Self Made

Self Made is a division of Involve Digital. It exists for New Zealanders who are out of work, or whose desk jobs are being taken over by AI, and it makes one argument: instead of applying for another job, start a local service business such as lawn mowing, cleaning or house washing.

A brochure site and an enquiry form would not do that job. Someone who has just lost their income does not know which business fits them, and will not fill in a form to find out. So the brief we set ourselves was a site whose front door is a conversation: an AI strategist that listens, asks one question at a time, and works out a direction with the visitor.

The conversation also had to end in something real. Once a direction is agreed, the visitor receives a custom business plan and a proposal they can read, print and sign, all in Self Made's own pages, with our proposal and client systems working behind it. And the site had to be found by the people it is for, which meant deep guides to the businesses and the cities they search for, structured for search engines and for AI answers alike.

We built Self Made in Next.js with strict TypeScript. The homepage is the chat. A typed line gives way to the strategist's first question, and replies stream in as they are written. The strategist works through five stages, from understanding the person's situation to agreeing a direction, and it has rules: it must have a full name, an email, a phone number and a suburb before it can go further, and it may not invent or guess any of them. It can take exactly one action, submitting the application, and only after the visitor has agreed to receive a plan. That action is checked against a schema on the server, and the chat is limited to 60 turns per session per hour. If a reply fails, the visitor is told, and the conversation is never silently reset.

When an application is submitted, the site sends it to our proposal engine in a signed server-to-server call. If that engine cannot be reached, the site sends the confirmation and the team notification itself, so the enquiry is never lost. The visitor's plan and proposal then open in Self Made's own design as one long page: the plan, what gets built, the marketing approach and timeline, the economics with a calculator the visitor can move, and the investment. A print stylesheet turns it into a business plan PDF. The terms sit above a signature pad built for this site with no third-party library, and the exact sentence the visitor accepted is stored with the signature and the version of the terms.

Each time a proposal is opened, the site records the visit and the reading time against a hashed visitor ID, never the raw IP address, and our own team's visits are marked so they do not count as client interest.

The guides come from one set of typed content: 39 business guides, each with its own earnings calculator, 21 city guides written city by city, 11 articles, and two free tools. The same content generates the sitemap, the structured data and the llms.txt file that AI assistants read, so the three can never disagree.