients — and tracks exactly where each placement stands:

•Profile sent — the client has received the candidate’s profile

•Interview — interview scheduled or completed

•Trial day — trial day arranged

•Placed — candidate successfully placed

At any moment, you can see: which candidates are in which stage, with which client. No more “wait, did we send that profile already?” No more lost placements. No more deals falling through the cracks because nobody remembered to follow up.

AI-Generated Outreach Emails

When a match is found, one click is all it takes. You press a button, and the system generates a personalized outreach email — not a template with placeholders, but an actual AI-written email, tailored to the specific client and candidate.

You review it, adjust if needed, and send. The thinking is already done.

The difference between a template and an AI-generated email is the difference between “Dear [Client Name]” and an email that sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows both parties. That’s what lands in the inbox. That’s what gets a response.

What’s Coming Next: Digital Onboarding

The next step is already planned and the mockup exists.

New employees will be welcomed digitally through a branded Frimontage onboarding page. They fill in their documents online — employee questionnaire, employment contract, important rights and information, document checklist. They sign digitally. Everything lands automatically in the system.

No paperwork. No “please send me that form again as a PDF.” No back-and-forth.

Four steps: Welcome → Fill in documents → Sign → Done.

The concept is ready. The build is next. And I’ll write about it when it’s live — if you want me to.

What This Means for You

You probably don’t run a staffing agency. But I’d bet you have a version of this problem.

A document you recreate from scratch every time. A follow-up that falls through the cracks because there’s no system to catch it. A process that takes an hour and shouldn’t. A client relationship that lives in your head instead of somewhere you can actually see it.

When I showed Ingo the finished system, he said something I keep thinking about:

“Anita, I feel like we can automate so much here that administration gets reduced to a minimum of hours per week.”

And then he said: “That gives me time for what actually matters — sales strategy, client relationships, growth.”

That’s it. That’s the whole point.

Speed isn’t just efficiency. Speed is revenue. When a client calls and needs a candidate today, the performance profile is ready in under a minute. The candidate gets placed faster. The client is happy. The invoice goes out.

This is what becomes possible when you stop using AI just for content — and start using it for the processes that actually run your business.

The question I want to leave you with: What’s the one process in your business that costs you the most time right now? The one you keep meaning to fix?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every single response. And the most interesting ones might just become the next Drop.

And one more thing: the digital onboarding system I mentioned — would that be useful to you? Is digital onboarding something you’re thinking about for your own business? Hit reply and let me know. If there’s interest, I’ll write about it. If not, I’ll cover something else.

Your answers shape what lands in your inbox. That’s how this works.

With coffee and Croatian stubbornness,

Anita 🤍

BabicADesigns

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I want to try something different today.

No strategy. No AI tips. No frameworks. Just a question.

But first, let me tell you where this question comes from.

My baka — my grandmother — passed in 2016. She was 93. And she had this way of asking questions that made you feel like she already knew the answer. She wasn’t asking to learn something. She was asking to make you learn something.

She’d sit in her kitchen — always the kitchen, never the living room, because the living room was for guests and she considered herself the host of every conversation, even in her own home — and she’d look at you over her coffee. Not espresso, not latte, just Turkish coffee, strong enough to wake the neighbors. And she’d wait.

She never rushed. That was the thing about her. In a world that was already speeding up, she moved at the speed of truth.

And then she’d ask something like:

“Jesi li sretna?”

Are you happy?

Not “are you successful.” Not “are you making money.” Not “are you productive.” Not “are you growing your audience.”

Are you happy?

Three words. In Croatian, just two. And suddenly you’re sitting there with your mouth open because you realize you haven’t asked yourself that question in months.

The Questions We Forget to Ask

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About the questions we never ask ourselves because we’re too busy answering everyone else’s.

“What’s your niche?”

“What’s your content strategy?”

“What’s your conversion rate?”

“What’s your Q2 plan?”

Good questions. Important questions. But they’re all outward questions. They point away from you. They ask about the machine, not the person running it.

My baka didn’t care about machines. She cared about people. And she had this almost supernatural ability to ask the one question you were avoiding.

