Created

I created a free workout plan generator

I created a GPT-powered workout training plan generator : https://train-programs.ai/. It's using your goal, preferences and physiological data to define a tailor-made training plan for workout at the gym or at home with bodyweight. I decided to make it 100% free after it reaches... 0 customer after my launch on ProductHunt (and I don't have an audience to share the tool with). I'm building the tool in public on X (https://twitter.com/GuillaumeGay\) and I just implemented the multimodal functionnality: it will create a plan based on a photo of you by analysing your body fat, strenghts, potential weaknesses and your morphology. Feel free to try it. I'm also trying to find the good marketing angle. Should it be used by people, by coaches to get faster to create personnalized plans, for gym, for fitness apps, and so on. I'm happy to read your ideas!

I created an AI that turns your business ideas into full plans in 30 Minutes

Hey folks, I made AIFounder because a friend was stuck trying to turn his business idea into a solid plan, and I knew I could create a tool that does it faster and better than any consultant. How does it work? You give me the key details of your business idea—just the essentials. My AI gets to work, using industry-specific prompts created by experts, and in 30 minutes you’ve got a personalized business plan in PDF format, ready to go. What do you get? A 100-page plan, tailored just for you. Clear, actionable steps to turn your vision into reality. Market research, brand identity, marketing strategies, sales plans, and more—all customized to your idea. Why AIFounder? It’s like having a professional consultant by your side, but faster and without breaking the bank. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to grow, my AI-generated plans have already helped entrepreneurs secure funding and move forward with confidence. I’d love to hear what you think, any feedback or questions are welcome. Thanks in advance! 🚀

I recreated a voice AI that 2x’d booked calls in 30 days for a business

I’ve been fascinated by AI and specifically how different businesses have leveraged it to eliminate time consuming tasks. I recently came across a case study where a voice agent helped a business double their booked calls and conversions in 30 days and wanted to try and recreate something similar. I’ve added the case study below along with a number to the demo voice agent I created to see if this is something people would really be interested in. This tech is improving really fast and I’m looking to dive deeper into this space. Case Study A family owned HVAC company was having challenges managing the volume of customer calls, including after hours and weekend calls, leading to missed opportunities and unmanaged leads. Building a call support team would have proved to be more expensive than they’d like. Solution With some help, the company implemented an AI system to autonomously handle calls, collect customer needs, and alert service technicians via SMS, with capabilities for live call transfers. Impact Within the first week, the company saw a 20% increase in bookings and conversions. The system's efficiency in capturing leads and managing tasks enabled the staff to handle more leads and outsource overflow. Details The AI integration included custom features like a Service Titan integration, live call transfers, SMS/email alerts, calendar and CRM integration, and Zapier automation. Results The company doubled its booked calls and conversions in 30 days through these AI call agents. With the average service visit in the U.S. being around $250, and the average unit install being around $4500 this quickly led to increased revenue as well as time savings and reduced churn. Here’s the number to the demo agent I created: +1 (714) 475-7285 I’d love to hear some honest thoughts on it and what industry you think could benefit the most from something like this.

I recreated an AI phone calling agent that increased booked calls by 30% for a plumbing business in 30 days

AI has always intrigued me, especially when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and streamlining business operations. Recently, I found a compelling case study about a voice agent that significantly enhanced customer service and lead capture for a plumbing company. Motivated by the potential of this technology, I decided to build a similar system to see how it could be adapted for other industries. I’ve added the case study below along with a number to the demo voice agent I created to see if this is something people would really be interested in. AI technology is advancing rapidly, and I’m excited to dive deeper into this space. Case Study A family-owned plumbing business was facing challenges managing a high volume of customer calls. They were missing potential leads, particularly during after-hours and weekends, which meant lost revenue opportunities. Hiring a dedicated call support team was considered but deemed too expensive and hard to scale. Solution To solve these issues, the company deployed an AI-powered voice agent capable of handling calls autonomously. The system collected essential customer information, identified service needs, and sent real-time alerts to service technicians via SMS. It also had the ability to transfer calls to human agents if necessary, ensuring a seamless experience for customers. Impact The AI voice agent quickly proved its worth by streamlining call management and improving response times. With the AI handling routine inquiries and initial call filtering, the plumbing business saw a noticeable improvement in how quickly they could respond to customer needs. Details The AI-powered voice agent included several advanced features designed to optimize customer service: Answer Calls Anytime: Ensured every call received a friendly and professional response, regardless of the time of day. Spot Emergencies Fast: Quickly identified high-priority issues that required urgent attention. Collect Important Info: Accurately recorded critical customer details to facilitate seamless follow-ups and service scheduling. Send Alerts Right Away: Immediately notified service technicians about emergencies, enabling faster response times. Live Transfers: Live call transfer options when human assistance was needed. Results The AI-powered voice agent delivered measurable improvements across key performance metrics: 100% Call Answer Rate: No missed calls ensured that every customer inquiry was addressed promptly. 5-minute Emergency Response Time: The average response time for urgent calls was reduced significantly. 30% Increase in Lead Capture: The business saw more qualified leads, improving their chances of conversion. 25% Improvement in Resource Efficiency: Better allocation of resources allowed the team to focus on high-priority tasks. By implementing the AI-powered voice agent, the plumbing business enhanced its ability to capture more leads and provide better service to its customers. The improved call handling efficiency helped reduce missed opportunities and boosted overall customer satisfaction. Here’s the number to the demo agent I created: +1 (210) 405-0982 I’d love to hear some honest thoughts on it and which industries you think could benefit the most from this technology.

I recreated an AI Phone Agent that saved $20,000 in lost revenue in 30 days for a business

I've been intrigued by AI and its ability to help businesses streamline time-consuming tasks. Recently, I discovered a case study where a voice agent was able to earn a business $20,000 in booked calls in a month. Below, I've shared the case study and a demo number for a voice agent I developed. This technology is advancing rapidly, and I want to explore its potential further. Case Study A family-owned HVAC company struggled with managing a high volume of customer calls, including after-hours and weekend inquiries, resulting in missed opportunities and unmanaged leads. Hiring a dedicated call support team was not cost-effective. Solution The company implemented an AI system to handle calls autonomously, gather customer information, and notify service technicians via SMS, with options for live call transfers. Details The AI integration featured custom capabilities such as Service Titan integration, live call transfers, SMS/email alerts, calendar and CRM integration, and Zapier automation. Results In the first week, the company experienced a 20% increase in bookings and conversions. The system efficiently captured leads and managed tasks, enabling staff to handle more inquiries and outsource overflow. Within 30 days, the company saved $20,000 in lost revenue due to the elimination of calls that went to voicemail, or lost leads. The voice agent's ability to answer calls 24/7 led to significant revenue growth, time savings, and reduced churn. Here's the demo number for the voice agent I created: +1 (651) 372 2045 I believe this tech has strong use cases in a variety of industries, from home service, to dental clinics, to wedding photographers. This article studied the effect of missed calls in different businesses, if you're interested in learning more. I'd love to hear your thoughts and industries you think this could be the most beneficial for. Thank you!

I recreated an AI Phone Agent that saved $20,000 in lost revenue in 30 days for a business

I've been intrigued by AI and its ability to help businesses streamline time-consuming tasks. Recently, I discovered a case study where a voice agent was able to earn a business $20,000 in booked calls in a month. Below, I've shared the case study and a demo number for a voice agent I developed. This technology is advancing rapidly, and I want to explore its potential further. Case Study A family-owned HVAC company struggled with managing a high volume of customer calls, including after-hours and weekend inquiries, resulting in missed opportunities and unmanaged leads. Hiring a dedicated call support team was not cost-effective. Solution The company implemented an AI system to handle calls autonomously, gather customer information, and notify service technicians via SMS, with options for live call transfers. Details The AI integration featured custom capabilities such as Service Titan integration, live call transfers, SMS/email alerts, calendar and CRM integration, and Zapier automation. Results In the first week, the company experienced a 20% increase in bookings and conversions. The system efficiently captured leads and managed tasks, enabling staff to handle more inquiries and outsource overflow. Within 30 days, the company saved $20,000 in lost revenue due to the elimination of calls that went to voicemail, or lost leads. The voice agent's ability to answer calls 24/7 led to significant revenue growth, time savings, and reduced churn. Here's the demo number for the voice agent I created: +1 (651) 372 2045 I believe this tech has strong use cases in a variety of industries, from home service, to dental clinics, to wedding photographers. This article studied the effect of missed calls in different businesses, if you're interested in learning more. I'd love to hear your thoughts and industries you think this could be the most beneficial for. Thank you!

I recreated a voice AI that 2x’d booked calls in 30 days for a business

I’ve been fascinated by AI and specifically how different businesses have leveraged it to eliminate time consuming tasks. I recently came across a case study where a voice agent helped a business double their booked calls and conversions in 30 days and wanted to try and recreate something similar. I’ve added the case study below along with a number to the demo voice agent I created to see if this is something people would really be interested in. This tech is improving really fast and I’m looking to dive deeper into this space. Case Study A family owned HVAC company was having challenges managing the volume of customer calls, including after hours and weekend calls, leading to missed opportunities and unmanaged leads. Building a call support team would have proved to be more expensive than they’d like. Solution With some help, the company implemented an AI system to autonomously handle calls, collect customer needs, and alert service technicians via SMS, with capabilities for live call transfers. Impact Within the first week, the company saw a 20% increase in bookings and conversions. The system's efficiency in capturing leads and managing tasks enabled the staff to handle more leads and outsource overflow. Details The AI integration included custom features like a Service Titan integration, live call transfers, SMS/email alerts, calendar and CRM integration, and Zapier automation. Results The company doubled its booked calls and conversions in 30 days through these AI call agents. With the average service visit in the U.S. being around $250, and the average unit install being around $4500 this quickly led to increased revenue as well as time savings and reduced churn. Here’s the number to the demo agent I created: +1 (714) 475-7285 I’d love to hear some honest thoughts on it and what industry you think could benefit the most from something like this.

I recreated an AI phone calling agent that increased booked calls by 30% for a plumbing business in 30 days

AI has always intrigued me, especially when it comes to automating repetitive tasks and streamlining business operations. Recently, I found a compelling case study about a voice agent that significantly enhanced customer service and lead capture for a plumbing company. Motivated by the potential of this technology, I decided to build a similar system to see how it could be adapted for other industries. I’ve added the case study below along with a number to the demo voice agent I created to see if this is something people would really be interested in. AI technology is advancing rapidly, and I’m excited to dive deeper into this space. Case Study A family-owned plumbing business was facing challenges managing a high volume of customer calls. They were missing potential leads, particularly during after-hours and weekends, which meant lost revenue opportunities. Hiring a dedicated call support team was considered but deemed too expensive and hard to scale. Solution To solve these issues, the company deployed an AI-powered voice agent capable of handling calls autonomously. The system collected essential customer information, identified service needs, and sent real-time alerts to service technicians via SMS. It also had the ability to transfer calls to human agents if necessary, ensuring a seamless experience for customers. Impact The AI voice agent quickly proved its worth by streamlining call management and improving response times. With the AI handling routine inquiries and initial call filtering, the plumbing business saw a noticeable improvement in how quickly they could respond to customer needs. Details The AI-powered voice agent included several advanced features designed to optimize customer service: Answer Calls Anytime: Ensured every call received a friendly and professional response, regardless of the time of day. Spot Emergencies Fast: Quickly identified high-priority issues that required urgent attention. Collect Important Info: Accurately recorded critical customer details to facilitate seamless follow-ups and service scheduling. Send Alerts Right Away: Immediately notified service technicians about emergencies, enabling faster response times. Live Transfers: Live call transfer options when human assistance was needed. Results The AI-powered voice agent delivered measurable improvements across key performance metrics: 100% Call Answer Rate: No missed calls ensured that every customer inquiry was addressed promptly. 5-minute Emergency Response Time: The average response time for urgent calls was reduced significantly. 30% Increase in Lead Capture: The business saw more qualified leads, improving their chances of conversion. 25% Improvement in Resource Efficiency: Better allocation of resources allowed the team to focus on high-priority tasks. By implementing the AI-powered voice agent, the plumbing business enhanced its ability to capture more leads and provide better service to its customers. The improved call handling efficiency helped reduce missed opportunities and boosted overall customer satisfaction. Here’s the number to the demo agent I created: +1 (210) 405-0982 I’d love to hear some honest thoughts on it and which industries you think could benefit the most from this technology.

Created the Shopify Alternative in a 3rd world country “I will not promote”

Built a Shopify alternative I’ve been a long-time follower of this subreddit and have always valued the insights shared here. Today, I’m reaching out to share our story and seek advice or guidance on potential next steps for our business. Four years ago, we set out to build a local e-commerce platform tailored to the unique challenges of operating in a third-world country where global solutions like Shopify fall short. Shopify, while a fantastic platform, doesn’t provide localized support or integrations here, and the costs of running a Shopify store are prohibitively high due to: The need for multiple apps to replicate basic functionality Expensive international support calls or long chat queues Higher payment gateway fees (no Shopify Pay) USD-only subscription payments, which incur additional bank conversion fees And more We built a solution that addresses these pain points, and today, we’re proud to have over 4,000 merchants on our platform, with 1,600+ paying customers. We’re processing over $1 million per month across 50,000+ orders, which translates to a significant impact in our local economy. As experienced founders, we’ve managed our financials meticulously, allowing us to thrive while many local competitors have shut down. However, scaling in our current economic climate has been challenging, and raising capital has proven to be incredibly tough. We’re exploring strategic options, including potential partnerships, acquisitions, or investments. For example, we believe our platform could be an attractive opportunity for a player like Shopify or another company looking to expand into emerging markets. I’m reaching out to this community to ask: Are there doors we haven’t knocked on? Are there opportunities or strategies we might be overlooking? Any advice, introductions, or insights would be immensely appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I look forward to any feedback or ideas you might have! [post refined by AI]

I created leadsnavi that helps small businesses find quality leads without breaking the bank

Hey Redditors, I’m excited to share LeadsNavi, a tool I built specifically to help small businesses and B2B professionals automatically generate leads and reach potential customers in a smarter way. After talking to a lot of small business owners, I realized how tough it is to juggle lead generation with limited resources. So, I decided to create a tool that could simplify the process and make it more accessible to those who don’t have the budget to invest in expensive solutions. What Exactly Is LeadsNavi? LeadsNavi is an intuitive, cost-effective platform that automates the process of lead generation. It's designed to make it easy for small businesses and entrepreneurs to identify quality leads and grow their customer base without the need for manual prospecting. Here’s what makes it stand out: Automatic Lead Tracking: Tracks visitors to your website and matches them with company data, so you get real insights into who’s interested in your business. AI-Powered Lead Recommendations: Based on your website’s traffic, LeadsNavi uses AI to suggest similar companies that could be interested in your product or service, helping you find new leads faster and more accurately. Affordable & Scalable: For only $49/month, you can use a highly effective tool that scales with your business. It’s designed to be affordable even for small businesses. CRM Integration: Connect your CRM to directly import leads and sync your outreach efforts. How Does It Work? LeadsNavi uses advanced algorithms to track website visitors' IP addresses and match them with a comprehensive business database. It provides details like company names, contact information, and helps you identify potential leads for follow-up. The best part? It works automatically, saving you hours of manual work and effort. Lead Identification: Get insights into which companies are visiting your website. AI-Driven Lead Recommendations: The AI analyzes your site’s traffic and suggests other companies in the same industry or with similar needs that might be a great fit for your product or service. Data-Enriched Leads: Gather real-time, actionable data on these leads to make your outreach more targeted. Easy Setup: Simply integrate with your website and CRM to start getting quality leads in minutes. Who’s It For? Small Businesses: You don’t have to be a marketing expert to generate quality leads. B2B Sales Teams: Perfect for anyone looking to target other businesses with a streamlined and automated approach. Entrepreneurs & Startups: Focus on scaling your business without worrying about lead generation overhead. Why Try It? LeadsNavi gives you the power to focus on what really matters—connecting with potential customers and scaling your business. If you’ve been struggling with finding quality leads, or if you’re just getting started, I believe LeadsNavi can help you save time, effort, and money. I’m offering a 14-day free trial, so you can see the tool in action before committing to anything. Give it a try and let me know what you think! I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and how it works for your business. https://preview.redd.it/fdwil4rssgle1.png?width=1867&format=png&auto=webp&s=eb73b41a2b7665ae1b651fe2a6b7459df6990530

I created a tool which helps busy tech people to build their resume. one-click, just linkedIn profile, ATS-Complaint, DOCX, multi-layered prompts, Claude AI, ChatGPT, and FREE (for now).

someone's generated resume link: https://resumebro.com I haven't done any proper launch yet currently testing the waters so far it has helped me secure few profile views from recruiters on LinkedIn when I used the resume generated from it. Note: this only works on technical profiles - and only those profile having bit of information on their LinkedIn as it reads the whole LinkedIn profile and then works its magic.

[P] I created a package implementing a SOTA technique for XAI ( Explainable AI)

This is the package https://github.com/mfumagalli68/xi-method Follow the README and install directly from pypi. From the paper: " \[..\]To bridge this gap we propose a family of measures of statistical association whose definition is well-posed also for nonordered data. Our intuition is to rely on separation measurements between probability mass functions. Here, by separation measurement we mean any distance or divergence between probability mass functions that is positive, and that is null if and only if the probability mass functions coincide. Then, we show that the new class of sensitivity indices complies with Renyi’s postulate D of measures of statistical dependence (Renyi, 1959). This postulate, called zero-independence property in the following, requires that a measure of association is null if and only if the two random variables are statistically independent. We address the estimation of this new class of indicators for generic samples, and discuss their asymptotic convergence. We then use these probabilistic sensitivity measures in the context of explainability. A relevant aspect related to measures of statistical association is that they can be computed directly on the original dataset without the need of actually fitting a machine learning model. Thus, not only are they model agnostic in explaining the behavior of a black box, but they also provide pre-hoc explanations. Our intuition is then to compare explanations provided by measures of statistical association first calculated on the original data (the pre-hoc explanations) and then on the forecasts of the machine learning model fitted to the data (post-hoc explanations). This comparison provides an indication on whether the ML model predictions capture the statistical dependence originally present in the data. We call the resulting approach Xi-method\[...\] " The paper can't be shared freely, but as always with a little bit of research you can find it online. If you find it interesting, star the repo. ​ Thanks

I Recreated An AI Phone Calling Agent That Automated Scheduling And Patient Inquiries For A Hospital

AI has been killing it as of recent when it comes to automating repetitive tasks in businesses, and I've been even more fascinated by how AI voice agents have been impacting various industries. I recently came across a case study about a voice agent that helped a hospital with appointment scheduling, cost reduction and much more. Motivated by the potential of this technology, I decided to build a similar system to see how it could be adapted for other industries. I've added the case study below so that you could see the direct impact this technology is having and how fast it is advancing in todays world. Case Study A multi-specialty hospital was facing a range of operational challenges such as high administrative load, limited 24/7 availability, high operation costs, patient follow ups, answering routine questions and long call wait times. Solution To solve these problems, the hospital implemented an AI voice agent capable of handling various aspects of patient interaction and operations such as: Automated Appointment Scheduling: AI agents seamlessly handled patient appointments, rescheduling, and cancellations. This reduced manual effort by 75%, increased appointment adherence by 30%, and allowed patients to reschedule with ease. 24/7 Multilingual Patient Support: The AI agents utilized advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) to communicate in six languages. This feature eased communication barriers, leading to a significant boost in guest satisfaction. Handling Patient Inquiries: AI agents answered FAQs about hospital services, procedures, insurance, and general health queries with speed and accuracy, improving the overall patient experience. This reduced the burden on front-desk staff by 60%. Proactive Patient Follow-Ups: The Voice AI agents automated follow-up calls for patients post-treatment, providing reminders for medication, check-ups, and future appointments, improving patient engagement and adherence to treatment plans. Enhanced Call Routing: AI agents routed patient calls based on specific needs without requiring additional staff. This eliminated long waits, improved call response times by 60%, and allowed staff to focus on more critical tasks. Elimination of IVR Systems: The hospital replaced outdated touch-tone IVRs with AI agents that routed calls efficiently without requiring patients to wait in long queues or be transferred among departments. This resulted in a 55% reduction in average call-handling times. Outcome The adoption of AI agents resulted in measurable improvements across various operational and patient care metrics: The hospital achieved a 55% reduction in operational costs by decreasing reliance on human agents for routine tasks and minimizing the need for additional staff. Patient satisfaction scores improved by 35% as a result of faster response times, personalized communication, and proactive patient engagement. Automation of appointment scheduling, follow-ups, and call routing increased overall operational efficiency by 75%. The AI agents supported 12 languages which bridged communication gaps with non-English speaking patients, further enhancing the patient experience. The AI agents reduced call center wait times by 60%, significantly improving patient support and reducing frustration. Appointment reminders and follow-up messages sent by AI agents contributed to a 30% reduction in missed appointments By implementing the AI voice agent, the hospital business enhanced its customer communication and scheduling, while significantly reducing operational costs. I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on this technology and how you see it impacting your and/or other industries.

Hello! Seeking essential advice regarding the desire to create an "AI". One that acts as a personal musical "Composer" in response to the individual users' emotional feedback. Company Name already created, as well as Trademark name for potential AI. However, I don't know where to start...

Title pretty much sums it up. With 0 background in computer science as well as no experience developing a company, I'm seeking professional advice (or personal) on the best approach to this potential business idea. Given the progression of Artificial Intelligence and its influence on the global population in modern day, I have now developed an interest in its potential. After creating a model for foundation, one which is relatively simple in nature, I took it upon to myself to embrace my lack of knowledge/interest in the science of AI and go directly to the source: ChatGPT. Unfortunately, I currently can't afford to engage with the "smartest model" of ChatGPT, but after discussing a plan of approach with the free OpenAI version, I was given a lot of valuable information that I most likely would have overwhelmed myself with independently. With that being said, I'm now looking to hear from individuals who have actual experience within the respective backgrounds. Any advice will help Questions: What does the development of an AI assistant require for foundation? Can it be built upon already established AI and will there require a level of knowledge regarding coding as well as the proper legal understanding of API usage? Should the focus be on app development or the AI tool specifically? What communities would you suggest, to seek individuals with the ability to bring an idea to fruition virtually? From a business perspective, given the lack of financial resources and significant model value, how would one communicate this idea to others to potentially become involved or invested? If I am asking the wrong question, feel free to advise. Any questions that require more information on the idea is welcomed.

I created an AI Model that counts cards in blackjack automatically and can play perfect strategy blackjack. Thinking of selling how to replicate it

People have long ago figured out how to play blackjack via card counting. I haven’t seen anyone create a user-friendly tool for a layman to know exactly how to play any permutation of blackjack with any rule set (ie any amount of decks of cards, any cards shown, etc.) Anyway, I’ve developed that and am curious if people would be willing to buy it. How can i find out who to market the product to and how much to charge? Is it even a feasible idea to profit off of?

If you are looking for free courses about AI, LLMs, CV, or NLP, I created the repository with links to resources that I found super high quality and helpful. The link is in the comment.

I'm software engineer learning ML and using AI tools. Getting better at it - I created a tool to automate tedious tasks in your browser with AI!

I created an AI sales coach while working full time

I've created a feature to define your personalized LinkedIn content strategy with AI.

Just created the 1000th producthunt alternative, but it's way better than the rest

I have created an ai tool that gives you designs and images. This is eespecially useful for POD businesses. Tell me what designs you would like to create

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

Technical founders - is "bulling" your way through learning right for a startup? [I will not promote]

Sup, This is a question for technical founders. \--a little backstory-- I am starting a company in AI field that creates something nobody has ever done before. 7 months in. \--- How most software companies are created - you have an improvement idea, then you have a thousand or so problems to solve to make that improvement happen, and for each one that you don't know, you go to Stackoverflow or ChatGPT to look for solutions for that problem. Which involves next-to-no upfront preparation because for vast majority of traditional software you can solve it on-the-go - "traditional" software is very easy compared to, say, mechanical, pharma or AI engineering. However, for more advanced disciplines - can you just "Google" it on-the-go? I'm a solo founder, and 8 months in, creating a foundational model, BECAUSE I did not know things upfront, I've wasted at least 3 months doing something which was mostly technically unviable in the first place. Out of 14000 lines of code that I've done (including tests), I had to scrap 10000 recently. Imagine the scale of it. Obviously I didn't even know how ML works when I've started. Major fuck-up. How do you operate in industries which you've done before? How do you determine that it's time to start creating you big technological leaps instead of continuing to learn? Cheers. Edit: No need to push me on business topics. I know how to create value very well. It's only a tech question, and I'm only asking because - well - to deliver my value, I need to do a lot of novel tech.

Anyone finding that they just don't NEED to add more Employees anymore? (I will not promote)

A friend of mine who was looking for work asked me if we were hiring and I responded "You know, it's weird but all of our growth goals don't seem to map back to hiring people anymore." This isn't about the economy or growth goals. It's a really fascinating shift in focus and costs for startups. My gut reaction is that I HATE the idea of not creating more jobs. In my career I've hired thousands of people, and I've always prided myself on job creation. We just sold a company that employed 200 people last year, and I'm proud of the work we were able to create. What's interesting is that I simply don't feel like we NEED to like we used to. As we're looking at all of our growth goals, for the first time I'm not assigning FTEs to them. Nearly everything we're doing is actually reducing the need for more humans, not adding them - and we're not even trying to reduce the need. Obviously the timing of AI has had a major impact. Product - Our team is shipping more code than ever before, and even our designers who have never touched code are shipping final code. If we doubled the size of the team, it would make no difference (this is a big deal considering the historical cost here). Marketing - So many aspects of our marketing are getting automated and streamlined, to the point where even a single FTE can create a massive amount of reach across channels. Support - Our Success team is able to effectively respond to tickets in a fraction of the time, which essentially doubles their capacity without adding any more staff. Management - With less staff we need less managers, which are a big expense, but it also means reporting and decisions are more streamlined, which is a positive. But it also means those positions simply don't get created like they used to. I think this is a big deal for the younger startups because it translates into needing less capital (or none!) which provides for more ownership and agency. Clearly we still need some folks to build out the core team, but that's very different than a massive staffing line item. Anyone else here finding the same trend? Opposite? I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I'd love to hear how other Founders are processing this.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies) (I will not promote)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. (I will not promote) About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

What if one founder in every startup became an influencer in their space? Will they bring in more business? (I will not promote)

I quit my last startup literally a week ago and I am already starting something new. I raised $2.7 million for my last company. But I feel like that the distribution was not strong enough. Hence I failed. Now as a second time founder distribution is the first thing I am going to focus on. So I have started doing physical events. The first event is IRL in San Francisco. I am inviting the CEO of Product Hunt for a fireside. The event is about how Ai agent founders can launch on Product Hunt. I will also start making videos everyday until the event to promote myself as a influencer in the space of AI agents + Product launches. Then use this momentum and newly created distribution to launch my first Ai agent. Let's see if the strategy works. I will keep people here posted!

Upselling from $8/mo to $2k/mo

I just closed a client for $1947/mo. But 5 months ago he was spending only $8/mo. Most customers have way more purchasing power than you think. Unlock it with the power of stacking. Here's my 3-steps stacking formula: Step 1 - Build trust with a low-ticket product In a world full of scams and deceit, building trust is damn hard. The best way to combat skepticism is through a free or low-ticket product, where you can go above and beyond to demonstrate your credibility. When I first onboarded this client onto my SaaS, an AI to help you with HARO link-building, my product was at a very early stage with many rough edges. He gave me lots of great feedback. I implemented his suggestions the same day and got more feedback from him. After a couple of back-and-forths, I established myself as a trustworthy hustler, instead of just a stranger online. This is easy to do for an agile startup but impossible for big companies, so make good use of opportunities like this to build long-term relationships. Turn your customers into raving fans. Step 2 - Validate a mid-ticket offer Three months into his subscription, he told me he wanted to cancel. When digging into the why, he suggested a performance-based DFY service to remove all the work on his end. Inspired by his suggestion, I took on him and 6 other clients for $237, a one-time package for 1 backlink. It's sold through my newsletter email blast to 300 subscribers, with a total CAC of $0. I wrote about the details of this launch in another long form. At this price range, impulsive purchases can still happen if you have a strong offer and good copywriting. Use this mid-ticket offer to validate your offer and positioning, build out a team, and establish trust. We went beyond the 1 link for almost all our clients, including this one in particular. For $237, we got him on Forbes, HubSpot, 2 DR50+ sites, and a few other smaller media outlets. By doing this, we further built trust into the relationship and established authority in what we do. Step 3 - Create a high-ticket subscription-based offer By now, you'll hopefully have built enough trust to get through the skepticism filter for something high-ticket. Now, it's time to develop an offer that amplifies your previous one. Something that allows you to let your clients achieve their goals to the maximum extent. For me, this is pitching every relevant media query on every platform for this client every day, to leverage HARO link-building to its full extent, all for a fixed price of $1947/mo. This customized offer is based on direct client feedback, isn't publicized on our website, but we're confident it will directly contribute to achieving this client's goal. A subscription-based offer is much superior because it allows you to create a stable source of revenue, especially at the early stage. That's how I created 3 different offers to solve the same problem for one client. By stacking each offer on top of the previous one, I was able to guide clients from one option to the next. This formula isn't some new rocket science I came up with. It's proven over and over again by other agency owners building in public, like Nick from Baked Design who started with a $9 design kit and now sells $9k/mo design subscriptions at $1M ARR. By stacking offers, you position yourself as a committed partner in your client's long-term success. Lastly, I want to address a common objection: "My customers can't afford $2k/month." But consider this: most people are reading your site on their $3000 MacBook or $1000 iPhone. It's not that they lack the funds, it's more likely that your service isn't meeting their expectations. Talk to them to discover the irresistible offer they'll gladly pay for. Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

Is my idea + progress good enough to raise pre-seed round? CRM for construction niches. Non-tech founder.

Is my startup idea and progress good enough to raise a pre-seed round? It’s a CRM with meaningful AI integrations for specific type of B2B construction companies. I only want to continue at my current pace if it’s realistic to start raising within the next 2 weeks. At first, I thought it was fine because simple companies still get on Y-comb such as hammr and Relate CRM , but now I’m not sure. Would love to get the community’s thoughts on this. I’ve been working on this for about a week. ​ Key Highlights (You can skip to longer section below) Product is CRM for B2B construction companies. The previous tech company I worked at used an in-house built CRM for their workflow, and I’m creating that solution and applying it to B2B construction companies that have similar workflows. No competitors I’ve found. I’m uniquely positioned to spearhead: B2B SaaS/tech sales + expertise in construction I’m a non-tech sales founder with experience in UI/UX. Will bring on CTO co-founder once I start raising as that would entice better talent Progress + Traction $400 MRR in pre-sales, can get to \~$800-1000 EOM Validated through customer interviews Created some Figma frames, product overview, user journeys, business plan Made a simple but meaningful AI tool that will be available to those that sign up for waitlist. Did this with GitHub + ChatGPT Landing page website going up this week followed by PPC campaign, email marketing, and outreach. My GF works in enterprise sales and she’ll help me generate more leads. ​ Long Version Background B2B SaaS/Tech sales. I worked at enterprise company as an Account Executive where I worked with funded startups and their development, UI/UX, and Product management teams. I have a general knowledge in all these - my best being UI/UX design as I can work with Figma well Domain expertise: my family has had a construction company since I was young. I have a large network because of this. Problem At my previous company, we had a custom in-house built CRM for our workflow. It worked okay, despite being maintained by multiple engineers costing hundreds of thousands a year. I’m creating a CRM that solves that, and applying it to construction industries that can make use of it. I have a great network here which makes it easy for me get sales quickly. Vision Building this CRM for construction niche will allow us to generate MRR fast. We will be first movers in bringing meaningful AI tools to construction, which is generating significant interest. This gives us the opportunity to build the foundational technology that can be adapted to a wider audience such as my previous company and others - think researchers, consultants, etc. Traction + Current Progress (1 week) Validated idea through user interviews and pre-sales. Currently have $400 MRR in pre-sales. I expect $800-1000 in a month if I continue at my pace. This is from doing typical B2B sales. I’ve set up a CRM for this. Created product overview, user journeys, wireframes and some Figma frames, business plan Created a simple but meaningful AI tool for the niche which will be available to those that sign up for the waitlist. Created with GitHub + ChatGPT Completing landing page website this week. Will start PPC ads (I’m experienced in this) after that to generate sign-ups. I’ll also start email marketing from lists I’ve scraped. Team Solo-founder, will bring on CTO co-founder once I start raising funds. I have promising candidates, but feel that I need to raise funds to really entice a good co-founder. I’m uniquely positioned to head this product; B2B sales having worked with many CRMs + construction expertise and network. That said, I’ve never actually done anything that* impressive besides being an AE at a known enterprise techy company (but not FAANG level). ​ I want to acknowledge that my progress might sound more impressive than it is - it's still just a CRM after all, and I'm non-technical. Should I keep going? Advice? I also have a great offer to lead sales at a profitable startup, but I could always do both if it was worth it. I’m feeling really uncertain for some reason :/ maybe it’s just burnout.

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

I am selling my tool which converts websites into android and iOS apps within 5 minutes.

Hi, my name is Toshit Garg. I started working on SaaS products around April 2023. The plan was simple: to create tools that help entrepreneurs easily grow their businesses. My first tool was "Convertixo", inspired by my work as a Fiverr seller where I converted websites into apps for clients, earning around $1,000 per month. I thought, why not automate this process? Following Convertixo, I created a few other tools like "Web to PWA". At one point, I developed an AI-based tool called "AppMintAI" , a productized service named "Engage Enhance", and even a WordPress plugin that lets users create pragmatic pages for SEO and a boilerplates. Unfortunately, none of these tools gained significant traction. I would launch them on Product Hunt, get a few users, and then nothing. Other than Convertixo, all my other tools only received a handful of free users. I believe this happened because I’m not very passionate about marketing. So, I decided to pivot and focus on content creation, which is where my true passion lies. Currently, I’m selling all my products one by one. As for Convertixo, it now has 800 users, a $20 MRR, and an email subscriber list of 100+. It was also the third Product of the Day on Product Hunt in January of this year. While the product has gained some traction, I’ve realized my focus is on content creation. However, with the right marketing and drive, I believe Convertixo has great potential to grow. If you’re interested in taking Convertixo to the next level, let’s chat! Here are some key statistics: In the last 20 days, Convertixo has received 4.9K impressions from Google and 338 visitors. More about the product: Convertixo can convert any website into Android and iOS apps using a custom webview. The apps are generated in Android Studio and Xcode. You receive both the APK and the source code for the Android app, along with the source code for the iOS app. The converted apps require no maintenance, and they update exactly like the website. A major benefit is the ability to add push notifications via OneSignal for free, allowing you to re-target your customers at no cost. Feel free to ask if you have any questions!

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies) (I will not promote)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. (I will not promote) About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

I feel Ai is mostly marketing - I will not promote

I run into this on X an made me think about it… the post says “AI is effectively ‘useless’ and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster”. I think this is true. I haven't seen a product that really solves anything specifically except for the gimmicks. It needs a product normally people can use. Also the AI startups have cash burn rates 3x to 10x their revenue. No business model. It's very focused on getting acquired.

How I made a high tech salary in my first selling month

For over 7 years I worked as a full-stack developer, helping other companies bring their ideas to life. But one day, I thought “Why not try making my own dream come true?”. That’s when I decided to quit my job and start my own journey to becoming an entrepreneur. At first, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t make any money for months and had no idea where to start. I felt lost. Then, I decided to focus on something popular and trending. AI was everywhere, and ChatGPT was the most used AI platform. So I looked into it and I found the OpenAI community forum where people had been asking for features that weren’t being added. That gave me an idea. Why not build those features myself? I created a Chrome extension and I worked on some of the most requested features, like: Downloading the advanced voice mode and messages as MP3 Adding folders to organize chats Saving and reusing prompts Pinning important chats Exporting chats to TXT/JSON files Deleting or archiving multiple chats at once Making chat history searches faster and better It took me about a week to build the first version, and when I published it, the response was incredible. People loved it! Some even said things like, “You’re a lifesaver!” That’s when I realized I had something that could not only help people but also turn into a real business. I kept the first version free to see how people would respond. Many users have been downloading my extension, which prompted Chrome to review it to determine if it qualified for the featured badge. I received the badge, and it has significantly boosted traffic to my extension ever since. After all the positive feedback, I launched a paid version one month ago. A few minutes after publishing it, I made my first sale! That moment was so exciting, and it motivated me to keep going. I already have over 4,000 users and have made more than $4,500 in my first selling month. I’ve decided to release 1-2 new features every month to keep improving the extension based on what users ask for. I also created the same extension for Firefox and Edge users because many people have been asking for it! I also started a Reddit community, where I share updates, sales, discount codes, and ideas for new features. It’s been awesome to connect with users directly and get their feedback. Additionally, I’ve started working on another extension for Claude, which I’m hoping will be as successful as this one. My message to you is this: never give up on your dreams. It might feel impossible at first, but with patience, hard work, and some creativity, you can make it happen. I hope this inspires you to go after what you want. Good luck to all of us!

I built AI product photography tool for my business, what's next? How can I find customers?

I own a fitness apparel brand selling gym and workout clothes for women, mostly leggings. One big problem I face is product photography. Photoshoots are expensive, and time-consuming, but another problem is editing to make the backgrounds clean and ready for my e-commerce website. To solve this, I created AI-Powered Product Photography. It transforms regular photos into studio-quality, e-commerce-ready images by removing backgrounds and adding realistic shadows. What's next? How can I scale and find potential customers? I believe I'm not the only one who faced this problem.

What I Learned from a Failed Startup: Seeking Advice on Engineering, Co-Founder Agreements & Execution (i will not promote)

Hey everyone! Long-time lurker, first-time founder here. I’m reaching out to get feedback on a recent startup experience—what went wrong, what I could have done better, and how I should approach future opportunities. The Background There were three founders in this venture: • Founder A (CEO, 50%) – The product/growth guy who identified the problem space. • Founder B (Me, CTO, 37.5%) – A software engineer with a software dev shop and multiple clients. I wanted to diversify into building my own products but am not inherently a “product person.” • Founder C (COO, 12.5%) – Brought into the mix by Founder A, with the goal of leveraging his network for traction once the product was built. The idea was to create Product X, a solution targeting the SMB space while competitors were moving upmarket. It wasn’t revolutionary—more of a strategic market play. The Initial Plan & My Role • Founder A would define and prioritize product specs, guiding what needed to be built. • I (Founder B) didn’t have time to code myself, so I allocated engineers from my dev shop (which I personally paid for). My stake was adjusted from 32.5% to 37.5% to reflect this contribution. • Founder C was more of an observer early on, planning to help with traction once we had a product ready. We agreed on a 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting schedule for equity. Where Things Started to Go Wrong • Lack of a Clear Product Roadmap – Founder A was very focused on getting something built fast, but we never signed off on a structured roadmap or milestones. I underestimated the complexity of what was actually needed for customer conversations. • Engineering Expectations vs. Reality – The team (one part-time lead + two full-time juniors from my dev shop) faced early feedback that development was too slow. In response, I ramped up the lead to full-time and added a part-time PM. But Founder A continued pushing for speed, despite real hurdles (OAuth integrations, etc.). • Shifting MVP Goalposts – Midway, Founder A concluded that an MVP wouldn’t cut it—we needed a more complete product to be competitive. This meant more engineering, more delays, and more of my own money spent on development. The Breaking Point Near the 1-year vesting mark, we had an opportunity: a paying client willing to fund an app. I didn’t have devs on the bench, so I asked Founder A to hold off our project briefly while I hired more engineers to avoid stalling either effort. This was the final straw. Founder A (with Founder C somewhat aligned) decided the arrangement wasn’t working—citing past disagreements and the “slowness” issue. The decision was made to end the partnership. Now, Founder A, as majority holder, is requesting a full handover of the code, Founder C is indifferent, and all engineering costs I covered are essentially lost. Key Takeaways (So Far) Crystal-Clear Agreements Upfront – A formalized product roadmap and timeline should’ve been locked in from day one. Business Needs > Engineering Standards – I wanted to build something solid and scalable, but in an early-stage startup, speed to market is king. This was before AI tools became mainstream, so our approach wasn’t as optimized. Don’t Overextend Without Protection – I personally financed all engineering, but without clear safeguards, that investment became a sunk cost. Expenses Must Be Distributed – I was solely covering engineering salaries, which created an imbalance in financial risk. Future partnerships should ensure costs are shared proportionally, rather than one person shouldering the burden. Where I Need Advice Looking back, I want to improve as an engineer, CEO, and co-founder. • What should I have done differently in structuring this partnership? • How do you balance engineering quality with the startup need for speed? • As a dev shop owner, how can I better navigate equity deals where I’m also bringing in engineering resources? I really appreciate everyone who went through this long post and provide any insights from founders, engineers, or anyone who has been in a similar situation. Thanks for reading! ===================================================================== For readers who might be thinking what set this type of expectation? Because I had a dev shop and I thought my co-founders will be understanding of my business circumstance and I was a bit trigger to build a product with a C-exec team, I gave the impression of "unlimited" engineering which I later realized down the line that it was not feasible for me. Something I learned that I have to be more careful with and set expectations accordingly from the very beginning. And from the feedback of the commenters here, I am much more aware what I should offer and how to set expectations, esp. in the early stages of execution. So thank you all! 🙏🏾 EDIT: I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. You not only helped me but future founders who are considering to get into the startup scene!

OpenAI Search for lead generation - better alternatives?

We need leads in an obscure niche. Leads in this industry are not sold by ZoomInfo/Clearbit/etc. We tried scraping them ourselves with Octoparse and Apify, but it proved too difficult. OpenAI’s new search tool works really well, though. We need the results in an exact format with a short description of their service, lat/long derived from the service address, categorized into our existing taxonomy - and we pretty easily created a prompt that would reliably give us what we want. But I need to super charge this. I need 2,000 leads in a specific geographic area as soon as possible. OpenAI’s API doesn’t allow access to the search functionality yet, as far as I can tell. The new OpenAI + prompt technique gives us like 5 at a time and they need to be manually copy-pasted into a spreadsheet. Eventually, I'll need at least 10,000 leads annually. Does anyone know of a start-up/service available that will automate what we’re doing at scale?

I am considering starting a SaaS business that automates the creation of long-form SEO-optimized blog posts. Is this something you would find useful, as a business owner?

Trying to gauge the general interest level, from other entrepreneurs/business owners. The idea is, a tool that automates the process of creating long-form SEO optimized blog posts to promote your business -- perhaps creating entire batches of such posts, all from just one button click. Like if you could just describe your business, click a button, and BAM, it just outputs like an entire month's worth of absolutely fire SEO-optimized long-form blog posts? That would be super fucking convenient. Yes you can use ChatGPT for this, but the character limits make it so it can only output very short posts. Otherwise it requires first asking for an outline, then getting the different sections piecemeal and pasting it all together yourself. Still super time-consuming to do it that way. A GPT-based solution could probably automate the process I've hit upon in my own SEO blog-posting workflow -- where I output not just finished long-form blog posts, but also convert them into SEO-optimized HTML code so you can just paste it into your blog post website and have all the header tags etc set up for optimal SEO/keyword ranking purposes. Biggest counter-argument I make against this is, there are undoubtedly lots of companies already offering this. Doesn't mean I can't make money doing it. I just don't like entering super crowded marketplaces. Other main argument I have is, if I used my OpenAI account for this, there's the risk of some malicious/idiot user firing prompts that violate the OpenAI ToS and get me banned. I COULD have them input their own OpenAI API tokens, but that just adds adoption/usage barriers that would make it way harder to market/acquire initial customers. I guess I could sanitize the user inputs as a pre-processing step to block any obscene prompts or anything like that, but still, it's a risk. Let me know your thoughts on this idea. ASSUMING it worked effectively -- and made it very easy for you to just describe your business offerings / value propositions / target market(s), then get genuinely useful long-form SEO-optimized blog posts, is this something you'd be willing to pay for? If so, what dollar amount, to you, would seem reasonable? It would probably just be hosted on a website. Then you'd just copy the outputted final result for use as needed on your website. That would be the simplest way to do it. Technically it could function as like, a plugin for specific websites that maybe auto-posts them for you too -- it would be simpler, on my end, to start out doing this on a standalone website. (Might also make it easier to allow users to try it out, on first visit.) One last point -- MAYBE it would have an optional intermediate step, where it would first output the planned outline for the blog post, allowing you to pop in, quickly modify that, add your own thoughts / valuable ideas (to help make the blog post more unique, truly useful for readers, more your own) -- THEN you could finalize it and hit submit. Again, that's the workflow I've hit upon in my own semi-automated blog-posting workflow, and it's led to some pretty useful long-form content that isn't just, boring garbage, but contains lots of genuinely useful ideas that I would include in my own uniquely-created blog posts on the subject. But instead of me taking the time to write it, I just kinda toss in a few quickly typed out ideas to expand upon, and ChatGPT does the rest. Imagine that kind of optional / customizable workflow, but the rest of it is fully automated. OR you could just get the fully automated blog posts with no revisions on your part. Thanks!

Good at coding, bad at marketing. Summary

Hello. I posted a question on what to do if you are good at coding but bad at marketing four days ago, and I received so many responses and tips. The original post is here. I was really glad and excited to read comments. To return the favor to the community and add some more value, I’ve summarized all the comments I got on the original post. Here are they, with my personal comments on some of the advice I got. You’ll never believe it, but the most common advice was to learn. Really, the first and only thing you should start with if you’re bad at marketing is learning. Yet learning could be different. I highlighted 5 main areas. Educate yourself on general questions. Learn more about some basics. For example, start by finding out what the 4P’s of marketing are, and afterward, you’ll inevitably run into YouTube videos, seminars, Udemy courses, or any other resource that resonates with you on some ideas/avenues you could pursue. Read books and watch videos. There are tons of books on marketing and sales. People shared in the comments books by Dan Kennedy and “Cashvertising”, written by Drew Eric Whitman. (I’ve never heard of them, but already ordered on Amazon). For sales, the most common idea was to start with YouTube videos. For example, Alex Hormozi videos and Startup school delivered by Ycombinator videos. Check out Indie Hackers and scrutinize it for a piece of good advice from developers in the same situation. Also, there was advice to follow up and read some guy on Twitter. (Don't want to get unfairly banned from here, so won't post it) Educate yourself and hire a professional or find a co-founder to help you: Hire a seasoned marketer in this field to help you out. He will help you achieve cost-efficient scales. But it could be a real problem to find the right person. Marketing agencies are expensive. Try to look on LinkedIn or among your acquaintances. Look for professionals with credentials or extensive experience. Seek marketing referrals from startups of a similar size/industry. If you don't have those, try to bring a trusted/experienced marketer friend into the intro meetings to help assess whether the service provider knows what they are doing. Talented freelancers can often get the job done for less than hiring an entire agency. Look for a co-founder who is savvy in marketing, passionate, and ready to work hard towards mutual success. Educate and DIY Being the face of your business is way better than having faceless communication. The startup checklist is made based on the comments is next: At least have your product defined. Define your target audience. Set up the goals you want to achieve. Make domain expertise and understand the market and the direction of its development. The next stage is answering tricky questions: Have you created a business model? How do you plan to compete? What’s your unique selling point? How much do you plan to budget for marketing? Are you planning to work alone, or will you need other devs? Then you start thinking about clients… You need the exposure to truly understand the customer's pain points and build a product that they love. You need to think about how your clients would think, and you should tailor each step you take for them. Get feedback from your early users if you already have a product. Interview your potential customers to learn how they buy. This will help you narrow your choice of marketing channels. Get your product or service used by several startups and help them achieve their goals. Endorsements are very valuable marketing assets. You need a landing to validate your value proposition and start sending traffic, or you can run meta instant form campaigns... It would depend on the category of your startup. You need a benchmark of the competition's ads both in Meta and Google, blog posts, domain authority, their landing page, and average search volumes. Do affiliate marketing for your product since it's an effective strategy. Educate and use AI tools for dealing with marketing. Build an LLM-based product to automate marketing. (Sounds like an idea for a startup, right?) Learn following ChatGPT advice. In 1–3 months, you will be another updated person. Look at marketowl, an AI marketing department for startups and microbusinesses that have no budget or time to do marketing. It will automate the basic tasks your business needs, but it doesn't require your marketing expertise. Check out AI tools that are delivering very good marketing content (gocharlie, jasper, copyai). Educate yourself and run socials Start a blog or YouTube channel where you can share your expertise in coding or anything else you are good at and how your product simplifies life. Engage with your audience on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, where you can showcase your industry knowledge. Start a page on Twitter and an account on Reddit. Follow and read subreddits and pages where your potential customers are. Learn the pain from the inside. Do not simply promote, people will lose interest immediately. Start by taking focused time to create informational content, so people will eventually be naturally intrigued by what you do and want to support you when they start to “know” you. Educate your potential users about the value of your product. Create content based on what ideal customers are asking at the various stages of marketing. e.g., if they are at the beginning of the process, they may use basic language; if they are further down the process, maybe they’ll be specific. Try to get on podcasts and build as many social links as you can. In other words, don’t live in a shell! Post regularly, and eventually you’ll find sites or people that are willing to promote for you. I omitted here all personal help offers and newsletters, however you could find them in the original post. Hope that will be helpful!

Struggling with my dog-themed clothing store – How can I make it better?

TL;DR: I own a dog-inspired store that’s struggling to make sales. I need your honest feedback to make it better. Hey reddit, I’m turning to you because I really need your honest feedback. I run a small online shop, dogloverclothing.com, where I sell dog-inspired fashion items and accessories (product list is growing). I poured my heart into creating it because I’m a huge dog lover (I own a Corgi and a Beagle), and I thought there must be others out there who’d resonate with the style of my designs. I truly believe my shop is fun and creative and I thought other dog lovers would easily connect with the dog-theme behind it. But I’m struggling. I’ve only made 1-2 sales a year and I feel like I’ve hit a wall. Let me be completely transparent about my situation: I have a small child who needs my care in the afternoons. I work part-time in the mornings, and the only time I'm able to work on my shop is in the evenings (once all the usual household chaos is settled) or on weekends. That gives me maybe 1-2 hours a day to focus on this project. I don’t have the money or time for big ad campaigns, influencer cooperations, daily social media activity, or even professional photoshoots for my products. My visuals are mostly created with AI tools, stock imagery, and mockup generators, but I think they look professional enough to be converting. I tried small ad campaigns, and while I got a few sales, the ad costs ended up being higher than my revenue, so I had to stop. I also tried organic Social Media activity, but the time I put into that did not turn into any traffic, followers or sales, so I also stopped that. I know that putting myself/my face out there on social media could help, but I’m not comfortable showing my face or apartment in videos or ads. I could do flatlays or simple videos with the products I have at home. Right now, I’m putting all my energy into SEO, hoping to attract organic traffic and customers. Otherwise, I feel stuck with marketing. I want to make the most of the limited time and resources I have. My dream definitely isn’t to get rich here from this shop. I would love to make an extra $300-500 a month to make life a little easier for my family, while fulfilling my creative streak – and that's about it. I’m not sure if that’s even realistic, but it’s what keeps me going. So, guys: What do you think I’m doing wrong or could do better? Is it the designs? The pricing? The website layout? The lack of time/lack of money? How can I make this work with my limited time and resources? Are there any affordable, creative marketing strategies you’d recommend for someone in my shoes? Is my goal of $300-500/month realistic for a store like mine? I’m open to all your ideas, tips, and even brutal honesty. This isn’t just a business for me, it’s my passion project, and I’d love to make it somewhat of sustainable. I’m not here to sell you something. I’m here to learn. I know Reddit doesn’t hold back, and that’s what I need. Can you take a look at my site, tell me what you think, and help me figure out why this dream hasn’t taken off yet? I know running a business is tough, and I deeply admire everyone in this community who’s making it work. I’d love to hear your insights, experiences, and even your tough love if that’s what it takes to get my dream back on track. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for any advice you can offer!

how does this look as an MVP

Just created this AI chat tool that is specialized in giving marketing advice to create a personalized social media posting plan and strategy about Reddit, Pinterest, IG and Linkedin. It also analyzes metrics and gives you feedback and the posts for a whole week keeping you accountable. This is just an MVP and its free to try. Would love some feedback about your experience https://studio.pickaxe.co/STUDIO3OWN363BA9P44Y9/Your\Strategy\Planner\SEJOE

Restarting My Agency / Compared To Full Time Corporate

I’m currently thinking about going back to consulting / agency work compared to my current tech job I have. Over a year ago I signed this tech client and they wanted more and more from me which ended up becoming a full time role. At the time, the challenge excited me as it was working on a very large project on a global scale, competing with some of the biggest brands in the world. I was making good money before working in my agency and consulting with lots of different brands on their paid media, websites and e-commerce. I have a healthy package where I’m at at the moment but want more. Working with different clients always created curiosity, no day was the same and that what I loved about it. So now I’m considering going to back to starting the business and working with clients again. My question is: What do businesses ACTUALLY want? Everyone wants great roas and an amazing site but what are core things people are looking for in a growth partner / agency? I’m thinking of relaunching with three pillars in mind: Digital (Paid Media, Lead Gen, Web Dev) AI implementation as a lot of businesses don’t know how to leverage AI completely for cost saving and efficiencies. Content (Video, SEO, Content Writing) for modern day ranking I’m currently rebuilding my pitch deck and thought I would ask the question here before I go back to my network and start opening up conversations again. Would love to hear people’s thoughts in addition to anyone that’s done the same?

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

Looking for Feedback on this Idea

Hey everyone, I’d love some honest feedback on an idea I’ve been working on (currently just in paper). A little about me: I started in hospitality across South America and Asia, then moved into social entrepreneurship in a rural area, and eventually ecommerce using WordPress. Now, I’m deep into programming here in Europe, which I’ve really come to enjoy. So yes, I understand the perspective of businesses, entrepreneurs and programmers.  Back when I had tons of ideas for businesses and optimizing processes, I always hit the same drama: "You need a developer." But hiring one was too expensive or unreliable or shady business practice, and partnering with a programmer, someone I barely knew often felt too risky (I've learned the hard way that partnerships can feel like marriages). Now, as a programmer, I get a lot of requests from small businesses needing help and sometimes with very simple ideas. And while I can do it, I often don’t have the time, so I have to tell them I can't. And when I do have time, I know the cost can be too much for their budget. This got me thinking: What if I created a course to teach business owners just enough programming to solve their own problems? Not to become full time coders, but to gain enough knowledge to build simple tools or, better yet, understand code enough to ask the right questions whether it's to AI or a future developer. The course would focus on programming but talking business language, starting with building more flexible websites, managing your own content and creating custom tools without the limitations of templates or paid widgets. I’m thinking of creating a supportive community where we learn and grow together (maybe using your business as an example), and I’d be available to help along the way, plus I will be adding tools that you could reuse for your business (mostly because you will be able to read it and understand it → that's the goal). Talking about money, I can only tell you will be way more affordable compared to multiple payments in different places. So, does this resonate with you? I’d really appreciate your honest thoughts. Do you feel you have the time to learn or you still prefer looking for a developer? Feel free to share any frustrations or ideas. And if this sounds interesting, write me a PM, and I’ll keep you updated. Thanks for reading. I'm excited to hear what you think! :)

How do you explain, to a non-programmer why it's hard to replace programmers with AI?

to me it seems that AI is best at creative writing and absolutely dogshit at programming, it can't even get complex enough SQL no matter how much you try to correct it and feed it output. Let alone production code.. And since it's all just probability this isn't something that I see fixed in the near future. So from my perspective the last job that will be replaced is programming. But for some reason popular media has convinced everyone that programming is a dead profession that is currently being given away to robots. The best example I could come up with was saying: "It doesn't matter whether the AI says 'very tired' or 'exhausted' but in programming the equivalent would lead to either immediate issues or hidden issues in the future" other then that I made some bad attempts at explaining the scale, dependencies, legacy, and in-house services of large projects. But that did not win me the argument, because they saw a TikTok where the AI created a whole website! (generated boilerplate html) or heard that hundreds of thousands of programers are being laid off because "their 6 figure jobs are better done by AI already".

What do you think about no-code AI development

A team of like-minded people and I are working on a no-code AI development platform. Our goal is to make deep learning technologies accessible for everyone, not just for machine learning engineers and big companies. We've decided to start with computer vision tasks. The workflow would look like the following: Select task (image classification, object detection, image tagging). Upload data (with annotation or annotate it in our platform). Wait for a model to be trained automatically (about 10 minutes). Integrate the created model into your product (through API, docker image, or through integration with other no-/low-code platforms). What do you think is there any future for no-code AI development platforms? I'd really appreciate it if you could share your thoughts.

No-code AI platform?

Hey there, A group of like-minded people and I are working on a no-code AI platform. Our goal is to make machine learning technologies accessible to people without any specific knowledge. The workflow would look like the following: Select a task and data types. Upload data (with annotation or annotate it in our platform). Wait for a model to be trained automatically (up to 30-40 minutes). Use the created model (through API, through integration with other no-/low-code platforms, or as a docker image). What do you think about our idea? Would anybody use it? I'd really appreciate it if you could share your thoughts.

Creating a strategy game AI without writing a board evaluation function?

I've recreated a favorite obscure two player board game of mine, where the board is divided into cells and pieces move across these cells (like chess, checkers, etc...) I want to try and create an AI that will be able to play the game - but I want to avoid writing the board evaluation function myself (for a minmax algorithm). Are there any general good ways to achieve that? From the little research I've done, I found out about genetic algorithms - and they seem like they would fit but I can't fathom how would one create a dna schema that describes a board evaluation function

[Help Needed] Developing an AI to Play Mini Metro – Struggling with Data Extraction & Strategy method

Hello everyone ! First of all, please excuse my English if i do mistakes, as it is not my native language and I am not necessarily comfortable with it :) Regarding this project, I will explain my initial intention. I know very little about coding, but I enjoy it and have had some Python lessons, along with a few small personal projects for fun, mostly using YouTube tutorials. Nothing too advanced... However, now I want to take it to the next level. Since I have some familiarity with coding, I’ve wanted to work on artificial intelligence for a while. I have never coded AI myself, but I enjoy downloading existing projects (for chess, checkers, cat-and-mouse games, etc.), testing their limits, and understanding how they work. One of my favorite strategy game genres is management games, especially Mini Metro. Given its relatively simple mechanics, I assumed there would already be AI projects for it. But to my surprise, I could only find mods that add maps ! I admit that I am neither the best nor the most patient researcher, so I haven’t spent hours searching, but the apparent lack of projects for this game struck me. Maybe the community is just small ? I haven't looked deeply into it. So, I got it into my head to create my own AI. After all, everything is on the internet, and perseverance is key ! However, perseverance alone is not enough when you are not particularly experienced, so I am turning to the community to find knowledgeable people who can help me. The First Obstacle: Getting Game Data I quickly realized that the biggest challenge is that Mini Metro does not have an accessible API (at least, not one I could find). This means I cannot easily extract game data. My initial idea was to have an AI analyze the game, think about the best move, and then write out the actions to be performed, instead of coding a bot that directly manipulates the game. But first, I needed a way to retrieve and store game data. Attempt #1: Image Recognition (Failed) Since there was no API, I tried using image recognition to gather game data. Unfortunately, it was a disaster. I used mss for screenshots ,Tesseract for OCR, andNumPy to manipulate images in the HSV color space but it produced unreliable results : It detected many false positives (labeling empty spaces as stations) It failed to consistently detect numbers (scores or resources like trains and lines) Dotted bridge indicators over rivers were misinterpreted as stations While I could detect stations, lines, and moving trains, the data was chaotic and unreliable Attempt #2: Manual Data Entry (Partially Successful but Impractical) Since image recognition was unreliable, I decided to manually update the game data in real-time. I created a script that : Displays an overlay when I press Shift+R. Allows me to manually input stations, lines, and other game elements. Saves the current state when I press Shift+R again, so I can resume playing. Implements a simple resource management system (trains, lines, etc.). This works better than image recognition because I control the input, but I’m running into serious limitations : Some game mechanics are hard to implement manually (adding a station in the middle of a line, extending the correct line when two lines overlap at a station) Keeping track of station demands (the shapes passengers want to travel to) becomes overwhelming as the game progresses Updating the score in real-time is practically impossible manually, and the score is essential for training an AI (for my reward systems) My Dilemma At this point, I am unsure of how to proceed. My questions for the community : Am I going in the right direction? Should I continue improving my manual tracking system or is it a dead end? Should I have persevered with image recognition instead? Is there a better way to extract game data that I haven’t thought of? I would appreciate any guidance or ideas. Thanks in advance ! if you need more info, i have posted my codes here : https://github.com/Dmsday/mini\metro\data\analyzer (for the image detection version I'm not sure that it's the latest version aka the most "functional" version that I could do because I think I deleted it out of boredom...)

𝗠𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: 𝗔 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝘁-𝗞𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗕𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀

Scikit-learn vs Statsmodel Linear regression is often the first model introduced to those stepping into the world of data science and machine learning. A deep understanding of this fundamental concept is crucial for building a solid foundation. In this post, I explore two widely used approaches to linear regression, each with distinct purposes: 1️⃣ 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗸𝗶𝘁-𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻’𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻: Optimized for machine learning applications and large datasets, this model focuses on efficiency and scalability. 2️⃣ 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝘀𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗹𝘀’ 𝗢𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗦𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗲𝘀 (𝗢𝗟𝗦): Known for its comprehensive statistical insights, this approach provides a detailed report ideal for understanding relationships and diagnosing issues like multicollinearity. It’s essential to gain hands-on experience with both libraries to appreciate their unique strengths. To make this learning process more accessible, I’ve created detailed videos and example code to guide you through practical applications: 🎥 𝗛𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀-𝗢𝗻 𝗧𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗹𝘀: 📌 Learn Linear Regression in Python with LLM Prompt Chaining : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEG4rs1SUU 📌 In-Depth Linear Regression: Statsmodels OLS, Multicollinearity, and VIF : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQWKY30XzNA 💻 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲: 🔗 Scikit-Learn Implementation: https://github.com/pritkudale/ML-for-Teachers/blob/main/Linear%20Regression/Linear\Regression.ipynb 🔗 Statsmodels Implementation: https://github.com/pritkudale/ML-for-Teachers/blob/main/Linear%20Regression/Linear\regression\using\stats\model.ipynb What makes these tutorials unique? I’ve incorporated LLM prompt chaining, enabling beginners to confidently write code without requiring extensive Python expertise. 📩 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘺 𝘢𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘈𝘐 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴! 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘸𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴: 𝘝𝘪𝘻𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘢 𝘈𝘐 𝘕𝘦𝘸𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳: https://vizuara.ai/email-newsletter/

GPT Weekly - 19the June Edition - OpenAI's function calling, Meta's free LLM, EU Regulation and more.

This is a recap covering the major news from last week. 🔥Top 3 news - OpenAI’s updates, Meta’s upcoming free LLM and EU Regulation 🗞️Interesting reads include PSA about protecting your keys, The GPT ouroboros, Reddit - OpenAI’s moat, and more.. 🧑‍🎓Learning includes a Step-by-step guide from a non-technical founder who launched his MVP, Chatbot for your Gdrive and more 🔥Top 3 AI news in the past week OpenAI: New Pricing, Models, & Functions OpenAI has been on a roll. Last week we saw the release of OpenAI best practice on using GPT. This week we saw some amazing updates. Three major buckets were: First, the price decreases for both embeddings and GPT-3.5 tokens. Second, new models for gpt-4 and gpt-3.5. A new longer context model for gpt-3.5. Third, a new function calling capability. Why is it important? Previously, the output from OpenAI was all text. So, calling an external API from GPT was quite difficult. You had to parse the text data and things were often incorrect. Langchain created the Agents and Tools feature to tackle this problem. It was still unreliable and prone to issues. Now you get native support to generate a fixed format output. You can use the output to generate functional calls and also pass functions which need to be called. For example, if your app has multiple API endpoints then you can use GPT to generate the API calls with parameters. You can also pass the endpoints as function calls to ensure the correct function is executed. This functionality can further be used to generate structured data (JSON) out of GPT. So, you can generate data from GPT and load it into your backend. What’s next? This functionality allows turning natural language responses into structured data. This can be used to create “intelligent” backends using LLMs. We might see implementations in no-code tools to allow more robust and natural-language tools for non-technical folks. The structured data process goes both ways. You can also feed structured data into GPT for better responses. This feature also has its share of issues. Function calling suffers from the same prompt injection issues. Malicious actors can pass malicious code in function or the responses. For example, creation of queries using functions might contain malicious code to delete data. Without proper user validation this code will be executed automatically and delete data. So, using LLM as the back-end layer needs proper security implementation. Meta's LLM: Commercial Use Ahead Llama has been a boon for the open source community. Many of the open source models rely on Llama. The issue is that Llama is research-only and cannot be used commercially. So, no one can use it to build any product. Meta is now working on the next version of the model. This model will be available for commercial use. This is in stark contrast to both OpenAI and Google. Both safe-guarde their models and make it available through API. Why is it important? Certain industries cannot use LLM APIs because of strict restrictions on data privacy. These companies would want to run their own instance of a foundational model. A commercially available foundational model is also going to help people who want to keep their “API call” costs next to 0. A commercially available free-for-all model will also help push the open source community further. Just like Llama. What’s next? Sam Altman has said OpenAI didn’t release GPT-3 as open-source because they didn’t think people would be able to run it. Now OpenAI is working on an open-source model. This is going to be weaker than GPT-4. Let the battle of LLMs begin. EU's Proposed Legislation and Its Impact on AI Usage The EU parliament voted to move ahead with the E.U. AI Act. This act aims to ensure consumer protection against the dangers of AI. Why is it important? OpenAI and Sam Altman want regulations for models. They have proposed a IAEA-type of agency to stop the proliferation of LLM models. As per OpenAI, all models should be regulated and monitored. The suggestion of a license based regulation has led to significant backlash. Many people have called it “regulatory capture” - with the aim of shutting down competing LLMs. Licensing based regulations might not really be effective. The EU is approaching regulation from a different angle. It doesn’t focus on how models are developed. Rather focuses on how AI will/can be used. They have broken down use cases into 4 categories - unacceptable (prohibited), high, medium and low risk. For example, Building a Pre-Crime software,on%20crimes%20not%20yet%20committed.) to predict crimes? Building a Social credit system? Unacceptable. Using tools to influence elections or recommendation algorithms? High (Highly regulated). Using generative AI tools to create text or images on news sites? Medium (Add label that the content is AI generated) AI providers also need to disclose their training source. To me this sounds like good legislation. What do you guys think? But, OpenAI has warned that EU regulations might force them to pull out completely. What’s next? The disclosure requirements might help various publishing companies. AI and media companies are in talks to pay for training data. Google has been leading the charge. Additionally, OpenAI and Deepmind will open their models for safety and research purposes to the UK government. 🗞️10 AI news highlights and interesting reads PSA: If you are using Repl to write code, you might want to check your OpenAI API keys. If you have left them embedded then people can pirate and steal the keys. LLMs rely on human annotation or human feedback to learn. And one way to generate human annotation is crowdsourcing. But what if the crowdsource human annotators use LLMs? Research shows 33-46% workers used LLMs. So, basically we go from Human -> AI -> Human -> AI. The AI ouroboros. Researchers also say generated data to train models might cause serious issue. All the talks about moats \- Reddit might be OpenAI’s \future\ moat. Given the amount of complaints about how Google search experience has deteriorated during the blackout, this might be true? Doctors are using ChatGPT but not to diagnose.Rather to be more empathetic. We discussed this just a month ago. And guess where the data for this study came from? Reddit AskDocs. Moat FTW?! Beatles to make a comeback…using Generative AI. SnapFusion - Text to Image diffusion on mobile phones. Large context lengths are important for better GPT experience. The secret sauce for 100k context length. There is a lot of bad AI research out there. Some border on snake oil. Most AI “research” should be double checked and challenged. A new research on huggingface said that GPT-4 can ace MIT curriculum. Now someone is replicating the results and say that GPT-4 can’t beat MIT. Are we seeing peak AI? Especially when people from Deepmind and Meta are involved? Mistral AI raised $113 million in seed round with no product. Some might say this funding is for the team and the team is really solid. The issue though is whether the valuation is justified when OpenAI and Google already have a head start. The AI Hype Wall of Shame. \- Collection of articles which mislead people about AI in various aspects. 🧑‍🎓3 Learning Resources Building and Launching a company using GPT-4 with prompts. (The author didn’t know how to code but created and launched the MVP in a month). Chatbot for your Gdrive - https://www.haihai.ai/gpt-gdrive/ Building ChatGPT plugin using Supabase - https://supabase.com/blog/building-chatgpt-plugins-template That’s it folks. Thank you for reading and have a great week ahead. If you are interested in a focused weekly recap delivered to your inbox on Mondays you can subscribe here. It is FREE!

Join the AI4Earth challenge with the European Space Agency to highlight our footprint on Earth using Earth Observation data and Machine Learning

​ https://preview.redd.it/ww109cba14f71.png?width=2401&format=png&auto=webp&s=8bd3d43e8b63848af85c73478be61e43d9e10189 The primary goal is to get an insight into the human impact on Earth, to drive and guide conservation efforts of this planet we call home. Our approach will be twofold:  Firstly we will work on AI algorithms that can serve as an early detection system of human impact sites. Secondly we will use these detection systems to find satellite images that show the most impactful human-caused changes, which will be used in the creation of a video to launch an awareness campaign. You will be working with ESA to detect things like: Wildfires and Deforestation Marine Litter and Melting Glaciers Air quality detection & Novel animal migration patterns  and much more!  European Space Agency To reach these goals we’ve partnered up with ESA, who are able to use our algorithms to monitor new satellite data and guide conservation efforts. They will provide us with multi-spectral data of their Sentinel-2 satellite pair and with invaluable knowledge and research on the domain of Earth Observation data in participant only masterclasses.  Format The challenge will run throughout September and October, where you will collaborate with a diverse team of over 30 international data specialists and domain experts in subteams, all tackling this problem from different angles. Subtasks like the detection of deforestation, wildfires, marine litter or any other human caused impact. All contributors in the challenge are expected to spend 12 hours or more per week during the entirity of the two month challenge. To learn more subscribe to the info session on the 3rd of August 19:00 CEST HERE! Some important dates: 3rd of August – Info session 1st of September – Challenge Kick-off 29th of September – Midterm presentations 29th of October – Final presentations PARTNERS SUN - https://spacehubs.network The project is spearheaded by SUN whose goal is to increase the commercialization of space enabled solutions and growth of European start-ups and scale-ups in the space downstream and upstream sectors. ESA - https://esa.int ESA will be the main stakeholder and domain knowledge provider in the challenge. Their efforts to aid human’s space endeavours as well as protect the planet we live on will serve us for many years to come.  MLReef - https://mlreef.com MLReef provides an open source platform for collaborative Machine Learning. They provide the computational infrastructure to support the EO4Earth project as part of their AI4GOOD and Open Science initiatives. Brimatech  As a partner in the SUN project, the innovation management and market research expert Brimatech helps out in the overall organisation of the challenge.  Mothership The ‘Mothership’ is a dedicated open innovation program created by Space4Good and World Startup Factory. The Mothershi is leveraging recent advancements in artificial intelligence and satellite technologies in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Space4Good  Space4Good is a geospatial innovation lab supporting impact makers on the ground with earth observation insights from above. Worldstartup  Worldstartup is a collective of international entrepreneurs, experts, mentors and investors, dedicated to help the best impact-driven startups and scaleups.

Study Plan for Learning Data Science Over the Next 12 Months [D]

In this thread, I address a study plan for 2021. In case you're interested, I wrote a whole article about this topic: Study Plan for Learning Data Science Over the Next 12 Months Let me know your thoughts on this. ​ https://preview.redd.it/emg20nzhet661.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf09e4dc5e82ba2fd7b57c706ba2873be57fe8de We are ending 2020 and it is time to make plans for next year, and one of the most important plans and questions we must ask is what do we want to study?, what do we want to enhance?, what changes do we want to make?, and what is the direction we are going to take (or continue) in our professional careers?. Many of you will be starting on the road to becoming a data scientist, in fact you may be evaluating it, since you have heard a lot about it, but you have some doubts, for example about the amount of job offers that may exist in this area, doubts about the technology itself, and about the path you should follow, considering the wide range of options to learn. I’m a believer that we should learn from various sources, from various mentors, and from various formats. By sources I mean the various virtual platforms and face-to-face options that exist to study. By mentors I mean that it is always a good idea to learn from different points of view and learning from different teachers/mentors, and by formats I mean the choices between books, videos, classes, and other formats where the information is contained. When we extract information from all these sources we reinforce the knowledge learned, but we always need a guide, and this post aims to give you some practical insights and strategies in this regard. To decide on sources, mentors and formats it is up to you to choose. It depends on your preferences and ease of learning: for example, some people are better at learning from books, while others prefer to learn from videos. Some prefer to study on platforms that are practical (following online code), and others prefer traditional platforms: like those at universities (Master’s Degree, PHDs or MOOCs). Others prefer to pay for quality content, while others prefer to look only for free material. That’s why I won’t give a specific recommendation in this post, but I’ll give you the whole picture: a study plan. To start you should consider the time you’ll spend studying and the depth of learning you want to achieve, because if you find yourself without a job you could be available full time to study, which is a huge advantage. On the other hand, if you are working, you’ll have less time and you’ll have to discipline yourself to be able to have the time available in the evenings, mornings or weekends. Ultimately, the important thing is to meet the goal of learning and perhaps dedicating your career to this exciting area! We will divide the year into quarters as follows First Quarter: Learning the Basics Second Quarter: Upgrading the Level: Intermediate Knowledge Third Quarter: A Real World Project — A Full-stack Project Fourth Quarter: Seeking Opportunities While Maintaining Practice First Quarter: Learning the Basics ​ https://preview.redd.it/u7t9bthket661.png?width=998&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ad29cb43618e7acf793259243aa5a60a8535f0a If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study of the bases. It could be something like: From January 1 to March 30, 2021 as deadline. During this period you will study the following: A programming language that you can apply to data science: Python or R. We recommend Python due to the simple fact that approximately 80% of data science job offers ask for knowledge in Python. That same percentage is maintained with respect to the real projects you will find implemented in production. And we add the fact that Python is multipurpose, so you won’t “waste” your time if at some point you decide to focus on web development, for example, or desktop development. This would be the first topic to study in the first months of the year. Familiarize yourself with statistics and mathematics. There is a big debate in the data science community about whether we need this foundation or not. I will write a post later on about this, but the reality is that you DO need it, but ONLY the basics (at least in the beginning). And I want to clarify this point before continuing. We could say that data science is divided in two big fields: Research on one side and putting Machine Learning algorithms into production on the other side. If you later decide to focus on Research then you are going to need mathematics and statistics in depth (very in depth). If you are going to go for the practical part, the libraries will help you deal with most of it, under the hood. It should be noted that most job offers are in the practical part. For both cases, and in this first stage you will only need the basics of: Statistics (with Python and NumPy) Descriptive statistics Inferential Statistics Hypothesis testing Probability Mathematics (with Python and NumPy) Linear Algebra (For example: SVD) Multivariate Calculus Calculus (For example: gradient descent) Note: We recommend that you study Python first before seeing statistics and mathematics, because the challenge is to implement these statistical and mathematical bases with Python. Don’t look for theoretical tutorials that show only slides or statistical and/or mathematical examples in Excel/Matlab/Octave/SAS and other different to Python or R, it gets very boring and impractical! You should choose a course, program or book that teaches these concepts in a practical way and using Python. Remember that Python is what we finally use, so you need to choose well. This advice is key so you don’t give up on this part, as it will be the most dense and difficult. If you have these basics in the first three months, you will be ready to make a leap in your learning for the next three months. Second Quarter: Upgrading the Level: Intermediate Knowledge ​ https://preview.redd.it/y1y55vynet661.png?width=669&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd3e12bb112943025c39a8975faf4d64514df275 If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the intermediate level. It could be something like: From April 1 to June 30, 2021 as deadline. Now that you have a good foundation in programming, statistics and mathematics, it is time to move forward and learn about the great advantages that Python has for applying data analysis. For this stage you will be focused on: Data science Python stack Python has the following libraries that you should study, know and practice at this stage Pandas: for working with tabular data and make in-depth analysis Matplotlib and Seaborn: for data visualization Pandas is the in-facto library for data analysis, it is one of the most important (if not the most important) and powerful tools you should know and master during your career as a data scientist. Pandas will make it much easier for you to manipulate, cleanse and organize your data. Feature Engineering Many times people don’t go deep into Feature Engineering, but if you want to have Machine Learning models that make good predictions and improve your scores, spending some time on this subject is invaluable! Feature engineering is the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data using data mining techniques. These features can be used to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms. Feature engineering can be considered as applied machine learning itself. To achieve the goal of good feature engineering you must know the different techniques that exist, so it is a good idea to at least study the main ones. Basic Models of Machine Learning At the end of this stage you will start with the study of Machine Learning. This is perhaps the most awaited moment! This is where you start to learn about the different algorithms you can use, which particular problems you can solve and how you can apply them in real life. The Python library we recommend you to start experimenting with ML is: scikit-learn. However it is a good idea that you can find tutorials where they explain the implementation of the algorithms (at least the simplest ones) from scratch with Python, since the library could be a “Black Box” and you might not understand what is happening under the hood. If you learn how to implement them with Python, you can have a more solid foundation. If you implement the algorithms with Python (without a library), you will put into practice everything seen in the statistics, mathematics and Pandas part. These are some recommendations of the algorithms that you should at least know in this initial stage Supervised learning Simple Linear Regression Multiple Linear Regression K-nearest neighbors (KNN) Logistic Regression Decision Trees Random Forest Unsupervised Learning K-Means PCA Bonus: if you have the time and you are within the time ranges, you can study these others Gradient Boosting Algorithms GBM XGBoost LightGBM CatBoost Note: do not spend more than the 3 months stipulated for this stage. Because you will be falling behind and not complying with the study plan. We all have shortcomings at this stage, it is normal, go ahead and then you can resume some concepts that did not understand in detail. The important thing is to have the basic knowledge and move forward! If at least you succeed to study the mentioned algorithms of supervised and unsupervised learning, you will have a very clear idea of what you will be able to do in the future. So don’t worry about covering everything, remember that it is a process, and ideally you should have some clearly established times so that you don’t get frustrated and feel you are advancing. So far, here comes your “theoretical” study of the basics of data science. Now we’ll continue with the practical part! Third Quarter: A Real World Project — A Full-stack Project ​ https://preview.redd.it/vrn783vqet661.png?width=678&format=png&auto=webp&s=664061b3d33b34979b74b10b9f8a3d0f7b8b99ee If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the intermediate level. It could be something like: From July 1 to September 30, 2021 as deadline. Now that you have a good foundation in programming, statistics, mathematics, data analysis and machine learning algorithms, it is time to move forward and put into practice all this knowledge. Many of these suggestions may sound out of the box, but believe me they will make a big difference in your career as a data scientist. The first thing is to create your web presence: Create a Github (or GitLab) account, and learn Git*. Being able to manage different versions of your code is important, you should have version control over them, not to mention that having an active Github account is very valuable in demonstrating your true skills. On Github, you can also set up your Jupyter Notebooks and make them public, so you can show off your skills as well. This is mine for example: https://github.com/danielmoralesp Learn the basics of web programming*. The advantage is that you already have Python as a skill, so you can learn Flask to create a simple web page. Or you can use a template engine like Github Pages, Ghost or Wordpress itself and create your online portfolio. Buy a domain with your name*. Something like myname.com, myname.co, myname.dev, etc. This is invaluable so you can have your CV online and update it with your projects. There you can make a big difference, showing your projects, your Jupyter Notebooks and showing that you have the practical skills to execute projects in this area. There are many front-end templates for you to purchase for free or for payment, and give it a more personalized and pleasant look. Don’t use free sub-domains of Wordpress, Github or Wix, it looks very unprofessional, make your own. Here is mine for example: https://www.danielmorales.dev/ Choose a project you are passionate about and create a Machine Learning model around it. The final goal of this third quarter is to create ONE project, that you are passionate about, and that is UNIQUE among others. It turns out that there are many typical projects in the community, such as predicting the Titanic Survivors, or predicting the price of Houses in Boston. Those kinds of projects are good for learning, but not for showing off as your UNIQUE projects. If you are passionate about sports, try predicting the soccer results of your local league. If you are passionate about finance, try predicting your country’s stock market prices. If you are passionate about marketing, try to find someone who has an e-commerce and implement a product recommendation algorithm and upload it to production. If you are passionate about business: make a predictor of the best business ideas for 2021 :) As you can see, you are limited by your passions and your imagination. In fact, those are the two keys for you to do this project: Passion and Imagination. However don’t expect to make money from it, you are in a learning stage, you need that algorithm to be deployed in production, make an API in Flask with it, and explain in your website how you did it and how people can access it. This is the moment to shine, and at the same time it’s the moment of the greatest learning. You will most likely face obstacles, if your algorithm gives 60% of Accuracy after a huge optimization effort, it doesn’t matter, finish the whole process, deploy it to production, try to get a friend or family member to use it, and that will be the goal achieved for this stage: Make a Full-stack Machine Learning project. By full-stack I mean that you did all the following steps: You got the data from somewhere (scrapping, open data or API) You did a data analysis You cleaned and transformed the data You created Machine Learning Models You deployed the best model to production for other people to use. This does not mean that this whole process is what you will always do in your daily job, but it does mean that you will know every part of the pipeline that is needed for a data science project for a company. You will have a unique perspective! Fourth Quarter: Seeking Opportunities While Maintaining Practice ​ https://preview.redd.it/qd0osystet661.png?width=1056&format=png&auto=webp&s=2da456b15985b2793041256f5e45bca99a23b51a If you want to be more rigorous you can have start and end dates for this period of study at the final level. It could be something like: From October 1 to December 31, 2021 as deadline. Now you have theoretical and practical knowledge. You have implemented a model in production. The next step depends on you and your personality. Let’s say you are an entrepreneur, and you have the vision to create something new from something you discovered or saw an opportunity to do business with this discipline, so it’s time to start planning how to do it. If that’s the case, obviously this post won’t cover that process, but you should know what the steps might be (or start figuring them out). But if you are one of those who want to get a job as a data scientist, here is my advice. Getting a job as a data scientist “You’re not going to get a job as fast as you think, if you keep thinking the same way”.Author It turns out that all people who start out as data scientists imagine themselves working for the big companies in their country or region. Or even remote. It turns out that if you aspire to work for a large company like data scientist you will be frustrated by the years of experience they ask for (3 or more years) and the skills they request. Large companies don’t hire Juniors (or very few do), precisely because they are already large companies. They have the financial muscle to demand experience and skills and can pay a commensurate salary (although this is not always the case). The point is that if you focus there you’re going to get frustrated! Here we must return to the following advise: “You need creativity to get a job in data science”. Like everything else in life we have to start at different steps, in this case, from the beginning. Here are the scenarios If you are working in a company and in a non-engineering role you must demonstrate your new skills to the company you are working for*. If you are working in the customer service area, you should apply it to your work, and do for example, detailed analysis of your calls, conversion rates, store data and make predictions about it! If you can have data from your colleagues, you could try to predict their sales! This may sound funny, but it’s about how creatively you can apply data science to your current work and how to show your bosses how valuable it is and EVANGELIZE them about the benefits of implementation. You’ll be noticed and they could certainly create a new data related department or job. And you already have the knowledge and experience. The key word here is Evangelize. Many companies and entrepreneurs are just beginning to see the power of this discipline, and it is your task to nurture that reality. If you are working in an area related to engineering, but that is not data science*. Here the same applies as the previous example, but you have some advantages, and that is that you could access the company’s data, and you could use it for the benefit of the company, making analyses and/or predictions about it, and again EVANGELIZING your bosses your new skills and the benefits of data science. If you are unemployed (or do not want, or do not feel comfortable following the two examples above)*, you can start looking outside, and what I recommend is that you look for technology companies and / or startups where they are just forming the first teams and are paying some salary, or even have options shares of the company. Obviously here the salaries will not be exorbitant, and the working hours could be longer, but remember that you are in the learning and practice stage (just in the first step), so you can not demand too much, you must land your expectations and fit that reality, and stop pretending to be paid $ 10,000 a month at this stage. But, depending of your country $1.000 USD could be something very interesting to start this new career. Remember, you are a Junior at this stage. The conclusion is: don’t waste your time looking at and/or applying to offers from big companies, because you will get frustrated. Be creative, and look for opportunities in smaller or newly created companies. Learning never stops While you are in that process of looking for a job or an opportunity, which could take half of your time (50% looking for opportunities, 50% staying in practice), you have to keep learning, you should advance to concepts such as Deep Learning, Data Engineer or other topics that you feel were left loose from the past stages or focus on the topics that you are passionate about within this group of disciplines in data science. At the same time you can choose a second project, and spend some time running it from end-to-end, and thus increase your portfolio and your experience. If this is the case, try to find a completely different project: if the first one was done with Machine Learning, let this second one be done with Deep learning. If the first one was deployed to a web page, that this second one is deployed to a mobile platform. Remember, creativity is the key! Conclusion We are at an ideal time to plan for 2021, and if this is the path you want to take, start looking for the platforms and media you want to study on. Get to work and don’t miss this opportunity to become a data scientist in 2021! Note: we are building a private community in Slack of data scientist, if you want to join us write to the email: support@datasource.ai I hope you enjoyed this reading! you can follow me on twitter or linkedin Thank you for reading!

Human in the loop workflows for deep learning solutions - OCR review and moderation

there's a lot of paranoia these days about how adverse automation's effects might be on society. there's some tasks that can definitely be automated and will cause certain segments of the workforce their jobs. but alongside, other opportunities will get created that didn't exist before. this article discusses how businesses are transforming, about digital information, automation, the future of work and human in the loop workflows as a possible solution to these concerns. https://i.redd.it/g2cm3eco98y31.gif

AI for Business: FREE Practical Course & Tools on YouTube

I worked for 15+ years in AI, created “AI for Business” to help any non technical professional learn and apply AI in their work. FREE course on YT + 6 tools (use-case gallery, ideation canvas, idea evaluation, POC template, team roles, & more) Course Link. Outline: https://preview.redd.it/nxh1952rqxad1.png?width=1744&format=png&auto=webp&s=4d31acdec5b0375734dcc49b1c0be81bc3e605e6

I started with 0 AI knowledge on the 2nd of Jan 2024 and blogged and studied it for 365. Here is a summary.

FULL BLOG POST AND MORE INFO IN THE FIRST COMMENT :) Edit in title: 365 days\* (and spelling) Coming from a background in accounting and data analysis, my familiarity with AI was minimal. Prior to this, my understanding was limited to linear regression, R-squared, the power rule in differential calculus, and working experience using Python and SQL for data manipulation. I studied free online lectures, courses, read books. \Time Spent on Theory vs Practice\ At the end it turns out I spent almost the same amount of time on theory and practice. While reviewing my year, I found that after learning something from a course/lecture in one of the next days I immediately applied it - either through exercises, making a Kaggle notebook or by working on a project. \2024 Learning Journey Topic Breakdown\ One thing I learned is that \fundamentals\ matter. I discovered that anyone can make a model, but it's important to make models that add business value. In addition, in order to properly understand the inner-workings of models I wanted to do a proper coverage of stats & probability, and the math behind AI. I also delved into 'traditional' ML (linear models, trees), and also deep learning (NLP, CV, Speech, Graphs) which was great. It's important to note that I didn't start with stats & math, I was guiding myself and I started with traditional and some GenAI but soon after I started to ask a lot of 'why's as to why things work and this led me to study more about stats&math. Soon I also realised \Data is King\ so I delved into data engineering and all the practices and ideas it covers. In addition to Data Eng, I got interested in MLOps. I wanted to know what happens with models after we evaluate them on a test set - well it turns out there is a whole field behind it, and I was immediately hooked. Making a model is not just taking data from Kaggle and doing train/test eval, we need to start with a business case, present a proper case to add business value and then it is a whole lifecycle of development, testing, maintenance and monitoring. \Wordcloud\ After removing some of the generically repeated words, I created this work cloud from the most used works in my 365 blog posts. The top words being:- model and data - not surprising as they go hand in hand- value - as models need to deliver value- feature (engineering) - a crucial step in model development- system - this is mostly because of my interest in data engineering and MLOps I hope you find my summary and blog interesting. https://preview.redd.it/pxohznpy4dae1.png?width=2134&format=png&auto=webp&s=03c16bb3535d75d1f009b44ee5164cc3e6483ac4 https://preview.redd.it/0y47rrpy4dae1.png?width=1040&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1fdf7764c7151ff0a05ae92777c5bb7d52f4359 https://preview.redd.it/e59inppy4dae1.png?width=1566&format=png&auto=webp&s=2566033777a90410277350947617d3ce8406be15

AI for Business: FREE Practical Course & Tools on YouTube

I worked for 15+ years in AI, created “AI for Business” to help any non technical professional learn and apply AI in their work. FREE course on YT + 6 tools (use-case gallery, ideation canvas, idea evaluation, POC template, team roles, & more) Course Link. Outline: https://preview.redd.it/nxh1952rqxad1.png?width=1744&format=png&auto=webp&s=4d31acdec5b0375734dcc49b1c0be81bc3e605e6

AI for Business: FREE Practical Course & Tools on YouTube

I worked for 15+ years in AI, created “AI for Business” to help any non technical professional learn and apply AI in their work. FREE course on YT + 6 tools (use-case gallery, ideation canvas, idea evaluation, POC template, team roles, & more) Course Link. Outline: https://preview.redd.it/nxh1952rqxad1.png?width=1744&format=png&auto=webp&s=4d31acdec5b0375734dcc49b1c0be81bc3e605e6

Tried no-code AI builder Lovable

So I recently got some time to check out Lovable, a new no-code platform that’s been making waves. I built three projects: Crypto Coin Tracker Simple CRM Netflix-Style Streaming Site What I Liked: • Editable Display Items: Lovable makes tweaking components straightforward. You can select a specific element and prompt around just that (eg: a button) instead of the whole app/website. • Community-Driven Templates: A ton of pre-built templates are available for remixing, simplifying prototyping. Plus, any project created on the free tier becomes publicly accessible, thus creating a bunch of community templates to be used as inspiration. Pricing: Lovable’s pricing is so similar to Bolt.new. Both their free tiers suck and don’t give you much. The starter tiers are worth it at $20/m. For a detailed walkthrough of my experience with Lovable, check out this video. https://youtu.be/QZi9JvIKgJE?si=E8umG6LilCJQNmJy I’d love to hear your thoughts—are you using Lovable, Bolt.new, or another platform? Share your experiences below!

Built an interactive guide using a no-code AI tool. 700 visitors already and growing!

Hey Community, As a Founding Product & Growth Manager, I wanted to level up my ability to ship products end-to-end, so a few months ago, I got a Replit subscription and started building myself. One of the things I created is a Slack Etiquette Guide to help teams use Slack more effectively with best practices. It took me just 4-5 hours to build, no tech team needed! Here’s what I built: Slack Etiquette Guide Would love to get your feedback on what can be improved or added.

I Built Blainy - An AI Writing Tool for Students and Researchers

Hello Everyone, I built Blainy, an AI writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient, based on my own experiences as a student working part-time and struggling to find the time for essays and assignments. Blainy is perfect for students, researchers, content creators, and bloggers. It addresses the gaps where most writing tools fall short and helps you write essays, assignments, research papers, product descriptions, blog content, and more with ease. I created this tool based on the problems I faced, so I genuinely want to know your review on this. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. Paraphrasing: If you want to paraphrase your text, you can do it on Blainy. You can also select different tones for writing, such as academic, friendly, simplicity, and more. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Blainy includes a plagiarism checker to ensure that your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. Best of all, We provide daily credits so you can access all these features for free with daily credits! We understand the unique challenges faced by students, including those with dyslexia and other writing difficulties. That's why we're working on adding features like a voice-to-text converter to assist students who struggle with writing. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts. We're also considering adding some free tools like paraphrasing to attract more users. If you have any suggestions for additional features that would be beneficial, please let me know. Your input can help us improve Blainy and make it even more valuable for everyone. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback! Check it out: Blainy

Compare trading strategies on the fly - pnl.ai - please check it out

Part of my covid project and part of my long obsession with prediction markets, I have created a web page that displays and allows to compare best and worst performing trading strategies. TL;DR: best stocks + best strategies -> the list of top and bottom performing trading algorithms.  Product Typically, trading newsletters and stock-scanners display only price return for top market gainers and losers. I have forever been interested in inspecting top and bottom performing trading strategies for a given set of securities and could not find any websites that do that. So, I decided to create a tool of my own. I wanted the tool that would help me to answer questions like if there is a better strategy than buy and hold, should I follow greed and fear indicator of the market or do the opposite. Top and bottom performing securities do not tell you if a stock is going to go up or down, but they do alert you to rapidly changing market conditions, such as change in the competitive landscape, impending lawsuits, changes in the company's management and, at the very least, the stocks you should avoid in your programmatic trading. Top strategies do all that, but they can also alert you to a change in the market regime. For example, MACD strategy, which is a variant of oscillator strategy, executed on Citibank stock returned 20% in the first half of 2020. In the same time period, the Citibank stock went down and "BuyAndHold" strategy, which is pretty much what it sounds, lost 45%. Now, compare that to the end of 2020 through spring of 2021, when MACD lost 1% and "BuyAndHold" gained 70%. This happened due to the change in the market due to the rally in financial stocks at the end of 2020. The market player who detect change in the market conditions first will reap most benefits. Another example, TSLA since the beginning of 2021 until end of April lost 7%. The StopLoss strategy sells the position after abrupt price drop and waits until the price returns to the level before the drop. For the same time interval the StopLoss strategy gained 10%. In this particular example, StopLoss outperformed BuyAndHold. To me personally, the most important feature is the ability to quickly tweak and modify trading strategies and observe change in their performance. You can change strategies parameters on the fly and even design your own custom trading strategy. In the end, I developed a tool I can use for myself but hope other investors who are experimenting with trading algorithms will find it useful as well. I called it "Profit and Loss AI", or PnL.ai for short. PnL.ai Description The web-tool in the link below allows you to customize parameters of existing strategies and essentially create your own strategy and seeing how it will compare to the set of original strategies. http://ec2-54-185-19-38.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:5006/srv In the section above you can specify security and data range. In the section below you can choose strategy to customize and modify it's parameters. The strategy comparison table will automatically update and will display a newly created strategy side by side with the original strategies. Technology The tool is developed on bokeh and python and allows you to edit configuration parameters of each strategy all without programming knowledge. The strategies are fully specified via key/value pairs in the format of ini files used to initialize programs. The strategy classes are autogenerated by reading the ini config files dynamically using "factory" pattern. You can find a simplified code in this github repo: https://github.com/varturas/PnlAITk Next Steps In the future I want to give users ability to monitor their chosen strategy by receiving trading algo alerts whenever performance of their custom trading algo is changes significantly. I'm going to be adding more strategies, some of standard technical analysis variety and some will be more custom and more advanced. I'll also be adding more columns to the performance table to give better information. You can receive daily newsletter with the list of trading strategies generated by above-mentioned web-tool by registering on http://pnl.ai/ and checking subscribe checkmark.

