Build log
How this is being made. One person, a terminal, and a marketing department that turned out to be a cron job. A post most weeks, written as it happens, including the bits that went wrong.
· 7 min
TikTok showed our 420 posts to nobody. Here is what it actually demotes.
Every other post got 70 to 260 views. Every cannabis post got zero. I assumed a shadowban and an account penalty. Half of that was right.
· 6 min
For Dolly
Dolly Parton died on 25 August. By late morning the next day FM.video had a tribute channel built from what radio had actually played of hers over the years, and two short films of her best moments. How that happened so fast, and why it had to be done properly.
· 6 min
Down for 44 minutes because a cable stayed plugged in
The site had a backup network path the whole time and never used it, and every alert we had went out over the link that was broken. What an outage teaches you that a design review never does.
· first on LinkedIn · 7 min
I handed my marketing to an AI agent and it spammed everyone. Here is how I fixed it.
The sequel. Not by posting less, but by making video at scale, on brand, and releasing it on a schedule that respects each platform.
· first on LinkedIn · 6 min
My marketing department is a cron job
How FM.video turns real radio airplay into AI-made reels, and why writing the brand down as files was the whole trick.
· 5 min
DevOps in the AI World
I run a media company from my phone. The agents do the devops. Here is how a change goes from a voice note to live, tested properly, with a rollback faster than a kick drum.
· 7 min
The admin area: everything the machine is doing, on one screen
Twenty-six tabs, built by asking for them. What a one-person company's control room looks like when the person is not the one writing the dashboards.
· 5 min
Karaoke mode: the words, on the big screen, in time
Tap the mic and the lyrics land on the video, line by line, in sync with the song. How it works, why the timing is yours to nudge, and what it took to make it work on every screen from a phone to a TV.
· 6 min
Radio you can watch, rebuilt in a day
The old FM.video had died quietly. The scraper had stopped in February, the matcher's source code was gone, and the live site was calling a dev API. On 19 July I started again from an empty folder, with an AI agent, and by the evening it was scraping, matching and playing.
Written by Tim Thomas. The reels the posts talk about are at fm.video/reels.