When my cousin got a promotion and came to visit, beaming with pride, my baka didn’t say congratulations. She said: “A tko se brine za tvoju djecu dok ti radiš?” — And who takes care of your children while you work?

Not to be cruel. To be real. Because she knew that sometimes the thing we’re celebrating is also the thing that costs us something. And she believed you should know the price before you pay it.

The Question I’ve Been Avoiding

I’ll go first. Because I’m asking you to be honest, and that only works if I am, too.

The question I’ve been avoiding is this: Am I building something I actually want, or am I building something I think I should want?

Because there’s a version of my business that looks perfect on paper. The content calendar is full. The products are listed. The automations are running. The analytics are... well, the analytics are what they are. We’re working on it.

But when I sit with that question — really sit with it, the way my baka would have made me sit with it, with coffee and silence and nowhere to hide — I realize that some of the things I’m building are answers to questions nobody asked me.

Nobody asked me to post every day. I decided that. Nobody asked me to have five different content series. I decided that. Nobody asked me to optimize my funnel at 11 PM on a Wednesday. I decided that.

And my baka, if she were here, would look at me over her Turkish coffee and say: “A zašto?”

And why?

Not judgmental. Just curious. The way only someone who lived 93 years can be curious — with the patience of someone who knows that most of the things we rush toward aren’t going anywhere.

What She Would Have Asked You

If my baka could sit across from you right now — in her kitchen, with the good cups, because you’re a guest — she would not ask about your business.

She would not ask about your follower count or your email list or your latest launch.

She would ask you one of these:

“Kad si se zadnji put smijala tako da te boljelo?”

When was the last time you laughed so hard it hurt?

“Tko te zove kad je teško?”

Who do you call when it gets hard?

“Što bi radila da nitko ne gleda?”

What would you do if nobody was watching?

These aren’t business questions. They’re life questions. And in my experience, the answers to life questions are always better business strategies than anything you’ll find in a course.

Because when you know what makes you laugh, you know your voice. When you know who you call, you know your values. When you know what you’d do if nobody was watching, you know your purpose.

And purpose, my baka would say, is the only strategy that doesn’t expire.

Your Turn

I’m going to ask you one question. Just one. And I’d love it if you actually answered — not in your head, but here. Reply to this email. Or leave a comment. Or send me a message. Whatever feels right.

Here it is. My baka’s question, translated for 2026:

If you could only do ONE thing in your business for the next 30 days — just one — and everything else had to wait... what would it be?

Not the smartest thing. Not the most strategic thing. The thing that makes your stomach do that little flip. The thing you keep pushing to “next month.” The thing that scares you a little because it actually matters.

Što bi to bilo?

Tell me. I’m sitting here with my coffee — yes, at whatever hour you’re reading this — and I genuinely want to know.

Because my baka taught me that the best conversations start with one honest question. And the best businesses? They start the same way.

With love and a strong cup of coffee,

Anita

BabicADesigns — Where soul meets system.

P.S. — My baka also taught me that you should never leave a guest without offering them something. So here: if you’re feeling stuck between “what I should do” and “what I want to do,” my Sohana — The Inner Work Muse might help you find the answer. She’s an AI guide I built for exactly those moments. Hop over, if you want to try the 21-day journey. No pressure. Just an open door.

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Sunday night. 9 PM. Third coffee. Laptop open. Couch.

This is the moment most creators dread: the blank screen. The “what am I even posting this week” spiral. The one where you open seven tabs, scroll through three apps, screenshot something you’ll never look at again, and end up watching a documentary about octopuses because — well, because your brain needed an escape route.

I used to be that person. Every. Single. Week.

And then I found Manus.

Not in a “this tool changed my life” influencer way. More in a “I accidentally discovered that my AI assistant could do the thing I hated most” kind of way. Like finding out your quiet neighbor is actually a DJ. You didn’t see it coming, but now you can’t unhear it.

What Manus Actually Is (For Those Who Haven’t Met)

Let me back up. Because when I say “Manus,” some of you might think I’m talking about another chatbot. I’m not.

Manus is an AI agent. Not a chatbot that answers questions — an agent that actually does things. It researches. It writes. It plans. It builds. It creates spreadsheets, websites, presentations, social media content. It reads documents. It analyzes data. It remembers what you told it three weeks ago.