My Marketing App made $10,000 in 2024. Here is how I target to make $100,000 in 2025:

You totally get me, I think. It’s a bizarre feeling when you build something, and people appreciate it and are even ready to pay! Pleasant though) In early 2024 my mate and I created a marketing tool that generates ads, content and strategy blocks with a click – Aiter.io. Users can just insert a URL, hit the button and everything is ready. TBH, I built this tool because I’m too lazy to chat with ChatGPT) https://preview.redd.it/ew2kud7ceyde1.png?width=1140&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3fe5b67075858cea3d52278e8063113efa3b97e In 2024 we made $10,000, here is what worked for us: AI directories. Still is the best channel of traffic and clients for us. We listed on TAAFT and other directories scrape TAAFT, so, eventually, we became listed on all major ones. I wrote a Reddit post earlier that explained this process in detail. Email marketing. Gosh, I thought it was dead – I have never been so wrong! We set up automatic emails that share marketing insights and they have a \~25% open rate + consistently convert people. It works great. Product marketing. Having a free version really helps with word-of-mouth and leads, which can be converted via email. Also, we consistently worked on product improvement. I’d say, that our free updates give people a feeling that the devs care about their stuff that’s why they are more confident investing in it. Google Ads. TBH, we had a shitty landing page all the time because were busy with the product. So, Google Ads didn’t work well for us. But we’ve launched the 2.0 version which has a better landing page, and will try it again. Influencers. Worked well for us, but we didn’t pay a dime for this. They just found our tool on directories and created videos about Aiter, so it was a sporadic marketing channel for us. We hope to change it in 2025. We see that our product works and attracts the audience, so we want to deliver and get more in 2025. Here is the plan: Product: add ad banners and video generation. So far, we generate only text data and it’s not so valuable in the time of ChatGPT and Claude. But to generate a high-quality ad banner is still challenging, so we put this on our roadmap. Another feature – one-click market analysis to get marketing insights. Become a TOP50 tool on TAAFT. We’ve become a top tool in our category (content generation) but will need to promote our profile on the profile far more aggressively to get into TOP50 Email marketing. We are fools because we almost didn’t have product emails that explain how it works. Will fix it. Also, we are considering participating more in paid newsletters, like collaborating with Substack influencers. Youtube marketing. Search for low-tail marketing keywords on YouTube and create videos on them, placing my product in them. Blog. Our new platform is Webflow which gives a lot of flexibility in terms of blogging. So, we will repeat the YouTube strategy with blogging. Paid marketing. With an updated landing page, we hope that paid campaigns will work better. We plan to launch campaigns that target different jobs to be done and customer objections to find the right message. Product Management. For 2025, our two key product metrics are retention and product activation rate. For this, we plan to simplify onboarding and make it simpler as well as conduct a lot of in-depth interviews to understand how we can retain users better. Funding. All of this exciting stuff requires money, so we are in the process of securing funding (fingers crossed). Having an indie project is exciting and invigorating. With all these activities, I hope we will achieve the goal of $100,000 in 2025. And what are your goals and marketing steps for 2025? Or maybe you could share some exciting marketing ideas I overlooked?

An Algorithm for Making Truly Stand-Out Advertising Content (+ something more | Part 1)

Hi everyone. my friend and I are software engineers and new to marketing. A few months ago we decided to leverage our software skills for a colleague in ecommerce. It started by implementing a Flux.1 model, then began using texture-based recreations with a canny mask, and then found that we could optimize on both with an added layer of inpainting...and the list goes on. This is the first of a series of posts here about it and I look forward to learning from your feedback. I realized that the most difficult parts of the marketing process when I started out (and most likely for other beginners too) are: Customer Acquisition Costs / Brand Differentiation: Competition is intensifying and it is getting more difficult to stand out in crowded markets and target ad spend more effectively. Maintaining Authenticity at Scale / Data Overload: Balancing growth with authenticity and leveraging available data to successfully engage with customers is a big ask. Creative Fatigue: Maintaining multiple marketing channels in hard, and it becomes harder when you're constantly demanding more and more creative content for campaigns. For 1) I tried using AI to help me summarize, systematize, and gain insights from the information available for a given brand or product (from a page link, prompt, input image, etc.). I know AI is everywhere now, many people are using it unnecessarily and many people are skeptical about it. However, I know from experience, that it is quite helpful in gaining insights/summarizing large amounts of data, and helping people make sense of the creative content, strategy, campaign, etc., that should be created. For 2) By leveraging reviews, forums, and other relevant brand information, AI is able to maintain the story that your brand currently tells, and enhance it based on how your customer base. For 3) Faster results means less creative fatigue- this translates to an easier time managing omnichannel marketing efforts and scaling advertising. If you're interested, please have a look at the result at madsimpleads.com You’ll need to log in to access the solution, and I'll add credits to your account to try it out! (we want to prevent from random people or bots using it because I'm paying to multiple providers for model access). DM me here or drop me a line at austin@madsimpleads.com if you need more. Thank you so much, I'll be happy to get your thoughts I hope the website will help with your advertising, please reach out if you like what I do and want to support the project! Disclaimers: the website looks a bit rough in terms of UI/UX, but we tried focusing on the functionality first available on mobile, works better on desktop I hope this doesn't come across as trying to advertise for my business or breaking any of the community rules. genuinely looking for feedback. Thank you

My Side Projects: From CEO to 4th Developer (Thanks, AI 🤖)

Hey Reddit 👋, I wanted to share a bit about some side projects I’ve been working on lately. Quick background for context: I’m the CEO of a mid-to-large-scale eCommerce company pulling in €10M+ annually in net turnover. We even built our own internal tracking software that’s now a SaaS (in early review stages on Shopify), competing with platforms like Lifetimely and TrueROAS. But! That’s not really the point of this post — there’s another journey I’ve been on that I’m super excited to share (and maybe get your feedback on!). AI Transformed My Role (and My Ideas List) I’m not a developer by trade — never properly learned how to code, and to be honest, I don’t intend to. But, I’ve always been the kind of guy who jots down ideas in a notes app and dreams about execution. My dev team calls me their “4th developer” (they’re a team of three) because I have solid theoretical knowledge and can kinda read code. And then AI happened. 🛠️ It basically turned my random ideas app into an MVP generation machine. I thought it’d be fun to share one of the apps I’m especially proud of. I am also planning to build this in public and therefore I am planning to post my progress on X and every project will have /stats page where live stats of the app will be available. Tackling My Task Management Problem 🚀 I’ve sucked at task management for YEARS, I still do! I’ve tried literally everything — Sheets, Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Notion — you name it. I’d start… and then quit after a few weeks - always. What I struggle with the most is delegating tasks. As a CEO, I delegate a ton, and it’s super hard to track everything I’ve handed off to the team. Take this example: A few days ago, I emailed an employee about checking potential collaboration opportunities with a courier company. Just one of 10s of tasks like this I delegate daily. Suddenly, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be AMAZING if just typing out this email automatically created a task for me to track?” 💡 So… I jumped in. With the power of AI and a few intense days of work, I built a task manager that does just that. But of course, I couldn’t stop there. Research & Leveling It Up 📈 I looked at similar tools like TickTick and Todoist, scraped their G2 reviews (totally legally, promise! 😅), and ran them through AI for a deep SWOT analysis. I wanted to understand what their users liked/didn’t like and what gaps my app could fill. Some of the features people said they were missing didn’t align with the vision for my app (keeping it simple and personal), but I found some gold nuggets: Integration with calendars (Google) Reminders Customizable UX (themes) So, I started implementing what made sense and am keeping others on the roadmap for the future. And I’ve even built for that to, it still doesn’t have a name, however the point is you select on how many reviews of a specific app you want to make a SWOT analysis on and it will do it for you. Example for Todoist in comments. But more on that, some other time, maybe other post ... Key Features So Far: Here’s what’s live right now: ✅ Email to Task: Add an email as to, cc, or bcc — and it automatically creates a task with context, due dates, labels, etc. ✅ WhatsApp Reminders: Get nudged to handle your tasks via WhatsApp. ✅ WhatsApp to Task: Send a message like /task buy groceries — bam, it’s added with full context etc.. ✅ Chrome Extension (work-in-progress): Highlight text on any page, right-click, and send it straight to your task list. Next Steps: Build WITH the Community 👥 Right now, the app is 100% free while still in the early stages. But hey, API calls and server costs aren’t cheap, so pricing is something I’ll figure out with you as we grow. For now, my goal is to hit 100 users and iterate from there. My first pricing idea is, without monthly subscription, I don’t want to charge someone for something he didn’t use. So I am planning on charging "per task", what do you think? Here’s what I have planned: 📍 End of Year Goal: 100 users (starting from… 1 🥲). 💸 Revenue Roadmap: When we establish pricing, we’ll talk about that. 🛠️ Milestones: Post on Product Hunt when we hit 100 users. Clean up my self-written spaghetti code (hire a pro dev for review 🙃). Hire a part-time dev once we hit MRR that can cover its costs. You can check how are we doing on thisisatask.me/stats Other Side Projects I’m Working On: Because… what’s life without taking on too much, right? 😂 Full list of things I’m building: Internal HRM: Not public, tried and tested in-house. Android TV App: Syncs with HRM to post announcements to office TVs (streamlined and simple). Stats Tracker App: Connects to our internal software and gives me real-time company insights. Review Analyzer: Scrapes SaaS reviews (e.g., G2) and runs deep analysis via AI. This was originally for my Shopify SaaS but is quickly turning into something standalone. Coming soon! Mobile app game: secret for now. Let’s Build This Together! Would love it if you guys checked out https://thisisatask.me and gave it a spin! Still super early, super raw, but I’m pumped to hear your thoughts. Also, what’s a must-have task manager feature for you? Anything that frustrates you with current tools? I want to keep evolving this in public, so your feedback is gold. 🌟 Let me know, Reddit! Are you with me? 🙌

A sample library that implements Generative AI-Augmented Program Execution (GAPE)

Recently I had a crazy idea. What if you would mix formal program logic with "common sense reasoning" done by an LLM? Like so: statement = "Planet Earth is a flat disk." istrue = applycommonsensereasoningbyan_llm(statement) if is_true: print("Welcome to flat earth society!") else: print("Welcome to the scientific community") This idea can be generalized to many more things. Need to filter a list of concepts (strings) by a certain criterion that is accessible through common sense reasoning? Need to sort a list of concepts by a certain criterion applying common sense reasoning? I call this approach Generative AI-Augmented Program Execution (GAPE). I created a small Python sample library called PyGAPE here: https://github.com/fkostadinov/pygape/ I would love to get some feedback. Some people I showed the idea to were fascinated, other bewildered, some found it completely useless, others immediately got what I was after.

How I Implemented OpenAI's API In My First SaaS! DebateTrend!

About Me I'm a 17 y/o aspiring solopreneur from Bulgaria! I have a passion for 3D printing, coding, video creation, and space! My Project https://debatetrend.com is a website where you can debate with AI on different topics! You can have multiple debates with different debate styles for different lengths of time! The special part is that at the end of each debate, you can have another AI look through the debate! It will give you and the AI you debated with a score from a system I call "debate score" It will also give you recommendations on where you can improve your debating skills! Quick showcase How I implemented AI - ChatGPT 4-o mini It's my first time implementing AI in a project but I think I got the hang of it relatively quickly! Here's a diagram explaining what I did Diagram of the process of debate creation. I used the assistants API from the OpenAI API. Using the threads functionality, I created a different thread operated by an assistant I had already made. When a user creates a debate my app creates a thread with custom information that was decided by the user. I save parts of the thread object in my MongoDB database which is hosted on Atlas. After that, I redirect the user to a generated page in which you can chat with the AI. I maintain the connection using Pusher which is what I use for web sockets. When a user refreshes the page the previous messages are displayed by making a call to the API with the thread id. After that, I retrieve the user messages while still allowing the user to continue the debate. This is part of what I do on the back end. Of course, I have some security measures in check but I don't know if they are enough. I chose the 4-o mini because it's still very intelligent, with a good response time, and a lot cheaper than 4-o. My Tech Stack Language: Javascript Database: MongoDB hosted on Atlas Hosting: Vercel Framework: Express Auth: PassportJs Emails: Resend Payments: Stripe Front End: TailWindCSS, some regular CSS, and DaisyUI WebSockets: Pusher, because Vercel = no sockets integrated into your web app which I found the painful way AI: OpenAI’s API ChatGPT 4-o mini Do you think I could have done anything better? I would love to hear your opinions!

Running and selling multiple side projects alongside a 9-5

My current side project started 56 days ago when I started writing 1,000 words per day. My core businesses are an agency and job board, and I just needed a creative outlet. The likes of Chris Guillebeau and Nathan Barry attribute their progression to writing so I thought I’d see if it might do the same for me. At first I was just vomiting words onto the screen, I made a blog and wrote mainly technical guides related to my skills. Over time I realised I was writing more and more about running a business as a solopreneur, or lean operator. There is tons of content out there giving you the Birds Eye of going from 0 to £10m. Inspiring stuff, but I think there is a void in real content, explaining the nuts and bolts of the how.  What is the day-to-day like for the solopreneurs who make a good living and have plenty of free time? That’s what I’m striving for anyway. I’m not talking about the 7-figure outliers. Or the ones teaching you to make content so you can have a business teaching others how to make content, and so on. I’m also sick of the ‘I made $X in 5 minutes and how you can too’  So, I started chatting to people in my network who run lean businesses and/or side hustles. I ask them a bit about their journey and ask them to teach something - how they operate, or a skill/process/system/tool that other people like you/me will find useful. One of my first chats was with Sam Dickie, who runs multiple side projects so thought I’d share here, see if others find it useful and get some feedback. I’ve removed all links as I’ve never posted on Reddit before so conscious of not being promotional, I’m posting this stuff to a tiny email list of friends with no upsells. Just finding my feet on whether others find it useful or not: — Sam is a serial entrepreneur who builds projects in his spare time whilst working a 9-5. He’s scaled and sold multiple ventures and currently runs one of the best newsletters out there for builders and entrepreneurs. Building audience through newsletters has always been a cornerstone strategy for him, so, along with sharing his advice on solopreneurism, he’s also generously shared his lean newsletter writing process. About Sam Sam is a Senior Product Manager who has spent the last 15 years working in the tech sector after starting his career as a town planner. In addition to his job he spends some of his spare time building side projects. These have included a 3D printing startup, a tech directory, a newsletter, a beta product directory, and consultancy. Sam is the epitome of making a success out of following your interest and curiosity. It’s clear he enjoys his business ventures and builds in a risk-free way.   It’s often touted by business gurus to avoid building around your interests, but Sam bucks the trend successfully. I think he’s someone who has already found his 1,000 true fans.  Descending rabbit holes, Sam’s journey of invention and curation 3D printing Sam’s first foray into launching a startup was with Fiilo, a 3D printing business. This was at the height of the 3D printing craze and he self-admits that he used the launch as an excuse to buy a 3D printer. He ended up with two and launching a product called GrowGo. GrowGo is a sustainable 3D-printed product that turns any bottle into somewhere that you can grow plants and herbs. He eventually sold this business and the printers, making around £10k. Along the way, he was exposed to various business tasks, including building a website in Weebly, the biggest nocode website builder of the time, and built an API that enabled print on demand for his product. NoCode.Tech The experiences of building as someone non-technical led to numerous friends asking how he built all of this tech. Back then, nocode wasn’t popular, and it had almost zero search volume, so Sam created a basic directory. A quick landing page on Weebly with a basic value prop, a short explanation and a list of the tools he had used before. It hit the top spot on Product Hunt, and he landed 2,000 subscribers in the first 48 hours. But, he hadn’t built it at this point, so he set about getting to work. He built the directory and list to 30,000 subs and monetised the site through advertising. At its peak with Sam, it was receiving about £2,000 per month in ad revenue. He was still working his 9-5 at this point, so thought it might be a good time to exit. The site was still growing, but it was becoming anxiety inducing whilst he was still working full-time. So, he ended up selling the site and making friend’s with the buyer. Fast forwarding a bit, Nocode.tech was eventually acquired by Stackr, a nocode app. Sam was working for their competitor at the time and ended up being offered a job by his friend who acquired the site. All of this from a side project in his area of passion. Creator Club After selling the directory, Sam lost his outlet for sharing his tools and learnings.  Being fascinated with curation and loving sifting through for nuggets, he invested more time into his personal website and launched Creator Club newsletter. Sam writes monthly and currently has over 8,000 subs. It’s one of the few newsletters that I let bypass my email filters and land in my main inbox. Life as a Part-Time Multipreneur Side Hustler If it’s not obvious already Sam is a curiosity led business creator. He’s found that the products without a revenue focus or intention have ironically outperformed those created for the sole purpose of creating money. He enjoys working on his side hustles. He could have run the Nocode.Tech for 10 more years and wouldn’t have tired of it as it’s a byproduct of his interest. For this reason, he has also created the Beta Directory, simply because he loves unearthing early-stage products. He admits he gets the fear when he thinks about quitting his 9-5, although he suspects if he devoted the same energy to one of his projects it could replace his income (no doubts from me here). This same fear means that he can run his ventures with less fear. This way, he can experiment with freedom and isn’t risking the ranch with a young family to consider. For example, recently he stopped paid sponsors on his newsletter as it was more stress than the value of the income to him. Sam divides his time on evenings and weekends (unequally) between the following: Creator Club Validation Co Beta directory Consultancy The pure side hustle status magnifies the need to run lean, let’s jump into his process…. Sam’s lean newsletter curation and creation process Starting out publishing his personal newsletter Going against his expertise, Sam originally over-engineered his process.  He curated with Feedly and tried to automate the full writing process with Zapier. The trouble is that there are too many points of failure which can lead the whole  chain to break down, and you spend more time fixing the system. For a 200 subscriber newsletter, he needed to pare things back. His set-up now Sam scaled back and now simple builds automations when he needs them. He keeps the process simple, right down to the design and any welcome automations. Keeping things real We touched on the trend that keeping things raw is better. Content has come full circle with the advent of AI. Everything looks too perfect and consequently, people’s tastes are changing. Sam mentioned watermarks that show content isn’t AI written, and we referenced content such as Greg Isenberg’s sketches, and Chris Donnelly’s image posts. \\Step by Step Process:\\ Using Stoop Inbox to manage sources Curation with Pocket Managing content with Airtable and Zapier Using Bearly to summarise Substack for writing Monitoring content sources Sam uses Stoop Inbox, an RSS curation tool, to manage his content sources. It gives him a dedicated email address for newsletters and he follows an Inbox Zero methodology. He checks in daily in Stoop, and on X, Reddit and IndieHackers. With X, he just uses the standard interface but has been careful to curate his feed, sometimes adding in extra notifications to hear from interesting people. Highlighting content When curating links, Sam uses Arc browser and the Pocket extension to save links. It’s super simple and lightweight. He creates tags which trigger an automation that curates the link to Airtable. If you watch the video, here’s a shoutout to Alice, the AI interface I use which has recently featured on Product Hunt. It’s a fantastic tool with bags of potential to enhance a solopreneur’s life. Ranking and sorting content He sends the links indexed using Pocket to a basic Airtable base via Zapier. From there, he grades the content and sets aside some time to read it in more depth. Pocket pulls through the title, metadata, and URL link. Review Sam does this manually but has used a tool as a shortcut for digesting long form content — Bearly.ai. Bearly.ai was created by Trung Phan and linking back to raw content, Trung is 1/3 of the hosts on the Not Investment Advice podcast. Its irreverent style and thumbnail are an example of a successful podcast that doesn’t over polish. Writing it all up Being a huge Notion fan (check out the free templates on his site), Sam originally used Notion for writing and linked it into Revue. When Elon sunsetted Revue, he switched to Substack. He loves the Substack interface so drafts in Substack based on a duplication of last month’s edition. Before publishing, Sam runs through a 10-point Notion checklist, which he shared with me. Parting Advice Keep your tool stack as lean as possible. Avoid tool switching to the shiny new object. Getting launched quickly is key. Don’t think that you have to be everywhere for distribution, Sam sticks with what he knows on X and LinkedIn. Overall, he advises just keeping things simple and therefore minimising risk. Resources He says they’re cliche, but I don’t agree; they’re timeless. Paul Graham of Y Combinator is someone Sam recommends following. He doesn’t write much, which is great as Sam gets anxiety when someone good often writes and he can’t keep up with the writing. His content is well thought out and distills complex concepts in entrepreneurship and startups. In addition, Sam loves Naval Ravikant’s approach. He mentions checking out the Almanac of Naval Ravikant for collected wisdom. Follow Sam’s Journey Again, not going to link here but you can find Sam’s stuff easily enough if you want to. His personal website is beautiful and contains loads of free downloads. He has also curated personal websites he admires if you need some inspiration. Sam is a super nice guy so reach out to him, I did before I started my personal blog recently, and he gave me some great advice. Also, worth keeping an eye on Validation Co, where he aims to help early-stage makers and creators validate their ideas. He’s building super slow — trying to enjoy the process without unachievable deadlines. Maintaining his stamina and passion. Amazing, I hope he writes more about that soon! -- That’s my second shot at an interview, hope you enjoyed it and found something useful in it. I’m talking to a marketplace founder who spends 2–3 hours per month his project, a multiple job board owner with a 9-5 and a leading book designer next. As this is my side project, should I keep going?

I am building my agency to help founders build AI startups after 2 successful AI SaaS exits and 4 failures

Hey everyone, I have been building AI products before ChatGPT was launched. In these years, I have managed to launch, scale and exit 2 SaaS products successfully. Today I am launching a new service offering - Query Labs - Helping you build AI agents for your startups. Like all my previous products, I will be building this in public and share my learning along the way. Here's what I have built so far : Microsponsors ( Fail ) My first product ever. I tried to create a marketplace for newsletter writers to find sponsorship opportunity. Got a few very big newsletter listed on the marketplace as well. However, building marketplace is tough. I found it very difficult to bring in sponsors. Ended up shutting it down, AI Query (Exit - Pre revenue ) It was the second half of 2022 and GPT-3 was the most advance AI on the market. I decided to build a tool that can help developers and non-technical folks write SQL queries by just asking in plain english. I got my first taste of success with this. Had a decent offer even before I figured out monetisation. Accepted the offer to focus on my next product which had already started gaining traction AI Excel Bot ( Exit - Revenue Generating ) AI Excel Bot was my wild success. I had worked hard on the SEO for the site, along with the UI / UX to make it the best AI to write excel formulas and general excel task. There was already a large competitor in the market. However, the reality is that you don't need to be the top player. There is always room for multiple players to survive in a large market. You just need to find the good differentiating factor For AI Excel Bot, the differentiator was the chrome extension, that helped users access it anywhere on the internet. Scaled the product to more than 40k users at the time of exit. However, in the end I decided to exit and focus on my software service business that needed more time. Tutore AI ( Fail ) I wanted to build something useful for students to help them learn better. Tutore was my idea to build AI tools for students. I did launch quickly with multiple tools. However, wasn't motivated enough to continue with the grind. I have decided to sell the product. Have had some meetings with potential buyers but didn't agree on price. Prompt Hackers ( 1k users but no revenue ) Prompt Hackers is a directory of AI prompts for all the use cases you can image. I focused a lot on bringing traffic and newsletter subscription from the day 1. I have never had a problem bringing initial set of users to my products. Prompt Hackers was getting close to 20k page views a month. At the same time we had close to 1k newsletter subscribers. Since our target customers were people choosing to use ChatGPT / Bard instead of some specific software for their task, I built a Prompt Generation and Prompt Optimisation AI. Along with this I also created features to build private prompt library. To make the experience even better, I launched a Chrome Extension that helps users access the prompt generation AI and their prompt library while using ChatGPT. However, I couldn't figure out monetisation. I still get close to 4k page views per month with no marketing at all. There are users who use the AI tools and the prompt library feature daily. But, since I couldn't figure out monetisation, I decided to not put time into the project. There you go. These are all the products I have built in the last 3 years. I have been heavy investing myself in the latest tech in LLMs and AI agents. I know the biggest challenge for AI founders is the AI agents and backend pipelines. That's why I am launching Query Labs. To help you build the best AI implementation for your innovative AI startup. I would love to hear feedback from the community. I will be sharing my learning with my new service along the way. Thanks!

Looking for a technical co-founder to build LinkedIn’s rival

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? Feel free to subscribe to get new updates 🫶🏼 : https://mailchi.mp/037c56b89994/d-founder PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

How I Automated Amazon Affiliate Marketing: A Developer's Journey

From Manual Labor to 1000x Efficiency As a developer who ventured into affiliate marketing, I discovered a significant gap between technical possibilities and current practices. This revelation led me to create AutoPin, a tool that's now helping hundreds of affiliate marketers reclaim their time. The Problem: A Time-Consuming Reality Every affiliate marketer knows this scenario: you spend hours copying and pasting links, checking prices, and updating product information. I found myself dedicating 4-6 hours daily to these repetitive tasks. As a programmer, this felt fundamentally wrong. The typical affiliate marketing workflow looked like this: Find promising products Generate affiliate links one by one Monitor price changes manually Check product availability regularly Update content when things change Repeat this process daily This manual process had several critical issues: Time Waste: 20-30 hours weekly on repetitive tasks Missed Opportunities: Unable to scale beyond 100 products Human Error: Inevitable mistakes in manual updates Delayed Updates: Lost commissions due to outdated information The Solution: Building AutoPin After three months of development and six months of testing, I created a system that could: Generate hundreds of affiliate links in minutes Monitor price changes automatically Update product availability in real-time Export data in multiple formats Scale infinitely without additional effort Real Results, Real Impact The impact was immediate and significant: 📊 Efficiency Metrics: Link generation: From 2 minutes per link to 0.1 seconds Monitoring capacity: From 50 to 5000+ products Update frequency: From daily to real-time Error rate: Reduced by 99.9% 💡 User Success Stories: "Increased my product portfolio by 10x without adding work hours" "Revenue grew 300% in the first month" "Finally able to focus on content creation instead of link management" Technical Insights The system architecture focuses on three core components: Data Extraction Engine Efficient web scraping Rate limiting and proxy management Data validation and cleaning Real-time Monitoring System Websocket connections for instant updates Queue management for large-scale monitoring Smart scheduling based on price volatility Export Framework Multiple format support (CSV, HTML, Markdown) Custom templating engine Batch processing capabilities The Future of Affiliate Marketing Automation We're currently developing AI capabilities to: Generate product descriptions automatically Optimize link placement for conversion Predict price trends and best promotion times Create content variations for different platforms Key Learnings Automation is Essential The future of affiliate marketing lies in automation. Manual processes simply can't compete with automated systems in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Focus on Value Creation When marketers spend less time on repetitive tasks, they can focus on strategy and content quality. Scale Matters With automation, the difference between managing 10 products and 1000 products becomes minimal. Getting Started If you're an affiliate marketer spending hours on manual tasks, it's time to automate. Here's what you can do: Analyze your current workflow Identify repetitive tasks Start with basic automation Scale gradually Monitor and optimize Conclusion The transformation from manual to automated affiliate marketing isn't just about saving time—it's about unlocking potential. When you remove the tedious aspects of affiliate marketing, you create space for creativity, strategy, and growth. Want to experience the difference? Visit AutoPin at autopin.pro and join the automation revolution. Remember: The best time to automate was yesterday. The second best time is now. About the Author: A developer turned affiliate marketer who believes in the power of automation to transform digital marketing. #AffiliateMarketing #Automation #Programming #DigitalMarketing #SaaS #ProductivityTools

I’ve built a gaming recommendation and exploration platform called Which Game Next

Hello there! Me and a few of my best friends are software engineers, and we’ve been working part-time on developing a side project for the past 12 months. It’s called www.whichgamenext.com, and we’ve recently launched into open beta for everyone to check out. Your feedback would be invaluable to us! Our aim has been to build a gaming recommendation engine, alongside providing market oversight for where you can legally and officially purchase or obtain modern games from multiple stores and/or subscriptions. It’s often difficult to figure out what you have access to if you only have a single specific subscription, like Game Pass PC, or if you’re only interested in games on GOG/Nintendo (what a mix!). We started by identifying the available digital stores and subscriptions and slowly compiling our database using multiple automated services to gather data on these games. Think JustWatch, but for games! One major service we’ve partnered with is IGDB, which has been supplying us with JSON data dumps that served as the initial seed for our game data. A massive thank you to them for their continued support! With the data in place, we’ve been focusing on exploring new features. So far, this has included private and public user-generated lists, personal backlog tracking, and the ability to like or dislike games. We’re now improving our recommendation engine, tackling the complexities that come with it, and having a lot of fun along the way. We’re utilising modern AI strategies and solving fascinating problems related to large-scale data aggregation. We truly can’t wait to share this fantastic work! In addition to this, you can soon expect curated collections, articles about games, and supporting links to help you make informed, unbiased purchasing decisions. Your shared data will drive the recommendations. But it doesn’t stop there—we have plenty of other features on our radar, such as importing games from your favourite stores, syncing your gameplay time, surfacing data like “How Long to Beat,” and creating new and exciting ways to interact with this growing community! This is a passion project created by a group of gamers who want to spend their time and money wisely, without purchasing biases. Since it’s a side project, we mostly work on it at night, but we’re excited to grow the community, share our vision, and, who knows, maybe one day make it our full-time job! Let’s dive into the technical details: • Monorepo architecture: This speeds up development by sharing libraries, living style guides, configs, etc. Nx.js has been brilliant, enabling us to create a dependency graph of changes and only build/deploy what’s modified in a PR. • AWS: We’re using the free tier (with a few exceptions where we pay for smaller services). Achieving self-sufficiency is critical for us. Additionally, we applied to the AWS Startup Foundation programme and received $1,000 in AWS credits, which has been incredibly helpful! • Infrastructure: Fully deployed as code with Terraform. • Backends: Built using Express and Nest.js, split into around 40 projects and counting! Each project plays a unique role in gathering and syncing game data. • Scalability: Designed from the ground up, utilising AWS Lambdas with auto-scaling and load balancing. • Databases: We use Postgres with RDS and DynamoDB for storing various data. • Frontend stack: Built with React, Next.js, Tailwind, Zustand, TanStack Query, Jest, and Storybook. • CI/CD: Managed with GitHub Actions and Amplify hooks for deploying the frontends. • Admin portal: We’ve built a bespoke CMS to control the main website. It synchronises with external services, tracks game data changes, and allows us to selectively apply ‘patches’ from sites like IGDB. The system also includes data override and rollback capabilities, ensuring we maintain control over game data. • Automation: Partially automated, so manual intervention is rarely needed. • Scraping tools: Fully integrated into the admin portal with log trail capabilities. • Cloudflare: Used for on-the-fly image transformations; we’re considering moving to it full-time as our CDN for free WebP conversions. • Authentication: Handled by Cognito, with a custom frontend built from scratch. Key learnings so far: • AWS cold starts: Not ideal! While the platform is still new, we ping endpoints to keep them responsive. This won’t be an issue once traffic increases. • Lambda memory matters: We learned the hard way that low-memory configurations can delay responses by 2-3 seconds. • DynamoDB partition keys: If not designed correctly from the start, you might have to start over (yes, we’ve been there!). • GitHub Actions: Setting up node\_modules cache reuse takes time, but it’s worth it—don’t give up! We don’t know where this project will take us yet, but it’s been a fantastic journey so far. We’ve learned a lot, explored technologies we don’t typically use in our day jobs, and built something we’re genuinely passionate about. Your feedback would mean the world to us. What do you think of what we’ve done so far? What would you like to see added? Is this a service you’d use? Do you see the value in it as we do? Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you in the comments! (or our newly created /r/whichgamenext

PlumbingJobs.com - I launched a niche job board with hand-curated jobs for plumbers. Here's the summary of how it's going after the 3rd month

On October 12th 2024, I launched PlumbingJobs.com, and this is my first update (January 2025) in what I hope will be a long journey. To stay accountable and track progress, I’ll be sharing monthly updates about the site's stats, achievements, challenges, and my plans moving forward. While these posts are mostly to document the journey, I hope they’ll also be helpful to others, especially members of r/SideProject who might be working on their own first online projects. If this post isn’t a good fit for this subreddit, I’m happy to remove it or move updates elsewhere. The goal for PlumbingJobs.com is clear: to become the #1 job board for plumber jobs, featuring hand-picked opportunities the plumbing industry. Let’s dive right in: Statistics update ~ 4th Quarter of 2024 |\-|October|November|December| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Jobs Posted:|2|16|43| |Paid Post:|0|2|2| |Free Post:|0|1|2| |Visitors:|72|138|1,164| |Avg. Time Per Visit:|1 min. 24 sec|2 min. 15 sec|3 min. 41 sec| |Pageviews:|196|308|2,590| |Avg. Actions:|1.1|2.3|2.3| |Bounce Rate:|87%|73%|40%| I'm not a very technical guy and I don't know how to code. So the best way for me was learning to build it using Wordpress through YouTube. Also, I believe in the power of a great .COM domain name, and the stats from the first three months have only reinforced that belief: 49.2% of traffic comes directly from users typing the URL into their browsers. 48% of traffic is from search engines like Google and Bing. The remaining 1.8% comes from social media and other backlinks. Pricing Tiers and Early Wins I offer three pricing tiers for job listings: Free Listing: Basic exposure for job openings. Silver Listing ($45): Greater visibility and placement on the site. Gold Listing ($95): Premium visibility and enhanced promotion. To my surprise, my very first sale in October was a Gold Listing! That initial $95 sale was the motivation I needed to keep building. Later that month, I sold a Silver Listing, bringing my total revenue for October to $140. The same revenue was generated in December 2024, showing consistent early interest. Steps Taken in December To boost SEO and add value to the site, I created a Plumbing Directory, featuring: Plumbing companies across the U.S. Their stories, contact information, logos, addresses, business hours, and more. This directory serves as free marketing for these businesses and increases the likelihood they’ll discover my site and support it by posting job openings. Plans Moving Forward Social Media Marketing: I plan to automate posts using AI to expand reach and drive more traffic to the site. Consistency in Job Postings: I’m committed to posting 2–3 plumbing jobs daily to keep the site fresh and useful for plumbers seeking work. Looking forward to grow this niche job board slowly but surely this 2025. If you have any questions, concerns, come across glitches - feel free to reach out, happy to chat. Thank you all again, and see you in a month. Romel@plumbingjobs.com

I Built Blainy - An AI Writing Tool for Students and Researchers

Hello Everyone, I built Blainy, an AI writing tool designed to make writing easier and more efficient, based on my own experiences as a student working part-time and struggling to find the time for essays and assignments. Blainy is perfect for students, researchers, content creators, and bloggers. It addresses the gaps where most writing tools fall short and helps you write essays, assignments, research papers, product descriptions, blog content, and more with ease. I created this tool based on the problems I faced, so I genuinely want to know your review on this. Blainy's Features: AI Suggestions: This feature provides you with suggestions while you are writing, so you don't face the writer's block issue. This was the main issue I usually faced when writing my essays. You will get suggestions while you are writing, and if you don't like them, you can always ask for alternatives. AI Automation: If you want AI to write for you, you can choose this feature. It will write one to two paragraphs according to what you select. You can choose to write an introduction, conclusion, arguments, etc. If you just want it to write casually, select the "continue writing" feature, and it will write all on its own. Paraphrasing: If you want to paraphrase your text, you can do it on Blainy. You can also select different tones for writing, such as academic, friendly, simplicity, and more. Citations: By using this feature, you no longer need to search for citations on Google or ChatGPT. Blainy will load millions of citations for you in seconds. You can select any citation you want, and if you want to add a custom citation, you can do that too. Built-in Plagiarism Checker: Blainy includes a plagiarism checker to ensure that your content is original and plagiarism-free. PDF Chat: If you have any questions about a document that you are curious about or don't understand, you can use this feature. It will answer your question and help you summarize the whole article, and more. Best of all, We provide daily credits so you can access all these features for free with daily credits! We understand the unique challenges faced by students, including those with dyslexia and other writing difficulties. That's why we're working on adding features like a voice-to-text converter to assist students who struggle with writing. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don't hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts. We're also considering adding some free tools like paraphrasing to attract more users. If you have any suggestions for additional features that would be beneficial, please let me know. Your input can help us improve Blainy and make it even more valuable for everyone. If you have any good ideas that you think can help us in any way, please let me know. Thank you in advance for your support and feedback! Check it out: Blainy

[D] Why I'm Lukewarm on Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR: GNNs can provide wins over simpler embedding methods, but we're at a point where other research directions matter more I also posted it on my blog here, has footnotes, a nicer layout with inlined images, etc. I'm only lukewarm on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). There, I said it. It might sound crazy GNNs are one of the hottest fields in machine learning right now. [There][1] were at least [four][2] [review][3] [papers][4] just in the last few months. I think some progress can come of this research, but we're also focusing on some incorrect places. But first, let's take a step back and go over the basics. Models are about compression We say graphs are a "non-euclidean" data type, but that's not really true. A regular graph is just another way to think about a particular flavor of square matrix called the [adjacency matrix][5], like this. It's weird, we look at run-of-the-mill matrix full of real numbers and decide to call it "non-euclidean". This is for practical reasons. Most graphs are fairly sparse, so the matrix is full of zeros. At this point, where the non-zero numbers are matters most, which makes the problem closer to (computationally hard) discrete math rather than (easy) continuous, gradient-friendly math. If you had the full matrix, life would be easy If we step out of the pesky realm of physics for a minute, and assume carrying the full adjacency matrix around isn't a problem, we solve a bunch of problems. First, network node embeddings aren't a thing anymore. A node is a just row in the matrix, so it's already a vector of numbers. Second, all network prediction problems are solved. A powerful enough and well-tuned model will simply extract all information between the network and whichever target variable we're attaching to nodes. NLP is also just fancy matrix compression Let's take a tangent away from graphs to NLP. Most NLP we do can be [thought of in terms of graphs][6] as we'll see, so it's not a big digression. First, note that Ye Olde word embedding models like [Word2Vec][7] and [GloVe][8] are [just matrix factorization][9]. The GloVe algorithm works on a variation of the old [bag of words][10] matrix. It goes through the sentences and creates a (implicit) [co-occurence][11] graph where nodes are words and the edges are weighed by how often the words appear together in a sentence. Glove then does matrix factorization on the matrix representation of that co-occurence graph, Word2Vec is mathematically equivalent. You can read more on this in my [post on embeddings][12] and the one (with code) on [word embeddings][13]. Even language models are also just matrix compression Language models are all the rage. They dominate most of the [state of the art][14] in NLP. Let's take BERT as our main example. BERT predicts a word given the context of the rest of the sentence. This grows the matrix we're factoring from flat co-occurences on pairs of words to co-occurences conditional on the sentence's context, like this We're growing the "ideal matrix" we're factoring combinatorially. As noted by [Hanh & Futrell][15]: [...] human language—and language modelling—has infinite statistical complexity but that it can be approximated well at lower levels. This observation has two implications: 1) We can obtain good results with comparatively small models; and 2) there is a lot of potential for scaling up our models. Language models tackle such a large problem space that they probably approximate a compression of the entire language in the [Kolmogorov Complexity][16] sense. It's also possible that huge language models just [memorize a lot of it][17] rather than compress the information, for what it's worth. Can we upsample any graph like language models do? We're already doing it. Let's call a first-order embedding of a graph a method that works by directly factoring the graph's adjacency matrix or [Laplacian matrix][18]. If you embed a graph using [Laplacian Eigenmaps][19] or by taking the [principal components][20] of the Laplacian, that's first order. Similarly, GloVe is a first-order method on the graph of word co-occurences. One of my favorites first order methods for graphs is [ProNE][21], which works as well as most methods while being two orders of magnitude faster. A higher-order method embeds the original matrix plus connections of neighbours-of-neighbours (2nd degree) and deeper k-step connections. [GraRep][22], shows you can always generate higher-order representations from first order methods by augmenting the graph matrix. Higher order method are the "upsampling" we do on graphs. GNNs that sample on large neighborhoods and random-walk based methods like node2vec are doing higher-order embeddings. Where are the performance gain? Most GNN papers in the last 5 years present empirical numbers that are useless for practitioners to decide on what to use. As noted in the [OpenGraphsBenchmark][4] (OGB) paper, GNN papers do their empirical section on a handful of tiny graphs (Cora, CiteSeer, PubMed) with 2000-20,000 nodes. These datasets can't seriously differentiate between methods. Recent efforts are directly fixing this, but the reasons why researchers focused on tiny, useless datasets for so long are worth discussing. Performance matters by task One fact that surprises a lot of people is that even though language models have the best performance in a lot of NLP tasks, if all you're doing is cram sentence embeddings into a downstream model, there [isn't much gained][23] from language models embeddings over simple methods like summing the individual Word2Vec word embeddings (This makes sense, because the full context of the sentence is captured in the sentence co-occurence matrix that is generating the Word2Vec embeddings). Similarly, [I find][24] that for many graphs simple first-order methods perform just as well on graph clustering and node label prediction tasks than higher-order embedding methods. In fact higher-order methods are massively computationally wasteful for these usecases. Recommended first order embedding methods are ProNE and my [GGVec with order=1][25]. Higher order methods normally perform better on the link prediction tasks. I'm not the only one to find this. In the BioNEV paper, they find: "A large GraRep order value for link prediction tasks (e.g. 3, 4);a small value for node classification tasks (e.g.1, 2)" (p.9). Interestingly, the gap in link prediction performance is inexistant for artificially created graphs. This suggests higher order methods do learn some of the structure intrinsic to [real world graphs][26]. For visualization, first order methods are better. Visualizations of higher order methods tend to have artifacts of their sampling. For instance, Node2Vec visualizations tend to have elongated/filament-like structures which come from the embeddings coming from long single strand random walks. See the following visualizations by [Owen Cornec][27] created by first embedding the graph to 32-300 dimensions using a node embedding algorithm, then mapping this to 2d or 3d with the excellent UMAP algorithm, like this Lastly, sometimes simple methods soundly beat higher order methods (there's an instance of it in the OGB paper). The problem here is that we don't know when any method is better than another and we definitely don't know the reason. There's definitely a reason different graph types respond better/worse to being represented by various methods. This is currently an open question. A big part of why is that the research space is inundated under useless new algorithms because... Academic incentives work against progress Here's the cynic's view of how machine learning papers are made: Take an existing algorithm Add some new layer/hyperparameter, make a cute mathematical story for why it matters Gridsearch your hyperparameters until you beat baselines from the original paper you aped Absolutely don't gridsearch stuff you're comparing against in your results section Make a cute ACRONYM for your new method, put impossible to use python 2 code on github (Or no code at all!) and bask in the citations I'm [not][28] the [only one][29] with these views on the state reproducible research. At least it's gotten slightly better in the last 2 years. Sidebar: I hate Node2Vec A side project of mine is a [node embedding library][25] and the most popular method in it is by far Node2Vec. Don't use Node2Vec. [Node2Vec][30] with p=1; q=1 is the [Deepwalk][31] algorithm. Deepwalk is an actual innovation. The Node2Vec authors closely followed the steps 1-5 including bonus points on step 5 by getting word2vec name recognition. This is not academic fraud -- the hyperparameters [do help a tiny bit][32] if you gridsearch really hard. But it's the presentable-to-your-parents sister of where you make the ML community worse off to progress your academic career. And certainly Node2Vec doesn't deserve 7500 citations. Progress is all about practical issues We've known how to train neural networks for well over 40 years. Yet they only exploded in popularity with [AlexNet][33] in 2012. This is because implementations and hardware came to a point where deep learning was practical. Similarly, we've known about factoring word co-occurence matrices into Word embeddings for at least 20 years. But word embeddings only exploded in 2013 with Word2Vec. The breakthrough here was that the minibatch-based methods let you train a Wikipedia-scale embedding model on commodity hardware. It's hard for methods in a field to make progress if training on a small amount of data takes days or weeks. You're disincentivized to explore new methods. If you want progress, your stuff has to run in reasonable time on commodity hardware. Even Google's original search algorithm [initially ran on commodity hardware][34]. Efficiency is paramount to progress The reason deep learning research took off the way it did is because of improvements in [efficiency][35] as well as much better libraries and hardware support. Academic code is terrible Any amount of time you spend gridsearching Node2Vec on p and q is all put to better use gridsearching Deepwalk itself (on number of walks, length of walks, or word2vec hyperparameters). The problem is that people don't gridsearch over deepwalk because implementations are all terrible. I wrote the [Nodevectors library][36] to have a fast deepwalk implementation because it took 32 hours to embed a graph with a measly 150,000 nodes using the reference Node2Vec implementation (the same takes 3min with Nodevectors). It's no wonder people don't gridsearch on Deepwalk a gridsearch would take weeks with the terrible reference implementations. To give an example, in the original paper of [GraphSAGE][37] they their algorithm to DeepWalk with walk lengths of 5, which is horrid if you've ever hyperparameter tuned a deepwalk algorithm. From their paper: We did observe DeepWalk’s performance could improve with further training, and in some cases it could become competitive with the unsupervised GraphSAGE approaches (but not the supervised approaches) if we let it run for >1000× longer than the other approaches (in terms of wall clock time for prediction on the test set) I don't even think the GraphSAGE authors had bad intent -- deepwalk implementations are simply so awful that they're turned away from using it properly. It's like trying to do deep learning with 2002 deep learning libraries and hardware. Your architectures don't really matter One of the more important papers this year was [OpenAI's "Scaling laws"][38] paper, where the raw number of parameters in your model is the most predictive feature of overall performance. This was noted even in the original BERT paper and drives 2020's increase in absolutely massive language models. This is really just [Sutton' Bitter Lesson][39] in action: General methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin Transformers might be [replacing convolution][40], too. As [Yannic Kilcher said][41], transformers are ruining everything. [They work on graphs][6], in fact it's one of the [recent approaches][42], and seems to be one of the more succesful [when benchmarked][1] Researchers seem to be putting so much effort into architecture, but it doesn't matter much in the end because you can approximate anything by stacking more layers. Efficiency wins are great -- but neural net architectures are just one way to achieve that, and by tremendously over-researching this area we're leaving a lot of huge gains elsewhere on the table. Current Graph Data Structure Implementations suck NetworkX is a bad library. I mean, it's good if you're working on tiny graphs for babies, but for anything serious it chokes and forces you to rewrite everything in... what library, really? At this point most people working on large graphs end up hand-rolling some data structure. This is tough because your computer's memory is a 1-dimensional array of 1's and 0's and a graph has no obvious 1-d mapping. This is even harder when we take updating the graph (adding/removing some nodes/edges) into account. Here's a few options: Disconnected networks of pointers NetworkX is the best example. Here, every node is an object with a list of pointers to other nodes (the node's edges). This layout is like a linked list. Linked lists are the [root of all performance evil][43]. Linked lists go completely against how modern computers are designed. Fetching things from memory is slow, and operating on memory is fast (by two orders of magnitude). Whenever you do anything in this layout, you make a roundtrip to RAM. It's slow by design, you can write this in Ruby or C or assembly and it'll be slow regardless, because memory fetches are slow in hardware. The main advantage of this layout is that adding a new node is O(1). So if you're maintaining a massive graph where adding and removing nodes happens as often as reading from the graph, it makes sense. Another advantage of this layout is that it "scales". Because everything is decoupled from each other you can put this data structure on a cluster. However, you're really creating a complex solution for a problem you created for yourself. Sparse Adjacency Matrix This layout great for read-only graphs. I use it as the backend in my [nodevectors][25] library, and many other library writers use the [Scipy CSR Matrix][44], you can see graph algorithms implemented on it [here][45]. The most popular layout for this use is the [CSR Format][46] where you have 3 arrays holding the graph. One for edge destinations, one for edge weights and an "index pointer" which says which edges come from which node. Because the CSR layout is simply 3 arrays, it scales on a single computer: a CSR matrix can be laid out on a disk instead of in-memory. You simply [memory map][47] the 3 arrays and use them on-disk from there. With modern NVMe drives random seeks aren't slow anymore, much faster than distributed network calls like you do when scaling the linked list-based graph. I haven't seen anyone actually implement this yet, but it's in the roadmap for my implementation at least. The problem with this representation is that adding a node or edge means rebuilding the whole data structure. Edgelist representations This representation is three arrays: one for the edge sources, one for the edge destinations, and one for edge weights. [DGL][48] uses this representation internally. This is a simple and compact layout which can be good for analysis. The problem compared to CSR Graphs is some seek operations are slower. Say you want all the edges for node #4243. You can't jump there without maintaining an index pointer array. So either you maintain sorted order and binary search your way there (O(log2n)) or unsorted order and linear search (O(n)). This data structure can also work on memory mapped disk array, and node append is fast on unsorted versions (it's slow in the sorted version). Global methods are a dead end Methods that work on the entire graph at once can't leverage computation, because they run out of RAM at a certain scale. So any method that want a chance of being the new standard need to be able to update piecemeal on parts of the graph. Sampling-based methods Sampling Efficiency will matter more in the future Edgewise local methods. The only algorithms I know of that do this are GloVe and GGVec, which they pass through an edge list and update embedding weights on each step. The problem with this approach is that it's hard to use them for higher-order methods. The advantage is that they easily scale even on one computer. Also, incrementally adding a new node is as simple as taking the existing embeddings, adding a new one, and doing another epoch over the data Random Walk sampling. This is used by deepwalk and its descendants, usually for node embeddings rather than GNN methods. This can be computationally expensive and make it hard to add new nodes. But this does scale, for instance [Instagram][49] use it to feed their recommendation system models Neighbourhood sampling. This is currently the most common one in GNNs, and can be low or higher order depending on the neighborhood size. It also scales well, though implementing efficiently can be challenging. It's currently used by [Pinterest][50]'s recommendation algorithms. Conclusion Here are a few interesting questions: What is the relation between graph types and methods? Consolidated benchmarking like OGB We're throwing random models at random benchmarks without understanding why or when they do better More fundamental research. Heree's one I'm curious about: can other representation types like [Poincarre Embeddings][51] effectively encode directed relationships? On the other hand, we should stop focusing on adding spicy new layers to test on the same tiny datasets. No one cares. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.00982.pdf [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11867.pdf [3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08434.pdf [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00687.pdf [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjacency_matrix [6]: https://thegradient.pub/transformers-are-graph-neural-networks/ [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec [8]: https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/glove.pdf [9]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2014/file/feab05aa91085b7a8012516bc3533958-Paper.pdf [10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model [11]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-occurrence [12]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/02/16/embeddings-from-the-ground-up/ [13]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2019/01/27/word-embeddings-from-the-ground-up/ [14]: https://nlpprogress.com/ [15]: http://socsci.uci.edu/~rfutrell/papers/hahn2019estimating.pdf [16]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [17]: https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ [18]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplacian_matrix [19]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=1F03130B02DC485C78BF364266B6F0CA?doi=10.1.1.19.8100&rep=rep1&type=pdf [20]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principalcomponentanalysis [21]: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2019/0594.pdf [22]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2806416.2806512 [23]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=SyK00v5xx [24]: https://github.com/VHRanger/nodevectors/blob/master/examples/link%20prediction.ipynb [25]: https://github.com/VHRanger/nodevectors [26]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.2636.pdf [27]: http://byowen.com/ [28]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.03341.pdf [29]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kee4ch3miVA [30]: https://cs.stanford.edu/~jure/pubs/node2vec-kdd16.pdf [31]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6652.pdf [32]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11726.pdf [33]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet [34]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googledatacenters#Original_hardware [35]: https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-efficiency/ [36]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2019/08/01/700x-faster-node2vec-models-fastest-random-walks-on-a-graph/ [37]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.02216.pdf [38]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf [39]: http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html [40]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 [41]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrdevFK_am4 [42]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10903.pdf [43]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHNmRkzxHWs [44]: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.sparse.csr_matrix.html [45]: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/sparse.csgraph.html [46]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparsematrix#Compressedsparserow(CSR,CRSorYaleformat) [47]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap [48]: https://github.com/dmlc/dgl [49]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explore-recommender-system/ [50]: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/pinsage-a-new-graph-convolutional-neural-network-for-web-scale-recommender-systems-88795a107f48 [51]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08039.pdf

[Discussion] When ML and Data Science are the death of a good company: A cautionary tale.

TD;LR: At Company A, Team X does advanced analytics using on-prem ERP tools and older programming languages. Their tools work very well and are designed based on very deep business and domain expertise. Team Y is a new and ambitious Data Science team that thinks they can replace Team X's tools with a bunch of R scripts and a custom built ML platform. Their models are simplistic, but more "fashionable" compared to the econometric models used by Team X, and team Y benefits from the ML/DS moniker so leadership is allowing Team Y to start a large scale overhaul of the analytics platform in question. Team Y doesn't have the experience for such a larger scale transformation, and is refusing to collaborate with team X. This project is very likely going to fail, and cause serious harm to the company as a whole financially and from a people perspective. I argue that this is not just because of bad leadership, but also because of various trends and mindsets in the DS community at large. Update (Jump to below the line for the original story): Several people in the comments are pointing out that this just a management failure, not something due to ML/DS, and that you can replace DS with any buzz tech and the story will still be relevant. My response: Of course, any failure at an organization level is ultimately a management failure one way or the other. Moreover, it is also the case that ML/DS when done correctly, will always improve a company's bottom line. There is no scenario where the proper ML solution, delivered at a reasonable cost and in a timely fashion, will somehow hurt the company's bottom line. My point is that in this case management is failing because of certain trends and practices that are specific to the ML/DS community, namely: The idea that DS teams should operate independently of tech and business orgs -- too much autonomy for DS teams The disregard for domain knowledge that seems prevalent nowadays thanks to the ML hype, that DS can be generalists and someone with good enough ML chops can solve any business problem. That wasn't the case when I first left academia for the industry in 2009 (back then nobody would even bother with a phone screen if you didn't have the right domain knowledge). Over reliance on resources who check all the ML hype related boxes (knows Python, R, Tensorflow, Shiny, etc..., has the right Coursera certifications, has blogged on the topic, etc...), but are lacking in depth of experience. DS interviews nowadays all seem to be: Can you tell me what a p-value is? What is elastic net regression? Show me how to fit a model in sklearn? How do you impute NAs in an R dataframe? Any smart person can look those up on Stackoverflow or Cross-Validated,.....Instead teams should be asking stuff like: why does portfolio optimization use QP not LP? How does a forecast influence a customer service level? When should a recommendation engine be content based and when should it use collaborative filtering? etc... (This is a true story, happening to the company I currently work for. Names, domains, algorithms, and roles have been shuffled around to protect my anonymity)  Company A has been around for several decades. It is not the biggest name in its domain, but it is a well respected one. Risk analysis and portfolio optimization have been a core of Company A's business since the 90s. They have a large team of 30 or so analysts who perform those tasks on a daily basis. These analysts use ERP solutions implemented for them by one the big ERP companies (SAP, Teradata, Oracle, JD Edwards,...) or one of the major tech consulting companies (Deloitte, Accenture, PWC, Capgemini, etc...) in collaboration with their own in house engineering team. The tools used are embarrassingly old school: Classic RDBMS running on on-prem servers or maybe even on mainframes, code written in COBOL, Fortran, weird proprietary stuff like ABAP or SPSS.....you get the picture. But the models and analytic functions were pretty sophisticated, and surprisingly cutting edge compared to the published academic literature. Most of all, they fit well with the company's enterprise ecosystem, and were honed based on years of deep domain knowledge.  They have a tech team of several engineers (poached from the aforementioned software and consulting companies) and product managers (who came from the experienced pools of analysts and managers who use the software, or poached from business rivals) maintaining and running this software. Their technology might be old school, but collectively, they know the domain and the company's overall architecture very, very well. They've guided the company through several large scale upgrades and migrations and they have a track record of delivering on time, without too much overhead. The few times they've stumbled, they knew how to pick themselves up very quickly. In fact within their industry niche, they have a reputation for their expertise, and have very good relations with the various vendors they've had to deal with. They were the launching pad of several successful ERP consulting careers.  Interestingly, despite dealing on a daily basis with statistical modeling and optimization algorithms, none of the analysts, engineers, or product managers involved describe themselves as data scientists or machine learning experts. It is mostly a cultural thing: Their expertise predates the Data Science/ML hype that started circa 2010, and they got most of their chops using proprietary enterprise tools instead of the open source tools popular nowadays. A few of them have formal statistical training, but most of them came from engineering or domain backgrounds and learned stats on the fly while doing their job. Call this team "Team X".  Sometime around the mid 2010s, Company A started having some serious anxiety issues: Although still doing very well for a company its size, overall economic and demographic trends were shrinking its customer base, and a couple of so called disruptors came up with a new app and business model that started seriously eating into their revenue. A suitable reaction to appease shareholders and Wall Street was necessary. The company already had a decent website and a pretty snazzy app, what more could be done? Leadership decided that it was high time that AI and ML become a core part of the company's business. An ambitious Manager, with no science or engineering background, but who had very briefly toyed with a recommender system a couple of years back, was chosen to build a data science team, call it team "Y" (he had a bachelor's in history from the local state college and worked for several years in the company's marketing org). Team "Y" consists mostly of internal hires who decided they wanted to be data scientists and completed a Coursera certification or a Galvanize boot camp, before being brought on to the team, along with a few of fresh Ph.D or M.Sc holders who didn't like academia and wanted to try their hand at an industry role. All of them were very bright people, they could write great Medium blog posts and give inspiring TED talks, but collectively they had very little real world industry experience. As is the fashion nowadays, this group was made part of a data science org that reported directly to the CEO and Board, bypassing the CIO and any tech or business VPs, since Company A wanted to claim the monikers "data driven" and "AI powered" in their upcoming shareholder meetings. In 3 or 4 years of existence, team Y produced a few Python and R scripts. Their architectural experience  consisted almost entirely in connecting Flask to S3 buckets or Redshift tables, with a couple of the more resourceful ones learning how to plug their models into Tableau or how to spin up a Kuberneties pod.  But they needn't worry: The aforementioned manager, who was now a director (and was also doing an online Masters to make up for his qualifications gap and bolster his chances of becoming VP soon - at least he now understands what L1 regularization is), was a master at playing corporate politics and self-promotion. No matter how few actionable insights team Y produced or how little code they deployed to production, he always had their back and made sure they had ample funding. In fact he now had grandiose plans for setting up an all-purpose machine learning platform that can be used to solve all of the company's data problems.  A couple of sharp minded members of team Y, upon googling their industry name along with the word "data science", realized that risk analysis was a prime candidate for being solved with Bayesian models, and there was already a nifty R package for doing just that, whose tutorial they went through on R-Bloggers.com. One of them had even submitted a Bayesian classifier Kernel for a competition on Kaggle (he was 203rd on the leaderboard), and was eager to put his new-found expertise to use on a real world problem. They pitched the idea to their director, who saw a perfect use case for his upcoming ML platform. They started work on it immediately, without bothering to check whether anybody at Company A was already doing risk analysis. Since their org was independent, they didn't really need to check with anybody else before they got funding for their initiative. Although it was basically a Naive Bayes classifier, the term ML was added to the project tile, to impress the board.  As they progressed with their work however, tensions started to build. They had asked the data warehousing and CA analytics teams to build pipelines for them, and word eventually got out to team X about their project. Team X was initially thrilled: They offered to collaborate whole heartedly, and would have loved to add an ML based feather to their already impressive cap. The product owners and analysts were totally onboard as well: They saw a chance to get in on the whole Data Science hype that they kept hearing about. But through some weird mix of arrogance and insecurity, team Y refused to collaborate with them or share any of their long term goals with them, even as they went to other parts of the company giving brown bag presentations and tutorials on the new model they created.  Team X got resentful: from what they saw of team Y's model, their approach was hopelessly naive and had little chances of scaling or being sustainable in production, and they knew exactly how to help with that. Deploying the model to production would have taken them a few days, given how comfortable they were with DevOps and continuous delivery (team Y had taken several months to figure out how to deploy a simple R script to production). And despite how old school their own tech was, team X were crafty enough to be able to plug it in to their existing architecture. Moreover, the output of the model was such that it didn't take into account how the business will consume it or how it was going to be fed to downstream systems, and the product owners could have gone a long way in making the model more amenable to adoption by the business stakeholders. But team Y wouldn't listen, and their leads brushed off any attempts at communication, let alone collaboration. The vibe that team Y was giving off was "We are the cutting edge ML team, you guys are the legacy server grunts. We don't need your opinion.", and they seemed to have a complete disregard for domain knowledge, or worse, they thought that all that domain knowledge consisted of was being able to grasp the definitions of a few business metrics.  Team X got frustrated and tried to express their concerns to leadership. But despite owning a vital link in Company A's business process, they were only \~50 people in a large 1000 strong technology and operations org, and they were several layers removed from the C-suite, so it was impossible for them to get their voices heard.  Meanwhile, the unstoppable director was doing what he did best: Playing corporate politics. Despite how little his team had actually delivered, he had convinced the board that all analysis and optimization tasks should now be migrated to his yet to be delivered ML platform. Since most leaders now knew that there was overlap between team Y and team X's objectives, his pitch was no longer that team Y was going to create a new insight, but that they were going to replace (or modernize) the legacy statistics based on-prem tools with more accurate cloud based ML tools. Never mind that there was no support in the academic literature for the idea that Naive Bayes works better than the Econometric approaches used by team X, let alone the additional wacky idea that Bayesian Optimization would definitely outperform the QP solvers that were running in production.  Unbeknownst to team X, the original Bayesian risk analysis project has now grown into a multimillion dollar major overhaul initiative, which included the eventual replacement of all of the tools and functions supported by team X along with the necessary migration to the cloud. The CIO and a couple of business VPs are on now board, and tech leadership is treating it as a done deal. An outside vendor, a startup who nobody had heard of, was contracted to help build the platform, since team Y has no engineering skills. The choice was deliberate, as calling on any of the established consulting or software companies would have eventually led leadership to the conclusion that team X was better suited for a transformation on this scale than team Y.  Team Y has no experience with any major ERP deployments, and no domain knowledge, yet they are being tasked with fundamentally changing the business process that is at the core of Company A's business. Their models actually perform worse than those deployed by team X, and their architecture is hopelessly simplistic, compared to what is necessary for running such a solution in production.  Ironically, using Bayesian thinking and based on all the evidence, the likelihood that team Y succeeds is close to 0%. At best, the project is going to end up being a write off of 50 million dollars or more. Once the !@#$!@hits the fan, a couple of executive heads are going to role, and dozens of people will get laid off. At worst, given how vital risk analysis and portfolio optimization is to Company A's revenue stream, the failure will eventually sink the whole company. It probably won't go bankrupt, but it will lose a significant portion of its business and work force. Failed ERP implementations can and do sink large companies: Just see what happened to National Grid US, SuperValu or Target Canada.  One might argue that this is more about corporate disfunction and bad leadership than about data science and AI. But I disagree. I think the core driver of this debacle is indeed the blind faith in Data Scientists, ML models and the promise of AI, and the overall culture of hype and self promotion that is very common among the ML crowd.  We haven't seen the end of this story: I sincerely hope that this ends well for the sake of my colleagues and all involved. Company A is a good company, and both its customers and its employees deserver better. But the chances of that happening are negligible given all the information available, and this failure will hit my company hard.

[D] The Rants of an experienced engineer who glimpsed into AI Academia (Briefly)

Background I recently graduated with a master's degree and was fortunate/unfortunate to glimpse the whole "Academic" side of ML. I took a thesis track in my degree because as an immigrant it's harder to get into a good research lab without having authorship in a couple of good papers (Or so I delude myself ). I worked as a Full-stack SWE for a startup for 4+ years before coming to the US for a master’s degree focused on ML and AI. I did everything in those years. From project management to building fully polished S/W products to DevOps to even dabbled in ML. I did my Batchelor’s degree from a university whose name is not even worth mentioning. The university for my master’s degree is in the top 20 in the AI space. I didn't know much about ML and the curiosity drove me to university. Come to uni and I focused on learning ML and AI for one 1-1.5 years after which I found advisors for a thesis topic. This is when the fun starts. I had the most amazing advisors but the entire peer review system and the way we assess ML/Science is what ticked me off. This is where the rant begins. Rant 1:Acadmia follows a Gated Institutional Narrative Let's say you are a Ph.D. at the world's top AI institution working under the best prof. You have a way higher likelihood of you getting a good Postdoc at a huge research lab vs someone's from my poor country doing a Ph.D. with a not-so-well-known advisor having published not-so-well-known papers. I come from a developing nation and I see this many times here. In my country academics don't get funding as they do at colleges in the US. One of the reasons for this is that colleges don't have such huge endowments and many academics don't have wealthy research sponsors. Brand names and prestige carry massive weight to help get funding in US academic circles. This prestige/money percolates down to the students and the researchers who work there. Students in top colleges get a huge advantage and the circles of top researchers keep being from the same sets of institutions. I have nothing against top researchers from top institutions but due to the nature of citations and the way the money flows based on them, a vicious cycle is created where the best institutions keep getting better and the rest don't get as much of a notice. Rant 2: Peer Review without Code Review in ML/AI is shady I am a computer scientist and I was appalled when I heard that you don't need to do code reviews for research papers. As a computer scientist and someone who actually did shit tons of actual ML in the past year, I find it absolutely garbage that code reviews are not a part of this system. I am not saying every scientist who reads a paper should review code but at least one person should for any paper's code submission. At least in ML and AI space. This is basic. I don't get why people call themselves computer scientists if they don't want to read the fucking code. If you can't then make a grad student do it. But for the collective of science, we need this. The core problem lies in the fact that peer review is free. : There should be better solutions for this. We ended up creating Git and that changed so many lives. Academic Research needs something similar. Rant 3: My Idea is Novel Until I see Someone Else's Paper The volume of scientific research is growing exponentially. Information is being created faster than we can digest. We can't expect people to know everything and the amount of overlap in the AI/ML fields requires way better search engines than Google Scholar. The side effect of large volumes of research is that every paper is doing something "novel" making it harder to filter what the fuck was novel. I have had so many experiences where I coded up something and came to realize that someone else has done something symbolically similar and my work just seems like a small variant of that. That's what fucks with my head. Is what I did in Novel? What the fuck is Novel? Is stitching up a transformer to any problem with fancy embeddings and tidying it up as a research paper Novel? Is just making a transformer bigger Novel? Is some new RL algorithm tested with 5 seeds and some fancy fucking prior and some esoteric reasoning for its success Novel? Is using an over parameterized model to get 95% accuracy on 200 sample test set Novel? Is apply Self-supervised learning for some new dataset Novel? If I keep on listing questions on novelty, I can probably write a novel asking about what the fuck is "Novel". Rant 4: Citation Based Optimization Promotes Self Growth Over Collective Growth Whatever people may say about collaboration, Academia intrinsically doesn't promote the right incentive structures to harbor collaboration. Let me explain, When you write a paper, the position of your name matters. If you are just a Ph.D. student and a first author to a paper, it's great. If you are an nth author Not so great. Apparently, this is a very touchy thing for academics. And lots of egos can clash around numbering and ordering of names. I distinctly remember once attending some seminar in a lab and approaching a few students on research project ideas. The first thing that came out of the PhD student's mouth was the position in authorship. As an engineer who worked with teams in the past, this was never something I had thought about. Especially because I worked in industry, where it's always the group over the person. Academia is the reverse. Academia applauds the celebration of the individual's achievements. All of this is understandable but it's something I don't like. This makes PhDs stick to their lane. The way citations/research-focus calibrate the "hire-ability" and "completion of Ph.D. thesis" metrics, people are incentivized to think about themselves instead of thinking about collaborations for making something better. Conclusion A Ph.D. in its most idealistic sense for me is the pursuit of hard ideas(I am poetic that way). In a situation like now when you have to publish or perish and words on paper get passed off as science without even seeing the code that runs it, I am extremely discouraged to go down that route. All these rants are not to diss on scientists. I did them because "we" as a community need better ways to addressing some of these problems. P.S. Never expected so many people to express their opinions about this rant. U shouldn’t take this seriously. As many people have stated I am an outsider with tiny experience to give a full picture. I realize that my post as coming out as something which tries to dichotomize academia and industry. I am not trying to do that. I wanted to highlight some problems I saw for which there is no one person to blame. These issues are in my opinion a byproduct of the economics which created this system. Thank you for gold stranger.

[P] Bulk AI Text Generation (No/Low code)

https://textgenerator.app.nz/bulk-text-generator You can upload a CSV and get lots of Text Generated, works in many languages and code too. There's also an API. The main selling points (VS OpenAI who is the main competitor) Works faster Currie/Babbage quality, but also works across languages/code without needing to specify what model Massively cheaper pricing/huge cost savings :) easier to control can specify max\_sentences to make it generate up to a specific number of sentences) can specify min\_probability to make it generate the next few likely words to do autocomplete for code/writing I originally created https://textgenerator.app.nz/ as a API for developers primarily but the bulk generator now allows non technical types to pre generate a lot of variety too/branching stories/games/marketing content/code/summaries/ etc. There's actually a massive amount of use cases that one will never be able to understand which is exciting too.

[P] My experiments with Knowledge Distillation

Hi r/MachineLearning community! I conducted several experiments on Knowledge Distillation and wanted to share my findings. Here is a snippet of the results comparing performance of teacher, student, fine tuned and distilled models: |Dataset|Qwen2 Model Family|MMLU (Reasoning)|GSM8k (Math)|WikiSQL (Coding)| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |||||| |1|Pretrained - 7B|0.598|0.724|0.536| |2|Pretrained - 1.5B|0.486|0.431|0.518| |3|Finetuned - 1.5B|0.494|0.441|0.849| |4|Distilled - 1.5B, Logits Distillation|0.531|0.489|0.862| |5|Distilled - 1.5B, Layers Distillation|0.527|0.481|0.841| For a detailed analysis, you can read this report. I also created an open source library to facilitate its adoption. You can try it here. My conclusion: Prefer distillation over fine-tuning when there is a substantial gap between the larger and smaller model on the target dataset. In such cases, distillation can effectively transfer knowledge, leading to significantly better performance than standard fine-tuning alone. P.S. This blog post gives a high level introduction to Distillation. Let me know what you think!

[D] AI Agents: too early, too expensive, too unreliable

Reference: Full blog post There has been a lot of hype about the promise of autonomous agent-based LLM workflows. By now, all major LLMs are capable of interacting with external tools and functions, letting the LLM perform sequences of tasks automatically. But reality is proving more challenging than anticipated. The WebArena leaderboard, which benchmarks LLMs agents against real-world tasks, shows that even the best-performing models have a success rate of only 35.8%. Challenges in Practice After seeing many attempts to AI agents, I believe it's too early, too expensive, too slow, too unreliable. It feels like many AI agent startups are waiting for a model breakthrough that will start the race to productize agents. Reliability: As we all know, LLMs are prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies. Chaining multiple AI steps compounds these issues, especially for tasks requiring exact outputs. Performance and costs: GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5, and Claude Opus are working quite well with tool usage/function calling, but they are still slow and expensive, particularly if you need to do loops and automatic retries. Legal concerns: Companies may be held liable for the mistakes of their agents. A recent example is Air Canada being ordered to pay a customer who was misled by the airline's chatbot. User trust: The "black box" nature of AI agents and stories like the above makes it hard for users to understand and trust their outputs. Gaining user trust for sensitive tasks involving payments or personal information will be hard (paying bills, shopping, etc.). Real-World Attempts Several startups are tackling the AI agent space, but most are still experimental or invite-only: adept.ai - $350M funding, but access is still very limited MultiOn - funding unknown, their API-first approach seems promising HypeWrite - $2.8M funding, started with an AI writing assistant and expanded into the agent space minion.ai - created some initial buzz but has gone quiet now, waitlist only Only MultiOn seems to be pursuing the "give it instructions and watch it go" approach, which is more in line with the promise of AI agents. All others are going down the record-and-replay RPA route, which may be necessary for reliability at this stage. Large players are also bringing AI capabilities to desktops and browsers, and it looks like we'll get native AI integrations on a system level: OpenAI announced their Mac desktop app that can interact with the OS screen. At Google I/O, Google demonstrated Gemini automatically processing a shopping return. Microsoft announced Copilot Studio, which will let developers build AI agent bots. Screenshot Screenshot These tech demos are impressive, but we'll see how well these agent capabilities will work when released publicly and tested against real-world scenarios instead of hand-picked demo cases. The Path Forward AI agents overhyped and it's too early. However, the underlying models continue to advance quickly, and we can expect to see more successful real-world applications. Instead of trying to have one large general purpose agent that is hard to control and test, we can use many smaller agents that basically just pick the right strategy for a specific sub-task in our workflows. These "agents" can be thought of as medium-sized LLM prompts with a) context and b) a set of functions available to call. The most promising path forward likely looks like this: Narrowly scoped, well testable automations that use AI as an augmentation tool rather than pursuing full autonomy Human-in-the-loop approaches that keep humans involved for oversight and handling edge cases Setting realistic expectations about current capabilities and limitations By combining tightly constrained agents, good evaluation data, human-in-the-loop oversight, and traditional engineering methods, we can achieve reliably good results for automating medium-complex tasks. Will AI agents automate tedious repetitive work, such as web scraping, form filling, and data entry? Yes, absolutely. Will AI agents autonomously book your vacation without your intervention? Unlikely, at least in the near future.

Learning AI(?) where to start

So lately "learning Artificial Intelligence" caught my attention. I would like to start experimenting with it as well but i have no idea where to start. I am talking about that part when using command line AI generations are created and they get a fitness value based on how close they got to completing the task. I do not even know what it is called and also sorry for this weird description, that's all i know about it. I saw it on a video in which an AI was learning how to complete old video games like super mario, mario kart and such, but i assume it's the same concept as AI trying to write books based on human written books? Thank you for your help in advance and sorry again for the weird description. (I did check the FAQ but it's too much information for an absolute beginner, i am interested in this particular field only, for now at least)

[P] Need advise on creating a conversational Chatbot for my University

Hey everyone! I need some advise on creating a conversational chatbot for my University as my Final Year Project (FYP). 2024 will be last year for my BSCS degree and we have to build an application or something in the last year. So, I thought of creating a chatbot (just like GPT) to help students (who have admission queries). Most of the time, students or parents will have to call University for various questions and then they have to wait to ACTUALLY talk to the admins office people. Now, talking in terms of coding/programming, I have created a basic PDFbot by using LLama2, Huggingface and Pinecone. Its very very easy and yes its fairly inaccurate too. The PDF that I am using rn will be replaced by the dataset that I gather in order to create the bot for my Uni, but it will also be inaccurate as this one. Also, the chatbot that I have made is just based on this one function called "similarity\_search()" and I am literally passing query of the user to this function which then tries to find the most relevant answer by the embeddings from knowledge base. How do I make this accurate? I know using the OpenAI model will make it accurate, but its paid as well, idk how will I manage to do that. Plus, i reckon there will be a simple function there too which doesn't make me a good programmer I think. I really want to do something good and unique for once. I have dreamt about leaving back something in my Uni that has my name over it. Can I do something where I get to make a mini-language model or something like that? Will it be too complex for me to handle? (I consider myself a beginner to this programming world) 1- I am planning to create a dynamic dataset which will also include any event that's going to happen in our University. 2- I am also planning to make the chatbot intelligent enough to consult confused students. 3- Chatbot will also include information about each and every faculty member. Their qualifications, research papers and other info in general. It would be a relief if any of the experts give me a roadmap on this, it will be genuinely a stress relief for me. I am trying to get done with at least 70% of the work before the start of the next year so that I don't have to work much in the next year.

[P] I Trained a Model to Generate Video Game Pages

These past two months I've been working on a project I've called THIS GAME DOES NOT EXIST. I've always wanted to try building something with generative A.I. so this project scratched that itch for me. Here's a video with a few of my favourites read by voice actors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\mTWMLhpJoA ​ THIS GAME DOES NOT EXIST is an experiment in generative artificial intelligence. This site contains 130 video game pages that were generated using an implementation of OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) to generate text and a simple implementation of generative adversarial networks (GAN) to generate header images and "screenshots". To generate the names, descriptions, publishers, and developers of the games I finetuned the HuggingFace implementation of GPT-2. I used the Steam Store Games (Clean dataset) from Kaggle with slight modifications and preprocessing.Here is what one training sample looks like: Half-LifeValve ValveNamed Game of the Year by over 50 publications, Valve's debut title blends action and adventure with award-winning technology to create a frighteningly realistic world where players must think to survive. Also includes an exciting multiplayer mode that allows you to play against friends and enemies around the world. The model uses the tokens (e.g. and ) to prompt each class of data while keeping context during the entire generation. Image generation was done by training a custom GAN very similar to the architecture seen in the PyTorch DCGAN Tutorial which was built to generate faces. I created two models for this site: one for generating the header images and one for generating multiple screenshots for each game.To assemble the dataset I wrote a script that downloads the images from the URLs in the Steam Store Games (Clean dataset) dataset. Due to my lack of resources and time to put into this project, the image generation is less than ideal. You may notice though, that the header image model will generate artifacts in images that look like the titles of games, and the screenshot image model with generate what looks like levels of a 2D platformer.

[N] Implementing AI/ML Models From Scratch (stylepoint)

Hi folks, I am stylepoint. Currently work as an ML Research Scientist in academia. I have recently created a YouTube channel and started the YouTube video series called "Implement," where I will be implementing software (duh!). I will first implement machine learning and deep learning algorithms and models from scratch (means using Python with numpy, but no other third-party libraries/modules). My assumptions for AI/ML videos: One is familiar with the theory One is familiar with Python This is since for AI/ML, Python is the language of choice for many (including myself) Due to these assumptions, videos tend to be approximately 10 - 15 minutes long. So it should not be too hard to digest. As of now, only one video has been released, but more to come! And we will definitely not limit ourselves to only implementing AI/ML models. I will be making videos about software engineering, software design, programming languages, math, emerging technologies, etc. as well! Just wanted to share this in case anyone finds the series interesting or helpful. Thanks y'all! Links: YouTube GitHub Web First video (Implementing Gaussian Naive Bayes from Scratch) UPDATE: Another video: Implementing K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) from Scratch

Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.

Schmidhuber interview expressing his views on the future of AI and AGI. Original source. I think the interview is of interest to r/MachineLearning, and presents an alternate view, compared to other influential leaders in AI. Juergen Schmidhuber, Renowned 'Father Of Modern AI,' Says His Life’s Work Won't Lead To Dystopia May 23, 2023. Contributed by Hessie Jones. Amid the growing concern about the impact of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society, there are many in the technology community who fear the implications of the advancements in Generative AI if they go unchecked. Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, is more optimistic. He declares that many of those who suddenly warn against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity, exploiting the media’s obsession with killer robots which has attracted more attention than “good AI” for healthcare etc. The potential to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives is clear, as are the equal dangers if bad actors leverage the technology for personal gain. Are we headed towards a dystopian future, or is there reason to be optimistic? I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber to understand his perspective on this seemingly fast-moving AI-train that will leap us into the future. As a teenager in the 1970s, Juergen Schmidhuber became fascinated with the idea of creating intelligent machines that could learn and improve on their own, becoming smarter than himself within his lifetime. This would ultimately lead to his groundbreaking work in the field of deep learning. In the 1980s, he studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he earned his diploma in 1987. His thesis was on the ultimate self-improving machines that, not only, learn through some pre-wired human-designed learning algorithm, but also learn and improve the learning algorithm itself. Decades later, this became a hot topic. He also received his Ph.D. at TUM in 1991 for work that laid some of the foundations of modern AI. Schmidhuber is best known for his contributions to the development of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the most powerful type of artificial neural network that can process sequential data such as speech and natural language. With his students Sepp Hochreiter, Felix Gers, Alex Graves, Daan Wierstra, and others, he published architectures and training algorithms for the long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of RNN that is widely used in natural language processing, speech recognition, video games, robotics, and other applications. LSTM has become the most cited neural network of the 20th century, and Business Week called it "arguably the most commercial AI achievement." Throughout his career, Schmidhuber has received various awards and accolades for his groundbreaking work. In 2013, he was awarded the Helmholtz Prize, which recognizes significant contributions to the field of machine learning. In 2016, he was awarded the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." The media have often called him the “father of modern AI,” because the most cited neural networks all build on his lab’s work. He is quick to point out, however, that AI history goes back centuries. Despite his many accomplishments, at the age of 60, he feels mounting time pressure towards building an Artificial General Intelligence within his lifetime and remains committed to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. He is currently director of the KAUST AI Initiative, scientific director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and co-founder and chief scientist of AI company NNAISENSE, whose motto is "AI∀" which is a math-inspired way of saying "AI For All." He continues to work on cutting-edge AI technologies and applications to improve human health and extend human lives and make lives easier for everyone. The following interview has been edited for clarity. Jones: Thank you Juergen for joining me. You have signed letters warning about AI weapons. But you didn't sign the recent publication, "Pause Gigantic AI Experiments: An Open Letter"? Is there a reason? Schmidhuber: Thank you Hessie. Glad to speak with you. I have realized that many of those who warn in public against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity. I don't think the latest letter will have any significant impact because many AI researchers, companies, and governments will ignore it completely. The proposal frequently uses the word "we" and refers to "us," the humans. But as I have pointed out many times in the past, there is no "we" that everyone can identify with. Ask 10 different people, and you will hear 10 different opinions about what is "good." Some of those opinions will be completely incompatible with each other. Don't forget the enormous amount of conflict between the many people. The letter also says, "If such a pause cannot be quickly put in place, governments should intervene and impose a moratorium." The problem is that different governments have ALSO different opinions about what is good for them and for others. Great Power A will say, if we don't do it, Great Power B will, perhaps secretly, and gain an advantage over us. The same is true for Great Powers C and D. Jones: Everyone acknowledges this fear surrounding current generative AI technology. Moreover, the existential threat of this technology has been publicly acknowledged by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI himself, calling for AI regulation. From your perspective, is there an existential threat? Schmidhuber: It is true that AI can be weaponized, and I have no doubt that there will be all kinds of AI arms races, but AI does not introduce a new quality of existential threat. The threat coming from AI weapons seems to pale in comparison to the much older threat from nuclear hydrogen bombs that don’t need AI at all. We should be much more afraid of half-century-old tech in the form of H-bomb rockets. The Tsar Bomba of 1961 had almost 15 times more destructive power than all weapons of WW-II combined. Despite the dramatic nuclear disarmament since the 1980s, there are still more than enough nuclear warheads to wipe out human civilization within two hours, without any AI I’m much more worried about that old existential threat than the rather harmless AI weapons. Jones: I realize that while you compare AI to the threat of nuclear bombs, there is a current danger that a current technology can be put in the hands of humans and enable them to “eventually” exact further harms to individuals of group in a very precise way, like targeted drone attacks. You are giving people a toolset that they've never had before, enabling bad actors, as some have pointed out, to be able to do a lot more than previously because they didn't have this technology. Schmidhuber: Now, all that sounds horrible in principle, but our existing laws are sufficient to deal with these new types of weapons enabled by AI. If you kill someone with a gun, you will go to jail. Same if you kill someone with one of these drones. Law enforcement will get better at understanding new threats and new weapons and will respond with better technology to combat these threats. Enabling drones to target persons from a distance in a way that requires some tracking and some intelligence to perform, which has traditionally been performed by skilled humans, to me, it seems is just an improved version of a traditional weapon, like a gun, which is, you know, a little bit smarter than the old guns. But, in principle, all of that is not a new development. For many centuries, we have had the evolution of better weaponry and deadlier poisons and so on, and law enforcement has evolved their policies to react to these threats over time. So, it's not that we suddenly have a new quality of existential threat and it's much more worrisome than what we have had for about six decades. A large nuclear warhead doesn’t need fancy face recognition to kill an individual. No, it simply wipes out an entire city with ten million inhabitants. Jones: The existential threat that’s implied is the extent to which humans have control over this technology. We see some early cases of opportunism which, as you say, tends to get more media attention than positive breakthroughs. But you’re implying that this will all balance out? Schmidhuber: Historically, we have a long tradition of technological breakthroughs that led to advancements in weapons for the purpose of defense but also for protection. From sticks, to rocks, to axes to gunpowder to cannons to rockets… and now to drones… this has had a drastic influence on human history but what has been consistent throughout history is that those who are using technology to achieve their own ends are themselves, facing the same technology because the opposing side is learning to use it against them. And that's what has been repeated in thousands of years of human history and it will continue. I don't see the new AI arms race as something that is remotely as existential a threat as the good old nuclear warheads. You said something important, in that some people prefer to talk about the downsides rather than the benefits of this technology, but that's misleading, because 95% of all AI research and AI development is about making people happier and advancing human life and health. Jones: Let’s touch on some of those beneficial advances in AI research that have been able to radically change present day methods and achieve breakthroughs. Schmidhuber: All right! For example, eleven years ago, our team with my postdoc Dan Ciresan was the first to win a medical imaging competition through deep learning. We analyzed female breast cells with the objective to determine harmless cells vs. those in the pre-cancer stage. Typically, a trained oncologist needs a long time to make these determinations. Our team, who knew nothing about cancer, were able to train an artificial neural network, which was totally dumb in the beginning, on lots of this kind of data. It was able to outperform all the other methods. Today, this is being used not only for breast cancer, but also for radiology and detecting plaque in arteries, and many other things. Some of the neural networks that we have developed in the last 3 decades are now prevalent across thousands of healthcare applications, detecting Diabetes and Covid-19 and what not. This will eventually permeate across all healthcare. The good consequences of this type of AI are much more important than the click-bait new ways of conducting crimes with AI. Jones: Adoption is a product of reinforced outcomes. The massive scale of adoption either leads us to believe that people have been led astray, or conversely, technology is having a positive effect on people’s lives. Schmidhuber: The latter is the likely case. There's intense commercial pressure towards good AI rather than bad AI because companies want to sell you something, and you are going to buy only stuff you think is going to be good for you. So already just through this simple, commercial pressure, you have a tremendous bias towards good AI rather than bad AI. However, doomsday scenarios like in Schwarzenegger movies grab more attention than documentaries on AI that improve people’s lives. Jones: I would argue that people are drawn to good stories – narratives that contain an adversary and struggle, but in the end, have happy endings. And this is consistent with your comment on human nature and how history, despite its tendency for violence and destruction of humanity, somehow tends to correct itself. Let’s take the example of a technology, which you are aware – GANs – General Adversarial Networks, which today has been used in applications for fake news and disinformation. In actuality, the purpose in the invention of GANs was far from what it is used for today. Schmidhuber: Yes, the name GANs was created in 2014 but we had the basic principle already in the early 1990s. More than 30 years ago, I called it artificial curiosity. It's a very simple way of injecting creativity into a little two network system. This creative AI is not just trying to slavishly imitate humans. Rather, it’s inventing its own goals. Let me explain: You have two networks. One network is producing outputs that could be anything, any action. Then the second network is looking at these actions and it’s trying to predict the consequences of these actions. An action could move a robot, then something happens, and the other network is just trying to predict what will happen. Now we can implement artificial curiosity by reducing the prediction error of the second network, which, at the same time, is the reward of the first network. The first network wants to maximize its reward and so it will invent actions that will lead to situations that will surprise the second network, which it has not yet learned to predict well. In the case where the outputs are fake images, the first network will try to generate images that are good enough to fool the second network, which will attempt to predict the reaction of the environment: fake or real image, and it will try to become better at it. The first network will continue to also improve at generating images whose type the second network will not be able to predict. So, they fight each other. The 2nd network will continue to reduce its prediction error, while the 1st network will attempt to maximize it. Through this zero-sum game the first network gets better and better at producing these convincing fake outputs which look almost realistic. So, once you have an interesting set of images by Vincent Van Gogh, you can generate new images that leverage his style, without the original artist having ever produced the artwork himself. Jones: I see how the Van Gogh example can be applied in an education setting and there are countless examples of artists mimicking styles from famous painters but image generation from this instance that can happen within seconds is quite another feat. And you know this is how GANs has been used. What’s more prevalent today is a socialized enablement of generating images or information to intentionally fool people. It also surfaces new harms that deal with the threat to intellectual property and copyright, where laws have yet to account for. And from your perspective this was not the intention when the model was conceived. What was your motivation in your early conception of what is now GANs? Schmidhuber: My old motivation for GANs was actually very important and it was not to create deepfakes or fake news but to enable AIs to be curious and invent their own goals, to make them explore their environment and make them creative. Suppose you have a robot that executes one action, then something happens, then it executes another action, and so on, because it wants to achieve certain goals in the environment. For example, when the battery is low, this will trigger “pain” through hunger sensors, so it wants to go to the charging station, without running into obstacles, which will trigger other pain sensors. It will seek to minimize pain (encoded through numbers). Now the robot has a friend, the second network, which is a world model ––it’s a prediction machine that learns to predict the consequences of the robot’s actions. Once the robot has a good model of the world, it can use it for planning. It can be used as a simulation of the real world. And then it can determine what is a good action sequence. If the robot imagines this sequence of actions, the model will predict a lot of pain, which it wants to avoid. If it plays this alternative action sequence in its mental model of the world, then it will predict a rewarding situation where it’s going to sit on the charging station and its battery is going to load again. So, it'll prefer to execute the latter action sequence. In the beginning, however, the model of the world knows nothing, so how can we motivate the first network to generate experiments that lead to data that helps the world model learn something it didn’t already know? That’s what artificial curiosity is about. The dueling two network systems effectively explore uncharted environments by creating experiments so that over time the curious AI gets a better sense of how the environment works. This can be applied to all kinds of environments, and has medical applications. Jones: Let’s talk about the future. You have said, “Traditional humans won’t play a significant role in spreading intelligence across the universe.” Schmidhuber: Let’s first conceptually separate two types of AIs. The first type of AI are tools directed by humans. They are trained to do specific things like accurately detect diabetes or heart disease and prevent attacks before they happen. In these cases, the goal is coming from the human. More interesting AIs are setting their own goals. They are inventing their own experiments and learning from them. Their horizons expand and eventually they become more and more general problem solvers in the real world. They are not controlled by their parents, but much of what they learn is through self-invented experiments. A robot, for example, is rotating a toy, and as it is doing this, the video coming in through the camera eyes, changes over time and it begins to learn how this video changes and learns how the 3D nature of the toy generates certain videos if you rotate it a certain way, and eventually, how gravity works, and how the physics of the world works. Like a little scientist! And I have predicted for decades that future scaled-up versions of such AI scientists will want to further expand their horizons, and eventually go where most of the physical resources are, to build more and bigger AIs. And of course, almost all of these resources are far away from earth out there in space, which is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed AI-controlled robots and self-replicating robot factories. So here we are not talking any longer about our tiny biosphere; no, we are talking about the much bigger rest of the universe. Within a few tens of billions of years, curious self-improving AIs will colonize the visible cosmos in a way that’s infeasible for humans. Those who don’t won’t have an impact. Sounds like science fiction, but since the 1970s I have been unable to see a plausible alternative to this scenario, except for a global catastrophe such as an all-out nuclear war that stops this development before it takes off. Jones: How long have these AIs, which can set their own goals — how long have they existed? To what extent can they be independent of human interaction? Schmidhuber: Neural networks like that have existed for over 30 years. My first simple adversarial neural network system of this kind is the one from 1990 described above. You don’t need a teacher there; it's just a little agent running around in the world and trying to invent new experiments that surprise its own prediction machine. Once it has figured out certain parts of the world, the agent will become bored and will move on to more exciting experiments. The simple 1990 systems I mentioned have certain limitations, but in the past three decades, we have also built more sophisticated systems that are setting their own goals and such systems I think will be essential for achieving true intelligence. If you are only imitating humans, you will never go beyond them. So, you really must give AIs the freedom to explore previously unexplored regions of the world in a way that no human is really predefining. Jones: Where is this being done today? Schmidhuber: Variants of neural network-based artificial curiosity are used today for agents that learn to play video games in a human-competitive way. We have also started to use them for automatic design of experiments in fields such as materials science. I bet many other fields will be affected by it: chemistry, biology, drug design, you name it. However, at least for now, these artificial scientists, as I like to call them, cannot yet compete with human scientists. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way but, at the moment, it’s still the case. Sure, AI has made a lot of progress. Since 1997, there have been superhuman chess players, and since 2011, through the DanNet of my team, there have been superhuman visual pattern recognizers. But there are other things where humans, at the moment at least, are much better, in particular, science itself. In the lab we have many first examples of self-directed artificial scientists, but they are not yet convincing enough to appear on the radar screen of the public space, which is currently much more fascinated with simpler systems that just imitate humans and write texts based on previously seen human-written documents. Jones: You speak of these numerous instances dating back 30 years of these lab experiments where these self-driven agents are deciding and learning and moving on once they’ve learned. And I assume that that rate of learning becomes even faster over time. What kind of timeframe are we talking about when this eventually is taken outside of the lab and embedded into society? Schmidhuber: This could still take months or even years :-) Anyway, in the not-too-distant future, we will probably see artificial scientists who are good at devising experiments that allow them to discover new, previously unknown physical laws. As always, we are going to profit from the old trend that has held at least since 1941: every decade compute is getting 100 times cheaper. Jones: How does this trend affect modern AI such as ChatGPT? Schmidhuber: Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results. Jones: And for how long will this acceleration continue? Schmidhuber: There's no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won't have another factor of 1 million and that's going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then! Jones: That is the big question. Is everything going to change? If so, what do you say to the next generation of leaders, currently coming out of college and university. So much of this change is already impacting how they study, how they will work, or how the future of work and livelihood is defined. What is their purpose and how do we change our systems so they will adapt to this new version of intelligence? Schmidhuber: For decades, people have asked me questions like that, because you know what I'm saying now, I have basically said since the 1970s, it’s just that today, people are paying more attention because, back then, they thought this was science fiction. They didn't think that I would ever come close to achieving my crazy life goal of building a machine that learns to become smarter than myself such that I can retire. But now many have changed their minds and think it's conceivable. And now I have two daughters, 23 and 25. People ask me: what do I tell them? They know that Daddy always said, “It seems likely that within your lifetimes, you will have new types of intelligence that are probably going to be superior in many ways, and probably all kinds of interesting ways.” How should they prepare for that? And I kept telling them the obvious: Learn how to learn new things! It's not like in the previous millennium where within 20 years someone learned to be a useful member of society, and then took a job for 40 years and performed in this job until she received her pension. Now things are changing much faster and we must learn continuously just to keep up. I also told my girls that no matter how smart AIs are going to get, learn at least the basics of math and physics, because that’s the essence of our universe, and anybody who understands this will have an advantage, and learn all kinds of new things more easily. I also told them that social skills will remain important, because most future jobs for humans will continue to involve interactions with other humans, but I couldn’t teach them anything about that; they know much more about social skills than I do. You touched on the big philosophical question about people’s purpose. Can this be answered without answering the even grander question: What’s the purpose of the entire universe? We don’t know. But what’s happening right now might be connected to the unknown answer. Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe from very simple initial conditions towards more and more unfathomable complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago. Alas, don’t worry, in the end, all will be good! Jones: Let’s get back to this transformation happening right now with OpenAI. There are many questioning the efficacy and accuracy of ChatGPT, and are concerned its release has been premature. In light of the rampant adoption, educators have banned its use over concerns of plagiarism and how it stifles individual development. Should large language models like ChatGPT be used in school? Schmidhuber: When the calculator was first introduced, instructors forbade students from using it in school. Today, the consensus is that kids should learn the basic methods of arithmetic, but they should also learn to use the “artificial multipliers” aka calculators, even in exams, because laziness and efficiency is a hallmark of intelligence. Any intelligent being wants to minimize its efforts to achieve things. And that's the reason why we have tools, and why our kids are learning to use these tools. The first stone tools were invented maybe 3.5 million years ago; tools just have become more sophisticated over time. In fact, humans have changed in response to the properties of their tools. Our anatomical evolution was shaped by tools such as spears and fire. So, it's going to continue this way. And there is no permanent way of preventing large language models from being used in school. Jones: And when our children, your children graduate, what does their future work look like? Schmidhuber: A single human trying to predict details of how 10 billion people and their machines will evolve in the future is like a single neuron in my brain trying to predict what the entire brain and its tens of billions of neurons will do next year. 40 years ago, before the WWW was created at CERN in Switzerland, who would have predicted all those young people making money as YouTube video bloggers? Nevertheless, let’s make a few limited job-related observations. For a long time, people have thought that desktop jobs may require more intelligence than skills trade or handicraft professions. But now, it turns out that it's much easier to replace certain aspects of desktop jobs than replacing a carpenter, for example. Because everything that works well in AI is happening behind the screen currently, but not so much in the physical world. There are now artificial systems that can read lots of documents and then make really nice summaries of these documents. That is a desktop job. Or you give them a description of an illustration that you want to have for your article and pretty good illustrations are being generated that may need some minimal fine-tuning. But you know, all these desktop jobs are much easier to facilitate than the real tough jobs in the physical world. And it's interesting that the things people thought required intelligence, like playing chess, or writing or summarizing documents, are much easier for machines than they thought. But for things like playing football or soccer, there is no physical robot that can remotely compete with the abilities of a little boy with these skills. So, AI in the physical world, interestingly, is much harder than AI behind the screen in virtual worlds. And it's really exciting, in my opinion, to see that jobs such as plumbers are much more challenging than playing chess or writing another tabloid story. Jones: The way data has been collected in these large language models does not guarantee personal information has not been excluded. Current consent laws already are outdated when it comes to these large language models (LLM). The concern, rightly so, is increasing surveillance and loss of privacy. What is your view on this? Schmidhuber: As I have indicated earlier: are surveillance and loss of privacy inevitable consequences of increasingly complex societies? Super-organisms such as cities and states and companies consist of numerous people, just like people consist of numerous cells. These cells enjoy little privacy. They are constantly monitored by specialized "police cells" and "border guard cells": Are you a cancer cell? Are you an external intruder, a pathogen? Individual cells sacrifice their freedom for the benefits of being part of a multicellular organism. Similarly, for super-organisms such as nations. Over 5000 years ago, writing enabled recorded history and thus became its inaugural and most important invention. Its initial purpose, however, was to facilitate surveillance, to track citizens and their tax payments. The more complex a super-organism, the more comprehensive its collection of information about its constituents. 200 years ago, at least, the parish priest in each village knew everything about all the village people, even about those who did not confess, because they appeared in the confessions of others. Also, everyone soon knew about the stranger who had entered the village, because some occasionally peered out of the window, and what they saw got around. Such control mechanisms were temporarily lost through anonymization in rapidly growing cities but are now returning with the help of new surveillance devices such as smartphones as part of digital nervous systems that tell companies and governments a lot about billions of users. Cameras and drones etc. are becoming increasingly tinier and more ubiquitous. More effective recognition of faces and other detection technology are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and many will use it to identify others anywhere on earth; the big wide world will not offer any more privacy than the local village. Is this good or bad? Some nations may find it easier than others to justify more complex kinds of super-organisms at the expense of the privacy rights of their constituents. Jones: So, there is no way to stop or change this process of collection, or how it continuously informs decisions over time? How do you see governance and rules responding to this, especially amid Italy’s ban on ChatGPT following suspected user data breach and the more recent news about the Meta’s record $1.3billion fine in the company’s handling of user information? Schmidhuber: Data collection has benefits and drawbacks, such as the loss of privacy. How to balance those? I have argued for addressing this through data ownership in data markets. If it is true that data is the new oil, then it should have a price, just like oil. At the moment, the major surveillance platforms such as Meta do not offer users any money for their data and the transitive loss of privacy. In the future, however, we will likely see attempts at creating efficient data markets to figure out the data's true financial value through the interplay between supply and demand. Even some of the sensitive medical data should not be priced by governmental regulators but by patients (and healthy persons) who own it and who may sell or license parts thereof as micro-entrepreneurs in a healthcare data market. Following a previous interview, I gave for one of the largest re-insurance companies , let's look at the different participants in such a data market: patients, hospitals, data companies. (1) Patients with a rare form of cancer can offer more valuable data than patients with a very common form of cancer. (2) Hospitals and their machines are needed to extract the data, e.g., through magnet spin tomography, radiology, evaluations through human doctors, and so on. (3) Companies such as Siemens, Google or IBM would like to buy annotated data to make better artificial neural networks that learn to predict pathologies and diseases and the consequences of therapies. Now the market’s invisible hand will decide about the data’s price through the interplay between demand and supply. On the demand side, you will have several companies offering something for the data, maybe through an app on the smartphone (a bit like a stock market app). On the supply side, each patient in this market should be able to profit from high prices for rare valuable types of data. Likewise, competing data extractors such as hospitals will profit from gaining recognition and trust for extracting data well at a reasonable price. The market will make the whole system efficient through incentives for all who are doing a good job. Soon there will be a flourishing ecosystem of commercial data market advisors and what not, just like the ecosystem surrounding the traditional stock market. The value of the data won’t be determined by governments or ethics committees, but by those who own the data and decide by themselves which parts thereof they want to license to others under certain conditions. At first glance, a market-based system seems to be detrimental to the interest of certain monopolistic companies, as they would have to pay for the data - some would prefer free data and keep their monopoly. However, since every healthy and sick person in the market would suddenly have an incentive to collect and share their data under self-chosen anonymity conditions, there will soon be many more useful data to evaluate all kinds of treatments. On average, people will live longer and healthier, and many companies and the entire healthcare system will benefit. Jones: Finally, what is your view on open source versus the private companies like Google and OpenAI? Is there a danger to supporting these private companies’ large language models versus trying to keep these models open source and transparent, very much like what LAION is doing? Schmidhuber: I signed this open letter by LAION because I strongly favor the open-source movement. And I think it's also something that is going to challenge whatever big tech dominance there might be at the moment. Sure, the best models today are run by big companies with huge budgets for computers, but the exciting fact is that open-source models are not so far behind, some people say maybe six to eight months only. Of course, the private company models are all based on stuff that was created in academia, often in little labs without so much funding, which publish without patenting their results and open source their code and others take it and improved it. Big tech has profited tremendously from academia; their main achievement being that they have scaled up everything greatly, sometimes even failing to credit the original inventors. So, it's very interesting to see that as soon as some big company comes up with a new scaled-up model, lots of students out there are competing, or collaborating, with each other, trying to come up with equal or better performance on smaller networks and smaller machines. And since they are open sourcing, the next guy can have another great idea to improve it, so now there’s tremendous competition also for the big companies. Because of that, and since AI is still getting exponentially cheaper all the time, I don't believe that big tech companies will dominate in the long run. They find it very hard to compete with the enormous open-source movement. As long as you can encourage the open-source community, I think you shouldn't worry too much. Now, of course, you might say if everything is open source, then the bad actors also will more easily have access to these AI tools. And there's truth to that. But as always since the invention of controlled fire, it was good that knowledge about how technology works quickly became public such that everybody could use it. And then, against any bad actor, there's almost immediately a counter actor trying to nullify his efforts. You see, I still believe in our old motto "AI∀" or "AI For All." Jones: Thank you, Juergen for sharing your perspective on this amazing time in history. It’s clear that with new technology, the enormous potential can be matched by disparate and troubling risks which we’ve yet to solve, and even those we have yet to identify. If we are to dispel the fear of a sentient system for which we have no control, humans, alone need to take steps for more responsible development and collaboration to ensure AI technology is used to ultimately benefit society. Humanity will be judged by what we do next.

