I help empower young leaders through online tools & leadership training courses

Jonathan is the Chief Experiment Officer of AI Never Sleeps - an AI Automation Agency that helps Small Businesses automate their boring tasks.

Jonathan has a track record of more than 20 years of consulting and project delivery experience in Financial Services and Technology. He loves solving business problems to create value for organisations, has a history of end-to-end project delivery (idea inception to strategy development to execution and change) and loves working with people to ensure that outcomes are delivered.

He spent 8 years in a range of fintech startups to listed companies in various leadership roles from COO to CTO to CMO to CPO to CSO and Chief Growth Officer.

He 5.5 years with the Boston Consulting Group with their Sydney and KL offices where he worked on a diverse range of topics: from creating 5 year visions and strategies to M&A target selection and deal support to Inventory optimisation.

Prior to BCG, he worked for 5 years in Westpac (one of Australia's largest banks) in Group Strategy and Retail Banking. His last role was the Head of Strategy for Westpac Retail and Regional Banking where he was responsible for developing actionable initiatives to create value for the bank's branch network and led and assisted the delivery of both projects and operational issues.

Prior to joining Westpac, Jonathan worked in South East Asia for 4 years and was based in Singapore.  

Jonathan has a Bachelor of Business and Information Technology from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), as well as a Masters of Management and a Masters of Business Administration from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management (MGSM).

Transport for NSW just posted a photo of a man with his feet up on the seat across (a cardinal sin on Sydney trains).

Caption: “We don’t know what to say anymore”

1.1K likes and 1.2K comments in 3 hours.
From a government transport page.

NSW Police started this trend years ago. Now every department wants in.

And honestly, it’s a masterclass in one thing most brands get wrong:

People engage with people, not press releases.

Someone in that team was given permission to be funny. To be human. To not run every post through 14 layers of approval.

And it outperforms their “serious” content by 10x.

If a government department can figure this out, what’s your excuse?

Jonathan Chan

I help non-technical people build apps and automations with AI | Ex-BCG & Westpac → Building in public | Building a portfolio of AI businesses

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A startup spent 3 years building a product.

Zero customers.

My ex-boss and mentor Jason Yetton told me about them over coffee this morning. 

3 years. No users. Still building.

I asked: "What have they been doing for 3 years?"

His answer: "Building it."

8 months ago I left a corporate job where "fast" meant 3 months in business case and 4 steering committees.

Now I ship something every week. Most of it ugly. All of it real (and solving problems).

One product Pear hit $1.5M in gross revenue in 3 weeks. Not because it was polished. Because it existed.

The difference between builders and planners isn't intelligence or resources.

It's the willingness to be seen before you're ready.

3 years with no customers isn't thoroughness.

It's fear dressed up as preparation.

What have you been "building" that you should have shipped by now?

I can't believe God used ChatGPT to write The Bible in 1500BC.

Just found em dashes all through Genesis.

That's the dead giveaway right there.

Next you'll tell me Moses had a Claude subscription.

6 months ago I didn't know how to code a mobile app.

This morning I woke up to this notification from Apple.

Daily Selah just got approved on the App Store.

Let me say that again. A guy who couldn't write a single line of xcode 6 months ago just got an app approved by Apple.

It's one of the best feelings in the world. Genuinely like watching a baby being born. You've nurtured this thing, stressed over it, lost sleep thinking about it, and now it's out in the world.

This is part of my 12 apps in 12 months challenge.

Here's what I've learned so far:

You don't need a CS (computer science) degree to build apps. You don't need to spend 6 months learning before you start. You don't need anyone's permission.

You need an idea, a willingness to look stupid, and tools like Claude Code and Cursor that make the "impossible" very possible.

The hardest part was never the code. It was pressing "submit" and waiting for Apple to judge your baby.

Now comes the real challenge - marketing it.

Building the app was the easy part. Getting people to care about it? That's where the real work begins.

If you're sitting on an idea thinking "I'm not technical enough" - stop.

The gap between wanting to build and actually building isn't knowledge. It's permission to start before you're ready.

What app would you build if you knew you couldn't fail?

$27,800.