Think of it like this: ChatGPT is the friend who gives great advice. Manus is the friend who gives great advice and then actually helps you move apartments on Saturday.

The difference matters. Because as a solopreneur, I don’t just need ideas. I need execution.

How My Content Week Actually Works Now

Let me walk you through what happened this week. Not a theoretical “you could do this” tutorial. What I actually did. Step by step.

Step 1: The Brain Dump (Sunday Evening)

I start by telling Manus what’s on my mind. Not in a structured way. More like texting a friend:

“Okay, this week I need a Drop article for Tuesday and a Gentle Note for Thursday. I’ve been thinking about how I use you for my content — maybe that’s a topic? Also, I have analytics data from Substack, can you look at what’s working? And I need Notes for every day, plus Instagram posts for both articles.”

That’s it. No brief. No project plan. No framework. Just me, talking.

[Screenshot-Stelle: Hier könnte ein Screenshot deines Chats mit Manus hin, wo du die Woche planst]

Step 2: The Research (Manus Does the Heavy Lifting)

Here’s where it gets interesting. I uploaded my Substack analytics — just the raw CSV files — and asked Manus to analyze them. Within minutes, I had:

•A complete breakdown of which articles performed best (and why)

•Open rates, engagement rates, view trends over time

•A clear diagnosis: my personal, soulful articles consistently outperform my strategy articles

•Specific recommendations for this week’s topics

I didn’t have to build a spreadsheet. I didn’t have to do the math. I didn’t have to pretend I enjoy looking at numbers. (I don’t. I’m a storyteller, not a data analyst. My baka — who passed in 2016 at 93 — would have said: “Nemoj reć hop prije nego što preskočiš.” Don’t celebrate the numbers before you understand what they mean.)

Step 3: The Topic Discussion (This Is Where It Gets Good)

Now, Manus didn’t just hand me a topic and say “write this.” We had a conversation. A real back-and-forth.

Manus suggested three options. I said: “That doesn’t feel right. The Drop is supposed to be practical, like a learning tool. Not a think piece.” And Manus adjusted. Not in a “yes, ma’am” way — in a “okay, I understand the difference now, here’s a better approach” way.

This is the part most people don’t understand about working with AI: it’s a conversation, not a command. You don’t type a prompt and get a perfect result. You talk. You push back. You refine. You say “that’s not me” and the AI learns what is you.

My tata — he passed in 2014, a man of very few words — used to say “Ne odmah, nego sad!” Not right away, but NOW. To this day I have no idea what the difference between odmah and sad is. But with Manus, I kind of get it now: the first answer is odmah — quick, automatic. The real answer comes when you push for sad — the one that’s actually right.

Step 4: The Writing (Together, Not Alone)

Once we agreed on the topic, Manus wrote a first draft. And here’s the honest truth: the first draft is never perfect. It’s about 70% there. The structure is solid. The research is accurate. The flow makes sense.

But the voice? That’s where I come in.

I read through it and add the things only I can add: the coffee at 9 PM, the Balkan humor, the moment where I break a serious point with something dry and unexpected. The Croatian words that don’t translate. The čežnja — that ache between longing and homesickness that English doesn’t have a word for.

Manus gives me the bones. I add the soul.

Step 5: The Social Media Content (The Part I Used to Hate)

This is where Manus really saves me. Because after the article is written, I still need:

•12 Substack Notes (morning and evening, Tuesday through Sunday)

•An Instagram carousel or single image post

•Captions for Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and TikTok

•A Story teaser

•A first comment for Instagram

Before Manus, this would take me an entire day. Now? Manus drafts everything based on the article. Same voice. Same themes. Adapted for each platform.

I review, adjust, add my touch, and schedule. Done.

[Screenshot-Stelle: Die verschiedenen Social Media Texte, die Manus erstellt hat]

Step 6: The Visuals (Yes, That Too)

Manus can also generate images. For my Substack article headers, I describe the scene I want — “a blonde woman on a Croatian balcony, coffee in hand, looking at the Adriatic, illustrated style, dusty rose and sage green palette” — and it creates options.