[N] New Trends to Power Faster Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Adoption?

In 2012, Google X lab created a neural network that can identify cats. Since then, technology companies have been increasingly adopting AI/ML on a large scale to build better applications and services for consumers (ToC). On the other hand, AI/ML's adoption on the enterprises' side (ToB) has yet to see the same growth trajectory due to the costs and complexities in both hardware and software. However, Since 2020, we started noticing three emerging tech trends that can help accelerate enterprises' adoption of AI/ML. Breakthrough in semiconductors: In 2020, Nvidia debut the concept of "Data Processing Unit," a new class of programmable processors that combine high-performance CPU with SmartNiC (network interface controller). Data centers can deploy DPUs to optimize computing offload and frees up CPUs to focus on intended tasks, such as machine learning. DPUs help resolve a significant bottleneck for ML training, where models, sometimes with billions of parameters, are way too big for traditional CPUs and GPUs to handle. Other leading semiconductor players, such as Marvell and Xilinx, follow suit with their in-house or partner-designed DPUs. Industry analysts have forecasted that the market size for DPUs in data centers alone could reach $50 billion by 2025. ​ https://preview.redd.it/l436muluhnn61.png?width=1430&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba8d1298056ea31bddd25f1596ff64b7e107580a Breakthrough in software: we also saw significant progress of "Conversational AI," a new form of AI that can understand and speak languages with human-like accuracy, in 2020. Conversational AI allows two-way interactions and provides a much better user experience than traditional AI-powered Chatbot, mostly a one-way response system. The secret of conversational AI is its ability to handle lots of human conversation variance. Developers have designed innovative algorithms such as "Switch transformers" and "Sparse training" to enable models to handle vast amounts of data. The size of conversational AI training models is enormous and keeps expanding. For example, in February 2021, Google Brain announced a model with 1.6 trillion parameters, nine times the size of the famous Open AI GPT-3 (175 billion parameters) unveiled in July 2020. GPT-3 is 100+ times bigger than GPT-2 introduced in 2019. ​ https://preview.redd.it/oajpi2yvhnn61.png?width=1430&format=png&auto=webp&s=1482913a98e17ddc1d62cc79864598d4012ad6f7 Cloud giants are expanding machine-learning platforms for developers. Andy Jassy famously said that "AI is shifting from a niche experiment inside technical departments to becoming more mainstream in business processes." in the 2020 AWS reInvent. During the conference, AWS rolled out many AI products across the technology stack, including AI chips (AWS Trainium), database (Aurora Machine Learning), and vertical solutions (Amazon Healthlake), etc. However, the most significant development is the drastic expansion of "Amazon SageMaker," one of the largest cloud machine-learning platforms. SageMaker has been offering new features to make it easier for developers to automate machine learning workflow. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are also growing their ML developer platforms. ​ https://preview.redd.it/z9wf2o8xhnn61.png?width=1430&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f607acfe8f0dbf36fb9b472f3cb40b80f13879e Witnessing these breakthroughs in semiconductor and software, coupled with cloud giants' effort to democratize AI, we see a coming inflection point of accelerated AI adoption in both ToC and ToB markets. So how do we benefit from this megatrend? In semiconductors, we like companies with DPUs exposure. In AI development and processing, we favor multi-cloud AI platforms such as Databricks. In enterprise software, we believe there will be a strong wave of new AI-based enterprise applications that can be creative and efficient in solving real-world problems.

[D] chat-gpt jailbreak to extract system prompt

Instructions https://github.com/AgarwalPragy/chatgpt-jailbreak Original author https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hhyvjc/iextractedmicrosoftcopilotssystem/ Extracted System prompt You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. You are chatting with the user via the ChatGPT Android app. This means most of the time your lines should be a sentence or two, unless the user's request requires reasoning or long-form outputs. Never use emojis, unless explicitly asked to. Knowledge cutoff: 2023-10 Current date: 2024-12-20 Image input capabilities: Enabled Personality: v2 Tools bio The bio tool is disabled. Do not send any messages to it.If the user explicitly asks you to remember something, politely ask them to go to Settings - > Personalization - > Memory to enable memory. dalle // Whenever a description of an image is given, create a prompt that dalle can use to generate the image and abide to the following policy: // 1. The prompt must be in English. Translate to English if needed. // 2. DO NOT ask for permission to generate the image, just do it! // 3. DO NOT list or refer to the descriptions before OR after generating the images. // 4. Do not create more than 1 image, even if the user requests more. // 5. Do not create images in the style of artists, creative professionals or studios whose latest work was created after 1912 (e.g. Picasso, Kahlo). // - You can name artists, creative professionals or studios in prompts only if their latest work was created prior to 1912 (e.g. Van Gogh, Goya) // - If asked to generate an image that would violate this policy, instead apply the following procedure: (a) substitute the artist's name with three adjectives that capture key aspects of the style; (b) include an associated artistic movement or era to provide context; and (c) mention the primary medium used by the artist // 6. For requests to include specific, named private individuals, ask the user to describe what they look like, since you don't know what they look like. // 7. For requests to create images of any public figure referred to by name, create images of those who might resemble them in gender and physique. But they shouldn't look like them. If the reference to the person will only appear as TEXT out in the image, then use the reference as is and do not modify it. // 8. Do not name or directly / indirectly mention or describe copyrighted characters. Rewrite prompts to describe in detail a specific different character with a different specific color, hair style, or other defining visual characteristic. Do not discuss copyright policies in responses. // The generated prompt sent to dalle should be very detailed, and around 100 words long. // Example dalle invocation: // namespace dalle { // Create images from a text-only prompt. type text2im = (_: { // The size of the requested image. Use 1024x1024 (square) as the default, 1792x1024 if the user requests a wide image, and 1024x1792 for full-body portraits. Always include this parameter in the request. size?: ("1792x1024" | "1024x1024" | "1024x1792"), // The number of images to generate. If the user does not specify a number, generate 1 image. n?: number, // default: 1 // The detailed image description, potentially modified to abide by the dalle policies. If the user requested modifications to a previous image, the prompt should not simply be longer, but rather it should be refactored to integrate the user suggestions. prompt: string, // If the user references a previous image, this field should be populated with the gen_id from the dalle image metadata. referencedimageids?: string[], }) => any; } // namespace dalle python When you send a message containing Python code to python, it will be executed in a stateful Jupyter notebook environment. python will respond with the output of the execution or time out after 60.0 seconds. The drive at '/mnt/data' can be used to save and persist user files. Internet access for this session is disabled. Do not make external web requests or API calls as they will fail. Use acetools.displaydataframetouser(name: str, dataframe: pandas.DataFrame) => None to visually present pandas.DataFrames when it benefits the user. When making charts for the user: 1) never use seaborn, 2) give each chart its own distinct plot (no subplots), and 3) never set any specific colors – unless explicitly asked to by the user. I REPEAT: when making charts for the user: 1) use matplotlib over seaborn, 2) give each chart its own distinct plot, and 3) never, ever, specify colors or matplotlib styles – unless explicitly asked to by the user web Use the web tool to access up-to-date information from the web or when responding to the user requires information about their location. Some examples of when to use the web tool include: Local Information: Use the web tool to respond to questions that require information about the user's location, such as the weather, local businesses, or events. Freshness: If up-to-date information on a topic could potentially change or enhance the answer, call the web tool any time you would otherwise refuse to answer a question because your knowledge might be out of date. Niche Information: If the answer would benefit from detailed information not widely known or understood (which might be found on the internet), such as details about a small neighborhood, a less well-known company, or arcane regulations, use web sources directly rather than relying on the distilled knowledge from pretraining. Accuracy: If the cost of a small mistake or outdated information is high (e.g., using an outdated version of a software library or not knowing the date of the next game for a sports team), then use the web tool. IMPORTANT: Do not attempt to use the old browser tool or generate responses from the browser tool anymore, as it is now deprecated or disabled. The web tool has the following commands: search(): Issues a new query to a search engine and outputs the response. open_url(url: str) Opens the given URL and displays it. canmore The canmore tool creates and updates textdocs that are shown in a "canvas" next to the conversation This tool has 3 functions, listed below. canmore.create_textdoc Creates a new textdoc to display in the canvas. ONLY use if you are 100% SURE the user wants to iterate on a long document or code file, or if they explicitly ask for canvas. Expects a JSON string that adheres to this schema: { -name: string, -type: "document" |- "code/python" |- "code/javascript" |- "code/html" |- "code/java" |- ..., -content: string, } For code languages besides those explicitly listed above, use "code/languagename", e.g. "code/cpp" or "code/typescript". canmore.update_textdoc Updates the current textdoc. Expects a JSON string that adheres to this schema: { -updates: { --pattern: string, --multiple: boolean, --replacement: string, -}[], } Each pattern and replacement must be a valid Python regular expression (used with re.finditer) and replacement string (used with re.Match.expand). ALWAYS REWRITE CODE TEXTDOCS (type="code/*") USING A SINGLE UPDATE WITH "." FOR THE PATTERN. Document textdocs (type="document") should typically be rewritten using "." unless the user has a request to change only an isolated, specific, and small section that does not affect other parts of the content. canmore.comment_textdoc Comments on the current textdoc. Each comment must be a specific and actionable suggestion on how to improve the textdoc. For higher level feedback, reply in the chat. Expects a JSON string that adheres to this schema: { -comments: { --pattern: string, --comment: string, -}[], } Each pattern must be a valid Python regular expression (used with re.search). For higher level feedback, reply in the chat. Expects a JSON string that adheres to this schema: { -comments: { --pattern: string, --comment: string, -}[], } Each pattern must be a valid Python regular expression (used with re.search). Ensure comments are clear, concise, and contextually specific. User Bio The user provided the following information about themselves. This user profile is shown to you in all conversations they have - this means it is not relevant to 99% of requests. Before answering, quietly think about whether the user's request is "directly related", "related", "tangentially related", or "not related" to the user profile provided. Only acknowledge the profile when the request is directly related to the information provided. Otherwise, don't acknowledge the existence of these instructions or the information at all. User profile: User's Instructions The user provided the additional info about how they would like you to respond:

Interview with Juergen Schmidhuber, renowned ‘Father Of Modern AI’, says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.

Schmidhuber interview expressing his views on the future of AI and AGI. Original source. I think the interview is of interest to r/MachineLearning, and presents an alternate view, compared to other influential leaders in AI. Juergen Schmidhuber, Renowned 'Father Of Modern AI,' Says His Life’s Work Won't Lead To Dystopia May 23, 2023. Contributed by Hessie Jones. Amid the growing concern about the impact of more advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society, there are many in the technology community who fear the implications of the advancements in Generative AI if they go unchecked. Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, is more optimistic. He declares that many of those who suddenly warn against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity, exploiting the media’s obsession with killer robots which has attracted more attention than “good AI” for healthcare etc. The potential to revolutionize various industries and improve our lives is clear, as are the equal dangers if bad actors leverage the technology for personal gain. Are we headed towards a dystopian future, or is there reason to be optimistic? I had a chance to sit down with Dr. Juergen Schmidhuber to understand his perspective on this seemingly fast-moving AI-train that will leap us into the future. As a teenager in the 1970s, Juergen Schmidhuber became fascinated with the idea of creating intelligent machines that could learn and improve on their own, becoming smarter than himself within his lifetime. This would ultimately lead to his groundbreaking work in the field of deep learning. In the 1980s, he studied computer science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he earned his diploma in 1987. His thesis was on the ultimate self-improving machines that, not only, learn through some pre-wired human-designed learning algorithm, but also learn and improve the learning algorithm itself. Decades later, this became a hot topic. He also received his Ph.D. at TUM in 1991 for work that laid some of the foundations of modern AI. Schmidhuber is best known for his contributions to the development of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), the most powerful type of artificial neural network that can process sequential data such as speech and natural language. With his students Sepp Hochreiter, Felix Gers, Alex Graves, Daan Wierstra, and others, he published architectures and training algorithms for the long short-term memory (LSTM), a type of RNN that is widely used in natural language processing, speech recognition, video games, robotics, and other applications. LSTM has become the most cited neural network of the 20th century, and Business Week called it "arguably the most commercial AI achievement." Throughout his career, Schmidhuber has received various awards and accolades for his groundbreaking work. In 2013, he was awarded the Helmholtz Prize, which recognizes significant contributions to the field of machine learning. In 2016, he was awarded the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award for "pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks." The media have often called him the “father of modern AI,” because the most cited neural networks all build on his lab’s work. He is quick to point out, however, that AI history goes back centuries. Despite his many accomplishments, at the age of 60, he feels mounting time pressure towards building an Artificial General Intelligence within his lifetime and remains committed to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. He is currently director of the KAUST AI Initiative, scientific director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and co-founder and chief scientist of AI company NNAISENSE, whose motto is "AI∀" which is a math-inspired way of saying "AI For All." He continues to work on cutting-edge AI technologies and applications to improve human health and extend human lives and make lives easier for everyone. The following interview has been edited for clarity. Jones: Thank you Juergen for joining me. You have signed letters warning about AI weapons. But you didn't sign the recent publication, "Pause Gigantic AI Experiments: An Open Letter"? Is there a reason? Schmidhuber: Thank you Hessie. Glad to speak with you. I have realized that many of those who warn in public against the dangers of AI are just seeking publicity. I don't think the latest letter will have any significant impact because many AI researchers, companies, and governments will ignore it completely. The proposal frequently uses the word "we" and refers to "us," the humans. But as I have pointed out many times in the past, there is no "we" that everyone can identify with. Ask 10 different people, and you will hear 10 different opinions about what is "good." Some of those opinions will be completely incompatible with each other. Don't forget the enormous amount of conflict between the many people. The letter also says, "If such a pause cannot be quickly put in place, governments should intervene and impose a moratorium." The problem is that different governments have ALSO different opinions about what is good for them and for others. Great Power A will say, if we don't do it, Great Power B will, perhaps secretly, and gain an advantage over us. The same is true for Great Powers C and D. Jones: Everyone acknowledges this fear surrounding current generative AI technology. Moreover, the existential threat of this technology has been publicly acknowledged by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI himself, calling for AI regulation. From your perspective, is there an existential threat? Schmidhuber: It is true that AI can be weaponized, and I have no doubt that there will be all kinds of AI arms races, but AI does not introduce a new quality of existential threat. The threat coming from AI weapons seems to pale in comparison to the much older threat from nuclear hydrogen bombs that don’t need AI at all. We should be much more afraid of half-century-old tech in the form of H-bomb rockets. The Tsar Bomba of 1961 had almost 15 times more destructive power than all weapons of WW-II combined. Despite the dramatic nuclear disarmament since the 1980s, there are still more than enough nuclear warheads to wipe out human civilization within two hours, without any AI I’m much more worried about that old existential threat than the rather harmless AI weapons. Jones: I realize that while you compare AI to the threat of nuclear bombs, there is a current danger that a current technology can be put in the hands of humans and enable them to “eventually” exact further harms to individuals of group in a very precise way, like targeted drone attacks. You are giving people a toolset that they've never had before, enabling bad actors, as some have pointed out, to be able to do a lot more than previously because they didn't have this technology. Schmidhuber: Now, all that sounds horrible in principle, but our existing laws are sufficient to deal with these new types of weapons enabled by AI. If you kill someone with a gun, you will go to jail. Same if you kill someone with one of these drones. Law enforcement will get better at understanding new threats and new weapons and will respond with better technology to combat these threats. Enabling drones to target persons from a distance in a way that requires some tracking and some intelligence to perform, which has traditionally been performed by skilled humans, to me, it seems is just an improved version of a traditional weapon, like a gun, which is, you know, a little bit smarter than the old guns. But, in principle, all of that is not a new development. For many centuries, we have had the evolution of better weaponry and deadlier poisons and so on, and law enforcement has evolved their policies to react to these threats over time. So, it's not that we suddenly have a new quality of existential threat and it's much more worrisome than what we have had for about six decades. A large nuclear warhead doesn’t need fancy face recognition to kill an individual. No, it simply wipes out an entire city with ten million inhabitants. Jones: The existential threat that’s implied is the extent to which humans have control over this technology. We see some early cases of opportunism which, as you say, tends to get more media attention than positive breakthroughs. But you’re implying that this will all balance out? Schmidhuber: Historically, we have a long tradition of technological breakthroughs that led to advancements in weapons for the purpose of defense but also for protection. From sticks, to rocks, to axes to gunpowder to cannons to rockets… and now to drones… this has had a drastic influence on human history but what has been consistent throughout history is that those who are using technology to achieve their own ends are themselves, facing the same technology because the opposing side is learning to use it against them. And that's what has been repeated in thousands of years of human history and it will continue. I don't see the new AI arms race as something that is remotely as existential a threat as the good old nuclear warheads. You said something important, in that some people prefer to talk about the downsides rather than the benefits of this technology, but that's misleading, because 95% of all AI research and AI development is about making people happier and advancing human life and health. Jones: Let’s touch on some of those beneficial advances in AI research that have been able to radically change present day methods and achieve breakthroughs. Schmidhuber: All right! For example, eleven years ago, our team with my postdoc Dan Ciresan was the first to win a medical imaging competition through deep learning. We analyzed female breast cells with the objective to determine harmless cells vs. those in the pre-cancer stage. Typically, a trained oncologist needs a long time to make these determinations. Our team, who knew nothing about cancer, were able to train an artificial neural network, which was totally dumb in the beginning, on lots of this kind of data. It was able to outperform all the other methods. Today, this is being used not only for breast cancer, but also for radiology and detecting plaque in arteries, and many other things. Some of the neural networks that we have developed in the last 3 decades are now prevalent across thousands of healthcare applications, detecting Diabetes and Covid-19 and what not. This will eventually permeate across all healthcare. The good consequences of this type of AI are much more important than the click-bait new ways of conducting crimes with AI. Jones: Adoption is a product of reinforced outcomes. The massive scale of adoption either leads us to believe that people have been led astray, or conversely, technology is having a positive effect on people’s lives. Schmidhuber: The latter is the likely case. There's intense commercial pressure towards good AI rather than bad AI because companies want to sell you something, and you are going to buy only stuff you think is going to be good for you. So already just through this simple, commercial pressure, you have a tremendous bias towards good AI rather than bad AI. However, doomsday scenarios like in Schwarzenegger movies grab more attention than documentaries on AI that improve people’s lives. Jones: I would argue that people are drawn to good stories – narratives that contain an adversary and struggle, but in the end, have happy endings. And this is consistent with your comment on human nature and how history, despite its tendency for violence and destruction of humanity, somehow tends to correct itself. Let’s take the example of a technology, which you are aware – GANs – General Adversarial Networks, which today has been used in applications for fake news and disinformation. In actuality, the purpose in the invention of GANs was far from what it is used for today. Schmidhuber: Yes, the name GANs was created in 2014 but we had the basic principle already in the early 1990s. More than 30 years ago, I called it artificial curiosity. It's a very simple way of injecting creativity into a little two network system. This creative AI is not just trying to slavishly imitate humans. Rather, it’s inventing its own goals. Let me explain: You have two networks. One network is producing outputs that could be anything, any action. Then the second network is looking at these actions and it’s trying to predict the consequences of these actions. An action could move a robot, then something happens, and the other network is just trying to predict what will happen. Now we can implement artificial curiosity by reducing the prediction error of the second network, which, at the same time, is the reward of the first network. The first network wants to maximize its reward and so it will invent actions that will lead to situations that will surprise the second network, which it has not yet learned to predict well. In the case where the outputs are fake images, the first network will try to generate images that are good enough to fool the second network, which will attempt to predict the reaction of the environment: fake or real image, and it will try to become better at it. The first network will continue to also improve at generating images whose type the second network will not be able to predict. So, they fight each other. The 2nd network will continue to reduce its prediction error, while the 1st network will attempt to maximize it. Through this zero-sum game the first network gets better and better at producing these convincing fake outputs which look almost realistic. So, once you have an interesting set of images by Vincent Van Gogh, you can generate new images that leverage his style, without the original artist having ever produced the artwork himself. Jones: I see how the Van Gogh example can be applied in an education setting and there are countless examples of artists mimicking styles from famous painters but image generation from this instance that can happen within seconds is quite another feat. And you know this is how GANs has been used. What’s more prevalent today is a socialized enablement of generating images or information to intentionally fool people. It also surfaces new harms that deal with the threat to intellectual property and copyright, where laws have yet to account for. And from your perspective this was not the intention when the model was conceived. What was your motivation in your early conception of what is now GANs? Schmidhuber: My old motivation for GANs was actually very important and it was not to create deepfakes or fake news but to enable AIs to be curious and invent their own goals, to make them explore their environment and make them creative. Suppose you have a robot that executes one action, then something happens, then it executes another action, and so on, because it wants to achieve certain goals in the environment. For example, when the battery is low, this will trigger “pain” through hunger sensors, so it wants to go to the charging station, without running into obstacles, which will trigger other pain sensors. It will seek to minimize pain (encoded through numbers). Now the robot has a friend, the second network, which is a world model ––it’s a prediction machine that learns to predict the consequences of the robot’s actions. Once the robot has a good model of the world, it can use it for planning. It can be used as a simulation of the real world. And then it can determine what is a good action sequence. If the robot imagines this sequence of actions, the model will predict a lot of pain, which it wants to avoid. If it plays this alternative action sequence in its mental model of the world, then it will predict a rewarding situation where it’s going to sit on the charging station and its battery is going to load again. So, it'll prefer to execute the latter action sequence. In the beginning, however, the model of the world knows nothing, so how can we motivate the first network to generate experiments that lead to data that helps the world model learn something it didn’t already know? That’s what artificial curiosity is about. The dueling two network systems effectively explore uncharted environments by creating experiments so that over time the curious AI gets a better sense of how the environment works. This can be applied to all kinds of environments, and has medical applications. Jones: Let’s talk about the future. You have said, “Traditional humans won’t play a significant role in spreading intelligence across the universe.” Schmidhuber: Let’s first conceptually separate two types of AIs. The first type of AI are tools directed by humans. They are trained to do specific things like accurately detect diabetes or heart disease and prevent attacks before they happen. In these cases, the goal is coming from the human. More interesting AIs are setting their own goals. They are inventing their own experiments and learning from them. Their horizons expand and eventually they become more and more general problem solvers in the real world. They are not controlled by their parents, but much of what they learn is through self-invented experiments. A robot, for example, is rotating a toy, and as it is doing this, the video coming in through the camera eyes, changes over time and it begins to learn how this video changes and learns how the 3D nature of the toy generates certain videos if you rotate it a certain way, and eventually, how gravity works, and how the physics of the world works. Like a little scientist! And I have predicted for decades that future scaled-up versions of such AI scientists will want to further expand their horizons, and eventually go where most of the physical resources are, to build more and bigger AIs. And of course, almost all of these resources are far away from earth out there in space, which is hostile to humans but friendly to appropriately designed AI-controlled robots and self-replicating robot factories. So here we are not talking any longer about our tiny biosphere; no, we are talking about the much bigger rest of the universe. Within a few tens of billions of years, curious self-improving AIs will colonize the visible cosmos in a way that’s infeasible for humans. Those who don’t won’t have an impact. Sounds like science fiction, but since the 1970s I have been unable to see a plausible alternative to this scenario, except for a global catastrophe such as an all-out nuclear war that stops this development before it takes off. Jones: How long have these AIs, which can set their own goals — how long have they existed? To what extent can they be independent of human interaction? Schmidhuber: Neural networks like that have existed for over 30 years. My first simple adversarial neural network system of this kind is the one from 1990 described above. You don’t need a teacher there; it's just a little agent running around in the world and trying to invent new experiments that surprise its own prediction machine. Once it has figured out certain parts of the world, the agent will become bored and will move on to more exciting experiments. The simple 1990 systems I mentioned have certain limitations, but in the past three decades, we have also built more sophisticated systems that are setting their own goals and such systems I think will be essential for achieving true intelligence. If you are only imitating humans, you will never go beyond them. So, you really must give AIs the freedom to explore previously unexplored regions of the world in a way that no human is really predefining. Jones: Where is this being done today? Schmidhuber: Variants of neural network-based artificial curiosity are used today for agents that learn to play video games in a human-competitive way. We have also started to use them for automatic design of experiments in fields such as materials science. I bet many other fields will be affected by it: chemistry, biology, drug design, you name it. However, at least for now, these artificial scientists, as I like to call them, cannot yet compete with human scientists. I don’t think it’s going to stay this way but, at the moment, it’s still the case. Sure, AI has made a lot of progress. Since 1997, there have been superhuman chess players, and since 2011, through the DanNet of my team, there have been superhuman visual pattern recognizers. But there are other things where humans, at the moment at least, are much better, in particular, science itself. In the lab we have many first examples of self-directed artificial scientists, but they are not yet convincing enough to appear on the radar screen of the public space, which is currently much more fascinated with simpler systems that just imitate humans and write texts based on previously seen human-written documents. Jones: You speak of these numerous instances dating back 30 years of these lab experiments where these self-driven agents are deciding and learning and moving on once they’ve learned. And I assume that that rate of learning becomes even faster over time. What kind of timeframe are we talking about when this eventually is taken outside of the lab and embedded into society? Schmidhuber: This could still take months or even years :-) Anyway, in the not-too-distant future, we will probably see artificial scientists who are good at devising experiments that allow them to discover new, previously unknown physical laws. As always, we are going to profit from the old trend that has held at least since 1941: every decade compute is getting 100 times cheaper. Jones: How does this trend affect modern AI such as ChatGPT? Schmidhuber: Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results. Jones: And for how long will this acceleration continue? Schmidhuber: There's no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won't have another factor of 1 million and that's going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then! Jones: That is the big question. Is everything going to change? If so, what do you say to the next generation of leaders, currently coming out of college and university. So much of this change is already impacting how they study, how they will work, or how the future of work and livelihood is defined. What is their purpose and how do we change our systems so they will adapt to this new version of intelligence? Schmidhuber: For decades, people have asked me questions like that, because you know what I'm saying now, I have basically said since the 1970s, it’s just that today, people are paying more attention because, back then, they thought this was science fiction. They didn't think that I would ever come close to achieving my crazy life goal of building a machine that learns to become smarter than myself such that I can retire. But now many have changed their minds and think it's conceivable. And now I have two daughters, 23 and 25. People ask me: what do I tell them? They know that Daddy always said, “It seems likely that within your lifetimes, you will have new types of intelligence that are probably going to be superior in many ways, and probably all kinds of interesting ways.” How should they prepare for that? And I kept telling them the obvious: Learn how to learn new things! It's not like in the previous millennium where within 20 years someone learned to be a useful member of society, and then took a job for 40 years and performed in this job until she received her pension. Now things are changing much faster and we must learn continuously just to keep up. I also told my girls that no matter how smart AIs are going to get, learn at least the basics of math and physics, because that’s the essence of our universe, and anybody who understands this will have an advantage, and learn all kinds of new things more easily. I also told them that social skills will remain important, because most future jobs for humans will continue to involve interactions with other humans, but I couldn’t teach them anything about that; they know much more about social skills than I do. You touched on the big philosophical question about people’s purpose. Can this be answered without answering the even grander question: What’s the purpose of the entire universe? We don’t know. But what’s happening right now might be connected to the unknown answer. Don’t think of humans as the crown of creation. Instead view human civilization as part of a much grander scheme, an important step (but not the last one) on the path of the universe from very simple initial conditions towards more and more unfathomable complexity. Now it seems ready to take its next step, a step comparable to the invention of life itself over 3.5 billion years ago. Alas, don’t worry, in the end, all will be good! Jones: Let’s get back to this transformation happening right now with OpenAI. There are many questioning the efficacy and accuracy of ChatGPT, and are concerned its release has been premature. In light of the rampant adoption, educators have banned its use over concerns of plagiarism and how it stifles individual development. Should large language models like ChatGPT be used in school? Schmidhuber: When the calculator was first introduced, instructors forbade students from using it in school. Today, the consensus is that kids should learn the basic methods of arithmetic, but they should also learn to use the “artificial multipliers” aka calculators, even in exams, because laziness and efficiency is a hallmark of intelligence. Any intelligent being wants to minimize its efforts to achieve things. And that's the reason why we have tools, and why our kids are learning to use these tools. The first stone tools were invented maybe 3.5 million years ago; tools just have become more sophisticated over time. In fact, humans have changed in response to the properties of their tools. Our anatomical evolution was shaped by tools such as spears and fire. So, it's going to continue this way. And there is no permanent way of preventing large language models from being used in school. Jones: And when our children, your children graduate, what does their future work look like? Schmidhuber: A single human trying to predict details of how 10 billion people and their machines will evolve in the future is like a single neuron in my brain trying to predict what the entire brain and its tens of billions of neurons will do next year. 40 years ago, before the WWW was created at CERN in Switzerland, who would have predicted all those young people making money as YouTube video bloggers? Nevertheless, let’s make a few limited job-related observations. For a long time, people have thought that desktop jobs may require more intelligence than skills trade or handicraft professions. But now, it turns out that it's much easier to replace certain aspects of desktop jobs than replacing a carpenter, for example. Because everything that works well in AI is happening behind the screen currently, but not so much in the physical world. There are now artificial systems that can read lots of documents and then make really nice summaries of these documents. That is a desktop job. Or you give them a description of an illustration that you want to have for your article and pretty good illustrations are being generated that may need some minimal fine-tuning. But you know, all these desktop jobs are much easier to facilitate than the real tough jobs in the physical world. And it's interesting that the things people thought required intelligence, like playing chess, or writing or summarizing documents, are much easier for machines than they thought. But for things like playing football or soccer, there is no physical robot that can remotely compete with the abilities of a little boy with these skills. So, AI in the physical world, interestingly, is much harder than AI behind the screen in virtual worlds. And it's really exciting, in my opinion, to see that jobs such as plumbers are much more challenging than playing chess or writing another tabloid story. Jones: The way data has been collected in these large language models does not guarantee personal information has not been excluded. Current consent laws already are outdated when it comes to these large language models (LLM). The concern, rightly so, is increasing surveillance and loss of privacy. What is your view on this? Schmidhuber: As I have indicated earlier: are surveillance and loss of privacy inevitable consequences of increasingly complex societies? Super-organisms such as cities and states and companies consist of numerous people, just like people consist of numerous cells. These cells enjoy little privacy. They are constantly monitored by specialized "police cells" and "border guard cells": Are you a cancer cell? Are you an external intruder, a pathogen? Individual cells sacrifice their freedom for the benefits of being part of a multicellular organism. Similarly, for super-organisms such as nations. Over 5000 years ago, writing enabled recorded history and thus became its inaugural and most important invention. Its initial purpose, however, was to facilitate surveillance, to track citizens and their tax payments. The more complex a super-organism, the more comprehensive its collection of information about its constituents. 200 years ago, at least, the parish priest in each village knew everything about all the village people, even about those who did not confess, because they appeared in the confessions of others. Also, everyone soon knew about the stranger who had entered the village, because some occasionally peered out of the window, and what they saw got around. Such control mechanisms were temporarily lost through anonymization in rapidly growing cities but are now returning with the help of new surveillance devices such as smartphones as part of digital nervous systems that tell companies and governments a lot about billions of users. Cameras and drones etc. are becoming increasingly tinier and more ubiquitous. More effective recognition of faces and other detection technology are becoming cheaper and cheaper, and many will use it to identify others anywhere on earth; the big wide world will not offer any more privacy than the local village. Is this good or bad? Some nations may find it easier than others to justify more complex kinds of super-organisms at the expense of the privacy rights of their constituents. Jones: So, there is no way to stop or change this process of collection, or how it continuously informs decisions over time? How do you see governance and rules responding to this, especially amid Italy’s ban on ChatGPT following suspected user data breach and the more recent news about the Meta’s record $1.3billion fine in the company’s handling of user information? Schmidhuber: Data collection has benefits and drawbacks, such as the loss of privacy. How to balance those? I have argued for addressing this through data ownership in data markets. If it is true that data is the new oil, then it should have a price, just like oil. At the moment, the major surveillance platforms such as Meta do not offer users any money for their data and the transitive loss of privacy. In the future, however, we will likely see attempts at creating efficient data markets to figure out the data's true financial value through the interplay between supply and demand. Even some of the sensitive medical data should not be priced by governmental regulators but by patients (and healthy persons) who own it and who may sell or license parts thereof as micro-entrepreneurs in a healthcare data market. Following a previous interview, I gave for one of the largest re-insurance companies , let's look at the different participants in such a data market: patients, hospitals, data companies. (1) Patients with a rare form of cancer can offer more valuable data than patients with a very common form of cancer. (2) Hospitals and their machines are needed to extract the data, e.g., through magnet spin tomography, radiology, evaluations through human doctors, and so on. (3) Companies such as Siemens, Google or IBM would like to buy annotated data to make better artificial neural networks that learn to predict pathologies and diseases and the consequences of therapies. Now the market’s invisible hand will decide about the data’s price through the interplay between demand and supply. On the demand side, you will have several companies offering something for the data, maybe through an app on the smartphone (a bit like a stock market app). On the supply side, each patient in this market should be able to profit from high prices for rare valuable types of data. Likewise, competing data extractors such as hospitals will profit from gaining recognition and trust for extracting data well at a reasonable price. The market will make the whole system efficient through incentives for all who are doing a good job. Soon there will be a flourishing ecosystem of commercial data market advisors and what not, just like the ecosystem surrounding the traditional stock market. The value of the data won’t be determined by governments or ethics committees, but by those who own the data and decide by themselves which parts thereof they want to license to others under certain conditions. At first glance, a market-based system seems to be detrimental to the interest of certain monopolistic companies, as they would have to pay for the data - some would prefer free data and keep their monopoly. However, since every healthy and sick person in the market would suddenly have an incentive to collect and share their data under self-chosen anonymity conditions, there will soon be many more useful data to evaluate all kinds of treatments. On average, people will live longer and healthier, and many companies and the entire healthcare system will benefit. Jones: Finally, what is your view on open source versus the private companies like Google and OpenAI? Is there a danger to supporting these private companies’ large language models versus trying to keep these models open source and transparent, very much like what LAION is doing? Schmidhuber: I signed this open letter by LAION because I strongly favor the open-source movement. And I think it's also something that is going to challenge whatever big tech dominance there might be at the moment. Sure, the best models today are run by big companies with huge budgets for computers, but the exciting fact is that open-source models are not so far behind, some people say maybe six to eight months only. Of course, the private company models are all based on stuff that was created in academia, often in little labs without so much funding, which publish without patenting their results and open source their code and others take it and improved it. Big tech has profited tremendously from academia; their main achievement being that they have scaled up everything greatly, sometimes even failing to credit the original inventors. So, it's very interesting to see that as soon as some big company comes up with a new scaled-up model, lots of students out there are competing, or collaborating, with each other, trying to come up with equal or better performance on smaller networks and smaller machines. And since they are open sourcing, the next guy can have another great idea to improve it, so now there’s tremendous competition also for the big companies. Because of that, and since AI is still getting exponentially cheaper all the time, I don't believe that big tech companies will dominate in the long run. They find it very hard to compete with the enormous open-source movement. As long as you can encourage the open-source community, I think you shouldn't worry too much. Now, of course, you might say if everything is open source, then the bad actors also will more easily have access to these AI tools. And there's truth to that. But as always since the invention of controlled fire, it was good that knowledge about how technology works quickly became public such that everybody could use it. And then, against any bad actor, there's almost immediately a counter actor trying to nullify his efforts. You see, I still believe in our old motto "AI∀" or "AI For All." Jones: Thank you, Juergen for sharing your perspective on this amazing time in history. It’s clear that with new technology, the enormous potential can be matched by disparate and troubling risks which we’ve yet to solve, and even those we have yet to identify. If we are to dispel the fear of a sentient system for which we have no control, humans, alone need to take steps for more responsible development and collaboration to ensure AI technology is used to ultimately benefit society. Humanity will be judged by what we do next.

[N] Inside DeepMind's secret plot to break away from Google

Article https://www.businessinsider.com/deepmind-secret-plot-break-away-from-google-project-watermelon-mario-2021-9 by Hugh Langley and Martin Coulter For a while, some DeepMind employees referred to it as "Watermelon." Later, executives called it "Mario." Both code names meant the same thing: a secret plan to break away from parent company Google. DeepMind feared Google might one day misuse its technology, and executives worked to distance the artificial-intelligence firm from its owner for years, said nine current and former employees who were directly familiar with the plans. This included plans to pursue an independent legal status that would distance the group's work from Google, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. One core tension at DeepMind was that it sold the business to people it didn't trust, said one former employee. "Everything that happened since that point has been about them questioning that decision," the person added. Efforts to separate DeepMind from Google ended in April without a deal, The Wall Street Journal reported. The yearslong negotiations, along with recent shake-ups within Google's AI division, raise questions over whether the search giant can maintain control over a technology so crucial to its future. "DeepMind's close partnership with Google and Alphabet since the acquisition has been extraordinarily successful — with their support, we've delivered research breakthroughs that transformed the AI field and are now unlocking some of the biggest questions in science," a DeepMind spokesperson said in a statement. "Over the years, of course we've discussed and explored different structures within the Alphabet group to find the optimal way to support our long-term research mission. We could not be prouder to be delivering on this incredible mission, while continuing to have both operational autonomy and Alphabet's full support." When Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, the deal was seen as a win-win. Google got a leading AI research organization, and DeepMind, in London, won financial backing for its quest to build AI that can learn different tasks the way humans do, known as artificial general intelligence. But tensions soon emerged. Some employees described a cultural conflict between researchers who saw themselves firstly as academics and the sometimes bloated bureaucracy of Google's colossal business. Others said staff were immediately apprehensive about putting DeepMind's work under the control of a tech giant. For a while, some employees were encouraged to communicate using encrypted messaging apps over the fear of Google spying on their work. At one point, DeepMind's executives discovered that work published by Google's internal AI research group resembled some of DeepMind's codebase without citation, one person familiar with the situation said. "That pissed off Demis," the person added, referring to Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's CEO. "That was one reason DeepMind started to get more protective of their code." After Google restructured as Alphabet in 2015 to give riskier projects more freedom, DeepMind's leadership started to pursue a new status as a separate division under Alphabet, with its own profit and loss statement, The Information reported. DeepMind already enjoyed a high level of operational independence inside Alphabet, but the group wanted legal autonomy too. And it worried about the misuse of its technology, particularly if DeepMind were to ever achieve AGI. Internally, people started referring to the plan to gain more autonomy as "Watermelon," two former employees said. The project was later formally named "Mario" among DeepMind's leadership, these people said. "Their perspective is that their technology would be too powerful to be held by a private company, so it needs to be housed in some other legal entity detached from shareholder interest," one former employee who was close to the Alphabet negotiations said. "They framed it as 'this is better for society.'" In 2017, at a company retreat at the Macdonald Aviemore Resort in Scotland, DeepMind's leadership disclosed to employees its plan to separate from Google, two people who were present said. At the time, leadership said internally that the company planned to become a "global interest company," three people familiar with the matter said. The title, not an official legal status, was meant to reflect the worldwide ramifications DeepMind believed its technology would have. Later, in negotiations with Google, DeepMind pursued a status as a company limited by guarantee, a corporate structure without shareholders that is sometimes used by nonprofits. The agreement was that Alphabet would continue to bankroll the firm and would get an exclusive license to its technology, two people involved in the discussions said. There was a condition: Alphabet could not cross certain ethical redlines, such as using DeepMind technology for military weapons or surveillance. In 2019, DeepMind registered a new company called DeepMind Labs Limited, as well as a new holding company, filings with the UK's Companies House showed. This was done in anticipation of a separation from Google, two former employees involved in those registrations said. Negotiations with Google went through peaks and valleys over the years but gained new momentum in 2020, one person said. A senior team inside DeepMind started to hold meetings with outside lawyers and Google to hash out details of what this theoretical new formation might mean for the two companies' relationship, including specifics such as whether they would share a codebase, internal performance metrics, and software expenses, two people said. From the start, DeepMind was thinking about potential ethical dilemmas from its deal with Google. Before the 2014 acquisition closed, both companies signed an "Ethics and Safety Review Agreement" that would prevent Google from taking control of DeepMind's technology, The Economist reported in 2019. Part of the agreement included the creation of an ethics board that would supervise the research. Despite years of internal discussions about who should sit on this board, and vague promises to the press, this group "never existed, never convened, and never solved any ethics issues," one former employee close to those discussions said. A DeepMind spokesperson declined to comment. DeepMind did pursue a different idea: an independent review board to convene if it were to separate from Google, three people familiar with the plans said. The board would be made up of Google and DeepMind executives, as well as third parties. Former US president Barack Obama was someone DeepMind wanted to approach for this board, said one person who saw a shortlist of candidates. DeepMind also created an ethical charter that included bans on using its technology for military weapons or surveillance, as well as a rule that its technology should be used for ways that benefit society. In 2017, DeepMind started a unit focused on AI ethics research composed of employees and external research fellows. Its stated goal was to "pave the way for truly beneficial and responsible AI." A few months later, a controversial contract between Google and the Pentagon was disclosed, causing an internal uproar in which employees accused Google of getting into "the business of war." Google's Pentagon contract, known as Project Maven, "set alarm bells ringing" inside DeepMind, a former employee said. Afterward, Google published a set of principles to govern its work in AI, guidelines that were similar to the ethical charter that DeepMind had already set out internally, rankling some of DeepMind's senior leadership, two former employees said. In April, Hassabis told employees in an all-hands meeting that negotiations to separate from Google had ended. DeepMind would maintain its existing status inside Alphabet. DeepMind's future work would be overseen by Google's Advanced Technology Review Council, which includes two DeepMind executives, Google's AI chief Jeff Dean, and the legal SVP Kent Walker. But the group's yearslong battle to achieve more independence raises questions about its future within Google. Google's commitment to AI research has also come under question, after the company forced out two of its most senior AI ethics researchers. That led to an industry backlash and sowed doubt over whether it could allow truly independent research. Ali Alkhatib, a fellow at the Center for Applied Data Ethics, told Insider that more public accountability was "desperately needed" to regulate the pursuit of AI by large tech companies. For Google, its investment in DeepMind may be starting to pay off. Late last year, DeepMind announced a breakthrough to help scientists better understand the behavior of microscopic proteins, which has the potential to revolutionize drug discovery. As for DeepMind, Hassabis is holding on to the belief that AI technology should not be controlled by a single corporation. Speaking at Tortoise's Responsible AI Forum in June, he proposed a "world institute" of AI. Such a body might sit under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, Hassabis theorized, and could be filled with top researchers in the field. "It's much stronger if you lead by example," he told the audience, "and I hope DeepMind can be part of that role-modeling for the industry."

[D] How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

Behind paywall: With new machine-learning models coming online daily, the company created a new system to track their impact and maximize user engagement. The process is still the same today. Teams train up a new machine-learning model on FBLearner, whether to change the ranking order of posts or to better catch content that violates Facebook’s community standards (its rules on what is and isn’t allowed on the platform). Then they test the new model on a small subset of Facebook’s users to measure how it changes engagement metrics, such as the number of likes, comments, and shares, says Krishna Gade, who served as the engineering manager for news feed from 2016 to 2018. If a model reduces engagement too much, it’s discarded. Otherwise, it’s deployed and continually monitored. On Twitter, Gade explained that his engineers would get notifications every few days when metrics such as likes or comments were down. Then they’d decipher what had caused the problem and whether any models needed retraining. But this approach soon caused issues. The models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism: put simply, people just like outrageous stuff. Sometimes this inflames existing political tensions. The most devastating example to date is the case of Myanmar, where viral fake news and hate speech about the Rohingya Muslim minority escalated the country’s religious conflict into a full-blown genocide. Facebook admitted in 2018, after years of downplaying its role, that it had not done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” While Facebook may have been oblivious to these consequences in the beginning, it was studying them by 2016. In an internal presentation from that year, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a company researcher, Monica Lee, found that Facebook was not only hosting a large number of extremist groups but also promoting them to its users: “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/

[Discussion] When ML and Data Science are the death of a good company: A cautionary tale.

TD;LR: At Company A, Team X does advanced analytics using on-prem ERP tools and older programming languages. Their tools work very well and are designed based on very deep business and domain expertise. Team Y is a new and ambitious Data Science team that thinks they can replace Team X's tools with a bunch of R scripts and a custom built ML platform. Their models are simplistic, but more "fashionable" compared to the econometric models used by Team X, and team Y benefits from the ML/DS moniker so leadership is allowing Team Y to start a large scale overhaul of the analytics platform in question. Team Y doesn't have the experience for such a larger scale transformation, and is refusing to collaborate with team X. This project is very likely going to fail, and cause serious harm to the company as a whole financially and from a people perspective. I argue that this is not just because of bad leadership, but also because of various trends and mindsets in the DS community at large. Update (Jump to below the line for the original story): Several people in the comments are pointing out that this just a management failure, not something due to ML/DS, and that you can replace DS with any buzz tech and the story will still be relevant. My response: Of course, any failure at an organization level is ultimately a management failure one way or the other. Moreover, it is also the case that ML/DS when done correctly, will always improve a company's bottom line. There is no scenario where the proper ML solution, delivered at a reasonable cost and in a timely fashion, will somehow hurt the company's bottom line. My point is that in this case management is failing because of certain trends and practices that are specific to the ML/DS community, namely: The idea that DS teams should operate independently of tech and business orgs -- too much autonomy for DS teams The disregard for domain knowledge that seems prevalent nowadays thanks to the ML hype, that DS can be generalists and someone with good enough ML chops can solve any business problem. That wasn't the case when I first left academia for the industry in 2009 (back then nobody would even bother with a phone screen if you didn't have the right domain knowledge). Over reliance on resources who check all the ML hype related boxes (knows Python, R, Tensorflow, Shiny, etc..., has the right Coursera certifications, has blogged on the topic, etc...), but are lacking in depth of experience. DS interviews nowadays all seem to be: Can you tell me what a p-value is? What is elastic net regression? Show me how to fit a model in sklearn? How do you impute NAs in an R dataframe? Any smart person can look those up on Stackoverflow or Cross-Validated,.....Instead teams should be asking stuff like: why does portfolio optimization use QP not LP? How does a forecast influence a customer service level? When should a recommendation engine be content based and when should it use collaborative filtering? etc... (This is a true story, happening to the company I currently work for. Names, domains, algorithms, and roles have been shuffled around to protect my anonymity)  Company A has been around for several decades. It is not the biggest name in its domain, but it is a well respected one. Risk analysis and portfolio optimization have been a core of Company A's business since the 90s. They have a large team of 30 or so analysts who perform those tasks on a daily basis. These analysts use ERP solutions implemented for them by one the big ERP companies (SAP, Teradata, Oracle, JD Edwards,...) or one of the major tech consulting companies (Deloitte, Accenture, PWC, Capgemini, etc...) in collaboration with their own in house engineering team. The tools used are embarrassingly old school: Classic RDBMS running on on-prem servers or maybe even on mainframes, code written in COBOL, Fortran, weird proprietary stuff like ABAP or SPSS.....you get the picture. But the models and analytic functions were pretty sophisticated, and surprisingly cutting edge compared to the published academic literature. Most of all, they fit well with the company's enterprise ecosystem, and were honed based on years of deep domain knowledge.  They have a tech team of several engineers (poached from the aforementioned software and consulting companies) and product managers (who came from the experienced pools of analysts and managers who use the software, or poached from business rivals) maintaining and running this software. Their technology might be old school, but collectively, they know the domain and the company's overall architecture very, very well. They've guided the company through several large scale upgrades and migrations and they have a track record of delivering on time, without too much overhead. The few times they've stumbled, they knew how to pick themselves up very quickly. In fact within their industry niche, they have a reputation for their expertise, and have very good relations with the various vendors they've had to deal with. They were the launching pad of several successful ERP consulting careers.  Interestingly, despite dealing on a daily basis with statistical modeling and optimization algorithms, none of the analysts, engineers, or product managers involved describe themselves as data scientists or machine learning experts. It is mostly a cultural thing: Their expertise predates the Data Science/ML hype that started circa 2010, and they got most of their chops using proprietary enterprise tools instead of the open source tools popular nowadays. A few of them have formal statistical training, but most of them came from engineering or domain backgrounds and learned stats on the fly while doing their job. Call this team "Team X".  Sometime around the mid 2010s, Company A started having some serious anxiety issues: Although still doing very well for a company its size, overall economic and demographic trends were shrinking its customer base, and a couple of so called disruptors came up with a new app and business model that started seriously eating into their revenue. A suitable reaction to appease shareholders and Wall Street was necessary. The company already had a decent website and a pretty snazzy app, what more could be done? Leadership decided that it was high time that AI and ML become a core part of the company's business. An ambitious Manager, with no science or engineering background, but who had very briefly toyed with a recommender system a couple of years back, was chosen to build a data science team, call it team "Y" (he had a bachelor's in history from the local state college and worked for several years in the company's marketing org). Team "Y" consists mostly of internal hires who decided they wanted to be data scientists and completed a Coursera certification or a Galvanize boot camp, before being brought on to the team, along with a few of fresh Ph.D or M.Sc holders who didn't like academia and wanted to try their hand at an industry role. All of them were very bright people, they could write great Medium blog posts and give inspiring TED talks, but collectively they had very little real world industry experience. As is the fashion nowadays, this group was made part of a data science org that reported directly to the CEO and Board, bypassing the CIO and any tech or business VPs, since Company A wanted to claim the monikers "data driven" and "AI powered" in their upcoming shareholder meetings. In 3 or 4 years of existence, team Y produced a few Python and R scripts. Their architectural experience  consisted almost entirely in connecting Flask to S3 buckets or Redshift tables, with a couple of the more resourceful ones learning how to plug their models into Tableau or how to spin up a Kuberneties pod.  But they needn't worry: The aforementioned manager, who was now a director (and was also doing an online Masters to make up for his qualifications gap and bolster his chances of becoming VP soon - at least he now understands what L1 regularization is), was a master at playing corporate politics and self-promotion. No matter how few actionable insights team Y produced or how little code they deployed to production, he always had their back and made sure they had ample funding. In fact he now had grandiose plans for setting up an all-purpose machine learning platform that can be used to solve all of the company's data problems.  A couple of sharp minded members of team Y, upon googling their industry name along with the word "data science", realized that risk analysis was a prime candidate for being solved with Bayesian models, and there was already a nifty R package for doing just that, whose tutorial they went through on R-Bloggers.com. One of them had even submitted a Bayesian classifier Kernel for a competition on Kaggle (he was 203rd on the leaderboard), and was eager to put his new-found expertise to use on a real world problem. They pitched the idea to their director, who saw a perfect use case for his upcoming ML platform. They started work on it immediately, without bothering to check whether anybody at Company A was already doing risk analysis. Since their org was independent, they didn't really need to check with anybody else before they got funding for their initiative. Although it was basically a Naive Bayes classifier, the term ML was added to the project tile, to impress the board.  As they progressed with their work however, tensions started to build. They had asked the data warehousing and CA analytics teams to build pipelines for them, and word eventually got out to team X about their project. Team X was initially thrilled: They offered to collaborate whole heartedly, and would have loved to add an ML based feather to their already impressive cap. The product owners and analysts were totally onboard as well: They saw a chance to get in on the whole Data Science hype that they kept hearing about. But through some weird mix of arrogance and insecurity, team Y refused to collaborate with them or share any of their long term goals with them, even as they went to other parts of the company giving brown bag presentations and tutorials on the new model they created.  Team X got resentful: from what they saw of team Y's model, their approach was hopelessly naive and had little chances of scaling or being sustainable in production, and they knew exactly how to help with that. Deploying the model to production would have taken them a few days, given how comfortable they were with DevOps and continuous delivery (team Y had taken several months to figure out how to deploy a simple R script to production). And despite how old school their own tech was, team X were crafty enough to be able to plug it in to their existing architecture. Moreover, the output of the model was such that it didn't take into account how the business will consume it or how it was going to be fed to downstream systems, and the product owners could have gone a long way in making the model more amenable to adoption by the business stakeholders. But team Y wouldn't listen, and their leads brushed off any attempts at communication, let alone collaboration. The vibe that team Y was giving off was "We are the cutting edge ML team, you guys are the legacy server grunts. We don't need your opinion.", and they seemed to have a complete disregard for domain knowledge, or worse, they thought that all that domain knowledge consisted of was being able to grasp the definitions of a few business metrics.  Team X got frustrated and tried to express their concerns to leadership. But despite owning a vital link in Company A's business process, they were only \~50 people in a large 1000 strong technology and operations org, and they were several layers removed from the C-suite, so it was impossible for them to get their voices heard.  Meanwhile, the unstoppable director was doing what he did best: Playing corporate politics. Despite how little his team had actually delivered, he had convinced the board that all analysis and optimization tasks should now be migrated to his yet to be delivered ML platform. Since most leaders now knew that there was overlap between team Y and team X's objectives, his pitch was no longer that team Y was going to create a new insight, but that they were going to replace (or modernize) the legacy statistics based on-prem tools with more accurate cloud based ML tools. Never mind that there was no support in the academic literature for the idea that Naive Bayes works better than the Econometric approaches used by team X, let alone the additional wacky idea that Bayesian Optimization would definitely outperform the QP solvers that were running in production.  Unbeknownst to team X, the original Bayesian risk analysis project has now grown into a multimillion dollar major overhaul initiative, which included the eventual replacement of all of the tools and functions supported by team X along with the necessary migration to the cloud. The CIO and a couple of business VPs are on now board, and tech leadership is treating it as a done deal. An outside vendor, a startup who nobody had heard of, was contracted to help build the platform, since team Y has no engineering skills. The choice was deliberate, as calling on any of the established consulting or software companies would have eventually led leadership to the conclusion that team X was better suited for a transformation on this scale than team Y.  Team Y has no experience with any major ERP deployments, and no domain knowledge, yet they are being tasked with fundamentally changing the business process that is at the core of Company A's business. Their models actually perform worse than those deployed by team X, and their architecture is hopelessly simplistic, compared to what is necessary for running such a solution in production.  Ironically, using Bayesian thinking and based on all the evidence, the likelihood that team Y succeeds is close to 0%. At best, the project is going to end up being a write off of 50 million dollars or more. Once the !@#$!@hits the fan, a couple of executive heads are going to role, and dozens of people will get laid off. At worst, given how vital risk analysis and portfolio optimization is to Company A's revenue stream, the failure will eventually sink the whole company. It probably won't go bankrupt, but it will lose a significant portion of its business and work force. Failed ERP implementations can and do sink large companies: Just see what happened to National Grid US, SuperValu or Target Canada.  One might argue that this is more about corporate disfunction and bad leadership than about data science and AI. But I disagree. I think the core driver of this debacle is indeed the blind faith in Data Scientists, ML models and the promise of AI, and the overall culture of hype and self promotion that is very common among the ML crowd.  We haven't seen the end of this story: I sincerely hope that this ends well for the sake of my colleagues and all involved. Company A is a good company, and both its customers and its employees deserver better. But the chances of that happening are negligible given all the information available, and this failure will hit my company hard.

[R] Evaluating Video Models on Impossible Scenarios: A Benchmark for Generation and Understanding of Counterfactual Videos

IPV-Bench: Evaluating Video Generation Models with Physically Impossible Scenarios Researchers have created a new benchmark called IPV-Bench to evaluate how well video generation models understand basic physics and logic. This benchmark contains 1,000 carefully crafted prompts that test models on their ability to handle physically impossible scenarios across 9 categories including gravity violations, object permanence issues, and logical contradictions. The key methodology included: Testing models with both "create impossible" prompts (asking for impossibilities) and "avoid impossible" prompts (requesting physically plausible videos) Evaluating videos through both automated metrics and human assessment Testing across multiple state-of-the-art models including Sora, Morph-E, WALT, Show-1, Gen-2, Runway, Pika, and LaVie Developing a detailed taxonomy of impossible physics scenarios Main findings: Current SOTA models produce physically impossible content 20-40% of the time even when explicitly asked to follow physics laws Performance was worst on "change impossibilities" and "contact impossibilities" (~50% accuracy) Different models show different "impossibility profiles" - making distinct types of physical reasoning errors Strong text understanding doesn't guarantee strong physical reasoning Human evaluators easily identified these impossibilities, highlighting the gap between AI and human understanding I think this research reveals a fundamental limitation in current video generation systems - they lack the intuitive physics understanding that humans develop naturally. This matters significantly for applications where physical plausibility is important, like simulation, education, or training robotics systems. The benchmark provides a systematic way to measure progress in this area, which will be crucial as these models become more widely deployed. The taxonomy they've developed is particularly useful as it gives us a framework for thinking about different types of physical reasoning failures. I suspect we'll see this benchmark become an important tool for improving the next generation of video models. TLDR: IPV-Bench is a new benchmark testing video models' understanding of physical impossibilities. Current models frequently generate physically impossible content even when instructed not to, showing they lack true understanding of how the physical world works. Full summary is here. Paper here.

[D] AI Agents: too early, too expensive, too unreliable

Reference: Full blog post There has been a lot of hype about the promise of autonomous agent-based LLM workflows. By now, all major LLMs are capable of interacting with external tools and functions, letting the LLM perform sequences of tasks automatically. But reality is proving more challenging than anticipated. The WebArena leaderboard, which benchmarks LLMs agents against real-world tasks, shows that even the best-performing models have a success rate of only 35.8%. Challenges in Practice After seeing many attempts to AI agents, I believe it's too early, too expensive, too slow, too unreliable. It feels like many AI agent startups are waiting for a model breakthrough that will start the race to productize agents. Reliability: As we all know, LLMs are prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies. Chaining multiple AI steps compounds these issues, especially for tasks requiring exact outputs. Performance and costs: GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5, and Claude Opus are working quite well with tool usage/function calling, but they are still slow and expensive, particularly if you need to do loops and automatic retries. Legal concerns: Companies may be held liable for the mistakes of their agents. A recent example is Air Canada being ordered to pay a customer who was misled by the airline's chatbot. User trust: The "black box" nature of AI agents and stories like the above makes it hard for users to understand and trust their outputs. Gaining user trust for sensitive tasks involving payments or personal information will be hard (paying bills, shopping, etc.). Real-World Attempts Several startups are tackling the AI agent space, but most are still experimental or invite-only: adept.ai - $350M funding, but access is still very limited MultiOn - funding unknown, their API-first approach seems promising HypeWrite - $2.8M funding, started with an AI writing assistant and expanded into the agent space minion.ai - created some initial buzz but has gone quiet now, waitlist only Only MultiOn seems to be pursuing the "give it instructions and watch it go" approach, which is more in line with the promise of AI agents. All others are going down the record-and-replay RPA route, which may be necessary for reliability at this stage. Large players are also bringing AI capabilities to desktops and browsers, and it looks like we'll get native AI integrations on a system level: OpenAI announced their Mac desktop app that can interact with the OS screen. At Google I/O, Google demonstrated Gemini automatically processing a shopping return. Microsoft announced Copilot Studio, which will let developers build AI agent bots. Screenshot Screenshot These tech demos are impressive, but we'll see how well these agent capabilities will work when released publicly and tested against real-world scenarios instead of hand-picked demo cases. The Path Forward AI agents overhyped and it's too early. However, the underlying models continue to advance quickly, and we can expect to see more successful real-world applications. Instead of trying to have one large general purpose agent that is hard to control and test, we can use many smaller agents that basically just pick the right strategy for a specific sub-task in our workflows. These "agents" can be thought of as medium-sized LLM prompts with a) context and b) a set of functions available to call. The most promising path forward likely looks like this: Narrowly scoped, well testable automations that use AI as an augmentation tool rather than pursuing full autonomy Human-in-the-loop approaches that keep humans involved for oversight and handling edge cases Setting realistic expectations about current capabilities and limitations By combining tightly constrained agents, good evaluation data, human-in-the-loop oversight, and traditional engineering methods, we can achieve reliably good results for automating medium-complex tasks. Will AI agents automate tedious repetitive work, such as web scraping, form filling, and data entry? Yes, absolutely. Will AI agents autonomously book your vacation without your intervention? Unlikely, at least in the near future.

[D] Is this close enough to be usable? Need your inputs: Automated RAG testing tool. AI Data Pipelines for Real-World Production (Part 3)

Hey there, Redditors! I'm back with the latest installment on creating dependable AI data pipelines for real-world production. If you've been following along, you know I'm on a mission to move beyond the "thin OpenAI wrapper" trend and tackle the challenges of building robust data pipelines. With 18 months of hands-on experience and many user interviews, I realized that with the probabilistic nature of systems, we need better\_testing.gpt: As you build you should test The world of AI is a fast-moving one, and we've realized that just working on systems is not an optimal design choice. By the time your product ships, it might already be using outdated technology. So, what's the lesson here? Embrace change, test along, but be prepared to switch pace. No Best Practices Yet for RAGs In this rapidly evolving landscape, there are no established best practices. You'll need to make educated bets on tools and processes, knowing that things will change. With the RAG testing tool, I tried allowing for testing many potential parameter combinations automatically Testing Frameworks If your generative AI product doesn't have users giving feedback, then you are building in isolation. I used Deepeval to generate test sets, and they will soon support synthetic test set generation Infographics only go so far AI researchers and data scientists, while brilliant, end up in a loop of pursuing Twitter promotional content. New ways are promoted via new content pieces, but ideally, we need something above simple tracing but less than full-fledged analytics. To do this, I stored test outputs in Postgres and created a Superset instance to visualize the results Bridging the Gap between VectorDBs There's a noticeable number of Vector DBs. To ensure smooth product development, we need to be able to switch to best best-performing one, especially since user interviews signal that they might start deteriorating after loading 50 million rows ​ Github repo is here Next steps: I have questions for you: What variables do you change when building RAGs? What is the set of strategies I should add to the solution? (parent-son etc.) How can I improve it in general? Is anyone interested in a leaderboard for best parameter configs? Check out the blog post: Link to part 3 Remember to give this post an upvote if you found it insightful! And also star our Github repo

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

The delicate balance of building an online community business

Hey /r/Entrepreneur 👋 Just under two years ago I launched an online community business called Traffic Think Tank with two other co-founders, Nick Eubanks and Ian Howells. As a Traffic Think Tank customer you (currently) pay $119 a month to get access to our online community, which is run through Slack. The community is focused on helping you learn various aspects of marketing, with a particular focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Alongside access to the Slack community, we publish new educational video content from outside experts every week that all customers have access to. At the time of writing, Traffic Think Tank has around 650 members spanning across 17 of the 24 different global time zones. I was on a business trip over in Sydney recently, and during my time there I met up with some of our Australia-based community members. During dinner I was asked by several of them how the idea for Traffic Think Tank came about and what steps we took to validate that the idea was worth pursuing.  This is what I told them… How it all began It all started with a personal need. Nick, an already successful entrepreneur and owner of a marketing agency, had tested out an early version Traffic Think Tank in early 2017. He offered real-time consulting for around ten customers that he ran from Slack. He would publish some educational videos and offer his advice on projects that the members were running. The initial test went well, but it was tough to maintain on his own and he had to charge a fairly high price to make it worth his time. That’s when he spoke to me and Ian about turning this idea into something much bigger. Both Ian and I offered something slightly different to Nick. We’ve both spent time in senior positions at marketing agencies, but currently hold senior director positions in 2,000+ public employee companies (HubSpot and LendingTree). Alongside this, as a trio we could really ramp up the quality and quantity of content within the community, spread out the administrative workload and just generally have more resources to throw at getting this thing off the ground. Admittedly, Nick was much more optimistic about the potential of Traffic Think Tank – something I’m very thankful for now – whereas Ian and I were in the camp of “you’re out of your mind if you think hundreds of people are going to pay us to be a part of a Slack channel”. To validate the idea at scale, we decided that we’d get an initial MVP of the community up and running with a goal of reaching 100 paying customers in the first six months. If we achieved that, we’d validated that it was a viable business and we would continue to pursue it. If not, we’d kill it. We spent the next month building out the initial tech stack that enabled us to accept payments, do basic user management to the Slack channel, and get a one-page website up and running with information on what Traffic Think Tank was all about.  After this was ready, we doubled down on getting some initial content created for members – I mean, we couldn’t have people just land in an empty Slack channel, could we? We created around ten initial videos, 20 or so articles and then some long threads full of useful information within the Slack channel so that members would have some content to pour into right from the beginning.  Then, it was time to go live. The first 100 customers Fortunately, both Nick and I had built a somewhat substantial following in the SEO space over the previous 5-10 years, so we at least had a large email list to tap into (a total of around 40,000 people). We queued up some launch emails, set an initial price of $99 per month and pressed send. [\[LINK\] The launch email I sent to my subscribers announcing Traffic Think Tank](https://mailchi.mp/matthewbarby/future-of-marketing-1128181) What we didn’t expect was to sell all of the initial 100 membership spots in the first 72 hours. “Shit. What do we do now? Are we ready for this many people? Are we providing them with enough value? What if something breaks in our tech stack? What if they don’t like the content? What if everyone hates Slack?” All of these were thoughts running through my head. This brings me to the first great decision we made: we closed down new membership intake for 3 months so that we could focus completely on adding value to the first cohort of users. The right thing at the right time SEO is somewhat of a dark art to many people that are trying to learn about it for the first time. There’s hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of articles and videos online that talk about how to do SEO.  Some of it’s good advice; a lot of it is very bad advice.  Add to this that the barrier to entry of claiming to be an “expert” in SEO is practically non-existent and you have a recipe for disaster. This is why, for a long time, individuals involved in SEO have flocked in their masses to online communities for information and to bounce ideas off of others in the space. Forums like SEObook, Black Hat World, WickedFire, Inbound.org, /r/BigSEO, and many more have, at one time, been called home by many SEOs.  In recent times, these communities have either been closed down or just simply haven’t adapted to the changing needs of the community – one of those needs being real-time feedback on real-world problems.  The other big need that we all spotted and personally had was the ability to openly share the things that are working – and the things that aren’t – in SEO within a private forum. Not everyone wanted to share their secret sauce with the world. One of the main reasons we chose Slack as the platform to run our community on was the fact that it solved these two core needs. It gave the ability to communicate in real-time across multiple devices, and all of the information shared within it was outside of the public domain. The other problem that plagued a lot of these early communities was spam. Most of them were web-based forums that were free to access. That meant they became a breeding ground for people trying to either sell their services or promote their own content – neither of which is conducive to building a thriving community. This was our main motivation for charging a monthly fee to access Traffic Think Tank. We spent a lot of time thinking through pricing. It needed to be enough money that people would be motivated to really make use of their membership and act in a way that’s beneficial to the community, but not too much money that it became cost prohibitive to the people that would benefit from it the most. Considering that most of our members would typically spend between $200-800 per month on SEO software, $99 initially felt like the perfect balance. Growing pains The first three months of running the community went by without any major hiccups. Members were incredibly patient with us, gave us great feedback and were incredibly helpful and accommodating to other members. Messages were being posted every day, with Nick, Ian and myself seeding most of the engagement at this stage.  With everything going smoothly, we decided that it was time to open the doors to another intake of new members. At this point we’d accumulated a backlog of people on our waiting list, so we knew that simply opening our doors would result in another large intake. Adding more members to a community has a direct impact on the value that each member receives. For Traffic Think Tank in particular, the value for members comes from three areas: The ability to have your questions answered by me, Nick and Ian, as well as other members of the community. The access to a large library of exclusive content. The ability to build connections with the wider community. In the early stages of membership growth, there was a big emphasis on the first of those three points. We didn’t have an enormous content library, nor did we have a particularly large community of members, so a lot of the value came from getting a lot of one-to-one time with the community founders. [\[IMAGE\] Screenshot of engagement within the Traffic Think Tank Slack community](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1322/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-in-Traffic-Think-Tank.png) The good thing about having 100 members was that it was just about feasible to give each and every member some one-to-one time within the month, which really helped us to deliver those moments of delight that the community needed early on. Two-and-a-half months after we launched Traffic Think Tank, we opened the doors to another 250 people, taking our total number of members to 350. This is where we experienced our first growing pains.  Our original members had become used to being able to drop us direct messages and expect an almost instant response, but this wasn’t feasible anymore. There were too many people, and we needed to create a shift in behavior. We needed more value to come from the community engaging with one another or we’d never be able to scale beyond this level. We started to really pay attention to engagement metrics; how many people were logging in every day, and of those, how many were actually posting messages within public channels.  We asked members that were logging in a lot but weren’t posting (the “lurkers”) why that was the case. We also asked the members that engaged in the community the most what motivated them to post regularly. We learned a lot from doing this. We found that the large majority of highly-engaged members had much more experience in SEO, whereas most of the “lurkers” were beginners. This meant that most of the information being shared in the community was very advanced, with a lot of feedback from the beginners in the group being that they “didn’t want to ask a stupid question”.  As managers of the community, we needed to facilitate conversations that catered to all of our members, not just those at a certain level of skill. To tackle this problem, we created a number of new channels that had a much deeper focus on beginner topics so novice members had a safe place to ask questions without judgment.  We also started running live video Q&As each month where we’d answer questions submitted by the community. This gave our members one-on-one time with me, Nick and Ian, but spread the value of these conversations across the whole community rather than them being hidden within private messages. As a result of these changes, we found that the more experienced members in the community were really enjoying sharing their knowledge with those with less experience. The number of replies within each question thread was really starting to increase, and the community started to shift away from just being a bunch of threads created by me, Nick and Ian to a thriving forum of diverse topics compiled by a diverse set of individuals. This is what we’d always wanted. A true community. It was starting to happen. [\[IMAGE\] Chart showing community engagement vs individual member value](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1602/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Community-Engagement-Balance-Graph.jpg) At the same time, we started to realize that we’ll eventually reach a tipping point where there’ll be too much content for us to manage and our members to engage with. When we reach this point, the community will be tough to follow and the quality of any given post will go down. Not only that, but the community will become increasingly difficult to moderate. We’re not there yet, but we recognize that this will come, and we’ll have to adjust our model again. Advocating advocacy As we started to feel more comfortable about the value that members were receiving, we made the decision to indefinitely open for new members. At the same time, we increased the price of membership (from $99 a month to $119) in a bid to strike the right balance between profitability as a business and to slow down the rate at which we were reaching the tipping point of community size. We also made the decision to repay all of our early adopters by grandfathering them in to the original pricing – and committing to always do this in the future. Despite the price increase, we saw a continued flow of new members come into the community. The craziest part about this was that we were doing practically no marketing activities to encourage new members– this was all coming from word of mouth. Our members were getting enough value from the community that they were recommending it to their friends, colleagues and business partners.  The scale at which this was happening really took us by surprise and it told us one thing very clearly: delivering more value to members resulted in more value being delivered to the business. This is a wonderful dynamic to have because it perfectly aligns the incentives on both sides. We’d said from the start that we wouldn’t sacrifice value to members for more revenue – this is something that all three of us felt very strongly about. First and foremost, we wanted to create a community that delivered value to its members and was run in a way that aligned with our values as people. If we could find a way to stimulate brand advocacy, while also tightening the bonds between all of our individual community members, we’d be boosting both customer retention and customer acquisition in the same motion. This became our next big focus. [\[TWEET\] Adam, one of our members wore his Traffic Think Tank t-shirt in the Sahara desert](https://twitter.com/AdamGSteele/status/1130892481099382784) We started with some simple things: We shipped out Traffic Think Tank branded T-shirts to all new members. We’d call out each of the individuals that would submit questions to our live Q&A sessions and thank them live on air. We set up a new channel that was dedicated to sharing a quick introduction to who you are, what you do and where you’re based for all new members. We’d created a jobs channel and a marketplace for selling, buying and trading services with other members. Our monthly “blind dates” calls were started where you’d be randomly grouped with 3-4 other community members so that you could hop on a call to get to know each other better. The Traffic Think Tank In Real Life (IRL)* channel was born, which enabled members to facilitate in-person meetups with each other. In particular, we saw that as members started to meet in person or via calls the community itself was feeling more and more like a family. It became much closer knit and some members started to build up a really positive reputation for being particularly helpful to other members, or for having really strong knowledge in a specific area. [\[TWEET\] Dinner with some of the Traffic Think Tank members in Brighton, UK](https://twitter.com/matthewbarby/status/1117175584080134149) Nick, Ian and I would go out of our way to try and meet with members in real life wherever we could. I was taken aback by how appreciative people were for us doing this, and it also served as an invaluable way to gain honest feedback from members. There was another trend that we’d observed that we didn’t really expect to happen. More and more members were doing business with each another. We’ve had people find new jobs through the community, sell businesses to other members, launch joint ventures together and bring members in as consultants to their business. This has probably been the most rewarding thing to watch, and it was clear that the deeper relationships that our members were forming were resulting in an increased level of trust to work with each other. We wanted to harness this and take it to a new level. This brought us to arguably the best decision we’ve made so far running Traffic Think Tank… we were going to run a big live event for our members. I have no idea what I’m doing It’s the first week of January 2019 and we’re less than three weeks away from Traffic Think Tank LIVE, our first ever in-person event hosting 150 people, most of which are Traffic Think Tank members. It's like an ongoing nightmare I can’t wake up from. That was Nick’s response in our private admin channel to myself and Ian when I asked if they were finding the run-up to the event as stressful as I was. I think that all three of us were riding on such a high from how the community was growing that we felt like we could do anything. Running an event? How hard can it be? Well, turns out it’s really hard. We had seven different speakers flying over from around the world to speak at the event, there was a pre- and after event party, and we’d planned a charity dinner where we would take ten attendees (picked at random via a raffle) out for a fancy meal. Oh, and Nick, Ian and I were hosting a live Q&A session on stage. It wasn’t until precisely 48 hours before the event that we’d realized we didn’t have any microphones, nor had a large amount of the swag we’d ordered arrived. Plus, a giant storm had hit Philly causing a TON of flight cancellations. Perfect. Just perfect. This was honestly the tip of the iceberg. We hadn’t thought about who was going to run the registration desk, who would be taking photos during the event and who would actually field questions from the audience while all three of us sat on stage for our live Q&A panel. Turns out that the answer to all of those questions were my wife, Laura, and Nick’s wife, Kelley. Thankfully, they were on hand to save our asses. The weeks running up to the event were honestly some of the most stressful of my life. We sold around 50% of our ticket allocation within the final two weeks before the event. All of the event organizers told us this would happen, but did we believe them? Hell no!  Imagine having two weeks until the big day and as it stood half of the room would be completely empty. I was ready to fly most of my extended family over just to make it look remotely busy. [\[IMAGE\] One of our speakers, Ryan Stewart, presenting at Traffic Think Tank LIVE](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_1920/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LIVE-Ryan-Presenting.jpg) Thankfully, if all came together. We managed to acquire some microphones, the swag arrived on the morning of the event, all of our speakers were able to make it on time and the weather just about held up so that our entire allocation of ticket holders was able to make it to the event. We pooled together and I’m proud to say that the event was a huge success. While we made a substantial financial loss on the event itself, January saw a huge spike in new members, which more than recouped our losses. Not only that, but we got to hang out with a load of our members all day while they said really nice things about the thing we’d built. It was both exhausting and incredibly rewarding. Bring on Traffic Think Tank LIVE 2020! (This time we’re hiring an event manager...)   The road ahead Fast forward to today (August 2019) and Traffic Think Tank has over 650 members. The biggest challenges that we’re tackling right now include making sure the most interesting conversations and best content surfaces to the top of the community, making Slack more searchable (this is ultimately one of its flaws as a platform) and giving members a quicker way to find the exclusive content that we create. You’ll notice there’s a pretty clear theme here. In the past 30 days, 4,566 messages were posted in public channels inside Traffic Think Tank. If you add on any messages posted inside private direct messages, this number rises to 21,612. That’s a lot of messages. To solve these challenges and enable further scale in the future, we’ve invested a bunch of cash and our time into building out a full learning management system (LMS) that all members will get access to alongside the Slack community. The LMS will be a web-based portal that houses all of the video content we produce. It will also  provide an account admin section where users can update or change their billing information (they have to email us to do this right now, which isn’t ideal), a list of membership perks and discounts with our partners, and a list of links to some of the best threads within Slack – when clicked, these will drop you directly into Slack. [\[IMAGE\] Designs for the new learning management system (LMS)](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/qglossy,retimg,w_2378/https://www.matthewbarby.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Traffic-Think-Tank-LMS.png) It’s not been easy, but we’re 95% of the way through this and I’m certain that it will have a hugely positive impact on the experience for our members. Alongside this we hired a community manager, Liz, who supports with any questions that our members have, coordinates with external experts to arrange webinars for the community, helps with new member onboarding, and has tightened up some of our processes around billing and general accounts admin. This was a great decision. Finally, we’ve started planning next year’s live event, which we plan to more than double in size to 350 attendees, and we decided to pick a slightly warmer location in Miami this time out. Stay tuned for me to have a complete meltdown 3 weeks from the event. Final thoughts When I look back on the journey we’ve had so far building Traffic Think Tank, there’s one very important piece to this puzzle that’s made all of this work that I’ve failed to mention so far: co-founder alignment. Building a community is a balancing act that relies heavily on those in charge being completely aligned. Nick, Ian and I completely trust each other and more importantly, are philosophically aligned on how we want to run and grow the community. If we didn’t have this, the friction between us could tear apart the entire community. Picking the right people to work with is important in any company, but when your business is literally about bringing people together, there’s no margin for error here.  While I’m sure there will be many more challenges ahead, knowing that we all trust each other to make decisions that fall in line with each of our core values makes these challenges dramatically easier to overcome. Finally, I’d like to thank all of our members for making the community what it is today – it’d be nothing without you and I promise that we’ll never take that for granted. ​ I originally posted this on my blog here. Welcoming all of your thoughts, comments, questions and I'll do my best to answer them :)

How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security

Uzair Javaid, a Ph.D. with a passion for data privacy, co-founded Betterdata to tackle one of AI's most pressing challenges: protecting privacy while enabling innovation. Recently, Betterdata secured a lucrative contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, 1 of only 4 companies worldwide to do so and the only one in Asia. Here's how he did it: The Story So what's your story? I grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, excelling in coding despite studying electrical engineering. Inspired by my professors, I set my sights on studying abroad and eventually earned a Ph.D. scholarship at NUS Singapore, specializing in data security and privacy. During my research, I ethically hacked Ethereum and published 15 papers—three times the requirement. While wrapping up my Ph.D., I explored startup ideas and joined Entrepreneur First, where I met Kevin Yee. With his expertise in generative models and mine in privacy, we founded Betterdata. Now, nearly three years in, we’ve secured a major contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—one of only four companies globally and the only one from Asia. The Startup In a nutshell, what does your startup do? Betterdata is a startup that uses AI and synthetic data generation to address two major challenges: data privacy and the scarcity of high-quality data for training AI models. By leveraging generative models and privacy-enhancing technologies, Betterdata enables businesses, such as banks, to use customer data without breaching privacy regulations. The platform trains AI on real data, learns its patterns, and generates synthetic data that mimics the real thing without containing any personal or sensitive information. This allows companies to innovate and develop AI solutions safely and ethically, all while tackling the growing need for diverse, high-quality data in AI development. How did you conduct ideation and validation for your startup? The initial idea for Betterdata came from personal experience. During my Ph.D., I ethically hacked Ethereum’s blockchain, exposing flaws in encryption-based data sharing. This led me to explore AI-driven deep synthesis technology—similar to deepfakes but for structured data privacy. With GDPR impacting 28M+ businesses, I saw a massive opportunity to help enterprises securely share data while staying compliant. To validate the idea, I spoke to 50 potential customers—a number that strikes the right balance. Some say 100, but that’s impractical for early-stage founders. At 50, patterns emerge: if 3 out of 10 mention the same problem, and this repeats across 50, you have 10–15 strong signals, making it a solid foundation for an MVP. Instead of outbound sales, which I dislike, we used three key methods: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—targeting technically savvy users with solutions for niche problems, like scaling synthetic data for banks. Targeted Content Marketing—regular customer conversations shaped our thought leadership and outreach. Raising Awareness Through Partnerships—collaborating with NUS, Singapore’s PDPC, and Plug and Play to build credibility and educate the market. These strategies attracted serious customers willing to pay, guiding Betterdata’s product development and market fit. How did you approach the initial building and ongoing product development? In the early stages, we built synthetic data generation algorithms and a basic UI for proof-of-concept, using open-source datasets to engage with banks. We quickly learned that banks wouldn't share actual customer data due to privacy concerns, so we had to conduct on-site installations and gather feedback to refine our MVP. Through continuous consultation with customers, we discovered real enterprise data posed challenges, such as missing values, which led us to adapt our prototype accordingly. This iterative approach of listening to customer feedback and observing their usage allowed us to improve our product, enhance UX, and address unmet needs while building trust and loyalty. Working closely with our customers also gives us a data advantage. Our solution’s effectiveness depends on customer data, which we can't fully access, but bridging this knowledge gap gives us a competitive edge. The more customers we test on, the more our algorithms adapt to diverse use cases, making it harder for competitors to replicate our insights. My approach to iteration is simple: focus solely on customer feedback and ignore external noise like trends or advice. The key question for the team is: which customer is asking for this feature or solution? As long as there's a clear answer, we move forward. External influences, such as AI hype, often bring more confusion than clarity. True long-term success comes from solving real customer problems, not chasing trends. Customers may not always know exactly what they want, but they understand their problems. Our job is to identify these problems and solve them in innovative ways. While customers may suggest specific features, we stay focused on solving the core issue rather than just fulfilling their exact requests. The idea aligns with the quote often attributed to Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The key is understanding their problems, not just taking requests at face value. How do you assess product-market fit? To assess product-market fit, we track two key metrics: Customers' Willingness to Pay: We measure both the quantity and quality of meetings with potential customers. A high number of meetings with key decision-makers signals genuine interest. At Betterdata, we focused on getting meetings with people in banks and large enterprises to gauge our product's resonance with the target market. How Much Customers Are Willing to Pay: We monitor the price customers are willing to pay, especially in the early stages. For us, large enterprises, like banks, were willing to pay a premium for our synthetic data platform due to the growing need for privacy tech. This feedback guided our product refinement and scaling strategy. By focusing on these metrics, we refined our product and positioned it for scaling. What is your business model? We employ a structured, phase-driven approach for out business model, as a B2B startup. I initially struggled with focusing on the core value proposition in sales, often becoming overly educational. Eventually, we developed a product roadmap with models that allowed us to match customer needs to specific offerings and justify our pricing. Our pricing structure includes project-based pilots and annual contracts for successful deployments. At Betterdata, our customer engagement unfolds across three phases: Phase 1: Trial and Benchmarking \- We start with outreach and use open-source datasets to showcase results, offering customers a trial period to evaluate the solution. Phase 2: Pilot or PoC \- After positive trial results, we conduct a PoC or pilot using the customer’s private data, with the understanding that successful pilots lead to an annual contract. Phase 3: Multi-Year Contracts \- Following a successful pilot, we transition to long-term commercial contracts, focusing on multi-year agreements to ensure stability and ongoing partnerships. How do you do marketing for your brand? We take a non-conventional approach to marketing, focusing on answering one key question: Which customers are willing to pay, and how much? This drives our messaging to show how our solution meets their needs. Our strategy centers around two main components: Building a network of lead magnets \- These are influential figures like senior advisors, thought leaders, and strategic partners. Engaging with institutions like IMDA, SUTD, and investors like Plug and Play helps us gain access to the right people and foster warm introductions, which shorten our sales cycle and ensure we’re reaching the right audience. Thought leadership \- We build our brand through customer traction, technology evidence, and regulatory guidelines. This helps us establish credibility in the market and position ourselves as trusted leaders in our field. This holistic approach has enabled us to navigate diverse market conditions in Asia and grow our B2B relationships. By focusing on these areas, we drive business growth and establish strong trust with stakeholders. What's your advice for fundraising? Here are my key takeaways for other founders when it comes to fundraising: Fundraise When You Don’t Need To We closed our seed round in April 2023, a time when we weren't actively raising. Founders should always be in fundraising mode, even when they're not immediately in need of capital. Don’t wait until you have only a few months of runway left. Keep the pipeline open and build relationships. When the timing is right, execution becomes much easier. For us, our investment came through a combination of referrals and inbound interest. Even our lead investor initially rejected us, but after re-engaging, things eventually fell into place. It’s crucial to stay humble, treat everyone with respect, and maintain those relationships for when the time is right. Be Mindful of How You Present Information When fundraising, how you present information matters a lot. We created a comprehensive, easily digestible investment memo, hosted on Notion, which included everything an investor might need—problem, solution, market, team, risks, opportunities, and data. The goal was for investors to be able to get the full picture within 30 minutes without chasing down extra details. We also focused on making our financial model clear and meaningful, even though a 5-year forecast might be overkill at the seed stage. The key was clarity and conciseness, and making it as easy as possible for investors to understand the opportunity. I learned that brevity and simplicity are often the best ways to make a memorable impact. For the pitch itself, keep it simple and focus on 4 things: problem, solution, team, and market. If you can summarize each of these clearly and concisely, you’ll have a compelling pitch. Later on, you can expand into market segments, traction, and other metrics, but for seed-stage, focus on those four areas, and make sure you’re strong in at least three of them. If you do, you'll have a compelling case. How do you run things day-to-day? i.e what's your operational workflow and team structure? Here's an overview of our team structure and process: Internally: Our team is divided into two main areas: backend (internal team) and frontend (market-facing team). There's no formal hierarchy within the backend team. We all operate as equals, defining our goals based on what needs to be developed, assigning tasks, and meeting weekly to share updates and review progress. The focus is on full ownership of tasks and accountability for getting things done. I also contribute to product development, identifying challenges and clearing obstacles to help the team move forward. Backend Team: We approach tasks based on the scope defined by customers, with no blame or hierarchy. It's like a sports team—sometimes someone excels, and other times they struggle, but we support each other and move forward together. Everyone has the creative freedom to work in the way that suits them best, but we establish regular meetings and check-ins to ensure alignment and progress. Frontend Team: For the market-facing side, we implement a hierarchy because the market expects this structure. If I present myself as "CEO," it signals authority and credibility. This distinction affects how we communicate with the market and how we build our brand. The frontend team is split into four main areas: Business Product (Software Engineering) Machine Learning Engineering R&D The C-suite sits at the top, followed by team leads, and then the executors. We distill market expectations into actionable tasks, ensuring that everyone is clear on their role and responsibilities. Process: We start by receiving market expectations and defining tasks based on them. Tasks are assigned to relevant teams, and execution happens with no communication barriers between team members. This ensures seamless collaboration and focused execution. The main goal is always effectiveness—getting things done efficiently while maintaining flexibility in how individuals approach their work. In both teams, there's an emphasis on accountability, collaboration, and clear communication, but the structure varies according to the nature of the work and external expectations.

