During my two-week camping holiday, I reflected on my current projects and decided to shift my focus from large, complex projects to smaller, more manageable ones. Inspired by discussions on Reddit, I realized that smaller projects allow for faster iterations and easier marketing. While away, I started developing Aspire Dan, an AI assistant for goal tracking, and planned another AI project for team-based search and information sharing. I also bought the domain Foundertooling.com, considering its potential as either an informational site for founders or a hub for micro products.
Encouraged by positive feedback on Reddit, I’m committed to maintaining my podcast’s weekly schedule and adding accountability episodes to track my progress and goals. I also plan to create video content for platforms like Instagram and TikTok to enhance engagement. This strategy change aims to make my projects more effective and my content more personal and interactive.
Check out founder tooling, and see the reddit post with the positive comment.
Today I'd like to talk about changing strategies. I've been on holidays for the past two weeks, away from my computer and a proper Dutch tradition. We've been camping two weeks,
so that means low luxury in a tent, somewhere in a grass field on a camping. And that's something that the Dutch people often do. Bad internet, I did not have my laptop with me, only my phone and my tablet. And they also gave me some time to think, some time to read, but not as much reading time done as I would have liked to.
But I've been following some Reddit groups like Microsaas, Side Projects, those groups.
And I realized, and I also realized that when I did the stepping stone approach,
recording, that I need to change my strategy. So up until now, I've been building
big projects. So the Observalyze Gamification update took two months on top of an existing
product already. I have Teletron, which is pretty big. Datasthor is pretty simple,
but there's a lot of competition there. And it's mostly something that I built for myself
and not necessarily something that will help a lot of people, but I can do marketing there.
And Watch Your Numbers, I worked on that, but I haven't published that yet. I haven't gotten
that far. And again, that's also medium size already in terms of product and complexity. But that one is still manageable, but I find that I need smaller projects to be able to iterate
faster.
So what I've been working on and also all the other days, I had my tablet with me with a
Bluetooth keyboard. And then I realized, or I saw that it is possible to do coding. So I installed
a terminal. I installed a code editor. I was able to set up a local dev environment with Node.js.
So I did some programming and then I realized I really missed Copilot. I really missed the proper
IDE because this IDE did completion in terms of strings that were already in the file that did not
automatically link out functions from external files, stuff like that. But I was able to get
something working. But a project I've been working on is the working title, Aspire Dan,
as in aspiration, as in having goals, reaching your goals. And it's an AI assistant, which you
can share your goals with. And it will periodically ask you for an update on the goal. And it can help
you give tips on the goal. And it's an AI wrapper around GPT 4.0 Winnie at the moment. And it works now. So I can use it myself using a Telegram bot. And I want to build it out to a product in the coming week, weeks, something like that.
And I also have a second project in mind also with AI, where you're able to do AI searching, but then also combined with a team. So searches that you do or things that you ask can also be seen and searched by your team members. You can share information that way. You can also inject knowledge, wellness documents inside for your team. So that's something that I also want to look into, but that's also, it could be a bigger size product, but for the MVP, it can be relatively small because then it's more becoming more of a knowledge base of yourself that you can chat with, which is pretty straightforward to build using a vector store. And so on my LLM. And that's the second thing I want to work on.
And it should be relatively small products. So that I'm able to market more easily and focus on.
And the thing is, once I have some smaller projects running, I can, I think at least I can
easily do marketing for them. I still need to learn SEO. I wanted to do that on holiday,
but I did not find the time or the mindset to really look into it. I did buy another domain
or enough for more of an information product. So I built, I bought Founder Tooling,
Foundertooling.com, which I kind of still going between two different routes. So I could make it
the information site where I link tools that founders can use for different categories. So
email address collection, landing pages, form inputs, email, stuff like that. And then I could
look into having people sponsor their product on there. So they get a promoted listing somewhere,
or I can do it totally differently and build all kinds of micro products there. And implement those things, my social landing pages, QR code generation, redirects, link shortening, that kind of stuff. And so I'm kind of in between, between the both of them.
It could also be a combination. I did see on the site projects site that there currently are a lot
of sites starting up, which have a lot of founder stories and those all look pretty AI-generated.
And I don't necessarily want to go that route. I really want it to be informational.
And it would, I think it would be good for SEO and for link sharing to have a site like Founder
Tooling. I'm not necessarily having about my own products. I could list them in there. I could also
promote them there. So I might even be leaning to the content part and not generate them using AI, but leverage AI to write some of the content or to assist in writing some of the content.
So that's what I'm looking into. So that's kind of the strategy change that I'm going to do
in terms of the podcast. I shared it on the site projects Reddit to get some feedback.
One person responded and said, well, I'm pretty, I like it. It was a positive feedback
and that also got me motivated to do more. So I came back from holiday yesterday and I'm recording this on Sunday to keep on my weekly schedule. And I might not have done that if I hadn't gotten that positive review. I'm also still eager, as I also mentioned earlier in the reflection podcast
to start working on video. Hopefully I can also leverage that with the smaller projects that I have
to create some video recordings of me using it. I also share that from I'd be on Instagram or TikTok and also get more experience working with those platforms.
That's a small update from my side. I'm also thinking about a second or kind of a different
place for a podcast in combined with the AI coach that I'm building is to do more of an
accountability episodes. So that in the episodes, I share what I'm working on, what I want to have
achieved within two weeks. And then two weeks later, I share what goals I was able to achieve,
what goals I did not, what I'm going to change to make it work better to achieve those goals.
And then set some new goals and I need to still look into the intervals. So it could be every
two weeks, could be every three weeks. We have some other episodes or updates in between because what I'm currently doing, I did some different topics in the first episodes, but I feel that
in the short run, I will probably run out of topics to discuss. And I think it's also good
to put some more personal input in there in the podcast. That's also what I enjoy more and
hopefully get some feedback on that.
That was it for today. Let me know what you think. Bye.