Then Chief of Staff and CMO at Wheel, and briefly an aerospace co-founder (long story).
Lived in Marfa for two years. Been to all seven continents.
Austin. Two kids, 2 and 4.
Now: advising founders (Anthimeros), building with AI full-time, and incubating a Texas vermouth and Bartleby, a keyboard-first iMessage inbox for the Mac.
Exhibit A: my own homepage
“Howdy. I’m a 2x dad, casual cyclist, avid reader, occasional investor, and frequent advisor…”
Please don’t use my site as a model.
Fifteen years in, I can get away with being loose. You’re at the part where someone is deciding whether to interview you. Lead with what they’re looking for.
Exhibit B: what a non-engineer can build now
I’m not an engineer. I built all of this.
This deck. Your survey answers, live. A phone version. My iPad is the clicker.
/ideas. 130 half-baked startup ideas as a deck you can shuffle and filter.
Trackers for the games I play, the books I read, and what I’m watching.
Dark mode and eight accent colors. Press d or c anywhere on the site.
A colophon that doubles as the site’s design system.
Apps and sites I use every day. A few are on the right; the rest are on /projects.
Bartleby, a Mac iMessage inboxStoop, a friends-only marketplaceSongshelf, a sheet-music appA birthday-week plannerCity guidesMy son’s day clock
Ten words for today
A little vocabulary first.
Getting a site online
Domain
Your address. yourname.com.
Registrar
The store you rent the domain from, by the year.
DNS
The phone book that points your domain at your site.
Host
The computer your site actually lives on.
Deploy
Putting a new version of your site on the host.
Getting AI to build it
Prompt
What you ask for.
Context
Everything it can see while it answers: your files, your notes, the conversation so far.
Agent
AI that does the steps instead of telling you the steps.
Coding agent
Claude Code, Codex, and the like: an agent on your laptop that can create files and run commands.
MCP
A plug that lets an AI operate another tool for you.
Tech
Buy the domain. Now.
domainr.com: find a name that’s available. Your name if you can get it. A .com if you can get it. Don’t agonize.
cloudflare.com → Domain Registration → buy it. At cost: about $10–30 a year, depending on the ending.
New to Cloudflare? Watch your email for an ICANN verification link. Click it or the domain gets suspended.
10:00
Tech · domains
Your name’s taken. Now what?
Add an initialsamjrivera.com
Add a wordhisamrivera.com itssamrivera.com samriveramakes.com
Use what people call yousammyrivera.com
Change the endingsamrivera.co samrivera.me samrivera.studio samrivera.xyz
No hyphens, no numbers. Say it out loud: if you’d have to spell it, pick another.
What you told me
Here’s the room.
Sites you like
Strategy
Four things I believe.
Interesting and memorable beats competent. Everyone in your interview pool is competent. That’s why they’re in the pool.
Skills are table stakes. Skip what everyone already has. A certification or a niche skill is worth a line; Excel isn’t.
Evergreen over a feed. Write three things that will still be true next year, instead of thirty posts you’ll stop writing in November.
70% > 100%. A site that’s live and a little rough beats the perfect one you never ship.
Content
The recipe.
One part marketing. What you can do and how you think. A campaign you’d have run differently. A page you rewrote, and the number that moved.
One part personal interest. Bikes. Coffee. A show. Whatever you’d talk about at dinner. This is the part people remember.
One part current events. Your take on AI, a policy fight, a brand that fumbled. Proof you’re paying attention to the world you want to work in.
Content · nuts and bolts
What goes on the site.
This is not a resume. Resume rules don’t apply. Be creative, within reason for the job you want.
One line that says what you do and what you care about. If someone reads nothing else, this is enough.
Three pieces of work. For each: what it was, what you did, what changed. A number if you have one.
Something that’s just you. A hobby, a strong opinion, a /now page.
About. A short paragraph, written the way you talk.
How to reach you. An email address, not a contact form.
Content · principles
Standing out.
Be clear about what you do and what you want. Name the job you’re after. Nobody should have to guess.
Be specific. Swap each adjective for a number, a name, or a place.
Be unique. If a classmate could paste it onto their site, rewrite it.
Show curiosity. What you’re into, what you’re learning, the question you can’t drop.
Be early. Show you’re already doing what the job will need next year. Building your site with AI, and saying how you built it, counts.