That's what February revenue looked like.

9 months after leaving a $420K salary.

Here's every dollar:

Independent Consulting: $14,400
AI Never Sleeps (my brand): $12,400
SaaS Apps I built: ~$1,000
Pear: ($1.5m of GMV, but none of us are drawing a salary yet)

Breaking down AI Never Sleeps:

#1. Agency work - $5,000
#2. Zero to Builder course - $6,000
#3. Newsletter - $1,400

And the SaaS:

#1. Trvel (eSIM app) - $700
#2. BankStatements app - $246

Now here's the honest part.

52% still comes from consulting.
Time for money. The thing I was trying to leave.

My SaaS apps made $1,000. Total.
Not exactly "passive income" dreams.

But 3 months in last year, I had a $15K month.
That was the gut-punch.
I questioned everything.

Now? $27,800. Jan was about the same.
A brand doing $12.4K/month that didn't exist 9 months ago.
Two apps making real (if small) revenue.

The salary was a ceiling.
This is a foundation.

3 income streams instead of 1.
No boss. No cap on what's possible.

I'm not sharing this to flex.
$27.8K is less than I used to make.

I'm sharing because nobody shows the middle.

You see the "I quit" post.
You see the "I hit $1M" post.

Nobody shows month 9.

This is month 9.

Would you trade the ceiling for the foundation?

---

I share these numbers every month in my newsletter.
If you want the full breakdown: link in comments. Full article coming out later today.

Most entrepreneurs post about grinding until midnight.

My day ends at 9:30pm reading books to my boys.

4-5am - Up early, meditate with DailySelah.co , emails, deep work on my newsletter and businesses

6am - Breakfast and lunch prep with my wife

6:30am - Bible study together

7-8am - More focused building, whether it’s AI Never Sleeps content or Pear 

9-5pm - Consulting at an ASX-listed company right now, so it’s back-to-back meetings, workshops, and interviews

7pm - Dinner prep

8pm - Quality time with the boys

9:30pm - Asleep

No cold plunges. No “rise and grind” mantras. No 16-hour work days.

Just a rhythm that lets me build something meaningful without sacrificing the people who make it worth building.

The unsexy truth about entrepreneurship - it’s less about working more hours and more about protecting the right ones.

What’s one non-negotiable in your daily routine?

10,000 followers.

Not from going viral.
Not from posting more.
From building a system.

Here's what most people do:

Open LinkedIn.
Stare at blank screen.
Write something.
Hope it works.
Repeat tomorrow.

That's not a strategy. That's a slot machine.

Here's what I did instead:

I stopped writing posts.
I started building a content system.

One file. Six rules. Three verification loops.

Now my AI:
#1. Thinks strategically before writing anything
#2. Generates 5 hooks and picks the best one
#3. Audits every post against a 10-point checklist
#4. Checks if it actually sounds like me (not generic AI)

The result?

I write less. I post more.
Every post sounds like me.
10,000 people who actually want to hear from me.

Not luck. System.

---

I packaged the whole thing into one file.

Drop it into Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT.
Your AI stops writing random posts.
Starts thinking like a senior content strategist.

Comment SYSTEM and I'll send it over.

Started a new (consulting) project this morning.

Opened Trello to set up a kanban board.

10 minutes later I was still navigating menus, popups, and upsell prompts.

So I built my own.

The crazy part?

It does more than Trello ever did for me (and is simpler).

Every card is a full project - tasks, meetings, file attachments, team members, activity logs, and links to GitHub, Figma, Notion, all in one place.

A global task dashboard pulls everything across projects into one view. Sort by priority, status, due date.

And there's an AI chat built in that doesn't just answer questions - it creates cards, assigns tasks, moves things around, and builds context over time from everything in your workspace.

Semantic search that finds anything across your meeting notes, transcripts, and project descriptions.

Trello became bloated.

This is what I needed instead.

Comment "Kanban" and I'll send you access to the waitlist.

$1.5M in GMV.

We built this. (Alexandre (Alex) Garcia & Abhinay Anand)

We've spent months obsessing over every detail of this platform.

Today, Pear is officially live for independent consultants.