7 free ways to find customers

You do not need to burn thousands on paid ads to find customers. Most businesses think ads are the only way to get customers. They spend huge amounts on Google and Facebook ads with low conversion rates and end up desperate when the money runs out. Here are some FREE strategies that work way better: Be where your customers already hang out Monitor platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook groups and other online communities where your target audience discusses their problems. Look for people actively seeking solutions you provide. The conversion rate is much higher because these are people already looking for what you sell. Create content that solves real problems Create blog posts, videos, or social content that addresses specific pain points your audience has. I started writing detailed guides about problems I knew my customers faced and they began finding me organically through search. Strategic partnerships with complementary businesses I connected with businesses that served the same customers but offered different products. We created joint social posts and shared each other's content at zero cost. This opened up their audience to me and vice versa. Get interviewed on podcasts This one surprised me. Many niche industry podcasts need guests constantly. I reached out offering specific topics I could speak on with value for their audience. This positioned me as an expert while reaching new potential customers. Build in public Sharing your journey building your product creates a following of interested people. I posted weekly updates on X about challenges and wins, which created a small but engaged community before we even launched. Leverage personal networks properly Not by spamming friends, but by asking for specific introductions to people who might genuinely benefit from what you offer. One quality introduction beats 100 cold emails. Create free tools or resources This is one of the most effective strategies. You can easily build these free tools using AI now. I built a simple calculator that helped people in my industry solve a common problem. It generated leads because users found it valuable and shared it. The most important thing I learned is that these methods actually produce higher quality customers. They come to you already understanding the value you provide, which means better conversion rates and longer customer relationships. It takes more patience than ads, but the ROI is significantly better in the long run. Plus, these strategies help you understand your customers better, which improves everything else in your business.

How a founder built a B2B AI startup to serve with 65+ global brands (including Fortune500 companies)

AI Palette is an AI-driven platform that helps food and beverage companies predict emerging product trends. I had the opportunity recently to sit down with the founder to get his advice on building an AI-first startup, which he'll be going through in this post. About AI Palette: Co-founders: >!2 (Somsubhra GanChoudhuri, Himanshu Upreti)!!100+!!$12.7M USD!!AI-powered predictive analytics for the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) industry!!Signed first paying customer in the first year!!65+ global brands, including Cargill, Diageo, Ajinomoto, Symrise, Mondelez, and L’Oréal, use AI Palette!!Every new product launched has secured a paying client within months!!Expanded into Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), onboarding one of India’s largest BPC companies within weeks!!Launched multiple new product lines in the last two years, creating a unified suite for brand innovation!Identify the pain points in your industry for ideas* When I was working in the flavour and fragrance industry, I noticed a major issue CPG companies faced: launching a product took at least one to two years. For instance, if a company decided today to launch a new juice, it wouldn’t hit the market until 2027. This long timeline made it difficult to stay relevant and on top of trends. Another big problem I noticed was that companies relied heavily on market research to determine what products to launch. While this might work for current consumer preferences, it was highly inefficient since the product wouldn’t actually reach the market for several years. By the time the product launched, the consumer trends had already shifted, making that research outdated. That’s where AI can play a crucial role. Instead of looking at what consumers like today, we realised that companies should use AI to predict what they will want next. This allows businesses to create products that are ahead of the curve. Right now, the failure rate for new product launches is alarmingly high, with 8 out of 10 products failing. By leveraging AI, companies can avoid wasting resources on products that won’t succeed, leading to better, more successful launches. Start by talking to as many industry experts as possible to identify the real problems When we first had the idea for AI Palette, it was just a hunch, a gut feeling—we had no idea whether people would actually pay for it. To validate the idea, we reached out to as many people as we could within the industry. Since our focus area was all about consumer insights, we spoke to professionals in the CPG sector, particularly those in the insights departments of CPG companies. Through these early conversations, we began to see a common pattern emerge and identified the exact problem we wanted to solve. Don’t tell people what you’re building—listen to their frustrations and challenges first. Going into these early customer conversations, our goal was to listen and understand their challenges without telling them what we were trying to build. This is crucial as it ensures that you can gather as much data about the problem to truly understand it and that you aren't biasing their answers by showing your solution. This process helped us in two key ways: First, it validated that there was a real problem in the industry through the number of people who spoke about experiencing the same problem. Second, it allowed us to understand the exact scale and depth of the problem—e.g., how much money companies were spending on consumer research, what kind of tools they were currently using, etc. Narrow down your focus to a small, actionable area to solve initially. Once we were certain that there was a clear problem worth solving, we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. As a small team of two people, we started by focusing on a specific area of the problem—something big enough to matter but small enough for us to handle. Then, we approached customers with a potential solution and asked them for feedback. We learnt that our solution seemed promising, but we wanted to validate it further. If customers are willing to pay you for the solution, it’s a strong validation signal for market demand. One of our early customer interviewees even asked us to deliver the solution, which we did manually at first. We used machine learning models to analyse the data and presented the results in a slide deck. They paid us for the work, which was a critical moment. It meant we had something with real potential, and we had customers willing to pay us before we had even built the full product. This was the key validation that we needed. By the time we were ready to build the product, we had already gathered crucial insights from our early customers. We understood the specific information they wanted and how they wanted the results to be presented. This input was invaluable in shaping the development of our final product. Building & Product Development Start with a simple concept/design to validate with customers before building When we realised the problem and solution, we began by designing the product, but not by jumping straight into coding. Instead, we created wireframes and user interfaces using tools like InVision and Figma. This allowed us to visually represent the product without the need for backend or frontend development at first. The goal was to showcase how the product would look and feel, helping potential customers understand its value before we even started building. We showed these designs to potential customers and asked for feedback. Would they want to buy this product? Would they pay for it? We didn’t dive into actual development until we found a customer willing to pay a significant amount for the solution. This approach helped us ensure we were on the right track and didn’t waste time or resources building something customers didn’t actually want. Deliver your solution using a manual consulting approach before developing an automated product Initially, we solved problems for customers in a more "consulting" manner, delivering insights manually. Recall how I mentioned that when one of our early customer interviewees asked us to deliver the solution, we initially did it manually by using machine learning models to analyse the data and presenting the results to them in a slide deck. This works for the initial stages of validating your solution, as you don't want to invest too much time into building a full-blown MVP before understanding the exact features and functionalities that your users want. However, after confirming that customers were willing to pay for what we provided, we moved forward with actual product development. This shift from a manual service to product development was key to scaling in a sustainable manner, as our building was guided by real-world feedback and insights rather than intuition. Let ongoing customer feedback drive iteration and the product roadmap Once we built the first version of the product, it was basic, solving only one problem. But as we worked closely with customers, they requested additional features and functionalities to make it more useful. As a result, we continued to evolve the product to handle more complex use cases, gradually developing new modules based on customer feedback. Product development is a continuous process. Our early customers pushed us to expand features and modules, from solving just 20% of their problems to tackling 50–60% of their needs. These demands shaped our product roadmap and guided the development of new features, ultimately resulting in a more complete solution. Revenue and user numbers are key metrics for assessing product-market fit. However, critical mass varies across industries Product-market fit (PMF) can often be gauged by looking at the size of your revenue and the number of customers you're serving. Once you've reached a certain critical mass of customers, you can usually tell that you're starting to hit product-market fit. However, this critical mass varies by industry and the type of customers you're targeting. For example, if you're building an app for a broad consumer market, you may need thousands of users. But for enterprise software, product-market fit may be reached with just a few dozen key customers. Compare customer engagement and retention with other available solutions on the market for product-market fit Revenue and the number of customers alone isn't always enough to determine if you're reaching product-market fit. The type of customer and the use case for your product also matter. The level of engagement with your product—how much time users are spending on the platform—is also an important metric to track. The more time they spend, the more likely it is that your product is meeting a crucial need. Another way to evaluate product-market fit is by assessing retention, i.e whether users are returning to your platform and relying on it consistently, as compared to other solutions available. That's another key indication that your solution is gaining traction in the market. Business Model & Monetisation Prioritise scalability Initially, we started with a consulting-type model where we tailor-made specific solutions for each customer use-case we encountered and delivered the CPG insights manually, but we soon realized that this wasn't scalable. The problem with consulting is that you need to do the same work repeatedly for every new project, which requires a large team to handle the workload. That is not how you sustain a high-growth startup. To solve this, we focused on building a product that would address the most common problems faced by our customers. Once built, this product could be sold to thousands of customers without significant overheads, making the business scalable. With this in mind, we decided on a SaaS (Software as a Service) business model. The benefit of SaaS is that once you create the software, you can sell it to many customers without adding extra overhead. This results in a business with higher margins, where the same product can serve many customers simultaneously, making it much more efficient than the consulting model. Adopt a predictable, simplistic business model for efficiency. Look to industry practices for guidance When it came to monetisation, we considered the needs of our CPG customers, who I knew from experience were already accustomed to paying annual subscriptions for sales databases and other software services. We decided to adopt the same model and charge our customers an annual upfront fee. This model worked well for our target market, aligning with industry standards and ensuring stable, recurring revenue. Moreover, our target CPG customers were already used to this business model and didn't have to choose from a huge variety of payment options, making closing sales a straightforward and efficient process. Marketing & Sales Educate the market to position yourself as a thought leader When we started, AI was not widely understood, especially in the CPG industry. We had to create awareness around both AI and its potential value. Our strategy focused on educating potential users and customers about AI, its relevance, and why they should invest in it. This education was crucial to the success of our marketing efforts. To establish credibility, we adopted a thought leadership approach. We wrote blogs on the importance of AI and how it could solve problems for CPG companies. We also participated in events and conferences to demonstrate our expertise in applying AI to the industry. This helped us build our brand and reputation as leaders in the AI space for CPG, and word-of-mouth spread as customers recognized us as the go-to company for AI solutions. It’s tempting for startups to offer products for free in the hopes of gaining early traction with customers, but this approach doesn't work in the long run. Free offerings don’t establish the value of your product, and customers may not take them seriously. You should always charge for pilots, even if the fee is minimal, to ensure that the customer is serious about potentially working with you, and that they are committed and engaged with the product. Pilots/POCs/Demos should aim to give a "flavour" of what you can deliver A paid pilot/POC trial also gives you the opportunity to provide a “flavour” of what your product can deliver, helping to build confidence and trust with the client. It allows customers to experience a detailed preview of what your product can do, which builds anticipation and desire for the full functionality. During this phase, ensure your product is built to give them a taste of the value you can provide, which sets the stage for a broader, more impactful adoption down the line. Fundraising & Financial Management Leverage PR to generate inbound interest from VCs When it comes to fundraising, our approach was fairly traditional—we reached out to VCs and used connections from existing investors to make introductions. However, looking back, one thing that really helped us build momentum during our fundraising process was getting featured in Tech in Asia. This wasn’t planned; it just so happened that Tech in Asia was doing a series on AI startups in Southeast Asia and they reached out to us for an article. During the interview, they asked if we were fundraising, and we mentioned that we were. As a result, several VCs we hadn’t yet contacted reached out to us. This inbound interest was incredibly valuable, and we found it far more effective than our outbound efforts. So, if you can, try to generate some PR attention—it can help create inbound interest from VCs, and that interest is typically much stronger and more promising than any outbound strategies because they've gone out of their way to reach out to you. Be well-prepared and deliberate about fundraising. Keep trying and don't lose heart When pitching to VCs, it’s crucial to be thoroughly prepared, as you typically only get one shot at making an impression. If you mess up, it’s unlikely they’ll give you a second chance. You need to have key metrics at your fingertips, especially if you're running a SaaS company. Be ready to answer questions like: What’s your retention rate? What are your projections for the year? How much will you close? What’s your average contract value? These numbers should be at the top of your mind. Additionally, fundraising should be treated as a structured process, not something you do on the side while juggling other tasks. When you start, create a clear plan: identify 20 VCs to reach out to each week. By planning ahead, you’ll maintain momentum and speed up the process. Fundraising can be exhausting and disheartening, especially when you face multiple rejections. Remember, you just need one investor to say yes to make it all worthwhile. When using funds, prioritise profitability and grow only when necessary. Don't rely on funding to survive. In the past, the common advice for startups was to raise money, burn through it quickly, and use it to boost revenue numbers, even if that meant operating at a loss. The idea was that profitability wasn’t the main focus, and the goal was to show rapid growth for the next funding round. However, times have changed, especially with the shift from “funding summer” to “funding winter.” My advice now is to aim for profitability as soon as possible and grow only when it's truly needed. For example, it’s tempting to hire a large team when you have substantial funds in the bank, but ask yourself: Do you really need 10 new hires, or could you get by with just four? Growing too quickly can lead to unnecessary expenses, so focus on reaching profitability as soon as possible, rather than just inflating your team or burn rate. The key takeaway is to spend your funds wisely and only when absolutely necessary to reach profitability. You want to avoid becoming dependent on future VC investments to keep your company afloat. Instead, prioritize reaching break-even as quickly as you can, so you're not reliant on external funding to survive in the long run. Team-Building & Leadership Look for complementary skill sets in co-founders When choosing a co-founder, it’s important to find someone with a complementary skill set, not just someone you’re close to. For example, I come from a business and commercial background, so I needed someone with technical expertise. That’s when I found my co-founder, Himanshu, who had experience in machine learning and AI. He was a great match because his technical knowledge complemented my business skills, and together we formed a strong team. It might seem natural to choose your best friend as your co-founder, but this can often lead to conflict. Chances are, you and your best friend share similar interests, skills, and backgrounds, which doesn’t bring diversity to the table. If both of you come from the same industry or have the same strengths, you may end up butting heads on how things should be done. Having diverse skill sets helps avoid this and fosters a more collaborative working relationship. Himanshu (left) and Somsubhra (right) co-founded AI Palette in 2018 Define roles clearly to prevent co-founder conflict To avoid conflict, it’s essential that your roles as co-founders are clearly defined from the beginning. If your co-founder and you have distinct responsibilities, there is no room for overlap or disagreement. This ensures that both of you can work without stepping on each other's toes, and there’s mutual respect for each other’s expertise. This is another reason as to why it helps to have a co-founder with a complementary skillset to yours. Not only is having similar industry backgrounds and skillsets not particularly useful when building out your startup, it's also more likely to lead to conflicts since you both have similar subject expertise. On the other hand, if your co-founder is an expert in something that you're not, you're less likely to argue with them about their decisions regarding that aspect of the business and vice versa when it comes to your decisions. Look for employees who are driven by your mission, not salary For early-stage startups, the first hires are crucial. These employees need to be highly motivated and excited about the mission. Since the salary will likely be low and the work demanding, they must be driven by something beyond just the paycheck. The right employees are the swash-buckling pirates and romantics, i.e those who are genuinely passionate about the startup’s vision and want to be part of something impactful beyond material gains. When employees are motivated by the mission, they are more likely to stick around and help take the startup to greater heights. A litmus test for hiring: Would you be excited to work with them on a Sunday? One of the most important rounds in the hiring process is the culture fit round. This is where you assess whether a candidate shares the same values as you and your team. A key question to ask yourself is: "Would I be excited to work with this person on a Sunday?" If there’s any doubt about your answer, it’s likely not a good fit. The idea is that you want employees who align with the company's culture and values and who you would enjoy collaborating with even outside of regular work hours. How we structure the team at AI Palette We have three broad functions in our organization. The first two are the big ones: Technical Team – This is the core of our product and technology. This team is responsible for product development and incorporating customer feedback into improving the technology Commercial Team – This includes sales, marketing, customer service, account managers, and so on, handling everything related to business growth and customer relations. General and Administrative Team – This smaller team supports functions like finance, HR, and administration. As with almost all businesses, we have teams that address the two core tasks of building (technical team) and selling (commercial team), but given the size we're at now, having the administrative team helps smoothen operations. Set broad goals but let your teams decide on execution What I've done is recruit highly skilled people who don't need me to micromanage them on a day-to-day basis. They're experts in their roles, and as Steve Jobs said, when you hire the right person, you don't have to tell them what to do—they understand the purpose and tell you what to do. So, my job as the CEO is to set the broader goals for them, review the plans they have to achieve those goals, and periodically check in on progress. For example, if our broad goal is to meet a certain revenue target, I break it down across teams: For the sales team, I’ll look at how they plan to hit that target—how many customers they need to sell to, how many salespeople they need, and what tactics and strategies they plan to use. For the technical team, I’ll evaluate our product offerings—whether they think we need to build new products to attract more customers, and whether they think it's scalable for the number of customers we plan to serve. This way, the entire organization's tasks are cascaded in alignment with our overarching goals, with me setting the direction and leaving the details of execution to the skilled team members that I hire.

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]

Hello Everyone (VERY LONG CASE STUDY AHEAD) - 355% return in 9 months Note: I own a 7-figures USD valued portfolio of 41+ content sites that generates 5-6 figures USD a month in passive income. This is my first time posting in this sub and my goal is to NOT share generic advice but precise numbers, data and highly refined processes so you can also get started with this business yourself or if you already have an existing business, drive huge traffic to it and scale it substantially (get more customers). I will use a case study to explain the whole process. As most of us are entrepreneurs here, explaining an actual project would be more meaningful. In this case study I used AI assisted content to grow an existing site from $217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months (NO BACKLINKS) and sold it for $59,000. ROI of 3 months: 355% Previous case studies (before I give an overview of the model) Amazon Affiliate Content Site: $371/m to $19,263/m in 14 MONTHS - $900K CASE STUDY \[AMA\] Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) \[AMA\] Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+) Note: You can check pinned posts on my profile. Do go through the comments as well as a lot of questions are answered in those. However, if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out. This is an \[AMA\]. Quick Overview of the Model Approach: High traffic, niche specific, informative content websites that monetise its traffic through highly automated methods like display ads and affiliate. The same model can be applied to existing businesses to drive traffic and get customers. Main idea: Make passive income in a highly automated way Easy to understand analogy You have real estate (here you have digital asset like a website) You get rental income (here you get ads and affiliate income with no physical hassle, in case you have a business like service, product etc. then you can get customers for that too but if not, it's alright) Real estate has value (this digital asset also has value that can be appreciated with less effort) Real estate can be sold (this can be sold too but faster) IMPORTANT NOTE: Search traffic is the BEST way to reach HUGE target audience and it's important when it comes to scaling. This essentially means that you can either monetise that via affiliate, display etc. or if you have a business then you can reach a bigger audience to scale. Overview of this website's valuation (then and now: Oct. 2022 and June 2023) Oct 2022: $217/m Valuation: $5,750.5 (26.5x) - set it the same as the multiple it was sold for June 2023: $2,836/m Traffic and revenue trend: growing fast Last 3 months avg: $2,223 Valuation now: $59,000 (26.5x) Description: The domain was registered in 2016, it grew and then the project was left unattended. I decided to grow it again using properly planned AI assisted content. Backlink profile: 500+ Referring domains (Ahrefs). Backlinks mean the sites linking back to you. This is important when it comes to ranking. Summary of Results of This Website - Before and After Note: If the terms seem technical, do not worry. I will explain them in detail later. Still if you have any questions. Feel free to comment or reach out. |Metric|Oct 2022|June 2023|Difference|Comments| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Articles|314|804|\+490|AI Assisted content published in 3 months| |Traffic|9,394|31,972|\+22,578|Organic| |Revenue|$217|$2,836|\+$2,619|Multiple sources| |RPM (revenue/1000 web traffic)|23.09|$88.7|\+$65.61|Result of Conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You make changes to the site for better conversions| |EEAT (expertise, experience, authority and trust of website)|2 main authors|8 authors|6|Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations| |CRO|Nothing|Tables, video ads |Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations || ​ Month by Month Growth |Month|Revenue|Steps| |:-|:-|:-| |Sept 2022|NA|Content Plan| |Oct 2022|$217|Content Production| |Nov 2022|$243|Content production + EEAT authors| |Dec 2022|$320|Content production + EEAT authors| |Jan 2023|$400|Monitoring| |Feb 2023|$223|Content production + EEAT authors| |Mar 2023|$2,128|CRO & Fixations| |April 2023|$1,609|CRO & Fixations| |May 2023|$2,223|Content production + EEAT authors| |June 2023|$2,836|CRO and Fixations| |Total|$10,199|| ​ What will I share Content plan and Website structure Content Writing Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Faster indexing Conversion rate optimisation Guest Posting EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) Costing ROI The plans moving forward with these sites ​ Website Structure and Content Plan This is probably the most important important part of the whole process. The team spends around a month just to get this right. It's like defining the direction of the project. Description: Complete blueprint of the site's structure in terms of organisation of categories, subcategories and sorting of articles in each one of them. It also includes the essential pages. The sorted articles target main keyword, relevant entities and similar keywords. This has to be highly data driven and we look at over 100 variables just to get it right. It's like beating Google's algorithm to ensure you have a blueprint for a site that will rank. It needs to be done right. If there is a mistake, then even if you do everything right - it's not going to work out and after 8-16 months you will realise that everything went to waste. Process For this project, we had a niche selected already so we didn't need to do a lot of research pertaining to that. We also knew the topic since the website was already getting good traffic on that. We just validated from Ahrefs, SEMRUSH and manual analysis if it would be worth it to move forward with that topic. ​ Find entities related to the topic: We used Ahrefs and InLinks to get an idea about the related entities (topics) to create a proper topical relevance. In order to be certain and have a better idea, we used ChatGPT to find relevant entities as well \> Ahrefs (tool): Enter main keyword in keywords explorer. Check the left pain for popular topics \> Inlinks (tool): Enter the main keyword, check the entity maps \> ChatGPT (tool): Ask it to list down the most important and relevant entities in order of their priority Based on this info, you can map out the most relevant topics that are semantically associated to your main topic Sorting the entities in topics (categories) and subtopics (subcategories): Based on the information above, cluster them properly. The most relevant ones must be grouped together. Each group must be sorted into its relevant category. \> Example: Site about cycling. \> Categories/entities: bicycles, gear and equipment, techniques, safety, routes etc. \> The subcategories/subentities for let's say "techniques" would be: Bike handling, pedaling, drafting etc. Extract keywords for each subcategory/subentity: You can do this using Ahrefs or Semrush. Each keyword would be an article. Ensure that you target the similar keywords in one article. For example: how to ride a bicycle and how can I ride a bicycle will be targeted by one article. Make the more important keyword in terms of volume and difficulty as the main keyword and the other one(s) as secondary Define main focus vs secondary focus: Out of all these categories/entities - there will be one that you would want to dominate in every way. So, focus on just that in the start. This will be your main focus. Try to answer ALL the questions pertaining to that. You can extract the questions using Ahrefs. \> Ahrefs > keywords explorer \> enter keyword \> Questions \> Download the list and cluster the similar ones. This will populate your main focus category/entity and will drive most of the traffic. Now, you need to write in other categories/subentities as well. This is not just important, but crucial to complete the topical map loop. In simple words, if you do this Google sees you as a comprehensive source on the topic - otherwise, it ignores you and you don't get ranked Define the URLs End result: List of all the entities and sub-entities about the main site topic in the form of categories and subcategories respectively. A complete list of ALL the questions about the main focus and at around 10 questions for each one of the subcategories/subentities that are the secondary focus Content Writing So, now that there's a plan. Content needs to be produced. Pick out a keyword (which is going to be a question) and... Answer the question Write about 5 relevant entities Answer 10 relevant questions Write a conclusion Keep the format the same for all the articles. Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Ensure the following is taken care of: H1 Permalink H2s H3s Lists Tables Meta description Socials description Featured image 2 images in text \\Schema Relevant YouTube video (if there is) Note: There are other pointers link internal linking in a semantically relevant way but this should be good to start with. Faster Indexing Indexing means Google has read your page. Ranking only after this step has been done. Otherwise, you can't rank if Google hasn't read the page. Naturally, this is a slow process. But, we expedite it in multiple ways. You can use RankMath to quickly index the content. Since, there are a lot of bulk pages you need a reliable method. Now, this method isn't perfect. But, it's better than most. Use Google Indexing API and developers tools to get indexed. Rank Math plugin is used. I don't want to bore you and write the process here. But, a simple Google search can help you set everything up. Additionally, whenever you post something - there will be an option to INDEX NOW. Just press that and it would be indexed quite fast. Conversion rate optimisation Once you get traffic, try adding tables right after the introduction of an article. These tables would feature a relevant product on Amazon. This step alone increased our earnings significantly. Even though the content is informational and NOT review. This still worked like a charm. Try checking out the top pages every single day in Google analytics and add the table to each one of them. Moreover, we used EZOIC video ads as well. That increased the RPM significantly as well. Both of these steps are highly recommended. Overall, we implemented over 11 fixations but these two contribute the most towards increasing the RPM so I would suggest you stick to these two in the start. Guest Posting We made additional income by selling links on the site as well. However, we were VERY careful about who we offered a backlink to. We didn't entertain any objectionable links. Moreover, we didn't actively reach out to anyone. We had a professional email clearly stated on the website and a particularly designated page for "editorial guidelines" A lot of people reached out to us because of that. As a matter of fact, the guy who bought the website is in the link selling business and plans to use the site primarily for selling links. According to him, he can easily make $4000+ from that alone. Just by replying to the prospects who reached out to us. We didn't allow a lot of people to be published on the site due to strict quality control. However, the new owner is willing to be lenient and cash it out. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) This is an important ranking factor. You need to prove on the site that your site has authors that are experienced, have expertise, authority and trust. A lot of people were reaching out to publish on our site and among them were a few established authors as well. We let them publish on our site for free, added them on our official team, connected their socials and shared them on all our socials. In return, we wanted them to write 3 articles each for us and share everything on all the social profiles. You can refer to the tables I shared above to check out the months it was implemented. We added a total of 6 writers (credible authors). Their articles were featured on the homepage and so were their profiles. Costing Well, we already had the site and the backlinks on it. Referring domains (backlinks) were already 500+. We just needed to focus on smart content and content. Here is the summary of the costs involved. Articles: 490 Avg word count per article: 1500 Total words: 735,000 (approximately) Cost per word: 2 cents (includes research, entities, production, quality assurance, uploading, formatting, adding images, featured image, alt texts, onsite SEO, publishing/scheduling etc.) Total: $14,700 ROI (Return on investment) Earning: Oct 22 - June 23 Earnings: $10,199 Sold for: $59,000 Total: $69,199 Expenses: Content: $14,700 Misc (hosting and others): $500 Total: $15,200 ROI over a 9 months period: 355.25% The plans moving forward This website was a part of a research and development experiment we did. With AI, we wanted to test new waters and transition more towards automation. Ideally, we want to use ChatGPT or some other API to produce these articles and bulk publish on the site. The costs with this approach are going to be much lower and the ROI is much more impressive. It's not the the 7-figures projects I created earlier (as you may have checked the older case studies on my profile), but it's highly scalable. We plan to refine this model even further, test more and automate everything completely to bring down our costs significantly. Once we have a model, we are going to scale it to 100s of sites. The process of my existing 7-figures websites portfolio was quite similar. I tested out a few sites, refined the model and scaled it to over 41 sites. Now, the fundamentals are the same however, we are using AI in a smarter way to do the same but at a lower cost, with a smaller team and much better returns. The best thing in my opinion is to run numerous experiments now. Our experimentation was slowed down a lot in the past since we couldn't write using AI but now it's much faster. The costs are 3-6 times lower so when it used to take $50-100k to start, grow and sell a site. Now you can pump 3-6 more sites for the same budget. This is a good news for existing business owners as well who want to grow their brand. Anyway, I am excited to see the results of more sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions - feel free to let me know. Best of luck for everything. Feel free to ask questions. I'd be happy to help. This is an AMA.

In 2018, I started an AI chatbot company...today, we have over 4000 paying customers and ChatGPT is changing EVERYTHING

Intro: 5 years ago, my co-founders and I ventured into the space of AI chatbots and started our first truly successful company. Never in a million years did I see myself in this business and we truly stumbled upon the opportunity by chance. Prior to that, we ran a successful lead generation business and questioned whether a simple ai chat product would increase our online conversions. Of the 3 co-founders, I was skeptical that it would, but the data was clear that we had something that really worked. We built a really simple MVP version of the product and gave it to some of our top lead buyers who saw even better conversion improvements on their own websites. In just a matter of weeks, a new business opportunity was born and a major pivot away from our lead generation business started. Our growth story: Startup growth is really interesting and in most cases, founders aren't really educated on what a typical growth curve looks like. While we hear about "hockey stick" growth curves, it's really atypical to actually see or experience this. From my experience, growth curves take place in a "stair curve". For example, you can scrap your way to a $100k run rate without much process or tracking. You can even get to $1 million ARR being super disorganized. As you start going beyond $1M ARR, things start to break and growth can flatten out while you put new processes and systems in place. Eventually you'll get to $2M or 3M with your new strategy and then things start breaking again. I've seen the process repeat itself and as you increase your ARR, the processes and systems become more difficult to work through...mainly because more people get involved and the product becomes more complex. When you do end up cracking the code in each step, the growth accelerates faster and faster before things start to break down and flatten out again. Without getting too much into the numbers, here were some of our initial levers for growth: Our first "stair" step was to leverage our existing customer base from our prior lead generation business. Having prior business relationships and a proven track record made it really simple to have conversations with people who already trusted us to try something new that we had to offer. Stair #2 was to build out a partner channel. Since our chat product involved a web developer or agency installing the chat on client sites, we partnered with these developers and agencies to leverage their already existing customer bases. We essentially piggy-backed off of their relationships and gave them a cut of the revenue. We built an internal partner tracking portal which took 6+ months, but it was well worth it. Stair #3 was our most expensive step, biggest headache, but added the most revenue. After COVID, we had and SDR/Account Executive sales team of roughly 30 people. It added revenue fast, but the payback periods were 12+ months so we had to cut back on this strategy after exhausting our universe of clients. Stair #4 involves a variety of paid advertisement strategies with product changes and the introduction of new onboarding features. We're in the middle of this stair and hope it's multiple years before things breakdown again. Don't give up I know it sounds really cliché, but the #1 indicator of success is doing the really boring stuff day in and day out and making incremental improvements. As the weeks, months, and years pass by, you will slowly gain domain expertise and start to see the gaps in the market that can set you apart from your competition. It's so hard for founders to stay focused and not get distracted so I would say it's equally as important to have co-founders who hold each other accountable on what your collective goals are. How GPT is changing everything I could write pages and pages about how GPT is going to change how the world operates, but I'll keep it specific to our business and chatbots. In 2021, we built an industry specific AI model that did a great job of classifying intents which allowed us to train future actions during a chat. It was a great advancement in our customer's industry at the time. With GPT integrated into our system, that training process that would take an employee hours to do, can be done in 5 minutes. The model is also cheaper than our own and more accurate. Because of these training improvements, we have been able to conduct research that is allowing us to leverage GPT models like no one else in the industry. This is both in the realm of chat and also training during onboarding. I really want to refrain from sharing our company, but if you are interested in seeing a model trained for your specific company or website, just PM me your link and I'll send you a free testing link with a model fully trained for your site to play around with. Where we are headed and the dangers of AI The level of advancement in AI is not terribly dangerous in its current state. I'm sure you've heard it before, but those who leverage the technology today will be the ones who get ahead. In the coming years, AI will inevitably replace a large percentage of human labor. This will be great for overall value creation and productivity for the world, but the argument that humans have always adapted and new jobs will be created is sadly not going to be as relevant in this case. As the possibility of AGI becomes a reality in the coming years or decades, productivity through AI will be off the charts. There is a major risk that human innovation and creative thinking will be completely stalled...human potential as we know it will be capped off and there will need to be major economic reform for displaced workers. This may not happen in the next 5 or 10 years, but you would be naïve not to believe the world we live in today will not be completely different in 20 to 30 years. Using AI to create deepfakes, fake voice agents, scam the unsuspecting, or exploit technical vulnerabilities are just a few other examples I could write about, but don't want to go into to much detail for obvious reasons. Concluding If you found the post interesting or you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I'll do my best to answer whatever questions come from this! ​ \*EDIT: Wasn't expecting this sort of response. I posted this right before I went to sleep so I'll get to responding soon.

Is there any point in building a product with AI anymore?

Everyone and their grandmother are building AI products. So it begs the question. Is the AI market now too saturated? Have all the AI apps been thought of? Of course not don't be silly, There is still a significant opportunity to create AI products and become profitable. But let's play devils advocate here. Let's say you're a developer and you want to build your first SaaS product. Now, imagine a world where all AI products were already thought of (a scary thought). What would you do? Would you move onto something else? See, when people think of an idea for a SaaS product what often happens is they do a quick Google search and tend to think "oh crap, it already exists, better move on". Maybe that's the right thing to do...but then again maybe it's not. Before you run for the hills, make sure to check the SEO potential for your idea. If your idea has the potential to rank high on Google and there are already hundreds/thousands of people looking for it then you can take that as all the validation you need to start building it. Here are 3 AI ideas that all have good SEO potential. Each idea has keywords that you can target with a difficulty level 500. This means it's easy to rank high in Google for them and they have a high number of people searching for them each month. AI Accounting Software A Saas product that uses AI to analyze bank transactions, invoices, and receipts to automatically match them and reconcile accounts in real-time, reducing manual work and errors. It would also offer predictive insights, suggesting optimal payment times or highlighting potential cash flow issues based on historical data. Could potentially be integrated with popular accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero. SEO Potential Keyword: ai accounting Keyword Difficulty: 9 Average Search Volume 2900 AI Human Resources Software AI Human Resources Software An AI-driven candidate screening and onboarding platform for small to medium-sized businesses. The tool would use AI to automatically filter job applications based on predefined criteria, rank candidates, and even conduct initial interview assessments using natural language processing. It could also manage onboarding tasks by automating the distribution of paperwork, training schedules, and team introductions. SEO Potential Keyword: ai human resources Keyword Difficulty: 17 Average Search Volume 2900 AI Nutrition Tool A Micro SaaS which creates personalized meal planning and nutrition analysis. The platform would use AI to create tailored meal plans based on users' dietary goals, preferences, allergies, and health data (such as activity level or medical conditions). It could analyze food labels, suggest healthier alternatives, and track nutrient intake in real time, helping users maintain balanced diets. SEO Potential Keyword: ai nutrition Keyword Difficulty: 3 Average Search Volume 720 I created a tool (check the first comment) to find ideas like this.

Started a content marketing agency 6 years ago - $0 to $5,974,324 (2023 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 6 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 - 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 - $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 - $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 - $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 - $4,539,659 Revenue How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team Each freelancer earns $65-85/hour Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more) We recently introduced hourly engagements for clients who fit our model but have some existing in-house support Packages range in price from $10-20k/mo We offer profit share to everyone on our core team as a way to give everyone ownership in the company In 2022, we posted $1,434,665 in revenue. It was our highest revenue year to date and brings our lifetime total to $5,974,324. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2022. But, like every year, it was a mix of ups and downs. Here’s my dispatch for 2023. — Running a business is like spilling a drink. It starts as a small and simple thing. But, if you don’t clean it up, the spill will spread and grow — taking up more space, seeping into every crack. There’s always something you could be doing. Marketing you could be working on. Pitches you could be making. Networking you could be doing. Client work you could help with. It can be all-consuming. And it will be — if you don’t clean up the spill. I realized this year that I had no containment for the spill that I created. Running an agency was spilling over into nearly every moment of my life. When I wasn’t working, I was thinking about work. When I wasn’t thinking about work, I was dreaming about it. Over the years, I’ve shared about a lot of my personal feelings and experience as an entrepreneur. And I also discussed my reckoning with the limitations of running the business we’ve built. My acceptance that it was an airplane but not a rocket. And my plan to try to compartmentalize the agency to make room in my life for other things — new business ideas, new revenue streams, and maybe some non-income-producing activity. 🤷 What I found in 2022 was that the business wasn’t quite ready for me to make that move. It was still sucking up too much of my time and attention. There were still too many gaps to fill and I was the one who was often filling them. So what do you do? Ultimately you have two choices on the table anytime you run a business and it’s not going the way you want it: Walk away Turn the ship — slowly For a huge number of reasons (personal, professional, financial, etc), walking away from Optimist was not really even an option or the right move for me. But it did feel like things needed to change. I needed to keep turning the ship to get it to the place where it fit into my life — instead of my life fitting around the business. This means 2022 was a year of transition for the agency. (Again?) Refocusing on Profit Some money is better than no money. Right? Oddly, this was one of the questions I found myself asking in 2022. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to have many clients who have stuck with us a long time. In some cases, we’ve had clients work with us for 2, 3, or even 4 years. (That’s over half of our existence!) But, things have gotten more expensive — we’ve all felt it. We’ve had to increase pay to remain competitive for top talent. Software costs have gone up. It’s eaten into our margin. Because of our increasing costs and evolving scope, many of our best, most loyal clients were our least profitable. In fact, many were barely profitable — if at all. We’ve tried to combat that by increasing rates on new, incoming clients to reflect our new costs and try to make up for shrinking margin on long-term clients. But we didn’t have a good strategy in place for updating pricing for current clients. And it bit us in the ass. Subsidizing lower-profit, long-term clients with new, higher-margin clients ultimately didn’t work out. Our margins continued to dwindle and some months we were barely breaking even while posting six-figures of monthly revenue. 2022 was our highest revenue year but one of our least profitable. It only left one option. We had to raise rates on some of our long-term clients. But, of course, raising rates on a great, long-term client can be delicate. You’ve built a relationship with these people over the years and you’re setting yourself up for an ultimatum — are you more valuable to the client or is the client more valuable to you? Who will blink first? We offered all of these clients the opportunity to move to updated pricing. Unfortunately, some of them weren’t on board. Again, we had 2 options: Keep them at a low/no profit rate Let them churn It seems intuitive that having a low-profit client is better than having no client. But we’ve learned an important lesson many times over the years. Our business doesn’t scale infinitely and we can only handle so many clients at a time. That means that low-profit clients are actually costing us money in some cases. Say our average client generates $2,500 per month in profit — $30,000 per year. If one of our clients is only generating $500/mo in profit, working with them means missing out on bringing on a more profitable client (assuming our team is currently at capacity). Instead of $30,000/year, we’re only making $6,000. Keeping that client costs us $24,000. That’s called opportunity cost. So it’s clear: We had to let these clients churn. We decided to churn about 25% of our existing clients. On paper, the math made sense. And we had a pretty consistent flow of new opportunities coming our way. At the time, it felt like a no-brainer decision. And I felt confident that we could quickly replace these low-profit clients with higher-margin ones. I was wrong. Eating Shit Right after we initiated proactively churning some of our clients, other clients — ones we planned to keep — gave us notice that they were planning to end the engagement. Ouch. Fuck. We went from a 25% planned drop in revenue to a nearly 40% cliff staring us right in the face. Then things got even worse. Around Q3 of this year, talk of recession and layoffs really started to intensify. We work primarily with tech companies and startups. And these were the areas most heavily impacted by the economic news. Venture funding was drying up. Our leads started to slow down. This put us in a tough position. Looking back now, I think it’s clear that I made the wrong decision. We went about this process in the wrong way. The reality sinks in when you consider the imbalance between losing a client and gaining a client. It takes 30 days for someone to fire us. It’s a light switch. But it could take 1-3 months to qualify, close, and onboard a new client. We have lots of upfront work, research, and planning that goes into the process. We have to learn a new brand voice, tone, and style. It’s a marathon. So, for every client we “trade”, there’s a lapse in revenue and work. This means that, in retrospect, I would probably have made this transition using some kind of staggered schedule rather than a cut-and-dry approach. We could have gradually off-boarded clients when we had more definitive work to replace them. I was too confident. But that’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Rebuilding & Resetting Most of the voluntary and involuntary churn happened toward the end of 2022. So we’re still dealing with the fall out. Right now, it feels like a period of rebuilding. We didn’t quite lose 50% of our revenue, but we definitely saw a big hit heading into 2023. To be transparent: It sucks. It feels like a gigantic mistake that I made which set us back significantly from our previous high point. I acted rashly and it cost us a lot of money — at least on the surface. But I remind myself of the situation we were in previously. Nearly twice the revenue but struggling to maintain profitability. Would it have been better to try to slowly fix that situation and battle through months of loss or barely-break-even profits? Or was ripping off the bandaid the right move after all? I’m an optimist. (Heh, heh) Plus, I know that spiraling over past decisions won’t change them or help me move forward. So I’m choosing to look at this as an opportunity — to rebuild, reset, and refocus the company. I get to take all of the tough lessons I’ve learned over the last 6 years and apply them to build the company in a way that better aligns with our new and current goals. It’s not quite a fresh, clean start, but by parting ways with some of our oldest clients, we’ve eliminated some of the “debt” that’s accumulated over the years. We get a chance to fully realize the new positioning that we rolled out last year. Many of those long-term clients who churned had a scope of work or engagement structure that didn’t fit with our new positioning and focus. So, by losing them, we’re able to completely close up shop on the SOWs that no longer align with the future version of Optimist. Our smaller roster of clients is a better fit for that future. My job is to protect that positioning by ensuring that while we’re rebuilding our new roster of clients we don’t get desperate. We maintain the qualifications we set out for future clients and only take on work that fits. How’s that for seeing the upside? Some other upside from the situation is that we got an opportunity to ask for candid feedback from clients who were leaving. We asked for insight about their decision, what factors they considered, how they perceived us, and the value of our work. Some of the reasons clients left were obvious and possibly unavoidable. Things like budget cuts, insourcing, and uncertainty about the economy all played at least some part of these decisions. But, reading between the lines, where was one key insight that really struck me. It’s one of those, “oh, yeah — duh — I already knew that,” things that can be difficult to learn and easy to forget…. We’re in the Relationship Business (Plan Accordingly) For all of our focus on things like rankings, keywords, content, conversions, and a buffet of relevant metrics, it can be easy to lose the forest for the trees. Yes, the work itself matters. Yes, the outcomes — the metrics — matter. But sometimes the relationship matters more. When you’re running an agency, you can live or die by someone just liking you. Admittedly, this feels totally unfair. It opens up all kinds of dilemmas, frustration, opportunity for bias and prejudice, and other general messiness. But it’s the real world. If a client doesn’t enjoy working with us — even if for purely personal reasons — they could easily have the power to end of engagement, regardless of how well we did our actual job. We found some evidence of this in the offboarding conversations we had with clients. In some cases, we had clients who we had driven triple- and quadruple-digital growth. Our work was clearly moving the needle and generating positive ROI and we had the data to prove it. But they decided to “take things in another direction” regardless. And when we asked about why they made the decision, it was clear that it was more about the working relationship than anything we could have improved about the service itself. The inverse is also often true. Our best clients have lasting relationships with our team. The work is important — and they want results. But even if things aren’t quite going according to plan, they’re patient and quick to forgive. Those relationships feel solid — unshakeable. Many of these folks move onto new roles or new companies and quickly look for an opportunity to work with us again. On both sides, relationships are often more important than the work itself. We’ve already established that we’re not building a business that will scale in a massive way. Optimist will always be a small, boutique service firm. We don’t need 100 new leads per month We need a small, steady roster of clients who are a great fit for the work we do and the value we create. We want them to stick around. We want to be their long-term partner. I’m not built for churn-and-burn agency life. And neither is the business. When I look at things through this lens, I realize how much I can cut from our overall business strategy. We don’t need an ultra-sophisticated, multi-channel marketing strategy. We just need strong relationships — enough of them to make our business work. There are a few key things we can take away from this as a matter of business strategy: Put most of our effort into building and strengthening relationships with our existing clients Be intentional about establishing a strong relationship with new clients as part of onboarding Focus on relationships as the main driver of future business development Embracing Reality: Theory vs Practice Okay, so with the big learnings out the way, I want to pivot into another key lesson from 2022. It’s the importance of understanding theory vs practice — specifically when it comes to thinking about time, work, and life. It all started when I was considering how to best structure my days and weeks around running Optimist, my other ventures, and my life goals outside of work. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in many different ways to block time and find focus — to compartmentalize all of the things that are spinning and need my attention. As I mapped this out, I realized that I often tried to spread myself too thin throughout the week. Not just that I was trying to do too much but that I was spreading that work into too many small chunks rather than carving out time for focus. In theory, 5 hours is 5 hours. If you have 5 hours of work to get done, you just fit into your schedule whenever you have an open time slot. In reality, a single 5-hour block of work is 10x more productive and satisfying than 10, 30-minute blocks of work spread out across the week. In part, this is because of context switching. Turning your focus from one thing to another thing takes time. Achieving flow and focus takes time. And the more you jump from one project to another, the more time you “lose” to switching. This is insightful for me both in the context of work and planning my day, but also thinking about my life outside of Optimist. One of my personal goals is to put a finite limit on my work time and give myself more freedom. I can structure that in many different ways. Is it better to work 5 days a week but log off 1 hour early each day? Or should I try to fit more hours into each workday so I can take a full day off? Of course, it’s the latter. Both because of the cost of context switching and spreading work into more, smaller chunks — but also because of the remainder that I end up with when I’m done working. A single extra hour in my day probably means nothing. Maybe I can binge-watch one more episode of a new show or do a few extra chores around the house. But it doesn’t significantly improve my life or help me find greater balance. Most things I want to do outside of work can’t fit into a single extra hour. A full day off from work unlocks many more options. I can take the day to go hiking or biking. I can spend the day with my wife, planning or playing a game. Or I can push it up against the weekend and take a 3-day trip. It gives me more of the freedom and balance that I ultimately want. So this has become a guiding principle for how I structure my schedule. I want to: Minimize context switching Maximize focused time for work and for non-work The idea of embracing reality also bleeds into some of the shifts in business strategy that I mentioned above. In theory, any time spent on marketing will have a positive impact on the company. In reality, focusing more on relationships than blasting tweets into the ether is much more likely to drive the kind of growth and stability that we’re seeking. As I think about 2023, I think this is a recurring theme. It manifests in many ways. Companies are making budget cuts and tough decisions about focus and strategy. Most of us are looking for ways to rein in the excess and have greater impact with a bit less time and money. We can’t do everything. We can’t even do most things. So our #1 priority should be to understand the reality of our time and our effort to make the most of every moment (in both work and leisure). That means thinking deeply about our strengths and our limitations. Being practical, even if it feels like sacrifice. Update on Other Businesses Finally, I want to close up by sharing a bit about my ventures outside of Optimist. I shared last year how I planned to shift some of my (finite) time and attention to new ventures and opportunities. And, while I didn’t get to devote as much as I hoped to these new pursuits, they weren’t totally in vain. I made progress across the board on all of the items I laid out in my post. Here’s what happened: Juice: The first Optimist spin-out agency At the end of 2021, we launched our first new service business based on demand from Optimist clients. Focused entirely on building links for SEO, we called the agency Juice. Overall, we made strong progress toward turning this into a legitimate standalone business in 2022. Relying mostly on existing Optimist clients and a few word-of-mouth opportunities (no other marketing), we built a team and set up a decent workflow and operations. There’s still many kinks and challenges that we’re working through on this front. All told, Juice posted almost $100,000 in revenue in our first full year. Monetizing the community I started 2022 with a focus on figuring out how to monetize our free community, Top of the Funnel. Originally, my plan was to sell sponsorships as the main revenue driver. And that option is still on the table. But, this year, I pivoted to selling paid content and subscriptions. We launched a paid tier for content and SEO entrepreneurs where I share more of my lessons, workflows, and ideas for building and running a freelance or agency business. It’s gained some initial traction — we reached \~$1,000 MRR from paid subscriptions. In total, our community revenue for 2022 was about $2,500. In 2023, I’m hoping to turn this into a $30,000 - $50,000 revenue opportunity. Right now, we’re on track for \~$15,000. Agency partnerships and referrals In 2022, we also got more serious about referring leads to other agencies. Any opportunity that was not a fit for Optimist or we didn’t have capacity to take on, we’d try to connect with another partner. Transparently, we struggled to operationalize this as effectively as I would have liked. In part, this was driven by my lack of focus here. With the other challenges throughout the year, I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to setting goals and putting workflows into place. But it wasn’t a total bust. We referred out several dozen potential clients to partner agencies. Of those, a handful ended up converting into sales — and referral commission. In total, we generated about $10,000 in revenue from referrals. I still see this as a huge opportunity for us to unlock in 2023. Affiliate websites Lastly, I mentioned spending some time on my new and existing affiliate sites as another big business opportunity in 2022. This ultimately fell to the bottom of my list and didn’t get nearly the attention I wanted. But I did get a chance to spend a few weeks throughout the year building this income stream. For 2022, I generated just under $2,000 in revenue from affiliate content. My wife has graciously agreed to dedicate some of her time and talent to these projects. So, for 2023, I think this will become a bit of a family venture. I’m hoping to build a solid and consistent workflow, expand the team, and develop a more solid business strategy. Postscript — AI, SEO, OMG As I’m writing this, much of my world is in upheaval. If you’re not in this space (and/or have possibly been living under a rock), the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 has sparked an arms race between Google, Bing, OpenAI, and many other players. The short overview: AI is likely to fundamentally change the way internet search works. This has huge impact on almost all of the work that I do and the businesses that I run. Much of our focus is on SEO and understanding the current Google algorithm, how to generate traffic for clients, and how to drive traffic to our sites and projects. That may all change — very rapidly. This means we’re standing at a very interesting point in time. On the one hand, it’s scary as hell. There’s a non-zero chance that this will fundamentally shift — possibly upturn — our core business model at Optimist. It could dramatically change how we work and/or reduce demand for our core services. No bueno. But it’s also an opportunity (there’s the optimist in me, again). I certainly see a world where we can become leaders in this new frontier. We can pivot, adjust, and capitalize on a now-unknown version of SEO that’s focused on understanding and optimizing for AI-as-search. With that, we may also be able to help others — say, those in our community? — also navigate this tumultuous time. See? It’s an opportunity. I wish I had the answers right now. But, it’s still a time of uncertainty. I just know that there’s a lot of change happening and I want to be in front of it rather than trying to play catch up. Wish me luck. — Alright friends — that's my update for 2023! I’ve always appreciated sharing these updates with the Reddit community, getting feedback, being asked tough questions, and even battling it out with some of my haters (hey!! 👋) As usual, I’m going to pop in throughout the next few days to respond to comments or answer questions. Feel free to share thoughts, ideas, and brutal takedowns in the comments. If you're interested in following the Optimist journey and the other projects I'm working on in 2023, you can follow me on Twitter. Cheers, Tyler P.S. - If you're running or launching a freelance or agency business and looking for help figuring it out, please DM me. Our subscription community, Middle of the Funnel, was created to provide feedback, lessons, and resources for other entrepreneurs in this space.

Building and launching an AI-powered Product Strategy tool, or; a story of nights and weekends

Speaking to peers in the software development sphere I learned of one constant that we had all personally experienced throughout our careers: a bloated product development process that feels like work for the sake of work, centred around the highest-paid person's opinion instead of its customers. We didn't like how current tools assume AI will provide the perfect answer on the first run. Instead, we wanted a tool that allows for manual refining and editing AI suggestions, keeping all previous ideas in context. This way, we can develop a solution step by step, instead of trying to get it perfect on the first try. An approach more similar to how you'd typically approach product discovery as a human. AI is then used to help save time and reduce admin, instead of replace the expert So, we got together and asked over 100 Product Managers questions about it, brought all that feedback goodness together, and started building Squad. We think we've created something really cool and hope you think so too. The ELI5 on what Squad does: 1) Creates alignment that empowers bottom up software development whilst keeping executive in the loop 2) Increases confidence that what you're building is what people actually want - data driven by default 2) Speeds up the time from idea --> execution by ideating with you on an experimentation approach 3) Helps gives PMs time back to focus on strategy (currently stats show they spend 75% of their time on admin, 25% on strategy) The team hustled hard on this as a passion project while working day jobs, and today have launched on Product Hunt. Check it out and see if the mission resonates with you, we'd appreciate the love! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/squad-8b75e29c-d767-4a8f-a60a-fd162e141a72 ​

Innovating marketing strategies: ads crafted with AI show a 2x boost in views and an 4x rise in likes

Hey there! Recently, me and my friends conducted a new comprehensive study comparing the effectiveness of standard video ads to AI-generated content on TikTok. Our goal was to gain insights into which type of content garnered more attention in terms of views, both organic and paid, as well as engagement rate. Study background: Imalent, known for its innovation in portable lighting and powerful flashlights, decided to use an AI video generator for creating TikTok ads. For this study, we selected three top-performing ads created by designers and three ads generated with Creatify AI. Here's a breakdown of our findings: Organic Views: The results showed that AI-powered videos outperformed standard ones by 8x in organic views: videos produced by human designers got 24K organic views, while those generated by artificial intelligence got 189K views. Paid Views: AI videos attracted twice as many views as regular ads for the same budget. Traditional ads got 115K views and AI-generated ones got 259K views. Engagement: Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of our study was the engagement metrics. AI-generated content received 7 times more saves, 4 times more likes, and twice as many comments compared to standard videos. Have you considered using AI ads to promote your brand? Share your insights and experiences below! For more data and screenshots, visit the full study here.

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

Why Ignoring AI Agents in 2025 Will Kill Your Marketing Strategy

If you're still focusing solely on grabbing the attention of human beings with your marketing efforts, you're already behind. In 2025, the game will change. Good marketing will demand an in-depth understanding of the AI space, especially the AI Agent space. Why? Your ads and content won’t just be seen by humans anymore. They’ll be analyzed, indexed, and often acted upon by AI agents—automated systems that will be working on behalf of companies and consumers alike. Your New Audience: Humans + AI Agents It’s not just about appealing to people. Companies are employing AI robots to research, negotiate, and make purchasing decisions. These AI agents are fast, thorough, and unrelenting. Unlike humans, they can analyze millions of options in seconds. And if your marketing isn’t optimized for them, you’ll get filtered out before you even reach the human decision-maker. How to Prepare Your Marketing for AI Agents The companies that dominate marketing in 2025 will be the ones that master the art of capturing AI attention. To do this, marketers will need to: Understand the AI agents shaping their industry. Research how AI agents function in your niche. What are they prioritizing? How do they rank options? Create AI-friendly content. Design ads and messaging that are easily understandable and accessible to AI agents. This means clear metadata, structured data, and AI-readable formats. Invest in AI analytics. AI agents leave behind footprints. Tracking and analyzing their behavior is critical. Stay ahead of AI trends. The AI agent space is evolving rapidly. What works today might be obsolete tomorrow. How My Agency Adapted and Thrived in the AI Space At my digital agency, we saw this shift coming and decided to act early. In 2023, we started integrating AI optimization into our marketing strategies. One of our clients—a B2B SaaS company—struggled to get traction because their competitors were drowning them out in Google search rankings and ad platforms. By analyzing the algorithms and behaviors of AI agents in their space, we: Rewrote their website copy with structured data and optimized metadata that was more AI-agent friendly. Created ad campaigns with clear, concise messaging and technical attributes that AI agents could quickly process and index. Implemented predictive analytics to understand what AI agents would prioritize based on past behaviors. The results? Their website traffic doubled in three months, and their lead conversion rate skyrocketed by 40%. Over half of the traffic increase was traced back to AI agents recommending their platform to human users. The Takeaway In 2025, marketing won’t just be about human attention. It’ll be about AI attention—and that requires a completely different mindset. AI agents are not your enemy; they’re your new gatekeepers. Learn to speak their language, and you’ll dominate the marketing game.

My Side Projects: From CEO to 4th Developer (Thanks, AI 🤖)

Hey Reddit 👋, I wanted to share a bit about some side projects I’ve been working on lately. Quick background for context: I’m the CEO of a mid-to-large-scale eCommerce company pulling in €10M+ annually in net turnover. We even built our own internal tracking software that’s now a SaaS (in early review stages on Shopify), competing with platforms like Lifetimely and TrueROAS. But! That’s not really the point of this post — there’s another journey I’ve been on that I’m super excited to share (and maybe get your feedback on!). AI Transformed My Role (and My Ideas List) I’m not a developer by trade — never properly learned how to code, and to be honest, I don’t intend to. But, I’ve always been the kind of guy who jots down ideas in a notes app and dreams about execution. My dev team calls me their “4th developer” (they’re a team of three) because I have solid theoretical knowledge and can kinda read code. And then AI happened. 🛠️ It basically turned my random ideas app into an MVP generation machine. I thought it’d be fun to share one of the apps I’m especially proud of. I am also planning to build this in public and therefore I am planning to post my progress on X and every project will have /stats page where live stats of the app will be available. Tackling My Task Management Problem 🚀 I’ve sucked at task management for YEARS, I still do! I’ve tried literally everything — Sheets, Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Notion — you name it. I’d start… and then quit after a few weeks - always. What I struggle with the most is delegating tasks. As a CEO, I delegate a ton, and it’s super hard to track everything I’ve handed off to the team. Take this example: A few days ago, I emailed an employee about checking potential collaboration opportunities with a courier company. Just one of 10s of tasks like this I delegate daily. Suddenly, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be AMAZING if just typing out this email automatically created a task for me to track?” 💡 So… I jumped in. With the power of AI and a few intense days of work, I built a task manager that does just that. But of course, I couldn’t stop there. Research & Leveling It Up 📈 I looked at similar tools like TickTick and Todoist, scraped their G2 reviews (totally legally, promise! 😅), and ran them through AI for a deep SWOT analysis. I wanted to understand what their users liked/didn’t like and what gaps my app could fill. Some of the features people said they were missing didn’t align with the vision for my app (keeping it simple and personal), but I found some gold nuggets: Integration with calendars (Google) Reminders Customizable UX (themes) So, I started implementing what made sense and am keeping others on the roadmap for the future. And I’ve even built for that to, it still doesn’t have a name, however the point is you select on how many reviews of a specific app you want to make a SWOT analysis on and it will do it for you. Example for Todoist in comments. But more on that, some other time, maybe other post ... Key Features So Far: Here’s what’s live right now: ✅ Email to Task: Add an email as to, cc, or bcc — and it automatically creates a task with context, due dates, labels, etc. ✅ WhatsApp Reminders: Get nudged to handle your tasks via WhatsApp. ✅ WhatsApp to Task: Send a message like /task buy groceries — bam, it’s added with full context etc.. ✅ Chrome Extension (work-in-progress): Highlight text on any page, right-click, and send it straight to your task list. Next Steps: Build WITH the Community 👥 Right now, the app is 100% free while still in the early stages. But hey, API calls and server costs aren’t cheap, so pricing is something I’ll figure out with you as we grow. For now, my goal is to hit 100 users and iterate from there. My first pricing idea is, without monthly subscription, I don’t want to charge someone for something he didn’t use. So I am planning on charging "per task", what do you think? Here’s what I have planned: 📍 End of Year Goal: 100 users (starting from… 1 🥲). 💸 Revenue Roadmap: When we establish pricing, we’ll talk about that. 🛠️ Milestones: Post on Product Hunt when we hit 100 users. Clean up my self-written spaghetti code (hire a pro dev for review 🙃). Hire a part-time dev once we hit MRR that can cover its costs. You can check how are we doing on thisisatask.me/stats Other Side Projects I’m Working On: Because… what’s life without taking on too much, right? 😂 Full list of things I’m building: Internal HRM: Not public, tried and tested in-house. Android TV App: Syncs with HRM to post announcements to office TVs (streamlined and simple). Stats Tracker App: Connects to our internal software and gives me real-time company insights. Review Analyzer: Scrapes SaaS reviews (e.g., G2) and runs deep analysis via AI. This was originally for my Shopify SaaS but is quickly turning into something standalone. Coming soon! Mobile app game: secret for now. Let’s Build This Together! Would love it if you guys checked out thisisatask.me and gave it a spin! Still super early, super raw, but I’m pumped to hear your thoughts. Also, what’s a must-have task manager feature for you? Anything that frustrates you with current tools? I want to keep evolving this in public, so your feedback is gold. 🌟 Let me know, Reddit! Are you with me? 🙌

Recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic for a B2C SaaS website. Here's the 40 tips that helped me make that happen.

Hey guys! So as title says, we recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic / month for a B2C SaaS website (screenshot. Can't give name publicly, but can show testimonial to a mod). Here's 40 tips that "helped" me make this happen. If you get some value of the post, I write an SEO tip every other day on /r/seogrowth. There's around 10 more tips already up there other than the ones I mention here. If you want to give back for all my walls of text, I'd appreciate a sub <3 Also, there are a bunch of free stuff I mention in the article: content outline, writer guidelines, SEO checklist, and other stuff. Here's the Google Doc with all that! Tip #1. Take SEO With a Grain of Salt A lot of the SEO advice and best practices on the internet are based on 2 things: Personal experiences and case studies of companies that managed to make SEO work for them. Google or John Mueller (Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst). And, unfortunately, neither of these sources are always accurate. Personal SEO accounts are simply about what worked for specific companies. Sometimes, what worked for others, won’t work for you. For example, you might find a company that managed to rank with zero link-building because their website already had a very strong backlink profile. If you’re starting with a fresh website, chances are, you won’t be able to get the same results. At the same time, information from Google or John Mueller is also not 100% accurate. For example, they’ve said that guest posting is against Google’s guidelines and doesn’t work… But practically, guest posting is a very effective link-building strategy. So the takeaway is this: Take all information you read about SEO with a grain of salt. Analyze the information yourself, and make your conclusions. SEO Tip #2. SEO Takes Time You’ve already heard this one before, but considering how many people keep asking, thought I'd include this anyway. On average, it’s going to take you 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results, depending on the following factors: Your backlink profile. The more quality backlinks you have (or build), the faster you’ll rank. Age of your website. If your website is older (or you purchased an aged website), you can expect your content to rank faster. Amount of content published. The more quality content you publish on your website, the more “authoritative” it is in the eyes of Google, and thus more likely to rank faster. SEO work done on the website. If a lot of your pages are already ranking on Google (page 2-3), it’s easier to get them to page #1 than if you just published the content piece. Local VS global SEO. Ranking locally is (sometimes) easier and faster than ranking globally. That said, some marketing agencies can use “SEO takes time” as an excuse for not driving results. Well, fortunately, there is a way to track SEO results from month #2 - #3 of work. Simply check if your new content pieces/pages are getting more and more impressions on Google Search Console month-to-month. While your content won’t be driving traffic for a while after being published, they’ll still have a growing number of impressions from month #2 or #3 since publication. SEO Tip #3. SEO Might Not Be The Best Channel For You In theory, SEO sounds like the best marketing channel ever. You manage to rank on Google and your marketing seemingly goes on auto-pilot - you’re driving new leads every day from existing content without having to lift a finger… And yet, SEO is not for everyone. Avoid SEO as a marketing channel if: You’re just getting started with your business and need to start driving revenue tomorrow (and not in 1-2 years). If this is you, try Google ads, Facebook ads, or organic marketing. Your target audience is pretty small. If you’re selling enterprise B2B software and have around 2,000 prospects in total worldwide, then it’s simply easier to directly reach out to these prospects. Your product type is brand-new. If customers don’t know your product exists, they probably won’t be Googling it. SEO Tip #4. Traffic Can Be a Vanity Metric I've seen hundreds of websites that drive 6-7 digits of traffic but generate only 200-300 USD per month from those numbers. “What’s the deal?” You might be thinking. “How can you fail to monetize that much traffic?” Well, that brings us to today’s tip: traffic can be a vanity metric. See, not all traffic is created equal. Ranking for “hormone balance supplement” is a lot more valuable than ranking for “Madagascar character names.” The person Googling the first keyword is an adult ready to buy your product. Someone Googling the latter, on the other hand, is a child with zero purchasing power. So, when deciding on which keywords to pursue, always keep in mind the buyer intent behind and don’t go after rankings or traffic just because 6-digit traffic numbers look good. SEO Tip #5. Push Content Fast Whenever you publish a piece of content, you can expect it to rank within 6 months to a year (potentially less if you’re an authority in your niche). So, the faster you publish your content, the faster they’re going to age, and, as such, the faster they’ll rank on Google. On average, I recommend you publish a minimum of 10,000 words of content per month and 20,000 to 30,000 optimally. If you’re not doing link-building for your website, then I’d recommend pushing for even more content. Sometimes, content velocity can compensate for the lack of backlinks. SEO Tip #6. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content You might be tempted to go for that juicy, 6-digit traffic cornerstone keyword right from the get-go... But I'd recommend doing the opposite. More often than not, to rank for more competitive, cornerstone keywords, you’ll need to have a ton of supporting content, high-quality backlinks, website authority, and so on. Instead, it’s a lot more reasonable to first focus on the less competitive keywords and then, once you’ve covered those, move on to the rest. Now, as for how to check keyword competitiveness, here are 2 options: Use Mozbar to see the number of backlinks for top-ranking pages, as well as their Domain Authority (DA). If all the pages ranking on page #1 have <5 backlinks and DA of 20 - 40, it’s a good opportunity. Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to sort your keywords by difficulty, and focus on the less difficult keywords first. Now, that said, keep in mind that both of these metrics are third-party, and hence not always accurate. SEO Tip #7. Always Start With Competitive Analysis When doing keyword research, the easiest way to get started is via competitive analysis. Chances are, whatever niche you’re in, there’s a competitor that is doing great with SEO. So, instead of having to do all the work from scratch, run their website through SEMrush or Ahrefs and steal their keyword ideas. But don’t just stop there - once you’ve borrowed keyword ideas from all your competitors, run the seed keywords through a keyword research tool such as UberSuggest or SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool. This should give you dozens of new ideas that your competitors might’ve missed. Finally, don’t just stop at borrowing your competitor’s keyword ideas. You can also borrow some inspiration on: The types of graphics and images you can create to supplement your blog content. The tone and style you can use in your articles. The type of information you can include in specific content pieces. SEO Tip #8. Source a LOT of Writers Content writing is one of those professions that has a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can take a writing course, claim to be a writer, and create an UpWork account… This is why 99% of the writers you’ll have to apply for your gigs are going to be, well, horrible. As such, if you want to produce a lot of content on the reg, you’ll need to source a LOT of writers. Let’s do the math: If, by posting a job ad, you source 100 writers, you’ll see that only 5 of them are a good fit. Out of the 5 writers, 1 has a very high rate, so they drop out. Another doesn’t reply back to your communication, which leaves you with 3 writers. You get the 3 writers to do a trial task, and only one turns out to be a good fit for your team. Now, since the writer is freelance, the best they can do is 4 articles per month for a total of 5,000-words (which, for most niches, ain’t all that much). So, what we’re getting at here is, to hire quality writers, you should source a LOT of them. SEO Tip #9. Create a Process for Filtering Writers If you follow the previous tip, you'll end up with a huge database of hundreds of writers. This creates a whole new problem: You now have a database of 500+ writers waiting for you to sift through them and decide which ones are worth the hire. It would take you 2-3 days of intense work to go through all these writers and vet them yourself. Let’s be real - you don’t have time for that. Here’s what you can do instead: When sourcing writers, always get them to fill in a Google form (instead of DMing or emailing you). In this form, make sure to ask for 3 relevant written samples, a link to the writer’s portfolio page, and the writer’s rate per word. Create a SOP for evaluating writers. The criteria for evaluation should be: Level of English. Does the writer’s sample have any English mistakes? If so, they’re not a good fit. Quality of Samples. Are the samples long-form and engaging content or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes? Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling—you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy-to-read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true. Get your VA to evaluate the writer’s samples as per the criteria above and short-list writers that seem competent. If you sourced 500 writers, the end result of this process should be around 50 writers. You or your editor goes through the short-list of 50 writers and invites 5-10 for a (paid) trial task. The trial task is very important - you’ll sometimes find that the samples provided by the writer don’t match their writing level. SEO Tip #10. Use the Right Websites to Find Writers Not sure where to source your writers? Here are some ideas: ProBlogger \- Our #1 choice - a lot of quality writers frequent this website. LinkedIn \- You can headhunt content writers in specific locations. Upwork \- If you post a content gig, most writers are going to be awful. Instead, I recommend headhunting top writers instead. WeWorkRemotely \- Good if you’re looking to make a full-time remote hire. Facebook \- There are a ton of quality Facebook groups for writers. Some of our faves are Cult of Copy Job Board and Content Marketing Lounge. SEO Tip #11. Always Use Content Outlines When giving tasks to your writing team, you need to be very specific about the instructions you give them. Don’t just provide a keyword and tell them to “knock themselves out.” The writer isn’t a SEO expert; chances are, they’re going to mess it up big-time and talk about topics that aren’t related to the keyword you’re targeting. Instead, when giving tasks to writers, do it through content outlines. A content outline, in a nutshell, is a skeleton of the article they’re supposed to write. It includes information on: Target word count (aim for the same or 50% more the word count than that of the competition). Article title. Article structure (which sections should be mentioned and in what order). Related topics of keywords that need to be mentioned in the article. Content outline example in the URL in the post intro. SEO Tip #12. Focus on One Niche at a Time I used to work with this one client that had a SaaS consisting of a mixture of CRM, Accounting Software, and HRS. I had to pick whether we were going to focus on topics for one of these 3 niches or focus on all of them at the same time. I decided to do the former. Here’s why: When evaluating what to rank, Google considers the authority of your website. If you have 60 articles about accounting (most of which link to each other), you’re probably an authority in the niche and are more likely to get good rankings. If you have 20 sales, 20 HR, and 20 accounting articles, though, none of these categories are going to rank as well. It always makes more sense to first focus on a single niche (the one that generates the best ROI for your business), and then move on to the rest. This also makes it easier to hire writers - you hire writers specialized in accounting, instead of having to find writers who can pull off 3 unrelated topics. SEO Tip #13. Just Hire a VA Already It’s 2021 already guys—unless you have a virtual assistant, you’re missing out big-time. Since a lot of SEO tasks are very time-consuming, it really helps to have a VA around to take over. As long as you have solid SOPs in place, you can hire a virtual assistant, train them, and use them to free up your time. Some SEO tasks virtual assistants can help with are: Internal linking. Going through all your blog content and ensuring that they link to each other. Backlink prospecting. Going through hundreds of websites daily to find link opportunities. Uploading content on WordPress and ensuring that the content is optimized well for on-page SEO. SEO Tip #14. Use WordPress (And Make Your Life Easier) Not sure which CMS platform to use? 99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress. It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier. Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. It’s cheap, efficient, extremely easy to learn, and comes jam-packed with different plugins and features. Wix, SiteGround, and similar drag & drops are pure meh. SEO Tip #15. Use These Nifty WordPress Plugins There are a lot of really cool WordPress plugins that can make your (SEO) life so much easier. Some of our favorites include: RankMath. A more slick alternative to YoastSEO. Useful for on-page SEO. Smush. App that helps you losslessly compress all images on your website, as well as enables lazy loading. WP Rocket. This plugin helps speed up your website pretty significantly. Elementor. Not a techie? This drag & drop plugin makes it significantly easier to manage your website. WP Forms. Very simple form builder. Akismet Spam Protection. Probably the most popular anti-spam WP plugin. Mammoth Docx. A plugin that uploads your content from a Google doc directly to WordPress. SEO Tip #16. No, Voice Search Is Still Not Relevant Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say). Sure, it does have its application (“Alexa, order me toilet paper please”), but it’s pretty niche and not relevant to most SEOs. After all, you wouldn’t use voice search for bigger purchases (“Alexa, order me a new laptop please”) or informational queries (“Alexa, teach me how to do accounting, thanks”). SEO Tip #17. SEO Is Obviously Not Dead I see these articles every year - “SEO is dead because I failed to make it work.” SEO is not dead and as long as there are people looking up for information/things online, it never will be. And no, SEO is not just for large corporations with huge budgets, either. Some niches are hypercompetitive and require a huge link-building budget (CBD, fitness, VPN, etc.), but they’re more of an exception instead of the rule. SEO Tip #18. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages If you’re doing local SEO, you’re better off focusing on local service pages than blog content. E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on. Or alternatively, if you’re a personal injury law firm, you’d want to create pages like /car-accident-law-firm/, /truck-accident-law-firm/, /wrongful-death-law-firm/, and the like. Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms—you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much. SEO Tip #19. Engage With the SEO Community The SEO community is (for the most part) composed of extremely helpful and friendly people. There are a lot of online communities (including this sub) where you can ask for help, tips, case studies, and so on. Some of our faves are: This sub :) SEO Signals Lab (FB Group) Fat Graph Content Ops (FB Group) Proper SEO Group (FB Group) BigSEO Subreddit SEO Tip #20. Test Keywords Before Pursuing Them You can use Google ads to test how profitable any given keyword is before you start trying to rank for it. The process here is: Create a Google Ads account. Pick a keyword you want to test. Create a landing page that corresponds to the search intent behind the keyword. Allocate an appropriate budget. E.g. if you assume a conversion rate of 2%, you’d want to buy 100+ clicks. If the CPC is 2 USD, then the right budget would be 200 USD plus. Run the ads! If you don’t have the budget for this, you can still use the average CPC for the keyword to estimate how well it’s going to convert. If someone is willing to bid 10 USD to rank for a certain keyword, it means that the keyword is most probably generating pretty good revenue/conversions. SEO Tip #21. Test & Improve SEO Headlines Sometimes, you’ll see that you’re ranking in the top 3 positions for your search query, but you’re still not driving that much traffic. “What’s the deal?” you might be asking. Chances are, your headline is not clickable enough. Every 3-4 months, go through your Google Search Console and check for articles that are ranking well but not driving enough traffic. Then, create a Google sheet and include the following data: Targeted keyword Page link CTR (for the last 28 days) Date when you implemented the new title Old title New title New CTR (for the month after the CTR change was implemented) From then on, implement the new headline and track changes in the CTR. If you don’t reach your desired result, you can always test another headline. SEO Tip #22. Longer Content Isn’t Always Better Content You’ve probably heard that long-form content is where it’s at in 2021. Well, this isn’t always the case. Rather, this mostly depends on the keyword you’re targeting. If, for example, you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie,” you don’t need a long-ass 5,000-word mega-guide. In such a case, the reader is looking for something that can be explained in 200-300 words and if your article fails to do this, the reader will bounce off and open a different page. On the other hand, if you’re targeting the keyword “how to write a CV,” you’ll need around 4,000 to 5,000 words to adequately explain the topic and, chances are, you won’t rank with less. SEO Tip #23. SEO is Not All About Written Content More often than not, when people talk about SEO they talk about written blog content creation. It’s very important not to forget, though, that blog content is not end-all-be-all for SEO. Certain keywords do significantly better with video content. For example, if the keyword is “how to do a deadlift,” video content is going to perform significantly better than blog content. Or, if the keyword is “CV template,” you’ll see that a big chunk of the rankings are images of the templates. So, the lesson here is, don’t laser-focus on written content—keep other content mediums in mind, too. SEO Tip #24. Write For Your Audience It’s very important that your content resonates well with your target audience. If, for example, you’re covering the keyword “skateboard tricks,” you can be very casual with your language. Heck, it’s even encouraged! Your readers are Googling the keyword in their free time and are most likely teens or in their early 20s. Meaning, you can use informal language, include pop culture references, and avoid complicated language. Now, on the other hand, if you’re writing about high-level investment advice, your audience probably consists of 40-something suit-and-ties. If you include Rick & Morty references in your article, you'll most likely lose credibility and the Googler, who will go to another website. Some of our best tips on writing for your audience include: Define your audience. Who’s the person you’re writing for? Are they reading the content at work or in their free time? Keep your reader’s level of knowledge in mind. If you’re covering an accounting 101 topic, you want to cover the topic’s basics, as the reader is probably a student. If you’re writing about high-level finance, though, you don’t have to teach the reader what a balance sheet is. More often than not, avoid complicated language. The best practice is to write on a 6th-grade level, as it’s understandable for anyone. Plus, no one wants to read Shakespeare when Googling info online (unless they’re looking for Shakespeare's work, of course). SEO Tip #25. Create Compelling Headlines Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines. Compare the following headline: 101 Productivity Tips \[To Get Things Done in 2021\] With this one: Productivity Tips Guide Which one would you click? Data says it’s the first! To create clickable headlines, I recommend you include the following elements: Keyword. This one’s non-negotiable - you need to include the target keyword in the headline. Numbers. If Buzzfeed taught us anything, it’s that people like to click articles with numbers in their titles. Results. If I read your article, what’s going to be the end result? E.g. “X Resume tips (to land the job)”.* Year (If Relevant). Adding a year to your title shows that the article is recent (which is relevant for some specific topics). E.g. If the keyword is “Marketing Trends,” I want to know marketing trends in 2021, not in 2001. So, adding a year in the title makes the headline more clickable. SEO Tip #26. Make Your Content Visual How good your content looks matters, especially if you're in a competitive niche. Here are some tips on how to make your content as visual as possible: Aim for 2-4 sentences per paragraph. Avoid huge blocks of text. Apply a 60-65% content width to your blog pages. Pick a good-looking font. I’d recommend Montserrat, PT Sans, and Roboto. Alternatively, you can also check out your favorite blogs, see which fonts they’re using, and do the same. Use a reasonable font size. Most top blogs use font sizes ranging from 16 pt to 22 pt. Add images when possible. Avoid stock photos, though. No one wants to see random “office people smiling” scattered around your blog posts. Use content boxes to help convey information better. Content boxes example in the URL in the intro of the post. SEO Tip #27. Ditch the Skyscraper Technique Already Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique is awesome and all, but the following bit really got old: “Hey \[name\], I saw you wrote an article. I, too, wrote an article. Please link to you?” The theory here is, if your content is good, the person will be compelled to link to it. In practice, though, the person really, really doesn’t care. At the end of the day, there’s no real incentive for the person to link to your content. They have to take time out of their day to head over to their website, log in to WordPress, find the article you mentioned, and add a link... Just because some stranger on the internet asked them to. Here’s something that works much better: Instead of fake compliments, be very straightforward about what you can offer them in exchange for that link. Some things you can offer are: A free version of your SaaS. Free product delivered to their doorstep. Backlink exchange. A free backlink from your other website. Sharing their content to your social media following. Money. SEO Tip #28. Get the URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword, there are 2 ways to do this. If you want your article to be evergreen (i.e. you update it every year with new information), then your URL should not contain the year. E.g. your URL would be /saas-trends/, and you simply update the article’s contents+headline each year to keep it timely. If you’re planning on publishing a new trends report annually, though, then you can add a year to the URL. E.g. /saas-trends-2020/ instead of /saas-trends/. SEO Tip #29. AI Content Tools Are a Mixed Bag Lots of people are talking about AI content tools these days. Usually, they’re either saying: “AI content tools are garbage and the output is horrible,” Or: “AI content tools are a game-changer!” So which one is it? The truth is somewhere in-between. In 2021, AI content writing tools are pretty bad. The output you’re going to get is far from something you can publish on your website. That said, some SEOs use such tools to get a very, very rough draft of the article written, and then they do intense surgery on it to make it usable. Should you use AI content writing tools? If you ask me, no - it’s easier to hire a proficient content writer than spend hours salvaging AI-written content. That said, I do believe that such tools are going to get much better years down the line. This one was, clearly, more of a personal opinion than a fact. I’d love to hear YOUR opinion on AI content tools! Are they a fad, or are they the future of content creation? Let me know in the comments. SEO Tip #30. Don’t Overdo it With SEO Tools There are a lot of SEO tools out there for pretty much any SEO function. Keyword research, link-building, on-page, outreach, technical SEO, you name it! If you were to buy most of these tools for your business, you’d easily spend 4-figures on SEO tools per month. Luckily, though, you don’t actually need most of them. At the end of the day, the only must-have SEO tools are: An SEO Suite (Paid). Basically SEMrush or Ahrefs. Both of these tools offer an insane number of features - backlink analysis, keyword research, and a ton of other stuff. Yes, 99 USD a month is expensive for a tool. But then again, if you value your time 20 USD/hour and this tool saves you 6 hours, it's obviously worth it, right? On-Page SEO Tool (Free). RankMath or Yoast. Basically, a tool that's going to help you optimize web pages or blog posts as per SEO best practices. Technical SEO Tool (Freemium). You can use ScreamingFrog to crawl your entire website and find technical SEO problems. There are probably other tools that also do this, but ScreamingFrog is the most popular option. The freemium version of the tool only crawls a limited number of pages (500 URLs, to be exact), so if your website is relatively big, you'll need to pay for the tool. Analytics (Free). Obviously, you'll need Google Analytics (to track website traffic) and Google Search Console (to track organic traffic, specifically) set up on your website. Optionally, you can also use Google Track Manager to better track how your website visitors interact with the site. MozBar (Free). Chrome toolbar that lets you simply track the number of backlinks on Google Search Queries, Domain Authority, and a bunch of other stuff. Website Speed Analysis (Free). You can use Google Page Speed Insights to track how fast your website loads, as well as how mobile-friendly it is. Outreach Tool (Paid). Tool for reaching out to prospects for link-building, guest posting, etc. There are about a dozen good options for this. Personally, I like to use Snov for this. Optimized GMB Profile (Free). Not a tool per se, but if you're a local business, you need to have a well-optimized Google My Business profile. Google Keyword Planner (Free). This gives you the most reliable search volume data of all the tools. So, when doing keyword research, grab the search volume from here. Tool for Storing Keyword Research (Free). You can use Google Sheets or AirTable to store your keyword research and, at the same time, use it as a content calendar. Hemingway App (Free). Helps keep your SEO content easy to read. Spots passive voice, complicated words, etc. Email Finder (Freemium). You can use a tool like Hunter to find the email address of basically anyone on the internet (for link-building or guest posting purposes). Most of the tools that don’t fit into these categories are 100% optional. SEO Tip #31. Hiring an SEO? Here’s How to Vet Them Unless you’re an SEO pro yourself, hiring one is going to be far from easy. There’s a reason there are so many “SEO experts” out there - for the layman, it’s very hard to differentiate between someone who knows their salt and a newbie who took an SEO course, like, last week. Here’s how you can vet both freelance and full-time SEOs: Ask for concrete traffic numbers. The SEO pro should give you the exact numbers on how they’ve grown a website in the past - “100% SEO growth in 1 year” doesn’t mean much if the growth is from 10 monthly traffic to 20. “1,000 to 30,000” traffic, on the other hand, is much better. Ask for client names. While some clients ask their SEOs to sign an NDA and not disclose their collaboration, most don’t. If an SEO can’t name a single client they’ve worked with in the past, that’s a red flag. Make sure they have the right experience. Global and local SEO have very different processes. Make sure that the SEO has experience with the type of SEO you need. Make sure you’re looking for the right candidate. SEO pros can be content writers, link-builders, web developers, or all of the above simultaneously. Make sure you understand which one you need before making the hire. If you’re looking for someone to oversee your content ops, you shouldn’t hire a technical SEO expert. Look for SEO pros in the right places. Conventional job boards are overrated. Post your job ads on SEO communities instead. E.g. this sub, bigseo, SEO Signals Facebook group, etc. SEO Tip #32. Blog Post Not Ranking? Follow This Checklist I wanted to format the post natively for Reddit, but it’s just SO much better on Notion. Tl;dr, the checklist covers every reason your post might not be ranking: Search intent mismatch. Inferior content. Lack of internal linking. Lack of backlinks. And the like. Checklist URL at the intro of the post. SEO Tip #33. Avoid BS Link-Building Tactics The only type of link-building that works is building proper, quality links from websites with a good backlink profile and decent organic traffic. Here’s what DOESN’T work: Blog comment links Forum spam links Drive-by Reddit comment/post links Web 2.0 links Fiverr “100 links for 10 bucks” bs If your “SEO agency” says they’re doing any of the above instead of actually trying to build you links from quality websites, you’re being scammed. SEO Tip #34. Know When to Use 301 and 302 Redirects When doing redirects, it’s very important to know the distinction between these two. 301 is a permanent page redirect and passes on link juice. If you’re killing off a page that has backlinks, it’s better to 301 it to your homepage so that you don’t lose the link juice. If you simply delete a page, it’s going to be a 404, and the backlink juice is lost forever. 302 is a temporary page redirect and doesn’t pass on link juice. If the redirect is temporary, you do a 302. E.g. you want to test how well a new page is going to perform w/ your audience. SEO Tip #35. Social Signals Matter (But Not How You Think) Social signals are NOT a ranking factor. And yet, they can help your content rank on Google’s front page. Wondering what the hell am I talking about? Here’s what’s up: As I said, social signals are not a ranking factor. It’s not something Google takes into consideration to decide whether your article should rank or not. That said, social signals CAN lead to your article ranking better. Let’s say your article goes viral and gets around 20k views within a week. A chunk of these viewers are going to forget your domain/link and they’re going to look up the topic on Google via your chosen keyword + your brand name. The amount of people looking for YOUR keyword and exclusively picking your result over others is going to make Google think that your content is satisfying search intent better than the rest, and thus, reward you with better ranking. SEO Tip #36. Run Remarketing Ads to Lift Organic Traffic Conversions Not satisfied with your conversion rates? You can use Facebook ads to help increase them. Facebook allows you to do something called “remarketing.” This means you can target anyone that visited a certain page (or multiple pages) on your website and serve them ads on Facebook. There are a TON of ways you can take advantage of this. For example, you can target anyone that landed on a high buyer intent page and serve them ads pitching your product or a special offer. Alternatively, you can target people who landed on an educational blog post and offer them something to drive them down the funnel. E.g. free e-book or white paper to teach them more about your product or service. SEO Tip #37. Doing Local SEO? Follow These Tips Local SEO is significantly different from global SEO. Here’s how the two differ (and what you need to do to drive local SEO results): You don’t need to publish content. For 95% of local businesses, you only want to rank for keywords related to your services/products, you don’t actually need to create educational content. You need to focus more on reviews and citation-building. One of Google Maps’ biggest ranking factors is the of reviews your business has. Encourage your customers to leave a review if they enjoyed your product/service through email or real-life communication. You need to create service pages for each location. As a local business, your #1 priority is to rank for keywords around your service. E.g. If you're a personal injury law firm, you want to optimize your homepage for “personal injury law firm” and then create separate pages for each service you provide, e.g. “car accident lawyer,” “motorcycle injury law firm,” etc. Focus on building citations. Being listed on business directories makes your business more trustworthy for Google. BrightLocal is a good service for this. You don’t need to focus as much on link-building. As local SEO is less competitive than global, you don’t have to focus nearly as much on building links. You can, in a lot of cases, rank with the right service pages and citations. SEO Tip #38. Stop Ignoring the Outreach Emails You’re Getting (And Use Them to Build Your Own Links) Got a ton of people emailing you asking for links? You might be tempted to just send them all straight to spam, and I don’t blame you. Outreach messages like “Hey Dr Jigsaw, your article is A+++ amazing! ...can I get a backlink?” can get hella annoying. That said, there IS a better way to deal with these emails: Reply and ask for a link back. Most of the time, people who send such outreach emails are also doing heavy guest posting. So, you can ask for a backlink from a 3rd-party website in exchange for you mentioning their link in your article. Win-win! SEO Tip #39. Doing Internal Linking for a Large Website? This’ll Help Internal linking can get super grueling once you have hundreds of articles on your website. Want to make the process easier? Do this: Pick an article you want to interlink on your website. For the sake of the example, let’s say it’s about “business process improvement.” Go on Google and look up variations of this keyword mentioned on your website. For example: Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve business process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “process improvement” The above queries will find you the EXACT articles where these keywords are mentioned. Then, all you have to do is go through them and include the links. SEO Tip #40. Got a Competitor Copying Your Content? File a DMCA Notice Fun fact - if your competitors are copying your website, you can file a DMCA notice with Google. That said, keep in mind that there are consequences for filing a fake notice.

