E9: Strategy Change
08/05/2024, duration: 09:03
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.
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Transcript
Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job and side projects. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in.
Today I'd like to talk about changing strategies. I've been on holidays for the past two weeks, away from my computer. In 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 that 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 bloops, like my croissants, side projects, those groups.
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. Projects, so you observe, realize, gamification updates to two months on top of an existing product already. I have Teletron, which is pretty big. Data store is pretty simple, but there's a lot of competition there. 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 hadn't gotten that far. And again, that's also medium size already in terms of product and complexity. 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 on is I had my tablet with me with a Bluetooth keyboard. 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 all did completion in terms of strings that were already in the file that did not automatically link up functions from external files, stuff like that. But I was able to get something working for the project I've been working on. The working title is Aspire Dan, as in aspiration, as in having goals, reaching your goals.
It's an AI assistant, which you can share your goals with, and it will periodically ask you for an update on the goal. It can help you give tips on the goal. It's an AI wrapper around GPT for a weenie 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 weeks, something like that. 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 in a search by your team members. You can share information that way; you can also inject knowledge, knowledge 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.
So that, 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. It should be relatively small products so that I'm able to market more easily and focus on. The thing is, once I have some smaller projects running, 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 time or the mindset to really look into it. I did buy another domain or not for more of an information product. So I built, I bought founder tooling, foundertooling.com, which I'm kind of still going between two different routes.
I could make it an information site where I link tools that founders can use for different categories. So for email address collection, landing pages, form inputs, email, stuff like that. Then I could look into having people sponsor their product on there, so they get 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. So I'm, I'm kind of in between, between the both of them. I mean, it could also be a combination. I did see on the side projects, that there currently are a lot of sites starting up which have a lot of founder stories and those all look pretty AI generated.
I don’t necessarily want to go that route. I really love to be informational and I think it would be good for SEO. For link sharing, to have a site like founder tooling and 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 side projects, Reddit to get some feedback. One person responded and he 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 movie schedule. 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 program might be on Instagram or TikTok and also get more experience working with those plus things.
That's a small update from my side. I'm also thinking about a second or kind of a different pace for a podcast in combined with the AI coach that I'm building is to do more of an accountability episode. 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. 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.
Right now, 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. 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. Thanks for tuning in to Debugging Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Stay curious and see you next week.
