You do not own your business. You rent it.
Here’s the thing—I’m not some viral expert who makes $2 million in revenue from startups a month, but I have audited the backends of multiple founders over the years. Some are doing $20k a month; others are doing $200k.
These guys are trapped.
Look at your P&L statement. Look at your tech stack. Strip away the revenue and the branding, and look at the infrastructure.
Your email list lives on a platform that can ban you for a “policy violation.” Your data is locked behind a $99/mo API. Your traffic is at the mercy of an algorithm change that you cannot see, influence, or predict.
We have been sold a lie. We were told that “SaaS” (Software as a Service) was the future because it was easy. And it was. It was easy to sign up, easy to scale, and easy to integrate.
But the cost of “easy” was Sovereignty.
What you gain in “ease” you lose in sanity, and you lose in identity. I’m not just talking about founders, either—creatives, creators, founders, and even just the little guy. The “hobbyist”.
The $2,000/Month Bleed
I audited a client’s old operations last year. She wasn’t running a business; she was running a subscription management service. Typeform for intake. Zapier for logic. Mailchimp for sending. Airtable for storage.
At this point, are you even making money? Sure, maybe if you go viral—but not every creator goes viral right away. And every second spent not going viral is spent bleeding.
Every simple action required a “tool.” Every tool required a monthly fee. And every tool held a piece of data hostage.
The same happened for me, right after the AI boom back in 2021, when I was launching one of my previous projects with a friend.
My co-founder at the time followed the traditional Silicon Valley mindset. He wanted to subscribe to every new service for quite literally every purpose—and I ended up stomaching the cost.
If I stopped paying, the business stopped existing. That is not a business. That is a liability.
The Pivot to Sovereignty
I founded The Alworths and my online empire on a single, ruthless principle: If we can build it, we do not rent it.
We operate on three protocols:
- Code Over Tools: We do not pay $29/mo for a WordPress plugin that we can replicate with 10 lines of JavaScript. We build our own pipelines.
- Data Sovereignty: We reject “platform risk.” Our data lives in databases we control (SQL, Google Sheets), not in proprietary black boxes.
- High Leverage: We automate the grunt work. If a task requires human repetition, it is a failure of system design.
This used to be impossible. With the addition of AI tools like GPT 5.2, Gemini Pro 3, and even self-hosted alternatives like Qwen and Llama, it’s no longer impossible. Actually, it’s easier.
The Portfolio
This is not a theory. I am building this live. The portfolio currently includes:
- Omir Systems: A high-end AI consultancy running on a custom 11ty architecture.
- SiteNimble: The engine for high-ticket web builds.
- ViralThumbs: A productized service with automated payment logic.
- BookCage: A human-led, AI-assisted book service for pumping out 20k-word manuscripts.
- DailyInkling: This intelligence feed, powered by a sovereign AI orchestration layer.
And every day, I’m building and shipping more work. Improving the systems and making each platform better. All by myself, and following my protocols.
The Signal
Most founders are content to play in the sandbox that big tech built for them. They are happy to pay the rent until the landlord raises the price.
I am not.
I view any centralization of data as a failure of the system we subscribe ourselves to.
DailyInkling is the documentation of the escape. I will show you the code, the strategy, and the architecture required to build assets that you actually own.
No matter if you’re creating YouTube videos and you want to automate production and editing, a thumbnail designer in search of new ideas, or especially a founder looking to turn their business into 100x with half the effort…
We are done renting. We are building.
Welcome to the Empire.
Carson
NEXT STEP: Read the Master Data Protocol to see how I legally hardened this philosophy, or check The Artifacts to steal my code (open source, coming soon).