Insights on AI, engineering, and building tools for solo entrepreneurs
[1] SoloStaff Bookkeeper processes receipts locally using whichever LLM provider you configure: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, or Google. No proprietary clou
Read moreSubscription fatigue is not a marketing term — it is a measurable operational cost. Research from Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Report found that the av
Read moreDeep Dive: The Six-Stage Sequential Pipeline By Stephen Bogner, P.Eng. — April 6, 2026 — Post 1 of 5 in the Blog Creator Innovations Serie
Read moreIn the first post in this series, I introduced the six-stage blog-creator pipeline and explained how each stage produces artifacts consumed by the
Read moreThis is the fifth and final post in a series exploring the engineering decisions behind blog-creator, a six-stage automated pipeline for produ
Read moreThe blog-creator.yaml configuration schema covers seven top-level sections.[2] Each section addresses a distinct concern in the pipeline. Together the
Read moreAfter Stage 3 (Writing) and Stage 4 (Visuals) produce an HTML draft, Stage 5 receives that draft and the research brief from Stage&
Read moreEveryone's building for the cloud. I'm going the opposite direction. As a practicing engineer (P.Eng.), I've watched good businesses get held hostage
Read more# The Privacy-First Approach to Business Automation: Why Local Beats Cloud As engineers, we're trained to question assumptions. So why do we blindly a
Read more# The Real Cost of 'Free' Cloud Tools: Why I'm Building Desktop Alternatives Imagine this: I just got an email from a SaaS tool I've used for three ye
Read more5 Key Innovations in Automated Blog Creation: How Source-Verified Content Changes Everything Most AI writing tools generate fluent text with no guaran
Read more# Dogfooding as Product Strategy: Why I Use Every Tool I Build In Silicon Valley, they call it 'dogfooding'—using your own product in real business op
Read more# The Hidden Cost of 'Convenient' Cloud Software for Solo Entrepreneurs Last month, I audited my business software subscriptions. The results were sho
Read moreI was building a pipeline to automate funding proposal creation for the SBIR program when I hit a wall that completely changed my understanding of doc
Read moreI am Stephen Bogner, a Professional Engineer based in Medicine Hat, Alberta. This is the story of SoloStaff — AI-powered desktop tools built for solo entrepreneurs, designed around a simple philosophy: privacy first, subscriptions never.
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