Are they perfect? Not always. Sometimes the AI gives my illustrated self brown hair instead of blonde. Sometimes the swan looks more like a confused duck. But it gives me a starting point, and I refine in Canva with my own fonts, my own logo, my own brand elements.

What This Actually Saves Me

Let me be specific, because vague “it saves so much time” claims help nobody:

That’s not a small difference. That’s the difference between content creation being my entire week and content creation being my Tuesday morning.

The rest of the week? I work on client projects. I build systems. I drink coffee. I live.

The Part That Surprised Me Most

Here’s what I didn’t expect: Manus made me a better writer.

Not because it writes better than me. It doesn’t — not in my voice, not with my stories, not with the things that make my content mine.

But because it handles the parts I’m bad at (research, structure, platform adaptation), I have more energy for the parts I’m good at (stories, voice, connection). I’m not exhausted by the time I get to the creative part. I arrive fresh. With coffee. Ready.

It’s like having a sous chef who does all the prep work so you can focus on the actual cooking. The dish is still yours. The taste is still yours. But you didn’t have to chop the onions.

Your Move This Week

If you’ve never tried working with an AI agent (not a chatbot — an agent), here’s my challenge:

Pick one task you dread this week. Not the creative stuff. The admin stuff. The research. The planning. The “I should really organize my content calendar but I’d rather reorganize my spice drawer” stuff.

Give it to an AI agent. See what happens.

And then tell me: What did you get back? Was it useful? Did it surprise you?

I genuinely want to know. Reply to this email or drop a comment. Because the best part of this whole Manus experiment isn’t the time I save — it’s the conversations that come from sharing it.

Quick Drops

DeepSeek V4-Pro just dropped with a 75% discount. China’s AI lab is making serious moves. For creators, this means: more competition in the AI space = better tools = lower prices. The race is on, and we’re the ones who benefit.

Vibe coding is officially a thing. A career coach with zero coding experience built a passive income app using AI tools. Business Insider covered it. The barrier between “I have an idea” and “I have a product” has never been thinner.

Next week on The Drop: How I built a complete lead and applicant system for a staffing agency. With AI. And a lot of coffee. You won’t want to miss that one.

One drop. One idea. One shift.

This week’s shift: The tool is only as good as the conversation you have with it.

Until next Tuesday,

Anita

BabicADesigns — Where soul meets system.

P.S. — Want to see what’s possible when you combine AI tools with real strategy? Check out my PromptPower Deluxe — because the best AI in the world still needs a human who knows what to ask.

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What's your Vibe today? Check it out ✨

I need to tell you about my baka.

Not because this is a nostalgia piece. Not because grandmothers are trending on Substack. But because last Wednesday at 11 PM, while I was rewriting the same Instagram caption for the fourth time — with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago, because apparently I’m the kind of person who makes coffee and then forgets to drink it — she walked into my head uninvited.

The way she used to walk into our kitchen. Without knocking. Carrying a pot of something that smelled like home.

She said — well, she didn’t say anything. She passed in 2016, at 93, with an opinion about everything until the very last day. But I heard her voice as clearly as if she were standing behind me:

“Zašto se pretvaraš da si netko drugi?”

Why are you pretending to be someone else?

I closed my laptop. I didn’t rewrite the caption. I sat in the dark for twenty minutes.

And that’s when something cracked open.

The Immigrant Daughter’s Content Problem

Here’s something I’ve never written about publicly, because it felt too personal for a “business” newsletter. But I’m done pretending this is just a business newsletter.

I grew up between two worlds. My parents came from Croatia to Germany in the 1970s — my tata from a tiny village called Pandore, up in the Velebit mountains near Senj, and my mama from a small village near Slunj. They brought everything with them: the language, the food, the humor, the stubbornness, the belief that hard work fixes everything and feelings are best discussed never.

And I grew up learning to translate. Not just languages — I speak several — but worlds. At school, I was the Croatian kid. At home, I was the quiet one — I have three sisters, and I was the one my mama could sit on the couch with the words “Ne mrdaj” — don’t move — and I wouldn’t move. Apparently, I didn’t even blink. In Croatia, visiting family in the summers, my sisters and I were Švabice — the German ones. Not quite Croatian enough there. Not quite German enough here.

