"Three and a half years ago, I died twice in one day. This is what I built after."
Get In TouchI'm Jeff Melvin — 49, a lifetime martial artist and combat sports competitor, and the founder of Less Than Basics. About three and a half years ago I survived a violent attack that nearly took my life. What came after — the physical recovery, relearning how to feel safe, rebuilding from the ground up — taught me more about starting over than anything before it.
In April 2026 I started using AI to build something real: a freelance content and training business, put together on an iPad and a phone, no formal team, no shortcuts. This is that build, out in the open.
Jobsite Safety Fundamentals — 17 chapters, 48 citations, every regulatory figure verified against the published standard at osha.gov. Built and available now. See the deck →
Practical, no-nonsense guidance for people who can't or won't carry a traditional firearm — real options, explained plainly.
Freelance voiceover and content creation, demo-first. You don't buy a car without driving it, and you shouldn't hire a voice without hearing it. See Media + AI Systems →
Physical repair work paired with real content built around it — for creators and small shops who need both the fix and the story.
Real-world problems rarely stay exactly the way they looked when they landed in front of you. I assess, adapt, use what I have, and find out what I don't know before I move.
The technology changed.
The operating method did not.
Started in April 2026. What began as learning the tools became a working system for solving real problems, documenting work, building projects, and producing this site.
A hundred days of homestead work recorded as it actually happened. Container starts moved into the ground, plant lines followed forward from early growth, hardscape and fence builds carried through to finished. Nothing staged and nothing reshot — the record is the deliverable, and it either holds up or it doesn't.
The same method pointed at a person instead of a project. Combat training broken into modules, filmed, and rebuilt around how one student actually takes information in rather than how the material is usually presented. A system you can only run yourself isn't a system yet. The test is whether it survives being handed to someone else.
A billing and service dispute run as a documentation exercise rather than an argument. Complaints filed with regulators, a settlement reached on a recorded line, and every measurement kept — including the one that can't yet be attributed to the carrier. A financial settlement was confirmed. The technical problem is still unresolved, and that stays in the record too, because a case study that only reports the wins isn't documentation, it's advertising.
The method pointed at a product instead of a problem. Seventeen years of jobsite work turned into seventeen chapters, then held to one rule: no regulatory number goes on a slide from memory. Every figure was pulled against the published standard at osha.gov and the citation index was printed inside the deck, because the whole value of safety training is that someone can check it.
Demo it, then sell it. Everything here is built the way I'd want to be sold to — see it work first.
This page is that demo. Nobody touched it but me — same AI-assisted process, same iPad and phone, 100+ days in. What you're looking at is the proof, not a promise.