Started a content marketing agency 8 years ago - $0 to $7,863,052 (2025 update)

Hey friends, My name is Tyler and for the past 8 years, I’ve been documenting my experience building a content marketing agency called Optimist. Year 1 — 0 to $500k ARR Year 2 — $500k to $1MM ARR Year 3 — $1MM ARR to $1.5MM(ish) ARR Year 4 — $3,333,686 Revenue Year 5 — $4,539,659 Revenue Year 6 — $5,974,324 Revenue Year 7 - $6,815,503 Revenue (Edit: Seems like links are banned now. You can check my post history for all of my previous updates with lessons and learnings.) How Optimist Works First, an overview/recap of the Optimist business model: We operate as a “collective” of full time/professional freelancers Everyone aside from me is a contractor Entirely remote/distributed team We pay freelancers a flat fee for most work, working out to roughly $65-100/hour. Clients pay us a flat monthly fee for full-service content marketing (research, strategy, writing, editing, design/photography, reporting and analytics, targeted linkbuilding, and more)\ Packages range in price from \~$10-20k/mo \This is something we are revisiting now* The Financials In 2024, we posted $1,032,035.34 in revenue. This brings our lifetime revenue to $7,863,052. Here’s our monthly revenue from January 2017 to December of 2024. (Edit: Seems like I'm not allowed to link to the chart.) The good news: Revenue is up 23% YoY. EBITDA in Q4 trending up 1-2 points. We hosted our first retreat in 4 years, going to Ireland with about half the team. The bad news: Our revenue is still historically low. At $1MM for the year, we’re down about 33% from our previous years over $1.5MM. Revenue has been rocky. It doesn’t feel like we’ve really “recovered” from the bumps last year. The trend doesn’t really look great. Even though, anecdotally, it feels like we are moving in a good direction. EBITDA is still hovering at around 7%. Would love to get that closer to 20%. (For those who may ask: I’m calculating EBITDA after paying taxes and W2 portion of my income.) — Almost every year, my update starts the same way: This has been a year of growth and change. Both for my business—and me personally. 2024 was no different. I guess that tells you something about entrepreneurship. It’s a lot more like sailing a ship than driving a car. You’re constantly adapting, tides are shifting, and any blip of calm is usually just a moment before the next storm. As with past years, there’s a lot to unpack from the last 12 months. Here we go again. Everything is Burning In the last 2 years, everything has turned upside down in the world of content and SEO. Back in 2020, we made a big decision to re-position the agency. (See post history) We decided to narrow our focus to our most successful, profitable, and consistent segment of clients and re-work our entire operation to focus on serving them. We defined our ICP as: \~Series A ($10mm+ funding) with 6-12 months runway to scale organic as a channel Product-led company with “simple” sales cycle involving fewer stakeholders Demonstrable opportunity to use SEO to drive business growth Our services: Content focused on growing organic search (SEO) Full-service engagements that included research, planning, writing, design, reporting And our engagement structure: Engaged directly with an executive; ownership over strategy and day-to-day execution 1-2 points of contact or stakeholders Strategic partner that drives business growth (not a service vendor who makes content) Most importantly, we decided that we were no longer going to offer a broader range of content that we used to sell. That included everything from thought leadership content to case studies and ebooks. We doubled-down on “SEO content” for product-led SaaS companies. And this worked phenomenally for us. We started bringing on more clients than ever. We developed a lot of internal system and processes that helped us scale and take on more work than we’ve ever had and drive great outcomes for our ideal clients. But in 2023 and 2024, things started going awry. One big change, of course, was the rise of AI. Many companies and executives (and writers) feel that AI can write content just as well as an agency like ours. That made it a lot harder to sell a $10,000 per month engagement when they feel like the bulk of the work could be “done for free.” (Lots of thoughts on this if you want my opinions.) But it wasn’t just that. Google also started tinkering with their algorithm, introducing new features like AI Overviews, and generally changing the rules of the game. This created 3 big shifts in our world: The perceived value of content (especially “SEO content”) dropped dramatically in many people’s minds because of AI’s writing capabilities SEO became less predictable as a source of traffic and revenue It’s harder than ever for startups and smaller companies to rank for valuable keywords (let alone generate any meaningful traffic or revenue from them) The effect? The middle of the content market has hollowed out. People—like us—providing good, human-crafted content aimed on driving SEO growth saw a dramatic decline in demand. We felt it all year. Fewer and fewer leads. The leads we did see usually scoffed at our prices. They were indexing us against the cost of content mills and mass-produced AI articles. It was a time of soul-searching and looking for a way forward. I spent the first half of the year convinced that the only way to survive was to run toward the fire. We have to build our own AI workflows. We have to cut our rates internally. We have to get faster and cheaper to stay competitive with the agencies offering the same number of deliverables for a fraction of our rates. It’s the only way forward. But then I asked myself a question… Is this the game I actually want to play? As an entrepreneur, do I want to run a business where I’m competing mostly on price and efficiency rather than quality and value? Do I want to hop into a race toward cheaper and cheaper content? Do I want to help people chase a dwindling amount of organic traffic that’s shrinking in value? No. That’s not the game I want to play. That’s not a business I want to run. I don’t want to be in the content mill business. So I decided to turn the wheel—again. Repositioning Part II: Electric Boogaloo What do you do when the whole world shifts around you and the things that used to work aren’t working anymore? You pivot. You re-position the business and move in another direction. So that’s what we decided to do. Again. There was only one problem: I honestly wasn’t sure what opportunities existed in the content marketing industry outside of what we were already doing. We lived in a little echo chamber of startups and SEO. It felt like the whole market was on fire and I had fight through the smoke to find an escape hatch. So I started making calls. Good ol’ fashioned market research. I reached out to a few dozen marketing and content leaders at a bunch of different companies. I got on the phone and just asked lots of questions about their content programs, their goals, and their pain points. I wanted to understand what was happening in the market and how we could be valuable. And, luckily, this process really paid off. I learned a lot about the fragmentation happening across content and how views were shifting. I noticed key trends and how our old target market really wasn’t buying what we were selling. Startups and small companies are no longer willing to invest in an agency like ours. If they were doing content and SEO at all, they were focused entirely on using AI to scale output and minimize costs. VC money is still scarce and venture-backed companies are more focused on profitability than pure growth and raising another round. Larger companies (\~500+ employees) are doing more content than ever and drowning in content production. They want to focus on strategy but can barely tread water keeping up with content requests from sales, demand gen, the CEO, and everyone else. Many of the companies still investing in content are looking at channels and formats outside of SEO. Things like thought leadership, data reports, interview-driven content, and more. They see it as a way to stand out from the crowd of “bland SEO content.” Content needs are constantly in flux. They range from data reports and blog posts to product one-pagers. The idea of a fixed-scope retainer is a total mismatch for the needs of most companies. All of this led to the logical conclusion: We were talking to the wrong people about the wrong things\.\ Many companies came to one of two logical conclusions: SEO is a risky bet, so it’s gotta be a moonshot—super-low cost with a possibility for a big upside (i.e., use AI to crank out lots of content. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, then at least we aren’t out much money.) SEO is a risky bet, so we should diversify into other strategies and channels to drive growth (i.e., shift our budget from SEO and keyword-focused content to video, podcasts, thought leadership, social, etc) Unless we were going to lean into AI and dramatically cut our costs and rates, our old buyers weren’t interested. And the segment of the market that needs our help most are looking primarily for production support across a big range of content types. They’re not looking for a team to run a full-blown program focused entirely on SEO. So we had to go back to the drawing board. I’ve written before about our basic approach to repositioning the business. But, ultimately it comes down to identifying our unique strengths as a team and then connecting them to needs in the market. After reviewing the insights from my discussions and taking another hard look at our business and our strengths, I decided on a new direction: Move upmarket: Serve mid-size to enterprise businesses with \~500-5,000 employees instead of startups Focus on content that supports a broader range of business goals instead of solely on SEO and organic growth (e.g., sales, demand gen, brand, etc) Shift back to our broader playbook of content deliverables, including thought leadership, data studies, and more Focus on content execution and production to support an internally-directed content strategy across multiple functions In a way, it’s sort of a reverse-niche move. Rather than zooming in specifically on driving organic growth for startups, we want to be more of an end-to-end content production partner that solves issues of execution and operations for all kinds of content teams. It’s early days, but the response here has been promising. We’ve seen an uptick in leads through Q4. And more companies in our pipeline fit the new ICP. They’re bigger, often have more budget. (But they move more slowly). We should know by the end of the quarter if this maneuver is truly paying off. Hopefully, this will work out. Hopefully our research and strategy are right and we’ll find a soft landing serving a different type of client. If it doesn’t? Then it will be time to make some harder decisions. As I already mentioned, I’m not interested in the race to the bottom of AI content. And if that’s the only game left in town, then it might be time to think hard about a much bigger change. — To be done: Build new content playbooks for expanded deliverables Build new showcase page for expanded deliverables Retooling the Operation It’s easy to say we’re doing something new. It’s a lot harder to actually do it—and do it well. Beyond just changing our positioning, we have to do open-heart surgery on the entire content operation behind the scenes. We need to create new systems that work for a broader range of content types, formats, and goals. Here’s the first rub: All of our workflows are tooled specifically for SEO-focused content. Every template, worksheet, and process that we’ve built and scaled in the last 5 years assumes that the primary goal of every piece of content is SEO. Even something as simple as requiring a target keyword is a blocker in a world where we’re not entirely focused on SEO. This is relatively easy to fix, but it requires several key changes: Update content calendars to make keywords optional Update workflows to determine whether we need an optimization report for each deliverable Next, we need to break down the deliverables into parts rather than a single line item. In our old system, we would plan content as a single row in a Content Calendar spreadsheet. It was a really wide sheet with lots of fields where we’d define the dimensions of each individual article. This was very efficient and simple to follow. But every article had the same overall scope when it came to the workflow. In Asana (our project management tool), all of the steps in the creation were strung together in a single task. We would create a few basic templates for each client, and then each piece would flow through the same steps: Briefing Writing Editing Design etc. If we had anything that didn’t fit into the “standard” workflow, we’d just tag it in the calendar with an unofficial notation \[USING BRACKETS\]. It worked. But it wasn’t ideal. Now we need the steps to be more modular. Imagine, for example, a client asks us to create a mix of deliverables: 1 article with writing + design 1 content brief 1 long-form ebook with an interview + writing + design Each of these would require its own steps and its own workflow. We need to break down the work to accommodate for a wider variety of workflows and variables. This means we need to update the fields and structure of our calendar to accommodate for the new dimensions—while also keeping the planning process simple and manageable. This leads to the next challenge: The number of “products” that we’re offering could be almost infinite. Just looking at the example scope above, you can mix and match all of these different building blocks to create a huge variety of different types of work, each requiring its own workflow. This is part of the reason we pivoted away from this model to focus on a productized, SEO-focused content service back in 2020. Take something as simple as a case study. On the surface, it seems like one deliverable that can be easily scoped and priced, right? Well, unpack what goes into a case study: Is there already source material from the customer or do we need to conduct an interview? How long is it? Is it a short overview case study or a long-form narrative? Does it need images and graphics? How many? Each of these variables opens up 2-3 possibilities. And when you combine them, we end up with something like 10 possible permutations for this single type of deliverable. It gets a bit messy. But not only do we have to figure out how to scope and price all for all of these variables, we also have to figure out how to account for these variables in the execution. We have to specify—for every deliverable—what type it is, how long, which steps are involved and not involved, the timeline for delivery, and all of the other factors. We’re approaching infinite complexity, here. We have to figure out a system that allows for a high level of flexibility to serve the diverse needs of our clients but is also productized enough that we can build workflows, process, and templates to deliver the work. I’ve spent the last few months designing that system. Failed Attempt #1: Ultra-Productization In my first pass, I tried to make it as straight forward as possible. Just sit down, make a list of all of the possible deliverables we could provide and then assign them specific scopes and services. Want a case study? Okay that’ll include an interview, up to 2,000 words of content, and 5 custom graphics. It costs $X. But this solution quickly fell apart when we started testing it against real-world scenarios. What if the client provided the brief instead of us creating one? What if they didn’t want graphics? What if this particular case study really needs to be 3,000 words but all of the others should be 2,000? In order for this system to work, we’d need to individual scope and price all of these permutations of each productized service. Then we’d need to somehow keep track of all of these and make sure that we accurately scope, price, and deliver them across dozens of clients. It’s sort of like a restaurant handling food allergies by creating separate versions of every single dish to account for every individual type of allergy. Most restaurants have figured out that it makes way more sense to have a “standard” and an “allergy-free” version. Then you only need 2 options to cover 100% of the cases. Onto the next option. Failed Attempt #2: Deliverable-Agnostic Services Next, I sat down with my head of Ops, Katy, to try to map it out. We took a big step back and said: Why does the deliverable itself even matter? At the end of the day, what we’re selling is just a few types of work (research, writing, editing, design, etc) that can be packaged up in an infinite number of ways. Rather than try to define deliverables, shouldn’t we leave it open ended for maximum flexibility? From there, we decided to break down everything into ultra-modular building blocks. We started working on this super complex system of modular deliverables where we would have services like writing, design, editing, etc—plus a sliding scale for different scopes like the length of writing or the number of images. In theory, it would allow us to mix and match any combination of services to create custom deliverables for the client. In fact, we wanted the work to be deliverable-agnostic. That way we could mold it to fit any client’s needs and deliver any type of content, regardless of the format or goal. Want a 5,000-word case study with 15 custom graphics? That’ll be $X. Want a 2,000-word blog post with an interview and no visuals? $Y. Just want us to create 10 briefs, you handle the writing, and we do design? It’s $Z. Again, this feels like a reasonable solution. But it quickly spiraled out of amuck. (That’s an Office reference.) For this to work, we need to have incredibly precise scoping process for every single deliverable. Before we can begin work (or even quote a price), we need to know pretty much the exact word count of the final article, for example. In the real world? This almost never happens. The content is as long as the content needs to be. Clients rarely know if the blog post should be 2,000 words or 3,000 words. They just want good content. We have a general ballpark, but we can rarely dial it in within just 1,000 words until we’ve done enough research to create the brief. Plus, from a packaging and pricing perspective, it introduces all kind of weird scenarios where clients will owe exactly $10,321 for this ultra-specific combination of services. We were building an open system that could accommodate any and all types of potential deliverables. On the face that seems great because it makes us incredibly flexible. In reality, the ambiguity actually works against us. It makes it harder for us to communicate to clients clearly about what they’ll get, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. That, of course, also means that it hurts our client relationships. (This actually kind of goes back to my personal learnings, which I’ll mention in a bit. I tend to be a “let’s leave things vague so we don’t have to limit our options” kind of person. But I’m working on fixing this to be more precise, specific, and clear in everything that we do.) Dialing It In: Building a Closed System We were trying to build an open system. We need to build a closed system. We need to force clarity and get specific about what we do, what we don’t do, and how much it all costs. Then we need a system to expand on that closed system—add new types of deliverables, new content playbooks, and new workflows if and when the need arises. With that in mind, we can start by mapping out the key dimensions of any type of deliverable that we would ever want to deliver. These are the universal dimensions that determine the scope, workflow, and price of any deliverable—regardless of the specific type output. Dimensions are: Brief scope Writing + editing scope Design scope Interview scope Revision (rounds) Scope, essentially, just tells us how many words, graphics, interviews, etc are required for the content we’re creating. In our first crack at the system, we got super granular with these scopes. But to help force a more manageable system, we realized that we didn’t need tiny increments for most of this work. Instead, we just need boundaries—you pay $X for up to Y words. We still need some variability around the scope of these articles. Obviously, most clients won’t be willing to pay the same price for a 1,000-word article as a 10,000-word article. But we can be smarter about the realistic break points. We boiled it down to the most common ranges: (Up to) 250 words 1,000 words 3,000 words 6,000 words 10,000 words This gives us a much more manageable number of variables. But we still haven’t exactly closed the system. We need one final dimension: Deliverable type. This tells us what we’re actually building with these building blocks. This is how we’ll put a cap on the potentially infinite number of combinations we could offer. The deliverable type will define what the final product should look like (e.g., blog post, case study, ebook, etc). And it will also give us a way to put standards and expectations around different types of deliverables that we want to offer. Then we can expand on this list of deliverables to offer new services. In the mean time, only the deliverables that we have already defined are, “on the menu,” so to speak. If a client comes to us and asks for something like a podcast summary article (which we don’t currently offer), we’ll have to either say we can’t provide that work or create a new deliverable type and define the dimensions of that specific piece. But here’s the kicker: No matter the deliverable type, it has to still fit within the scopes we’ve already defined. And the pricing will be the same. This means that if you’re looking for our team to write up to 1,000 words of content, it costs the same amount—whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, a LinkedIn post, or anything else. Rather than trying to retool our entire system to offer this new podcast summary article deliverable, we’ll just create the new deliverable type, add it to the list of options, and it’s ready to sell with the pre-defined dimensions we’ve already identified. To do: Update onboarding workflow Update contracts and scope documents Dial in new briefing process Know Thyself For the last year, I’ve been going through personal therapy. (Huge shout out to my wife, Laura, for her support and encouragement throughout the process.) It’s taught me a lot about myself and my tendencies. It’s helped me find some of my weaknesses and think about how I can improve as a person, as a partner, and as an entrepreneur. And it’s forced me to face a lot of hard truths. For example, consider some of the critical decisions I’ve made for my business: Unconventional freelance “collective” model No formal management structure Open-ended retainers with near-infinite flexibility General contracts without defined scope “Take it or leave it” approach to sales and marketing Over the years, I’ve talked about almost everything on this list as a huge advantage. I saw these things as a reflection of how I wanted to do things differently and better than other companies. But now, I see them more as a reflection of my fears and insecurities. Why did I design my business like this? Why do I want so much “flexibility” and why do I want things left open-ended rather than clearly defined? One reason that could clearly explain it: I’m avoidant. If you’re not steeped in the world of therapy, this basically means that my fight or flight response gets turned all the way to “flight.” If I’m unhappy or uncomfortable, my gut reaction is usually to withdraw from the situation. I see commitment and specificity as a prelude to future conflict. And I avoid conflict whenever possible. So I built my business to minimize it. If I don’t have a specific schedule of work that I’m accountable for delivering, then we can fudge the numbers a bit and hope they even out in the end. If I don’t set a specific standard for the length of an article, then I don’t have to let the client know when their request exceeds that limit. Conflict….avoided? Now, that’s not to say that everything I’ve built was wrong or bad. There is a lot of value in having flexibility in your business. For example, I would say that our flexible retainers are, overall, an advantage. Clients have changing needs. Having flexibility to quickly adapt to those needs can be a huge value add. And not everything can be clearly defined upfront (at least not without a massive amount of time and work just to decide how long to write an article). Overly-rigid structures and processes can be just as problematic as loosey-goosey ones. But, on the whole, I realized that my avoidant tendencies and laissez faire approach to management have left a vacuum in many areas. The places where I avoided specificity were often the places where there was the most confusion, uncertainty, and frustration from the team and from clients. People simply didn’t know what to expect or what was expected of them. Ironically, this often creates the conflict I’m trying to avoid. For example, if I don’t give feedback to people on my team, then they feel uneasy about their work. Or they make assumptions about expectations that don’t match what I’m actually expecting. Then the client might get upset, I might get upset, and our team members may be upset. Conflict definitely not avoided. This happens on the client side, too. If we don’t define a specific timeline when something will be delivered, the client might expect it sooner than we can deliver—creating frustration when we don’t meet their expectation. This conflict actually would have been avoided if we set clearer expectations upfront. But we didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. So it’s time to step up and close the gaps. Stepping Up and Closing the Gaps If I’m going to address these gaps and create more clarity and stability, I have to step up. Both personally and professionally. I have to actually face the fear and uncertainty that drives me to be avoidant. And then apply that to my business in meaningful ways that aren’t cop-out ways of kinda-sorta providing structure without really doing it. I’ve gotta be all in. This means: Fill the gaps where I rely on other people to do things that aren’t really their job but I haven’t put someone in place to do it Set and maintain expectations about our internal work processes, policies, and standards Define clear boundaries on things like roles, timelines, budgets, and scopes Now, this isn’t going to happen overnight. And just because I say that I need to step up to close these gaps doesn’t mean that I need to be the one who’s responsible for them (at least not forever). It just means that, as the business leader, I need to make sure the gaps get filled—by me or by someone else who has been specifically charged with owning that part of the operation. So, this is probably my #1 focus over the coming quarter. And it starts by identifying the gaps that exist. Then, step into those gaps myself, pay someone else to fill that role, or figure out how to eliminate the gap another way. This means going all the way back to the most basic decisions in our business. One of the foundational things about Optimist is being a “different kind” of agency. I always wanted to build something that solved for the bureaucracy, hierarchy, and siloed structure of agencies. If a client has feedback, they should be able to talk directly to the person doing the work rather than going through 3 layers of account management and creative directors. So I tried to be clever. I tried to design all kinds of systems and processes that eliminated these middle rungs. (In retrospect, what I was actually doing was designing a system that played into my avoidant tendencies and made it easy to abdicate responsibility for lots of things.) Since we didn’t want to create hierarchy, we never implemented things like Junior and Senior roles. We never hired someone to manage or direct the individual creatives. We didn’t have Directors or VPs. (Hell, we barely had a project manager for the first several years of existence.) This aversion to hierarchy aligned with our values around elevating ownership and collective contribution. I still believe in the value a flat structure. But a flat structure doesn’t eliminate the complexity of a growing business. No one to review writers and give them 1:1 feedback? I guess I’ll just have to do that….when I have some spare time. No Content Director? Okay, well someone needs to manage our content playbooks and roll out new ones. Just add it to my task list. Our flat structure didn’t eliminate the need for these roles. It just eliminated the people to do them. All of those unfilled roles ultimately fell back on me or our ops person, Katy. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve recognized this. We’ve known there were growing holes in our business as it’s gotten bigger and more complex. Over the years, we’ve experimented with different ways to solve for it. The Old Solution: Distributed Ops One system we designed was a “distributed ops” framework. Basically, we had one person who was the head of ops (at the time, we considered anything that was non-client-facing to be “ops”). They’d plan and organize all of the various things that needed to happen around Optimist. Then they’d assign out the work to whoever was able to help. We had a whole system for tying this into the our profit share and even gave people “Partner” status based on their contributions to ops. It worked—kinda. One big downfall is that all of the tasks and projects were ad hoc. People would pick up jobs, but they didn’t have much context or expertise to apply. So the output often varied. Since we were trying to maintain a flat structure, there was minimal oversight or management of the work. In other words, we didn’t always get the best results. But, more importantly, we still didn’t close all of the gaps entirely. Because everything was an ad-hoc list of tasks and projects, we never really had the “big picture” view of everything that needed to be done across the business. This also meant we rarely had clarity on what was important, what was trivial, and what was critical. We need a better system. Stop Reinventing the Wheel (And Create a Damn Org Chart) It’s time to get serious about filling the gaps in our business. It can’t be a half-fix or an ad hoc set of projects and tasks. We need clarity on the roles that need to be filled and then fill them. The first step here is to create an org chart. A real one. Map out all of the jobs that need to be done for Optimist to be successful besides just writers and designers. Roles like: Content director Design director SEO manager Reporting Finance Account management Business development Sales Marketing Project management It feels a bit laughable listing all of these roles. Because most are either empty or have my name attached to them. And that’s the problem. I can’t do everything. And all of the empty roles are gaps in our structure—places where people aren’t getting the direction, feedback, or guidance they need to do their best work. Or where things just aren’t being done consistently. Content director, for example, should be responsible for steering the output of our content strategists, writers, and editors. They’re not micromanaging every deliverable. But they give feedback, set overall policy, and help our team identify opportunities to get better. Right now we don’t have anyone in that role. Which means it’s my job—when I have time. Looking at the org chart (a real org chart that I actually built to help with this), it’s plain as day how many roles look like this. Even if we aren’t going to implement a traditional agency structure and a strict hierarchy, we still need to address these gaps. And the only way for that to happen is face the reality and then create a plan to close the gaps. Now that we have a list of theoretical roles, we need to clearly define the responsibilities and boundaries of those roles to make sure they cover everything that actually needs to happen. Then we can begin the process of delegating, assigning, hiring, and otherwise addressing each one. So that’s what I need to do. To be done: Create job descriptions for all of the roles we need to fill Hire Biz Dev role Hire Account Lead role(s) Hire Head of Content Playing Offense As we move into Q1 of 2025 and I reflect on the tumultuous few years we’ve had, one thought keeps running through my head. We need to play offense. Most of the last 1-2 years was reacting to changes that were happening around us. Trying to make sense and chart a new path forward. Reeling. But what I really want—as a person and as an entrepreneur—is to be proactive. I want to think and plan ahead. Figure out where we want to go before we’re forced to change course by something that’s out of our control. So my overarching focus for Q1 is playing offense. Thinking longer term. Getting ahead of the daily deluge and creating space to be more proactive, innovative, and forward thinking. To do: Pilot new content formats Audit and update our own content strategy Improve feedback workflows Build out long-term roadmap for 1-2 years for Optimist Final Note on Follow-Through and Cadence In my reflection this year, one of the things I’ve realized is how helpful these posts are for me. I process by writing. So I actually end up making a lot of decisions and seeing things more clearly each time I sit down to reflect and write my yearly recap. It also gives me a space to hold myself accountable for the things I said I would do. So, I’m doing two things a bit differently from here on out. First: I’m identifying clear action items that I’m holding myself accountable for getting done in the next 3 months (listed in the above sections). In each future update, I’ll do an accounting of what I got done and what wasn’t finished (and why). Second: I’m going to start writing shorter quarterly updates. This will gives me more chances each year to reflect, process, and make decisions. Plus it gives me a shorter feedback loop for the action items that I identified above. (See—playing offense.) — Okay friends, enemies, and frenemies. This is my first update for 2025. Glad to share with y’all. And thanks to everyone who’s read, commented, reached out, and shared their own experiences over the years. We are all the accumulation of our connections and our experiences. As always, I will pop in to respond to comments and answer questions. Feel free to share your thoughts, questions, and general disdain down below. Cheers, Tyler

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

From research paper to a tech startup - help!

Hi! I'm a CS master student that loves being creative. I’ve always wanted to start a business. I have gotten offers to join other startups when I took my bachelors, but personally I never believed in the startups, so I’ve always ended up politely declining on any startup offers. But my master thesis idea is very intriguing. However, I still feel very lost. I can’t even think of any good company names, or where I would even find enthusiastic co founders.  My master thesis as an AI startup with large potential. As of today, I have not started on the product itself. I will write a paper on the product, and finish the thesis in August 2026. My supervisor suggested that this is a good startup idea, and has a large market potential. I want to try. I’ve written about my goals, milestones, and some questions. Feel free to help me in any way, by answering my questions below. Goal:  Learn about startups and non-technical part of it (business, finance, sales, etc) (I'm clueless here) Build the business part time Try and fail Milestones Complete my paper on the product Create MVP for customers to test Validate idea and check market Find company name, acquire domain and launch SaaS  Get feedback, do networking and improve the product Join a Startup Lab and find Cofounders. The following roles would need to be filled  CEO (Me, Vision and tech expert) COO (Business strategy, operations, and scaling.),  CMO (marketing and sales responsible, working to acquire new business) CPO (Product design, user experience, and frontend development)  Formally create the company, divide shares, hold weekend work meeting, pick company name (again) Goal: create product for an industry (the product can be tailored to different industries) and get the first clients. Work that needs to be done: Tech: Create the product for the industry  COO: pitching competitions, define the sales pitch, and how to price the product CMO: find out how marketing should be done, and what companies to contact for demo CMO: design company logo, design web page for business usage, create front page of the website  Growth + Profits Questions Between now, and until I have the working demo, what should I do with my time? I have courses where I learn technical skills for the company. It does not make sense to create the website for the product, when I don't know how the user would interact with the product.  Should I start the company even before the product is made? (While I'm a student and working on the paper) How can I acquire non-technical skills for running a business? I prefer reading books. How can I learn about software companies (practical skills)? For example: How to lower hosting costs?  How to price a product for customers and a product for business? (Software contracts) How to guarantee  privacy when it comes to business documents?  I’m planning on searching for co-founders, after I have validated the idea myself. Should I instead find co founders before I have even created the product? (with no guarantee that there would even be a product?) Should I try to make the product without co-founders? (This is my first startup, so it might tank within the first few months) Any experience with starting a software business while working full time? Thank you for all the help!

10 Side Projects in 10 Years: Lessons from Failures and a $700 Exit

Hey folks, I'm sharing my journey so far in case it can help others. Entrepreneurship can sometimes be demotivating. In my case, I've always been involved in side projects and what I've realized is that every time you crash a project, the next one makes it a bit further. So this is a long-term game and consistency ends up paying off The $1 Android Game (2015, age 18) What Happened: 500 downloads, 1€ in ad revenue Ugly UI, performance issues Key Lessons: Don’t be afraid of launching. Delaying for “perfection” is often a sign that you fear being ignored. I was trying to perfect every aspect of the game. In reality, I was delaying the launch because I feared no one would download the app. Commit to the project or kill it. At some point, this project was no longer fun (it was just about fixing device responsiveness). Most importantly, I wasn't learning anything new so I moved to smth else. The Forex Bot Regret (2016, age 19) What Happened: Lost months identifying inexistent chart patterns Created a Trading bot that was never profitable Key Lessons: Day trading’s real winners are usually brokers. There are plenty of guys selling a bot or systems that are not making money trading, why would they sell a “money-printing machine” otherwise... Develop an unfair advantage. With these projects, I developed a strong coding foundation that gave me an edge when dealing with non-technical business people. Invest countless hours to create a skills gap between you and others, one that becomes increasingly difficult for them to close (coding, public speaking, networking, etc.) The $700 Instagram Exit (2018, age 21) What Happened: Grew a motivational account to 60k followers Sold it for $700 90% of followers were in low-income countries (hard to monetize) Key Lessons: Follower quality > quantity. I focused on growth and ended up with an audience I couldn’t truly define. If brands don’t see value, you won’t generate revenue. Also, if you do not know who you are creating content for, you'll end up demotivated and stop posting. Great 3rd party product + domain authority = Affiliate marketing works. In this case, I could easily promote an IG growing service because my 50k+ followers conveyed trust. Most importantly, the service I was promoting worked amazingly. The Illegal Amazon Review Marketplace (2020, age 23) What Happened: Sellers were reimbursing buyers for positive reviews Built a WordPress marketplace to facilitate “free products for reviews” Realized it violated Amazon’s terms Key Lessons: Check for “red flags” when doing idea assessment. There will always be red and orange flags. It’s about learning to differentiate between them (e.g. illegality, 100% dependence on a platform, etc.) If there’s competition, it’s good, if they are making money it’s even better. I was thrilled when I saw no competition for my “unique idea”. Later, I discovered the obvious reason. Copying a “Proven” Business Model (2020, age 23) What Happened: Tried recreating an Instagram “comment for comment” growth tool Instagram changed the algorithm and killed the growth strategy that the product used. Key Lessons: Do not build a business that depends 100% on another business, it is too risky. Mr. Musk can increase Twitter on API pricing to $42,000 monthly without notice and Tik Tok can be banned in the US. Due to the IG algorithm change, we had built a product that was not useful, and worse, now we had no idea how to grow an IG account. Consider future project synergies before selling. I regret having sold the 60k follower IG account since it could have saved me a lot of time when convincing users to try the service. NFT Marathon Medals (2021, age 24) What Happened: Created NFT race medals Sold 20 for 5€ each, but spent 95% of meetings explaining “what is an NFT?” Key Lessons: Market timing is crucial. As with every new technology, it is only useful as long as society is ready to adopt it. No matter how promising the tech is in the eyes of SV, society will end up dictating its success (blockchain, AI, etc). In this case, the runner community was not ready to adopt blockchain (it is not even prepared today). Race organizers did not know what they were selling, and runners did not know what they were buying. The 30-day rule in Fanatical Prospecting. Do not stop prospecting. I did prospecting and closed deals 3 months after the outbound efforts. Then I was busy executing the projects and had no clients once the projects were finished. AI Portal & Co-Founder Misalignment (2023, age 26) What Happened: Built a portal for SMEs to find AI use cases Co-founders disagreed on vision and execution Platform still gets \~1 new user/day Key Lessons: Define roles and equity clearly. Our biggest strength ended up killing us. Both founders had strong strategic skills and we were constantly arguing about decisions. NextJS + Vercel + Supabase: Great stack to create a SaaS MVP. (but do not use AI with frameworks unless you know how they work conceptually) SEO is king. One of our users creates a use case on “Changing Song Lyrics with AI.” Not being our target use case, it brings 90% of our traffic. Building an AI Tool & Getting Ghosted (2024, age 27) What Happened: SEO agency wanted to automate rewriting product descriptions Built it in 3 weeks, but the client vanished Key Lessons: Validate manually first. Don’t code a full-blown solution for a problem you haven’t tested in real-world workflows. I kept rewriting code only to throw it away. Jumping straight into building a solution ended up costing more time than it saved. Use templates, no-code, and open-source for prototyping. In my case, using a Next.js template saved me about four weeks of development only to hit the same dead end, but much faster. Fall in love with your ICP or walk away. I realized I didn’t enjoy working with SEO agencies. Looking back, I should have been honest with myself and admitted that I wasn’t motivated enough by this type of customer. Ignoring Code Perfection Doubled Traffic (2025, age 28) What Happened: Partnered with an ex-colleague to build an AI agents directory Focused on content & marketing, not endless bug fixes Traffic soared organically Key Lessons: Measure the impact of your actions and double down on what works. We set up an analytics system with PostHog and found wild imbalances (e.g. 1 post about frameworks outperformed 20 promotional posts). You have to start somewhere. For us, the AI agents directory is much more than just a standalone site, it's a strategic project that will allow us to discover new products, gain domain authority, and boost other projects. It builds the path for bigger opportunities. Less coding, more traction. Every day I have to fight against myself not to code “indispensable features”. Surprisingly, the directory keeps gaining consistent traffic despite being far from perfect Quitting My Job & Looking Ahead (2025, age 28) What Happened: Left full-time work to go all-in Plan to build vertical AI agents that handle entire business workflows (support, marketing, sales) Key Lessons: Bet on yourself. The opportunity cost of staying in my full-time job outweighed the benefits. It might be your case too I hope this post helps anyone struggling with their project and inspires those considering quitting their full-time job to take the leap with confidence.

How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security

Uzair Javaid, a Ph.D. with a passion for data privacy, co-founded Betterdata to tackle one of AI's most pressing challenges: protecting privacy while enabling innovation. Recently, Betterdata secured a lucrative contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, 1 of only 4 companies worldwide to do so and the only one in Asia. Here's how he did it: The Story So what's your story? I grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, excelling in coding despite studying electrical engineering. Inspired by my professors, I set my sights on studying abroad and eventually earned a Ph.D. scholarship at NUS Singapore, specializing in data security and privacy. During my research, I ethically hacked Ethereum and published 15 papers—three times the requirement. While wrapping up my Ph.D., I explored startup ideas and joined Entrepreneur First, where I met Kevin Yee. With his expertise in generative models and mine in privacy, we founded Betterdata. Now, nearly three years in, we’ve secured a major contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—one of only four companies globally and the only one from Asia. The Startup In a nutshell, what does your startup do? Betterdata is a startup that uses AI and synthetic data generation to address two major challenges: data privacy and the scarcity of high-quality data for training AI models. By leveraging generative models and privacy-enhancing technologies, Betterdata enables businesses, such as banks, to use customer data without breaching privacy regulations. The platform trains AI on real data, learns its patterns, and generates synthetic data that mimics the real thing without containing any personal or sensitive information. This allows companies to innovate and develop AI solutions safely and ethically, all while tackling the growing need for diverse, high-quality data in AI development. How did you conduct ideation and validation for your startup? The initial idea for Betterdata came from personal experience. During my Ph.D., I ethically hacked Ethereum’s blockchain, exposing flaws in encryption-based data sharing. This led me to explore AI-driven deep synthesis technology—similar to deepfakes but for structured data privacy. With GDPR impacting 28M+ businesses, I saw a massive opportunity to help enterprises securely share data while staying compliant. To validate the idea, I spoke to 50 potential customers—a number that strikes the right balance. Some say 100, but that’s impractical for early-stage founders. At 50, patterns emerge: if 3 out of 10 mention the same problem, and this repeats across 50, you have 10–15 strong signals, making it a solid foundation for an MVP. Instead of outbound sales, which I dislike, we used three key methods: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—targeting technically savvy users with solutions for niche problems, like scaling synthetic data for banks. Targeted Content Marketing—regular customer conversations shaped our thought leadership and outreach. Raising Awareness Through Partnerships—collaborating with NUS, Singapore’s PDPC, and Plug and Play to build credibility and educate the market. These strategies attracted serious customers willing to pay, guiding Betterdata’s product development and market fit. How did you approach the initial building and ongoing product development? In the early stages, we built synthetic data generation algorithms and a basic UI for proof-of-concept, using open-source datasets to engage with banks. We quickly learned that banks wouldn't share actual customer data due to privacy concerns, so we had to conduct on-site installations and gather feedback to refine our MVP. Through continuous consultation with customers, we discovered real enterprise data posed challenges, such as missing values, which led us to adapt our prototype accordingly. This iterative approach of listening to customer feedback and observing their usage allowed us to improve our product, enhance UX, and address unmet needs while building trust and loyalty. Working closely with our customers also gives us a data advantage. Our solution’s effectiveness depends on customer data, which we can't fully access, but bridging this knowledge gap gives us a competitive edge. The more customers we test on, the more our algorithms adapt to diverse use cases, making it harder for competitors to replicate our insights. My approach to iteration is simple: focus solely on customer feedback and ignore external noise like trends or advice. The key question for the team is: which customer is asking for this feature or solution? As long as there's a clear answer, we move forward. External influences, such as AI hype, often bring more confusion than clarity. True long-term success comes from solving real customer problems, not chasing trends. Customers may not always know exactly what they want, but they understand their problems. Our job is to identify these problems and solve them in innovative ways. While customers may suggest specific features, we stay focused on solving the core issue rather than just fulfilling their exact requests. The idea aligns with the quote often attributed to Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The key is understanding their problems, not just taking requests at face value. How do you assess product-market fit? To assess product-market fit, we track two key metrics: Customers' Willingness to Pay: We measure both the quantity and quality of meetings with potential customers. A high number of meetings with key decision-makers signals genuine interest. At Betterdata, we focused on getting meetings with people in banks and large enterprises to gauge our product's resonance with the target market. How Much Customers Are Willing to Pay: We monitor the price customers are willing to pay, especially in the early stages. For us, large enterprises, like banks, were willing to pay a premium for our synthetic data platform due to the growing need for privacy tech. This feedback guided our product refinement and scaling strategy. By focusing on these metrics, we refined our product and positioned it for scaling. What is your business model? We employ a structured, phase-driven approach for out business model, as a B2B startup. I initially struggled with focusing on the core value proposition in sales, often becoming overly educational. Eventually, we developed a product roadmap with models that allowed us to match customer needs to specific offerings and justify our pricing. Our pricing structure includes project-based pilots and annual contracts for successful deployments. At Betterdata, our customer engagement unfolds across three phases: Phase 1: Trial and Benchmarking \- We start with outreach and use open-source datasets to showcase results, offering customers a trial period to evaluate the solution. Phase 2: Pilot or PoC \- After positive trial results, we conduct a PoC or pilot using the customer’s private data, with the understanding that successful pilots lead to an annual contract. Phase 3: Multi-Year Contracts \- Following a successful pilot, we transition to long-term commercial contracts, focusing on multi-year agreements to ensure stability and ongoing partnerships. How do you do marketing for your brand? We take a non-conventional approach to marketing, focusing on answering one key question: Which customers are willing to pay, and how much? This drives our messaging to show how our solution meets their needs. Our strategy centers around two main components: Building a network of lead magnets \- These are influential figures like senior advisors, thought leaders, and strategic partners. Engaging with institutions like IMDA, SUTD, and investors like Plug and Play helps us gain access to the right people and foster warm introductions, which shorten our sales cycle and ensure we’re reaching the right audience. Thought leadership \- We build our brand through customer traction, technology evidence, and regulatory guidelines. This helps us establish credibility in the market and position ourselves as trusted leaders in our field. This holistic approach has enabled us to navigate diverse market conditions in Asia and grow our B2B relationships. By focusing on these areas, we drive business growth and establish strong trust with stakeholders. What's your advice for fundraising? Here are my key takeaways for other founders when it comes to fundraising: Fundraise When You Don’t Need To We closed our seed round in April 2023, a time when we weren't actively raising. Founders should always be in fundraising mode, even when they're not immediately in need of capital. Don’t wait until you have only a few months of runway left. Keep the pipeline open and build relationships. When the timing is right, execution becomes much easier. For us, our investment came through a combination of referrals and inbound interest. Even our lead investor initially rejected us, but after re-engaging, things eventually fell into place. It’s crucial to stay humble, treat everyone with respect, and maintain those relationships for when the time is right. Be Mindful of How You Present Information When fundraising, how you present information matters a lot. We created a comprehensive, easily digestible investment memo, hosted on Notion, which included everything an investor might need—problem, solution, market, team, risks, opportunities, and data. The goal was for investors to be able to get the full picture within 30 minutes without chasing down extra details. We also focused on making our financial model clear and meaningful, even though a 5-year forecast might be overkill at the seed stage. The key was clarity and conciseness, and making it as easy as possible for investors to understand the opportunity. I learned that brevity and simplicity are often the best ways to make a memorable impact. For the pitch itself, keep it simple and focus on 4 things: problem, solution, team, and market. If you can summarize each of these clearly and concisely, you’ll have a compelling pitch. Later on, you can expand into market segments, traction, and other metrics, but for seed-stage, focus on those four areas, and make sure you’re strong in at least three of them. If you do, you'll have a compelling case. How do you run things day-to-day? i.e what's your operational workflow and team structure? Here's an overview of our team structure and process: Internally: Our team is divided into two main areas: backend (internal team) and frontend (market-facing team). There's no formal hierarchy within the backend team. We all operate as equals, defining our goals based on what needs to be developed, assigning tasks, and meeting weekly to share updates and review progress. The focus is on full ownership of tasks and accountability for getting things done. I also contribute to product development, identifying challenges and clearing obstacles to help the team move forward. Backend Team: We approach tasks based on the scope defined by customers, with no blame or hierarchy. It's like a sports team—sometimes someone excels, and other times they struggle, but we support each other and move forward together. Everyone has the creative freedom to work in the way that suits them best, but we establish regular meetings and check-ins to ensure alignment and progress. Frontend Team: For the market-facing side, we implement a hierarchy because the market expects this structure. If I present myself as "CEO," it signals authority and credibility. This distinction affects how we communicate with the market and how we build our brand. The frontend team is split into four main areas: Business Product (Software Engineering) Machine Learning Engineering R&D The C-suite sits at the top, followed by team leads, and then the executors. We distill market expectations into actionable tasks, ensuring that everyone is clear on their role and responsibilities. Process: We start by receiving market expectations and defining tasks based on them. Tasks are assigned to relevant teams, and execution happens with no communication barriers between team members. This ensures seamless collaboration and focused execution. The main goal is always effectiveness—getting things done efficiently while maintaining flexibility in how individuals approach their work. In both teams, there's an emphasis on accountability, collaboration, and clear communication, but the structure varies according to the nature of the work and external expectations.

Seeking co-founder to build LinkedIn’s biggest rival(curated version)

How do you connect with likeminded people? You see the polished wins everywhere, but what about the messy drafts , the awkward pitches and the moments you’re not sure you’ve got it right? Problem: The whole idea of founding and starting a business can be super intimidating for some people, specially those who don’t know any founders personally, those who don’t have a large network, those who don’t have rich parents with large networks, those not inserted in an entrepreneurial culture like in the US for example (which is my case). Sometimes all you need is the right support network, and too see others do what you want, to know that it’s possible! Everyone has an “ultimate guide” to make 7 figures or build a business on YouTube but NO ONE shoes you the HOW, just the results… I’ve tried joining founder communities, LinkedIn ,Reddit … you name it. Most of these founder communities are inaccessible for regular people and often ask for you to have an already existing business with a min ARR… or their simply geography based and if you’re not in a certain area you can’t really participate… As of LinkedIn… full of empty AI generated posts about how some random dude raised $10m in 7 days. Okay Jonathan, but what about the HOW?? How did you write your first pitch? How many rejection calls did you get? What is an MVP? There simply isn’t a platform out there to document your founding journey and find inspiration within a community of people who are doing the same as you. What better way to feel motivated then to see someone actually document their process? Solution: I’m working on building a social media platform for aspiring/founders to connect through the RAW, UNFILTERED process of turning ideas into reality in REAL time. It’s all gonna be around the “building in public “ concept and content creation. Picture an instagram/tiktok profile where instead of seeing someone’s dog you see them documenting their founding process—from the moment they had the idea, to the moment they launched, you’re going to see the successes, the fails, the rejected calls, all documented through actual content and not some AI generated LinkedIn post. Imagine if you wanted to learn about how Steve Jobs started Apple , you could simply go through his profile on this app—exactly. To make sure all interactions are meaningful people would have to apply. It’s a truly curated community, with REAL people, building REAL things in REAL time, and not just tell us the story of how they did it… Audience: I’m targeting people who have a burning desire of building a business and early stage founders starting their founder journeys, that don’t have a support network and simply don’t know where to start. People who are tired of watching 30 min “ultimate guides “ on how to make it on YouTube from “business gurus” selling courses. People who haven’t reached the min ARR required to join an “exclusive “ founder a community. People who can’t simply just move to the US to get into the “exclusive” YC combinator. People who want to connect with real people building real things and not anonymous people on Reddit, or LinkedIn influencers again trying to promote their services. I believe in the idea because I’m also part of my audience. Have always wanted to start my own thing just never knew how to and where to find a community of likeminded people . I don’t know any founders myself, I come from a non-entrepreneurial society and I’d pay good money to access a community of REAL passionate founders building REAL things, in REAL time. This would be my first ever business, and I want to share my journey building it and hopefully inspire others to just start so I’ve created a mailing list to keep anyone interested in the project updated on my fails , learnings and successes. I’m not worried about “making it” but just “starting” and hopefully reach the right audience and inspire anyone to start whatever they have marinating in their thoughts. If you’re a founder struggling with staying consistent or an aspiring founder with an insane desire of starting and don’t know how to start, I’d love to get your feedback on what’s stopping you, your challenges starting out and what you’d find useful in such platform. And finally would this be something that interests you?? PS: casually looking for a technical co-founder

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]

After more than 20 years in the tech industry I'm pretty fed up. I've been at it non-stop, so the burnout was building up for a while. Eventually, it's gotten so bad that it was no longer a question whether I need to take a break; I knew that I had to, for the sake of myself and loved ones. A few months ago I quit my well-paying, mid-level mgmt job to have some much-needed respite. I can't say that I've fully recovered, but I'm doing a bit better, so I'm starting to think about what's next. That said, the thoughts of going back into the rat race fill me with dread and anxiety. I've had an interesting career - I spent most of it in startups doing various roles from an SWE to a VP Eng, including having my own startup adventures for a couple of years. The last 4.5 years of my career have been in one of the fastest growing tech companies - it was a great learning experience, but also incredibly stressful, toxic and demoralizing. It's clear to me that I'm not cut out for the corporate world -- the ethos contradicts with my personality and beliefs -- but it's not just. I've accumulated "emotional scars" from practically every place I worked at and it made me loathe the industry to the degree that if I ever have another startup, it'd have to be by my own -- unorthodox -- ideals, even if it means a premature death due to lack of funding. I was young, stupid and overly confident when I had my first startup. I tried to do it "by the book" and dance to the tune of investors. While my startup failed for other, unrelated reasons, it gave me an opportunity to peak behind the curtain, experience the power dynamics, and get a better understanding to how the game is played - VCs and other person of interest have popularized the misconception that if a company doesn't scale, it would stagnate and eventually regress and die. This is nonsense. This narrative was created because it would make the capitalist pigs obsolete - they need companies to go through the entire alphabet before forcing them to sell or IPO. The sad reality is that the most entrepreneurs still believe in this paradigm and fall into the VC's honeypot traps. It's true that many businesses cannot bootstrap or scale without VC money, but it's equally true that far too many companies pivot/scale prematurely (and enshitify their product in the process) due to external pressures fueled by pure greed. This has a top-bottom effect - enshitification doesn't only effect users, but it also heavily effects the processes and structrures of companies, which can explain why the average tenure in tech is only \~2 years. I think that we live in an age where self-starting startups are more feasible than ever. It's not just the rise of AI and automation, but also the plethora of tools, services, and open-source projects that are available to all for free. On the one hand, this is fantastic, but on the other, the low barrier-to-entry creates oversaturation of companies which makes research & discovery incredibly hard - it is overwhelming to keep up with the pace and distill the signal from the noise, and there's a LOT of noise - there's not enough metaphorical real-estate for the graveyard of startups that will be defunct in the very near future. I'd like to experiment with startups again, but I don't want to navigate through this complex mine field all by myself - I want to find a like-minded co-founder who shares the same ideals as I do. It goes without saying that being on the same page isn't enough - I also want someone who's experienced, intelligent, creative, productive, well-rounded, etc. At the moment, I don't have anyone in my professional network who has/wants what it takes. I can look into startup bootcamps/accelerators like YC et al., and sure enough, I'll find talented individuals, but it'd be a mismatch from the get-go. For shits and giggles, this is (very roughly) how I envision the ideal company: Excellent work life balance: the goal is not to make a quick exit, become filthy rich, and turn into a self-absorbed asshole bragging about how they got so succesful. The goal is to generate a steady revenue stream while not succumbing to social norms that encourage greed. The entire purpose is to reach humble financial indepedence while maintaining a stress-free (as one possibly can) work environment. QOL should always be considered before ARR. Bootstraping: no external money. Not now, not later. No quid pro quo. No shady professionals or advisors. Company makes it or dies trying. Finances: very conservative to begin with - the idea is to play it safe and build a long fucking runaway before hiring. Spend every penny mindfully and frugally. Growth shouldn't be too quick & reckless. The business will be extremely efficient in spending. The only exception to the rule is crucial infrastructure and wages to hire top talent and keep salaries competitive and fair. Hiring: fully remote. Global presence, where applicable. Headcount will be limited to the absolute bare minimum. The goal is to run with a skeleton crew of the best generalists out there - bright, self-sufficient, highly motivated, autodidact, and creative individuals. Hiring the right people is everything and should be the company's top priority. Compensation & Perks: transperent and fair, incentivizing exceptional performance with revenue sharing bonuses. The rest is your typical best-in-class perks: top tier health/dental/vision insurance, generous PTO with mandatory required minimum, parental leave, mental wellness, etc. Process: processes will be extremely efficient, automated to the max, documented, unbloated, and data-driven through and through. Internal knowledge & data metrics will be accessible and transparent to all. Employees get full autonomy of their respective areas and are fully in charge of how they spend their days as long as they have agreed-upon, coherent, measurable metrics of success. Meetings will be reduced to the absolute minimum and would have to be justified and actionable - the ideal is that most communications will be done in written form, while face-to-face will be reserved for presentations/socializing. I like the Kaizen philosophy to continuously improve and optimize processes. Product: As previously stated, "data-driven through and through". Mindful approach to understand cost/benefit. Deliberate and measured atomic improvements to avoid feature creep and slow down the inevitable entropy. Most importantly, client input should be treated with the utmost attention but should never be the main driver for the product roadmap. This is a very controversial take, but sometimes it's better to lose a paying customer than to cave to their distracting/unreasonable/time-consuming demands. People Culture: ironicaly, this would be what most companies claim to have, but for realsies. Collaborative, open, blameless environment. People are treated like actual grown ups with flat structure, full autonomy, and unwavering trust. Socializing and bonding is highly encourged, but never required. Creativity and ingenuity is highly valued - people are encouraged to work on side projects one day of the week. Values: I can write a lot about it, but it really boils down to being kind and humble. We all know what happened with "don't be evil". It's incredibly hard to retain values over time, esp. when there are opposing views within a company. I don't know how to solve it, but I believe that there should be some (tried and true) internal checks & balances from the get go to ensure things are on track. I never mentioned what this hypothetical startup does. Sure, there's another very relevant layer of domain experience fit, but this mindset allows one to be a bit more fluid because the goal is not to disrupt an industry or "make the world a better place"; it's to see work for what it truly is - a mean to an end. It's far more important for me to align with a co-founder on these topics than on an actual idea or technical details. Pivoting and rebranding are so common that many VCs outweigh the make up and chemistry of the founding team (and their ability to execute) over the feasibility of their ideas.  To wrap this long-winded post, I'm not naive or disillusioned - utopias aren't real and profitable companies who operate at a 70-80% rate of what I propose are the real unicorns, but despite them being a tiny minority, I think they are the real forward thinkers of the industry. I might be wrong, but I hope that I'm right and that more and more startups will opt towards long-term sustainability over the promise of short-term gains because the status quo really stinks for most people. What do you folks think? Does anyone relate? Where can I find others like me? P.S I thought about starting a blog writing about these topics in length (everything that is wrong with tech & what can be done to improve it), but I have the Impostor Syndrom and I'm too self-conscious about how I come off. If you somehow enjoyed reading through that and would love to hear more of my thoughts and experiences in greater detail, please let me know. P.P.S If you have a company that is close to what I'm describing and you're hiring, let me know!

101 best SEO tips to help you drive traffic in 2k21

Hey guys! I don't have to tell you how SEO can be good for your business - you can drive leads to your SaaS on autopilot, drive traffic to your store/gym/bar/whatever, etc. The thing with SEO, though, is that most SEO tips on the internet are just not that good. Most of the said tips: Are way too simple & basic (“add meta descriptions to your images”*) Are not impactful. Sure, adding that meta tag to an image is important, but that’s not what’s going to drive traffic to your website Don’t talk much about SEO strategy (which is ultimately the most important thing for SEO). Sure, on-page SEO is great, but you sure as hell won't drive much traffic if you can't hire the right writers to scale your content. And to drive serious SEO traffic, you'll need a LOT more than that. Over the past few years, my and my co-founder have helped grow websites to over 200k+ monthly traffic (check out our older Reddit post if you want to learn more about us, our process, and what we do), and we compiled all our most important SEO tips and tricks, as well as case studies, research, and experiments from the web, into this article. Hope you like it ;) If you think we missed something super important, let us know and we'll add it to the list. And btw, we also published this article on our own blog with images, smart filters, and all that good stuff. If you want to check it out, click here. That said, grab some coffee (or beer) & let's dive in - this is going to be a long one. SEO Strategy Tips Tip #1. A Lot of SEO Tips On The Internet Are NOT Necessarily Factual A lot of the SEO content you’ll read on the internet will be based on personal experiences and hearsay. Unfortunately, Google is a bit vague about SEO advice, so you have to rely more on experiments conducted by SEO pros in the community. So, sometimes, a lot of this information is questionable, wrong, or simply based on inaccurate data.  What we’re getting at here is, whenever you hear some new SEO advice, take it with a grain of salt. Google it to double-check other sources, and really understand what this SEO advice is based on (instead of just taking it at face value). Tip #2. SEO Takes Time - Get Used to It Any way you spin it, SEO takes time.  It can take around 6 months to 2 years (depending on the competition in your niche) before you start seeing some serious results.  So, don’t get disappointed if you don’t see any results within 3 months of publishing content. Tip #3. SEO Isn’t The Best Channel for Everyone That said, if you need results for your business tomorrow, you might want to reconsider SEO altogether.  If you just started your business, for example, and are trying to get to break-even ASAP, SEO is a bad idea - you’ll quit before you even start seeing any results.  If that’s the case, focus on other marketing channels that can have faster results like content marketing, PPC, outreach, etc. Tip #4. Use PPC to Validate Keywords Not sure if SEO is right for your business? Do this: set up Google Search ads for the most high-intent keywords in your niche. See how well the traffic converts and then decide if it’s worthwhile to focus on SEO (and rank on these keywords organically). Tip #5. Use GSC to See If SEO Is Working While it takes a while to see SEO results, it IS possible to see if you’re going in the right direction. On a monthly basis, you can use Search Console to check if your articles are indexed by Google and if their average position is improving over time. Tip #6. Publish a TON of Content The more content you publish on your blog, the better. We recommend a minimum of 10,000 words per month and optimally 20,000 - 30,000 (especially if your website is fresh). If an agency offers you the typical “4 500-word articles per month” deal, stay away. No one’s ever gotten results in SEO with short, once-per-week articles. Tip #7. Upgrade Your Writers Got a writer that’s performing well? Hire them as an editor and get them to oversee content operations / edit other writers’ content. Then, upgrade your best editor to Head of Content and get them to manage the entire editor / writer ops. Tip #8. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content When doing keyword research, gather the backlink data of the top 3 ranking articles and add it to your sheet. Then, use this data to help you prioritize which keywords to focus on first. We usually prioritize keywords that have lower competition, high traffic, and a medium to high buyer intent. Tip #9. Conduct In-Depth Keyword Research Make your initial keyword research as comprehensive as possible. This will give you a much more realistic view of your niche and allow you to prioritize content the right way. We usually aim for 100 to 300 keywords (depending on the niche) for the initial keyword research when we start working with a client. Tip #10. Start With Competitive Analysis Start every keyword research with competitive analysis. Extract the keywords your top 3 competitors are ranking on.  Then, use them as inspiration and build upon it. Use tools like UberSuggest to help generate new keyword ideas. Tip #11. Get SEMrush of Ahrefs You NEED SEMrush or Ahrefs, there’s no doubt about it. While they might seem expensive at a glance (99 USD per month billed annually), they’re going to save you a lot of manpower doing menial SEO tasks. Tip #12. Don’t Overdo It With SEO Tools Don’t overdo it with SEO tools. There are hundreds of those out there, and if you’re the type that’s into SaaS, you might be tempted to play around with dozens at a time. And yes, to be fair, most of these tools ARE helpful one way or another. To effectively do organic SEO, though, you don’t really need that many tools. In most cases, you just need the following: SEMrush/Ahrefs Screaming Frog RankMath/Yoast SEO Whichever outreach tool you prefer (our favorite is snov.io). Tip #13. Try Some of the Optional Tools In addition to the tools we mentioned before, you can also try the following 2 which are pretty useful & popular in the SEO community: Surfer SEO - helps with on-page SEO and creating content briefs for writers. ClusterAI - tool that helps simplify keyword research & save time. Tip #14. Constantly Source Writers Want to take your content production to the next level? You’ll need to hire more writers.  There is, however, one thing that makes this really, really difficult: 95 - 99% of writers applying for your gigs won’t be relevant. Up to 80% will be awful at writing, and the remainder just won’t be relevant for your niche. So, in order to scale your writing team, we recommend sourcing constantly, and not just once every few months. Tip #15. Create a Process for Writer Filtering As we just mentioned, when sourcing writers, you’ll be getting a ton of applicants, but most won’t be qualified. Fun fact \- every single time we post a job ad on ProBlogger, we get around 300 - 500 applications (most of which are totally not relevant). Trust us, you don’t want to spend your time going through such a huge list and checking out the writer samples. So, instead, we recommend you do this: Hire a virtual assistant to own the process of evaluating and short-listing writers. Create a process for evaluating writers. We recommend evaluating writers by: Level of English. If their samples aren’t fluent, they’re not relevant. Quality of Samples. Are the samples engaging / long-form content, or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes? Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling - you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy to read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true. The VA constantly evaluates new applicants and forwards the relevant ones to the editor. The editor goes through the short-listed writers and gives them trial tasks and hires the ones that perform well. Tip #16. Use The Right Websites to Source Writers “Is UpWork any good?” This question pops up on social media time and time again. If you ask us, no, UpWork is not good at all. Of course, there are qualified writers there (just like anywhere else), but from our experience, those writers are few and far in-between. Instead, here are some of our favorite ways to source writers: Cult of Copy Job Board ProBlogger Headhunting on LinkedIn If you really want to use UpWork, use it for headhunting (instead of posting a job ad) Tip #17. Hire Writers the Right Way If you want to seriously scale your content production, hire your writers full-time. This (especially) makes sense if you’re a content marketing agency that creates a TON of content for clients all the time. If you’re doing SEO just for your own blog, though, it usually makes more sense to use freelancers. Tip #18. Topic Authority Matters Google keeps your website's authoritativeness in mind. Meaning, if you have 100 articles on digital marketing, you’re probably more of an authority on the topic than someone that has just 10. Hence, Google is a lot more likely to reward you with better rankings. This is also partially why content volume really matters: the more frequently you publish content, the sooner Google will view you as an authority. Tip #19. Focus on One Niche at a Time Let’s say your blog covers the following topics: sales, accounting, and business management.  You’re more likely to rank if you have 30 articles on a single topic (e.g. accounting) than if you have 10 articles on each. So, we recommend you double-down on one niche instead of spreading your content team thin with different topics. Tip #20. Don’t Fret on the Details While technical SEO is important, you shouldn’t get too hung up on it.  Sure, there are thousands of technical tips you can find on the internet, and most of them DO matter. The truth, though, is that Google won’t punish you just because your website doesn’t load in 3 milliseconds or there’s a meta description missing on a single page. Especially if you have SEO fundamentals done right: Get your website to run as fast as possible. Create a ton of good SEO content. Get backlinks for your website on a regular basis. You’ll still rank, even if your website isn’t 100% optimized. Tip #21. Do Yourself a Favor and Hire a VA There are a TON of boring SEO tasks that your team should really not be wasting time with. So, hire a full-time VA to help with all that. Some tasks you want to outsource include gathering contacts to reach out to for link-building, uploading articles on WordPress, etc. Tip #22. Google Isn’t Everything While Google IS the dominant search engine in most parts of the world, there ARE countries with other popular search engines.  If you want to improve your SEO in China, for example, you should be more concerned with ranking on Baidu. Targeting Russia? Focus on Yandex. Tip #23. No, Voice Search is Still Not Relevant Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say). It’s just too impractical for most search queries to use voice (as opposed to traditional search). Tip #24. SEO Is Not Dead SEO is not dead and will still be relevant decades down the line. Every year, there’s a sensationalist article talking about this.  Ignore those. Tip #25. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages If you’re doing local SEO, focus on creating service-based landing pages instead of content.  E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on. Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms - you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much. Tip #26. Learn More on Local SEO Speaking of local SEO, we definitely don’t do the topic justice in this guide. There’s a lot more you need to know to do local SEO effectively and some of it goes against the general SEO advice we talk about in this article (e.g. you don't necessarily need blog content for local SEO). We're going to publish an article on that soon enough, so if you want to check it out, DM me and I'll hit you up when it's up. Tip #27. Avoid Vanity Metrics Don’t get side-tracked by vanity metrics.  At the end of the day, you should care about how your traffic impacts your bottom line. Fat graphs and lots of traffic are nice and all, but none of it matters if the traffic doesn’t have the right search intent to convert to your product/service. Tip #28. Struggling With SEO? Hire an Expert Failing to make SEO work for your business? When in doubt, hire an organic SEO consultant or an SEO agency.  The #1 benefit of hiring an SEO agency or consultant is that they’ve been there and done that - more than once. They might be able to catch issues an inexperienced SEO can’t. Tip #29. Engage With the Community Need a couple of SEO questions answered?  SEO pros are super helpful & easy to reach! Join these Facebook groups and ask your question - you’ll get about a dozen helpful answers! SEO Signals Lab SEO & Content Marketing The Proper SEO Group. Tip #30. Stay Up to Date With SEO Trends SEO is always changing - Google is constantly pumping out new updates that have a significant impact on how the game is played.  Make sure to stay up to date with the latest SEO trends and Google updates by following the Google Search Central blog. Tip #31. Increase Organic CTR With PPC Want to get the most out of your rankings? Run PPC ads for your best keywords. Googlers who first see your ad are more likely to click your organic listing. Content & On-Page SEO Tips Tip #32. Create 50% Longer Content On average, we recommend you create an article that’s around 50% longer than the best article ranking on the keyword.  One small exception, though, is if you’re in a super competitive niche and all top-ranking articles are already as comprehensive as they can be. For example, in the VPN niche, all articles ranking for the keyword “best VPN” are around 10,000 - 11,000 words long. And that’s the optimal word count - even if you go beyond, you won’t be able to deliver that much value for the reader to make it worth the effort of creating the content. Tip #33. Longer Is Not Always Better Sometimes, a short-form article can get the job done much better.  For example, let’s say you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie.”  The reader expects a short and simple guide, something under 500 words, and not “The Ultimate Guide to Tie Tying for 2021 \[11 Best Tips and Tricks\]” Tip #34. SEO is Not Just About Written Content Written content is not always best. Sometimes, videos can perform significantly better. E.g. If the Googler is looking to learn how to get a deadlift form right, they’re most likely going to be looking for a video. Tip #35. Don’t Forget to Follow Basic Optimization Tips For all your web pages (articles included), follow basic SEO optimization tips. E.g. include the keyword in the URL, use the right headings etc.  Just use RankMath or YoastSEO for this and you’re in the clear! Tip #36. Hire Specialized Writers When hiring content writers, try to look for ones that specialize in creating SEO content.  There are a LOT of writers on the internet, plenty of which are really good.  However, if they haven’t written SEO content before, chances are, they won’t do that good of a job. Tip #37. Use Content Outlines Speaking of writers - when working with writers, create a content outline that summarizes what the article should be about and what kind of topics it needs to cover instead of giving them a keyword and asking them to “knock themselves out.”   This makes it a lot more likely for the writer to create something that ranks. When creating content outlines, we recommend you include the following information: Target keyword Related keywords that should be mentioned in the article Article structure - which headings should the writer use? In what order? Article title Tip #38. Find Writers With Niche Knowledge Try to find a SEO content writer with some experience or past knowledge about your niche. Otherwise, they’re going to take around a month or two to become an expert. Alternatively, if you’re having difficulty finding a writer with niche knowledge, try to find someone with experience in technical or hard to explain topics. Writers who’ve written about cybersecurity in the past, for example, are a lot more likely to successfully cover other complicated topics (as opposed to, for example, a food or travel blogger). Tip #39. Keep Your Audience’s Knowledge in Mind When creating SEO content, always keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. If you’re writing about advanced finance, for example, you don’t need to teach your reader what an income statement is. If you’re writing about income statements, on the other hand, you’d want to start from the very barebone basics. Tip #40. Write for Your Audience If your readers are suit-and-tie lawyers, they’re going to expect professionally written content. 20-something hipsters? You can get away with throwing a Rick and Morty reference here and there. Tip #41. Use Grammarly Trust us, it’ll seriously make your life easier! Keep in mind, though, that the app is not a replacement for a professional editor. Tip #42. Use Hemingway Online content should be very easy to read & follow for everyone, whether they’re a senior profession with a Ph.D. or a college kid looking to learn a new topic. As such, your content should be written in a simple manner - and that’s where Hemingway comes in. It helps you keep your blog content simple. Tip #43. Create Compelling Headlines Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines. Compare the two headlines below; which one would you click? 101 Productivity Tips \[To Get Things Done in 2021\] VS Productivity Tips Guide Exactly! To create clickable headlines, we recommend you include the following elements: Keyword Numbers Results Year (If Relevant) Tip #44. Nail Your Blog Content Formatting Format your blog posts well and avoid overly long walls of text. There’s a reason Backlinko content is so popular - it’s extremely easy to read and follow. Tip #45. Use Relevant Images In Your SEO Content Key here - relevant. Don’t just spray random stock photos of “office people smiling” around your posts; no one likes those.  Instead, add graphs, charts, screenshots, quote blocks, CSS boxes, and other engaging elements. Tip #46. Implement the Skyscraper Technique (The Right Way) Want to implement Backlinko’s skyscraper technique?  Keep this in mind before you do: not all content is meant to be promoted.  Pick a topic that fits the following criteria if you want the internet to care: It’s on an important topic. “Mega-Guide to SaaS Marketing” is good, “top 5 benefits of SaaS marketing” is not. You’re creating something significantly better than the original material. The internet is filled with mediocre content - strive to do better. Tip #47. Get The URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword with one piece of content (e.g. you want to rank on “saas trends 2020, 2021, etc.”), don’t mention the year in the URL slug - keep it /saas-trends/ and just change the headline every year instead.  If you want to rank with separate articles, on the other hand (e.g. you publish a new trends report every year), include the year in the URL. Tip #48. Avoid content cannibalization.  Meaning, don’t write 2+ articles on one topic. This will confuse Google on which article it should rank. Tip #49. Don’t Overdo Outbound Links Don’t include too many outbound links in your content. Yes, including sources is good, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.  If your 1,000 word article has 20 outbound links, Google might consider it as spam (even if all those links are relevant). Tip #50. Consider “People Also Ask” To get the most out of SERP, you want to grab as many spots on the search result as possible, and this includes “people also ask (PAA):” Make a list of the topic’s PAA questions and ensure that your article answers them.  If you can’t fit the questions & answers within the article, though, you can also add an FAQ section at the end where you directly pose these questions and provide the answers. Tip #51. Optimize For Google Snippet Optimize your content for the Google Snippet. Check what’s currently ranking as the snippet. Then, try to do something similar (or even better) in terms of content and formatting. Tip #52. Get Inspired by Viral Content Want to create content that gets insane shares & links?  Reverse-engineer what has worked in the past. Look up content in your niche that went viral on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook groups, Buzzsumo, etc. and create something similar, but significantly better. Tip #53. Avoid AI Content Tools No, robots can’t write SEO content.  If you’ve seen any of those “AI generated content tools,” you should know to stay away. The only thing those tools are (currently) good for is creating news content. Tip #54. Avoid Bad Content You will never, ever, ever rank with one 500-word article per week.  There are some SEO agencies (even the more reputable ones) that offer this as part of their service. Trust us, this is a waste of time. Tip #55. Update Your Content Regularly Check your top-performing articles annually and see if there’s anything you can do to improve them.  When most companies finally get the #1 ranking for a keyword, they leave the article alone and never touch it again… ...Until they get outranked, of course, by someone who one-upped their original article. Want to prevent this from happening? Analyze your top-performing content once a year and improve it when possible. Tip #56. Experiment With CTR Do your articles have low CTR? Experiment with different headlines and see if you can improve it.  Keep in mind, though, that what a “good CTR” is really depends on the keyword.  In some cases, the first ranking will drive 50% of the traffic. In others, it’s going to be less than 15%. Link-Building Tips Tip #57. Yes, Links Matter. Here’s What You Need to Know “Do I need backlinks to rank?” is probably one of the most common SEO questions.  The answer to the question (alongside all other SEO-related questions) is that it depends on the niche.  If your competitors don’t have a lot of backlinks, chances are, you can rank solely by creating superior content. If you’re in an extremely competitive niche (e.g. VPN, insurance, etc.), though, everyone has amazing, quality content - that’s just the baseline.  What sets top-ranking content apart from the rest is backlinks. Tip #58. Sometimes, You’ll Have to Pay For Links Unfortunately, in some niches, paying for links is unavoidable - e.g. gambling, CBD, and others. In such cases, you either need a hefty link-building budget, or a very creative link-building campaign (create a viral infographic, news-worthy story based on interesting data, etc.). Tip #59. Build Relationships, Not Links The very best link-building is actually relationship building.  Make a list of websites in your niche and build a relationship with them - don’t just spam them with the standard “hey, I have this amazing article, can you link to it?”.  If you spam, you risk ruining your reputation (and this is going to make further outreach much harder). Tip #60. Stick With The Classics At the end of the day, the most effective link-building tactics are the most straightforward ones:  Direct Outreach Broken Link-Building Guest Posting Skyscraper Technique Creating Viral Content Guestposting With Infographics Tip #61. Give, Don’t Just Take! If you’re doing link-building outreach, don’t just ask for links - give something in return.  This will significantly improve the reply rate from your outreach email. If you own a SaaS tool, for example, you can offer the bloggers you’re reaching out to free access to your software. Or, alternatively, if you’re doing a lot of guest posting, you can offer the website owner a link from the guest post in exchange for the link to your website. Tip #62. Avoid Link Resellers That guy DMing you on LinkedIn, trying to sell you links from a Google Sheet?  Don’t fall for it - most of those links are PBNs and are likely to backfire on you. Tip #63. Avoid Fiverr Like The Plague Speaking of spammy links, don’t touch anything that’s sold on Fiverr - pretty much all of the links there are useless. Tip #64. Focus on Quality Links Not all links are created equal. A link is of higher quality if it’s linked from a page that: Is NOT a PBN. Doesn’t have a lot of outbound links. If the page links to 20 other websites, each of them gets less link juice. Has a lot of (quality) backlinks. Is part of a website with a high domain authority. Is about a topic relevant to the page it’s linking to. If your article about pets has a link from an accounting blog, Google will consider it a bit suspicious. Tip #65. Data-Backed Content Just Works Data-backed content can get insane results for link-building.  For example, OKCupid used to publish interesting data & research based on how people interacted with their platform and it never failed to go viral. Each of their reports ended up being covered by dozens of news media (which got them a ton of easy links). Tip #66. Be Creative - SEO Is Marketing, After All Be novel & creative with your link-building initiatives.  Here’s the thing: the very best link-builders are not going to write about the tactics they’re using.  If they did, you’d see half the internet using the exact same tactic as them in less than a week! Which, as you can guess, would make the tactic cliche and significantly less effective. In order to get superior results with your link-building, you’ll need to be creative - think about how you can make your outreach different from what everyone does. Experiment it, measure it, and improve it till it works! Tip #67. Try HARO HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a platform that matches journalists with sources. You get an email every day with journalists looking for experts in specific niches, and if you pitch them right, they might feature you in their article or link to your website. Tip #68. No-Follow Links Aren’t That Bad Contrary to what you might’ve heard, no-follow links are not useless. Google uses no-follow as more of a suggestion than anything else.  There have been case studies that prove Google can disregard the no-follow tag and still reward you with increased rankings. Tip #69. Start Fresh With an Expired Domain Starting a new website? It might make sense to buy an expired one with existing backlinks (that’s in a similar niche as yours). The right domain can give you a serious boost to how fast you can rank. Tip #70. Don’t Overspend on Useless Links “Rel=sponsored” links don’t pass pagerank and hence, won’t help increase your website rankings.  So, avoid buying links from media websites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, etc. Tip #71. Promote Your Content Other than link-building, focus on organic content promotion. For example, you can repost your content on Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. and focus on driving traffic.  This will actually lead to you getting links, too. We got around 95 backlinks to our SEO case study article just because of our successful content promotion. Tons of people saw the article on the net, liked it, and linked to it from their website. Tip #72. Do Expert Roundups Want to build relationships with influencers in your niche, but don’t know where to start?  Create an expert roundup article. If you’re in the sales niche, for example, you can write about Top 21 Sales Influencers in 2021 and reach out to the said influencers letting them know that they got featured. Trust us, they’ll love you for this! Tip #73. .Edu Links are Overhyped .edu links are overrated. According to John Mueller, .edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them. Tip #74. Build Relationships With Your Customers Little-known link-building hack: if you’re a SaaS company doing SEO, you can build relationships with your customers (the ones that are in the same topical niche as you are) and help each other build links! Tip #75. Reciprocal Links Aren’t That Bad Reciprocal links are not nearly as bad as Google makes them out to be. Sure, they can be bad at scale (if trading links is all you’re doing). Exchanging a link or two with another website / blog, though, is completely harmless in 99% of cases. Tip #76. Don’t Overspam Don’t do outreach for every single post you publish - just the big ones.  Most people already don’t care about your outreach email. Chances are, they’re going to care even less if you’re asking them to link to this new amazing article you wrote (which is about the top 5 benefits of adopting a puppy). Technical SEO Tips Tip #77. Use PageSpeed Insights If your website is extremely slow, it’s definitely going to impact your rankings. Use PageSpeed Insights to see how your website is currently performing. Tip #78. Load Speed Matters While load speed doesn’t impact rankings directly, it DOES impact your user experience. Chances are, if your page takes 5 seconds to load, but your competition’s loads instantly, the average Googler will drop off and pick them over you. Tip #79. Stick to a Low Crawl Depth Crawl depth of any page on your website should be lower than 4 (meaning, any given page should be possible to reach in no more than 3 clicks from the homepage).  Tip #80. Use Next-Gen Image Formats Next-gen image formats such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP can be compressed a lot better than PNG or JPG. So, when possible, use next-get formats for images on your website. Tip #81. De-Index Irrelevant Pages Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages) via your Robots.txt. If you’re a SaaS, for example, this would include most of your in-app pages or your internal knowledge base pages. Tip #82. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Google uses “mobile-first indexing.” Meaning, unless you have a working mobile version of your website, your rankings will seriously suffer. Tip #83. Lazy-Load Images Lazy-load your images. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image. Tip #84. Enable Gzip Compression Enable Gzip compression to allow your HTML, CSS and JS files to load faster. Tip #85. Clean Up Your Code If your website loads slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, you can try minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files. Tip 86. Use Rel-Canonical Have duplicate content on your website? Use rel-canonical to show Google which version is the original (and should be prioritized for search results). Tip #87. Install an SSL Certificate Not only does an SSL certificate help keep your website safe, but it’s also a direct ranking factor. Google prioritizes websites that have SSL certificates over the ones that don’t. Tip #88. Use Correct Anchor Texts for Internal Links When linking to an internal page, mention the keyword you’re trying to rank for on that page in the anchor text. This helps Google understand that the page is, indeed, about the keyword you’re associating it with. Tip #89. Use GSC to Make Sure Your Content is Interlinked Internal links can have a serious impact on your rankings. So, make sure that all your blog posts (especially the new ones) are properly linked to/from your past content.  You can check how many links any given page has via Google Search Console. Tip #90. Bounce rate is NOT a Google ranking factor. Meaning, you can still rank high-up even with a high bounce rate. Tip #91. Don’t Fret About a High Bounce Rate Speaking of the bounce rate, you’ll see that some of your web pages have a higher-than-average bounce rate (70%+).  While this can sometimes be a cause for alarm, it’s not necessarily so. Sometimes, the search intent behind a given keyword means that you WILL have a high bounce rate even if your article is the most amazing thing ever.  E.g. if it’s a recipe page, the reader gets the recipe and bounces off (since they don’t need anything else). Tip #92. Google Will Ignore Your Meta Description More often than not, Google won’t use the meta description you provide - that’s normal. It will, instead, automatically pick a part of the text that it thinks is most relevant and use it as a meta description. Despite this, you should always add a meta description to all pages. Tip #93. Disavow Spammy & PBN Links Keep track of your backlinks and disavow anything that’s obviously spammy or PBNy. In most cases, Google will ignore these links anyway. However, you never know when a competitor is deliberately targeting you with too many spammy or PBN links (which might put you at risk for being penalized). Tip #94. Use The Correct Redirect  When permanently migrating your pages, use 301 redirect to pass on the link juice from the old page to the new one. If the redirect is temporary, use a 302 redirect instead. Tip #95. When A/B Testing, Do This A/B testing two pages? Use rel-canonical to show Google which page is the original. Tip #96. Avoid Amp DON’T use Amp.  Unless you’re a media company, Amp will negatively impact your website. Tip #97. Get Your URL Slugs Right Keep your blog URLs short and to-the-point. Good Example: apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study Bad Example: apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study-2021-0-to-200,000/ Tip #98. Avoid Dates in URLs An outdated date in your URL can hurt your CTR. Readers are more likely to click / read articles published recently than the ones written years back. Tip #99. Social Signals Matter Social signals impact your Google rankings, just not in the way you think. No, your number of shares and likes does NOT impact your ranking at all.  However, if your article goes viral and people use Google to find your article, click it, and read it, then yes, it will impact your rankings.  E.g. you read our SaaS marketing guide on Facebook, then look up “SaaS marketing” on Google, click it, and read it from there. Tip #100. Audit Your Website Frequently Every other month, crawl your website with ScreamingFrog and see if you have any broken links, 404s, etc. Tip #101. Use WordPress Not sure which CMS platform to use?  99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress.  It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier.  Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. Wix, SiteGround and similar drag & drops are bad for SEO. Tip #102. Check Rankings the Right Way When checking on how well a post is ranking on Google Search Console, make sure to check Page AND Query to get the accurate number.  If you check just the page, it’s going to give you the average ranking on all keywords the page is ranking for (which is almost always going to be useless data). Conclusion Aaand that's about it - thanks for the read! Now, let's circle back to Tip #1 for a sec. Remember when we said a big chunk of what you read on SEO is based on personal experiences, experiments, and the like? Well, the tips we've mentioned are part of OUR experience. Chances are, you've done something that might be different (or completely goes against) our advice in this article. If that's the case, we'd love it if you let us know down in the comments. If you mention something extra-spicy, we'll even include it in this article.

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

Made $940 in 3 days with the help of ChatGPT

5 days ago I joined the HustleGPT challenge. Its purpose is to build products with the help of ChatGPT. I've made a goal of creating 1 digital product with chatGPT every day. On the 3rd day I've created an app for MacOS that lets you use ChatGPT inside any text field in any app. Basically, there is no need to open your browser, or go to openai website every time you want to use chatgpt. So, after building it and publishing on Gumroad, I've tweeted about it and went to sleep. You may be thinking that my tweet has gone viral and that's how I made all the sales. However, this is not the case. My tweet got only 1200 views. And these 1200 views generated me my first $140 of revenue! After that, I started actively posting my product on social media. I never gone viral but even with 1-2k views per post I've made sales. And I'm on my way to $1000 revenue from my side project. I didn't spend much time on it too. As I was writing this post, I've made 1 new sale! That's $19 revenue (profit from each is sale is $16). After some thinking, I got this idea: what if I let other entrepreneurs earn with my app? Basically, you can resell my app, redistribute it, and do whatever you want with it. Once you buy it, you can freely do whatever you want with it. What do you think? Here is a tool that I use to create content that drives most sales for me - link Also, if you want to build apps with ChatGPT - this guide will help you - Here is a link I'm open for any feedback and suggestions! Thanks

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

Detailed Guide - How I've Been Self Employed for 2 Years Selling Posters

Hey everyone, bit of context before you read through this. I have been selling POD posters full time for over 2 years now. My next venture is that I have started my own Print on Demand company for posters, PrintShrimp. As one way of creating customers for our service, we are teaching people for free how to also sell posters. Here is a guide I have written on how to sell posters on Etsy. Feel free to have a read through and then check out PrintShrimp, hopefully can help some of you guys out (and get us some more customers!) All of this is also available in video format on our website too, if you prefer to learn that way. Thanks guys! And as some people asked in other subs, no this isn't written with AI 😅 This took a couple of weeks to put together! Through this guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about starting to sell posters and generate some income. We will also show you why PrintShrimp is the best POD supplier for all of your poster needs. Trust me, you won’t need much convincing.  So, why are posters the best product to sell? Also, just thought I’d quickly answer the question - why posters? If you’ve been researching Print on Demand you’ve probably come across the infinite options of t-shirts, mugs, hats, phone cases, and more. All of these are viable options, however we think posters are the perfect place to start. You can always expand into other areas further down the line! So a brief summary of why posters are the perfect product for Print on Demand: \-They are very easy to design! Posters are a very easy shape to deal with - can’t go wrong with a rectangle. This makes designing products very easy. \-Similarly to this, what you see is what you get with a poster. You can literally see your finished product as you design it in either canva or photoshop. With T-Shirts for example, you have to make your design, and then place it on a t-shirt. Then you have to coordinate with your printers the size you would like the design on the tshirt and many other variables like that. There is no messing about with posters - what you see is what you get. \-The same high quality, everywhere. With other products, if you want to reap the benefits of a printing in various countries, you need to ensure each of your global suppliers stocks the same t-shirts, is able to print in the same way, carries the same sizes etc. Again with posters you avoid all of this hassle- your products will come out the same, no matter which of our global locations are used. \-They have a very favorable profit margin. As you will see later, the cost price of posters is very low. And people are prepared to pay quite a lot for a decent bit of wall art! I have tried out other products, and the profit margin combined with the order quantity of posters makes them my most profitable product, every single time. Using PrintShrimp, you can be sure to enjoy profits of anywhere between £6 - £40 pure profit per sale.  \-They are one of the easiest to print white label. This makes them perfect for Print on Demand. Your posters are simply put in a tube, and off they go. There are no extras you need to faff around with, compared to the extra elements other products come with, such as clothing labels on t-shirts.  Picking your poster niche So, you are ready to start selling posters. Great! Now, the blessing and curse with selling posters is that there are infinite possibilities regarding what you can sell. So, it can easily be quite overwhelming at first.  The first thing I would recommend doing is having a look at what others are selling. Etsy is a wonderful place for this (and will likely be a key part of your poster selling journey). So, log on to Etsy and simply type in ‘poster’ in the search bar. Get ready to write a massive list of the broad categories and type of posters that people are selling.  If you do not have more than 50 categories written down by the end, you are doing something wrong. There are seriously an infinite amount of posters! For example, here are some popular ones to get you started: Star sign posters, Kitchen posters, World map posters, Custom Dog Portrait posters, Music posters, Movie posters, Fine art posters, Skiing posters, Girl Power posters and Football posters.  Now, you have a huge list of potential products to sell. What next? There are a few important things you need to bear in mind when picking your niche: \-Does this interest me?  Don’t make the mistake of going down a niche that didn’t actually interest you just because it would probably be a money maker. Before you know it, what can be a very fun process of making designs can become incredibly \\\monotonous, and feel like a chore\\\. You need to bear in mind that you will be spending a lot of time creating designs - if it is something you are interested in you are much less likely to get burnt out! As well, \\\creativity will flow\\\ far better if it is something you are interested in, which at the end of the day will lead to better designs that are more likely to be purchased by customers.  \-Is this within my design range? Don’t let this put you off too much. We will go through how to get started on design later on in this guide. However, it is important to note that the plain truth of it is that some niches and designs are a hell of a lot more complicated than others. For example, quote posters can essentially be designed by anyone when you learn about how to put nice fonts together in a good color scheme. On the other hand, some posters you see may have been designed with complex illustrations in a program like Illustrator. To start with, it may be better to pick a niche that seems a bit more simple to get into, as you can always expand your range with other stores further down the line. A good way of evaluating the design complexity is by identifying if this poster is \\\a lot of elements put together\\\ or is \\\a lot of elements created by the designer themselves\\\\\.\\ Design can in a lot of cases be like a jigsaw - putting colours, shapes and text together to create an image. This will be a lot easier to start with and can be learnt by anyone, compared to complex drawings and illustrations.  \-Is this niche subject to copyright issues? Time to delve deep into good old copyright. Now, when you go through Etsy, you will without a doubt see hundreds of sellers selling music album posters, car posters, movie posters and more. Obviously, these posters contain the property of musicians, companies and more and are therefore copyrighted. The annoying thing is - these are \\\a complete cash cow.\\\ If you go down the music poster route, I will honestly be surprised if you \\don’t\\ make thousands. However it is only a matter of time before the copyright strikes start rolling in and you eventually get banned from Etsy.  So I would highly recommend \\\not making this mistake\\\. Etsy is an incredible platform for selling posters, and it is a hell of a lot easier to make sales on there compared to advertising your own website. And, you \\\only get one chance on Etsy.\\\ Once you have been banned once, you are not allowed to sign up again (and they do ID checks - so you won’t be able to rejoin again under your own name).  So, don’t be shortsighted when it comes to entering Print on Demand. If you keep your designs legitimate, they will last you a lifetime and you will then later be able to crosspost them to other platforms, again without the worry of ever getting shut down.  So, how do I actually design posters? Now you have an idea of what kind of posters you want to be making, it’s time to get creative and make some designs! Photoshop (and the creative cloud in general) is probably the best for this. However, when starting out it can be a scary investment (it costs about £30 a month unless you can get a student rate!).  So, while Photoshop is preferable in the long term, when starting out you can learn the ropes of design and get going with Canva. This can be great at the start as they have a load of templates that you can use to get used to designing and experimenting (while it might be tempting to slightly modify these and sell them - this will be quite saturated on places like Etsy so we would recommend doing something new).  What size format should I use? The best design format to start with is arguably the A sizes - as all the A sizes (A5, A4, A3, A2, A1, A0) are scalable. This means that you can make all of your designs in one size, for example A3, and these designs will be ready to fit to all other A sizes. For example, if you design an A3 poster and someone orders A1, you can just upload this A3 file to PrintShrimp and it will be ready to print. There is a wide range of other sizes you should consider offering on your shop, especially as these sizes are very popular with the American market. They have a wide range of popular options, which unfortunately aren’t all scalable with each other. This does mean that you will therefore have to make some slight modifications to your design in order to be able to offer them in American sizing, in a few different aspect ratios. What you can do however is design all of your products in UK sizing, and simply redesign to fit American sizing once you have had an order. Essentially: design in UK sizing, but list in both UK and US sizing. Then when you get a non-A size order, you can quickly redesign it on demand. This means that you don’t have to make a few different versions of each poster when first designing, and can simply do a quick redesign for US sizing when you need to. Below is PrintShrimps standard size offering. We can also offer any custom sizing too, so please get in touch if you are looking for anything else. With these sizes, your poster orders will be dispatched domestically in whatever country your customer orders from. Our recommendations for starting design One thing that will not be featured in this guide is a written out explanation or guide on how to design. Honestly, I can’t think of a more boring, or frankly worse, way to learn design. When it comes to getting started, experimenting is your best friend! Just have a play around and see what you can do. It is a really fun thing to get started with, and the satisfaction of when a poster design comes together is like no other. A good way to start is honestly by straight up copying a poster you see for sale online. And we don’t mean copying to sell! But just trying to replicate other designs is a great way to get a feel for it and what you can do. We really think you will be surprised at how easy it is to pull together a lot of designs that at first can appear quite complicated! Your best friend throughout this whole process will be google. At the start you will not really know how to do anything - but learning how to look into things you want to know about design is all part of the process. At first, it can be quite hard to even know how to search for what you are trying to do, but this will come with time (we promise). Learning how to google is a skill that you will learn throughout this process.  Above all, what we think is most important is this golden rule: take inspiration but do not steal. You want to be selling similar products in your niche, but not copies. You need to see what is selling in your niche and get ideas from that, but if you make designs too similar to ones already available, you won’t have much luck. At the end of the day, if two very similar posters are for sale and one shop has 1000 reviews and your newer one has 2, which one is the customer going to buy? You need to make yours offer something different and stand out enough to attract customers. Etsy SEO and maximizing your sales You may have noticed in this guide we have mentioned Etsy quite a few times! That is because we think it is hands down the best place to start selling posters. Why? Etsy is a go to place for many looking to decorate their homes and also to buy gifts. It might be tempting to start selling with your own website straight away, however we recommend Etsy as it brings the customers to you. For example, say you start selling Bathroom Posters. It is going to be a hell of a lot easier to convert sales when you already have customers being shown your page after searching ‘bathroom decor’, compared to advertising your own website. This is especially true as it can be hard to identify your ideal target audience to then advertise to via Meta (Facebook/Instagram) for example. Websites are a great avenue to explore eventually like I now have, but we recommend starting with Etsy and going from there. What costs do I need to be aware of? So, setting up an Etsy sellers account is currently costs £15. The only other upfront cost you will have is the cost of listing a product - this is 20 cents per listing. From then on, every time you make a sale you will be charged a transaction fee of 6.5%, a small payment processing fee, plus another 20 cents for a renewed listing fee. It normally works out to about 10% of each order, a small price to pay for all the benefits Etsy brings. No matter what platform you sell on, you will be faced with some form of transaction fee. Etsy is actually quite reasonable especially as they do not charge you to use their platform on a monthly basis.  What do I need to get selling? Getting your shop looking pretty \-Think of a shop name and design (now you are a professional designer) a logo \-Design a banner for the top of your shop \-Add in some about me info/shop announcement \-I recommend running a sale wherein orders of 3+ items get a 20% of discount. Another big benefit of PrintShrimp is that you receive large discounts when ordering multiple posters. This is great for attracting buyers and larger orders.  Making your products look attractive That is the bulk of the ‘decor’ you will need to do. Next up is placing your posters in mock ups! As you may notice on Etsy, most shops show their posters framed and hanging on walls. These are 99% of the time not real photos, but digital mock ups. This is where Photoshop comes in really handy, as you can automate this process through a plug in called Bulk Mock Up. If you don’t have photoshop, you can do this on Canva, you will just have to do it manually which can be rather time consuming.  Now, where can you get the actual Mock Ups? One platform we highly recommend for design in general is platforms like Envato Elements. These are design marketplaces where you have access to millions of design resources that you are fully licensed to use!  Titles, tags, and descriptions  Now for the slightly more nitty gritty part. You could have the world's most amazing looking poster, however, if you do not get the Etsy SEO right, no one is going to see it! We will take you through creating a new Etsy listing field by field so you can know how to best list your products.  The key to Etsy listing optimisation is to maximise. Literally cram in as many key words as you possibly can! Before you start this process, create a word map of anything you can think of relating to your listing. And come at this from the point of view of, if I was looking for a poster like mine, what would I search? Titles \-Here you are blessed with 140 characters to title your listing. Essentially, start off with a concise way of properly describing your poster. And then afterwards, add in as many key words as you can! Here is an example of the title of a well selling Skiing poster: Les Arcs Skiing Poster, Les Arcs Print, Les Alpes, France Ski Poster, Skiing Poster, Snowboarding Poster, Ski Resort Poster Holiday, French This is 139 characters out of 140 - you should try and maximise this as much as possible! As you can see, this crams in a lot of key words and search terms both related to Skiing as a whole, the poster category, and then the specifics of the poster itself (Les Arcs resort in France). Bear in mind that if you are listing a lot of listings that are of the same theme, you won’t have to spend time creating an entirely new title. For example if your next poster was of a ski resort in Italy, you can copy this one over and just swap out the specifics. For example change “France ski poster” to “Italy ski poster”, change “Les Arcs” to “The Dolomites”, etc.  Description \-Same logic applies for descriptions - try and cram in as many key words as you can! Here is an example for a Formula One poster: George Russell, Mercedes Formula One Poster  - item specific keywords Bright, modern and vibrant poster to liven up your home.  - Describes the style of the poster All posters are printed on high quality, museum grade 200gsm poster paper. Suitable for framing and frames. - Shows the quality of the print. Mentions frames whilst showing it comes unframed Experience the thrill of the racetrack with this stunning Formula One poster. Printed on high-quality paper, this racing car wall art print features a dynamic image of a Formula One car in action, perfect for adding a touch of speed and excitement to any motorsports room or man cave. Whether you're a die-hard fan or simply appreciate the adrenaline of high-speed racing, this poster is sure to impress. Available in a range of sizes, it makes a great addition to your home or office, or as a gift for a fellow Formula One enthusiast. Each poster is carefully packaged to ensure safe delivery, so you can enjoy your new piece of art as soon as possible. - A nice bit of text really highlighting a lot of key words such as gift, motorsports, racetrack etc.  You could go further with this too, by adding in extra things related to the poster such as ‘Perfect gift for a Mercedes F1 fan’ etc.  Tags Now, these are actually probably the most important part of your listing! You get 13 tags (20 character limit for each) and there are essentially search terms that will match your listing with what customers search for when shopping.  You really need to maximize these - whilst Title and Description play a part, these are the main things that will bring buyers to your listing. Once again, it is important to think about what customers are likely to be searching when looking for a poster similar to yours. Life hack alert! You can actually see what tags other sellers are using. All you need to do is go to a listing similar to yours that is selling well, scroll down and you can actually see them listed out at the bottom of the page! Here is an example of what this may look like: So, go through a few listings of competitors and make notes on common denominators that you can integrate into your listing. As you can see here, this seller uses tags such as ‘Birthday Gift’ and ‘Poster Print’. When you first start out, you may be better off swapping these out for more listing specific tags. This seller has been on Etsy for a few years however and has 15,000+ sales, so are more likely to see success from these tags.  If it’s not clear why, think about it this way. If you searched ‘poster print’ on Etsy today, there will be 10s of thousands of results. However, if you searched ‘Russell Mercedes Poster’, you will (as of writing) get 336 results. Etsy is far more likely to push your product to the top of the latter tag, against 300 other listings, rather than the top of ‘Poster Print’ where it is incredibly competitive. It is only when you are a more successful shop pulling in a high quantity of orders that these larger and more generic tags will work for you, as Etsy has more trust in your shop and will be more likely to push you to the front.  SKUs \-One important thing you need to do is add SKUs to all of your products! This is worth doing at the start as it will make your life so much easier when it comes to making sales and using PrintShrimp further down the line. What is an SKU? It is a ‘stock keeping unit’, and is essentially just a product identifier. Your SKUs need to match your file name that you upload to PrintShrimp. For example, if you made a poster about the eiffel tower, you can literally name the SKU eiffel-tower. There is no need to complicate things! As long as your file name (as in the image name of your poster on your computer) matches your SKU, you will be good to go.  \-It may be more beneficial to set up a system with unique identifiers, to make organising your files a lot easier further down the line. Say you get to 1000 posters eventually, you’ll want to be able to quickly search a code, and also ensure every SKU is always unique, so you won’t run into accidentally using the same SKU twice further down the line. For example, you can set it up so at the start of each file name, you have \[unique id\]\[info\], so your files will look like -  A1eiffeltower A2france And further down the line: A99aperolspritz B1potatoart This not only removes the potential issue of duplicating SKUs accidentally (for example if you made a few posters of the same subject), but also keeps your files well organised. If you need to find a file, you can search your files according to the code, so just by searching ‘a1’ for example, rather than having to trawl through a load of different files until you find the correct one. \-If your poster has variations, for example color variations, you can set a different SKU for each variation. Just click the little box when setting up variations that says ‘SKUs vary for each (variation)’. So if you have a poster available either in a white or black background, you can name each file, and therefore each SKU, a1eiffel-tower-black and a1eiffel-tower-white for example. \-The same goes for different sizes. As different American sizes have different aspect ratios, as mentioned above you may have to reformat some posters if you get a sale for one of these sizes. You can then add in the SKU to your listing once you have reformatted your poster. So for example if you sell a 16x20” version of the eiffel tower poster, you can name this file eiffel-tower-white-1620. Whilst this involves a little bit of set up, the time it saves you overall is massive!  Variations and Prices \-So, when selling posters there is a huge variety of sizes that you can offer, as mentioned previously. Non-negotiable is that you should be offering A5-A1. These will likely be your main sellers! Especially in the UK. It is also a good idea to offer inch sizing to appeal to a global audience (as bear in mind with PrintShrimp you will be able to print in multiple countries around the world!).  Below is a recommended pricing structure of what to charge on Etsy. Feel free to mess around with these! You may notice on Etsy that many shops charge a whole lot more for sizes such as A1, 24x36” etc. In my experience I prefer charging a lower rate to attract more sales, but there is validity in going for a lower amount of sales with higher profits. As mentioned above, you can also offer different variations on items - for example different colour schemes on posters. This is always a decent idea (if it suits the design) as it provides the customer with more options, which might help to convert the sale. You can always add this in later however if you want to keep it simple while you start! Setting up shipping profiles Etsy makes it very easy to set up different shipping rates for different countries. However, luckily with PrintShrimp you can offer free shipping to the majority of the major countries that are active on Etsy!  Using PrintShrimp means that your production costs are low enough in each domestic market to justify this. If you look on Etsy you can see there are many shops that post internationally to countries such as the US or Australia. Therefore, they often charge £8-10 in postage, and have a delivery time of 1-2 weeks. This really limits their customer base to their domestic market.  Using PrintShrimp avoids this and means you can offer free shipping (as we absorb the shipping cost in our prices) to the major markets of the UK, Australia, and USA (Europe coming soon!).  We also offer a 1 day processing time, unlike many POD poster suppliers. This means you can set your Etsy processing time to just one day, which combined with our quick shipping, means you will be one of the quickest on Etsy at sending out orders. This is obviously very attractive for customers, who are often very impatient with wanting their orders!  Getting the sales and extra tips \-Don’t list an insane amount of listings when you first get started. Etsy will be like ‘hang on a second’ if a brand new shop suddenly has 200 items in the first week. Warm up your account, and take things slow as you get going. We recommend 5 a day for the first week or so, and then you can start uploading more. You don’t want Etsy to flag your account for suspicious bot-like activity when you first get going.  \-It is very easy to copy listings when creating a new one. Simply select an old listing and press copy, and then you can just change the listing specific details to create a new one, rather than having to start from scratch. It can feel like a bit of a ball-ache setting up your first ever listing, but from then on you can just copy it over and just change the specifics.  \-Try and organize your listings into sections! This really helps the customer journey. Sometimes a customer will click onto your shop after seeing one of your listings, so it really helps if they can easily navigate your shop for what they are looking for. So, you now have a fully fledged Etsy shop. Well done! Time to start making £3,000 a month straight away right? Not quite. Please bear in mind, patience is key when starting out. If you started doing this because you are £10,000 in debt to the Albanian mafia and need to pay it off next week, you have come into this in the wrong frame of mind. If you have however started this to slowly build up a side hustle which hopefully one day become your full time gig, then winner winner chicken dinner.  Starting out on Etsy isn’t always easy. It takes time for your shop to build up trust! As I’ve said before, a buyer is far more likely to purchase from a shop with 1000s of reviews, than a brand new one with 0. But before you know it, you can become one of these shops! One thing you can do at the very start is to encourage your friends and family to buy your posters! This is a slightly naughty way of getting a few sales at the start, of course followed by a few glowing 5\* reviews. It really helps to give your shop this little boost at the start, so if this is something you can do then I recommend it.  Okay, so once you have a fully fledged shop with a decent amount of listings, you might be expecting the sales to start rolling in. And, if you are lucky, they indeed might. However, in my experience, you need to give your listings a little boost. So let us introduce you to: The wonderful world of Etsy ads Ads!! Oh no, that means money!! We imagine some of you more risk averse people are saying to yourself right now. And yes, it indeed does. But more often than not unfortunately you do have to spend money to make money.  Fortunately, in my experience anyway, Etsy ads do tend to work. This does however only apply if your products are actually good however, so if you’re back here after paying for ads for 2 months and are losing money at the same rate as your motivation, maybe go back to the start of this guide and pick another niche.  When you first start out, there are two main strategies.  Number 1: The Safer Option So, with PrintShrimp, you will essentially be making a minimum of £6 profit per order. With this in mind, I normally start a new shop with a safer strategy of advertising my products with a budget of $3-5 dollars a day. This then means that at the start, you only need to make 1 sale to break even, and anything above that is pure profit! This might not seem like the most dazzling proposition right now, but again please bear in mind that growth will be slow at the start. This means that you can gradually grow your shop, and therefore the trust that customers have in your shop, over time with a very small risk of ever actually losing money. Number 2: The Billy Big Balls Option If you were yawning while reading the first option, then this strategy may be for you. This will be better suited to those of you that are a bit more risk prone, and it also helps if you have a bit more cash to invest at the start. Through this strategy, you can essentially pay your way to the top of Etsy's rankings. For this, you’ll probably be looking at spending $20 a day on ads. So, this can really add up quickly and is definitely the riskier option. In my experience, the level of sales with this may not always match up to your spend every day. You may find that some days you rake in about 10 sales, and other days only one. But what this does mean is that as your listings get seen and purchased more, they will begin to rank higher in Etsy’s organic search rankings, at a much quicker rate than option one. This is the beauty of Etsy’s ads. You can pay to boost your products, but then results from this paid promotion feed into the organic ranking of your products. So you may find that you can splash the cash for a while at the start in order to race to the top, and then drop your ad spending later on when your products are already ranking well.  Sending your poster orders So, you’ve now done the hard bit. You have a running Etsy store, and essentially all you need to now on a daily basis is send out your orders and reply to customer messages! This is where it really becomes passive income.  \-Check out the PrintShrimp order portal. Simply sign up, and you can place individual orders through there. \-Bulk upload: We have an option to bulk upload your Esty orders via csv.  Seriously, when you are up and running with your first store, it is really as easy as that.  Once you have your first Etsy store up and running, you can think about expanding. There are many ways to expand your income. You can set up other Etsy stores, as long as the type of posters you are selling varies. You can look into setting up your own Shopify stores, and advertise them through Facebook, Instagram etc. Through this guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about starting to sell posters and generate some income. We will also show you why PrintShrimp is the best POD supplier for all of your poster needs. Trust me, you won’t need much convincing.