And online? Online, I was... what, exactly?

That’s the question that hit me at 11 PM.

Because somewhere along the way, I had created yet another version of myself for the internet. A version that was polished and strategic and used words like “framework” and “leverage” and “content pillar.” A version that sounded like every other creator writing about AI and branding.

A version my baka would not have recognized. A version that would have made her walk into my office, look at my screen, and say something devastating in three words — the way only Balkan grandmothers can.

The Three Languages in My Head

I want to try something with you. I want to show you how I actually think — not the cleaned-up version, but the real one.

When I’m working on a brand strategy for a client, I think in English. It’s structured. It’s precise. “Define the core value proposition. Identify the visual language. Build the messaging hierarchy.” Clean. Professional. Useful.

When I’m feeling something — really feeling it, not just thinking about feeling it — I switch to Croatian. There’s a word, čežnja, that means something between longing and homesickness and the ache you feel when you miss someone who’s sitting right next to you. English doesn’t have that word. German has Sehnsucht, which is close but not quite. Croatian has čežnja, and when I feel it, that’s the language it arrives in.

And when I’m being funny — the dry, deadpan, “everything is fine while the house is burning” kind of funny — that’s pure Balkan. That’s the humor I grew up with. The humor of Lepa Brena movies and Audicija and my uncle telling the most devastating story you’ve ever heard with a completely straight face and then asking if anyone wants more rakija. My tata’s village, Pandore — let’s just say it could have easily been called Pijandore. Rakija for breakfast wasn’t a joke there. It was Tuesday.

Three languages. Three versions of me. And my content has been using exactly one of them.

The Experiment

So I tried something stupid. Or brave. I’m not sure which — on the Balkan, those are often the same thing.

I wrote a Substack Note the way I’d actually tell the story to a friend. Not my “content creator” voice. My real voice. The one that switches languages mid-sentence. The one that makes a joke when things get too serious. The one that references my grandmother and Croatian villages in the same breath as AI tools.

I didn’t plan it. I didn’t outline it. I didn’t run it through any framework.

I just... talked. On paper.

And here’s what happened: More people responded to that one unplanned Note than to my last three carefully structured articles combined.

I sat there looking at the notifications and thought about my tata. He passed in 2014, but his voice still lives in my head rent-free. He was a man of few words — the kind who could end an entire argument with one look. When things worked out unexpectedly, he’d just say: “Vidiš?” See? That was it. No explanation. No “I told you so.” Just vidiš, with a shrug, like the answer had been obvious all along and you were the only one who couldn’t see it.

He was also the kind of man who once told me: “Ne odmah, nego sad!” — Not right away, but NOW. I still don’t know what the difference is. Odmah and sad literally mean the same thing. But when he said it, you didn’t ask questions. You moved.

I think about that a lot when it comes to content. We spend so much time planning to be authentic odmah — soon, eventually, when we’re ready. Maybe the answer is sad. Now. Even if it’s messy.

What I Actually Learned (The Un-Framework)

I’m not going to give you “5 Steps to Finding Your Authentic Voice.” If I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that the moment you turn authenticity into a framework, it stops being authentic.

But I will tell you what I noticed. Not as a strategy. As a confession.

The parts of me I was hiding were the parts people wanted to see. The Croatian references. The dry humor. The spirituality. The fact that I sometimes pull a Tarot card before making a business decision — yes, really, and no, I’m not going to apologize for it. These weren’t “unprofessional.” They were the only things that made my content different from the 47,000 other people writing about AI and branding.

My “messy” voice performed better than my “clean” voice. Not because messy is better. But because messy was mine. The clean voice was a composite of every creator I’d been reading for six months. Professional, yes. Mine? Ne. Not even close.

The bilingual thing isn’t a bug. For years, I treated my multilingual brain as something to manage — make sure the English is perfect, don’t let the German structures sneak in, definitely don’t drop Croatian words into a business article. But that mixing? That’s exactly what makes my perspective different. I see patterns between cultures that monolingual creators can’t see. I make connections between a Croatian proverb and a branding principle that nobody else would make. That’s not confusion. That’s range.