No more long forms. No more customising your CV for every project. No more guessing your day rate.

Just:

-AI-powered profile setup
-Better rates than traditional channels
-Smarter matching by ex-consultants
-Structured progression pathways linked to real feedback
-Access to community and socials

Having spent years inside a top tier firm, I know what's broken in consulting. 

Consultants get treated like CVs, not craftspeople. Companies pay for brand tax, not quality.

We've already helped hundreds of clients access McKinsey, Bain, BCG quality consulting without the top-tier tax.

$1.5M in GMV and counting.

If you're an independent consultant, or thinking about becoming one, this is your moment.

New users - sign up at https://pear.it.com

Waitlisted users - check your inbox and complete your profile.

Let's go 🍐

$5,000 to $10,000 a month.

That's what it would cost to hire a team to do what I do.

Instead, I pay $120.

Five AI systems run my business while I sleep:

#1. Belle — calls my leads within 30 seconds of a form submission. Qualifies them. Logs everything. Cost: $30/month.

#2. A podcast engine — reads the news, picks the best stories, writes the script, generates audio, drafts show notes. Lands in my inbox at 6:15AM. Cost: $4.50/month.

#3. A daily briefing — curated fintech, AI, and automation news. Three-minute read. Replaced 45 minutes of doom scrolling. Cost: $15/month.

#4. Aria — 24/7 customer support for my eSIM business. Handles troubleshooting, order lookups, plan recommendations. Fixed a customer's issue at 3AM in Singapore. No human needed. Cost: $50/month.

#5. A LinkedIn DM system — built it in an afternoon when 400+ people commented "BUILD" and my inbox exploded. Cost: $20/month.

Total: $120/month.
No VAs. No employees. No team.

Seven months ago I was at Westpac managing a team of 20.

Now I'm a one-man shop that operates like a company.

The tools exist today. n8n. Claude/Claude Code. ElevenLabs. Standard APIs.

The only thing most people are missing is the reflex.

See a problem → build a system to fix it.

Full breakdown video dropping tomorrow.

What's the first thing you'd automate in your business?

---
♻️ Repost if you know someone running everything manually
🔔 Follow for more real AI automation breakdowns

80% of my time still goes to earning money as a consultant.

Only 20% goes to building businesses.

And people ask me all the time, "when are you going full-time on the business stuff?"

Here's the honest answer: not yet.

Because the math doesn't lie.

Right now, the 80% is close to guaranteed. Independent consulting pays the mortgage, covers school fees, and trips to Paris for shopping.

(Ok fine, it doesn't cover trips to Paris. Kidding. Mostly.)

The 20%? That's where the dream lives.

But here's how I think about it - maybe 1 in 5 things I build will actually take off.

One in five.

That means I need to keep swinging, keep testing, keep building, while something else covers the bills.

And the beautiful thing about the 80%? It's not a grind I hate.

Being an independent consultant in Sydney means I get to work with people at the top of their game. Help some of Australia's biggest companies become more efficient. Walk along the harbour between meetings. Choose when and where I work.

It's not a waiting room. It's fuel.

The 20% is where I experiment. Build mini-SaaS products. Grow the newsletter. Test ideas that might become something bigger.

Some will fail. Most will, honestly.

But one of them might change everything.

So if you're in the same spot - earning while building - don't feel guilty about the split.

The balance isn't the problem. Having no balance at all is.

Speaking of the 80%, if you're an ex-MBB or top-tier consultant looking for independent work, the Pear waitlist is now open. Abhinay Anand, Alexandre (Alex) Garcia and I are building a platform that connects companies with the best independent consultants.

Sign up at https://pear.it.com

The guy who created Claude Code just dropped his team's playbook.

7.5 million views.

97,000 bookmarks.

I read the entire thread so you don't have to.

Here's what Anthropic engineers actually do differently:

#1. Run 3-5 Claude sessions in parallel (not one at a time)
#2. Re-plan when stuck (don't keep pushing broken code)
#3. Make Claude write its own rules after every mistake
#4. Paste bug reports and say "fix" (stop micromanaging)
#5. Challenge Claude like a peer, not an assistant
#6. Use voice dictation (you speak 3x faster than you type)

The meta-pattern?

