Hey 👋, I’m Richard Patey.

For fifteen years I built, operated, and sold online businesses.
Newsletters, content sites, Shopify stores, community projects, and AI automations.

Some were small, some were meaningful, all of them taught me something about how work shapes a life.

In 2012 I launched a Shopify store that ended up on the Shopify blog.

By 2013 I had enough SEO customers to live comfortably and sold that portfolio, writing Coffee Shop Entrepreneurs to capture the journey.

Over the next decade I kept building and exiting. A Shopify store through Empire Flippers. A software review site that doubled in value after I operated it for an investor. Flipping Websites, a community and operator service I later sold. The Website Investing publication. Alts on Substack. Acquire.gg and multiple beehiiv newsletters.

The pattern was simple. I built digital assets that created freedom. Then I sold them to create more of it.

At some point I realised I was no longer trading assets for money. I was trading them for autonomy. The ability to choose how I spend my time, where I live, who I work with, and what I think about.

That shift took me to Central Europe with my family, where I now live a quieter life with far more clarity than I ever had in my twenties and thirties.

Now the same fight has a new opponent.

The work that bought me that freedom, the vetting, the research, the building, the operating, is the work AI is about to automate. For everyone. The only real question is whether you do it to yourself first, on your terms, or wait for someone to do it to you.

So that is what Redundant is. I build AI workers that take the jobs operators and investors still do by hand and just do them. You run the worker, you read the output, you make the call. You keep the judgment. You drop the grind. Own the work, don't do it.

The thesis is one line: make yourself redundant before AI does.

If you have ever felt the pull toward a life with more space, more clarity, and more choice, and you would rather build that on your terms than have it forced on you, you are in the right place.

—Richard Patey