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 that 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.

Essays on Meaning, Freedom, and Agency is the next chapter. These essays explore the ideas that reshaped my life.

How to build work that supports your inner world. How to stay honest with yourself. How to rebuild agency after losing it.

How to create freedom that is real rather than theoretical.

If you have ever felt the pull toward a life with more space, more clarity, and more choice, you will find something here for you.

—Richard Patey