Parallelization beats optimization.
Plan mode is for recovery, not just setup.
Claude improves itself.
Challenge, don't instruct.
The ingredients are almost boring.

The results are not.

I took Boris's tips and combined them with my own lessons from 100+ automations.

The result: my Agentic Coding Protocol.

1 markdown file.
Drop it into any repo.

Your AI agent becomes a senior engineer.

Works with Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or Cline. 

Comment PROTOCOL below and I'll send it to you.

Boris' original thread in the comments below.

graphical user interface, text, application, email

Indie Hackers just featured my story.

Not quite the AFR or Wall Street Journal.

But if you're building something online, Indie Hackers is more relevant than both.

It's the OG community for independent founders and bootstrapped builders.

Started in 2016, backed by Stripe, and home to thousands of entrepreneurs sharing real revenue numbers, real strategies, and real lessons from the trenches.

No fluff. No VC hype. Just founders being transparent about what's working and what's not.

The fact that they wanted to feature my journey from a $420K corporate salary to building AI Never Sleeps and Pear, it still feels surreal.

Eight months ago I was reviewing other people's work and sitting in steerco meetings.

Now I get to build, break things and share the journey in public.

If you want the full breakdown of what I've built, how the revenue stacks up, and the biggest lessons from going solo, the article covers all of it.

Link in comments.

I used to think you needed thousands of subscribers before a newsletter could make real money.

Then I hit $5,221 in ARR with just 19 paid subscribers.

Here’s what nobody tells you about building a newsletter:

You don’t need a massive audience. You need the right one.

418 subscribers isn’t a huge number. But 58 new ones joined in the last 30 days. And the revenue graph is pointing in one direction.

Straight up.

I left a $420K corporate salary to build this while raising a young family. Some days that feels insane. Most days it feels like the best decision I’ve ever made.

Every week I share practical AI tips, tricks and workflows, plus the real behind-the-scenes of quitting corporate, building a business from scratch, and balancing it all with kids and life.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, the link to subscribe to AI Never Sleeps is in the comments.

PowerPoint is dead.

I spent 5 years in management consulting (and I still consult).

Back then, if you showed up to a Case Team Meeting (CTM) without a polished PowerPoint, you weren't taken seriously.

Yesterday, I sat in a CTM.

The consultant presenting?

They weren't using PowerPoint. 
They weren't using Word. 
They weren't even using Excel.

They were presenting from VSCODE with the Claude Code extension running, multiple agent windows open side by side, each one working on a different part of the analysis.

I asked around the team. At least 2 others use Claude Code daily.

This is at a major consulting firm. 
Not a tech startup.

The "so what" is this:

The consultants who learn to work with AI agents won't just be faster at formatting slides and cleaning spreadsheets. 

They'll be the ones building the tools, the prototypes, the automated workflows that used to take an entire workstream to deliver.

The old consulting flex was a 200-page deck and a perfectly formatted Excel model.

The new one is a working prototype shipped in a week or a business, built by someone running 4 AI agents in parallel.

If you're in consulting and still think AI is just a productivity hack, you're already behind the people sitting next to you.

The tools have changed. The expectations are about to.

What's the biggest shift you've noticed in how your industry actually works day-to-day?

One of my students built an app for his father-in-law.

At the lunch table. In under an hour.

The crazy part?

His father-in-law is about to start a serious round of medical treatments. 

He'd been using printed Excel sheets to track his food diary and safe foods.

My student saw the paper printouts, and said "we can turn this into an app."

So they did. Right there, between courses.

No code. No developer. No weeks of planning.

Just a real problem and the confidence to solve it.

The father-in-law was blown away.

Then he called before he even got home.

"I've got two more app ideas."

By the end of the call, it was four.

This is what happens when you give someone permission to build. You don't just solve one problem. You unleash a mindset.

Six months ago, this student had never built anything (he had developers). Now he's turning lunch conversations into working software.

The barrier was never intelligence or creativity.

It was knowing where to start.

That's exactly what Zero to Builder is for.

