It's been a while.
I quit my job May 2023 and started sharing my journey on YouTube September 2023. A little over three years later, quite a bit has changed: the tools, the projects, and how I spend my time. My situation at home has changed a couple times as well which has delayed things a bit.
More on all this in a sec for anyone that cares.
One thing hasn't changed though. I'm still excited about what I'm building and where I see it going. Probably more excited now than ever, actually.
Today, I am most excited to finally launch The Lab. It's somewhere I can finally share the random fruits of my labor with my e-mail list subscribers all in one place. All 1,197 of you last time I checked!
How I Got Here
Early videos on the Meteoric Money Labs YouTube channel were just my best copy of successful content on other channels, but from my experience. They included everything I thought I had learned over the years about building online businesses, content marketing, and why I wanted to take a different direction with my work.
Nobody cared. Videos flatlined after hundreds of views and no one subscribed.
So I decided to get back to my SEO "roots" and started reverse engineering the YouTube algorithm. I found some "cracks" in it that basically leak what videos a small channel can create to get some traction.
I methodically tested my theories by creating practical walkthroughs and tutorials on various topics optimized for search and guess what? It worked! I started to get views and subscribers!
I did more testing to dial in the thresholds and tried to monetize videos outside the YouTube Partner Program. I also uploaded some more content optimized for "browse traffic" as a control to help confirm my findings.
I found that the "hit rate" on SEO optimized videos is way higher with my methods and that search optimized videos also make enough money to justify their effort.
In fact, I never actually figured out what the hit rate on videos optimzed for browse traffic is because I am too lazy to make enough failing videos no one will ever watch to find out!
So, I created the Rank Fast Formula which is a 65 page pdf & Notion template and a couple of videos to document my YouTube SEO process the best I could and gave it away for free to grow my email list.
After that I continued to use the Rank Fast Formula to create a few more SEO videos that got the YouTube channel monetized in the YouTube Partner Program making about $300 - $500 per month total and most of that was outside the YouTube partner program.
Armed with a sure fire way to get traffic and make money (validation), my focus shifted toward building apps and automating with AI. I needed a way to automate the 65 page Rank Fast Formula.
That led me to build the MakerKit boilerplate scripts that automate much of the DevOps work that goes into launching a robust and secure production grade app fast.
And that's where things started to stall a bit.
Where I've Been
I haven't made much content over the past couple of years and there are good reasons for that.
First the current "administration" switched over early 2025. The chaos and uncertainty that was unleashed affected my wife's work which forced me back into contracting for the better part of that year which left little time for my other business efforts.
Then, tragedy struck my family near the end of 2025 right as I was wrapping up my contracting work to get back to business full time.
That's a story for another day, but the short version is that for most of 2026 I've been grieving a profound loss smack dab in the middle of a pivotal moment in my career and it was a big part of why I was pretty quiet for a while.
One way I tried to cope was spending a lot of time trying to make sure AI is actually going to work for me soon enough to matter, building things, testing them, fixing them etc. And that, required focus and hard work.
Like a lot of people earlier this year I believe I had what people were calling "AI psychosis." I developed this false belief that AI would eventually (and easily) make up for all my flaws and lack of skills and make me successful with little effort on my part.
Every new tool release suggesting another project was ungated but actually a dead end. Every cringe lord demo making something look easy and the temptation to chase all of it at once with exuberance despite little concrete results to show for it.
Maybe that sounds familiar to some of you?
But, after the last eight months of hard and focused work, I believe I'm cured or at least recovering now.
I've finally got AI working well enough for me on both the content creation and app development fronts that I now see the remaining bottlenecks on the horizon I still need to tackle. And, this is the important part, I know it's going to be hard work.
Ask me again after the next model, tool or multi-agent harness release to be sure though!
But seriously, the time has helped me get clearer about what I want to build and how I want to use these tools and I'm ready to start sharing more of my work in real time again.
What is The Lab?
Right now The Lab is a collection of my experiments, scripts, guides and templates. Some will be useful to you, some won't. Have a look around and take what helps.
The Lab brings all the resources I've been sharing into one place, with room for the things I'm working on next.
My hope is that this also makes the lab something else: an incentive to stay subscribed to my mailing list so that you get notified when something new comes out or when there's an important update to something you already downloaded and hopefully use every day.
At launch, you'll find:
- Developer tools: Right now just my MakerKit boilerplate scripts that automate Makerkit DevOps, but soon I'll be putting my OpenClaw setup and security scripts there as well.
- SEO and content resources: The Rank Fast Formula and the Content First Content Marketing Strategy flow chart.
- Site-speed tools: the Enhanced PageSpeed Insights Google Sheet and an Unlighthouse configuration file, with walkthroughs to help you use them.
These are the kinds of things I make while working through a problem myself. I give them away to honestly help me figure out if other people have the same problem to gauge whether I should develop the idea further into a product I could sell someday.
A free Meteoric Money newsletter subscription gives you access. Subscribe, confirm your email, then sign in with that same address.
Inside The Lab, you can choose which resources you want update emails about. That includes things like new versions, fixes and changes to repository access. Those choices are separate from the main newsletter, and you can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
Back to work
I still want to build online businesses using AI, code and content, and share what I learn along the way. The tools have changed a lot since I started. So have my plans. My enthusiasm for the work and its future is still very much intact.
I've got things I want to make, experiments I want to run, and plenty left to figure out. Launching The Lab feels like a good way to get back to that mission and bring you along as I go.
If that interests you, subscribe to get access to The Lab. If you're already a confirmed subscriber, sign in with your subscribed email.
Thanks for sticking around. I'm excited to get back to work and share it with you.
— Troy
Cover photo: Manuel Chinchilla on Unsplash.