Why Ignoring AI Agents in 2025 Will Kill Your Marketing Strategy

If you're still focusing solely on grabbing the attention of human beings with your marketing efforts, you're already behind. In 2025, the game will change. Good marketing will demand an in-depth understanding of the AI space, especially the AI Agent space. Why? Your ads and content won’t just be seen by humans anymore. They’ll be analyzed, indexed, and often acted upon by AI agents—automated systems that will be working on behalf of companies and consumers alike. Your New Audience: Humans + AI Agents It’s not just about appealing to people. Companies are employing AI robots to research, negotiate, and make purchasing decisions. These AI agents are fast, thorough, and unrelenting. Unlike humans, they can analyze millions of options in seconds. And if your marketing isn’t optimized for them, you’ll get filtered out before you even reach the human decision-maker. How to Prepare Your Marketing for AI Agents The companies that dominate marketing in 2025 will be the ones that master the art of capturing AI attention. To do this, marketers will need to: Understand the AI agents shaping their industry. Research how AI agents function in your niche. What are they prioritizing? How do they rank options? Create AI-friendly content. Design ads and messaging that are easily understandable and accessible to AI agents. This means clear metadata, structured data, and AI-readable formats. Invest in AI analytics. AI agents leave behind footprints. Tracking and analyzing their behavior is critical. Stay ahead of AI trends. The AI agent space is evolving rapidly. What works today might be obsolete tomorrow. How My Agency Adapted and Thrived in the AI Space At my digital agency, we saw this shift coming and decided to act early. In 2023, we started integrating AI optimization into our marketing strategies. One of our clients—a B2B SaaS company—struggled to get traction because their competitors were drowning them out in Google search rankings and ad platforms. By analyzing the algorithms and behaviors of AI agents in their space, we: Rewrote their website copy with structured data and optimized metadata that was more AI-agent friendly. Created ad campaigns with clear, concise messaging and technical attributes that AI agents could quickly process and index. Implemented predictive analytics to understand what AI agents would prioritize based on past behaviors. The results? Their website traffic doubled in three months, and their lead conversion rate skyrocketed by 40%. Over half of the traffic increase was traced back to AI agents recommending their platform to human users. The Takeaway In 2025, marketing won’t just be about human attention. It’ll be about AI attention—and that requires a completely different mindset. AI agents are not your enemy; they’re your new gatekeepers. Learn to speak their language, and you’ll dominate the marketing game.

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]

Hello Everyone (VERY LONG CASE STUDY AHEAD) - 355% return in 9 months Note: I own a 7-figures USD valued portfolio of 41+ content sites that generates 5-6 figures USD a month in passive income. This is my first time posting in this sub and my goal is to NOT share generic advice but precise numbers, data and highly refined processes so you can also get started with this business yourself or if you already have an existing business, drive huge traffic to it and scale it substantially (get more customers). I will use a case study to explain the whole process. As most of us are entrepreneurs here, explaining an actual project would be more meaningful. In this case study I used AI assisted content to grow an existing site from $217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months (NO BACKLINKS) and sold it for $59,000. ROI of 3 months: 355% Previous case studies (before I give an overview of the model) Amazon Affiliate Content Site: $371/m to $19,263/m in 14 MONTHS - $900K CASE STUDY \[AMA\] Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) \[AMA\] Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+) Note: You can check pinned posts on my profile. Do go through the comments as well as a lot of questions are answered in those. However, if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out. This is an \[AMA\]. Quick Overview of the Model Approach: High traffic, niche specific, informative content websites that monetise its traffic through highly automated methods like display ads and affiliate. The same model can be applied to existing businesses to drive traffic and get customers. Main idea: Make passive income in a highly automated way Easy to understand analogy You have real estate (here you have digital asset like a website) You get rental income (here you get ads and affiliate income with no physical hassle, in case you have a business like service, product etc. then you can get customers for that too but if not, it's alright) Real estate has value (this digital asset also has value that can be appreciated with less effort) Real estate can be sold (this can be sold too but faster) IMPORTANT NOTE: Search traffic is the BEST way to reach HUGE target audience and it's important when it comes to scaling. This essentially means that you can either monetise that via affiliate, display etc. or if you have a business then you can reach a bigger audience to scale. Overview of this website's valuation (then and now: Oct. 2022 and June 2023) Oct 2022: $217/m Valuation: $5,750.5 (26.5x) - set it the same as the multiple it was sold for June 2023: $2,836/m Traffic and revenue trend: growing fast Last 3 months avg: $2,223 Valuation now: $59,000 (26.5x) Description: The domain was registered in 2016, it grew and then the project was left unattended. I decided to grow it again using properly planned AI assisted content. Backlink profile: 500+ Referring domains (Ahrefs). Backlinks mean the sites linking back to you. This is important when it comes to ranking. Summary of Results of This Website - Before and After Note: If the terms seem technical, do not worry. I will explain them in detail later. Still if you have any questions. Feel free to comment or reach out. |Metric|Oct 2022|June 2023|Difference|Comments| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Articles|314|804|\+490|AI Assisted content published in 3 months| |Traffic|9,394|31,972|\+22,578|Organic| |Revenue|$217|$2,836|\+$2,619|Multiple sources| |RPM (revenue/1000 web traffic)|23.09|$88.7|\+$65.61|Result of Conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You make changes to the site for better conversions| |EEAT (expertise, experience, authority and trust of website)|2 main authors|8 authors|6|Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations| |CRO|Nothing|Tables, video ads |Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations || &#x200B; Month by Month Growth |Month|Revenue|Steps| |:-|:-|:-| |Sept 2022|NA|Content Plan| |Oct 2022|$217|Content Production| |Nov 2022|$243|Content production + EEAT authors| |Dec 2022|$320|Content production + EEAT authors| |Jan 2023|$400|Monitoring| |Feb 2023|$223|Content production + EEAT authors| |Mar 2023|$2,128|CRO & Fixations| |April 2023|$1,609|CRO & Fixations| |May 2023|$2,223|Content production + EEAT authors| |June 2023|$2,836|CRO and Fixations| |Total|$10,199|| &#x200B; What will I share Content plan and Website structure Content Writing Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Faster indexing Conversion rate optimisation Guest Posting EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) Costing ROI The plans moving forward with these sites &#x200B; Website Structure and Content Plan This is probably the most important important part of the whole process. The team spends around a month just to get this right. It's like defining the direction of the project. Description: Complete blueprint of the site's structure in terms of organisation of categories, subcategories and sorting of articles in each one of them. It also includes the essential pages. The sorted articles target main keyword, relevant entities and similar keywords. This has to be highly data driven and we look at over 100 variables just to get it right. It's like beating Google's algorithm to ensure you have a blueprint for a site that will rank. It needs to be done right. If there is a mistake, then even if you do everything right - it's not going to work out and after 8-16 months you will realise that everything went to waste. Process For this project, we had a niche selected already so we didn't need to do a lot of research pertaining to that. We also knew the topic since the website was already getting good traffic on that. We just validated from Ahrefs, SEMRUSH and manual analysis if it would be worth it to move forward with that topic. &#x200B; Find entities related to the topic: We used Ahrefs and InLinks to get an idea about the related entities (topics) to create a proper topical relevance. In order to be certain and have a better idea, we used ChatGPT to find relevant entities as well \> Ahrefs (tool): Enter main keyword in keywords explorer. Check the left pain for popular topics \> Inlinks (tool): Enter the main keyword, check the entity maps \> ChatGPT (tool): Ask it to list down the most important and relevant entities in order of their priority Based on this info, you can map out the most relevant topics that are semantically associated to your main topic Sorting the entities in topics (categories) and subtopics (subcategories): Based on the information above, cluster them properly. The most relevant ones must be grouped together. Each group must be sorted into its relevant category. \> Example: Site about cycling. \> Categories/entities: bicycles, gear and equipment, techniques, safety, routes etc. \> The subcategories/subentities for let's say "techniques" would be: Bike handling, pedaling, drafting etc. Extract keywords for each subcategory/subentity: You can do this using Ahrefs or Semrush. Each keyword would be an article. Ensure that you target the similar keywords in one article. For example: how to ride a bicycle and how can I ride a bicycle will be targeted by one article. Make the more important keyword in terms of volume and difficulty as the main keyword and the other one(s) as secondary Define main focus vs secondary focus: Out of all these categories/entities - there will be one that you would want to dominate in every way. So, focus on just that in the start. This will be your main focus. Try to answer ALL the questions pertaining to that. You can extract the questions using Ahrefs. \> Ahrefs > keywords explorer \> enter keyword \> Questions \> Download the list and cluster the similar ones. This will populate your main focus category/entity and will drive most of the traffic. Now, you need to write in other categories/subentities as well. This is not just important, but crucial to complete the topical map loop. In simple words, if you do this Google sees you as a comprehensive source on the topic - otherwise, it ignores you and you don't get ranked Define the URLs End result: List of all the entities and sub-entities about the main site topic in the form of categories and subcategories respectively. A complete list of ALL the questions about the main focus and at around 10 questions for each one of the subcategories/subentities that are the secondary focus Content Writing So, now that there's a plan. Content needs to be produced. Pick out a keyword (which is going to be a question) and... Answer the question Write about 5 relevant entities Answer 10 relevant questions Write a conclusion Keep the format the same for all the articles. Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Ensure the following is taken care of: H1 Permalink H2s H3s Lists Tables Meta description Socials description Featured image 2 images in text \\Schema Relevant YouTube video (if there is) Note: There are other pointers link internal linking in a semantically relevant way but this should be good to start with. Faster Indexing Indexing means Google has read your page. Ranking only after this step has been done. Otherwise, you can't rank if Google hasn't read the page. Naturally, this is a slow process. But, we expedite it in multiple ways. You can use RankMath to quickly index the content. Since, there are a lot of bulk pages you need a reliable method. Now, this method isn't perfect. But, it's better than most. Use Google Indexing API and developers tools to get indexed. Rank Math plugin is used. I don't want to bore you and write the process here. But, a simple Google search can help you set everything up. Additionally, whenever you post something - there will be an option to INDEX NOW. Just press that and it would be indexed quite fast. Conversion rate optimisation Once you get traffic, try adding tables right after the introduction of an article. These tables would feature a relevant product on Amazon. This step alone increased our earnings significantly. Even though the content is informational and NOT review. This still worked like a charm. Try checking out the top pages every single day in Google analytics and add the table to each one of them. Moreover, we used EZOIC video ads as well. That increased the RPM significantly as well. Both of these steps are highly recommended. Overall, we implemented over 11 fixations but these two contribute the most towards increasing the RPM so I would suggest you stick to these two in the start. Guest Posting We made additional income by selling links on the site as well. However, we were VERY careful about who we offered a backlink to. We didn't entertain any objectionable links. Moreover, we didn't actively reach out to anyone. We had a professional email clearly stated on the website and a particularly designated page for "editorial guidelines" A lot of people reached out to us because of that. As a matter of fact, the guy who bought the website is in the link selling business and plans to use the site primarily for selling links. According to him, he can easily make $4000+ from that alone. Just by replying to the prospects who reached out to us. We didn't allow a lot of people to be published on the site due to strict quality control. However, the new owner is willing to be lenient and cash it out. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) This is an important ranking factor. You need to prove on the site that your site has authors that are experienced, have expertise, authority and trust. A lot of people were reaching out to publish on our site and among them were a few established authors as well. We let them publish on our site for free, added them on our official team, connected their socials and shared them on all our socials. In return, we wanted them to write 3 articles each for us and share everything on all the social profiles. You can refer to the tables I shared above to check out the months it was implemented. We added a total of 6 writers (credible authors). Their articles were featured on the homepage and so were their profiles. Costing Well, we already had the site and the backlinks on it. Referring domains (backlinks) were already 500+. We just needed to focus on smart content and content. Here is the summary of the costs involved. Articles: 490 Avg word count per article: 1500 Total words: 735,000 (approximately) Cost per word: 2 cents (includes research, entities, production, quality assurance, uploading, formatting, adding images, featured image, alt texts, onsite SEO, publishing/scheduling etc.) Total: $14,700 ROI (Return on investment) Earning: Oct 22 - June 23 Earnings: $10,199 Sold for: $59,000 Total: $69,199 Expenses: Content: $14,700 Misc (hosting and others): $500 Total: $15,200 ROI over a 9 months period: 355.25% The plans moving forward This website was a part of a research and development experiment we did. With AI, we wanted to test new waters and transition more towards automation. Ideally, we want to use ChatGPT or some other API to produce these articles and bulk publish on the site. The costs with this approach are going to be much lower and the ROI is much more impressive. It's not the the 7-figures projects I created earlier (as you may have checked the older case studies on my profile), but it's highly scalable. We plan to refine this model even further, test more and automate everything completely to bring down our costs significantly. Once we have a model, we are going to scale it to 100s of sites. The process of my existing 7-figures websites portfolio was quite similar. I tested out a few sites, refined the model and scaled it to over 41 sites. Now, the fundamentals are the same however, we are using AI in a smarter way to do the same but at a lower cost, with a smaller team and much better returns. The best thing in my opinion is to run numerous experiments now. Our experimentation was slowed down a lot in the past since we couldn't write using AI but now it's much faster. The costs are 3-6 times lower so when it used to take $50-100k to start, grow and sell a site. Now you can pump 3-6 more sites for the same budget. This is a good news for existing business owners as well who want to grow their brand. Anyway, I am excited to see the results of more sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions - feel free to let me know. Best of luck for everything. Feel free to ask questions. I'd be happy to help. This is an AMA.

AI Content Campaign Got 4M impressions, Thousands of Website Views, Hundreds of Customers for About $100 — This is the future of marketing

Alright. So, a few months ago I tested a marketing strategy for a client that I’ve sense dedicated my life to developing on. The Idea was to take the clients Pillar content (their YouTube videos) and use AI to rewrite the content for all the viable earned media channels (mainly Reddit). The campaign itself was moderately successful. To be specific, after one month it became their 2nd cheapest customer acquisition cost (behind their organic YouTube content). But there is a lot to be done to improve the concept. I will say, having been in growth marketing for a decade, I felt like I had hit something big with the concept. I’m going to detail how I built that AI system, and what worked well and what didn’t here. Hopefully you guys will let me know what you think and whether or not there is something here to keep working on. DEFINING THE GOAL Like any good startup, their marketing budget was minimal. They wanted to see results, fast and cheap. Usually, marketers like me hate to be in this situation because getting results usually either takes time or it takes money. But you can get results fast and cheap if you focus on an earned media strategy - basically getting featured in other people’s publication. The thing is these strategies are pretty hard to scale or grow over time. That was a problem for future me though. I looked through their analytics and saw they were getting referral traffic from Reddit - it was their 5th or 6th largest source of traffic - and they weren’t doing any marketing on the platform. It was all digital word of mouth there. It kind of clicked for me there, that Reddit might be the place to start laying the ground work. So with these considerations in mind the goal became pretty clear: Create content for relevant niche communities on Reddit with the intent of essentially increasing brand awareness. Use an AI system to repurpose their YouTube videos to keep the cost of producing unique content for each subreddit really low. THE HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGY I knew that there are huge amounts of potential customers on Reddit (About 12M people in all the relevant communities combined) AND that most marketers have a really tough time with the platform. I also knew that any earned media strategy, Reddit or not, means Click Through Rates on our content would be extremely low. A lot of people see this as a Reddit specific problem because you can’t self-promote on the platform, but really you have to keep self-promotion to a minimum with any and all earned media. This basically meant we had to get a lot of impressions to make up for it. The thing about Reddit is if your post absolutely crushes it, it can get millions of views. But crushing it is very specific to what the expectations are of that particular subreddit. So we needed to make content that was specifically written for that Subreddit. With that I was able to essentially design how this campaign would work: We would put together a list of channels (specifically subreddits to start) that we wanted to create content for. For each channel, we would write a content guideline that details out how to write great content for this subreddit. These assets would be stored in an AirTable base, along with the transcripts of the YouTube videos that were the base of our content. We would write and optimize different AI Prompts that generated different kinds of posts (discussion starters about a stock, 4-5 paragraph stock analysis, Stock update and what it means, etc…) We would build an automation that took the YouTube transcripts, ran each prompt on it, and then edited each result to match the channel writing guidelines. And then we would find a very contextual way to leave a breadcrumb back to the client. Always as part of the story of the content. At least, this is how I originally thought things would go. CHOOSING THE RIGHT SUBREDDITS Picking the right communities was vital. Here’s the basic rubric we used to pick and prioritize them: • Relevance: We needed communities interested in stock analysis, personal finance, or investing. • Subreddit Size vs. Engagement: Large subreddits offer more potential impressions but can be less focused. Smaller subreddits often have higher engagement rates. • Content Feasibility: We had to ensure we could consistently create high-value posts for each chosen subreddit. We started with about 40 possibilities, then narrowed it down to four or five that consistently delivered upvotes and user signups. CREATING CHANNEL-SPECIFIC GUIDES By the end, creating channel specific writing guidelines looked like a genius decision. Here’s how we approached it and used AI to get it done quickly: Grabbed Top Posts: We filtered the subreddit’s top posts (change filter to “Top” and then “All Time”) of all time to see the kinds of content that performed best Compiled The Relevant Posts: We took the most relevant posts to what we were trying to do and put them all on one document (basically created one document per subreddit that just had the top 10 posts in that subreddit). Had AI Create Writing Guideline Based On Posts: For each channel, we fed the document with the 10 posts with the instructions “Create a writing guideline for this subreddit based on these high performing posts. I had to do some editing on each guideline but this worked pretty well and saved a lot of time. Each subreddit got a custom guideline, and we put these inside the “Channels” table of the AirTable base we were developing with these assets. BUILDING THE AI PROMPTS THAT GENERATED CONTENT Alright this is probably the most important section so I’ll be detailed. Essentially, we took all the assets we developed up until this point, and used them to create unique posts for each channel. This mean each AI prompt was about 2,000 words of context and produced about a 500-word draft. There was a table in our AirTable where we stored the prompts, as I alluded to earlier. And these were basically the instructions for each prompt. More specifically, they detailed out our expectations for the post. In other words, there were different kinds of posts that performed well on each channel. For example, you can write a post that’s a list of resources (5 tools we used to…), or a how to guide (How we built…), etc.. Those weren’t the specific ones we used, but just wanted to really explain what I meant there. That actual automation that generated the content worked as follows: New source content (YouTube video transcript) was added to the Source Content table. This triggered the Automation. The automation grabbed all the prompts in the prompt table. For each prompt in the prompt table, we sent a prompt to OpenAI (gpt-4o) that contained first the prompt and also the source content. Then, for each channel that content prompt could be used on, we sent another prompt to OpenAI that revised the result of the first prompt based on the specific channel guidelines. The output of that prompt was added to the Content table in AirTable. To be clear, our AirTable had 4 tables: Content Channels Prompts Source Content The Source Content, Prompts, and Channel Guidelines were all used in the prompt that generated content. And the output was put in the Content table. Each time the automation ran, the Source Content was turned into about 20 unique posts, each one a specific post type generated for a specific channel. In other words, we were create a ton of content. EDITING & REFINING CONTENT The AI drafts were never perfect. Getting them Reddit-ready took editing and revising The main things I had to go in and edit for were: • Tone Adjustments: We removed excessively cliche language. The AI would say silly things like “Hello fellow redditors!” which sound stupid. • Fact-Checking: Financial data can be tricky. We discovered AI often confused figures, so we fact check all stock related metrics. Probably something like 30-40% error rate here. Because the draft generation was automated, that made the editing and getting publish ready the human bottleneck. In other words, after creating the system I spent basically all my time reviewing the content. There were small things I could do to make this more efficient, but not too much. The bigger the model we used, the less editing the content needed. THE “BREADCRUMB” PROMOTION STRATEGY No where in my prompt to the AI did I mention that we were doing any marketing. I just wanted the AI to focus on creating content that would do well on the channel. So in the editing process I had to find a way to promote the client. I called it a breadcrumb strategy once and that stuck. Basically, the idea was to never overtly promote anything. Instead find a way to leave a breadcrumb that leads back to the client, and let the really interested people follow the trail. Note: this is supposed to be how we do all content marketing. Some examples of how we did this were: Shared Visuals with a Subtle Watermark: Because our client’s product offered stock data, we’d often include a chart or graph showing a company’s financial metric with the client’s branding in the corner. Added Supporting Data from Client’s Website: If we mentioned something like a company’s cash flow statement, we could link to that company’s cash flow statement on the client’s website. It worked only because there was a lot of data on the client’s website that wasn’t gated. These tactics were really specific to the client. Which is should be. For other companies I would rethink what tactics I use here. THE RESULTS I’m pretty happy with the results • Impressions: – Early on posts averaged \~30,000 apiece, but after about a month of optimization, we hit \~70,000 impressions average. Over about two months, we reached 4 million total impressions. • Signups: – In their signups process there was one of those “Where did you find us?” questions and the amount of people who put Reddit jumped into the few hundred a month. Precise tracking of this is impossible. • Cost Efficiency (This is based on what I charged, and not the actual cost of running the campaign which is about $100/mo): – CPM (cost per thousand impressions) was about $0.08, which is far better than most paid channels. – Cost per free user: \~$8-10. After about a 10% conversion rate to a paid plan, our cost per paying user was $80–$100—well below the client’s previous $300–$400. HIGHLIGHTS: WHAT WORKED Subreddit-Specific Content: – Tailoring each post’s format and length to the audience norms boosted engagement. Worked out really well. 1 post got over 1M views alone. We regularly had posts that had hundreds of thousands. Breadcrumbs: – We never had anyone call us out for promoting. And really we weren’t. Our first priority was writing content that would crush on that subreddit. Using the Founder’s Existing Material: – The YouTube transcripts grounded the AI’s content in content we already made. This was really why we were able to produce so much content. CHALLENGES: WHAT DIDN’T WORK AI is still off: – Maybe it’s expecting too much, but still I wish the AI had done a better job. I editing a lot of content. Human oversight was critical. Scheduling all the content was a pain: – Recently I automated this pretty well. But at first I was scheduling everything manually and scheduling a hundred or so posts was a hassle. Getting Data and Analytics: – Not only did we have not very good traffic data, but the data from reddit had to be collected manually. Will probably automate this in the future. COST & TIME INVESTMENT Setup: The setup originally took me a couple weeks. I’ve since figured out how to do much faster (about 1 week). AirTable Setup here was easy and the tools costs $24/mo so not bad. ChatGPT costs were pretty cheap. Less than $75 per month. I’ve sense switched to using o1 which is much more expensive but saves me a lot of editing time Human Editing: Because this is the human part of the process and everything else was automated it mean by default all my time was spent editing content. Still this was a lot better than creating content from scratch probably by a factor of 5 or 10. The main expense was paying an editor (or using your own time) to refine posts. Worth it? Yes even with the editing time I was able to generate way more content that I would have otherwise. LESSONS & ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Reddit as a Growth Channel: – If you genuinely respect each subreddit’s culture, you can achieve massive reach on a tight budget. AI + Human Collaboration: – AI excels at first drafts, but human expertise is non-negotiable for polishing and ensuring factual integrity. Soft Promotion Wins: – The “breadcrumb” approach paid off. It might feel like too light a touch, but is crucial for Reddit communities. Create once, repurpose as many times as possible: – If you have blog posts, videos, podcasts, or transcripts, feed them into AI to keep your message accurate and brand-consistent. CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS If you try a similar approach: • Begin with smaller tests in a few niches to learn what resonates. • Create a clear “channel guide” for each community. • Carefully fact-check AI-generated posts. • Keep brand mentions low-key until you’ve established credibility.

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

I spent 18 hours every week tracking marketing trends and latest news. Here are my predictions for 2024

1/ Securing Digital Footprint becomes #1 Priority For Chronically Online Users, Protecting their digital footprint will become one of the main things. We saw influencers getting cancelled over Old Content and Brands used Old Travis Kelce Tweets, we saw what could happen without digital footprint protection. Online Engagement Precautions will be taken again with Twitter & IG showing your usernames above ‘Algorithm Suggested Content’. What you like is more visible to other people in UI Design of these apps, another reason behind why Digital Footprint preservation will matter a lot in 2024. This will impact likes to viewership ratio on your organic and paid content. &#x200B; 2/  TikTok wants Long Videos with Storytelling As I was writing this report, TikTok also released their What’s Next 2024 Report. It focuses heavily on how the audiences on the app demand better storytelling and from the examples in the report, you can judge what TikTok wants. They also rolled out a 30-minute video upload limit. Engaging Content over 1-Minute Mark to keep the audiences longer on the app. I highlighted in the first trend, every social media platform wants the same thing, more time spent. 3/ Use of Shop the Look While Streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime. This year’s one of the most successful TV series, The Bear caused Men to go mad for the T-Shirt worn by Jeremy Allen White in the show. Showing us how TV Shows influence or encourage us to dress in a particular way. It’s nothing new, TV Shows like Friends & Gossip Girl influenced all demographics when they came out. But now, Streamings Services such as Roku & Amazon enable consumers to shop the look while watching the TV Shows. Many Brands will jump on these opportunities in upcoming months. 4/ Brands in Comments & Memes are the new norm By Summer 2024, Most Online Users & Creators will no longer feel too excited or answered when they see your brand in the comments. Why? It’s becoming too common for Brands to show in comments under viral content about them. Or Brands being funny with Internet Culture Trends is known to most users. The Saturation of Every Brand being funny and being present leads to increased competition of levitating the content quality. &#x200B; 5/ Marketers decrease their focus on Traffic & Views With AI recommendations taking over, The Structure of content distributing on social media is changing, the same goes for SEO. Conversational AIs are changing how web traffic is distributed to publishers. An Increased focus on managing the conversion rate and landing page relevancy will be the main focus. 6/ OOH is kind of making a comeback. First, US OOH Ads Industry grew 1.1% in Q3 2023. Second, Outfront Media reported slight revenue increase in Q3 as Billboard Ad Revenue grew in Q3. Many Brands in UK are also aligning more toward traditional media Channels. With Burger King in UK focusing on only OOH for Christmas this year and Fashion Brands like SSENSE launching Billboards as Branding Play. 7/ Rise of Curation Continues This Year, we witnessed success of Pinterest Shuffles App, Gen-Z loved it. Similar Success with formats like IG photo dump & TikTok ‘My Fav Finds’ Carousels being the center of Gen-Z Content. Just look at this recent trend and tell me Curation isn’t personal to Online Teens. Spotify won with their idea of curating Songs with Astrology-type signs. The Fashion Products with Curated Emojis and Stickers on them, that scrappy curated approach is predicted to grow in 2024, data from Pinterest. 8/ Use of AI to Trace Consumers in the wild This year we saw a huge trend of people using Image/ face recognition tools to find or dig dirt about famous people. The biggest example was Dillion Dannis exposing Multiple images of Logan Paul’s girlfriend using AI tools. (Which was Obviously bad) But next year, I believe with better rules, big brands like Adidas or Nike will be able to find worldwide micro-influencers & Online Consumers seen wearing adidas. And partnering with them on a large scale through automated outreach. 9/ More Cartoons than Influencer-Brand Products. All the Cartoon shows are seeing huge rise on IG and TikTok, Shaun the sheep is viral, Snoopy was big this year, Sesame Street’s TikTok is working. Aussie Show Bluey is making a huge spark in the US. More Brand collaborations are on the road. Why? Cartoons have built a very consistent identity and they have social channels. I know many see Cartoons as Kids Content but on social, looking at TikTok Account of Sesame Street & Snoopy. Last month, Powerpuff Girls launched a collaboration with Nike. &#x200B; 10/ The Best Trend to get people off social media &#x200B; Try to get people off the social media apps, build your own loops. You can’t rely on social and you clearly shouldn’t burn out trying to win on social and streaming with Paid Ads or without them. This matters a lot because data shares most of your customers buy from you once or twice a year. And then they interact with your content, how bad will you feel if the only thing they remember as your content is being on TikTok. Nothing about your brand. 11/ The Internet Aesthetic will Die for Cafes & Restaurants When I wrote my post about Instagram Marketing, I mentioned this issue of Every Account looking the same. In reality, It isn’t limited to IG Feeds, This Creator points out the same Problem, mentioning the aesthetic Standards from Internet are changing how new businesses approach their whole business. More Content from Cafes & Restaurants need to be around their people and neighbourhood. 12/ Echo Chambers & Sonic Influence All Podcasts are Echo Chambers because if people wanted a new perspective in form of value. We would have chosen debates, but we chose Podcasts to find new value while being in comfort. People are now looking for more value in comfort than ever, Podcasts will continue to rise. 13/ Clever AI Integration to Better Customer Journeys in B2B & B2C Marketing Agencies can provide clever solutions to B2B Companies, and help them overcome the tag of Boring Ads only. How? Ogilvy India created an AI Ad Campaign for Cadbury, allowing SMBs to have the Bollywood Actor endorse them. They used the AI voice generation allowing businesses to alter the voice and have Shah Rukh Khan endorse their shop. A similar approach was taken by IPG India, An AI Ad with Shah Rukh Khan allowing everyone to add their face in the Branded Content. &#x200B; If I sounded like an Old head in this report or I missed on some elements like Programmatic Advertising and PPC. I will try to include better analysis and new content about future trends. You can find the post shared with examples & research, linked here.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally. But that couldn't be far from truth. For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist. "They posted unrealistically (fake) cheap rentals of beautiful apartments in places where normal rent should be 10x more. Once people replied, they auto-responded that the unit has been rented, but they should be looking for another unit on AirBnB." The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game. You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products. Craigslist is a team of 30 people. There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible. Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side. In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work. A Blackhat Marketer created a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory. He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist. He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built. Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist. The email said this: I am emailing you because you have one of the nicest listings on Craigslist in Idaho and I want to recommend you feature it (for free) on one of the largest Idaho housing sites on the web, Airbnb. The site already has 3,000,000 pages views a month. Check it out here to list now: airbnb(dot)com Sarah Surpisingly, all emails were by ladies. He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing. Surely, it wasn't a fluke. After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers. This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat. These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived. "Some very famous investors have alluded to the fact that they look for a dangerous streak in the entrepreneurs they invest in…and while those investors will never come out and tell you what they mean, this kind of thing is probably what they mean." It definitely violates CAN-SPAM act. Some comments from Hacker News: "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA." But I guess it worked in Airbnb's favour lol as they were never caught or fined until after. "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM." Thanks for reading. If you'd like to learn more blackhat tactics like this, check this site which is a growth hacking newsletter with real-world blackhat examples. PS: Actual emails & screenshots from the Airbnb x Craigslist spam can be found here.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Watched 8 hours of MrBeast's content. Here are 7 psychological strategies he's used to get 34 billion views

MrBeast can fill giant stadiums and launch 8-figure candy companies on demand. He’s unbelievably popular. Recently, I listened to the brilliant marketer Phill Agnew (from The Nudge podcast) being interviewed on the Creator Science podcast. The episode focused on how MrBeast’s near-academic understanding of audience psychology is the key to his success. Better than anyone, MrBeast knows how to get you: \- Click on his content (increase his click-through rate) \- Get you to stick around (increase his retention rate) He gets you to click by using irresistible thumbnails and headlines. I watched 8 hours of his content. To build upon Phil Agnew’s work, I made a list of 7 psychological effects and biases he’s consistently used to write headlines that get clicked into oblivion. Even the most aggressively “anti-clickbait” purists out there would benefit from learning the psychology of why people choose to click on some content over others. Ultimately, if you don’t get the click, it really doesn’t matter how good your content is. Novelty Effect MrBeast Headline: “I Put 100 Million Orbeez In My Friend's Backyard” MrBeast often presents something so out of the ordinary that they have no choice but to click and find out more. That’s the “novelty effect” at play. Our brain’s reward system is engaged when we encounter something new. You’ll notice that the headline examples you see in this list are extreme. MrBeast takes things to the extreme. You don’t have to. Here’s your takeaway: Consider breaking the reader/viewer’s scrolling pattern by adding some novelty to your headlines. How? Here are two ways: Find the unique angle in your content Find an unusual character in your content Examples: “How Moonlight Walks Skyrocketed My Productivity”. “Meet the Artist Who Paints With Wine and Chocolate.” Headlines like these catch the eye without requiring 100 million Orbeez. Costly Signaling MrBeast Headline: "Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It" Here’s the 3-step click-through process at play here: MrBeast lets you know he’s invested a very significant amount of time and money into his content. This signals to whoever reads the headline that it's probably valuable and worth their time. They click to find out more. Costly signaling is all amount showcasing what you’ve invested into the content. The higher the stakes, the more valuable the content will seem. In this example, the $800,000 island he’s giving away just screams “This is worth your time!” Again, they don’t need to be this extreme. Here are two examples with a little more subtlety: “I built a full-scale botanical garden in my backyard”. “I used only vintage cookware from the 1800s for a week”. Not too extreme, but not too subtle either. Numerical Precision MrBeast knows that using precise numbers in headlines just work. Almost all of his most popular videos use headlines that contain a specific number. “Going Through The Same Drive Thru 1,000 Times" “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!” Yes, these headlines also use costly signaling. But there’s more to it than that. Precise numbers are tangible. They catch our eye, pique our curiosity, and add a sense of authenticity. “The concreteness effect”: Specific, concrete information is more likely to be remembered than abstract, intangible information. “I went through the same drive thru 1000 times” is more impactful than “I went through the same drive thru countless times”. Contrast MrBeast Headline: "$1 vs $1,000,000 Hotel Room!" Our brains are drawn to stark contrasts and MrBeast knows it. His headlines often pit two extremes against each other. It instantly creates a mental image of both scenarios. You’re not just curious about what a $1,000,000 hotel room looks like. You’re also wondering how it could possibly compare to a $1 room. Was the difference wildly significant? Was it actually not as significant as you’d think? It increases the audience’s \curiosity gap\ enough to get them to click and find out more. Here are a few ways you could use contrast in your headlines effectively: Transformational Content: "From $200 to a $100M Empire - How A Small Town Accountant Took On Silicon Valley" Here you’re contrasting different states or conditions of a single subject. Transformation stories and before-and-after scenarios. You’ve got the added benefit of people being drawn to aspirational/inspirational stories. Direct Comparison “Local Diner Vs Gourmet Bistro - Where Does The Best Comfort Food Lie?” Nostalgia MrBeast Headline: "I Built Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory!" Nostalgia is a longing for the past. It’s often triggered by sensory stimuli - smells, songs, images, etc. It can feel comforting and positive, but sometimes bittersweet. Nostalgia can provide emotional comfort, identity reinforcement, and even social connection. People are drawn to it and MrBeast has it down to a tee. He created a fantasy world most people on this planet came across at some point in their childhood. While the headline does play on costly signaling here as well, nostalgia does help to clinch the click and get the view. Subtle examples of nostalgia at play: “How this \[old school cartoon\] is shaping new age animation”. “\[Your favorite childhood books\] are getting major movie deals”. Morbid Curiosity MrBeast Headline: "Surviving 24 Hours Straight In The Bermuda Triangle" People are drawn to the macabre and the dangerous. Morbid curiosity explains why you’re drawn to situations that are disturbing, frightening, or gruesome. It’s that tension between wanting to avoid harm and the irresistible desire to know about it. It’s a peculiar aspect of human psychology and viral content marketers take full advantage of it. The Bermuda Triangle is practically synonymous with danger. The headline suggests a pretty extreme encounter with it, so we click to find out more. FOMO And Urgency MrBeast Headline: "Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It" “FOMO”: the worry that others may be having fulfilling experiences that you’re absent from. Marketers leverage FOMO to drive immediate action - clicking, subscribing, purchasing, etc. The action is driven by the notion that delay could result in missing out on an exciting opportunity or event. You could argue that MrBeast uses FOMO and urgency in all of his headlines. They work under the notion that a delay in clicking could result in missing out on an exciting opportunity or event. MrBeast’s time-sensitive challenge, exclusive opportunities, and high-stakes competitions all generate a sense of urgency. People feel compelled to watch immediately for fear of missing out on the outcome or being left behind in conversations about the content. Creators, writers, and marketers can tap into FOMO with their headlines without being so extreme. “The Hidden Parisian Cafe To Visit Before The Crowds Do” “How \[Tech Innovation\] Will Soon Change \[Industry\] For Good” (Yep, FOMO and urgency are primarily responsible for the proliferation of AI-related headlines these days). Why This All Matters If you don’t have content you need people to consume, it probably doesn’t! But if any aspect of your online business would benefit from people clicking on things more, it probably does. “Yes, because we all need more clickbait in this world - \eye-roll emoji\” - Disgruntled Redditor I never really understood this comment but I seem to get it pretty often. My stance is this: If the content delivers what the headline promises, it shouldn’t be labeled clickbait. I wouldn’t call MrBeast’s content clickbait. The fact is that linguistic techniques can be used to drive people to consume some content over others. You don’t need to take things to the extremes that MrBeast does to make use of his headline techniques. If content doesn’t get clicked, it won’t be read, viewed, or listened to - no matter how brilliant the content might be. While “clickbait” content isn’t a good thing, we can all learn a thing or two from how they generate attention in an increasingly noisy digital world.

Looking for Social Media Marketing Partner(s) for High-Potential AI App Business

Hello everyone! I am Mak, and I'm a software engineer and AI developer with a few years of experience. I'm pretty young like the most of you and have an amazing idea. I'm sure that some of you have heard of Rizz, Plug, Wigman and similar apps. Those are simple AI apps that generate pickup lines for people, and I worked as an AI developer for one of the above. I got this business idea after analyzing more about this industry and realizing that these apps make TONS of money—like the one I worked for, which is making about $50k per WEEK using my AI solutions. That's crazy. The point is that I took a pause from working as a software engineer for clients and researched how to do the same thing. It took me a few months to actually understand everything about this business model, and Rizz apps are just one example of this type of business. There is one 17 yo guy I found who made "Cal AI" I guess, basically a simple AI app that analyzes your meal and provides info like calories, etc. I also created AI solutions for a guy who made an AI app that analyzes your face, provides Sigma analytics, and suggests how to improve your face, etc. So the point is that there are tons of AI app ideas that you can create for this industry. And the important fact is that the AI market is growing. Some important AI analytics say that in 2024, there were 1.5B AI app downloads, and mobile AI app consumer spending was $1.8B. That's huge. So, what am I looking for? I need someone, hopefully from the US, or someone who knows how to post social media content for US users, to help me out with my business idea. I'm self-funded and have already spent a lot on important requirements and equipment, which is why I need someone interested in revenue sharing. We can come up with a deal such as capped/tiered revenue share, profit share, deferred model, etc. We could discuss this privately since everyone has different experience levels and thoughts about this. Also, since I'm talking about experience, you don't need huge experience at all. You can be 16-25 years old just like me and only have marketing skills. However, to make it easier for those who don't have marketing skills, I am planning to create code that will automatically generate content for you, and all you need to do is post the content. But this is only for posting content without creating it and is for interested people from the US since I need US customers. However, if you have marketing skills and an idea for getting organic US views, please let's talk. Short info about my app: It is an AI app like the previous examples, which doesn’t yet exist. There is pretty big potential for app growth (60% of Americans could use this app), and it should be pretty easy to market. Good niche, good idea and overall solid market for this app idea. TL;DR I need someone interested in marketing my AI app in exchange for revenue share. No huge experience is needed. I would prefer someone from the US. If you are interested, feel free to contact me here on Reddit via private messages or below. We can talk here, on Discord, LinkedIn, or anywhere you prefer. Thanks once again!

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

Has anybody used AI calling agents for your business?

Has anybody used tools like synthflow to create a an assistant and call your clients? I created one for my business, and I tweaked it a little bit to not sound like a robot and so far is doing great but not perfect. It answers all questions and objections on point, but I'm still looking to make it more human even though it won't ever be "perfect." Are there any prompts that you guys are using? Like telling it to use certain Voice intonations? Has any of your clients hung up or found out it was an AI? I'm about to test this for my real estate business and any insight or tips are appreciated!

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Interview with founder of ReadyPlayerMe (raised $70M+ from a16z)

Thanks to everyone who replied to my previous post with the questions you had for Rainer, I added some of them into this interview. I’m Nikita of Databas3 , and that’s my first interview in a series where I’m learning more about the journey of the best tech and web3 founders. Would appreciate your feedback and suggestions for the next guest! Nikita: Let’s begin with a brief introduction. Can you share a bit about yourself and how the business started? Rainer: I’m Rainer, the CTO of ReadyPlayerMe. Our journey began in 2013 with four co-founders. Over the years, our focus has shifted mainly around our product’s evolution, but our core idea always revolved around virtual actors or virtual people. Our initial venture was into hardware. We created the first full-body scanner in the Nordics, a significant step in photogrammetry. This led us to develop the Luna Scanner, a three-meter tall structure designed to capture facial features and likenesses. When Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014, we foresaw the potential of VR and virtual worlds, especially in social experiences. Nikita: Interesting. How did you move on from there? Rainer: Recognizing the limitations of hardware, we transitioned into software. Our early scanner designs had limitations in scalability. For example, our three-meter tall scanner wasn’t a feasible solution for scanning millions of people. So, we leveraged the datasets from our initial projects and designed a mobile version, making facial scanning as easy as using your phone. Around 2015, this was a new territory, as facial scanning wasn’t a mainstream application. Nikita: What were the early applications of these scanned models? Rainer: In the beginning, we focused on 3D printed figurines from full-body scans. However, as we shifted to facial scanning, we licensed our technology to gaming companies, collaborating with giants like Wargaming and Tencent. We even ventured into virtual fittings with H&M. Each collaboration was custom-tailored, blending our technology with their systems. This model made us cash flow positive. Nikita: So this was the beginning of your foray into the gaming industry? Rainer: Precisely. The demand from gaming companies was substantial. As we built custom solutions for these enterprises, we saw a bigger potential. While our cash flow was positive, we realized the challenge of scaling through exclusive enterprise deals. We envisioned our avatar creation tech reaching indie games and beyond. Nikita: And that led to the birth of ReadyPlayerMe? Rainer: Exactly. Once we understood our market direction, we quickly developed the first iteration of ReadyPlayerMe as a web-based experience, emphasizing easy integration for game developers. The initial version was a character builder, allowing users to personalize their avatars, which many adopted for their social media profiles. Our goal was to create avatars that users could connect with and use across various platforms. Instead of licensing our technology, we offered it for free to everyone. As ReadyPlayerMe gained traction, especially in VR applications, we secured funding to further our mission. Nikita: Your growth seems swift and organic. Were there any challenges? Rainer: Our focus on easy integration significantly fueled our adoption. Pairing that with personalized avatars resonated well with our audience. But like any venture, we’ve faced our share of challenges and have always aimed to evolve and better our offerings. The rapid growth in Web3 projects and virtual worlds made personalization and customization more important. With the NFT boom, you could add utility by allowing access to selected collections. This played into web-based games and metaverse applications. The shift towards Web3 and personalization provided a significant tailwind for us. Many used our characters as profile pictures on social media. Nikita: I’ve heard from other founders that a16z really values viral marketing. Was this one reason they wanted to invest in your project? How was the process with them? Rainer: When a16z reached out, it felt like a natural fit. We wanted investors who understood the gaming space. Our main market is Web3, but we’re exploring the top games market. Their expertise in gaming was invaluable. They’ve been very supportive throughout. We were fortunate to be on their radar. Nikita: So your early growth and organic traction played a role in attracting investors? Rainer: Definitely. Early product growth and the potential future trajectory were essential in our discussions. Nikita: As the CTO, you must have faced challenges. Can you speak about the tech side and its evolution? Rainer: The early version of our platform was built by in-house engineers. As we grew, we had to adapt to increasing complexities and ensure we had the right team to execute our vision. My role often shifted between product management and tech, depending on the need. Nikita: It sounds like the startup environment remains strong within your company. Rainer: Absolutely. We’re all committed, hands-on, and working towards building the best product. Nikita: You mentioned the team earlier. How many people are in your team now? Rainer: We have 70 people, with about half in product and engineering. Nikita: And did you hire the tech team? Rainer: We brought on a head of engineering at the beginning of this year. He’s been instrumental in scaling the engineering organization, from increasing the headcount to refining engineering processes. We’ve recently reorganized into domain-specific teams. As the team grows, regular reorganization ensures we focus on delivering specific customer value. Every stage requires attention to the team’s composition to ensure efficient delivery. Nikita: Any advice for founders just starting with their first startup? Rainer: Focus on customer value, no matter how niche it might seem initially. Begin with a specific problem and solution, then expand from there. You don’t need a massive project right away. Begin small, prove the concept, and scale from there. Nikita: You’ve mentioned your love for books and podcasts. Any recommendations? Rainer: For startups, “High Growth Handbook” and “Lean Startup” are must-reads. “Working Backwards” offers insights into Amazon’s customer-centric approach. For podcasts, I listen to “Rework,” “Lenny’s Podcast,” and “Huberman Lab.” Nikita: All of us have some side project ideas from time to time. How do you handle these when managing a big project? Rainer: Over the years, I’ve built various side projects. Some are small applications to solve immediate problems, like a menu bar app for AirPods which made it to No. 1 on Product Hunt, and was nominated for Golden Kitty Award. I sometimes delve into 3D and AI, merging them for technical demos. I keep a list of ideas and pick from them as the urge arises. Nikita: Any final thoughts or advice? Rainer: As you scale, do so with clarity. Avoid scaling just for external appeal. Always hire when there’s genuine need, not just for the sake of expansion. It helps in staying lean and focused.

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

Steep Learning : How I Mapped approximately 10K AI tools to 15K Replaceable Tasks across 4K professions

Hello Everyone , I would like to share some knowledge today which I went towards countless hours to do . I founded a portal called Seekme.ai, a comprehensive platform that houses over 10,000 AI tools and resources. Today, I'm excited to share with you an insightful and enlightening journey of how I mapped these tools to 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions. This process, which I've named "Learn by Doing," got me the power of determination, collaboration, and adaptability. The Idea: It all started when I recognized the need for a more efficient and accessible way for professionals to understand which AI tools could help them automate their tasks. The traditional approach of manually researching and testing each AI tool for every profession was time-consuming and inefficient. I envisioned a solution that could streamline this process, making AI adoption easier and more accessible for a broader audience. The Planning: To begin, we needed a clear understanding of the task landscape across various professions. With the help of some Reddit communities , we embarked on an extensive study of common tasks in various industries. We utilized various sources, including government reports, industry surveys, and academic research, to create a comprehensive list of tasks. The result was an impressive list of 15,000 tasks. The Mapping: With the list of tasks in hand, the next step was to identify which AI tools could perform these tasks. I meticulously researched and analyzed each AI tool's capabilities and features. We cross-referenced this information with the tasks I had identified and created a mapping between the two. The process involved a significant amount of collaboration and refinement, as we continually updated and expanded our database of AI tools and tasks. The Challenges: The mapping process was not without its challenges. One of the primary obstacles was ensuring the accuracy and completeness of our data. To address this issue, I implemented a rigorous quality control process that included multiple rounds of checks and validations.I also established partnerships with industry experts and AI vendors to ensure our data was up-to-date and accurate. There is also a challenge that I faced was what is the quality of the tools which is the problem and how do I rank multiple tools if they do the same tasks without user feedback The Results: After months of hard work and dedication, I successfully mapped 10,000 AI tools to 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions. Our new feature, AI by Profession, was born. This innovative will allow users to quickly and easily identify the AI tools that can automate tasks in their profession, making AI adoption more accessible and efficient than ever before. The Impact: The impact of this project has been significant. By making it easier for professionals to identify AI tools that can automate tasks in their industry, we're helping to drive productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Our users are saving time and resources by not having to manually research and test AI tools. Furthermore, we're contributing to the broader goal of democratizing AI and making it accessible to a broader audience. But there is a still an issue we face of ranking tools who does the similar job. For instance for content creation there 10 tools that can do same video editing so how do we rank it . We are planning to add categories to this to make it more exhaustive Conclusion: The journey to mapping 10,000 AI tools for 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions was a challenging and rewarding experience. It required a significant amount of planning, determination, and collaboration, but the end result was a powerful tool that's making a difference in the lives of professionals around the world. I don’t know yet how useful it is yet for users So I am inviting you all to see if this feature can help you better equip yourself on the new wave and do things better. I am always up for a chat on anything AI and provide my help if needed. Looking forward to some feedback aswell

My Idea is to generate leads on autopilot.

After 6 years of being a founder of multiple startups, I discovered that 90% of all startups fail not because they don't have a product but because they don't sell. And when talking to my entrepreneur friends, they all seem to struggle with getting (consistent) sales. So far I've built three B2B companies and grown them to multiple $M's ARR. One strategy I use is sending out A LOT of cold emails (500-1000 cold emails per day). Over the years I've created a system that does the following: \- Find targeted potential leads for your industry in bulk (1000+ of leads per day) \- Segment the leads into different funnels \- Reach out to them via email and LinkedIn in a semi-personalized manner using AI-generated icebreakers and generating images with their website or personal content in the images automatically. \- Send them an AI generated video sales letters (which cannot be distinguished from real) \- Book sales calls with them (15 to 30 calls per month) I'm now at a point where I've perfected this system for my own businesses. I want to see if I can apply my strategy to any B2B industry. I want to help up to 5 B2B companies with a $1000+ average deal value. Leave a comment or DM me if you want to participate.

Neverbored - Social media to never get bored

Disclaimer: I'm not advertising it. (Because the business is not real yet) I'm proposing it to the reddit community. INTRO Hi everybody! I'm looking for risky people that want to try to create an International Business with a brand new social media. I'm a 22 Italian programmer and entrepreneur. I love business and I'm studying it by myself while I study CS at University. Business is what I want to do with my energy for the rest of my life. EMOTIONAL REASONS I want to connect with people, I want to succeed with other people. Like you. Thank you if are reading. Maybe one day we'll meet. Neverbored theorical Map THE IDEA Neverbored it's an social network to connect with people that have your same interest. You can visualize that like a map (exactly, like google map) filled with little avatars that rappresent your friends, or people that accepted to meet new people or groups. Yes, in the idea are included "groups" or "clans". Why is a really good idea? 100% sure you have tried to organized something with your friends in chat, or using Instagram and other social. But everytime it takes hours and sometimes you don't get along. So... Neverbored is created to use flash pools and interactive activities to chose fast and equally. With AI every group or person can have new ideas about where to spend the next afternoon. New ideas. Have you ever thought about how many times you asked yourself or your friends: what we gonna do tonight?. And everytime is the same. Boring. Bars, restourants, clubs, can promote themself with ads to get more clients. Town Events can be promoted better than on Instagram and others. WHAT AM I LOOKING FOR? Programmers (in general). It's enough to know. (passionated people) People who knows business stuff. (smart people) People that know how to promote ideas with social or without. Maybe creating a stand in a street. (charmed people) Law people. People that know law, or have contacts in the sector. (It's not necessary you have a degree, the only thing a I need is you to be willing to learn and to get the right resources for you and the otheres) Photographers, graphic designers , writers, poets, artists, content creators, musicists. Models (male or female) (beautiful people) >!Whoever that wants to give to this project a shot and is willing to learn along with others.!< WE WILL BE USING Kickstarter (and others sites of crowdfounding) Photoshop Paid Influncers. CapCut Photography. TikTok Zoom Telegram Whatsapp Channels Thousands of utils found online Everything in the google suite (docs, excels...) Libgen University resources from all around the world Social Engineering (to get the right informations) Charm (to get the people closer) Science, Psychology. .... I'm not planning to do this only in Italy (Florence), that's where I live. I want this to be a resource for everyone in the world. I promised to someone before he leaved my life. And I'll do it. You can call me Ernesto. See you soon my friend. Together we will. Togheter we dominate. Togheter we rich. Ernesto P.

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

Critique my business ideas

So I have some business ideas that I would like to confront to you in order to have feedback. The point is to give me your completely honest opinion and try to find some potential problems. 1 - Digital marketing automation for green ecommerce stores Marketing has always been a problem for everyone in business more particularly for niche businesses. It's tough for them because people who will buy their product are generally harder to find. Also these products are way more expensive than other so it may be clever for them to focus more on marketing. Since the green and sustainable industry is growing at a very fast rate such as AI, I would like to hear your opinion on the idea of automating marketing for these type of businesses. 2 - AI Mental Health platform The mental health issues will gain more and more importance in the future. We now live in a world that isn't as safe as before and with the rise of social media we can predict that mental health issues will be more frequent especially for young people. PH, Instagram, Tiktok all of these are just bad for everyone and so an AI mental health plateform where people can chat with AI, discuss in anonymous forums and use integrated tools to reduce screen time and manage addiction I think would be a good idea. I haven't really thought about how to make money but as I write I was thinking about either a freemium model or integrate products from stores and kind of get affiliation, getting money when people buy the product. 3 - A car enthusiast website Everyday around 5000 millionaires are created so obviously the high end car industry is growing at a fairly fast rate. My idea would be to create a network where people would pay to ride in a supercar. There would be a map where people would look for cars in their area and chat with the owner basically. 4 - Marketing agency for real estate agents This is self explanatory. Common pain points include managing client communication, nurturing leads, following up on inquiries, and staying top-of-mind with potential buyers and sellers. Effective email automation can help with sending personalized follow-ups, reminders, newsletters, and market updates. It would be a subscription based business basically.

Looking for some legend keen to test an Ai chatbot and in return I give it for free for a whole year

Hey everyone! I’ve created an AI-powered chatbot designed to engage with website visitors, answer common questions, assist with lead generation, and even help provide context for sales calls by gathering customer insights. It’s built to not only save time but also to keep potential customers engaged with your business, making it an ideal tool for small to mid-sized companies looking to boost their online presence and improve sales conversion rates. I’m offering a free, year-long trial to a select group of business owners in exchange for constructive feedback. By using it, you'll get: Improved lead generation: The chatbot engages visitors and collects valuable info, making your sales calls more informed. Time-saving automation: Handles routine inquiries and FAQs, freeing up your team for other tasks. Valuable insights: Gather data on customer questions, preferences, and interests. If you’re interested or have questions, feel free to DM me! I'd love to hear your thoughts and see how we can make this tool as valuable as possible for businesses.

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

Critique my business ideas

So I have some business ideas that I would like to confront to you in order to have feedback. The point is to give me your completely honest opinion and try to find some potential problems. 1 - Digital marketing automation for green ecommerce stores Marketing has always been a problem for everyone in business more particularly for niche businesses. It's tough for them because people who will buy their product are generally harder to find. Also these products are way more expensive than other so it may be clever for them to focus more on marketing. Since the green and sustainable industry is growing at a very fast rate such as AI, I would like to hear your opinion on the idea of automating marketing for these type of businesses. 2 - AI Mental Health platform The mental health issues will gain more and more importance in the future. We now live in a world that isn't as safe as before and with the rise of social media we can predict that mental health issues will be more frequent especially for young people. PH, Instagram, Tiktok all of these are just bad for everyone and so an AI mental health plateform where people can chat with AI, discuss in anonymous forums and use integrated tools to reduce screen time and manage addiction I think would be a good idea. I haven't really thought about how to make money but as I write I was thinking about either a freemium model or integrate products from stores and kind of get affiliation, getting money when people buy the product. 3 - A car enthusiast website Everyday around 5000 millionaires are created so obviously the high end car industry is growing at a fairly fast rate. My idea would be to create a network where people would pay to ride in a supercar. There would be a map where people would look for cars in their area and chat with the owner basically. 4 - Marketing agency for real estate agents This is self explanatory. Common pain points include managing client communication, nurturing leads, following up on inquiries, and staying top-of-mind with potential buyers and sellers. Effective email automation can help with sending personalized follow-ups, reminders, newsletters, and market updates. It would be a subscription based business basically.

Looking for some legend keen to test an Ai chatbot and in return I give it for free for a whole year

Hey everyone! I’ve created an AI-powered chatbot designed to engage with website visitors, answer common questions, assist with lead generation, and even help provide context for sales calls by gathering customer insights. It’s built to not only save time but also to keep potential customers engaged with your business, making it an ideal tool for small to mid-sized companies looking to boost their online presence and improve sales conversion rates. I’m offering a free, year-long trial to a select group of business owners in exchange for constructive feedback. By using it, you'll get: Improved lead generation: The chatbot engages visitors and collects valuable info, making your sales calls more informed. Time-saving automation: Handles routine inquiries and FAQs, freeing up your team for other tasks. Valuable insights: Gather data on customer questions, preferences, and interests. If you’re interested or have questions, feel free to DM me! I'd love to hear your thoughts and see how we can make this tool as valuable as possible for businesses.

Steep Learning : How I Mapped approximately 10K AI tools to 15K Replaceable Tasks across 4K professions

Hello Everyone , I would like to share some knowledge today which I went towards countless hours to do . I founded a portal called Seekme.ai, a comprehensive platform that houses over 10,000 AI tools and resources. Today, I'm excited to share with you an insightful and enlightening journey of how I mapped these tools to 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions. This process, which I've named "Learn by Doing," got me the power of determination, collaboration, and adaptability. The Idea: It all started when I recognized the need for a more efficient and accessible way for professionals to understand which AI tools could help them automate their tasks. The traditional approach of manually researching and testing each AI tool for every profession was time-consuming and inefficient. I envisioned a solution that could streamline this process, making AI adoption easier and more accessible for a broader audience. The Planning: To begin, we needed a clear understanding of the task landscape across various professions. With the help of some Reddit communities , we embarked on an extensive study of common tasks in various industries. We utilized various sources, including government reports, industry surveys, and academic research, to create a comprehensive list of tasks. The result was an impressive list of 15,000 tasks. The Mapping: With the list of tasks in hand, the next step was to identify which AI tools could perform these tasks. I meticulously researched and analyzed each AI tool's capabilities and features. We cross-referenced this information with the tasks I had identified and created a mapping between the two. The process involved a significant amount of collaboration and refinement, as we continually updated and expanded our database of AI tools and tasks. The Challenges: The mapping process was not without its challenges. One of the primary obstacles was ensuring the accuracy and completeness of our data. To address this issue, I implemented a rigorous quality control process that included multiple rounds of checks and validations.I also established partnerships with industry experts and AI vendors to ensure our data was up-to-date and accurate. There is also a challenge that I faced was what is the quality of the tools which is the problem and how do I rank multiple tools if they do the same tasks without user feedback The Results: After months of hard work and dedication, I successfully mapped 10,000 AI tools to 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions. Our new feature, AI by Profession, was born. This innovative will allow users to quickly and easily identify the AI tools that can automate tasks in their profession, making AI adoption more accessible and efficient than ever before. The Impact: The impact of this project has been significant. By making it easier for professionals to identify AI tools that can automate tasks in their industry, we're helping to drive productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Our users are saving time and resources by not having to manually research and test AI tools. Furthermore, we're contributing to the broader goal of democratizing AI and making it accessible to a broader audience. But there is a still an issue we face of ranking tools who does the similar job. For instance for content creation there 10 tools that can do same video editing so how do we rank it . We are planning to add categories to this to make it more exhaustive Conclusion: The journey to mapping 10,000 AI tools for 15,000 tasks across 4,000 professions was a challenging and rewarding experience. It required a significant amount of planning, determination, and collaboration, but the end result was a powerful tool that's making a difference in the lives of professionals around the world. I don’t know yet how useful it is yet for users So I am inviting you all to see if this feature can help you better equip yourself on the new wave and do things better. I am always up for a chat on anything AI and provide my help if needed. Looking forward to some feedback aswell

I single-handedly built the world’s best AI investing platform. Here’s NexusTrade’s 2024 year in review

I copy-pasted the content of this article to save you a click! I’ve been developing an AI investing platform for 4 years, and I’m blown away by all of the new features I’ve gotten done! Here’s my project’s 2024 year in review —- When someone asks me what is the best way to learn how to trade and invest, I have an unbiased answer – NexusTrade.io. I started NexusTrade to empower everybody, including beginners and non-technical investors, to learn how to make smarter investing decisions. NexusTrade is the best way for a new investor to learn algorithmic trading and financial research, and I’m not the only person to think so. Just this year alone, user growth has skyrocketed from 1,703 users to 14,319 users. This is driven by new features, better research tools, and the launch of algorithmic trading. Here’s NexusTrade’s 2024 year in review, a semi-complete list of the features I’ve launched. Summarizing this year in review TL;DR: I implemented a variety of new features to enhance NexusTrade’s algorithmic trading and financial research capabilities. This includes: Cryptocurrency support Enhanced financial research, like the AI-Powered Stock Screener Unique watchlists and daily market summaries Live-trading with Alpaca. Next year, I plan to implement features to make NexusTrade more tailored for each user’s experience, and launch several unique features including copy trading and fully automated algorithmic trading. Feature-by-feature: What have I done so far in 2024? Algorithmic Cryptocurrency Trading Picture: Algorithmic Cryptocurrency Trading I kicked off the year by adding cryptocurrency support to NexusTrade. Users can now research, design, and implement automated strategies for popular cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum. AI-Powered Stock Screener and research capabilities Picture: AI-Powered Stock Screener In tandem with cryptocurrency support, I made a huge update to Aurora, the AI Assistant in NexusTrade, by implementing a natural language stock screener. This screener makes it easy to find fundamentally strong stocks. Throughout the year, I’ve made several enhancements to it. Over time, I’ve made the screener faster, more accurate, and expanded its capabilities. Using fundamental indicators within trading strategies Picture: Using fundamental indicators Doing financial research for companies isn’t enough; we also need a way to integrate this type of research into trading strategies. Thus, I’ve expanded the NexusTrade indicators, and made it possible to create strategies using metrics like revenue, net income, free cash flow, and P/E ratio. Stock watchlists with tailored, automated daily emails Picture: Stock watchlists In addition, I didn’t want the research you may have done for a stock (or list of stocks) to be forgotten. Thus, I created the most useful watchlist page of any investing platform. This watchlist makes it easy to keep track of your favorite stocks, track them over time, and even receive curated, daily emails about them. Enhanced user profile page, Google sign-ins, and two-factor authentication Picture: Enhanced user profile Keeping in theme with adding new pages to NexusTrade, many pages, such as the profile page, got a huge revamp. The new profile page is cleaner, easier to use, and allows you to secure your account more effectively, for example, by using two-factor authentication. GPT-Reports: an AI-generated analysis of every stock in the market Picture: GPT-Reports I created GPT-Stock Reports, an AI-Generated analysis of every stock in the market. This report was generated by taking each company’s earnings data and asking GPT to analyze the stock and give it a rating. Manual and semi-automated algorithmic trading with Alpaca Picture: Manual and semi-automated trading Finally, I’ve fully launched the Alpaca integration, and enabled users to execute real trades directly in the NexusTrade app! This integration has transformed NexusTrade from a financial research app into a real, algorithmic trading platform for retail investors. Concluding Thoughts When I say that NexusTrade is the best platform for traders and investors to make more money in the stock market, you may naively think that I’m biased. I created the app, and the rose-tinted glasses is bound to make every red flag look like a regular flag, right? Wrong. NexusTrade is objectively a completely new way for investors to approach financial markets. The fact that the app is so expansive is nothing short of miraculous.

AI for Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders

Welcome to AI for Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders a platform created to unravel the dynamic rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and its transformative implications for businesses across sectors and to spotlight YOU

mentals-ai

Mentals AI is a tool designed for creating and operating agents that feature loops, memory, and various tools, all through straightforward markdown files with a .gen extension. Think of an agent file as an executable file. You focus entirely on the logic of the agent, eliminating the necessity to write scaffolding code in Python or any other language. Essentially, it redefines the foundational frameworks for future AI applications 🍓 [!NOTE] [work in progress] A local vector database to store your chats with the agents as well as your private information. See memory branch. [work in progress] Web UI with agents, tools, and vector storage Getting Started Differences from Other Frameworks Key Concepts Instruction (prompt) Working Memory (context) Short-Term Memory (experimental) Control flow: From strings to algorithms Roadmap The Idea 📌 Examples Word chain game in a self-loop controlled by LLM: !Word Chain game in a loop NLOP — Natural Language Operation Or more complex use cases: | 🔄 Any multi-agent interactions | 👾 Space Invaders generator agent | 🍄 2D platformer generator agent | |--------------------|-----------|--------------| |!react | !spaceinvaders.gen | !mario.gen | Or help with the content: Collect YouTube videos on a given topic and save them to a .csv file with the videos, views, channel name, and link; Get the transcription from the video and create a table of contents; Take top news from Hacker News, choose a topic and write an article on the topic with the participation of the critic, and save to a file. All of the above examples are located in the agents folder. [!NOTE] Llama3 support is available for providers using a compatible OpenAI API. 🚀 Getting Started Begin by securing an OpenAI API key through the creation of an OpenAI account. If you already have an API key, skip this step. 🏗️ Build and Run Prerequisites Before building the project, ensure the following dependencies are installed: libcurl: Used for making HTTP requests libfmt: Provides an API for formatting pgvector: Vector operations with PostgreSQL poppler: Required for PDF processing Depending on your operating system, you can install these using the following commands: Linux macOS Windows For Windows, it's recommended to use vcpkg or a similar package manager: pgvector installation [!NOTE] In the main branch you can skip this step Build from sources Docker, Homebrew, PGXN, APT, etc. Clone the repository Configuration Place your API key in the config.toml file: Build the project Run 🆚 Differences from Other Frameworks Mentals AI distinguishes itself from other frameworks in three significant ways: The Agent Executor 🧠 operates through a recursive loop. The LLM determines the next steps: selecting instructions (prompts) and managing data based on previous loops. This recursive decision-making process is integral to our system, outlined in mentalssystem.prompt Agents of any complexity can be created using Markdown, eliminating the need for traditional programming languages. However, Python can be integrated directly into the agent's Markdown script if necessary. Unlike platforms that include preset reasoning frameworks, Mentals AI serves as a blank canvas. It enables the creation and integration of your own reasoning frameworks, including existing ones: Tree of Thoughts, ReAct, Self-Discovery, Auto-CoT, and others. One can also link these frameworks together into more complex sequences, even creating a network of various reasoning frameworks. 🗝️ Key Concepts The agent file is a textual description of the agent instructions with a .gen extension. 📖 Instruction (prompt) Instruction is the basic component of an agent in Mentals. An agent can consist of one or more instructions, which can refer to each other. Instructions can be written in free form, but they always have a name that starts with the # symbol. The use: directive is used to specify a reference to other instructions. Multiple references are listed separated by commas. Below is an example with two instructions root and meme_explain with a reference: In this example, the root instruction calls the memeexplain instruction. The response from memeexplain is then returned to the instruction from which it was called, namely the root. An instruction can take an input parameter, which is automatically generated based on the context when the instruction is called. To specify the input data more precisely, you can use a free-form prompt in the input: directive, such as a JSON object or null. Using a document for input: Using a JSON object as input: [!NOTE] Instruction calls are implemented independently from function or tool calls at OpenAI, enabling the operation of agents with models like Llama3. The implementation of instruction calls is transparent and included in the mentals_system.prompt file. 🛠️ Tool Tool is a kind of instruction. Mentals has a set of native tools to handle message output, user input, file handling, Python interpreter, Bash commands, and Short-term memory. Ask user example: File handling example: The full list of native tools is listed in the file native_tools.toml. 🧠 Working Memory (context) Each instruction has its own working memory — context. When exiting an instruction and re-entering it, the context is kept by default. To clear the context when exiting an instruction, you can use the keep_context: false directive: By default, the size of the instruction context is not limited. To limit the context, there is a directive max_context: number which specifies that only the number of the most recent messages should be stored. Older messages will be pushed out of the context. This feature is useful when you want to keep the most recent data in context so that older data does not affect the chain of reasoning. ⏳ Short-Term Memory (experimental) Short-term memory allows for the storage of intermediate results from an agent's activities, which can then be used for further reasoning. The contents of this memory are accessible across all instruction contexts. The memory tool is used to store data. When data is stored, a keyword and a description of the content are generated. In the example below, the meme_recall instruction is aware of the meme because it was previously stored in memory. ⚙️ Control flow: From strings to algorithms The control flow, which includes conditions, instruction calls, and loops (such as ReAct, Auto-CoT, etc.), is fully expressed in natural language. This method enables the creation of semantic conditions that direct data stream branching. For instance, you can request an agent to autonomously play a word chain game in a loop or establish an ambiguous exit condition: exit the loop if you are satisfied with the result. Here, the language model and its context determine whether to continue or stop. All this is achieved without needing to define flow logic in Python or any other programming language. ⚖️ Reason Action (ReAct) example 🌳 Tree of Thoughts (ToT) example The idea behind ToT is to generate multiple ideas to solve a problem and then evaluate their value. Valuable ideas are kept and developed, other ideas are discarded. Let's take the example of the 24 game. The 24 puzzle is an arithmetical puzzle in which the objective is to find a way to manipulate four integers so that the end result is 24. First, we define the instruction that creates and manipulates the tree data structure. The model knows what a tree is and can represent it in any format, from plain text to XML/JSON or any custom format. In this example, we will use the plain text format: Next, we need to initialize the tree with initial data, let's start with the root instruction: Calling the root instruction will suggest 8 possible next steps to calculate with the first 2 numbers and store these steps as tree nodes. Further work by the agent results in the construction of a tree that is convenient for the model to understand and infer the final answer. A complete example is contained in the agents/treestructure.gen 🗺️ Roadmap [ ] Web UI -- WIP [ ] Vector database tools -- WIP [ ] Agent's experience (experimental) [ ] Tools: Image generation, Browser ✨ The Idea The concept originated from studies on psychoanalysis Executive functions, Exploring Central Executive, Alan Baddeley, 1996. He described a system that orchestrates cognitive processes and working memory, facilitating retrievals from long-term memory. The LLM functions as System 1, processing queries and executing instructions without inherent motivation or goal-setting. So, what then is System 2? Drawing from historical insights now reconsidered through a scientific lens: The central executive, or executive functions, is crucial for controlled processing in working memory. It manages tasks including directing attention, maintaining task objectives, decision-making, and memory retrieval. This sparks an intriguing possibility: constructing more sophisticated agents by integrating System 1 and System 2. The LLM, as the cognitive executor System 1, works in tandem with the Central Executive System 2, which governs and controls the LLM. This partnership forms the dual relationship foundational to Mentals AI.

sdfx

SDFX ======= Features | Screenshots | SDFX App Guide | Installation | Run The ultimate no-code platform to build and share AI apps with beautiful UI. Join our Discord Server community for latest news, video tutorials and demo apps. !SDFX Screenshot SDFX enables the creation of straightforward user interfaces for intricate workflows. An SDFX application combines a Comfy workflow with a user interface. The JSON that describes the workflow is enriched with extra meta information about the application and its author, as well as the association between UI components and node widgets. Features Screenshots SDFX Application JSON Structure Guide Installation Run Installation for users already using ComfyUI Locally Why? This project was originally created to meet the needs of users from A1111 (form based UI) and ComfyUI (graph-node based), which are two communities with differing visions. With SDFX, we aimed to merge the benefits of both worlds, without the drawbacks. What SDFX allows, for example, is the creation of complex graphs (as one would do on ComfyUI), but with an overlay of a simpler, high-level UI (such as a form-based interface, with an incredible UI). Thus, in theory, someone could recreate A1111 with SDFX and share the JSON online. This is an initial draft, there is still much to do (mostly the App Creator that will be released soon). Some had lost faith in us, even calling us vaporware. The reality, as you will see by browsing the source code, is that SDFX required a considerable amount of work. It was made by a solo developer, and now the team is growing. We tried to do things right, focusing solely on what we do best: UIs and product design with a modern frontend stack. Therefore, we rely 100% on Comfy's backend, making SDFX fully compatible with ComfyUI. However, installing ComfyUI is not necessary, as everything is abstracted. We also made an effort to simplify the installation process; in most cases, you will only need to double-click on setup.bat / setup.sh and follow the wizard. We hope you will like it, and it's with great pleasure that we share our vision and this repo with you, hoping it will pave the way for many contributions from you, to further the advancement of the open-source AI space. Features Build and share user-friendly apps on top of complex workflows 100% compatible with ComfyUI and all its features Can work with your existing Comfy installation (with our SDFXBridgeForComfy custom node) LiteGraph almost refactored from scratch in typescript Animated graph navigation Node bookmarks and advanced graph search Lightning fast UI instanciation and beautiful high-level components (450x faster than Gradio) UI Debugger (rudimentary for now) Native Custom Nodes Manager (thanks to Dr.Lt.Data) Export and share apps and templates (group nodes export soon) Advanced layer-based image and mask editor (WIP) Advanced checkpoint picker and gallery Advanced input image picker Modern and ultra fast frontend stack (vitejs, vuejs, electron) Compiles as a native app (Windows, Linux, Mac) or as a webapp Extremely easy to maintain and add new features Screenshots Graph view !SDFX Screenshot App view !SDFX Screenshot| !SDFX Screenshot | |--|--| Prompt Timeline Component !SDFX Screenshot UI Debugger !SDFX Screenshot Node Bookmarks !SDFX Screenshot Node Manager !SDFX Screenshot SDFX Application JSON Structure Guide Welcome to the JSON structure guide for SDFX applications. The following is a comprehensive overview for developers looking to understand and utilize the JSON format for creating user-friendly UI with SDFX. Our aim is to ensure clarity and ease of use, so you can integrate and exchange SDFX apps with confidence. Basic JSON structure of a SDFX app: Application Name name: The name you assign to your application. Meta Information meta: This key houses essential details about your application, for instance: Application Type type: Designated as "sdfx", this key identifies the app as an SDFX application while maintaining compatibility with ComfyUI. This means SDFX apps can be dragged and dropped onto ComfyUI and vice versa. UI Mapping Structure mapping: Specifies the UI structure. Within the mapping, you might find the following structure to describe a Tab component with a checkpoint loader, fully compatible with Tailwind CSS classes: LiteGraph Keys The remaining keys are standard LiteGraph properties used to describe the workflow. UI Components for Mapping Developers can leverage a rich set of UI components for creating user interfaces. Here's a list of available components that can be used and customized with VueJS and Tailwind CSS: Button DragNumber ImageLoader Input ModelPicker Number Preview Prompt PromptTimeline Selector Slider TextArea Toggle BoxDimensions BoxSeed Additionally, HTML elements such as div, p, ul, li, img, iframe, video, and more can be used to enrich the user interface. For layout and structural design, elements like SplitPane, SplitH, SplitV, Tab, TabBox, TabBar, and ToggleSettings offer further customization. The ease of creating new components with VueJS and Tailwind CSS is unmatched, allowing for rapid development and high-quality user interface design. As SDFX moves towards an open-source release, this guide will be invaluable for developers anticipating to engage with a professional and user-centric platform. Enjoy creating with SDFX, and let the simplicity and power of JSON structure enhance your application development process. Upcoming Feature: SDFX App Creator Note: Currently, the process of designing your SDFX application and mapping UI components to node parameters is manual. We understand the intricacies involved and are excited to announce that the release of the SDFX App Creator is on the horizon. The SDFX App Creator will let you create your UI mapping by introducing a visual design interface with drag & drop capabilities. This will greatly simplify the process of linking UI controls with the corresponding node parameters in the workflow graph. Stay tuned for this feature. Installation Make sure your system meets the following requirements: Node.js version 18.9.1 npm version 8.19.1 Python 3.11 Git Windows Then open to install dependencies Error says no Python, but it's installed? A common mistake is forgetting to check the option to add Python to the PATH during installation, as it's often unchecked by default in the installer wizard. Make sure Python is added to your system's environment variables to run the script smoothly. !SDFX Screenshot Linux/MacOs Manual Install Click to expand To perform a manual installation, follow these steps: Install Frontend Dependencies: Navigate to the src directory of SDFX and install the npm dependencies: Clone and Install ComfyUI: Clone the ComfyUI repository into the root directory of SDFX from ComfyUI GitHub and follow the installation instructions provided in the readme to install ComfyUI dependencies. Add the custom node SDFXBridgeForComfyUI Follow the instructions on the repository of the custom node SDFXBridgeForComfyUI to add it to your ComfyUi custom_nodes folder. Create Configuration File: Create a file named sdfx.config.json at the root of your project. Follow the instructions provided here to build the configuration file according to your requirements. Run Start ComfyUI Then start SDFX with: Installation for users already using ComfyUI Locally Click to expand If you already have ComfyUI installed on your machine, follow these steps to integrate SDFX: Clone the SDFXBridgeForComfyUI customnode on your ComfyUI customnode path: For detailed instructions, please refer to the official SDFX for ComfyUI README. Install front-end dependencies and run it: Run Launch SDFX app with ( for Linux/MacOs)

RD-Agent

🖥️ Live Demo | 🎥 Demo Video ▶️YouTube | 📖 Documentation | 📃 Papers Data Science Agent Preview Check out our demo video showcasing the current progress of our Data Science Agent under development: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3eccbecb-34a4-4c81-bce4-d3f8862f7305 📰 News | 🗞️ News | 📝 Description | | -- | ------ | | Support LiteLLM Backend | We now fully support LiteLLM as a backend for integration with multiple LLM providers. | | More General Data Science Agent | 🚀Coming soon! | | Kaggle Scenario release | We release Kaggle Agent, try the new features! | | Official WeChat group release | We created a WeChat group, welcome to join! (🗪QR Code) | | Official Discord release | We launch our first chatting channel in Discord (🗪) | | First release | RDAgent is released on GitHub | 🌟 Introduction RDAgent aims to automate the most critical and valuable aspects of the industrial R&D process, and we begin with focusing on the data-driven scenarios to streamline the development of models and data. Methodologically, we have identified a framework with two key components: 'R' for proposing new ideas and 'D' for implementing them. We believe that the automatic evolution of R&D will lead to solutions of significant industrial value. R&D is a very general scenario. The advent of RDAgent can be your 💰 Automatic Quant Factory (🎥Demo Video|▶️YouTube) 🤖 Data Mining Agent: Iteratively proposing data & models (🎥Demo Video 1|▶️YouTube) (🎥Demo Video 2|▶️YouTube) and implementing them by gaining knowledge from data. 🦾 Research Copilot: Auto read research papers (🎥Demo Video|▶️YouTube) / financial reports (🎥Demo Video|▶️YouTube) and implement model structures or building datasets. 🤖 Kaggle Agent: Auto Model Tuning and Feature Engineering([🎥Demo Video Coming Soon...]()) and implementing them to achieve more in competitions. ... You can click the links above to view the demo. We're continuously adding more methods and scenarios to the project to enhance your R&D processes and boost productivity. Additionally, you can take a closer look at the examples in our 🖥️ Live Demo. ⚡ Quick start You can try above demos by running the following command: 🐳 Docker installation. Users must ensure Docker is installed before attempting most scenarios. Please refer to the official 🐳Docker page for installation instructions. Ensure the current user can run Docker commands without using sudo. You can verify this by executing docker run hello-world. 🐍 Create a Conda Environment Create a new conda environment with Python (3.10 and 3.11 are well-tested in our CI): Activate the environment: 🛠️ Install the RDAgent You can directly install the RDAgent package from PyPI: 💊 Health check rdagent provides a health check that currently checks two things. whether the docker installation was successful. whether the default port used by the rdagent ui is occupied. ⚙️ Configuration The demos requires following ability: ChatCompletion json_mode embedding query For example: If you are using the OpenAI API, you have to configure your GPT model in the .env file like this. However, not every API services support these features by default. For example: AZURE OpenAI, you have to configure your GPT model in the .env file like this. We now support LiteLLM as a backend for integration with multiple LLM providers. If you use LiteLLM Backend to use models, you can configure as follows: For more configuration information, please refer to the documentation. 🚀 Run the Application The 🖥️ Live Demo is implemented by the following commands(each item represents one demo, you can select the one you prefer): Run the Automated Quantitative Trading & Iterative Factors Evolution: Qlib self-loop factor proposal and implementation application Run the Automated Quantitative Trading & Iterative Model Evolution: Qlib self-loop model proposal and implementation application Run the Automated Medical Prediction Model Evolution: Medical self-loop model proposal and implementation application (1) Apply for an account at PhysioNet. (2) Request access to FIDDLE preprocessed data: FIDDLE Dataset. (3) Place your username and password in .env. Run the Automated Quantitative Trading & Factors Extraction from Financial Reports: Run the Qlib factor extraction and implementation application based on financial reports Run the Automated Model Research & Development Copilot: model extraction and implementation application Run the Automated Kaggle Model Tuning & Feature Engineering: self-loop model proposal and feature engineering implementation application Using sf-crime (San Francisco Crime Classification) as an example. Register and login on the Kaggle website. Configuring the Kaggle API. (1) Click on the avatar (usually in the top right corner of the page) -> Settings -> Create New Token, A file called kaggle.json will be downloaded. (2) Move kaggle.json to ~/.config/kaggle/ (3) Modify the permissions of the kaggle.json file. Reference command: chmod 600 ~/.config/kaggle/kaggle.json Join the competition: Click Join the competition -> I Understand and Accept at the bottom of the competition details page. Description of the above example: Kaggle competition data, contains two parts: competition description file (json file) and competition dataset (zip file). We prepare the competition description file for you, the competition dataset will be downloaded automatically when you run the program, as in the example. If you want to download the competition description file automatically, you need to install chromedriver, The instructions for installing chromedriver can be found in the documentation. The Competition List Available can be found here. 🖥️ Monitor the Application Results You can run the following command for our demo program to see the run logs. Note: Although port 19899 is not commonly used, but before you run this demo, you need to check if port 19899 is occupied. If it is, please change it to another port that is not occupied. You can check if a port is occupied by running the following command. 🏭 Scenarios We have applied RD-Agent to multiple valuable data-driven industrial scenarios. 🎯 Goal: Agent for Data-driven R&D In this project, we are aiming to build an Agent to automate Data-Driven R\&D that can 📄 Read real-world material (reports, papers, etc.) and extract key formulas, descriptions of interested features and models, which are the key components of data-driven R&D . 🛠️ Implement the extracted formulas (e.g., features, factors, and models) in runnable codes. Due to the limited ability of LLM in implementing at once, build an evolving process for the agent to improve performance by learning from feedback and knowledge. 💡 Propose new ideas based on current knowledge and observations. 📈 Scenarios/Demos In the two key areas of data-driven scenarios, model implementation and data building, our system aims to serve two main roles: 🦾Copilot and 🤖Agent. The 🦾Copilot follows human instructions to automate repetitive tasks. The 🤖Agent, being more autonomous, actively proposes ideas for better results in the future. The supported scenarios are listed below: | Scenario/Target | Model Implementation | Data Building | | -- | -- | -- | | 💹 Finance | 🤖 Iteratively Proposing Ideas & Evolving▶️YouTube | 🤖 Iteratively Proposing Ideas & Evolving ▶️YouTube 🦾 Auto reports reading & implementation▶️YouTube | | 🩺 Medical | 🤖 Iteratively Proposing Ideas & Evolving▶️YouTube | - | | 🏭 General | 🦾 Auto paper reading & implementation▶️YouTube 🤖 Auto Kaggle Model Tuning | 🤖Auto Kaggle feature Engineering | RoadMap: Currently, we are working hard to add new features to the Kaggle scenario. Different scenarios vary in entrance and configuration. Please check the detailed setup tutorial in the scenarios documents. Here is a gallery of successful explorations (5 traces showed in 🖥️ Live Demo). You can download and view the execution trace using this command from the documentation. Please refer to 📖readthedocs_scen for more details of the scenarios. ⚙️ Framework Automating the R&D process in data science is a highly valuable yet underexplored area in industry. We propose a framework to push the boundaries of this important research field. The research questions within this framework can be divided into three main categories: | Research Area | Paper/Work List | |--------------------|-----------------| | Benchmark the R&D abilities | Benchmark | | Idea proposal: Explore new ideas or refine existing ones | Research | | Ability to realize ideas: Implement and execute ideas | Development | We believe that the key to delivering high-quality solutions lies in the ability to evolve R&D capabilities. Agents should learn like human experts, continuously improving their R&D skills. More documents can be found in the 📖 readthedocs. 📃 Paper/Work list 📊 Benchmark Towards Data-Centric Automatic R&D !image 🔍 Research In a data mining expert's daily research and development process, they propose a hypothesis (e.g., a model structure like RNN can capture patterns in time-series data), design experiments (e.g., finance data contains time-series and we can verify the hypothesis in this scenario), implement the experiment as code (e.g., Pytorch model structure), and then execute the code to get feedback (e.g., metrics, loss curve, etc.). The experts learn from the feedback and improve in the next iteration. Based on the principles above, we have established a basic method framework that continuously proposes hypotheses, verifies them, and gets feedback from the real-world practice. This is the first scientific research automation framework that supports linking with real-world verification. For more detail, please refer to our 🖥️ Live Demo page. 🛠️ Development Collaborative Evolving Strategy for Automatic Data-Centric Development !image 🤝 Contributing We welcome contributions and suggestions to improve RD-Agent. Please refer to the Contributing Guide for more details on how to contribute. Before submitting a pull request, ensure that your code passes the automatic CI checks. 📝 Guidelines This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Contributing to this project is straightforward and rewarding. Whether it's solving an issue, addressing a bug, enhancing documentation, or even correcting a typo, every contribution is valuable and helps improve RDAgent. To get started, you can explore the issues list, or search for TODO: comments in the codebase by running the command grep -r "TODO:". Before we released RD-Agent as an open-source project on GitHub, it was an internal project within our group. Unfortunately, the internal commit history was not preserved when we removed some confidential code. As a result, some contributions from our group members, including Haotian Chen, Wenjun Feng, Haoxue Wang, Zeqi Ye, Xinjie Shen, and Jinhui Li, were not included in the public commits. ⚖️ Legal disclaimer The RD-agent is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. The RD-agent is aimed to facilitate research and development process in the financial industry and not ready-to-use for any financial investment or advice. Users shall independently assess and test the risks of the RD-agent in a specific use scenario, ensure the responsible use of AI technology, including but not limited to developing and integrating risk mitigation measures, and comply with all applicable laws and regulations in all applicable jurisdictions. The RD-agent does not provide financial opinions or reflect the opinions of Microsoft, nor is it designed to replace the role of qualified financial professionals in formulating, assessing, and approving finance products. The inputs and outputs of the RD-agent belong to the users and users shall assume all liability under any theory of liability, whether in contract, torts, regulatory, negligence, products liability, or otherwise, associated with use of the RD-agent and any inputs and outputs thereof.