Content · first lines
Before and after.
Working in marketing now
Marketing professional passionate about storytelling and data-driven growth.
I run the TikTok for a Round Rock taco shop (900 to 40k followers), and I have a lot of opinions about why Duolingo’s owl gets to be unhinged and your bank doesn’t.
No work experience yet
Recent graduate seeking opportunities in brand management.
I spent a semester figuring out why nobody opened my dorm’s newsletter (we sent it at 7am on Mondays). Moving it to Thursday night tripled the opens, and now I want to do that for a brand you’ve heard of.
Ten-plus years
Results-driven marketing leader with 12 years of B2B and B2C experience.
I’ve spent twelve years marketing products nobody had heard of yet. Most recently I took a Dallas HVAC software company to 4,000 customers with no ad budget, mostly by writing the guides its customers were already Googling.
Content · little details
Disproportionately memorable.
Dark mode Press d. Hand-tuned, not inverted.A /now page What I’m up to this month. Proof the site is alive.A colophon How the site was made, and its rules.The time where I am One line of code. Feels like a person lives here.Things I love, tracked 51 games, rated./ideas 130 half-baked ideas, as a deck.
Examples · eight sites
For each one: steal one thing. Skip one thing.
Shout it out. I’ll go last.
nat.org · A plain-HTML list of things he believes.
My pick
maggieappleton.com · One sentence that says exactly what she makes and what it’s about.
My pick
briewolfson.com · Navigation that sounds like a person: “work I’m proud of,” “under the bed.”
My pick
robinsloan.com · A color and a voice he owns. “A creative industrialist” is a positioning line.
My pick
masonre.art · Every project gets a re: name, and the letters page is a hand-drawn desk.
My pick
rauno.me · Restraint. Type, whitespace, and a few small interactions.
You picked this
paulstamatiou.com · Twenty years of writing, work, and the gear he uses, on one site.
You picked this
helloginniehsu.com · Gray type and a lot of white space, so you look at the illustrations first.
You picked this
Live build · mad libs
Give me six things.
Live build · deploy
Drag. Drop. Live.
The AI gives you index.html. Put it in a folder on your desktop.
Cloudflare → Compute → Workers & Pages → Create application → Upload your static files. Name it, drag the folder in, Deploy.
Optional Later, once it’s ready to be your real site: your project → Custom domains → add the domain you bought. Cloudflare wires up the DNS.
Your turn · pick one
Build yours.
20:00
Let a coding agent build it
Claude Code (included with your UT account) or Codex (may need a paid ChatGPT plan).
Give it your six answers. It creates the site as a folder on your laptop. Drag that folder into Cloudflare.
Optional Ask it to deploy with Cloudflare’s Wrangler too. One browser login, no keys to copy.
Or chat in the browser
claude.ai or ChatGPT. Nothing to install.
Give it your six answers and ask for one index.html file. Save it into a folder. Drag the folder into Cloudflare.
If you need it · Claude Code
Install Claude Code.
Mac: open Terminal and paste
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash
Windows: open PowerShell and paste
irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex
Open a new terminal window when it finishes.
Make a folder and go into it: mkdir mysite, then cd mysite
Type claude and sign in with your UT account.
Paste the prompt with your six answers.
The honest part
“I don’t have anything to put in it yet.”
You probably have more than you think. All of these count:
✓A class project
✓The vibe-coding project this fall
✓A take on a campaign you didn’t run
Your next thing
Build the foundation today. The work goes in as it happens.
The other honest part
“I have too much to put in it.”
Pick three. The three you’d most want to be asked about in an interview. Everything else is one line per role, or a link to your resume.
One site is usually enough. Split it only when the work is for two different audiences.
Before you go
What’s next.
msm.alexpriest.com: this deck, live, plus step-by-step guides: /simple (one page, the Claude or ChatGPT app) and /advanced (whole site, Claude Code or Codex).
An open question: who here starts something? Anthropic’s campus program funds student leads, and master’s students have their own track. UT’s builder club looks like it went quiet.
Invest in your home on the internet. Keep it current. When something changes, change the site, even if it’s one line on a /now page.
Ship at 70%, then send it to me. Want a critique? Email your page whenever it’s ready: hello@alexpriest.com. I’ll send notes back.
