How a lapsed beer blogger, a baby girl named Radley, and a stack of AI tools became the unlikely origin story of RadDadLyfe.com.

A few years ago, I bought RadDadLyfe.com and did absolutely nothing with it. Classic move. The domain was supposed to be the spiritual successor to my local craft beer publication, BrowardBeer.com — but life had other plans.

Specifically, my beautiful daughter named Radley, who immediately made me want to cut back on the drinking and tighten up everything else: career, health, finances. The whole package.

So I sat on the domain. Because that's what responsible dads do, apparently.

I'm a journalist with a degree in communications. I'm supposed to know how to build an audience. I did not know how to build a website.

Then Radley happened — and so did AI

Fast forward to now.

I've been going deep on AI tools. Not as a gimmick, but as someone who genuinely believes this is where the workforce is heading and wants to be ahead of the curve, not playing catch-up. And somewhere in that rabbit hole, I decided it was finally time to resurrect this domain and actually build the thing.

The stack that built this thing

Here's what I used to get RadDadLyfe off the ground: Claude, Lovable, Supabase, Netlify, and GoDaddy. None of that was in my original toolkit. A year ago, I was a writer who used the internet.

Now I'm a writer who uses the internet and has strong opinions about DNS propagation. That's growth. I'm also building out a video production pipeline using ChatGPT, MidJourney, Google Flow, ElevenLabs, and Canva/CapCut — because apparently I needed more tabs open. The goal is to create content at a level that used to require a full production team, solo, from my laptop.

None of this is polished yet. The site is a work in progress. My workflows are a work in progress. I am, arguably, a work in progress.

But that's exactly why I'm documenting it here — because the messy middle is where the real lessons live. If you're a parent, a career-pivoter, or just someone trying to figure out how to use these tools without feeling like a fraud, you're in the right place.

I don't have it figured out. But I'm figuring it out in public, and I hope my mistakes, lessons, and whatever stubborn persistence I can muster save you some time.

Welcome to Rad Dad Lyfe. Radley inspired the name. AI helped build the house. Let's see what we can make of it.