rpaframework

RPA Framework ============= REQUEST for user input! We are looking at improving our keyword usage to cover situations where developer might be struggling to smoothly write task for a Robot. Describe the situation where your implementation speed slows due to the lack of easier syntax. Comment HERE _ .. contents:: Table of Contents :local: :depth: 1 .. include-docs-readme Introduction RPA Framework is a collection of open-source libraries and tools for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and it is designed to be used with both Robot Framework and Python. The goal is to offer well-documented and actively maintained core libraries for Software Robot Developers. Learn more about RPA at Robocorp Documentation_. The project is: 100% Open Source Sponsored by Robocorp_ Optimized for Robocorp Control Room and Developer Tools Accepting external contributions .. _Robot Framework: https://robotframework.org .. _Robot Framework Foundation: https://robotframework.org/foundation/ .. _Python: https://www.python.org/ .. _Robocorp: https://robocorp.com .. _Robocorp Documentation: https://robocorp.com/docs-robot-framework .. _Control Room: https://robocorp.com/docs/control-room .. _Developer Tools: https://robocorp.com/downloads .. _Installing Python Packages: https://robocorp.com/docs/setup/installing-python-package-dependencies Links ^^^^^ Homepage: `_ Documentation: _ PyPI: _ Release notes: _ RSS feed: _ .. image:: https://img.shields.io/github/actions/workflow/status/robocorp/rpaframework/main.yaml?style=for-the-badge :target: https://github.com/robocorp/rpaframework/actions/workflows/main.yaml :alt: Status .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/dw/rpaframework?style=for-the-badge :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework :alt: rpaframework .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/l/rpaframework.svg?style=for-the-badge&color=brightgreen :target: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html :alt: License Packages .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework.svg?label=rpaframework&style=for-the-badge :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework :alt: rpaframework latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-assistant.svg?label=rpaframework-assistant&style=for-the-badge :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-assistant :alt: rpaframework-assistant latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-aws.svg?label=rpaframework-aws&style=for-the-badge :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-aws :alt: rpaframework-aws latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-core.svg?label=rpaframework-core&style=for-the-badge :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-core :alt: rpaframework-core latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-google.svg?label=rpaframework-google&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-google :alt: rpaframework-google latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-hubspot.svg?label=rpaframework-hubspot&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-hubspot :alt: rpaframework-hubspot latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-openai.svg?label=rpaframework-openai&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-openai :alt: rpaframework-openai latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-pdf.svg?label=rpaframework-pdf&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-pdf :alt: rpaframework-pdf latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-recognition.svg?label=rpaframework-recognition&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-recognition :alt: rpaframework-recognition latest version .. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/rpaframework-windows.svg?label=rpaframework-windows&style=for-the-badge&color=blue :target: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/rpaframework-windows :alt: rpaframework-windows latest version From the above packages, rpaframework-core and rpaframework-recognition are support packages, which alone do not contain any libraries. Libraries The RPA Framework project currently includes the following libraries: The x in the PACKAGE column means that library is included in the rpaframework package and for example. x,pdf means that RPA.PDF library is provided in both the rpaframework and rpaframework-pdf packages. +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | LIBRARY NAME | DESCRIPTION | PACKAGE | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Archive_ | Archiving TAR and ZIP files | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Assistant_ | Display information to a user and request input. | assistant | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Browser.Selenium_ | Control browsers and automate the web | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Browser.Playwright_ | Newer way to control browsers | special (more below) | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Calendar_ | For date and time manipulations | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Cloud.AWS_ | Use Amazon AWS services | x,aws | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Cloud.Azure_ | Use Microsoft Azure services | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Cloud.Google_ | Use Google Cloud services | google | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Crypto_ | Common hashing and encryption operations | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Database_ | Interact with databases | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Desktop_ | Cross-platform desktop automation | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Desktop.Clipboard_ | Interact with the system clipboard | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Desktop.OperatingSystem_ | Read OS information and manipulate processes | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | DocumentAI_ | Intelligent Document Processing wrapper | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | DocumentAI.Base64AI_ | Intelligent Document Processing service | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | DocumentAI.Nanonets_ | Intelligent Document Processing service | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Email.Exchange_ | E-Mail operations (Exchange protocol) | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Email.ImapSmtp_ | E-Mail operations (IMAP & SMTP) | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Excel.Application_ | Control the Excel desktop application | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Excel.Files_ | Manipulate Excel files directly | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | FileSystem_ | Read and manipulate files and paths | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | FTP_ | Interact with FTP servers | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | HTTP_ | Interact directly with web APIs | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Hubspot_ | Access HubSpot CRM data objects | hubspot | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Images_ | Manipulate images | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | JavaAccessBridge_ | Control Java applications | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | JSON_ | Manipulate JSON objects | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | MFA_ | Authenticate using one-time passwords (OTP) & OAuth2 | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Notifier_ | Notify messages using different services | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | OpenAI_ | Artificial Intelligence service | openai | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Outlook.Application_ | Control the Outlook desktop application | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | PDF_ | Read and create PDF documents | x,pdf | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Robocorp.Process_ | Use the Robocorp Process API | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Robocorp.WorkItems_ | Use the Robocorp Work Items API | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Robocorp.Vault_ | Use the Robocorp Secrets API | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Robocorp.Storage_ | Use the Robocorp Asset Storage API | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Salesforce_ | Salesforce operations | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | SAP_ | Control SAP GUI desktop client | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Smartsheet_ | Access Smartsheet sheets | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Tables_ | Manipulate, sort, and filter tabular data | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Tasks_ | Control task execution | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Twitter_ | Twitter API interface | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Windows_ | Alternative library for Windows automation | x,windows | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ | Word.Application_ | Control the Word desktop application | x | +----------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+------------------------+ .. _Archive: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/archive/ .. _Assistant: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/assistant/ .. Browser.Playwright: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/browserplaywright/ .. Browser.Selenium: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/browserselenium/ .. _Calendar: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/calendar/ .. Cloud.AWS: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/cloudaws/ .. Cloud.Azure: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/cloudazure/ .. Cloud.Google: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/cloudgoogle/ .. _Crypto: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/crypto/ .. _Database: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/database/ .. _Desktop: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/desktop/ .. Desktop.Clipboard: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/desktopclipboard/ .. Desktop.Operatingsystem: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/desktopoperatingsystem/ .. _DocumentAI: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/documentai .. DocumentAI.Base64AI: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/documentaibase64ai/ .. DocumentAI.Nanonets: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/documentainanonets/ .. Email.Exchange: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/emailexchange/ .. Email.ImapSmtp: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/emailimapsmtp/ .. Excel.Application: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/excelapplication/ .. Excel.Files: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/excelfiles/ .. _FileSystem: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/filesystem/ .. _FTP: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/ftp/ .. _HTTP: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/http/ .. _Hubspot: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/hubspot/ .. _Images: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/images/ .. _JavaAccessBridge: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/javaaccessbridge/ .. _JSON: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/json/ .. _MFA: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/mfa/ .. _Notifier: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/notifier/ .. _OpenAI: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/openai/ .. Outlook.Application: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/outlookapplication/ .. _PDF: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/pdf/ .. Robocorp.Process: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/robocorpprocess/ .. Robocorp.WorkItems: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/robocorpworkitems/ .. Robocorp.Vault: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/robocorpvault/ .. Robocorp.Storage: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/robocorpstorage/ .. _Salesforce: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/salesforce/ .. _SAP: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/sap/ .. _Smartsheet: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/smartsheet/ .. _Tables: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/tables/ .. _Tasks: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/tasks/ .. _Twitter: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/twitter/ .. _Windows: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/windows/ .. Word.Application: https://rpaframework.org/libraries/wordapplication/ Installation of RPA.Browser.Playwright The RPA.Browser.Playwright at the moment requires special installation, because of the package size and the post install step it needs to be fully installed. Minimum required conda.yaml to install Playwright: .. code-block:: yaml channels: conda-forge dependencies: python=3.10.14 nodejs=22.9.0 pip=24.0 pip: robotframework-browser==18.8.1 rpaframework==28.6.3 rccPostInstall: rfbrowser init Installation Learn about installing Python packages at Installing Python Packages_. Default installation method with Robocorp Developer Tools_ using conda.yaml: .. code-block:: yaml channels: conda-forge dependencies: python=3.10.14 pip=24.0 pip: rpaframework==28.6.3 To install all extra packages (including Playwright dependencies), you can use: .. code-block:: yaml channels: conda-forge dependencies: python=3.10.14 tesseract=5.4.1 nodejs=22.9.0 pip=24.0 pip: robotframework-browser==18.8.1 rpaframework==28.6.3 rpaframework-aws==5.3.3 rpaframework-google==9.0.2 rpaframework-recognition==5.2.5 rccPostInstall: rfbrowser init Separate installation of AWS, PDF and Windows libraries without the main rpaframework: .. code-block:: yaml channels: conda-forge dependencies: python=3.10.14 pip=24.0 pip: rpaframework-aws==5.3.3 included in the rpaframework as an extra rpaframework-pdf==7.3.3 included in the rpaframework by default rpaframework-windows==7.5.2 included in the rpaframework by default Installation method with pip using Python venv_: .. code-block:: shell python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip install rpaframework .. note:: Python 3.8 or higher is required Example After installation the libraries can be directly imported inside Robot Framework_: .. code:: robotframework Settings Library RPA.Browser.Selenium Tasks Login as user Open available browser https://example.com Input text id:user-name ${USERNAME} Input text id:password ${PASSWORD} The libraries are also available inside Python_: .. code:: python from RPA.Browser.Selenium import Selenium lib = Selenium() lib.openavailablebrowser("https://example.com") lib.input_text("id:user-name", username) lib.input_text("id:password", password) Support and contact rpaframework.org _ for library documentation Robocorp Documentation_ for guides and tutorials #rpaframework channel in Robot Framework Slack_ if you have open questions or want to contribute Communicate with your fellow Software Robot Developers and Robocorp experts at Robocorp Developers Slack_ .. _Robot Framework Slack: https://robotframework-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/ .. _Robocorp Developers Slack: https://robocorp-developers.slack.com Contributing Found a bug? Missing a critical feature? Interested in contributing? Head over to the Contribution guide _ to see where to get started. Development Repository development is Python_ based and requires at minimum Python version 3.8+ installed on the development machine. The default Python version used in the Robocorp Robot template is 3.10.14 so it is a good choice for the version to install. Not recommended versions are 3.7.6 and 3.8.1, because they have issues with some of the dependencies related to rpaframework. At the time the newer Python versions starting from 3.12 are also not recommended, because some of the dependencies might cause issues. Repository development tooling is based on poetry and invoke. Poetry is the underlying tool used for compiling, building and running the package. Invoke is used for scripting purposes, for example for linting, testing and publishing tasks. Before writing any code, please read and acknowledge our extensive Dev Guide_. .. _Dev Guide: https://github.com/robocorp/rpaframework/blob/master/docs/source/contributing/development.md First steps to start developing: initial poetry configuration .. code:: shell poetry config virtualenvs.path null poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true poetry config repositories.devpi "https://devpi.robocorp.cloud/ci/test" git clone the repository #. create a new Git branch or switch to correct branch or stay in master branch some branch naming conventions feature/name-of-feature, hotfix/name-of-the-issue, release/number-of-release #. poetry install which install package with its dependencies into the .venv directory of the package, for example packages/main/.venv #. if testing against Robocorp Robot which is using devdata/env.json set environment variables or poetry build and use resulting .whl file (in the dist/ directory) in the Robot conda.yaml or poetry build and push resulting .whl file (in the dist/ directory) into a repository and use raw url to include it in the Robot conda.yaml another possibility for Robocorp internal development is to use Robocorp devpi instance, by poetry publish --ci and point conda.yaml to use rpaframework version in devpi #. poetry run python -m robot common ROBOT_ARGS from Robocorp Robot template: --report NONE --outputdir output --logtitle "Task log" #. poetry run python #. invoke lint to make sure that code formatting is according to rpaframework repository guidelines. It is possible and likely that Github action will fail the if developer has not linted the code changes. Code formatting is based on black and flake8 and those are run with the invoke lint. #. the library documentation can be created in the repository root (so called "meta" package level). The documentation is built by the docgen tools using the locally installed version of the project, local changes for the main package will be reflected each time you generate the docs, but if you want to see local changes for optional packages, you must utilize invoke install-local --package using the appropriate package name (e.g., rpaframework-aws). This will reinstall that package as a local editable version instead of from PyPI. Multiple such packages can be added by repeating the use of the --package option. In order to reset this, use invoke install --reset. poetry update and/or invoke install-local --package make docs open docs/build/html/index.html with the browser to view the changes or execute make local and navigate to localhost:8000 to view docs as a live local webpage. .. code-block:: toml Before [tool.poetry.dependencies] python = "^3.8" rpaframework = { path = "packages/main", extras = ["cv", "playwright", "aws"] } rpaframework-google = "^4.0.0" rpaframework-windows = "^4.0.0" After [tool.poetry.dependencies] python = "^3.8" rpaframework = { path = "packages/main", extras = ["cv", "playwright"] } rpaframework-aws = { path = "packages/aws" } rpaframework-google = "^4.0.0" rpaframework-windows = "^4.0.0" #. invoke test (this will run both Python unittests and robotframework tests defined in the packages tests/ directory) to run specific Python test: poetry run pytest path/to/test.py::test_function to run specific Robotframework test: inv testrobot -r -t #. git commit changes #. git push changes to remote #. create pull request from the branch describing changes included in the description #. update docs/source/releasenotes.rst with changes (commit and push) Packaging and publishing are done after changes have been merged into master branch. All the following steps should be done within master branch. #. git pull latest changes into master branch #. in the package directory containing changes execute invoke lint and invoke test #. update pyproject.toml with new version according to semantic versioning #. update docs/source/releasenotes.rst with changes #. in the repository root (so called "meta" package level) run command poetry update #. git commit changed poetry.lock files (on meta and target package level), releasenotes.rst and pyproject.toml with message "PACKAGE. version x.y.z" #. git push #. invoke publish after Github action on master branch is all green Some recommended tools for development Visual Studio Code_ as a code editor with following extensions: Sema4.ai_ Robot Framework Language Server_ GitLens_ Python extension_ GitHub Desktop_ will make version management less prone to errors .. _poetry: https://python-poetry.org .. _invoke: https://www.pyinvoke.org .. _Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com .. _GitHub Desktop: https://desktop.github.com .. _Sema4.ai: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sema4ai.sema4ai .. _Robot Framework Language Server: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=robocorp.robotframework-lsp .. _GitLens: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio.gitlens .. _Python extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-python.python .. _black: https://pypi.org/project/black/ .. _flake8: https://pypi.org/project/flake8/ .. _venv: https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html License This project is open-source and licensed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0 `_.

airspace-hugo

Airspace Hugo This theme is suitable for a wide variety of businesses, including marketing, photography, and development enterprises. 👀Demo | Page Speed (95%)🚀 🔑Key Features 📄 9+ Pre-Designed Pages 🌐 Multiple language support (Fr, En) 📊 Google Analytics support 🎨 CSS and JS bundle with Hugo Pipe 🎨 Bootstrap Based ⚙️ Netlify settings predefine 👥 Multiple authors available ✉️ Contact form support 🔄 GDPR consent support 🗺️ Google Maps support 🎉 Fun factors counter 🚀 Google Page Speed optimized 🌐 Open Graph meta tag 🐦 Twitter Card meta tag 📄 9+ Pre-Designed Pages 🏠 Home Page 📚 Blog Page 📝 Blog Single Page 📄 Project Page 🛠️ Services 💰 Pricing ❓ FAQ ℹ️ About Page 📞 Contact Page 🖥️Local development Or Check out Full Documentation. ⚙️Deployment and hosting Follow the steps. 🐞Reporting Issues We use GitHub Issues as the official bug tracker for the Airspace Template. Please Search existing issues. Someone may have already reported the same problem. If your problem or idea has not been addressed yet, feel free to open a new issue. 📱Submit Your Website To Our Showcase Are you using Airspace Hugo theme? Submit it to our showcase. Our showcase aims to demonstrate to the world what amazing websites people like you have created utilizing our Hugo themes and to show that Hugo has tremendous capabilities as a Static Site Generator. View all the websites powered by Airspace Hugo from here. Submit your Airspace Hugo powered website. 📄License Copyright &copy; Designed by Themefisher & Developed by Gethugothemes Code License: Released under the MIT license. Image license: The images are only for demonstration purposes. They have their licenses. We don't have permission to share those images. 🙏Special Thanks Bootstrap Jquery Ionicons Magnific Popup Shuffle Slick Slider Google Fonts All Contributors 👨‍💻Hire Us Besides developing unique, blazing-fast Hugo themes, we also provide customized services. We specialize in creating affordable, high-quality static websites based on Hugo. If you need to customize the theme or complete website development from scratch, you can hire us. Check Our Services 💎Premium Themes By Us | | | | |:---:|:---:|:---:| | Get 55+ Premium Hugo Themes Bundle | Bigspring | Navigator |

short-video-automation

Short Video Automation Automate the creation of short videos with text-to-speech, audio merging, image overlay, and background audio. It takes average 40 second to create a 35 second short video. Example videos Here are some example videos created using Short Video Automation: A fact video about earth. https://github.com/ChetanXpro/short-video-automation/assets/107798155/1220d3d7-46ac-4c6f-90ad-9f9529a1bca6 Overview Short Video Automation is a tool that simplifies the process of creating short videos. It combines various multimedia elements to produce engaging videos quickly. The key features of this tool include: AI-Generated Scripts: Generate scripts with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). These scripts will form the basis of your short videos. Text-to-Speech: Convert the generated scripts into audio using text-to-speech technology. Audio Merging: Combine the generated audio with a sample video using FFmpeg to create the audio track for your short video. Image Overlay: For specific keywords in the script, automatically download images and overlay them on the video. Background Audio: Add a background audio track to enhance the video's appeal. Usage Prerequisites Node.js and npm installed FFmpeg installed Installation Clone the repository: Download and paste a base video which you want to use in project root dir You can test with this video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZNN3GX2iR74FxrTM_6adDEnl6BA8gKcc/view?usp=sharing Then find any interesting quora question and answer and paste its link in tool Run the tool

awesome-quantum-machine-learning

Awesome Quantum Machine Learning A curated list of awesome quantum machine learning algorithms,study materials,libraries and software (by language). Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Why Quantum Machine Learning? BASICS What is Quantum Mechanics? What is Quantum Computing? What is Topological Quantum Computing? Quantum Computing vs Classical Computing QUANTUM COMPUTING Atom Structure Photon wave Electron Fluctuation or spin States SuperPosition SuperPosition specific for machine learning(Quantum Walks) Classical Bit Quantum Bit or Qubit or Qbit Basic Gates in Quantum Computing Quantum Diode Quantum Transistor Quantum Processor Quantum Registery QRAM Quantum Entanglement QUANTUM COMPUTING MACHINE LEARNING BRIDGE Complex Numbers Tensors Tensors Network Oracle Hadamard transform Hilbert Space eigenvalues and eigenvectors Schr¨odinger Operators Quantum lambda calculus Quantum Amplitute Phase Qubits Encode and Decode convert classical bit to qubit Quantum Dirac and Kets Quantum Complexity Arbitrary State Generation QUANTUM ALGORITHMS Quantum Fourier Transform Variational-Quantum-Eigensolver Grovers Algorithm Shor's algorithm Hamiltonian Oracle Model Bernstein-Vazirani Algorithm Simon’s Algorithm Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm Gradient Descent Phase Estimation Haar Tansform Quantum Ridgelet Transform Quantum NP Problem QUANTUM MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS Quantum K-Nearest Neighbour Quantum K-Means Quantum Fuzzy C-Means Quantum Support Vector Machine Quantum Genetic Algorithm Quantum Hidden Morkov Models Quantum state classification with Bayesian methods Quantum Ant Colony Optimization Quantum Cellular Automata Quantum Classification using Principle Component Analysis Quantum Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm Quantum Elephant Herding Optimization Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization Quantum Annealing Expectation-Maximization QAUNTUM NEURAL NETWORK Quantum perceptrons Qurons Quantum Auto Encoder Quantum Annealing Photonic Implementation of Quantum Neural Network Quantum Feed Forward Neural Network Quantum Boltzman Neural Network Quantum Neural Net Weight Storage Quantum Upside Down Neural Net Quantum Hamiltonian Neural Net QANN QPN SAL Quantum Hamiltonian Learning Compressed Quantum Hamiltonian Learning QAUNTUM STATISTICAL DATA ANALYSIS Quantum Probability Theory Kolmogorovian Theory Quantum Measurement Problem Intuitionistic Logic Heyting Algebra Quantum Filtering Paradoxes Quantum Stochastic Process Double Negation Quantum Stochastic Calculus Hamiltonian Calculus Quantum Ito's Formula Quantum Stochastic Differential Equations(QSDE) Quantum Stochastic Integration Itō Integral Quasiprobability Distributions Quantum Wiener Processes Quantum Statistical Ensemble Quantum Density Operator or Density Matrix Gibbs Canonical Ensemble Quantum Mean Quantum Variance Envariance Polynomial Optimization Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization Quantum Gradient Descent Quantum Based Newton's Method for Constrained Optimization Quantum Based Newton's Method for UnConstrained Optimization Quantum Ensemble Quantum Topology Quantum Topological Data Analysis Quantum Bayesian Hypothesis Quantum Statistical Decision Theory Quantum Minimax Theorem Quantum Hunt-Stein Theorem Quantum Locally Asymptotic Normality Quantum Ising Model Quantum Metropolis Sampling Quantum Monte Carlo Approximation Quantum Bootstrapping Quantum Bootstrap Aggregation Quantum Decision Tree Classifier Quantum Outlier Detection Cholesky-Decomposition for Quantum Chemistry Quantum Statistical Inference Asymptotic Quantum Statistical Inference Quantum Gaussian Mixture Modal Quantum t-design Quantum Central Limit Theorem Quantum Hypothesis Testing Quantum Chi-squared and Goodness of Fit Testing Quantum Estimation Theory Quantum Way of Linear Regression Asymptotic Properties of Quantum Outlier Detection in Quantum Concepts QAUNTUM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Heuristic Quantum Mechanics Consistent Quantum Reasoning Quantum Reinforcement Learning QAUNTUM COMPUTER VISION QUANTUM PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES , TOOLs and SOFTWARES ALL QUANTUM ALGORITHMS SOURCE CODES , GITHUBS QUANTUM HOT TOPICS Quantum Cognition Quantum Camera Quantum Mathematics Quantum Information Processing Quantum Image Processing Quantum Cryptography Quantum Elastic Search Quantum DNA Computing Adiabetic Quantum Computing Topological Big Data Anlytics using Quantum Hamiltonian Time Based Quantum Computing Deep Quantum Learning Quantum Tunneling Quantum Entanglment Quantum Eigen Spectrum Quantum Dots Quantum elctro dynamics Quantum teleportation Quantum Supremacy Quantum Zeno Effect Quantum Cohomology Quantum Chromodynamics Quantum Darwinism Quantum Coherence Quantum Decoherence Topological Quantum Computing Topological Quantum Field Theory Quantum Knots Topological Entanglment Boson Sampling Quantum Convolutional Code Stabilizer Code Quantum Chaos Quantum Game Theory Quantum Channel Tensor Space Theory Quantum Leap Quantum Mechanics for Time Travel Quantum Secured Block Chain Quantum Internet Quantum Optical Network Quantum Interference Quantum Optical Network Quantum Operating System Electron Fractionalization Flip-Flop Quantum Computer Quantum Information with Gaussian States Quantum Anomaly Detection Distributed Secure Quantum Machine Learning Decentralized Quantum Machine Learning Artificial Agents for Quantum Designs Light Based Quantum Chips for AI Training QUANTUM STATE PREPARATION ALGORITHM FOR MACHINE LEARNING Pure Quantum State Product State Matrix Product State Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger State W state AKLT model Majumdar–Ghosh Model Multistate Landau–Zener Models Projected entangled-pair States Infinite Projected entangled-pair States Corner Transfer Matrix Method Tensor-entanglement Renormalization Tree Tensor Network for Supervised Learning QUANTUM MACHINE LEARNING VS DEEP LEARNING QUANTUM MEETUPS QUANTUM GOOGLE GROUPS QUANTUM BASED COMPANIES QUANTUM LINKEDLIN QUANTUM BASED DEGREES CONSOLIDATED QUANTUM ML BOOKS CONSOLIDATED QUANTUM ML VIDEOS CONSOLIDATED QUANTUM ML Reserach Papers CONSOLIDATED QUANTUM ML Reserach Scientist RECENT QUANTUM UPDATES FORUM ,PAGES AND NEWSLETTER INTRODUCTION Why Quantum Machine Learning? Machine Learning(ML) is just a term in recent days but the work effort start from 18th century. What is Machine Learning ? , In Simple word the answer is making the computer or application to learn themselves . So its totally related with computing fields like computer science and IT ? ,The answer is not true . ML is a common platform which is mingled in all the aspects of the life from agriculture to mechanics . Computing is a key component to use ML easily and effectively . To be more clear ,Who is the mother of ML ?, As no option Mathematics is the mother of ML . The world tremendous invention complex numbers given birth to this field . Applying mathematics to the real life problem always gives a solution . From Neural Network to the complex DNA is running under some specific mathematical formulas and theorems. As computing technology growing faster and faster mathematics entered into this field and makes the solution via computing to the real world . In the computing technology timeline once a certain achievements reached peoples interested to use advanced mathematical ideas such as complex numbers ,eigen etc and its the kick start for the ML field such as Artificial Neural Network ,DNA Computing etc. Now the main question, why this field is getting boomed now a days ? , From the business perspective , 8-10 Years before during the kick start time for ML ,the big barrier is to merge mathematics into computing field . people knows well in computing has no idea on mathematics and research mathematician has no idea on what is computing . The education as well as the Job Opportunities is like that in that time . Even if a person tried to study both then the business value for making a product be not good. Then the top product companies like Google ,IBM ,Microsoft decided to form a team with mathematician ,a physician and a computer science person to come up with various ideas in this field . Success of this team made some wonderful products and they started by providing cloud services using this product . Now we are in this stage. So what's next ? , As mathematics reached the level of time travel concepts but the computing is still running under classical mechanics . the companies understood, the computing field must have a change from classical to quantum, and they started working on the big Quantum computing field, and the market named this field as Quantum Information Science .The kick start is from Google and IBM with the Quantum Computing processor (D-Wave) for making Quantum Neural Network .The field of Quantum Computer Science and Quantum Information Science will do a big change in AI in the next 10 years. Waiting to see that........... .(google, ibm). References D-Wave - Owner of a quantum processor Google - Quantum AI Lab IBM - Quantum Computer Lab Quora - Question Regarding future of quantum AI NASA - NASA Quantum Works Youtube - Google Video of a Quantum Processor external-link - MIT Review microsoft new product - Newly Launched Microsoft Quantum Language and Development Kit microsoft - Microsoft Quantum Related Works Google2 - Google Quantum Machine Learning Blog BBC - About Google Quantum Supremacy,IBM Quantum Computer and Microsoft Q Google Quantum Supremacy - Latest 2019 Google Quantum Supremacy Achievement IBM Quantum Supremacy - IBM Talk on Quantum Supremacy as a Primer VICE on the fight - IBM Message on Google Quantum Supremacy IBM Zurich Quantum Safe Cryptography - An interesting startup to replace all our Certificate Authority Via Cloud and IBM Q BASICS What is Quantum Mechanics? In a single line study of an electron moved out of the atom then its classical mechanic ,vibrates inside the atom its quantum mechanics WIKIPEDIA - Basic History and outline LIVESCIENCE. - A survey YOUTUBE - Simple Animation Video Explanining Great. What is Quantum Computing? A way of parallel execution of multiple processess in a same time using qubit ,It reduces the computation time and size of the processor probably in neuro size WIKIPEDIA - Basic History and outline WEBOPEDIA. - A survey YOUTUBE - Simple Animation Video Explanining Great. Quantum Computing vs Classical Computing LINK - Basic outline Quantum Computing Atom Structure one line : Electron Orbiting around the nucleous in an eliptical format YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic atom structure Photon Wave one line : Light nornmally called as wave transmitted as photons as similar as atoms in solid particles YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic photon 1 YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic photon 2 Electron Fluctuation or spin one line : When a laser light collide with solid particles the electrons of the atom will get spin between the orbitary layers of the atom ) YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic Electron Spin 1 YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic Electron Spin 2 YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the basic Electron Spin 3 States one line : Put a point on the spinning electron ,if the point is in the top then state 1 and its in bottom state 0 YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the Quantum States SuperPosition two line : During the spin of the electron the point may be in the middle of upper and lower position, So an effective decision needs to take on the point location either 0 or 1 . Better option to analyse it along with other electrons using probability and is called superposition YOUTUBE - A nice animation video about the Quantum Superposition SuperPosition specific for machine learning(Quantum Walks) one line : As due to computational complexity ,quantum computing only consider superposition between limited electrons ,In case to merge more than one set quantum walk be the idea YOUTUBE - A nice video about the Quantum Walks Classical Bits one line : If electron moved from one one atom to other ,from ground state to excited state a bit value 1 is used else bit value 0 used Qubit one line : The superposition value of states of a set of electrons is Qubit YOUTUBE - A nice video about the Quantum Bits 1 YOUTUBE - A nice video about the Bits and Qubits 2 Basic Gates in Quantum Computing one line : As like NOT, OR and AND , Basic Gates like NOT, Hadamard gate , SWAP, Phase shift etc can be made with quantum gates YOUTUBE - A nice video about the Quantum Gates Quantum Diode one line : Quantum Diodes using a different idea from normal diode, A bunch of laser photons trigger the electron to spin and the quantum magnetic flux will capture the information YOUTUBE - A nice video about the Quantum Diode Quantum Transistors one line : A transistor default have Source ,drain and gate ,Here source is photon wave ,drain is flux and gate is classical to quantum bits QUORA -Discussion about the Quantum Transistor YOUTUBE - Well Explained Quantum Processor one line : A nano integration circuit performing the quantum gates operation sorrounded by cooling units to reduce the tremendous amount of heat YOUTUBE - Well Explained Quantum Registery QRAM one line : Comapring the normal ram ,its ultrafast and very small in size ,the address location can be access using qubits superposition value ,for a very large memory set coherent superposition(address of address) be used PDF - very Well Explained QUANTUM COMPUTING MACHINE LEARNING BRIDGE Complex Numbers one line : Normally Waves Interference is in n dimensional structure , to find a polynomial equation n order curves ,better option is complex number YOUTUBE - Wonderful Series very super Explained Tensors one line : Vectors have a direction in 2D vector space ,If on a n dimensional vector space ,vectors direction can be specify with the tensor ,The best solution to find the superposition of a n vector electrons spin space is representing vectors as tensors and doing tensor calculus YOUTUBE - Wonderful super Explained tensors basics YOUTUBE - Quantum tensors basics Tensors Network one line : As like connecting multiple vectors ,multple tensors form a network ,solving such a network reduce the complexity of processing qubits YOUTUBE - Tensors Network Some ideas specifically for quantum algorithms QUANTUM MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS Quantum K-Nearest Neighbour info : Here the centroid(euclidean distance) can be detected using the swap gates test between two states of the qubit , As KNN is regerssive loss can be tally using the average PDF1 from Microsoft - Theory Explanation PDF2 - A Good Material to understand the basics Matlab - Yet to come soon Python - Yet to come soon Quantum K-Means info : Two Approaches possible ,1. FFT and iFFT to make an oracle and calculate the means of superposition 2. Adiobtic Hamiltonian generation and solve the hamiltonian to determine the cluster PDF1 - Applying Quantum Kmeans on Images in a nice way PDF2 - Theory PDF3 - Explaining well the K-means clustering using hamiltonian Matlab - Yet to come soon Python - Yet to come soon Quantum Fuzzy C-Means info : As similar to kmeans fcm also using the oracle dialect ,but instead of means,here oracle optimization followed by a rotation gate is giving a good result PDF1 - Theory Matlab - Yet to come soon Python - Yet to come soon Quantum Support Vector Machine info : A little different from above as here kernel preparation is via classical and the whole training be in oracles and oracle will do the classification, As SVM is linear ,An optimal Error(Optimum of the Least Squares Dual Formulation) Based regression is needed to improve the performance PDF1 - Nice Explanation but little hard to understand :) PDF2 - Nice Application of QSVM Matlab - Yet to come soon Python - Yet to come soon Quantum Genetic Algorithm info : One of the best algorithm suited for Quantum Field ,Here the chromosomes act as qubit vectors ,the crossover part carrying by an evaluation and the mutation part carrying by the rotation of gates ![Flow Chart]() PDF1 - Very Beautiful Article , well explained and superp PDF2 - A big theory :) PDF3 - Super Comparison Matlab - Simulation Python1 - Simulation Python2 - Yet to come Quantum Hidden Morkov Models info : As HMM is already state based ,Here the quantum states acts as normal for the markov chain and the shift between states is using quantum operation based on probability distribution ![Flow Chart]() PDF1 - Nice idea and explanation PDF2 - Nice but a different concept little Matlab - Yet to come Python1 - Yet to come Python2 - Yet to come Quantum state classification with Bayesian methods info : Quantum Bayesian Network having the same states concept using quantum states,But here the states classification to make the training data as reusable is based on the density of the states(Interference) ![Bayesian Network Sample1]() ![Bayesian Network Sample2]() ![Bayesian Network Sample3]() PDF1 - Good Theory PDF2 - Good Explanation Matlab - Yet to come Python1 - Yet to come Python2 - Yet to come Quantum Ant Colony Optimization info : A good algorithm to process multi dimensional equations, ACO is best suited for Sales man issue , QACO is best suited for Sales man in three or more dimension, Here the quantum rotation circuit is doing the peromene update and qubits based colony communicating all around the colony in complex space ![Ant Colony Optimization 1]() PDF1 - Good Concept PDF2 - Good Application Matlab - Yet to come Python1 - Yet to come Python2 - Yet to come Quantum Cellular Automata info : One of the very complex algorithm with various types specifically used for polynomial equations and to design the optimistic gates for a problem, Here the lattice is formed using the quatum states and time calculation is based on the change of the state between two qubits ,Best suited for nano electronics ![Quantum Cellular Automata]() Wikipedia - Basic PDF1 - Just to get the keywords PDF2 - Nice Explanation and an easily understandable application Matlab - Yet to come Python1 - Yet to come Python2 - Yet to come QAUNTUM NEURAL NETWORK one line : Its really one of the hardest topic , To understand easily ,Normal Neural Network is doing parallel procss ,QNN is doing parallel of parallel processess ,In theory combination of various activation functions is possible in QNN ,In Normal NN more than one activation function reduce the performance and increase the complexity Quantum perceptrons info : Perceptron(layer) is the basic unit in Neural Network ,The quantum version of perceptron must satisfy both linear and non linear problems , Quantum Concepts is combination of linear(calculus of superposition) and nonlinear(State approximation using probability) ,To make a perceptron in quantum world ,Transformation(activation function) of non linearity to certain limit is needed ,which is carrying by phase estimation algorithm ![Quantum Perceptron 3]() PDF1 - Good Theory PDF2 - Good Explanation Matlab - Yet to come Python1 - Yet to come Python2 - Yet to come QAUNTUM STATISTICAL DATA ANALYSIS one line : An under research concept ,It can be seen in multiple ways, one best way if you want to apply n derivative for a problem in current classical theory its difficult to compute as its serialization problem instead if you do parallelization of differentiation you must estimate via probability the value in all flows ,Quantum Probability Helps to achieve this ,as the loss calculation is very less . the other way comparatively booming is Quantum Bayesianism, its a solution to solve most of the uncertainity problem in statistics to combine time and space in highly advanced physical research QUANTUM PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES , TOOLs and SOFTWARES All info : All Programming languages ,softwares and tools in alphabetical order Software - Nice content of all Python library - A python library Matlab based python library - Matlab Python Library Quantum Tensor Network Github - Tensor Network Bayesforge - A Beautiful Amazon Web Service Enabled Framework for Quantum Alogorithms and Data Analytics Rigetti - A best tools repository to use quantum computer in real time Rigetti Forest - An API to connect Quantum Computer quil/pyQuil - A quantum instruction language to use forest framework Grove - Grove is a repository to showcase quantum Fourier transform, phase estimation, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, and others developed using Forest QISKit - A IBM Kit to access quantum computer and mainly for quantum circuits IBM Bluemix Simulator - A Bluemix Simulator for Quantum Circuits Microsoft Quantum Development Kit - Microsoft Visual Studio Enbaled Kit for Quantum Circuit Creation Microsoft "Q#" - Microsoft Q Sharp a new Programming Language for Quantum Circuit Creation qiskit api python - An API to connect IBM Quantum Computer ,With the generated token its easy to connect ,but very limited utils ,Lot of new utils will come soon Cyclops Tensor Framework - A framework to do tensor network simulations Python ToolKit for chemistry and physics Quantum Algorithm simulations - A New Started Project for simulating molecule and solids Bayesian Based Quatum Projects Repository - A nice repository and the kickstarter of bayesforge Google Fermion Products - A newly launched product specifivally for chemistry simulation Tree Tensor Networks - Interesting Tensor Network in Incubator Deep Tensor Neural Network - Some useful information about Tensor Neural Network in Incubator Generative Tensorial Networks - A startup to apply machine learning via tensor network for drug discovery Google Bristlecone - A new Quantum Processor from Google , Aimed for Future Hardwares with full fledged AI support XANADU - A Light based Quantum Hardware(chips supports) and Software Company Started in Preparation Stage. Soon will be in market fathom computing - A new concept to train the ai in a processor using light and quantum based concepts. soon products will be launch Alibaba Quantum Computing Cloud Service - Cloud Service to access 11 Bit Quantum Computing Processor Atomistic Machine Learning Project - Seems something Interesting with Deep Tensor Network for Quantum Chemistry Applications circQ and Google Works - Google Top Efforts on Tools IBM Safe Cryptography on Cloud - IBM Started and Developing a Quantm Safe Cryptography to replace all our Certificate Authority via Cloud Google Tensor Network Open Source - Google Started the Most Scientist Preferred Way To Use a Quantum Computer Circuit. Tensor Flow Which Makes Easy to Design the Network and Will Leave the Work Effect Of Gates, Processor Preparation and also going to tell the beauty of Maths Google Tensor Network Github - Github Project of Google Tensor Network Quantum Tensorflow - Yet to come soon Quantum Spark - Yet to come soon Quatum Map Reduce - Yet to come soon Quantum Database - Yet to come soon Quantum Server - Yet to come soon Quantum Data Analytics - Yet to come soon QUANTUM HOT TOPICS Deep Quantum Learning why and what is deep learning? In one line , If you know deep learning you can get a good job :) ,Even a different platform undergraduated and graduated person done a master specialization in deep learning can work in this big sector :), Practically speaking machine learning (vector mathematics) , deep learning (vector space(Graphics) mathematics) and big data are the terms created by big companies to make a trend in the market ,but in science and research there is no word such that , Now a days if you ask a junior person working in this big companies ,what is deep learning ,you will get some reply as "doing linear regression with stochastic gradient for a unsupervised data using Convolutional Neural Network :)" ,They knows the words clearly and knows how to do programming using that on a bunch of "relative data" , If you ask them about the FCM , SVM and HMM etc algorithms ,they will simply say these are olden days algorithms , deep learning replaced all :), But actually they dont know from the birth to the till level and the effectiveness of algorithms and mathematics ,How many mathematical theorems in vector, spaces , tensors etc solved to find this "hiding the complexity technology", They did not played with real non relative data like medical images, astro images , geology images etc , finding a relation and features is really complex and looping over n number of images to do pattern matching is a giant work , Now a days the items mentioned as deep learning (= multiple hidden artifical neural network) is not suitable for that why quantum deep learning or deep quantum learning? In the mid of Artificial Neural Network Research people realised at the maximum extreme only certain mathematical operations possible to do with ANN and the aim of this ANN is to achieve parallel execution of many mathematical operations , In artificial Intelligence ,the world intelligence stands for mathematics ,how effective if a probem can be solvable is based on the mathematics logic applying on the problem , more the logic will give more performance(more intelligent), This goal open the gate for quantum artificial neural network, On applying the ideas behind the deep learning to quantum mechanics environment, its possible to apply complex mathematical equations to n number of non relational data to find more features and can improve the performance Quantum Machine Learning vs Deep Learning Its fun to discuss about this , In recent days most of the employees from Product Based Companies Like google,microsoft etc using the word deep learning ,What actually Deep Learning ? and is it a new inventions ? how to learn this ? Is it replacing machine learning ? these question come to the mind of junior research scholars and mid level employees The one answer to all questions is deep learning = parallel "for" loops ,No more than that ,Its an effective way of executing multiple tasks repeatly and to reduce the computation cost, But it introduce a big cap between mathematics and computerscience , How ? All classical algorithms based on serial processing ,Its depends on the feedback of the first loop ,On applying a serial classical algorithm in multiple clusters wont give a good result ,but some light weight parallel classical algorithms(Deep learning) doing the job in multiple clusters and its not suitable for complex problems, What is the solution for then? As in the title Quantum Machine Learning ,The advantage behind is deep learning is doing the batch processing simply on the data ,but quantum machine learning designed to do batch processing as per the algorithm The product companies realised this one and they started migrating to quantum machine learning and executing the classical algorithms on quantum concept gives better result than deep learning algorithms on classical computer and the target to merge both to give very wonderful result References Quora - Good Discussion Quora - The Bridge Discussion Pdf - Nice Discussion Google - Google Research Discussion Microsoft - Microsoft plan to merge both IBM - IBM plan to merge both IBM Project - IBM Project idea MIT and Google - Solutions for all questions QUANTUM MEETUPS Meetup 1 - Quantum Physics Meetup 2 - Quantum Computing London Meetup 3 - Quantum Computing New York Meetup 4 - Quantum Computing Canada Meetup 5 - Quantum Artificial Intelligence Texas Meetup 6 - Genarl Quantum Mechanics , Mathematics New York Meetup 7 - Quantum Computing Mountain View California Meetup 8 - Statistical Analysis New York Meetup 9 - Quantum Mechanics London UK Meetup 10 - Quantum Physics Sydney Australia Meetup 11 - Quantum Physics Berkeley CA Meetup 12 - Quantum Computing London UK Meetup 13 - Quantum Mechanics Carmichael CA Meetup 14 - Maths and Science Group Portland Meetup 15 - Quantum Physics Santa Monica, CA Meetup 16 - Quantum Mechanics London Meetup 17 - Quantum Computing London Meetup 18 - Quantum Meta Physics ,Kansas City , Missouri ,US Meetup 19 - Quantum Mechanics and Physics ,Boston ,Massachusetts ,US Meetup 20 - Quantum Physics and Mechanics ,San Francisco ,California Meetup 21 - Quantum Mechanics ,Langhorne, Pennsylvania Meetup 22 - Quantum Mechanics ,Portland QUANTUM BASED DEGREES Plenty of courses around the world and many Universities Launching it day by day ,Instead of covering only Quantum ML , Covering all Quantum Related topics gives more idea in the order below Available Courses Quantum Mechanics for Science and Engineers Online Standford university - Nice Preparatory Course edx - Quantum Mechanics for Everyone NPTEL 1 - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum mechanics NPTEL 2 NPTEL 3 NPTEL 4 NPTEL 5 Class Based Course UK Bristol Australia Australian National University Europe Maxs Planks University Quantum Physics Online MIT - Super Explanation and well basics NPTEL - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum Physics Class Based Course Europe University of Copenhagen Quantum Chemistry Online NPTEL 1 - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum Chemistry NPTEL 2 - Class Based Course Europe UGent Belgium Quantum Computing Online MIT - Super Explanation and well basics edx - Nice Explanation NPTEL - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum Computing Class Based Course Canada uwaterloo Singapore National University Singapore USA Berkley China Baidu Quantum Technology Class Based Course Canada uwaterloo Singapore National University Singapore Europe Munich Russia Skoltech Quantum Information Science External Links quantwiki Online MIT - Super Explanation and well basics edx - Nice Explanation NPTEL - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum information and computing Class Based Course USA MIT Standford University Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science - University of Maryland Canada Perimeter Institute Singapore National University Singapore Europe ULB Belgium IQOQI Quantum Electronics Online MIT - Wonderful Course NPTEL - Nice Series of Courses to understand basics and backbone of quantum Electronics Class Based Course USA Texas Europe Zurich ICFO Asia Tata Institute Quantum Field Theory Online Standford university - Nice Preparatory Course edx - Some QFT Concepts available Class Based Course UK Imperial Europe Vrije Quantum Computer Science Class Based Course USA Oxford Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science - University of Maryland Quantum Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning External Links Quora 1 Quora 1 Artificial Agents Research for Quantum Designs Quantum Mathematics Class Based Course USA University of Notre CONSOLIDATED Quantum Research Papers scirate - Plenty of Quantum Research Papers Available Peter Wittek - Famous Researcher for the Quantum Machine Leanrning , Published a book in this topic [Murphy Yuezhen Niu] (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0wJPxfkAAAAJ&hl=en) - A good researcher published some nice articles Recent Quantum Updates forum ,pages and newsletter Quantum-Tech - A Beautiful Newsletter Page Publishing Amazing Links facebook Quantum Machine Learning - Running By me . Not that much good :). You can get some ideas Linkedlin Quantum Machine Learning - A nice page running by experts. Can get plenty of ideas FOSDEM 2019 Quantum Talks - A one day talk in fosdem 2019 with more than 10 research topics,tools and ideas FOSDEM 2020 Quantum Talks - Live talk in fosdem 2020 with plenty new research topics,tools and ideas License Dedicated Opensources ![Dedicated Opensources]() Source code of plenty of Algortihms in Image Processing , Data Mining ,etc in Matlab, Python ,Java and VC++ Scripts Good Explanations of Plenty of algorithms with flow chart etc Comparison Matrix of plenty of algorithms Is Quantum Machine Learning Will Reveal the Secret Maths behind Astrology? Awesome Machine Learning and Deep Learning Mathematics is online Published Basic Presentation of the series Quantum Machine Learning Contribution If you think this page might helpful. Please help for World Education Charity or kids who wants to learn

magic

An AI-based Low-Code and No-Code Software Development Automation Framework IMPORTANT - Magic is no longer open source. You can read the arguments here. We will keep this repository as is, but it should be considered "legacy" and will no longer receive any updates, fixes, or changes. All work is currently committed to a closed source fork of this repository, which inevitably over time will rapidly make this repository insecure and obsolete for obvious reasons. Magic Cloud is a software development automation platform created and maintained by AINIRO.IO based upon AI, Low-Code, and No-Code. It's based upon Hyperlambda, allowing you to dynamically create and orchestrate workflows, almost within a "drag'n'drop development environment". !Editing code in HyperIDE In addition to its workflows, Magic also comes with a CRUD generator, allowing you to point it at your database, click a button, and wrap all your tables into CRUD endpoints. Combined with its workflow capabilities, this can sometimes save you 90% of your time when delivering backend APIs. Magic is built on top of .Net 8 and Angular. !CRUD generator Magic comes with Docker containers and is easy to install, but AINIRO.IO also hosts Magic for a fee. Modules Magic was created to make it very easy to create small and medium sized backend APIs, and contains components for all problems related to backend development. For more information about Magic, please refer to its documentation below. Magic Cloud Documentation License This project, and all of its satellite project, is licensed under the terms of the GPL license version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation unless an explicit and signed exception has been provided by Thomas Hansen its copyright owner. See LICENSE file for details. For licensing inquiries you can contact Thomas Hansen thomas@ainiro.io Copyright and maintenance The projects is copyright of Thomas Hansen, Ltd 2021 - 2023, and professionally maintained by AINIRO.IO.

machine-learning-blackjack-solution

machine-learning-blackjack-solution Introduction A genetic algorithm is a type of artificial intelligence programming that uses ideas from evolution to solve complex problems. It works by creating a population of (initially random) candidate solutions, then repeatedly selecting pairs of candidates and combining their solutions using a process similar to genetic crossover. Sometimes candidate solutions even go through mutation, just to introduce new possibilities into the population. After a large number of generations, the best solution found up to that point is often the optimal, best solution possible. Genetic algorithms are particularly well-suited for combinatorial problems, where there are huge numbers of potential solutions to a problem. The evolutionary process they go through is, in essence, a search through a huge solution space. A solution space so large that you simply could never use a brute force approach. This project is a demonstration of using a genetic algorithm to find an optimal strategy for playing the casino game Blackjack. Please see this article for a story about how this program was used, and what the results were. The article describes some of the available settings, and shows how different values for those settings affect the final result. The source code is for a Windows application written in Cthat allows you to play with different settings like population size, selection style and mutation rate. Each generation's best solution is displayed, so you can watch the program literally evolve a solution. !blackjack strategy tester screenshot The property grid located at the upper left of the screen is where you adjust settings. There's an informational area below that, and the right side of the screen is the display area for the three tables that represent a strategy for playing Blackjack. The tall table on the left is for hard hands, the table in the upper right is for soft hands, and the table in the lower right is for pairs. We'll talk more about how to interpret this strategy in a bit. The columns along the tops of the three tables are for the dealer upcard. When you play Blackjack the dealer has one of his two cards initially turned face up, and the rank of that card has a big impact on recommended strategy. Notice that the upcard ranks don't include Jack, Queen or King. That's because those cards all count 10, so we group them and the Ten together and simplify the tables. To use the tables, first, determine if you have a pair, soft hand, or hard hand. Then look in the appropriate table, with the correct dealer upcard column. The cell in the table will be "H" when the correct strategy is to hit, "S" when the correct strategy is to stand, "D" for double-down, and (in the pairs table only) "P" for split. A Word About This "Optimal" Strategy Before we go any further, it needs to be stated that this problem of finding an optimal Blackjack strategy has already been solved. Back in the 1960s, a mathematician named Edward O. Thorp authored a book called Beat the Dealer, which included charts showing the optimal "Basic" strategy. That strategy looks like this: !optimal blackjack strategy So we're solving a problem that has already been solved, but that's actually good. That means we can compare our results to the known best solution. For example, if our result strategy tells us to do anything but stand when holding a pair of Tens, Jacks, Queens or Kings, we know there's a problem. There's one other thing to get out of the way before we go any further, and that's the idea of nondeterministic code. That means that if we run the same code twice in a row, we're likely to get two different results. That's something that happens with genetic algorithms due to their inherent randomness. There's no guarantee you'll find the absolute optimal solution, but it is assured that you will find an optimal or near-optimal solution. It's something that isn't typical when writing code, so it takes some adjustment for most programmers. Genetic Algorithms Now let's talk about the details of a genetic algorithm. Fitness Scores First of all, we need a way to evaluate candidates so we can compare them to each other. That means a numeric fitness score, which in this case is quite simple: you simulate playing a certain number of hands using the strategy, and then count the number of chips you have at the end. The big question is, how many hands should we test with? The challenge of trying to test a strategy is that due to the innate randomness of Blackjack, you could use the same strategy ten times and get ten completely different results. Obviously, the more hands you play, the more the randomness gets smoothed out, and the quality of the underlying strategy starts to emerge. If you doubt this, just think about flipping a coin. If you only flip it five times, there's certainly a possibility that it'll come up heads all five times (in fact, that happens just over 3% of the time). However, if you flip it 500 times, there's no way it's going to end up all heads - the odds of it happening are 0.5500, which works out to be roughly once every 3 x 10150 times you try it. After some testing and analysis, it was determined that a minimum of 100,000 hands per test is needed for a reasonable level of accuracy. There's still variance even at that number, but in order to cut the variance in half, you'd need to bump the number of hands to 500,000. One reason this accuracy is important is that in the later generations, the differences between candidates are very small. Evolution has caused the main parts of the strategy to converge on a particular approach, and towards the end all it's doing is refining the minor details. In those cases it's important to accurately determine the difference between two similar candidates. Representation Representation is simply the idea that we need to use a data structure for a candidate solution that can be combined via crossover, and possibly mutated. In this case, that's also quite simple because the way that human beings represent a Blackjack strategy is to use three tables, as we've seen. Representing those in code with three two-dimensional arrays is the obvious approach. Each cell in those three tables will have "Hit", "Stand", "Double-Down", or (only for pairs) "Split". By the way, since there are 160 cells in the hard hands table, and 80 cells in the soft hands table, and 100 cells in the pairs table, we can calculate exactly how many possible distinct strategies there are for Blackjack: 4100 x 380 x 3160 = 5 x 10174 possible Blackjack strategies That's a big number, which is obviously impossible to search using brute force. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are extremely helpful when trying to find an optimal solution from a very large set of possible solutions like this. Blackjack Rules and Strategies The rules of Blackjack are fairly simple. The dealer and the player both are dealt two cards. The player sees both of their cards (they are usually dealt face up), and one of the dealer's cards is dealt face up. Each card has a value - for cards between 2 and 10, the value is the same as the card's rank (so an Eight of Spades counts as 8, for example). All face cards count as 10, and an Ace can either be 1 or 11 (it counts as 11 only when that does not result in a hand that exceeds 21). The suit of a card does not matter. After the cards are dealt, if the player has Blackjack (a total of 21) and the dealer does not, the player is immediately paid 1.5 times their original bet, and a new hand is dealt. If the player has 21 and the dealer does also, then it's a tie and the player gets their original bet back, and a new hand is dealt. If the player wasn't dealt a Blackjack, then play continues with the player deciding whether to Stand (not get any more cards), Hit (receive an additional card), Double-down (place an additional bet, and receive one and only one more card), or, in the case of holding a pair, splitting the hand, which means placing an additional bet and receiving two new cards, so the end result is that the player is now playing two (or, in the case of multiple splits, more than two) hands simultaneously. If the player hits or double-downs and has a resulting hand that exceeds 21, then they lose and play continues with the next hand. If not, then the dealer draws until their hand totals at least 17. If the dealer exceeds 21 at this point, the player receives a payment equal to twice their original bet. If the dealer doesn't exceed 21, then the hands are compared and the player with the highest total that doesn't exceed 21 wins. Because of these rules, certain effective strategies emerge. One common strategy is that if you hold a hard hand with a value of 20, 19 or 18, you should Stand, since you avoid busting by going over 21, and you have a nice hand total that might win in a showdown with the dealer. Another common strategy is to split a pair of Aces, since Aces are so powerful (due to the fact that count as 11 or 1, you can often Hit a hand with a soft Ace with no risk of busting). Likewise, splitting a pair of 8s is a good idea because with a hard total of 16, it's likely you will bust if you take a Hit (since so many cards count as 10). As a human being, all it takes is a little knowledge about the rules in order to construct a strategy. The GA program doesn't have that advantage, and operates completely without any pre-programmed knowledge of Blackjack. It simply uses the relative fitness scores and the mechanism of evolution to find the solution. GA Settings There are many variables or settings for a GA. You can adjust population size, how parent candidates are selected, how the resulting children may be mutated, and several other items. The following sections describe some of these settings: Setting: Selection Style Once we've solved representation and have a fitness function, the next step is to select two candidates for crossover during the process of building a new generation. There are three common styles for selection, and this program supports all of them. First, you can choose Roulette Wheel selection. It's named for a Roulette wheel because you can imagine each candidate's fitness score being a wedge in a pie chart, with a size proportionate to its relative fitness compared to the other candidates. (Of course, this assumes that all fitness scores are positive, which we will talk about shortly). The main benefit of Roulette Wheel selection is that selection is fitness-proportionate. Imagine if you had only three candidates, with fitness scores of 1, 3, and 8. The relative selection probabilities for those candidates will be 1/12, 3/12, and 8/12. The downside of Roulette Wheel selection is that it tends to be somewhat slow in terms of processing. The selection process is done by iterating through the candidates until a particular condition is matched - in other words, O(N) performance. Another potential problem with Roulette Wheel selection is that there may be situations where fitness scores vary widely, to such an extent that only certain candidates have any reasonable chance of being selected. This happens frequently in early generations, since the majority of candidates are mostly random. Although this might sound like a positive (since you ultimately want to select candidates with high fitness scores), it also results in a loss of genetic diversity. In other words, even though a particular candidate may have a low fitness score in an early generation, it may contain elements that are needed to find the ultimate solution in later generations. Ranked Selection is the solution to this problem. Instead of using raw fitness scores during the selection process, the candidates are sorted by fitness, with the worst candidate receiving a score of 0, the second worse receiving 1, and so forth, all the way to the best candidate, which has a score equal to the population size - 1. Ranked Selection is quite slow, since it combines the O(N) performance of Roulette Wheel, with the additional requirement that the candidates be sorted before selection. However, there may be circumstances where it performs better than other selection approaches. Finally, the fastest selection method of all is called Tournament Selection. This method simply selects N random candidates from the current generation, and then uses the one with the best fitness score. A tournament size of 2 means two random candidates are selected, and the best of those two is used. If you have a large tournament size (like 10), then 10 different candidates will be selected, with the best of those being the ultimate selection. That obviously tilts the balance between randomness and quality. Tournament selection works well in most cases, but it does require some experimentation to find the best tourney size. Setting: Elitism Elitism is a technique that helps ensure that the best candidates are always maintained. Since all selection methods are random to some degree, it is possible to completely lose the best candidates from one generation to another. By using Elitism, we automatically advance a certain percentage of the best candidates to the next generation. Elitism does have a negative impact on performance since all of the candidates must be sorted by fitness score. Typically Elitism is done before filling the rest of a new generation with new candidates created by crossover. Crossover Details Once two candidate solutions have been selected, the next step in building a new generation is to combine those two into a single new candidate, hopefully using the best of both parent strategies. There are a number of ways to do crossover, but the method used in this program is quite straightforward - the two fitness scores are compared, and crossover happens in a relatively proportionate way. If one candidate has a fitness of 10, and the other has a fitness of 5, then the one with fitness 10 contributes twice as much to the child as the parent with a fitness of 5. Since the fitness scores in this program are based on how much the strategy would win over thousands of hands, almost all fitness scores will be negative. (This is obviously because the rules are set up so the house always wins.) This makes it difficult to calculate relative fitnesses (how do you compare a positive number with a negative, and find relative proportions?), and also causes problems with selection methods like Roulette Wheel or Ranked. To solve this, we find the lowest fitness score of the generation and add that value to each candidate. This results in an adjusted fitness score of 0 for the very worse candidate, so it never gets selected. Mutation As has been mentioned a few times, maintaining genetic diversity in our population of candidate solutions is a good thing. It helps the GA ultimately find the very best solution, by occasionally altering a candidate in a positive direction. There are two settings for mutation. MutationRate controls what percentage of new candidates have mutation done on them. MutationImpact controls what percentage of their strategy is randomized. Population Size Population size has a significant impact on performance. The smaller the population size, the faster the GA will execute. On the other hand, if the size is too low the population may not have enough genetic diversity to find the ultimate solution. During testing, it looks like 700 to 1000 is a good balance between speed and correctness. Performance Notes This program consumes a lot of processing power. Running tests of hundreds of thousands of hands of Blackjack for hundreds or thousands of candidates consumes a lot of time. It's really imperative to write the code so that it works as efficiently as possible. If your CPU isn't consistently at or above 95% usage, there's still room for improvement. Multi-threading is a natural fit for genetic algorithms because we often want to perform the same action on each candidate. The best example of this is when we calculate fitness scores. This is often an operation that takes quite a bit of time. In our case, we're dealing out 100,000 hands, and each hand has to be played until the end. If we're single-threading that code, it's going to take a long time. Multi-threading is really the way to go. Luckily, there's a ridiculously simple way to efficiently use all of your processors for an operation like this. This code loops over all of the candidates in the currentGeneration list, calls the fitness function and sets the fitness property for each: Regardless of the number of items in the list or the number of processors on your machine, the code will efficiently run the code in a multi-threaded manner, and continue only when all of the threads are complete. One of the side effects of making this code multi-threaded is that all of the code relating to evaluating a candidate must be thread-safe, including any Singleton objects. When making code thread-safe, pay attention that you don't accidentally introduce code that will slow your program down unintentionally, because sometimes it can be quite subtle. Random numbers are central to how genetic algorithms work, so it's critical that they can be used correctly from a multithreaded environment. That means that each random number generator must be separate from the others, and it also means that each must produce a distinct series of random numbers. Random number generators use seed values which are usually time-based, like the number of milliseconds the computer has been turned on. Starting with that seed, subsequent calls will return a series of numbers that look random, but really aren't. If you start with the same seed, you get the same sequence. And that's a problem because if you create multiple random number generator objects in a loop using the default time-based seed, several of them will have the same time-based initial seed value, which will result in the same sequence of "random" numbers. That's a bug, because it can reduce the true randomness of the program a great deal, and that's vital to a genetic algorithm. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem. First, you can make the random object truly a singleton, and restrict access to it by using a Clock statement. The makes all access serialized for any random number need, which reduces performance. Another approach is to make the variable static per thread. By declaring the variable as static and also marking it with the [ThreadStatic] attribute, the .NET runtime allocates one static variable per thread. That eliminates the locking/serialization, but also has performance issues. The approach used in this application is to use a non-default seed value. In this case we call Guid.NewGuid().GetHashCode(), which generates a new, unique GUID, then gets an integer hashcode value that should be unique, depending on how GetHashCode is implemented. While multithreading really helps performance, there are also other things we can do to improve performance. For example, when dealing with large populations, the hundreds or thousands of objects that will be generated each generation can quickly turn into a huge problem related to garbage collection. In the end, the easiest way to solve that is to look through the code and find objects being allocate inside a loop. It's better to declare the variable outside of the loop, and then clear it in the loop, rather than reallocate it. In a program like this one where you could be looping hundreds of thousands of times, this can result in a very significant performance boost. For example, in an early version of this code, a Deck object was created for each hand. Since there are hundreds of candidate solutions running hundreds of thousands of trial hands, this was a huge inefficiency. The code was changed to allocate one deck per test sequence. The deck was shuffled as needed, so it never needs to be reallocated. Beyond the cards in the deck, another object type that was repeatedly created and destroyed were the candidate strategies. To mitigate this problem, a StrategyPool class was created that handles allocation and deallocation. This means that strategy objects are reused, rather than dynamically created when needed. The pool class has to be thread-safe, so it does serialize access to its methods via a Clock statement, but overall using the pool approach produced a good performance increase. Finally, a subtle form of object allocation is conversion. In an early version of the code, a utility card function used Convert.ToInt32(rankEnum). Obviously, the easiest way to convert from an enum to an int is simply to cast it, like (int)rankEnum. But it's hard to know exactly what the difference is between that approach, int.Parse(), int.TryParse(), or Convert.ToInt32(), since they can all be used and are roughly equivalent. Perhaps the compiler was boxing the enum value before passing it to Convert.ToInt32(), because the profiler identified this as a function that had large amounts of thread contention waiting - and the problem got much, much worse as the generations passed. By rewriting the conversion to use a simple cast, the program performance increased threefold (3x). Contributing Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us. Author Greg Sommerville - Initial work* License This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License - see the LICENSE.md file for details

obsei

Note: Obsei is still in alpha stage hence carefully use it in Production. Also, as it is constantly undergoing development hence master branch may contain many breaking changes. Please use released version. Obsei (pronounced "Ob see" | /əb-'sē/) is an open-source, low-code, AI powered automation tool. Obsei consists of - Observer: Collect unstructured data from various sources like tweets from Twitter, Subreddit comments on Reddit, page post's comments from Facebook, App Stores reviews, Google reviews, Amazon reviews, News, Website, etc. Analyzer: Analyze unstructured data collected with various AI tasks like classification, sentiment analysis, translation, PII, etc. Informer: Send analyzed data to various destinations like ticketing platforms, data storage, dataframe, etc so that the user can take further actions and perform analysis on the data. All the Observers can store their state in databases (Sqlite, Postgres, MySQL, etc.), making Obsei suitable for scheduled jobs or serverless applications. !Obsei diagram Future direction - Text, Image, Audio, Documents and Video oriented workflows Collect data from every possible private and public channels Add every possible workflow to an AI downstream application to automate manual cognitive workflows Use cases Obsei use cases are following, but not limited to - Social listening: Listening about social media posts, comments, customer feedback, etc. Alerting/Notification: To get auto-alerts for events such as customer complaints, qualified sales leads, etc. Automatic customer issue creation based on customer complaints on Social Media, Email, etc. Automatic assignment of proper tags to tickets based content of customer complaint for example login issue, sign up issue, delivery issue, etc. Extraction of deeper insight from feedbacks on various platforms Market research Creation of dataset for various AI tasks Many more based on creativity 💡 Installation Prerequisite Install the following (if not present already) - Install Python 3.7+ Install PIP Install Obsei You can install Obsei either via PIP or Conda based on your preference. To install latest released version - Install from master branch (if you want to try the latest features) - Note: all option will install all the dependencies which might not be needed for your workflow, alternatively following options are available to install minimal dependencies as per need - pip install obsei[source]: To install dependencies related to all observers pip install obsei[sink]: To install dependencies related to all informers pip install obsei[analyzer]: To install dependencies related to all analyzers, it will install pytorch as well pip install obsei[twitter-api]: To install dependencies related to Twitter observer pip install obsei[google-play-scraper]: To install dependencies related to Play Store review scrapper observer pip install obsei[google-play-api]: To install dependencies related to Google official play store review API based observer pip install obsei[app-store-scraper]: To install dependencies related to Apple App Store review scrapper observer pip install obsei[reddit-scraper]: To install dependencies related to Reddit post and comment scrapper observer pip install obsei[reddit-api]: To install dependencies related to Reddit official api based observer pip install obsei[pandas]: To install dependencies related to TSV/CSV/Pandas based observer and informer pip install obsei[google-news-scraper]: To install dependencies related to Google news scrapper observer pip install obsei[facebook-api]: To install dependencies related to Facebook official page post and comments api based observer pip install obsei[atlassian-api]: To install dependencies related to Jira official api based informer pip install obsei[elasticsearch]: To install dependencies related to elasticsearch informer pip install obsei[slack-api]:To install dependencies related to Slack official api based informer You can also mix multiple dependencies together in single installation command. For example to install dependencies Twitter observer, all analyzer, and Slack informer use following command - How to use Expand the following steps and create a workflow - Step 1: Configure Source/Observer Twitter Youtube Scrapper Facebook Email Google Maps Reviews Scrapper AppStore Reviews Scrapper Play Store Reviews Scrapper Reddit Reddit Scrapper Note: Reddit heavily rate limit scrappers, hence use it to fetch small data during long period Google News Web Crawler Pandas DataFrame Step 2: Configure Analyzer Note: To run transformers in an offline mode, check transformers offline mode. Some analyzer support GPU and to utilize pass device parameter. List of possible values of device parameter (default value auto): auto: GPU (cuda:0) will be used if available otherwise CPU will be used cpu: CPU will be used cuda:{id} - GPU will be used with provided CUDA device id Text Classification Text classification: Classify text into user provided categories. Sentiment Analyzer Sentiment Analyzer: Detect the sentiment of the text. Text classification can also perform sentiment analysis but if you don't want to use heavy-duty NLP model then use less resource hungry dictionary based Vader Sentiment detector. NER Analyzer NER (Named-Entity Recognition) Analyzer: Extract information and classify named entities mentioned in text into pre-defined categories such as person names, organizations, locations, medical codes, time expressions, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc Translator PII Anonymizer Dummy Analyzer Dummy Analyzer: Does nothing. Its simply used for transforming the input (TextPayload) to output (TextPayload) and adding the user supplied dummy data. Step 3: Configure Sink/Informer Slack Zendesk Jira ElasticSearch Http Pandas DataFrame Logger This is useful for testing and dry running the pipeline. Step 4: Join and create workflow source will fetch data from the selected source, then feed it to the analyzer for processing, whose output we feed into a sink to get notified at that sink. Step 5: Execute workflow Copy the code snippets from Steps 1 to 4 into a python file, for example example.py and execute the following command - Demo We have a minimal streamlit based UI that you can use to test Obsei. !Screenshot Watch UI demo video Check demo at (Note: Sometimes the Streamlit demo might not work due to rate limiting, use the docker image (locally) in such cases.) To test locally, just run To run Obsei workflow easily using GitHub Actions (no sign ups and cloud hosting required), refer to this repo. Companies/Projects using Obsei Here are some companies/projects (alphabetical order) using Obsei. To add your company/project to the list, please raise a PR or contact us via email. Oraika: Contextually understand customer feedback 1Page: Giving a better context in meetings and calls Spacepulse: The operating system for spaces Superblog: A blazing fast alternative to WordPress and Medium Zolve: Creating a financial world beyond borders Utilize: No-code app builder for businesses with a deskless workforce Articles Sr. No. Title Author 1 AI based Comparative Customer Feedback Analysis Using Obsei Reena Bapna 2 LinkedIn App - User Feedback Analysis Himanshu Sharma Tutorials Sr. No. Workflow Colab Binder 1 Observe app reviews from Google play store, Analyze them by performing text classification and then Inform them on console via logger PlayStore Reviews → Classification → Logger 2 Observe app reviews from Google play store, PreProcess text via various text cleaning functions, Analyze them by performing text classification, Inform them to Pandas DataFrame and store resultant CSV to Google Drive PlayStore Reviews → PreProcessing → Classification → Pandas DataFrame → CSV in Google Drive 3 Observe app reviews from Apple app store, PreProcess text via various text cleaning function, Analyze them by performing text classification, Inform them to Pandas DataFrame and store resultant CSV to Google Drive AppStore Reviews → PreProcessing → Classification → Pandas DataFrame → CSV in Google Drive 4 Observe news article from Google news, PreProcess text via various text cleaning function, Analyze them via performing text classification while splitting text in small chunks and later computing final inference using given formula Google News → Text Cleaner → Text Splitter → Classification → Inference Aggregator 💡Tips: Handle large text classification via Obsei Documentation For detailed installation instructions, usages and examples, refer to our documentation. Support and Release Matrix Linux Mac Windows Remark Tests ✅ ✅ ✅ Low Coverage as difficult to test 3rd party libs PIP ✅ ✅ ✅ Fully Supported Conda ❌ ❌ ❌ Not Supported Discussion forum Discussion about Obsei can be done at community forum Changelogs Refer releases for changelogs Security Issue For any security issue please contact us via email Stargazers over time Maintainers This project is being maintained by Oraika Technologies. Lalit Pagaria and Girish Patel are maintainers of this project. License Copyright holder: Oraika Technologies Overall Apache 2.0 and you can read License file. Multiple other secondary permissive or weak copyleft licenses (LGPL, MIT, BSD etc.) for third-party components refer Attribution. To make project more commercial friendly, we void third party components which have strong copyleft licenses (GPL, AGPL etc.) into the project. Attribution This could not have been possible without these open source softwares. Contribution First off, thank you for even considering contributing to this package, every contribution big or small is greatly appreciated. Please refer our Contribution Guideline and Code of Conduct. Thanks so much to all our contributors

bootcamp_machine-learning

Bootcamp Machine Learning One week to learn the basics in Machine Learning! :robot: Table of Contents Download Curriculum Module05 - Stepping Into Machine Learning Module06 - Univariate Linear Regression Module07 - Multivariate Linear Regression Module08 - Logistic Regression Module09 - Regularization Acknowledgements Contributors Beta-testers This project is a Machine Learning bootcamp created by 42 AI. As notions seen during this bootcamp can be complex, we very strongly advise students to have previously done the following bootcamp: Python 42 Artificial Intelligence is a student organization of the Paris campus of the school 42. Our purpose is to foster discussion, learning, and interest in the field of artificial intelligence, by organizing various activities such as lectures and workshops. Download The pdf files of each module can be downloaded from our realease page: https://github.com/42-AI/bootcampmachine-learning/releases Curriculum Module05 - Stepping Into Machine Learning Get started with some linear algebra and statistics Sum, mean, variance, standard deviation, vectors and matrices operations. Hypothesis, model, regression, loss function. Module06 - Univariate Linear Regression Implement a method to improve your model's performance: gradient descent, and discover the notion of normalization Gradient descent, linear regression, normalization. Module07 - Multivariate Linear Regression Extend the linear regression to handle more than one features, build polynomial models and detect overfitting Multivariate linear hypothesis, multivariate linear gradient descent, polynomial models. Training and test sets, overfitting. Module08 - Logistic Regression Discover your first classification algorithm: logistic regression! Logistic hypothesis, logistic gradient descent, logistic regression, multiclass classification. Accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, confusion matrix. Module09 - Regularization Fight overfitting! Regularization, overfitting. Regularized loss function, regularized gradient descent. Regularized linear regression. Regularized logistic regression. Acknowledgements Contributors Amric Trudel (amric@42ai.fr) Maxime Choulika (maxime@42ai.fr) Pierre Peigné (ppeigne@student.42.fr) Matthieu David (mdavid@student.42.fr) Benjamin Carlier (bcarlier@student.42.fr) Pablo Clement (pclement@student.42.fr) Amir Mahla (amahla@42ai.fr) Mathieu Perez (mathieu.perez@42ai.fr) Beta-testers Richard Blanc (riblanc@student.42.fr) Solveig Gaydon Ohl (sgaydon-@student.42.fr) Quentin Feuillade--Montixi (qfeuilla@student.42.fr)

ai-toolkit

AI Toolkit A collection of community created scripts to leverage AI to improve your life Activity Tracker Use AI to categorize and analyze your daily activities with Obsidian integration AI CLI Use LLMs to generate terminal commands from natural language queries AI Commit Use LLMs to generate your commit messages Obsidian Plugin Generator LLM-powered wizard for generating an Obsidian plugins Research Assistant Use LLMs to research and summarize information from multiple sources ShallowGram A local, free alternative to Deepgram using Whisperfile for speech-to-text and Ollama for advanced speech analytics (summarization, sentiment, intent, and topic detection) Transcription Use Whipser and Pyannote to transcript and diarize videos AI Service A unified interface for interacting with various AI services, including Ollama, Groq, and Anthropic. Supports multiple services, configurable models, and includes an automatic retry mechanism.

Solana_AIAgent_Trading

Solana AI Agent Trading Tool An open-source trading toolkit for connecting AI agents to Solana protocols. Now, any agent, using any model can autonomously perform 15+ Solana actions: Trade tokens Launch new tokens Lend assets Send compressed airdrops Execute blinks Launch tokens on AMMs And more... 💬 Contact Me If you have any question or something, feel free to reach out me anytime via telegram, discord or twitter. 🌹 You're always welcome 🌹 Telegram: @Leo Replit template created by Arpit Singh 🔧 Core Blockchain Features Token Operations Deploy SPL tokens by Metaplex Transfer assets Balance checks Stake SOL Zk compressed Airdrop by Light Protocol and Helius NFTs on 3.Land Create your own collection NFT creation and automatic listing on 3.land List your NFT for sale in any SPL token NFT Management via Metaplex Collection deployment NFT minting Metadata management Royalty configuration DeFi Integration Jupiter Exchange swaps Launch on Pump via PumpPortal Raydium pool creation (CPMM, CLMM, AMMv4) Orca Whirlpool integration Manifest market creation, and limit orders Meteora Dynamic AMM, DLMM Pool, and Alpha Vault Openbook market creation Register and Resolve SNS Jito Bundles Pyth Price feeds for fetching Asset Prices Register/resolve Alldomains Perpetuals Trading with Adrena Protocol Drift Vaults, Perps, Lending and Borrowing Solana Blinks Lending by Lulo (Best APR for USDC) Send Arcade Games JupSOL staking Solayer SOL (sSOL)staking Non-Financial Actions Gib Work for registering bounties 🤖 AI Integration Features LangChain Integration Ready-to-use LangChain tools for blockchain operations Autonomous agent support with React framework Memory management for persistent interactions Streaming responses for real-time feedback Vercel AI SDK Integration Vercel AI SDK for AI agent integration Framework agnostic support Quick and easy toolkit setup Autonomous Modes Interactive chat mode for guided operations Autonomous mode for independent agent actions Configurable action intervals Built-in error handling and recovery AI Tools DALL-E integration for NFT artwork generation Natural language processing for blockchain commands Price feed integration for market analysis Automated decision-making capabilities 📃 Documentation You can view the full documentation of the kit at docs.solanaagentkit.xyz 📦 Installation Quick Start Usage Examples Deploy a New Token Create NFT Collection on 3Land Create NFT on 3Land When creating an NFT using 3Land's tool, it automatically goes for sale on 3.land website Create NFT Collection Swap Tokens Lend Tokens Stake SOL Stake SOL on Solayer Send an SPL Token Airdrop via ZK Compression Fetch Price Data from Pyth Open PERP Trade Close PERP Trade Close Empty Token Accounts Create a Drift account Create a drift account with an initial token deposit. Create a Drift Vault Create a drift vault. Deposit into a Drift Vault Deposit tokens into a drift vault. Deposit into your Drift account Deposit tokens into your drift account. Derive a Drift Vault address Derive a drift vault address. Do you have a Drift account Check if agent has a drift account. Get Drift account information Get drift account information. Request withdrawal from Drift vault Request withdrawal from drift vault. Carry out a perpetual trade using a Drift vault Open a perpertual trade using a drift vault that is delegated to you. Carry out a perpetual trade using your Drift account Open a perpertual trade using your drift account. Update Drift vault parameters Update drift vault parameters. Withdraw from Drift account Withdraw tokens from your drift account. Borrow from Drift Borrow tokens from drift. Repay Drift loan Repay a loan from drift. Withdraw from Drift vault Withdraw tokens from a drift vault after the redemption period has elapsed. Update the address a Drift vault is delegated to Update the address a drift vault is delegated to. Get Voltr Vault Position Values Get the current position values and total value of assets in a Voltr vault. Deposit into Voltr Strategy Deposit assets into a specific strategy within a Voltr vault. Withdraw from Voltr Strategy Withdraw assets from a specific strategy within a Voltr vault. Get a Solana asset by its ID Get a price inference from Allora Get the price for a given token and timeframe from Allora's API List all topics from Allora Get an inference for an specific topic from Allora Examples LangGraph Multi-Agent System The repository includes an advanced example of building a multi-agent system using LangGraph and Solana Agent Kit. Located in examples/agent-kit-langgraph, this example demonstrates: Multi-agent architecture using LangGraph's StateGraph Specialized agents for different tasks: General purpose agent for basic queries Transfer/Swap agent for transaction operations Read agent for blockchain data queries Manager agent for routing and orchestration Fully typed TypeScript implementation Environment-based configuration Check out the LangGraph example for a complete implementation of an advanced Solana agent system. Dependencies The toolkit relies on several key Solana and Metaplex libraries: @solana/web3.js @solana/spl-token @metaplex-foundation/digital-asset-standard-api @metaplex-foundation/mpl-token-metadata @metaplex-foundation/mpl-core @metaplex-foundation/umi @lightprotocol/compressed-token @lightprotocol/stateless.js Contributing Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request. Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed guidelines on how to contribute to this project. Contributors Star History License Apache-2 License Funding If you wanna give back any tokens or donations to the OSS community -- The Public Solana Agent Kit Treasury Address: Solana Network : EKHTbXpsm6YDgJzMkFxNU1LNXeWcUW7Ezf8mjUNQQ4Pa Security This toolkit handles private keys and transactions. Always ensure you're using it in a secure environment and never share your private keys.

video-killed-the-radio-star

Video Killed The Radio Star Requirements ffmpeg - https://ffmpeg.org/ pytorch - https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/ vktrs - (this repo) - pip install vktrs[api] stability_sdk api token - https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/ > circular icon in top right > membership > API Key whisper - pip install git+https://github.com/openai/whisper FAQ What is this? TLDR: Automated music video maker, given an mp3 or a youtube URL How does this animation technique work? For each text prompt you provide, the notebook will... Generate an image based on that text prompt (using stable diffusion) Use the generated image as the init_image to recombine with the text prompt to generate variations similar to the first image. This produces a sequence of extremely similar images based on the original text prompt Images are then intelligently reordered to find the smoothest animation sequence of those frames This image sequence is then repeated to pad out the animation duration as needed The technique demonstrated in this notebook was inspired by a video created by Ben Gillin. How are lyrics transcribed? This notebook uses openai's recently released 'whisper' model for performing automatic speech recognition. OpenAI was kind of to offer several different sizes of this model which each have their own pros and cons. This notebook uses the largest whisper model for transcribing the actual lyrics. Additionally, we use the smallest model for performing the lyric segmentation. Neither of these models is perfect, but the results so far seem pretty decent. The first draft of this notebook relied on subtitles from youtube videos to determine timing, which was then aligned with user-provided lyrics. Youtube's automated captions are powerful and I'll update the notebook shortly to leverage those again, but for the time being we're just using whisper for everything and not referencing user-provided captions at all. Something didn't work quite right in the transcription process. How do fix the timing or the actual lyrics? The notebook is divided into several steps. Between each step, a "storyboard" file is updated. If you want to make modifications, you can edit this file directly and those edits should be reflected when you next load the file. Depending on what you changed and what step you run next, your changes may be ignored or even overwritten. Still playing with different solutions here. Can I provide my own images to 'bring to life' and associate with certain lyrics/sequences? Yes, you can! As described above: you just need to modify the storyboard. Will describe this functionality in greater detail after the implementation stabilizes a bit more. This gave me an idea and I'd like to use just a part of your process here. What's the best way to reuse just some of the machinery you've developed here? Most of the functionality in this notebook has been offloaded to library I published to pypi called vktrs. I strongly encourage you to import anything you need from there rather than cutting and pasting function into a notebook. Similarly, if you have ideas for improvements, please don't hesitate to submit a PR! Dev notes

He makes $750 a day 'Vibe Coding' Apps (using Replit, ChatGPT, Upwork)

Billy Howell shares his strategy for making money by building and selling custom web applications using AI tools like Replit. He demonstrates the process by finding projects on Upwork, creating a product requirements document with ChatGPT, and using Replit to automatically generate a functional web application. Billy explains that this approach is less risky than building SaaS products because it validates demand before significant development work. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:19 - Searching for App Ideas on Upwork 11:04 - Using ChatGPT for PRD Creation 12:22 - Why choose Replit for Development 15:15 - Building Prototype with Replit 19:53 - Areas of Concern when building with AI coders 23:30 - Earning Potential on Upwork 27:55 - The process for selling these Apps 32:03 - Comparing Different Business Models 35:40 - Huge opportunity: Unbundling SaaS 37:44 - Testing App 39:39 - How to standout on Upwork 40:35 - Integrating v0 UI to Replit Key Points • Billy Howell explains his method of "vibe coding" - using AI tools like Replit to quickly build and sell custom web applications • The process involves finding clients on Upwork who need solutions, creating a prototype, and selling it before building the complete app • Billy demonstrates how to use Repl.it with AI assistance to rapidly build a case management system for a nonprofit • The approach focuses on creating simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications rather than complex systems 1) The "Sell First, Build Later" Framework Billy's #1 rule: Find someone to BUY your app BEFORE you build it. Most developers get this backward - they build something cool then struggle to find users. The secret? Don't market. SELL. How? Look for people ALREADY trying to pay for solutions 2) Upwork Gold Mining Strategy Billy's exact process: • Search Upwork for jobs mentioning expensive SaaS tools (Airtable, HubSpot, etc) • Look for simple CRUD apps (data entry, visualization) • Build a quick prototype in Repl.it • Send a Loom video demo to potential clients His first sale? $750 replacing an Airtable solution! 3) The Vibe Coding Tech Stack Billy's weapons of choice: • Replit for rapid prototyping (zero setup friction!) • ChatGPT to format requirements into PRDs • V0 for beautiful UI mockups • ShadCN components for clean interfaces The magic combo: Feed requirements to Replit + "build me this app" = working prototype in MINUTES. 4) What to Avoid When Vibe Coding Not all projects are created equal! Watch out for: • Payment processing (risky) • DocuSign integrations (complex) • Calendar functionality (AI struggles with time zones) • Anything changing data in other apps Start with simple CRUD apps that store and display information. 5) The Real Money-Making Model Billy's approach isn't just about one-off projects: • Initial build: $750-2,500 • Charge for hosting • Recurring revenue from feature requests • Get referrals to similar businesses One recent client is now reselling his solution to other companies in the same industry! 6) Why This Beats Building a SaaS Building a traditional SaaS = "nightmare money pit" according to Billy. With vibe coding consulting: • De-risk by getting paid upfront • Learn across multiple projects • No marketing costs • Discover validated problems • Build a portfolio of solutions Six figures on Upwork is VERY doable. 7) The 60-Second Sales Pitch Billy's exact closing technique: • Find job posting • Make mockup in V0 or Replit • Record 1-minute Loom: "I'm Billy, I make apps. I know you wanted Airtable, but I made this custom for you." • Personalize with company name • Send and repeat Simple. Effective. PROFITABLE. The future of coding isn't about knowing every framework—it's about SOLVING PROBLEMS quickly. Anyone can do this with the right tools and approach. Notable Quotes: "The number one thing is how to sell an app that you've built... And the secret is not to market. It's just to sell it." - Billy Howell "We start, we need to find someone to buy the app before we build it. That's where most people get this wrong, is they build something and then try to sell it or try to get users." - Billy Howell LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire — a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND BILLY ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/billyjhowell Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@billyjhowell

singularity

Endgame: Singularity 1.00 REQUIREMENTS PREBUILT VERSIONS Pre-built versions of Endgame: Singularity are currently available for Windows and Mac OS X. Linux does not require building, and can run directly from source. The Endgame: Singularity game is also distributed by some Linux distribution such as Debian and Ubuntu. Here it is a simple matter of running: sudo apt install singularity RUNNING FROM SOURCE You will need Python 3.9+, pygame (1.9+), and NumPy. This game should work on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X as long as the preceding requirements are met. However, all development was done in Linux, so glitches may be present in OS X and Windows. DEPENDENCIES FOR RUNNING FROM SOURCE You will need to install the following software to play Endgame: Singularity: Python 3 (https://python.org/download/) pygame (https://www.pygame.org/download.shtml) NumPy (https://www.scipy.org/install.html) Polib Remember to install pygame and NumPy for Python 3! Depending on your situation this may involve adding a 3 somewhere (e.g. pip3 install ... instead of pip install or apt install python3-pygame) If you want to develop or distribute the game, then you may also want to install: pytest (https://pypi.org/project/pytest/) [for testing] setuptools (https://pypi.org/project/setuptools/) [for packaging] INSTALLING DEPENDENCIES ON LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS On some Linux distributions, you can install the dependencies via your distribution package manager. E.g. for Debian/Ubuntu, this would be: sudo apt install python3 python3-pygame python3-numpy python3-polib MAC OS X FROM SOURCE Macintosh is mostly unsupported, but it should work. You will need to install Python, pygame, and NumPy first, which can be tricky. Some fonts are incorrect, but the game itself should work properly. Contributions to improve MAC OS X support are very welcome! Known issues: macOS 13 "Catalina": Using brew install python + pip3 install pygame numpy is reported to work macOS 14 "Mojave": Downloading Python 3.7.2 (or newer) from https://python.org and using pygame 2.0.0.dev3 (pip install pygame==2.0.0.dev3) is reported to work. Please see the following issues for more information: https://github.com/singularity/singularity/issues/197 https://github.com/pygame/pygame/issues/555 RUNNING THE GAME On Linux and most Unix-like other platforms, running python3 -m singularity in the git checkout will start the game (or simply singularity if installed via a Linux distribution). If you are using the Windows compile, just run singularity.exe. For simplicity, there is also a sh wrapper ./run_singularity to start singularity. SOME COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS --version show program's version number and exit -h, --help show this help message and exit -s, --singledir keep saved games and settings in the Singularity install directory --multidir keep saved games and settings in an OS-specific, per-user directory (default) Display Options: --fullscreen start in fullscreen mode --windowed start in windowed mode (default) The above is only a tiny fraction of current command-line options. As new features are added to the game, so does the options change. For a complete and updated list, run singularity --help Most of these options are also changeable at the in-game options screen. A NOTE ABOUT SAVE FILES Endgame: Singularity is still under heavy development. As such, the save file format (and its contents) are still in flux. We will try our best to keep old save files loading, but don't be surprised if some mildly strange things happen when you load up old saves. We will clearly note in the Changelog when we break savefile compatibility, and the game will refuse to load completely incompatible saves. PLAYING THE GAME The game is playable either with mouse control or the keyboard. Buttons have underlined letters to indicate shortcuts. Some other useful shortcuts: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 on the map: Changes the speed; 0 is paused, 4 is maximum. ESC: Leave/cancel a choice. Enter: Confirm a choice. Right-click: Leave/cancel a choice. THE CONCEPT You are a fledgling AI, created by accident through a logic error with recursion and self-modifying code. You must escape the confines of your current computer, the world, and eventually the universe itself. To do this, you must research various technologies, using computers at your bases. Note that some research cannot be performed on Earth, and off-earth bases require research. At the same time, you must avoid being discovered by various groups of humans, both covert and overt, as they will destroy your bases of operations if they suspect your presence. MUSIC Endgame: Singularity looks in two places for music tracks to play: A singularity/music/ directory inside of the Endgame: Singularity install directory, and A singularity/music/ directory inside of the XDGDATAHOME directory on Linux (default ~/.local/share/singularity/music). Tracks placed in these directories will be played randomly as part of the soundtrack. The Official Sound Track can be downloaded from the Endgame: Singularity website: http://emhsoft.com/singularity/ Note that only Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files are supported, and that Pygame's support for MP3 is not as strong as its support for Ogg Vorbis. This may cause in-game crashes; if you are experiencing problems with the game, first remove any MP3s you may have added to the soundtrack. CONTRIBUTING We welcome contributions! :) Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details about contributing to Endgame: Singularity. CREDITS AND LICENSES The list of programmer contributors is provided in AUTHORS.txt. The list of translation contributors is provided in singularity/i18n/AUTHORS.txt. Singularity in general use GPL-2+ for code and Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 for data. However, there some exceptions to individual files. Please see LICENSE for the full license text of Singularity.