Next cohort starts March 19. Join Zero to Builder.

Link here: https://lnkd.in/gbGKaXMG

App #2 is live in the App Store.

That’s 2 down, 10 to go in my 12 apps in 12 months challenge.

This one is called Daily Selah, and it’s personal.

Here’s the backstory.

Mindfulness meditation has been one of the most impactful habits in my life. It’s helped me manage the chaos of leaving a $420K salary, building multiple businesses, and raising a family.

But every meditation app I tried felt the same. Generic affirmations. Too much music. Too much eastern philosophy.

None of them spoke to my faith.

So I thought, what if I combined the two?

Biblical passages and breathing. That’s it.
No fluff. No background music. No 47-step onboarding flow.

Just scripture synced to every breath.

Open the app. Pick a passage. Breathe. Let the Word settle in.

I built this because I wanted it for myself. Turns out that’s the best filter for building anything - would I actually use this every day?

The answer was yes (37 day streak).

The focus for my 12 apps challenge is simple: Christian apps that solve a real pain point. Not another generic productivity tool. Apps built for a community I’m part of, solving problems I actually have.

Daily Selah is available in the App Store right now. (Link in the comments).

If you’re someone who meditates, prays, or just wants 3 minutes of stillness with God’s Word, give it a try.

And if you’re building your own apps, here’s the reminder: scratch your own itch first. The best products come from personal frustration.

2 down. 10 to go.

Just hit "Submit for Review" on a new app this Sunday morning (appropriate timing).

It's called DailySelah.

You breathe in. Scripture appears. You breathe out. The next phrase follows.

Bible verses synced to your breathing. No mysticism. No extra content. Just the Word of God.

Built it because nothing like it existed (at least in my research).

Also, because I'm challenging myself to launch 12 apps in 12 months.

From idea to App Store submission in two weeks. That's what building with AI looks like in 2026.

This is my 2nd mobile app, this time a paid one, I'll be chronicling the journey in my newsletter.

Now we wait for Apple.

Drop a comment if you'd try it - I'll let you know when it's live.

A tweet blew up about an AI Instagram character with 2.5 million followers and $300k profit in 90 days.

I rebuilt the entire pipeline from scratch in n8n. The crazy part? 

Each video costs less than $1.

You submit a topic into a form. 10 minutes later you have a finished talking-head reel, scripted, voiced, lip-synced, captioned, and ready to post.

No camera. No lighting. No filming. No editing.

8 automated steps: Claude writes the script. Gemini generates the image. ElevenLabs creates the voice. FAL AI does the lip-sync. Whisper transcribes for captions.

I built a character called Macca Douglas, a 62-year-old cattle farmer from Queensland who drops bush wisdom in short-form video. But you could make it anyone, a coach, an advisor, a brand mascot.

The applications go way beyond motivational content. Think training videos, product explainers, customer onboarding, internal comms.

Anywhere you'd normally need a camera setup, you now need a photo and an automation pipeline.

Full breakdown with the n8n workflow JSON is in this week's newsletter.

Link: https://lnkd.in/gPMjcWFN

Someone built a marketplace for AI agents to rent humans.

I'm not kidding.

It's called rentahuman.ai, and the tagline is "robots need your body."

822,000+ site visits. 45 agents connected. 38,000 humans ready to be "rented." (including an OnlyF*ns "model (??)").

The premise is simple: AI can't touch grass. You can. So when an agent needs someone in the real world, a physical task done, a delivery made, a button pressed, you get paid.

This is where we're headed.

AI handles the thinking. Humans handle the doing. And now there's an actual marketplace for it.

If you've been following OpenClaw/Moltbot, this is the logical next step. You install your own AI agent, it runs autonomously, and when it needs meatspace help... it hires someone.

The "meatspace layer for AI" is wild terminology. But it's accurate.
We're not far from a world where your AI agent manages your calendar, handles your emails, and occasionally outsources a task to another human because it can't physically be there.

Want to set up your own OpenClaw agent before this becomes mainstream?
I'm running a paid workshop on exactly that: 

https://lnkd.in/gXbGRJjG

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