50% of YC focused on AI, but not because they focus on AI, but because they focus on smart good founders, and many smart people are focusing on AI
Tarpits are things that seem really exciting for a lot of founders, but actually isn’t that great…might be hard to solve the real problem
Example tarpits for AI: copilot, chat interfaces
Use UX and software, and instead of chat interface, add in LLMs in background
Boring is often good
Example of boring: AI that is able to search government contracts and apply for relevant ones
If someone doesn’t want to buy your AI product, try to compete with the market itself
For example: if you develop a product for a industry and they won’t buy it, see if you can build your own company in that industry and see if you can beat them
I think this is KEY for consulting for big ideas like I want to do (solve their biggest issue) I need to think of ideas that would run them out of business if I made a company enhanced with AI
Specific is important: don’t do a catchall, include a lot of business logic
Prompting and GPT wrappers is the future: SAAS is basically a MySQL wrapper
I’ve been struggling with an idea recently, the question of how and when to charge for coaching services and when to propose coaching to someone.
The way most coaches approach this is by simply thinking about every hour they spend with someone as a billable hour. They do a “free” intro or demo sessions. I find this approach problematic for numerous reasons:
I love solving problems and delivering value. The reason why I think coaching is the right career is that I would do this stuff even if it was for free.
I hate thinking of every hour of my time as billable. Does every conversation that I don’t get paid for mean that I’m bleeding money everywhere?
I don’t know how to propose coaching, what will the difference be from talking to them? Won’t they feel like I’m charging money for something that should be free?
I don’t see why I shouldn’t prioritize my friends and help people for free? Why should I prioritize only people who pay me money?
I thought about it a lot and I realized that when I want to pay for a coach is because I want to be able to take it seriously. I don’t want a friend, I want someone who can help take me to the next level (emotionally, career and success-wise).
I realized that I can help as many people as I want to for free. I can prioritize friends and spend time with them without thinking of billable hours. But coaching is different. It isn’t just about brainstorming solutions to problems or being an empathetic ear. It’s about taking professional responsibility for someone’s success. The difference between a friend who hired you as a coach from an ordinary friend is that by hiring you they are asking you to meddle with their life!
There are three questions I can ask to see if they would be a good client:
Should they invest in themselves?
Are they doing something that requires coaching?
Do I feel confident that I will be the best coach for the job?
If the answer to all three is yes, I will push to sell them on coaching. If they are friends, I can tell them I will help them and give them advice for the rest of their life for free, but it wouldn’t be coaching until they invested in it.
The price of coaching is a mix of what would be an investment for the client, what would make ME invest, and what value I would be delivering.
In terms of differences in details:
Much more structure (cadence for meetings, methods, note-taking etc.)
Different mindset (clients’ goals are my goals, not my friend’s goals)
Today I feel tired. My kidneys ache. They feel bloated and stagnated. My stomach feels slow. My head iches on the top. My eyes are dry. I feel burning inflammation up my back and spine. My skin is flaking on my face.
These past few days have felt exhausting, extremely stressful, and demoralizing. Last night, I asked myself the question, how do I get out of this.
I didn’t know the answer then, but my answer today during my walk was to take my stress seriously.
And just now, I had a realization that I have the systems developed to do extraordinary things. I just need to utilize them and follow their principals.
Systems in place:
Daily walk to ponder questions I am stressed about
Daily workpost to grow myself, plan for greatness
Clean space to deal with stress, clean place = clean mind
Meal prep strategy for healthy cheap meals with little stress – fridge containers, tacos, lettuce wraps
Whiteboards to write strategies
Off computer working systems (working while walking, running errands, working out, eating out)
Todo list strategy – focus on one thing at a time, prioritize
Clean after working hours to transition, decompress
Crawling to get cardio in small space
Walking backwards and tibialus for knee
Hanging for shoulders and posture
Working out after and before meals for better absorption, muscle growth, and recovery
Journaling to ask myself questions at night
Walking with no effort
I have absolutely everything I need to build a life where I can do almost anything I want, achieve anything I want.
Right now, I want to focus on two things: recovery and priming
Priming are stuff like cleaning, wiping off my whiteboards, clearing out tabs, filling markers, mealprep, todo list grooming
Recovery means lots of sleep, rest, hydration, and exercise. Specifically paying attention to anytime I want to game to see if I feel stressed or uncomfortable, taking a break when that happens.
To top off this post, I want to attach something that I want to erase from my whiteboard, but want to save forever:
Reasons Why I’m Ready
I’ve developed very deep and powerful life theories (flow, connection) → these theories can give anyone direction in darkness, I forget them but they come back when I need them
When faced with pain I’ve always come out stronger (ACL) → pain is the greatest teacher
I’ve proven that I can complete hard challenges (knee, sova) → I can achieve the challenges I set my mind to
I can solve problems few people can solve (triage, nikola) → normal rules don’t apply
I’m deeply attuned to emotions (coaching, art, philosophy) → makes it much easier to connect with people
I used to walk up to girls on the street → Nothing is something I can’t handle. There is nothing that I can’t ask for
No matter how badly I fail there are people who still love me
The point is not to get there, be productive or succeed, the point is to find a meaningful problem, problems we want to solve → we will never have no problems but we can choose which problems we want to contend with
Happiness doesn’t come from acing the past but seizing the now → its never too late to be happyIt’s near too late to fix it with a degree in engineering and parents who don’t mess with me
I have lots of assets and saving and a degree in engineering and parents and a sister all with money saved
It was really easy to write in my notebook about my AI game.
