The LinkedIn experiment nobody else would publish honestly. The AAA Accelerator handed a cold, 20-year-old account to a personal branding operator with 200+ clients and 75 million impressions behind her. Then they published exactly what happened, good and bad. Most early posts got around 200 impressions. Sixty connection requests yielded one reply. Designed graphics? Underperformed real photos every time. The one win: a case study post generated the account's first-ever inbound call, a 50-person property management company that booked a meeting. One post. One call. That's the whole game at the start. If you've been staring at your LinkedIn analytics feeling like a failure, this experiment is the most useful thing I've seen on the topic in months. The full 14-lesson course with worksheets is now live in their community.
A cheaper way to run AI on your coding work. xAI just released Grok 4.7, and the headline isn't the model, it's the price. It's built for coding and knowledge work, it runs longer on hard problems, and it checks its own output more consistently than earlier versions. What makes it worth mentioning here: it's available inside Cursor (the AI coding tool a lot of owners are using to build automations and internal tools) and it costs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. The faster variant runs $4 and $12. An internal benchmark shows it costs less per task than comparable frontier models. If you're paying for Cursor and not picking your model carefully, you might be leaving money on the table.
Trending on GitHub
akitaonrails/ai-memory: Gives AI coding agents a long-term memory so they don't forget context between sessions or when you switch tools. (167 stars today)
zhouxiaoka/autoclip: Automatically cuts long videos into highlights using AI. Built for content creators who don't want to edit by hand. (250 stars today)
ruanyf/weekly: A weekly tech digest published every Friday, written in Chinese. (182 stars today)
mvt-project/mvt: Scans your phone for signs it's been compromised. Useful if you're worried about spyware on a business device. (169 stars today)
cloudflare/quiche: Cloudflare's implementation of a faster internet transport protocol. Infrastructure-level, not something you'd run yourself, but it's what makes connections faster under the hood. (32 stars today)
Also Worth Knowing
Reader trust in news just hit a record low of 37%, and 10% of readers are already getting news from AI according to the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report. If you publish content, the practical move is to structure it for LLMs, add clear internal links, and put sourcing and trust signals on every page.
Omeda put out a practical playbook for turning audience behavior into upsell and cross-sell revenue, mapping six types of signals to an observe, segment, orchestrate framework. Worth a look if you have an email list and want to find the next offer without chasing new customers.
Google Ads is pushing AI Max for Search, claiming up to a 14% conversion boost for non-retail advertisers. Worth watching if you're running search campaigns, though Google's own benchmarks always deserve a second opinion.
WP Engine is hosting a September 22 webinar on proving content marketing ROI with analytics frameworks, aimed at content and media teams who need to justify the spend.
-Scott
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.