The Uncomfortable Truth About “Finding Your Voice”

Everyone says “find your voice” like it’s a treasure hunt. Like your voice is hiding somewhere and you just need the right map.

But what if your voice isn’t lost? What if it’s right there — in the way you talk to your best friend over coffee at midnight, in the stories you tell at family dinners, in the jokes that make your people laugh — and the only reason it’s not in your content is because you decided it wasn’t “professional” enough?

I spent months trying to sound like the creators I admired. And they’re brilliant — truly. But I’m not them. I’m the daughter of Croatian immigrants who writes romance novels and pulls Tarot cards and makes brand strategies that somehow work, and I do all of this while switching between three languages in my head like a radio that can’t find the right station.

That’s not a problem to fix. That’s a voice to use.

My mama used to sit me on the couch and say “Ne mrdaj.” Don’t move. And I didn’t. I was the quiet one. The observer. The one who watched everything and said nothing. Apparently, I didn’t even blink.

Turns out, that’s exactly the skill that makes me good at what I do now. I watch. I notice. I see the thing nobody else sees. And then — when I finally speak — it means something.

I just forgot to bring that into my content.

What Changes Now

I’m not going to promise you that every article from now on will be perfect. I’m not even sure what “perfect” means anymore — probably something a LinkedIn guru made up to sell a course.

But I am going to promise you this: it’ll be me. The real one. The one with the accent you can hear even in writing. The one who makes a čežnja reference in a business article and doesn’t explain it because some things are better felt than translated.

If that’s not for you, I understand. There are plenty of clean, polished, framework-heavy newsletters out there.

But if you’ve ever felt like you’re performing a version of yourself online that your grandmother wouldn’t recognize — onda si na pravom mjestu.

Then you’re in the right place.

See you next time,

Anita

BabicADesigns — Where soul meets system.

P.S. — Next in the Creator System Series: how I’m actually using AI to amplify my real voice instead of replacing it. Spoiler: it involves talking to Manus the way I’d talk to a friend, not the way I’d write a brief. Turns out, AI is better at helping you sound like yourself when you stop trying to sound like everyone else.

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My Substack will always remain free to read. But if this article gave you a little "aha" moment or made you smile today, or if you just want to support my work without committing to a subscription, you can leave a little something in my tip jar.

Drop Tip in the Jar ✨

Last Tuesday, I was sitting on my couch with my second coffee of the evening — yes, I’m one of those people who drinks coffee at 9 PM and still sleeps fine, it’s a Balkan thing — scrolling through LinkedIn. You know that late-evening scroll where you’re not really looking for anything, you’re just... avoiding the dishes.

And then I saw it.

A post. Simple. No carousel, no fancy graphic. Just a sentence:

“Solopreneurs are running 7-figure businesses with a $250/month AI stack that replaces $800K in senior hires.”

I put down my cup.

Not because the number shocked me. Numbers like that fly around Instagram & Co. like confetti at a Croatian wedding — everyone throws them, nobody cleans up the mess.

No. I put down my coffee because I recognized something in that sentence. Something I’ve been feeling for months but couldn’t quite name.

The Feeling Before the Thought

You know that moment when you hear a song in a language you don’t speak, but your body responds before your brain does? That’s what this was.

Because here’s the thing: I’ve been building my business as a solopreneur for a while now. And somewhere between the Canva templates and the AI automations and the Substack articles, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not overnight. More like the way the light changes in Senj when autumn comes — you don’t notice it until one evening you’re sitting on the terrace and realize the shadows are longer than they were last week.

The shift is this: I’m not just using AI tools anymore. I’m running a business that couldn’t exist without them.

And that sentence — the $250 stack, the $800K team — it wasn’t news. It was a mirror.

What Actually Happened This Week

Let me give you the real picture, because the internet loves a headline but hates the nuance.

This week, the “solopreneur AI stack” conversation exploded. Not because of one tool or one launch, but because of a convergence. Several things happened at once:

The numbers got real. Multiple reports confirmed that solo founders using AI automation tools (think: Manus for research and content, Make.com for workflows, Canva for design) are genuinely operating at a level that used to require teams of 5-10 people. Not in theory. In practice. With receipts.