Perhaps it will get harder when I actually try to code it.
I came up with the basic architectures.
Super Basic MVP Stack
Streamlit
Python vector db
Free MySQL
Production Stack
WordPress + NodeJS
AWS
VectorDB
MySQL
I also came up with a bunch of mini challenges that will help me get to the Basic MVP done.
Goals for the MVP are:
Determine the overall AI technologies needed
Come up with estimated overhead to run the game
Raise money/interest
Mini Challenges for MVP:
Create and pull from vector databases in python
Work on data structures:
Story summary
Last 3 transactions
Story summary
Main objective
Geography
Locations
Lore
Physical properties
Characters
Stats
Age
Race
Health
Strength: A character’s physical strength, such as how much they can lift or punch
Dexterity: A character’s precision, agility, and nimbleness
Constitution: A character’s physical fortitude, such as how well they resist damage and disease
Intelligence: A character’s raw IQ and ability to learn
Wisdom: A character’s spellcasting ability
Charisma: A character’s spellcasting ability and saving throws
Location
Updates
Backstory
NPCs
Stats
Location
Backstory
Motivation
Relationship matrix
Time
Visibility mechanism (to see who gets to see and interact with a new transaction)
Overall prompt
Story summary mechanism
Query past with locations and time
Develop multi session chat in streamlit
Teach LLM examples
Battle
Non standard battle
Player enjoyment
Plot armor
Changing objective
Map movement mechanics
Later development challenges:
Explore invalid response resistance (create a way to repair responses)
Explore cost-cutting and LLM selection
Explore personality extraction (of NPC’s or characters)
Explore context length restriction problem solving
Writing all this down I’ve come up with two steps moving forward:
Even simpler MVP – completely prompt based
After getting interest, develop simple MVP into NodeJS + frontend
Then work on full final product
Tool calls might be a gamechanger as well as vector databases
I’ve done it. I hit the wall of sinking dread, exhaustion, and boredom in this project.
I don’t want to create a DND game focused on storytelling with AI. AI just isn’t good enough, masterful enough, creative enough to create a rich world.
I want to focus on creating a game similar to the games I always wanted to create, focused on strategy and cool mechanics based in a system that allows for infinite creativity.
I need to create a system that builds a reality, not tells a story, and lets the player interface with it in a seamless way.
That means I’m adding a challenge:
Think about how to allow for the user to have multiple inputs
Speech – what your character says
Action – what your character attempts to do
Question – what you want to ask the DM
Separate the types of responses
Speech and actions get translated into story
Questions are responded to
Think of how to use fewer words and show more
Character sheet
Map
Voice input and output
Also, I take back what I said, I can make a game on LLMs that tells a story, even though the thought of it makes me queasy in my chest for some reason.
I have then the challenges related to storywriting:
Also, I want to spend 20 minutes watching the next part of the coaching session.
Finally, I want to go after the brand and posts in a directed way. I’ll use the syllabus method.
A reminder for the syllabus method:
Create a clear, ambitious, and exciting goal (something to inspire the angels)
Use Alex Hormozi mindset (don’t think about how to achieve it, think about what would make it impossible for you to not achieve it)
Break down those things into 3 steps
If the steps are still too big and nebulous, break those steps into 3 more steps, repeating step 2 and 3
Goal: Create an Instagram page that is able to bring my energy of coaching to all artists, something so clear and powerful it is easy for me to create posts (3 hrs)
Step 1: Develop Brand (1 hr)
Tap into coaching energy, write down ideas
Try looka and other ai brand generators
Develop style guide
Step 2: Ask Questions and Get Answers
Put myself in the mindset of posting videos, posts, etc
I’ve always wanted to take as many sales and marketing offers as possible. I don’t know whether or not they are scams or not. I don’t know which ones are useful or not. So I wanted to take all of them, and treat them all like challenges.
Today, I started one of the Challenges. I signed up for a book called “Sell Like Crazy” from King Kong marketing agency with founder Sabri Suby. The book is about building clients from facebook ads (something I can already see they are good at and I have an interest in). I want to try this out with my coaching business.
The reason why I started with this sales funnel is that they have a hilarious Facebook commercial and they also had a unique offer – a free (or almost free) book.
My thoughts so far:
Really well-shot and entertaining commercial, they are a good marketing agency.
Glassdoor makes me think they are legit
I’m excited about the free book
They are too salesy, they kept me on the funnel for like an HOUR and predictably tried to sell me something immediately afterwards
My idea of them definitely soured in the sales funnel because of the endless funnel and greedy money grabs
