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I've been steadily building a system to help me service my clients better and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
The biggest differentiator? It holds full context about who I am and what I do best. So when I open a terminal, find a project on Contra, and start outreach, the system already knows my voice, my work history, and what makes a good fit. I still make sure every proposal is on point before shipping, but the scaffolding is already there.
Beyond initial setup, I keep it lean: faster models for quick pulls (Haiku), smarter ones (Sonnet) for judgment calls. Built on top of Nate Herk's AIS-OS template and Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern, two frameworks that help LLMs hold context across sessions without losing the thread.
Today I asked Claude (and Gamma) to map out what we've built over about a week. See what it generated below.
Most of the connections to @Contra HQ and other tools run via MCP, basically live data pipes that let the system read my calendar, inbox, meetings, and revenue without me having to copy-paste anything.
This is the part I think is most underrated: two of the skills (/audit and /level-up) exist specifically to find gaps in the system and ship one improvement per week. It means you're building something that gets better the more you use it.
What do you think? What would you add to a setup like this?
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The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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To the AI creatives:
I remember when AI became a sensation a few years ago. Everyone was amazed by the realistic quality and the infinite possibilities for creation. It was new, exciting, fun—but also intimidating.
Fast-forward to today. Even though its popularity has grown and the technology has improved significantly, I've realized that many people who are not experienced with these tools have developed certain expectations about them.
AI = Fast = High Quality = Cheap
No.
Yes, tools like Nano Banana, Kling, and Seedance can produce impressive results, but don't forget that behind those results is a person sitting at a computer, iterating over and over and over again until they find that "perfect" final image.
I've had bad experiences with clients who think that just because I'm using AI, I should charge less.
"You use AI. You can do it in 20 minutes. Why are you charging so much?"
Well, what about the credits? What about post-production in Photoshop and Lightroom when needed? What about the constant back-and-forth to match branding guidelines and client feedback?
Those minutes and hours count too—not just the speed of Higgsfield, Kling, or ComfyUI.
And what about our hardware? Our storage drives? Our electricity costs? Our subscriptions?
Know your value.
Just because you're using AI doesn't mean you're an emotionless robot working nonstop, generating endless iterations for cheap dollars.
Take your time. Trust your process. Don't fall for the "it's instant and effortless" narrative that many content creators promote—or that some clients expect.
Plan your work. Define your goals. Sometimes a single image can take hours to get right.
If a client thinks that because something is generated quickly it should automatically be cheap, the answer is still:
No.
Know your value. Have a detailed understanding of how much you spend on credits, software, hardware, post-production, and revisions.
Clients are paying for results, experience, taste, creative direction, problem-solving, and the countless hours you've invested in mastering these tools—not just for the seconds it takes an AI model to render an image.
Peace.
Love this!
$945K on Contra. And $10K of next month is already booked, without sending a single new offer.
That second number is the one that matters. Early on, freelancing felt like starting from zero every month. Close, deliver, panic, repeat. The fix wasn't more outreach. It was treating my client list like a portfolio.
Two kinds of income, same as investing.
Retainers are your index funds. Ongoing, month to month, slower, but they pay whether or not you land something new. That is where the $10K came from.
One-off projects are your growth stocks. One can be 9K, the next 20K, but you never quite know what next month looks like.
Live on only retainers and you cap your upside. Live on only one-offs and you ride the rollercoaster. The freelancers who stop white-knuckling every month are the ones who hold both and tune the ratio to how much stability they actually need.
I'm still dialing in my mix. But going from zero recurring to a real safety net changed how the whole business feels.
New Road to a Million every week. What's your retainer-to-project split right now?
I’m new on Contra. What advice would you give for getting the first clients and building toward retainers?
Lately, I’ve been diving deep into Cursor, Claude, and AI agents.
Instead of just watching tutorials, I decided to learn by building something myself — a Figma plugin from scratch. There are already plenty of similar solutions out there, but my goal was to understand the entire creation process, from idea to a working product.
And here’s the result: I went from zero knowledge to a functioning plugin in just two days.
The plugin already helps identify issues in design files and highlights things that are easy to miss during day-to-day work. Of course, I’m still not 100% satisfied with it — there’s always room for improvement. But for a first attempt, I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
The most exciting part is that while building it, I started coming up with new ideas for Design System automation: naming conventions, component structure, style organization, and other repetitive tasks that could be streamlined with AI.
Looks like this is just the beginning 😄
Tech stack: Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, and the Figma Plugin API.
For now, here’s a look at what I’ve built so far 👇
Wowww, great job 😍 Intrigued for part 2! You know, your approach to testing things yourself (from scratch!) reminded me the Tumblr times back in idk 2012-2014 maybe when everyone was photoshopping pics, memes, gifs etc. and I created my own "colors" (layers with different image...
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