Google dropped new chips. Google announced its next generation of TPUs — the custom chips that power AI models — at Google Cloud Next. Why does this matter for you? Because cheaper, faster AI infrastructure means the tools you use get better and cheaper. The $250/month stack of today might be $100/month by December.

Apple replaced Siri with Gemini. Let that sink in. Apple — the company that would rather die than admit someone else does something better — quietly replaced its own voice assistant with Google’s AI. When Apple surrenders, you know the game has changed.

The “agentic” shift accelerated. Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork, Anthropic’s Managed Agents, and a dozen smaller tools all moved in the same direction: AI that doesn’t just answer questions, but actually does the work. Not “helps you” do the work. Does it.

The Part Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s where I want to get honest with you. Because everyone is celebrating the $250 stack and the solopreneur revolution, and I’m sitting here with my coffee thinking: Da, ali...

Yes, but.

Yes, the tools are incredible. But nobody’s talking about the weird loneliness of it. The fact that when your AI handles your research, your scheduling, your first drafts, your customer emails — you’re left alone with the one thing AI can’t do: deciding what actually matters.

I had a moment last week. I was using Manus to research a topic for this newsletter. And it came back with something brilliant. Structured. Well-sourced. Better than what I would have found in three hours of Googling.

And I sat there and thought: Okay. But what do I actually think about this?

That’s the real shift. It’s not about whether you can afford the tools. It’s about whether you’ve done the inner work to know what to do with them.

My baka — my grandmother, who lived to 93 and had an opinion about everything until the very last day — used to say: “Nemoj reć hop prije nego što preskočiš.” Don’t say “hop” before you’ve jumped. Meaning: don’t celebrate the tool before you’ve done the work.

She passed in 2016, but I swear she would have looked at all these solopreneurs posting their $250 AI stacks on LinkedIn and said exactly that. With her arms crossed. And then she would have asked if anyone’s actually making money or just making screenshots.

My tata — he passed in 2014, but his voice is still the loudest in my head — he would have said even less. Just: “Vidiš?” See? And that would have been enough. He was a man of few words. The kind who once told me “Ne odmah, nego sad!” — not right away, but NOW. To this day, I have no idea what the difference is. Odmah and sad mean the same thing. But when he said it, you moved.

The Soulful Reframe

Everyone’s asking: “What’s the best AI stack for solopreneurs?”

Wrong question.

The right question is: “What’s the one thing in your business that only you can do — and are you spending enough time doing it?”

Because the $250 stack doesn’t replace you. It replaces everything around you. The admin. The research. The formatting. The scheduling. The first drafts.

What’s left is the core. The taste. The intuition. The weird connection you make between a client’s childhood memory and their brand color. The moment you look at a design and think ne, to nije to — no, that’s not it — and you can’t explain why, but you’re right.

That’s not a $250 problem. That’s a lifetime-of-being-you problem. And no stack in the world can solve it for you.

Your Move This Week

Don’t go shopping for AI tools. You probably have enough.

Instead, try this: Block 30 minutes this week. No tools. No screens. Just you and a notebook — or a voice memo, if you’re like me and think better out loud.

Ask yourself: If my AI handled everything else perfectly, what would I spend my time on?

Write down whatever comes. Don’t edit it. Don’t make it strategic.

That messy, unfiltered answer? That’s your actual value. That’s the thing the $250 stack is trying to free you up to do.

Now go do it.

Quick Drops

A few more things that caught my eye this week:

Claude Mythos 5 exists but you can’t use it. Anthropic built a model so powerful they triggered their own highest safety protocol and decided not to release it. A 10-trillion-parameter model that stays locked in a vault. We’re officially in the era where AI companies build things they’re afraid to ship. Let that sit with you for a moment.

Google vs. Nvidia: the chip war heats up. Google is developing new AI chips with Marvell Technology to reduce dependence on Nvidia. For creators and solopreneurs, this means: more competition = lower prices = better tools for us. The big companies fighting is actually good news for the little ones.

One drop. One idea. One shift.

This week’s shift: The tools are ready. The question is whether you are.

Until next Tuesday,

Anita

BabicADesigns — Where soul meets system.

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