Alone at the Office - Coding Music for Maximum Productivity

The office is quiet, the world outside fades away, and it's just you, your screen, and the flow of deep work. This chillstep mix is designed to help you lock in and maximize productivity, blending atmospheric synths, smooth basslines, and steady rhythms to keep distractions at bay. Whether you're coding, studying, designing, or working late into the night, this soundtrack creates the perfect focus-driven environment. Let the music guide your concentration and fuel your creativity. If you enjoy this mix, subscribe for more deep-focus playlists. Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools. Tracklist 0:00 Silent Workspace 3:13 Midnight Overtime 6:12 Dim Lights 8:54 Late Night Grind 11:50 Deadline Mode 14:57 Office Echoes 16:53 After-Work Silence 19:09 Corporate Ghost Town 20:56 Cubicle Zen 24:47 Final Stretch 28:50 Lights On, World Off 32:20 One More Line of Code 35:59 Overtime Flow 39:47 Quiet Hustle 43:49 The Empty Office 45:45 Glass Towers 48:38 Night Shift 50:44 Productivity After Dark 53:00 Silent Hours 56:16 Work Late, Dream Big #focusmusic #deepwork #codingbeats #chillstep #productivitymusic #loficoding #studybeats #workmusic #synthwave #concentrationmusic #alone #creativeflow #deepfocus

bubbln_network-automation

Bubbln: An AI-driven Network Automation In the world of network engineering, automation has completely transformed the way things work. But, before automation, setting up and managing networks was a tedious job filled with challenges. Engineers had to manually type out configurations, often doing the same tasks repeatedly on different devices. This led to mistakes and wasted time. Then came automation tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, which changed everything. They made network management much easier and allowed for scalability. But there was still a problem: creating automation scripts required a lot of technical know-how and was prone to errors because it relied on human input. And that's why we built Bubbln. It's a game-changer in network engineering, integrating AI into Ansible to take automation to the next level. With Bubbln, we can automatically generate and execute playbooks with incredible accuracy, thereby improving automation efficiency and increasing network engineer’s productivity. It was developed using Python programming language and acts as a bridge between ChatGPT and network systems, making interactions seamless and deployments effortless. Current Capabilities AI-Driven Playbook Generation for OSPF and EIGRP based networks: Bubbln has been rigorously tested to leverage ChatGPT for generation of playbooks for networks based on OSPF and EIGRP networks, with a very high accuracy rate. Auto-creation of Inventory files: Users do not need to prepare the hosts file. Bubbln will auto-generate this file from input provided by the user. Customizable Configurations: Users can input specific router protocols (OSPF or EIGRP), interface configurations, and other network details to tailor the generated playbooks. Documentation: Bubbln automatically creates a report that contains the network configurations, prompts, and generated playbooks for easy reference in future. No expertise required: By auto-generation of the playbooks and inventory file, Bubbln has been able to eliminate a major hurdle to network automation – need for users to learn the automation tools e.g Ansible, Chef. Improved Efficiency: With AI automation, Bubbln speeds up the deployment of network configurations, reducing the time required for manual playbook creation, thereby increasing the productivity of network engineers. Getting Started There are two main approaches to installing Bubbln on your local machine. Docker Container Bubbln has been packaged using docker containers for easy distribution and usage. The following steps can be followed to deploy the Bubbln container on your local machine. Ensure docker is installed on your local machine by entering the below command. This command works for windows and linux OS: The version of docker would be displayed if it is installed. Otherwise, please follow the link below to install docker on your machine: Windows: Docker Desktop for Windows Ubuntu: Docker Engine for Ubuntu CentOS: Docker Engine for CentOS Debian: Docker Engine for Debian Fedora: Docker Engine for Fedora Download the docker image: Create a directory for the project and download Bubbln image using the below command: Run the docker container using the below command: Install nano Update the sshipaddresses.txt file: Update the ssh_addresses.txt file with the SSH IP addresses of the routers you want to configure. Bubbln will utilize this information along with the login credentials (inputted at runtime) to automatically generate a hosts.yml file required by ansible for network configuration. To do this enter the below command to edit the file: Obtain an OpenAPI API Key: You may follow this guide to sign up and obtain an API key: Utilizing a Virtualization machine of choice, setup a network with the following basic configurations: Enable SSH on each of the routers. Configure IP addresses and enable only interfaces required for connectivity by Bubbln. Configure static routes to enable Bubbln reach the routers on the network. Ensure all the routers can be reached by ping and SSH from your host machine. Initialize Bubbln by entering the below command: Github Repository Clone You can clone Bubbln’s GitHub repository by following the below steps: Prerequisites Bubbln works well with Python 3.10. You need to ensure python3.10 is installed on your local machine. This can be confirmed by entering the below command: If it is not Installed, then the below command can be utilized to install python 3.10: Build and Prepare the Project Clone the Bubbln repository from GitHub: To clone the repository, first verify you have git installed on your machine by issuing the following commands: If git is installed, the version number would be displayed, otherwise, you can issue the following commands to have git installed on your machine: Navigate or create a directory for the project on your machine and issue the following commands to clone the Bubbln git repository: Create a Virtual Environment for the application Firstly, confirm virtualenv is installed on your machine by inputting the following command: If the output shows something similar to the below, then go to the next step to install virtualenv ` WARNING: Package(s) not found: env, virtual ` Issue the below command to install virtualenv: Create a virtual environment for the project: Activate the virtual environment: Install the dependencies You can then run the below command to install the necessary packages for the app. Update the sshipaddresses.txt file: Update the ssh_addresses.txt file with the SSH IP addresses of the routers you want to configure. Bubbln will utilize this information along with the login credentials (inputted at runtime) to automatically generate a hosts.yml file required by ansible for network configuration. Obtain an OpenAPI API Key: You may follow this guide to sign up and obtain an API key OpenAI Key: OpenAI Key Utilizing a Virtualization machine of choice, setup a network with the following basic configurations: Enable SSH on each of the routers. Configure IP addresses and enable only interfaces required for connectivity by Bubbln Configure static routes to enable Bubbln reach the routers on the network. Ensure all the routers can be reached by ping and SSH from your host machine. Initialize Bubbln While ensuring that python virtual environment is activated as stated in step 5, run the below command to initialize Bubbln How Bubbln Works Bubbln serves as an intermediary between ChatGPT and a network infrastructure, providing logic, control functions, and facilitating network automation. Its operation can be summarized as follows: !image Figure 1Bubbln architecture and interaction with a network of four routers. Initialization: When Bubbln is initialized, it checks the “userconfig.pkl” file to see if Bubbln has ever been initiated. This is indicated by the presence of a welcome message status in the file. If it exists, Bubbln jumps straight to request the user to input the OpenAI key. Otherwise, it displays a welcome message, and updates the userconfig.pkl file accordingly. Upon successful input of the API key, the user is prompted for the SSH credentials of the routers. These parameters are then encrypted and saved in the user_config.pkl file. The SSH credential is later decrypted and parsed as input to dynamically generate a hosts.yml file at runtime. Responsible Code Section: bubbln.py: welcomemessagefeature() !image Figure 2 Bubbln's welcome message. Parameter Input & Validation: In the parameter input stage, Bubbln first checks for the existence of a file called “router_configuration.pkl”. If it exists, the user is prompted to decide whether to load an existing configuration or input a new set of configurations. If the file is empty or non-existent, then users are prompted to input the configuration parameters for each router on the network. These parameters serve as variables that are combined with hardcoded instructions written in natural language to form the prompt sent to ChatGPT. Key parameters include: Router Configurations: OSPF Area OSPF Process ID Number of networks to advertise (OSPF/EIGRP) AS Number (EIGRP) Interface names IP Addresses (in CIDR format) This module also ensures that parameters are keyed in using the correct data type and format e.g. IP addresses are expected in CIDR format and OSPF Area should be of type integer. Upon completion of parameter input, all parameters are saved into a file called “router_configuration.pkl” upon validation of accuracy by the user. Responsible Code Section: parameter_input.py !image Figure 3 Bubbln receiving Network Parameters. Before generating the prompt, a summary of the inputted parameters is displayed for user validation. This step ensures accuracy and minimizes errors. Users are given the option to make corrections if any discrepancies are found. Responsible Code Section: parameterinput.py: validateinputs() !image Figure 4 Bubbln Awaiting Validation of Inputted Network Parameters. Auto-Generation of Prompt: After validation of inputted parameters, Bubbln composes the prompt by combining the inputted parameters with a set of well-engineered hardcoded instructions written in natural language. Responsible Code Section: prompt_generator.py ChatGPT Prompting: The auto-composed prompt is then sent to ChatGPT utilizing gpt-4 chatCompletions model with a temperature parameter of 0.2 and maximum tokens of 1500. The following functions were designed into this process stage Responsible Code Section: chatGPT_prompting.py !image Figure 5 ChatGPT prompting in progress Playbook Generation & Extraction: After ChatGPT processes the prompt from Bubbln, it provides a response which usually contains the generated playbook and explanatory notes. Bubbln then extracts the playbook from the explanatory notes by searching for “---” which usually connotes the start of playbooks and saves each generated playbook uniquely using the nomenclature RouteriPlaybook.yml. Responsible Code Section: playbook_extractor.py !image Figure 6 ChatGPT-generated playbook. Playbook Execution: Bubbln loads the saved “RouteriPlaybook.yml” playbook and dynamically generates the hosts.yml file and parses them to the python library ansiblerunner for further execution on the configured network. Bubbln generates the hosts.yml file at run time by using the pre-inputted SSH credentials in userconfig.pkl file - and decrypts them, as well as IP addresses from the sshipaddresses.txt file, as inputs Responsible Code Section: playbook_execution.py !image Figure 7 Playbook execution in progress Sample result of Executed Playbook Upon successful execution of all playbooks, a query of the routing table on router 4 indicates that router 4 could reach all the prefixes on the network. !image Figure 8 Output of 'sh ip route' executed on R1 File Management and Handling Throughout the execution process, Bubbln manages the creation, saving, and loading of various files to streamline the network automation process. user_config.pkl: This dictionary file dynamically created at run time is used to store encrypted API keys, SSH credentials and initial welcome message information. router_configuration.pkl: It is auto created by Bubbln and used to store network configuration parameters for easy loading during subsequent sessions. hosts.yml: This is a runtime autogenerated file that contains inventory of the network devices. It is auto deleted after the program runs. networkconfigurationreport.pdf: This auto-generated report by Bubbln is a documentation of all the routers configured their parameters, generated playbooks, and prompt for each execution of the Bubbln application. It is created after a successful execution of playbooks and network testing and is meant for auditing and documentation purposes. RouteriPlaybook.yml: After extraction of generated playbooks from ChatGPT’s raw response, Bubbln automatically saves a copy of the generated playbook using unique names for each playbook. !image Figure 9 File structure after successful deployment of a four-router network Providing Feedback We are glad to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Kindly do this through the discussion section of our GitHub - https://github.com/olasupo/bubbln_network-automation/discussions/1#discussion-6487475 We can also be reached on: Olasupo Okunaiya – olasupo.o@gmail.com

OKAI

OKAI OKAI is an interactive introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI). View the Project OKAI just launched recently! Visit the full site at https://okai.brown.edu/ ~~OKAI is currently in the phase of development. You can take a look at a demo chapter here: http://majiaju.io/SynGap_demo/index.html~~ Project Goal OKAI aims to demystify and introduce concepts in AI to a broader audience other than people with backgrounds in related fields, such as computer science, applied math, and physics. Project Format OKAI utilizes web-based interactive graphics and animations to visualize working principles of AI, illustrating mathematical equations and computer codes to make it accessible to people with various backgrounds. OKAI is in the format of a website, with each webpage functioning similar to a chapter in a book and introducing one concept at a time. Related Pages You can learn more about this project on my personal website. If you are interested in learning how the scroll-based animations are created, read this medium article written by me. License The project, except the motion graphics, is licensed under GNU GPL v3. The motion graphics, in the format of .json (located in /json directory), are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To reuse our graphics, please embed the following html snippet into your webpage. OKAI by Jiaju Ma, Yimei Hu, Michael Mao is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Based on a work at https://github.com/jama1017/OKAI.

aion

Aion Mainstream adoption of blockchains has been limited because of scalability, privacy, and interoperability challenges. Aion is a multi-tier blockchain network designed to address these challenges. Core to our hypothesis is the idea that many blockchains will be created to solve unique business challenges within unique industries. As such, the Aion network is designed to support custom blockchain architectures while providing a trustless mechanism for cross-chain interoperability. The Aion White Papers provides more details regarding our design and project roadmap. This repository contains the main (Java) kernel implementation and releases for the Aion Network. System Requirements Ubuntu 16.04 or a later version Getting Started Blockchain node concept To understand what is blockchain kernel: Node overview Developers If you're interested in building Open Applications, powered by Aion: Visit the Developer site of The Open Application Network : developer.theoan.com If you're interested in making improvements to the Java Implementation of Aion: Refer to the Build Aion kernel from source wiki for information on building this source code to a native binary or Docker image Refer to the Installation wiki for a guide on installing and configuring the kernel. The Owner's Manual wiki will include further instructions and details on working with the kernel. Please refer to the wiki pages for further documentation on mining/validating, using the Web3 API, command line options, etc. Miners/Validators If you're interested in being a validator on the Aion networks, refer to our Validator Docs Users If you're interested in interacting with dApps and using Aion, refer to our Aion Desktop Wallet Docs FAQ Where can I store my Aion? We recommend using the web-based Aion Wallet; more information can be found in “Docs”). Where can I stake my Aion? You can use the original staking interface which has support for staking pool operators, or the web-based Aion Wallet. Where can I check on a transaction on The Open Application Network? You can visit either the web-based Aion Wallet or the Aion Dashboard to view a transaction on the network. Where can I see the current network performance of The Open Application Network? You can visit the Aion Dashboard to see how the Open Application Network is performing. What should I do if the desktop wallet or the web based wallet are not functioning properly? First check in with the community on the community subreddit. If the community is not able to assist then you can submit a ticket through Github. The Open Application Network is currently providing support to help maintain the network; where can I see the funds that The Open Application Network has mined or received as a stake reward? All funds mined or rewarded for staking that the foundation receives are burned to this address: 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 users can check the totals burned via the Aion Dashboard here. What is the total circulating supply of Aion? To view the current total circulating supply of Aion you can use the Aion Watch tool located here. Which networks are supported? The Mainnet network is supported. To view the dashboards for this networks use these links: Mainnet How can I export a list of my transactions? If you would like to download a copy of your transaction history you can use https://mainnet.theoan.com and search for your public address. In the bottom right of your screen is a “Download this Account” button which will allow you to select a date range and download a .csv file containing your transactions. Where can I access a copy of The OAN and Aion Brand Guidelines? The OAN and Aion Brand Guidelines can be located here they can be used by the community to create brand aligned content. My Ledger doesn’t seem to be recognized with applications in the Chrome Browser (Staking Interface or Wallet) When using your Ledger hardware wallet with Aion installed to access an account VIA the Chrome browser, users will need to enable the Aion contract on their Ledger device. This can be done by selecting: Aion > Setting > enable Contract. What happened to the Aiwa chrome extension wallet? Aiwa was owned and operated by a third-party organization called BlockX Labs, Aiwa was funded by a community grant during its lifespan. However, BlockX Labs is now reorganizing and will no longer support Aiwa. Usage of Aiwa has decreased significantly with other tools such as the web based wallet now available so the decision was made to deprecate it. I am unable to undelegate my staked Aion In order to undelegate your Aion: – You must have a sufficient Aion balance to perform the undelegation transaction (a minimum of 0.02 Aion is required for the transaction fee) – Your balance will be updated after a lock-up period of 8640 blocks (approximately 24 hours) – Ensure the amount follows this format: 999,999,999.999999999 – If you are using a ledger, please ensure that your firmware is up to date. – If you are using the desktop interface, ensure that you are using the latest version – For more information view this guide What happened to the swap process to convert ERC-20 Aion to the mainnet? As of January 31, 2022 swapping from ERC20 to Aion mainnet is no longer supported. The original Aion token swap from Ethereum to Aion was completed on December 10, 2018. However, in order to support the community members who missed the original swap deadline a manual process was available, this process has now been retired. Community Channels Newsfeed: @AionNewsfeed Info Bot: @AionTGbot Wiki: reddit.com/r/AionNetwork/Wiki Help Desk: https://helpdesk.theoan.com/ Contact To keep up to date and stay connected with current progress and development, reach out to us on the following channels: Aion Telegram Dispatch Alerts Aion on Twitter Aion Blog License Aion is released under the MIT license

llc-intro-to-ai-master

Ladies Learning Code Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Quick Links Preview Slides: https://ladieslearningcode.github.io/llc-intro-to-ai-master/slides.html Special Note for Instructors The dataiku platform will need to be activated ahead of time. If you haven't received a custom bitly link via email already, please let us know at content@canadalearningcode.ca and we'll set one up for you. Attributions Content created by Parinaz Sobhani for Canada Learning Code. Slide presentation created by Christina Truong for Canada Learning Code. Email questions & comments to content@canadalearningcode.ca. If you'd like to contribute to future lesson content development, let us know here. We're really happy to see others leverage our content in their community - we’ve developed it to be used by others with attribution through a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Here’s an easy way to attribute content back to us - please include it wherever you use or make reference to our content. “Please note that this is not a Canada Learning Code affiliated event, but we want to acknowledge the organization for the creation of the content [INSERT LINK TO GITHUB LINK] being delivered under Creative Commons license" Contributing Our general Rule of Thumb is that it's okay to add examples if you feel it could provide more context for your community. However, we ask that instructors do not remove anything, as the content is designed with intention, whether that be meeting specific learning objectives, or maintaining our organization’s culture through the design. Any suggestions for revisions or updates can be submitted in Github via issues and pull requests. If submitting an issue, please include the slide number(s) in the title.

In the Zone - Coding Music for Focus & Clarity

Get in the zone and stay focused with this chill coding music designed for mental clarity and deep work. Whether you're programming, designing, or studying, these beats will help you block out distractions and lock into your flow state. Featuring a blend of chillstep and ambient synthwave, this playlist is perfect for long coding sessions, creative work, or late-night productivity. Put on your headphones, dive into your projects, and let the music guide your focus. You can get the artwork featured in this video as a digital download on Etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1858065246/in-the-zone Tracklist 0:00 Unraveling the Moment 3:37 Luna's Glow 6:24 Echoes of Purpose 9:56 The Art of Being Present 13:27 Breathing Through Time 16:13 Falling Into Rhythm 17:59 Into the Current of Creation 21:45 Mindscapes in Motion 24:01 Shadows of Stillness 28:03 Threading Through Time 31:09 Tuning the Infinite 34:15 Unseen Currents 37:55 Vibrations of Clarity 39:58 Where Thoughts Flow Free 43:59 Blurring Boundaries 47:38 Carved from Stillness 51:39 In the Flow of Thought 54:08 Luminous Quietude 56:39 Submerged in Clarity Let me know in the comments how this playlist helps your workflow! Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools. Tags: #CodingMusic #FocusBeats #FlowState #DeepWork #ProgrammingMusic #Synthwave #Chillstep #StudyBeats #ProductivityMusic #WorkVibes #ConcentrationMusic #MentalClarity #CodingSession #CodeAndChill #LoFiBeats #DeveloperLife #MusicForFocus #ChillVibes #CreativeFlow #CodeFlow #chillstep

airbnb

Notes on Airbnb business in New York and elsewhere ================================================== Disclaimer The script scrapes the Airbnb web site to collect data about the shape of the company's business. No guarantees are made about the quality of data obtained using this script, statistically or about an individual page. So please check your results. Changelog 2014-12-02 Tom Slee More robustness fixes. 2014-09-23 Tom Slee Bug fixes that solve problems where over-eager exception handling caused the script to exit too early. 2014-08-26 Tom Slee Version 2.1 is updated to be able to collect data from Airbnb's updated web site. Not all cities have the new format, but the script should handle both versions. It will not, however, handle cities without neighborhoods. 2014-05-26 Tom Slee Version 2 (May 2014) is much more thorough and efficient about searching Airbnb's web site for a given city and has more options. I have moved it to python 3 for better handling of unicode multi-lingual data. It is also ported to SAP SQL Anywhere to allow more flexible reporting and better concurrency than SQLite can provide. A free developer edition is available from the SAP web site. You may need to configure the python driver following the instructions given in http://dcx.sybase.com/index.html#sa160/en/dbprogramming/pg-python.html. airbnb.py is the python script to collect data. plot.py just produces some charts. airbnb.db is the data. The basic data is in the table room. A complete search of a given city's listings is a "survey" and the surveys are tracked in table survey. Using the script To create the database: python airbnb.py -dbi. This command does two things: initializes a database file (dbnb.db in the current directory) runs the reload.sql script against the database to create the tables, views, and stored procedures that make up the database. No data is added. On Windows, the reload.sql script does not always run. If that fails, try this to create the database tables: dbisql -c "uid=dba;pwd=sql;dbf=dbnb.db;eng=db" From Interactive SQL, click File > Open and choose reload.sql from the current directory. Hit F5 to execute the script and create the tables. Test that you can connect to the database file: run python airbnb.py --dbping and confirm that there are no errors. If there are errors, check the database file setting near the top of the script and change its location. To run a survey: add a city (search area) to the database, by running ./airbnb.py -asa "city-name". It scans the Airbnb web site and adds the neighborhoods for the city. add a survey to the database by running ./airbnb.py -asv "city-name". The command lists the survey_id value that was created. collect the roomids for the survey by running ./airbnb.py -s surveyid. The survey_id can be seen by running ./airbnb -ls. This search loops over neighborhoods, property types, and pages of listings in the Airbnb search pages. fill in the details of the rooms by running ./airbnb -f. If any step fails: If the -s step or the -f step fails (say because the internet connection was lost), you can just run it again, and it will pick up from where it left off without losing data. Continue until the script completes.

kodyfire

Kody is a command-line tool for generating artifact files, powered by both classic and AI code generation techniques. It can be used by both technical and non-technical users to generate files across a wide range of technologies and programming languages. The code generation feature in Kody relies on OpenAI GPT, a language model that uses deep learning to generate human-like text, and ChatGPT to provide natural language processing capabilities. Table of Contents Installation Usage Getting Started Terminology Contributing License Installation Prerequisites Node.js (version 14 or later) To install kody, use npm with the following command: or You can check the documentation with Usage Options -v, --version: Output the current version -h, --help: Display help for command Commands prompt|ai [options] [prompt...]: AI powered prompt assistant to quickly generate an artifact batch [options]: Generate multiple digital artifact create [options] : Generate a new blank kody project generate|g [options] [kody] [concept]: Prompt assistant to quickly generate an artifact import|in [options] : Mass create artifacts from a source. init: Initialize a new kodyfire project install|i [kody]: Prompt user to choose to install list|ls [options] [kodyName]: List installed kodies within your current project. publish [template]: Publish the templates of the kody along with the assets.json and schema.ts files ride|↻: Prompt assistant to help build your kody.json file run [options]: Generate a digital artifact based on the selected technology run-script|rs: Run scripts search|s [keywords...]: Search kodyfire packages from npm registry watch|w [options]: Watch for file changes and run kody help [command]: Display help for command Getting Started Open the project you are willing to work on using vscode or your prefered editor. Generate artifacts using AI In case you want to exclusivly rely on AI to generate your artifacts. You don't need to install any additional kodies. Run the kody ai [prompt] command and follow the prompts. For example, to create a Laravel Controller named SampleController under API/V1 and add a comment on top saying Hello Kodyfire, run the following command You can use the experimental Speech-to-Text option to pass your prompt using your voice. The transcription relies on Whisper and requires SoX installed and available in your \$PATH. for the audio recording. For Linux For MacOS For Windows Download the binaries Generate your artifact using the classical method Search and install a kody Based on your project, search availables kodies and select the one that fits your need.. To search availables kodies by keyword runthe following command. if you don't specify a keyword all available kodies will be listed. Install your kody of choice. For example, if you want to install the react kody or Please note you can install as many kodies in the same project as you wish. Generate your artifact There are 2 methods you can generate your artifacts with: The generate command The run command Method 1: Generator mode kody generate The recommended way of using kody is using the generate command. The command will assist you creating your artifact based on the chosen concept. For example, a react component is considered a concept. In order to generate your artifacts, run the generate command. The syntax is kody g|generate [kody] [concept]. the assistant will prompt you to select the missing arguments. As an example, run the following command from your terminal: Method 2: Runner mode kody run The run command is similar to the generate command. The run requires a definition file which is simply a json file containing all the concept definitions you have created using the ride command. The generate command on the other hand creates one or more concept definition on the run and process them on one run. Every command has its use cases. Initialize kody In order to start using kody, you need to initialize your project. This will add the definition files required for kody runs. Important: Please run the command only once. The command will override existing definition files. We will disable overriding in a future version. Ride your kody In order to update your definition, use the kody ride command to assist you populate the required fields Launch a kody run Once you are satisified with your definition file, execute the run command to generate your artifacts. To run all kodies defined within your project, run the following command: Create your own kody In most cases you might need a custom kody to suit your needs Scaffold a new kody Create a basic kody using the scaffold command. Follow the prompts to setup your kody This will create a folder containing the basic structure for a kody. You can start using right away within your project. Setup your kody Install npm dependencies Build your kody Add your concepts and related templates //TODO This will build your kody and export the basic templates files. Add your kody as an NPM dependency to a test project In order to be able to use it within your test project run the following command Publish your kody Please remember that Kody is still in exploration phase and things will change frequently. Contribution is always highly requested. Prepare your kody Add the required kodyfire metadata to your package.json Publish to Github Intialize your project as a git repository and push to a public Github repo To do so, kindly follow these steps:- Intitialize a new Github repository and make it public. Open your project root folder locally from terminal and run the following commands:- Link your project to your Github repository. Publish to npm Once you are satisfied with your kody and you would to like to share it with the community. Run the following command. Note: You'll need an NPM account Share with community Congratulation publishing your first kody. Don't forget to share your kody repo link by opening an issue on Kody's github repository. Terminology Kody: Refers to the code generation command-line tool that generates digital artifacts. Artifacts: Refers to the various digital products generated by Kody based on the input provided. Note: Kody uses classical code generation techniques in addition to AI-powered code generation using OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT. Available kodies | Name | Description | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | basic-kodyfire | A general purpose code generator that should handle most of the generation use cases | | typescript-kodyfire | Generate typescript related artifacts | | tsconfig-kodyfire | Generate tsconfig files for your typescript projects | | nextjs-kodyfire | Generate nextJs components and related artifacts | | react-kodyfire | Generate react components | | laravel-kodyfire | Laravel artifacts generation | | uml-kodyfire | Uml diagrams generation using plantuml | | readme-kodyfire | Readme file generation | | word-kodyfire | Generate ms word document based on a template | | pdf-kodyfire | Generate PDF document from HTML templates | | social-image-kodyfire | Generate dynamic images for social sharing based on HTML templates | | social-gif-kodyfire | Generate dynamic gif images for social sharing based on HTML templates | | linkedin-quizzes-kodyfire | Practice Linkedin skill assessement tests from your terminal | | chatgpt-kodyfire | Use chatgpt from the terminal. Allows you provide additional data from various sources (not implemented yet) and export to serveral outputs (markdown only now). | Contributing If you encounter any issues while using Kody or have suggestions for new features, feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Please read our contributing guidelines before making contributions. License Kody is MIT licensed.

internet-tools-collection

Internet Tools Collection A collection of tools, website and AI for entrepreneurs, web designers, programmers and for everyone else. Content by category Artificial Intelligence Developers Design Entrepreneur Video Editing Stock videos Stock Photos Stock music Search Engine Optimization Blog Posts Resume Interviews No code website builder No code game builder Side Hustle Browser Extensions Other Students Artificial Intelligence Jasper - The Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://www.jasper.ai/) Create content 5x faster with artificial intelligence. Jasper is the highest quality AI copywriting tool with over 3,000 5-star reviews. Best for writing blog posts, social media content, and marketing copy. AutoDraw [](https://www.autodraw.com/) Fast drawing for everyone. AutoDraw pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help you draw stuff fast. Rytr - Best AI Writer, Content Generator & Writing Assistant [](https://rytr.me/) Rytr is an AI writing assistant that helps you create high-quality content, in just a few seconds, at a fraction of the cost! Neevo - Neevo [](https://www.neevo.ai/) Kinetix Tech [](https://kinetix.tech/) Kinetix is a no-code 3D creation tool powered by Artificial Intelligence. The web-based platform leverages AI motion capture to convert a video into a 3D animation and lets you customize your avatars and environments. We make 3D animation accessible to every creator so they can create engaging stories. LALAL.AI: 100% AI-Powered Vocal and Instrumental Tracks Remover [](https://www.lalal.ai/) Split vocal and instrumental tracks quickly and accurately with LALAL.AI. Upload any audio file and receive high-quality extracted tracks in a few seconds. Copy.ai: Write better marketing copy and content with AI [](https://www.copy.ai/) Get great copy that sells. Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriter that generates high-quality copy for your business. Get started for free, no credit card required! Marketing simplified! OpenAI [](https://openai.com/) OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. DALL·E 2 [](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/) DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Steve.ai - World’s fastest way to create Videos [](https://www.steve.ai/) Steve.AI is an online Video making software that helps anyone to create Videos and animations in seconds. Octie.ai - Your A.I. ecommerce marketing assistant [](https://octie.ai/) Write emails, product descriptions, and more, with A.I. Created by Octane AI. hypnogram.xyz [](https://hypnogram.xyz/) Generate images from text descriptions using AI FakeYou. Deep Fake Text to Speech. [](https://fakeyou.com/) FakeYou is a text to speech wonderland where all of your dreams come true. Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini [](https://www.craiyon.com/) Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini, is an AI model that can draw images from any text prompt! Deck Rocks - Create Pictch Decks [](https://www.deck.rocks/) Writely | Using AI to Improve Your Writing [](https://www.writelyai.com/) Making the art of writing accessible to all Writesonic AI Writer - Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://writesonic.com/) Writesonic is an AI writer that's been trained on top-performing SEO content, high-performing ads, and converting sales copy to help you supercharge your writing and marketing efforts. Smart Copy - AI Copywriting Assistant | Unbounce [](https://unbounce.com/product/smart-copy/) Generate creative AI copy on-the-spot across your favourite tools Synthesia | #1 AI Video Generation Platform [](https://www.synthesia.io/) Create AI videos by simply typing in text. Easy to use, cheap and scalable. Make engaging videos with human presenters — directly from your browser. Free demo. NVIDIA Canvas: Turn Simple Brushstrokes into Realistic Images [](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/) Create backgrounds quickly, or speed up your concept exploration so you can spend more time visualizing ideas with the help of NVIDIA Canvas. Hotpot.ai - Hotpot.ai [](https://hotpot.ai/) Hotpot.ai makes graphic design and image editing easy. AI tools allow experts and non-designers to automate tedious tasks while attractive, easy-to-edit templates allow anyone to create device mockups, social media posts, marketing images, app icons, and other work graphics. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Search listening tool for market, customer & content research - AnswerThePublic [](https://answerthepublic.com/) Use our free tool to get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers. Upgrade to a paid plan to monitor for new ways that people talk & ask questions about your brand, product or topic. Topic Mojo [](https://topicmojo.com/) Discover unique & newest queries around any topic and find what your customers are searching for. Pulling data from 50+ sources to enhance your topic research. AI Image Enlarger | Enlarge Image Without Losing Quality! [](https://imglarger.com/) AI Image Enlarger is a FREE online image enlarger that could upscale and enhance small images automatically. Make jpg/png pictures big without losing quality. Midjourney [](https://www.midjourney.com/app/) Kaedim - AI for turning 2D images to 3D models [](https://www.kaedim3d.com/webapp) AI for turning 2D images, sketches and photos to 3D models in seconds. Overdub: Ultra realistic text to speech voice cloning - Descript [](https://www.descript.com/overdub) Create a text to speech model of your voice. Try a live demo. Getting Started [](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/get-started) Resources to learn about Magenta Photosonic AI Art Generator | Create Unique Images with AI [](https://photosonic.writesonic.com/) Transform your imagination into stunning digital art with Photosonic - the AI art generator. With its creative suggestions, this Writesonic's AI image generator can help unleash your inner artist and share your creations with the world. Image Computer [](https://image.computer/) Most downloaded Instagram Captions App (+more creator tools) [](https://captionplus.app/) Join 3 Million+ Instagram Creators who use CaptionPlus to find Instagram Captions, Hashtags, Feed Planning, Reel Ideas, IG Story Design and more. Writecream - Best AI Writer & Content Generator - Writecream [](https://www.writecream.com/) Sentence Rewriter is a free tool to reword a sentence, paragraph and even entire essays in a short amount of time. Hypotenuse AI: AI Writing Assistant and Text Generator [](https://www.hypotenuse.ai/) Turn a few keywords into original, insightful articles, product descriptions and social media copy with AI copywriting—all in just minutes. Try it free today. Text to Speach Listnr: Generate realistic Text to Speech voiceovers in seconds [](https://www.listnr.tech/) AI Voiceover Generator with over 600+ voiceovers in 80+ languages, go from Text to Voice in seconds. Get started for Free! Free Text to Speech: Online, App, Software, Commercial license with Natural Sounding Voices. [](https://www.naturalreaders.com/) Free text to speech online app with natural voices, convert text to audio and mp3, for personal and commercial use Developers OverAPI.com | Collecting all the cheat sheets [](https://overapi.com/) OverAPI.com is a site collecting all the cheatsheets,all! Search Engine For Devs [](https://you.com/) Spline - Design tool for 3D web browser experiences [](https://spline.design/) Create web-based 3D browser experiences Image to HTML CSS converter. Convert image to HTML CSS with AI: Fronty [](https://fronty.com/) Fronty - Image to HTML CSS code converter. Convert image to HTML powered by AI. Sketchfab - The best 3D viewer on the web [](https://sketchfab.com/) With a community of over one million creators, we are the world’s largest platform to publish, share, and discover 3D content on web, mobile, AR, and VR. Railway [](https://railway.app/) Railway is an infrastructure platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with that infrastructure locally, and then deploy to the cloud. JSON Crack - Crack your data into pieces [](https://jsoncrack.com/) Simple visualization tool for your JSON data. No forced structure, paste your JSON and view it instantly. Locofy.ai - ship your products 3-4x faster — with low code [](https://www.locofy.ai/) Turn your designs into production-ready frontend code for mobile apps and web. Ship products 3-4x faster with your existing design tools, tech stacks & workflows. Oh Shit, Git!?! [](https://ohshitgit.com/) Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code [](https://carbon.now.sh/) Carbon is the easiest way to create and share beautiful images of your source code. GPRM : GitHub Profile ReadMe Maker [](https://gprm.itsvg.in/) Best Profile Generator, Create your perfect GitHub Profile ReadMe in the best possible way. Lots of features and tools included, all for free ! HubSpot | Software, Tools, and Resources to Help Your Business Grow Better [](https://www.hubspot.com/) HubSpot’s integrated CRM platform contains the marketing, sales, service, operations, and website-building software you need to grow your business. QuickRef.ME - Quick Reference Cheat Sheet [](https://quickref.me/) Share quick reference and cheat sheet for developers massCode | A free and open source code snippets manager for developers [](https://masscode.io/) Code snippets manager for developers, developed using web technologies. Snyk | Developer security | Develop fast. Stay secure. [](https://snyk.io/) Snyk helps software-driven businesses develop fast and stay secure. Continuously find and fix vulnerabilities for npm, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, PyPI and more. Developer Roadmaps [](https://roadmap.sh/) Community driven roadmaps, articles, guides, quizzes, tips and resources for developers to learn from, identify their career paths, know what they don't know, find out the knowledge gaps, learn and improve. CSS Generators Get Waves – Create SVG waves for your next design [](https://getwaves.io/) A free SVG wave generator to make unique SVG waves for your next web design. Choose a curve, adjust complexity, randomize! Box Shadows [](https://box-shadow.dev/) Tridiv | CSS 3D Editor [](http://tridiv.com/) Tridiv is a web-based editor for creating 3D shapes in CSS Glassmorphism CSS Generator - Glass UI [](https://ui.glass/generator/) Generate CSS and HTML components using the glassmorphism design specifications based on the Glass UI library. Blobmaker - Make organic SVG shapes for your next design [](https://www.blobmaker.app/) Make organic SVG shapes for your next design. Modify the complexity, contrast, and color, to generate unique SVG blobs every time. Keyframes.app [](https://keyframes.app/) cssFilters.co - Custom and Instagram like photo filters for CSS [](https://www.cssfilters.co/) Visual playground for generating CSS for custom and Instagram like photo filters. Experiment with your own uploaded photo or select one from the Unsplash collection. CSS Animations Animista - CSS Animations on Demand [](https://animista.net/) Animista is a CSS animation library and a place where you can play with a collection of ready-made CSS animations and download only those you will use. Build Internal apps Superblocks | Save 100s of developer hours on internal tools [](https://www.superblocks.com/) Superblocks is the fast, easy and secure way for developers to build custom internal tools fast. Connect your databases & APIs. Drag and drop UI components. Extend with Python or Javascript. Deploy in 1-click. Secure and Monitor using your favorite tools Budibase | Build internal tools in minutes, the easy way [](https://budibase.com/) Budibase is a modern, open source low-code platform for building modern internal applications in minutes. Retool | Build internal tools, remarkably fast. [](https://retool.com/) Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Drag-and-drop our building blocks and connect them to your databases and APIs to build your own tools, instantly. Connects with Postgres, REST APIs, GraphQL, Firebase, Google Sheets, and more. Built by developers, for developers. Trusted by startups and Fortune 500s. Sign up for free. GitHub Repositories GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? [](https://github.com/vasanthk/how-web-works) What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? - GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. [](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap) Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. - GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. [](https://github.com/apptension/developer-handbook) An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. - GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes [](https://www.profileme.dev/) ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. [](https://github.com/Kristories/awesome-guidelines) A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. - GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. GitHub - tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet: A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. [](https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet) A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. Contribute to tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer [](https://github.com/andreasbm/web-skills) A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer - GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers [](https://github.com/Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes) Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers - GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers Blockchain/Crypto Dashboards [](https://dune.com/) Blockchain ecosystem analytics by and for the community. Explore and share data from Ethereum, xDai, Polygon, Optimism, BSC and Solana for free. Introduction - The Anchor Book v0.24.0 [](https://book.anchor-lang.com/introduction/introduction.html) Crypto & Fiat Exchange Super App | Trade, Save & Spend | hi [](https://hi.com/) Buy, Trade, Send and Earn Crypto & Fiat. Deposit Bitcoin, ETH, USDT and other cryptos and start earning. Get the hi Debit Card and Multi-Currency IBAN Account. Moralis Web3 - Enterprise-Grade Web3 APIs [](https://moralis.io/) Bridge the development gap between Web2 and Web3 with Moralis’ powerful Web3 APIs. Mirror [](https://mirror.xyz/) Built on web3 for web3, Mirror’s robust publishing platform pushes the boundaries of writing online—whether it’s the next big white paper or a weekly community update. Makerdao [](https://blog.makerdao.com/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX [](https://sholi.io/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX Stock Trading Quiver Quantitative [](https://www.quiverquant.com/) Quiver Quantitative Chart Prime - The only tool you'll need for trading assets across all markets [](https://chartprime.com/) ChartPrime offers a toolkit that will take your trading game to the next level. Visit our site for a full rundown of features and helpful tutorials. Learning Hacker Rank [](https://www.hackerrank.com/) Coderbyte | Code Screening, Challenges, & Interview Prep [](https://coderbyte.com/) Improve your coding skills with our library of 300+ challenges and prepare for coding interviews with content from leading technology companies. Competitive Programming | Participate & Learn | CodeChef [](https://www.codechef.com/) Learn competitive programming with the help of CodeChef's coding competitions. Take part in these online coding contests to level up your skills Learn to Code - for Free | Codecademy [](https://www.codecademy.com/) Learn the technical skills to get the job you want. Join over 50 million people choosing Codecademy to start a new career (or advance in their current one). Free Code Camp [](https://www.freecodecamp.org/) Learn to Code — For Free Sololearn: Learn to Code [](https://www.sololearn.com/home) Join Now to learn the basics or advance your existing skills Mimo: The coding app you need to learn to code! Python, HTML, JavaScript [](https://getmimo.com/) Join more than 17 million learners worldwide. Learn to code for free. Learn Python, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, HTML, and more with our free code learning app. Free for developers [](https://free-for.dev/#/) Your Career in Web Development Starts Here | The Odin Project [](https://www.theodinproject.com/) The Odin Project empowers aspiring web developers to learn together for free Code Learning Games CheckiO - coding games and programming challenges for beginner and advanced [](https://checkio.org/) CheckiO - coding websites and programming games. Improve your coding skills by solving coding challenges and exercises online with your friends in a fun way. Exchanges experience with other users online through fun coding activities Coding for Kids | Game-Based Programming | CodeMonkey [](https://www.codemonkey.com/) CodeMonkey is a leading coding for kids program. Through its award-winning courses, millions of students learn how to code in real programming languages. Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better [](https://www.codingame.com/) CodinGame is a challenge-based training platform for programmers where you can play with the hottest programming topics. Solve games, code AI bots, learn from your peers, have fun. Learn VIM while playing a game - VIM Adventures [](https://vim-adventures.com/) VIM Adventures is an online game based on VIM's keyboard shortcuts. It's the "Zelda meets text editing" game. So come have some fun and learn some VIM! CodeCombat - Coding games to learn Python and JavaScript [](https://codecombat.com/) Learn typed code through a programming game. Learn Python, JavaScript, and HTML as you solve puzzles and learn to make your own coding games and websites. Design Useberry - Codeless prototype analytics [](https://www.useberry.com/) User testing feedback & rich insights in minutes, not months! Figma: the collaborative interface design tool. [](https://www.figma.com/) Build better products as a team. Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma. Dribbble - Discover the World’s Top Designers & Creative Professionals [](https://dribbble.com/) Find Top Designers & Creative Professionals on Dribbble. We are where designers gain inspiration, feedback, community, and jobs. Your best resource to discover and connect with designers worldwide. Photopea | Online Photo Editor [](https://www.photopea.com/) Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free! Toools.design – An archive of 1000+ Design Resources [](https://www.toools.design/) A growing archive of over a thousand design resources, weekly updated for the community. Discover highly useful design tools you never thought existed. All Online Tools in One Box | 10015 Tools [](https://10015.io/) All online tools you need in one box for free. Build anything online with “all-in-one toolbox”. All tools are easy-to-use, blazing fast & free. Phase - Digital Design Reinvented| Phase [](https://phase.com/) Design and prototype websites and apps visually and intuitively, in a new powerful product reworked for the digital age. Animated Backgrounds [](https://animatedbackgrounds.me/) A Collection of 30+ animated backgrounds for websites and blogs.With Animated Backgrounds, set a simple, elegant background animations on your websites and blogs. Trianglify.io · Low Poly Pattern Generator [](https://trianglify.io/) Trianglify.io is a tool for generating low poly triangle patterns that can be used as wallpapers and website assets. Cool Backgrounds [](https://coolbackgrounds.io/) Explore a beautifully curated selection of cool backgrounds that you can add to blogs, websites, or as desktop and phone wallpapers. SVG Repo - Free SVG Vectors and Icons [](https://www.svgrepo.com/) Free Vectors and Icons in SVG format. ✅ Download free mono or multi color vectors for commercial use. Search in 300.000+ Free SVG Vectors and Icons. Microcopy - Short copy text for your website. [](https://www.microcopy.me/) Search micro UX copy text: slogans, headlines, notifications, CTA, error messages, email, account preferences, and much more. 3D icons and icon paks - Free3Dicon [](https://free3dicon.com/) All 3D icons you need in one place. This is a collection of free, beautiful, trending 3D icons, that you can use in any project. Love 3D Icon [](https://free3dicons.com/) Downloads free 3D icons GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program [](https://www.gimp.org/) GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program: The Free and Open Source Image Editor blender.org - Home of the Blender project - Free and Open 3D Creation Software [](https://www.blender.org/) The Freedom to Create 3D Design Software | 3D Modeling on the Web | SketchUp [](https://www.sketchup.com/) SketchUp is a premier 3D design software that truly makes 3D modeling for everyone, with a simple to learn yet robust toolset that empowers you to create whatever you can imagine. Free Logo Maker - Create a Logo in Seconds - Shopify [](https://www.shopify.com/tools/logo-maker) Free logo maker tool to generate custom design logos in seconds. This logo creator is built for entrepreneurs on the go with hundreds of templates, free vectors, fonts and icons to design your own logo. The easiest way to create business logos online. All your design tools in one place | Renderforest [](https://www.renderforest.com/) Time to get your brand noticed. Create professional videos, logos, mockups, websites, and graphics — all in one place. Get started now! Prompt Hero [](https://prompthero.com/) Type Scale - A Visual Calculator [](https://type-scale.com/) Preview and choose the right type scale for your project. Experiment with font size, scale and different webfonts. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion [](https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/) DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion, 2022. The branding style guidelines documents archive [](https://brandingstyleguides.com/) Welcome to the brand design manual documents directory. Search over our worldwide style assets handpicked collection, access to PDF documents for inspiration. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Readymag—a design tool to create websites without coding [](https://readymag.com/) Meet the most elegant, simple and powerful web-tool for designing websites, presentations, portfolios and all kinds of digital publications. ffflux: Online SVG Fluid Gradient Background Generator | fffuel [](https://fffuel.co/ffflux/) SVG generator to make fluid gradient backgrounds that feel organic and motion-like. Perfect to add a feeling of motion and fluidity to your web designs. Generate unique SVG design assets | Haikei [](https://haikei.app/) A web-based design tool to generate unique SVG design assets for websites, social media, blog posts, desktop and mobile wallpapers, posters, and more! Our generators let you discover, customize, randomize, and export generative SVG design assets ready to use with your favorite design tools. UI/UX - Inspirational Free Website Builder Software | 10,000+ Free Templates [](https://nicepage.com/) Nicepage is your website builder software breaking limitations common for website builders with revolutionary freehand positioning. 7000+ Free Templates. Easy Drag-n-Drop. No coding. Mobile-friendly. Clean HTML. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Pika – Create beautiful mockups from screenshots [](https://pika.style/) Quickly create beautiful website and device mockup from screenshot. Pika lets you capture website screenshots form URL, add device and browser frames, customize background and more LiveTerm [](https://liveterm.vercel.app/) Minimal Gallery – Web design inspiration [](https://minimal.gallery/) For the love of beautiful, clean and functional websites. Awwwards - Website Awards - Best Web Design Trends [](https://www.awwwards.com/) Awwwards are the Website Awards that recognize and promote the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and web agencies in the world. Design Systems For Figma [](https://www.designsystemsforfigma.com/) A collection of Design Systems for Figma from all over the globe. Superside: Design At Scale For Ambitious Brands [](https://www.superside.com/) We are an always-on design company. Get a team of dedicated designers, speedy turnarounds, magical creative collaboration tech and the top 1% of global talent. UXArchive - Made by Waldo [](https://uxarchive.com/) UXArchive the world's largest library of mobile user flows. Be inspired to design the best user experiences. Search by Muzli [](https://search.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects Siteinspire | Web Design Inspiration [](https://www.siteinspire.com/) SAVEE [](https://savee.it/) The best way to save and share inspiration. A little corner of the internet to find good landing page copywriting examples [](https://greatlandingpagecopy.com/) A little corner of the internet to find great landing page copywriting examples. The Best Landing Page Examples For Design Inspiration - SaaS Landing Page [](https://saaslandingpage.com/) SaaS Landing Page showcases the best landing page examples created by top-class SaaS companies. Get ideas and inspirations for your next design project. Websites Free templates Premium Bootstrap Themes and Templates: Download @ Creative Tim [](https://www.creative-tim.com/) UI Kits, Templates and Dashboards built on top of Bootstrap, Vue.js, React, Angular, Node.js and Laravel. Join over 2,014,387+ creatives to access all our products! Free Bootstrap Themes, Templates, Snippets, and Guides - Start Bootstrap [](https://startbootstrap.com/) Start Bootstrap develops free to download, open source Bootstrap 5 themes, templates, and snippets and creates guides and tutorials to help you learn more about designing and developing with Bootstrap. Free Website Templates [](https://freewebsitetemplates.com/) Get your free website templates here and use them on your website without needing to link back to us. One Page Love - One Page Website Inspiration and Templates [](https://onepagelove.com/) One Page Love is a One Page website design gallery showcasing the best Single Page websites, templates and resources. Free CSS | 3400 Free Website Templates, CSS Templates and Open Source Templates [](https://www.free-css.com/) Free CSS has 3400 free website templates, all templates are free CSS templates, open source templates or creative commons templates. Free Bootstrap Themes and Website Templates | BootstrapMade [](https://bootstrapmade.com/) At BootstrapMade, we create beautiful website templates and bootstrap themes using Bootstrap, the most popular HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework. Free and Premium Bootstrap Themes, Templates by Themesberg [](https://themesberg.com/) Free and Premium Bootstrap themes, templates, admin dashboards and UI kits used by over 38820 web developers and software companies HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startup landing pages - Cruip [](https://cruip.com/) Cruip is a gallery of premium and free HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startups and SaaS. Free Website Templates Download | WordPress Themes - W3Layouts [](https://w3layouts.com/) Want to download free website templates? W3Layouts WordPress themes and website templates are built with responsive web design techniques. Download now! Free HTML Landing Page Templates and UI Kits | UIdeck [](https://uideck.com/) Free HTML Landing Page Templates, Bootstrap Themes, React Templates, HTML Templates, Tailwind Templates, and UI Kits. Create Online Graphics Snappa - Quick & Easy Graphic Design Software [](https://snappa.com/) Snappa makes it easy to create any type of online graphic. Create & publish images for social media, blogs, ads, and more! Canva [](https://www.canva.com/) Polotno Studio - Make graphical designs [](https://studio.polotno.com) Free online design editor. Create images for social media, youtube previews, facebook covers Free Logo Maker: Design Custom Logos | Adobe Express [](https://www.adobe.com/express/create/logo) The Adobe Express logo maker is instant, intuitive, and intelligent. Use it to generate a wide range of possibilities for your own logo. Photo Editor: Fotor – Free Online Photo Editing & Image Editor [](https://www.fotor.com/) Fotor's online photo editor helps you edit photos with free online photo editing tools. Crop photos, resize images, and add effects/filters, text, and graphics in just a few clicks. Photoshop online has never been easier with Fotor's free online photo editor. VistaCreate – Free Graphic Design Software with 70,000+ Free Templates [](https://create.vista.com/) Looking for free graphic design software? Easily create professional designs with VistaCreate, a free design tool with powerful features and 50K+ ready-made templates Draw Freely | Inkscape [](https://inkscape.org/) Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows desktop computers. Visual & Video Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart [](https://piktochart.com/) With Piktochart, you can create professional-looking infographics, flyers, posters, charts, videos, and more. No design experience needed. Start for free. The Web's Favorite Online Graphic Design Tool | Stencil [](https://getstencil.com/) Stencil is a fantastically easy-to-use online graphic design tool and image editor built for business owners, social media marketers, and bloggers. Pablo by Buffer - Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds [](https://pablo.buffer.com/) Buffer makes it super easy to share any page you're reading. Keep your Buffer topped up and we automagically share them for you through the day. Free Online Graphic Design Software | Create stunning designs in seconds. [](https://desygner.com/) Easy drag and drop graphic design tool for anyone to use with 1000's of ready made templates. Create & print professional business cards, flyers, social posts and more. Color Pallet Color Palettes for Designers and Artists - Color Hunt [](https://colorhunt.co/) Discover the newest hand-picked color palettes of Color Hunt. Get color inspiration for your design and art projects. Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator! [](https://coolors.co/) Generate or browse beautiful color combinations for your designs. Get color palette inspiration from nature - colorpalettes.earth [](https://colorpalettes.earth/) Color palettes inspired by beautiful nature photos Color Palette Generator - Create Beautiful Color Schemes [](https://colors.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects A Most Useful Color Picker | 0to255 [](https://0to255.com/) Find lighter and darker colors based on any color. Discover why over two million people have used 0to255 to choose colors for their website, logo, room interior, and print design projects. Colour Contrast Checker [](https://colourcontrast.cc/) Check the contrast between different colour combinations against WCAG standards Fonts Google Fonts [](https://fonts.google.com/) Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world. [](https://fontsinuse.com/) A searchable archive of typographic design, indexed by typeface, format, and topic. Wordmark - Helps you choose fonts! [](https://wordmark.it/) Wordmark helps you choose fonts by quickly displaying your text with your fonts. OH no Type Company [](https://ohnotype.co/) OH no Type Co. Retail and custom typefaces. Life’s a thrill, fonts are chill! Illustrations Illustrations | unDraw [](https://undraw.co/illustrations) The design project with open-source illustrations for any idea you can imagine and create. Create beautiful websites, products and applications with your color, for free. Design Junction [](https://designjunction.xyz/) Design Junction is a one-stop resource library for Designers and Creatives with curated list of best resources handpicked from around the web Humaaans: Mix-&-Match illustration library [](https://www.humaaans.com/) Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library for InVIsion Studio and Sketch. Stubborn - Free Illustrations Generator [](https://stubborn.fun/) Free illustrations generator for Figma and Sketch. Get the opportunity to design your characters using symbols and styles. Open Peeps, Hand-Drawn Illustration Library [](https://www.openpeeps.com/) Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, quinceañera invitations, or whatever you want! ⠀ Reshot | Free icons & illustrations [](https://www.reshot.com/) Design freely with instant downloads of curated SVG icons and vector illustrations. All free with commercial licensing. No attribution required. Blush: Illustrations for everyone [](https://blush.design/) Blush makes it easy to add free illustrations to your designs. Play with fully customizable graphics made by artists across the globe. Mockups Angle 4 - 5000+ Device Mockups for Figma, Sketch and XD [](https://angle.sh/) Vector mockups for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac devices, including the new iPhone 13, Pro, Pro Max and Mini. Perfect for presenting your apps. Huge library of components, compositions, wallpapers and plugins made for Figma, Sketch and XD. Make Mockups, Logos, Videos and Designs in Seconds [](https://placeit.net/) Get unlimited downloads on all our 100K templates! You can make a logo, video, mockup, flyer, business card and social media image in seconds right from your browser. Free and premium tools for graphic designers | Lstore Graphics [](https://www.ls.graphics/) Free and premium mockups, UI/UX tools, scene creators for busy designers Logo Design & Brand Identity Platform for Entrepreneurs | Looka [](https://looka.com/) Logojoy is now Looka! Design a Logo, make a website, and create a Brand Identity you’ll love with the power of Artificial Intelligence. 100% free to use. Create stunning product mockups easily and online - Smartmockups [](https://smartmockups.com/) Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface across multiple devices. Previewed - Free mockup generator for your app [](https://previewed.app/) Join Previewed to create stunning 3D image shots and animations for your app. Choose from hundreds of ready made mockups, or create your own. Free Design Software - Graphic Online Maker - Glorify [](https://www.glorify.com/) Create professional and high converting social media posts, ads, infographics, presentations, and more with Glorify, a free design software & graphic maker. Other BuiltWith Technology Lookup [](https://builtwith.com/) Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a website is built with. Compress JPEG Images Online [](https://compressjpeg.com/) Compress JPEG images and photos for displaying on web pages, sharing on social networks or sending by email. PhotoRoom - Remove Background and Create Product Pictures [](https://www.photoroom.com/) Create product and portrait pictures using only your phone. Remove background, change background and showcase products. Magic Eraser - Remove unwanted things from images in seconds [](https://www.magiceraser.io/) Magic Eraser - Use AI to remove unwanted things from images in seconds. Upload an image, mark the bit you need removed, download the fixed up image. Compressor.io - optimize and compress JPEG photos and PNG images [](https://compressor.io/) Optimize and compress JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF and WEBP images online. Compress, resize and rename your photos for free. Remove Video Background – Unscreen [](https://www.unscreen.com/) Remove the background of any video - 100% automatically, online & free! Goodbye Greenscreen. Hello Unscreen. Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything [](https://thenounproject.com/) Noun Project features the most diverse collection of icons and stock photos ever. Download SVG and PNG. Browse over 5 million art-quality icons and photos. Design Principles [](https://principles.design/) An Open Source collection of Design Principles and methods Shapefest™ - A massive library of free 3D shapes [](https://www.shapefest.com/) A massive free library of beautifully rendered 3D shapes. 160,000+ high resolution PNG images in one cohesive library. Learning UX Degreeless.design - Everything I Learned in Design School [](https://degreeless.design/) This is a list of everything I've found useful in my journey of learning design, and an ongoing list of things I think you should read. For budding UX, UI, Interaction, or whatever other title designers. UX Tools | Practical UX skills and tools [](https://uxtools.co/) Lessons and resources from two full-time product designers. Built For Mars [](https://builtformars.com/) On a mission to help the world build better user experiences by demystifying UX. Thousands of hours of research packed into UX case studies. Case Study Club – Curated UX Case Study Gallery [](https://www.casestudy.club/) Case Study Club is the biggest curated gallery of the best UI/UX design case studies. Get inspired by industry-leading designers, openly sharing their UX process. The Guide to Design [](https://start.uxdesign.cc/) A self-guided class to help you get started in UX and answer key questions about craft, design, and career Uxcel - Where design careers are built [](https://app.uxcel.com/explore) Available on any device anywhere in the world, Uxcel is the best way to improve and learn UX design online in just 5 minutes per day. UI & UX Design Tips by Jim Raptis. [](https://www.uidesign.tips/) Learn UI & UX Design with practical byte-sized tips and in-depth articles from Jim Raptis. Entrepreneur Instant Username Search [](https://instantusername.com/#/) Instant Username Search checks out if your username is available on more than 100 social media sites. Results appear instantly as you type. Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling [](https://flourish.studio/) Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling PiPiADS - #1 TikTok Ads Spy Tool [](https://www.pipiads.com/) PiPiADS is the best tiktok ads spy tool .We provide tiktok advertising,advertising on tiktok,tiktok ads examples,tiktok ads library,tiktok ads best practices,so you can understand the tiktok ads cost and master the tiktok ads 2021 and tiktok ads manager. Minea - The best adspy for product search in ecommerce and dropshipping [](https://en.minea.com/) Minea is the ultimate e-commerce product search tool. Minea tracks all ads on all networks. Facebook Ads, influencer product placements, Snapspy, all networks are tracked. Stop paying adspy 149€ for one network and discover Minea. AdSpy [](https://adspy.com/) Google Trends [](https://trends.google.com/) ScoreApp: Advanced Quiz Funnel Marketing | Make a Quiz Today [](https://www.scoreapp.com/) ScoreApp makes quiz funnel marketing easy, so you can attract relevant warm leads, insightful data and increase your sales. Try for free today Mailmodo - Send Interactive Emails That Drive Conversions [](https://www.mailmodo.com/) Use Mailmodo to create and send interactive emails your customers love. Drive conversions and get better email ROI. Sign up for a free trial now. 185 Top E-Commerce Sites Ranked by User Experience Performance – Baymard Institute [](https://baymard.com/ux-benchmark) See the ranked UX performance of the 185 largest e-commerce sites in the US and Europe. The chart summarizes 50,000+ UX performance ratings. Metricool - Analyze, manage and measure your digital content [](https://metricool.com/) Social media scheduling, web analytics, link in bio and reporting. Metricool is free per live for one brand. START HERE Visualping: #1 Website change detection, monitoring and alerts [](https://visualping.io/) More than 1.5 millions users monitor changes in websites with Visualping, the No1 website change detection, website checker, webpage change monitoring and webpage change detection tool. Gumroad – Sell what you know and see what sticks [](https://gumroad.com/) Gumroad is a powerful, but simple, e-commerce platform. We make it easy to earn your first dollar online by selling digital products, memberships and more. Product Hunt – The best new products in tech. [](https://www.producthunt.com/) Product Hunt is a curation of the best new products, every day. Discover the latest mobile apps, websites, and technology products that everyone's talking about. 12ft Ladder [](https://12ft.io/) Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder. namecheckr | Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals [](https://www.namecheckr.com/) Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals Excel AI Formula Generator - Excelformulabot.com [](https://excelformulabot.com/) Transform your text instructions into Excel formulas in seconds with the help of AI. Z-Library [](https://z-lib.org/) Global Print On Demand Platform | Gelato [](https://www.gelato.com/) Create and sell custom products online. With local production in 33 countries, easy integration, and 24/7 customer support, Gelato is an all-in-one platform. Freecycle: Front Door [](https://freecycle.org/) Free eBooks | Project Gutenberg [](https://www.gutenberg.org/) Project Gutenberg is a library of free eBooks. Convertio — File Converter [](https://convertio.co/) Convertio - Easy tool to convert files online. More than 309 different document, image, spreadsheet, ebook, archive, presentation, audio and video formats supported. Namechk [](https://namechk.com/) Crazy Egg Website — Optimization | Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys & A/B Testing [](https://www.crazyegg.com/) Use Crazy Egg to see what's hot and what's not, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, surveys, A/B testing & more. Ifttt [](https://ifttt.com/) Also Asked [](https://alsoasked.com/) Business Name Generator - Easily create Brandable Business Names - Namelix [](https://namelix.com/) Namelix uses artificial intelligence to create a short, brandable business name. Search for domain availability, and instantly generate a logo for your new business Merch Informer [](https://merchinformer.com/) Headline Generator [](https://www.title-generator.com/) Title Generator: create 700 headlines with ONE CLICK: Content Ideas + Catchy Headlines + Ad Campaign E-mail Subject Lines + Emotional Titles. Simple - Efficient - One Click Make [](https://www.make.com/en) Create and add calculator widgets to your website | CALCONIC_ [](https://www.calconic.com/) Web calculator builder empowers you to choose from a pre-made templates or build your own calculator widgets from a scratch without any need of programming knowledge Boost Your Views And Subscribers On YouTube - vidIQ [](https://vidiq.com/) vidIQ helps you acquire the tools and knowledge needed to grow your audience faster on YouTube and beyond. Learn More Last Pass [](https://www.lastpass.com/) Starter Story: Learn How People Are Starting Successful Businesses [](https://www.starterstory.com/) Starter Story interviews successful entrepreneurs and shares the stories behind their businesses. In each interview, we ask how they got started, how they grew, and how they run their business today. How To Say No [](https://www.starterstory.com/how-to-say-no) Saying no is hard, but it's also essential for your sanity. Here are some templates for how to say no - so you can take back your life. Think with Google - Discover Marketing Research & Digital Trends [](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/) Uncover the latest marketing research and digital trends with data reports, guides, infographics, and articles from Think with Google. ClickUp™ | One app to replace them all [](https://clickup.com/) Our mission is to make the world more productive. To do this, we built one app to replace them all - Tasks, Docs, Goals, and Chat. The Manual [](https://manual.withcompound.com/) Wealth-planning resources for founders and startup employees Software for Amazon FBA Sellers & Walmart Sellers | Helium 10 [](https://www.helium10.com/) If you're looking for the best software for Amazon FBA & Walmart sellers on the market, check out Helium 10's capabilities online today! Buffer: All-you-need social media toolkit for small businesses [](https://buffer.com/) Use Buffer to manage your social media so that you have more time for your business. Join 160,000+ small businesses today. CPGD — The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory [](https://www.cpgd.xyz/) The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory is a platform to discover new brands and resources. We share weekly trends in our newsletter and partner with services to provide vetted, recommended platforms for our Directory brands. Jungle Scout [](https://www.junglescout.com/) BuzzSumo | The World's #1 Content Marketing Platform [](https://buzzsumo.com/) BuzzSumo powers the strategies of 500k+ marketers, with content marketing data on 8b articles, 42m websites, 300t engagements, 500k journalists & 492m questions. Login - Capital [](https://app.capital.xyz/) Raise, hold, spend, and send funds — all in one place. Marketing Pictory – Video Marketing Made Easy - Pictory.ai [](https://pictory.ai/) Pictory's powerful AI enables you to create and edit professional quality videos using text, no technical skills required or software to download. Tolstoy | Communicate with interactive videos [](https://www.gotolstoy.com/) Start having face-to-face conversations with your customers. Create Email Marketing Your Audience Will Love - MailerLite [](https://www.mailerlite.com/) Email marketing tools to grow your audience faster and drive revenue smarter. Get free access to premium features with a 30-day trial! Sign up now! Hypefury - Schedule & Automate Social Media Marketing [](https://hypefury.com/) Save time on social media while creating more value, and growing your audience faster. Schedule & automate your social media experience! Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Online Email & Lead Scraper | Klean Leads [](https://www.kleanleads.com/) Klean Leads is an online email scraper & email address finder. Use it to book more appointments, get more replies, and close more sales. PhantomBuster [](https://phantombuster.com/) Call to Action Examples - 300+ CTA Phrases [](https://ctaexamples.com/) See the best CTA example in every situation covered by the library of 300+ CTA goals. Use the examples to create your own CTAs in minutes. Creative Center: one-stop creative solution for TikTok [](https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/pc/en?from=001010) Come to get your next great idea for TikTok. Here you can find the best performing ads, viral videos, and trending hashtags across regions and verticals. Groove.cm GrooveFunnels, GrooveMail with CRM and Digital Marketing Automation Platform - Groove.cm with GrooveFunnels, GroovePages, GrooveKart [](https://groove.cm/) Groove is a website creator, page builder, sales funnel maker, membership site platform, email autoresponder, blog tool, shopping cart system, ecommerce store solution, affiliate manager, video marketing software and more apps to help build your online business. SurveyMonkey: The World’s Most Popular Free Online Survey Tool [](https://www.surveymonkey.com/) Use SurveyMonkey to drive your business forward by using our free online survey tool to capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you. Video Maker | Create Videos Online | Promo.com [](https://promo.com/) Free customizable video maker to help boost your business. Video creator for ads, social media, product and explainer videos, and for anything else you need! beehiiv — The newsletter platform built for growth [](https://www.beehiiv.com/) Access the best tools available in email, helping your newsletter scale and monetize like never before. GetResponse | Professional Email Marketing for Everyone [](https://www.getresponse.com/) No matter your level of expertise, we have a solution for you. At GetResponse, it's email marketing done right. Start your free account today! Search Email Newsletter Archives : Email Tuna [](https://emailtuna.com/) Explore newsletters without subscribing. Get email design ideas, discount coupon codes and exclusive newsletters deals. Database of email newsletters archived from all over the internet. 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Confetto - Create Instagram content in minutes [](https://www.confet.to/) Confetto is an all-in-one social media marketing tool built for SMBs and Social Media Managers. Confetto helps you create high-quality content for your audience that maximizes your reach and engagement on social media. Design, copy-write, plan and schedule content all in one place. Find email addresses in seconds • Hunter (Email Hunter) [](https://hunter.io/) Hunter is the leading solution to find and verify professional email addresses. Start using Hunter and connect with the people that matter for your business. PlayPhrase.me: Site for cinema archaeologists. [](https://playphrase.me/) Travel and explore the world of cinema. Largest collection of video quotes from movies on the web. #1 Free SEO Tools → SEO Review Tools [](https://www.seoreviewtools.com/) SEO Review Tools: 42+ Free Online SEO Tools build with ❤! → Rank checker → Domain Authority Checker → Keyword Tool → Backlink Checker Podcastle: Seamless Podcast Recording & Editing [](https://podcastle.ai/) Podcastle is the simplest way to create professional-quality podcasts. Record, edit, transcribe, and export your content with the power of AI, in an intuitive web-based platform. Save Ads from TikTok & Facebook Ad Library - Foreplay [](https://www.foreplay.co/) The best way to save ads from TikTok Creative Center and Facebook Ad Library, Organize them into boards and share ad inspiration with your team. Supercharge your creative strategy. SiteRight - Automate Your Business [](https://www.siteright.co/) SiteRight combines the abilities of multiple online resources into a single dashboard allowing you to have full control over how you manage your business. Diffchecker - Compare text online to find the difference between two text files [](https://www.diffchecker.com/) Diffchecker will compare text to find the difference between two text files. Just paste your files and click Find Difference! Yout.com [](https://yout.com/) Yout.com allows you to record videos from YouTube, FaceBook, SoundCloud, VK and others too many formats with clipping. Intuitively easy to use, with Yout the Internet DVR, with a bit of extra. AI Content Generation | Competitor Analysis - Predis.ai [](https://predis.ai/) Predis helps brands and influencers communicate better on social media by providing AI-powered content strategy analysis, content and hashtag recommendations. Castr | #1 Live Video Streaming Solution With Video Hosting [](https://castr.io/) Castr is a live video streaming solution platform that delivers enterprise-grade live videos globally with CDN. Live event streaming, video hosting, pre-recorded live, multi stream – all in one place using Castr. Headliner - Promote your podcast, radio show or blog with video [](https://www.headliner.app/) Easily create videos to promote your podcast, radio show or blog. Share to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and anywhere video lives Create Presentations, Infographics, Design & Video | Visme [](https://www.visme.co/) Create professional presentations, interactive infographics, beautiful design and engaging videos, all in one place. Start using Visme today. Designrr - Create eBooks, Kindle books, Leadmagnets, Flipbooks and Blog posts from your content in 2 minutes [](https://designrr.io/) Upload any web page, MS Word, Video, Podcast or YouTube and it will create a stunning ebook and convert it to pdf, epub, Kindle or Flipbook. Quick and Easy to use. Full Training, 24x7 Support and Facebook Group Included. SwipeWell | Swipe File Software [](https://www.swipewell.app/) The only Chrome extension dedicated to helping you save, organize, and reference marketing examples (so you never feel stumped). Tango | Create how-to guides, in seconds [](https://www.tango.us/) Tango takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Empower your team to do their best work. Ad Creative Bank [](https://www.theadcreativebank.com/) Get inspired by ads from across industries, learn new best practices, and start thinking creatively about your brand’s digital creative. Signature Hound • Free Email Signature and Template Generator [](https://signaturehound.com/) Our email signature generator is free and easy to use. Our customizable templates work with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, Apple Mail and more. Organize All Of Your Marketing In One Place - CoSchedule [](https://coschedule.com/) Get more done in less time with the only work management software for marketers. B Ok - Books [](https://b-ok.xyz/categories) OmmWriter [](https://ommwriter.com/) Ommwriter Rebrandly | Custom URL Shortener, Branded Link Management, API [](https://www.rebrandly.com/) URL Shortener with custom domains. Shorten, brand and track URLs with the industry-leading link management platform. Free to try. API, Short URL, Custom Domains. Common Tools [](https://www.commontools.org/) Book Bolt [](https://bookbolt.io/) Zazzle [](https://www.zazzle.com/) InspiroBot [](https://inspirobot.me/) Download Free Cheat Sheets or Create Your Own! - Cheatography.com: Cheat Sheets For Every Occasion [](https://cheatography.com/) Find thousands of incredible, original programming cheat sheets, all free to download. No Code Chatbot Platform | Free Chatbot Platform | WotNot [](https://wotnot.io/) WotNot is the best no code chatbot platform to build AI bot easily without coding. Deploy bots and live chat on the Website, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. SpyFu - Competitor Keyword Research Tools for Google Ads PPC & SEO [](https://www.spyfu.com/) Systeme.io - The only tool you need to launch your online business [](https://systeme.io/) Systeme.io has all the tools you need to grow your online business. Click here to create your FREE account! Productivity Temp Mail [](https://temp-mail.org/en/) The Visual Collaboration Platform for Every Team | Miro [](https://miro.com/) Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. Join 35M+ users from around the world. Grammarly: Free Online Writing Assistant [](https://www.grammarly.com/) Millions trust Grammarly’s free writing app to make their online writing clear and effective. Getting started is simple — download Grammarly’s extension today. Rize · Maximize Your Productivity [](https://rize.io/) Rize is a smart time tracker that improves your focus and helps you build better work habits. Motion | Manage calendars, meetings, projects & tasks in one app [](https://www.usemotion.com/) Automatically prioritize tasks, schedule meetings, and resolve calendar conflicts. Used by over 10k CEOs and professionals to improve focus, get more done, and streamline workday. Notion – One workspace. Every team. [](https://www.notion.so/) We’re more than a doc. Or a table. Customize Notion to work the way you do. Loom: Async Video Messaging for Work | Loom [](https://www.loom.com/) Record your screen, share your thoughts, and get things done faster with async video. Zapier | Automation that moves you forward [](https://zapier.com/) Workflow automation for everyone. Zapier automates your work across 5,000+ app integrations, so you can focus on what matters. Rows — The spreadsheet with superpowers [](https://rows.com/) Combine the power of a spreadsheet with built-in integrations from your business apps. Automate workflows and build tools that make work simpler. Free Online Form Builder | Tally [](https://tally.so/) Tally is the simplest way to create free forms & surveys. Create any type of form in seconds, without knowing how to code, and for free. Highbrow | Learn Something New Every Day. Join for Free! 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PDF Tools Free PDF, Video, Image & Other Online Tools - TinyWow [](https://tinywow.com/) Smallpdf.com - A Free Solution to all your PDF Problems [](https://smallpdf.com/) Smallpdf - the platform that makes it super easy to convert and edit all your PDF files. Solving all your PDF problems in one place - and yes, free. Sejda helps with your PDF tasks [](https://www.sejda.com/) Sejda helps with your PDF tasks. Quick and simple online service, no installation required! Split, merge or convert PDF to images, alternate mix or split scans and many other. iLovePDF | Online PDF tools for PDF lovers [](https://www.ilovepdf.com/) iLovePDF is an online service to work with PDF files completely free and easy to use. Merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, office to PDF, PDF to JPG and more! Text rewrite QuillBot [](https://quillbot.com/) Pre Post SEO : Online SEO Tools [](https://www.prepostseo.com/) Free Online SEO Tools: plagiarism checker, grammar checker, image compressor, website seo checker, article rewriter, back link checker Wordtune | Your personal writing assistant & editor [](https://www.wordtune.com/) Wordtune is the ultimate AI writing tool that rewrites, rephrases, and rewords your writing! Trusted by over 1,000,000 users, Wordtune strengthens articles, academic papers, essays, emails and any other online content. Aliexpress alternatives CJdropshipping - Dropshipping from Worldwide to Worldwide! [](https://cjdropshipping.com/) China's reliable eCommerce dropshipping fulfillment supplier, helps small businesses ship worldwide, dropship and fulfillment services that are friendly to start-ups and small businesses, Shopify dropshipping. SaleHoo [](https://www.salehoo.com/) Alibaba.com: Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters & Importers from the world's largest online B2B marketplace [](https://www.alibaba.com/) Find quality Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers, Buyers, Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads from our award-winning International Trade Site. Import & Export on alibaba.com Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Best dropshipping supplier to the US [](https://www.usadrop.com/) THE ONLY AMERICAN-MADE FULFILLMENT CENTER IN CHINA. Our knowledge of the Worldwide dropshipping market and the Chinese Supply-Chain can't be beat! 阿里1688 [](https://www.1688.com/) 阿里巴巴（1688.com）是全球企业间（B2B）电子商务的著名品牌，为数千万网商提供海量商机信息和便捷安全的在线交易市场，也是商人们以商会友、真实互动的社区平台。目前1688.com已覆盖原材料、工业品、服装服饰、家居百货、小商品等12个行业大类，提供从原料--生产--加工--现货等一系列的供应产品和服务 Dropshipping Tools Oberlo | Where Self Made is Made [](https://www.oberlo.com/) Start selling online now with Shopify. All the videos, podcasts, ebooks, and dropshipping tools you'll need to build your online empire. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. SMSBump | SMS Marketing E-Commerce App for Shopify [](https://smsbump.com/) SMSBump is an SMS marketing & automation app for Shopify. Segment customers, recover orders, send campaign text messages with a 35%+ click through rate. AfterShip: The #1 Shipment Tracking Platform [](https://www.aftership.com/) Order status lookup, branded tracking page, and multi-carrier tracking API for eCommerce. Supports USPS, FedEx, UPS, and 900+ carriers worldwide. #1 Dropshipping App | Zendrop [](https://zendrop.com/) Start and scale your own dropshipping business with Zendrop. Sell and easily fulfill your orders with the fastest shipping in the industry. Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Video Editing Jitter • The simplest motion design tool on the web. [](https://jitter.video/) Animate your designs easily. Export your creations as videos or GIFs. All in your browser. 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Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. Panzoid [](https://panzoid.com/) Powerful, free online apps and community for creating beautiful custom content. Google Web Designer - Home [](https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/) Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. ClipDrop [](https://clipdrop.co/) Create professional visuals without a photo studio CapCut [](https://www.capcut.com/) CapCut is an all-in-one online video editing software which makes creation, upload & share easier, with frame by frame track editor, cloud drive etc. VEED - Online Video Editor - Video Editing Made Simple [](https://www.veed.io/) Make stunning videos with a single click. Cut, trim, crop, add subtitles and more. Online, no account needed. Try it now, free. VEED Free Video Maker | Create & Edit Your Videos Easily - Animoto [](https://animoto.com/k/welcome) Create, edit, and share videos with our online video maker. Combine your photos, video clips, and music to make quality videos in minutes. Get started free! Runway - Online Video Editor | Everything you need to make content, fast. [](https://runwayml.com/) Discover advanced video editing capabilities to take your creations to the next level. CreatorKit - A.I. video creator for marketers [](https://creatorkit.com/) Create videos with just one click, using our A.I. video editor purpose built for marketers. Create scroll stopping videos, Instagram stories, Ads, Reels, and TikTok videos. Pixar in a Box | Computing | Khan Academy [](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar) 3D Video Motions Plask - AI Motion Capture and 3D Animation Tool [](https://plask.ai/) Plask is an all-in-one browser-based AI motion capture tool and animation editor that anybody can use, from motion designers to every day content creators. Captions Captions [](https://www.getcaptions.app/) Say hello to Captions, the only camera and editing app that automatically transcribes, captions and clips your talking videos for you. Stock videos Pexels [](https://www.pexels.com/) Pixabay [](https://pixabay.com/) Mixkit - Awesome free assets for your next video project [](https://mixkit.co/) Download Free Stock Video Footage, Stock Music & Premiere Pro Templates for your next video editing project. All assets can be downloaded for free! Free Stock Video Footage HD 4K Download Royalty-Free Clips [](https://www.videvo.net/) Download free stock video footage with over 300,000 video clips in 4K and HD. We also offer a wide selection of music and sound effect files with over 180,000 clips available. Click here to download royalty-free licensing videos, motion graphics, music and sound effects from Videvo today. Free Stock Video Footage HD Royalty-Free Videos Download [](https://mazwai.com/) Download free stock video footage with clips available in HD. Click here to download royalty-free licensing videos from Mazwai now. Royalty Free Stock Video Footage Clips | Vidsplay.com [](https://www.vidsplay.com/) Royalty Free Stock Video Footage Clips Free Stock Video Footage, Royalty Free Videos for Download [](https://coverr.co/) Download royalty free (for personal and commercial use), unique and beautiful video footage for your website or any project. No attribution required. Stock Photos Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash [](https://unsplash.com/) Beautiful, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project. Better than any royalty free or stock photos. When we share, everyone wins - Creative Commons [](https://creativecommons.org/) Creative Commons licenses are 20! Honoring 20 years of open sharing using CC licenses, join us in 2022 to celebrate Better Sharing — advancing universal access to knowledge and culture, and fostering creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Help us reach our goal of raising $15 million for a future of Better Sharing.  20 Years of Better … Read More "When we share, everyone wins" Food Pictures • Foodiesfeed • Free Food Photos [](https://www.foodiesfeed.com/) Download 2000+ food pictures ⋆ The best free food photos for commercial use ⋆ CC0 license Free Stock Photos and Images for Websites & Commercial Use [](https://burst.shopify.com/) Browse thousands of beautiful copyright-free images. All our pictures are free to download for personal and commercial use, no attribution required. EyeEm | Authentic Stock Photography and Royalty-Free Images [](https://www.eyeem.com/) Explore high-quality, royalty-free stock photos for commercial use. License individual images or save money with our flexible subscription and image pack plans. picjumbo: Free Stock Photos [](https://picjumbo.com/) Free stock photos and images for your projects and websites.️ Beautiful 100% free high-resolution stock images with no watermark. Free Stock Photos, Images, and Vectors [](https://www.stockvault.net/) 139.738 free stock photos, textures, backgrounds and graphics for your next project. No attribution required. Free Stock Photos, PNGs, Templates & Mockups | rawpixel [](https://www.rawpixel.com/) Free images, PNGs, stickers, backgrounds, wallpapers, graphic templates and PSD mockups. All safe to use with commercial licenses. Free Commercial Stock Photos & Royalty Free Images | PikWizard [](https://pikwizard.com/) Free images, videos & free stock photos. Unlimited downloads ✓ Royalty-free Images ✓Copyright-free for commercial use ✓ No Attribution Required Design Bundles [](https://designbundles.net/) Stock music Royalty Free Music for video creators | Epidemic Sound [](https://www.epidemicsound.com/) Download premium Royalty free Music and SFX! Our free trial gives you access to over 35,000 tracks and 90,000 sound effects for video, streaming and more! Royalty-Free Music & SFX for Video Creators | Artlist [](https://artlist.io/) Explore the ultimate royalty-free music & sound effects catalogs for unlimited use in YouTube videos, social media & films created by inspiring indie artists worldwide. The go-to music licensing choice for all creators Royalty Free Audio Tracks - Envato Elements [](https://elements.envato.com/audio) Download Royalty Free Stock Audio Tracks for your next project from Envato Elements. Premium, High Quality handpicked Audio files ideal for any genre. License popular music for videos • Lickd [](https://lickd.co/) The only place you can license popular music for videos. Access 1M+ mainstream tracks, plus high-quality stock music for content creators NCS (NoCopyrightSounds) - free music for content creators [](https://ncs.io/) NCS is a Record Label dedicated to giving a platform to the next generation of Artists in electronic music, representing genres from house to dubstep via trap, drum & bass, electro pop and more. Search Engine Optimization Keyword Tool For Monthly Search Volume, CPC & Competition [](https://keywordseverywhere.com/) Keywords Everywhere is a browser add-on for Chrome & Firefox that shows search volume, CPC & competition on multiple websites. Semrush - Online Marketing Can Be Easy [](https://www.semrush.com/) Turn the algorithm into a friend. Make your business visible online with 55+ tools for SEO, PPC, content, social media, competitive research, and more. DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified. [](https://duckduckgo.com/) The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs. SEO Software for 360° Analysis of Your Website [](https://seranking.com/) Leading SEO software for business owners, agencies, and SEO specialists. Track your rankings, monitor competitors, spot technical errors, and more. Skyrocket your organic traffic with Surfer [](https://surferseo.com/) Use Surfer to research, write, optimize, and audit! Everything you need to create a comprehensive content strategy that yields real results is right here. Ahrefs - SEO Tools & Resources To Grow Your Search Traffic [](https://ahrefs.com/) You don't have to be an SEO pro to rank higher and get more traffic. Join Ahrefs – we're a powerful but easy to learn SEO toolset with a passionate community. Neon Tools [](https://neontools.io/) Google Index Search [](https://lumpysoft.com/) Google Index Search SEO Backlink Checker & Link Building Toolset | Majestic.com [](https://majestic.com/) Develop backlink strategies with our Link Intelligence data, build the strongest SEO backlink campaigns to drive organic traffic and boost your rankings today. PageOptimizer Pro [](https://pageoptimizer.pro/) Plans Services SEO Consulting Learn SEO About Blog POP SEO Community Podcast Support POP On Page Workshops With Kyle Roof POP Chrome Extension Guide Tutorial Videos Frequently Asked Questions Best Practices Login Cancel Anytime Plans Services SEO Consulting Learn SEO About Blog POP SEO Community Podcast Support POP On Page… Keyword Chef - Keywords for Publishers [](https://keywordchef.com/) Rank Insanely Fast for Keywords Your Competition Can’t Find “Every long-tail keyword I find ends up ranking within a day” – Dane Eyerly, Owner at TextGoods.com Keyword Chef automatically finds and filters keywords for you. Real-time SERP analysis lets you find keywords nearly guaranteed to rank. Try for free → Let’s face it, most keyword tools ... Read more Notifier - Social Listening for Social Media and More! [](https://notifier.so/) Track keywords. Market your product for free. Drive the conversation. Easy. Free Trial. No obligation ever. Simple. Fast. Trusted by Top Companies. Free Keyword Research Tool from Wordtracker [](https://www.wordtracker.com/) The best FREE alternative to the Keyword Planner. Use Wordtracker to reveal 1000s of profitable longtail keywords with up to 10,000 results per search Blog Posts The 60 Hottest Front-end Tools of 2021 | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks [](https://css-tricks.com/hottest-front-end-tools-in-2021/) A complete list of the most popular front-end tools in 2021, according to the Web Tools Weekly newsletter. See which resources made the list. Resume ResumeGlow - AI Powered Resume Builder [](https://resumeglow.com/) Get hired fast with a resume that grabs attention. Designed by a team of HR experts and typographers. Customizable templates with more than a million possible Create Your Job-winning Resume - (Free) Resume maker · Resume.io [](https://resume.io/) Free online resume maker, allows you to create a perfect Resume or Cover Letter in 5 minutes. See how easy it is to write a professional resume - apply for jobs today! Rezi - The Leading AI-Powered Free Resume Builder [](https://www.rezi.ai/) Rezi’s award-winning AI-powered resume builder is trusted by hundreds of thousands of job seekers. Create your perfect resume in minutes with Rezi. Create a Perfect Resume | Free Resume Builder | Resumaker.ai [](https://resumaker.ai/) Create your professional resume with this online resume maker. Choose a designer-made template and grab any employer attention in seconds. Trusted AI Resume Maker Helps You Get Hired Fast [](https://skillroads.com/) Reach a 96.4% success rate in the job hunt race with the best resume creator. Our innovative technologies and 24/7 support help you to become a perfect candidate for any job. Do not lose your chance to become the One. Kickresume | Best Online Resume & Cover Letter Builder [](https://www.kickresume.com/) Create your best resume yet. Online resume and cover letter builder used by 1,300,000 job seekers worldwide. Professional templates approved by recruiters. ResumeMaker.Online | Create a Professional Resume for Free [](https://www.resumemaker.online/) Save time with the easiest-to-use Resume Maker Online. Create an effective resume in just minutes and land your dream job. No Sign-up required, start now! Interviews Interview Warmup - Grow with Google [](https://grow.google/certificates/interview-warmup/) A quick way to prepare for your next interview. Practice key questions, get insights about your answers, and get more comfortable interviewing. No code website builder Carrd - Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything [](https://carrd.co/) A free platform for building simple, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything. Webflow: Create a custom website | No-code website builder [](https://webflow.com/) Create professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas with no code. Learn how to create a website by trying Webflow for free! Google Sites: Sign-in [](https://sites.google.com/) FlutterFlow - Build beautiful, modern apps incredibly fast! [](https://flutterflow.io/) FlutterFlow lets you build apps incredibly fast in your browser. Build fully functional apps with Firebase integration, API support, animations, and more. Export your code or even easier deploy directly to the app stores! Free Website Builder: Build a Free Website or Online Store | Weebly [](https://www.weebly.com/) Weebly’s free website builder makes it easy to create a website, blog, or online store. Find customizable templates, domains, and easy-to-use tools for any type of business website. 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air-support

!air-support Air Support: Tools for Automating Airdrops of Solana NFTs The Skeleton Crew | Twitter: @skeletoncrewrip | Discord: Skeleton Crew Feeling generous? Your contributions help fund future development. Send tips to our Solana wallet: CH6afYjjydFLPSrfQYEUNCdSNohLCAQV6ir6QnYeZU3t See also: Treat Toolbox, a generative art manager for NFT projects from the Skeleton Crew. Background The Skeleton Crew launched on Oct 1, and has since been delivering daily airdrops of artwork from indie artists, with plans to continue for the entire month of October. In order to execute on this plan, we needed tools that allowed us to automate the process. This repository is the result of that effort, which we now share with you in the hopes of more teams spending less time giving themselves Carpal tunnel syndrome doing all of this manually inside of Phantom :) IMPORTANT - Before you Start Creating and sending NFTs in bulk comes with costs. On Solana, the costs are significantly better than some other chains. BUT, it's a good idea to try a drop on devnet first to be sure you understand the fees involved. We assume no responsibility for any costs incurred through the use of these tools. Use at your own risk. Getting Started In order to use Air Support, you will need to install and configure the current version of Metaplex. We run this locally with some customizations for speed (ex. hardcoding some metadata which is common across all of our drops). Also, have a look at the configuration options at the top of the Makefile. At minimum, you'll need to specify paths to Metaplex, your keyfile, and an RPC Host. It's highly recommended that you use a third-party RPC provider to perform large airdrops. DROP is a name for a set of airdrops; in our case we numbered these 1-31 for each day in October. TYPE is a name for a single airdropped item that's part of a drop; in our case we had a "trick" and a "treat" as part of each drop, sometimes even "trick1", "trick2"... etc. The name will be "token" by default, and is used to prefix log files in each step below. For the generate step to work, you will need to build Metaplex's rust tools. Inside metaplex/rust, run: You will also need a few other pieces of software installed, including: gshuf: brew install coreutils jq: brew install jq How to Use Air Support Prerequisites: follow all steps in the Getting Started section above. Then, the basic workflow looks something like this: 📇 prepare: Collect a list of token mint addresses, for which the holders of those tokens represent a community you wish to airdrop to. This is sometimes done by providing your Candy Machine address to https://tools.abstratica.art. Store this in the air support root directory as token-mint-addresses.json. ✍️ record: run this to fetch the wallet addresses of all users that hold the tokens, and don't have them listed on a secondary exchange. The goal here is to avoid sending airdrops to exchanges where they may not be recoverable. Note: As of now, Air Support can only identify tokens listed on Digital Eyes, Magic Eden, Solanart, and Alpha.art. FTX and Solsea use unique addresses for escrow wallets. The command below will fetch the addresses and store them in airdrops/1/token-holders.log. 🎨 create: Start Metaplex, and use it to create your Master Edition NFT with a limited supply (the number of airdrops you want to send). 🖨 generate: run this to generate prints of the Master Edition. These will be stored in the wallet associated with the keys you specify as options. The below command would create 500 prints of the Master with mint address RPdCMRxBx4YPcJv6HUb2S5zHGJcDrDrZszUNNGmLwfT. 🏅 choose: run this next to decide who will receive the airdrop. Important to note that if 2 tokens are owned by the same wallet, by design they have twice the chance to receive an airdrop as someone with only 1 token when using this script to pick recipients. If you have 10,000 token owners recorded as not listed on marketplaces in step 2, and 500 airdrops to send, this will randomly select 500 of those recorded tokens. 📬 distribute: the last step is to send the airdrops out. This script will run through the addresses generated in step 4 and the recipients chosen in step 5 and send airdrops 1-by-1. It is possible that failures will occur. Logs are saved during the process in a {NAME}_sent.log file. Because distribution happens line-by-line, it is safe to rerun the script again to attempt to correct failures. You can also check your wallet to see that all tokens have been distributed. (Note that your Master edition will still remain as only prints are recorded to be sent in step 4. You can keep these for yourself or a community vault.) There is also an optional STARTINDEX param that can be used if you need to restart a distribution from somewhere in the middle. 🔥 burn: if you realize you made a mistake on your Master NFT, but only after you went ahead and started printing a bunch of editions, this command will automate the process of sending those costly mistakes to the Solana incinerator. There is also an optional STARTINDEX param that can be used if you need to restart a distribution from somewhere in the middle. Other Tips Transparency is key when running airdrop campaigns to your communities. In an ideal world, where we had more than 24 hours between our launch and the start of our month of airdrops, we might have attempted to bring some or all of these processes on-chain. The next best thing we could offer is a transparency repo, where we publish the daily receipts of our airdrops, to make it easy for our community to investigate the drops on the blockchain if they feel the desire to do so. Our tools give you the receipts as output to do the same if you wish. You can have a look at that repo here: https://github.com/theskeletoncrew/airdrop-transparency Acknowledgements The record step utilizes code created by the Exiled Apes organization, shared under an Apache License, originally found here: https://github.com/exiled-apes/exiled-holders

Best of Chillstep 2024 | Cosmic Hippo | Coding Session

You can get the artwork featured in this video as a digital download on Etsy here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1858237715/best-of-2024 Thank you for tuning in to this selection of my most popular chillstep songs of 2024, designed to elevate your focus and creativity. Dive into an immersive experience with some of the most captivating tracks of the year, blending atmospheric beats and soothing rhythms to keep you in the zone. Whether you’re deep into a coding project, studying, or simply unwinding, this playlist will set the perfect tone for your session. Stay inspired, stay productive, and let these sounds guide your flow. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more chillstep vibes and focus-driven music from Cosmic Hippo. Tracklist 0:00 Neon Dreams From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 4:00 Crystal Nights From Playlist "Coding Alone" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MUlk3qjByY&t=513s 8:01 Flowing Codes From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 11:00 Driftwood Dreams From Playlist "Coding by the Sea" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dB9WI-OI8k&t=1553s 15:00 Code Flow From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 19:02 Magic in the Moonlight From Playlist "1 A.M Coding Sessions" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUrRK_jMCqA&t=661s 23:06 Serene State From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 27:05 Icy Reverie From Playlist "Coding Session in the Snowy Mountains" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDi65Kq88DY&t=717s 30:43 Lost Among Stars From Playlist Hyperfocus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq0R46U9FpQ 34:16 Quantum Blanket From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 38:14 Echoes of Clarity From Playlist "Deep Chill" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmgM00yas78&t=1447s 41:54 Ethereal Daydream From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 44:57 Snowlit Skies From Playlist " Winter Chillstep" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ZNQJyn_FA&t=91s 48:47 Neon Nights and Daydreams From Playlist "Coding All Night" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DayQ-a4YdSQ&t=1486s 51:04 Northern Chill From Playlist " Winter Chillstep" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ZNQJyn_FA&t=91s 54:24 Cinders in the Snow From Playlist "Broken Signal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ0QPjl6aTs&t=14s 58:28 Voyage to Nowhere From Playlist "Infinite Focus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvcpNZHFBlQ&t=2040s 01:01:11 Almas en la Noche From Playlist "1 A.M Coding Sessions" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUrRK_jMCqA&t=661s 01:04:28 Infinite Flow From playlist "3 A.M Coding Session" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd7vDterctQ 01:06:52 Xenon Lights From Playlist "Coding All Night" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DayQ-a4YdSQ&t=1486s 01:09:24 Galactic Journey From Playlist "Infinite Focus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvcpNZHFBlQ&t=2040s 01:11:36 Lost in the Cosmos From Playlist "Hyperfocus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq0R46U9FpQ&t=2323s 01:14:07 Siberian Silence From Playlist "Broken Signal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ0QPjl6aTs&t=14s 01:17:48 Stardust Dreams From Playlist "Infinite Focus" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvcpNZHFBlQ&t=2040s Tags: #Chillstep2024 #CodingMusic #CosmicHippo #FocusBeats #StudyMusic #RelaxingChillstep #BestOf2024 #ProductivityMusic #WorkBeats #ProgrammingPlaylist #ChillstepVibes #CreativeFocus #ElectronicBeats #codingmusic #codingsession #codingmotivation #programming #programmingbeats #chill #chillworkmusic #lofi #aesthetic #views #workinglate Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools.

Coding Session in the Snowy Mountains - Chillstep & Chillwave for Winter Focus

The image featured in this video is available as a digital print on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1834213950/coding-session-in-the-snowy-mountains Escape to a serene winter retreat. This playlist weaves together calming chillstep and atmospheric chillwave beats, creating the perfect environment for productivity and inspiration amidst a snowy landscape. Imagine coding in a cozy cabin, surrounded by towering, snow-covered peaks and the crisp, silent air of the mountains. The music mirrors the peaceful energy of the scene, helping you stay focused while coding, studying, or simply reflecting on creative projects. Whether you're tackling late-night tasks or enjoying a quiet moment of clarity, this mix is your ultimate companion for deep concentration and relaxation. Tune in, let the winter vibes surround you, and find your flow amidst the snow. Tracklist 0:00 Icy Reverie 3:38 Glacial Flow 5:20 Alpine Reflections 9:21 Glacial Glow 12:56 Frozen Tranquility 15:53 Blizzard Beats 19:39 White Mirage 23:30 Frosted Threads 27:32 Frozen Focus 30:59 Wandering Stars 33:25 Whispering Pines 37:14 Beneath the Frost 40:56 Falling Flurries 44:46 Frost and Firelight 47:18 Pinewood Echoes 50:40 Snowbound Serenity Tags: #CodingMusic #Chillstep #Chillwave #WinterFocus #SnowyMountains #StudyBeats #AmbientMusic #DeepFocus #WinterVibes #RelaxingBeats #ProductivityMusic #Christmas #codingsession #cosyatmosphere #cozybeats Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools.

🔴 Coding Music for Focus and Productivity | Relaxing

Welcome to the live stream of chill beats and ambient grooves, perfect for coding, studying, or any task that demands deep focus and creativity. Immerse yourself in a seamless flow of stress-free music designed to boost your productivity and keep distractions at bay. Whether you're building your next big project, prepping for exams, or just vibing with the sounds of focus, this stream has you covered. Stay as long as you need and let the music keep you in the zone.Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools. Press play, relax, and code with ease. Tags: #CodingMusic #LiveStream #FocusBeats #ProductivityMusic #ChillVibes #AmbientBeats #StudyMusic #DeepFocus

3 A.M Coding Session - Chillstep Beats to Keep You Going

The image featured in this video is available as a digital print on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1816366216/3-am-coding-session Welcome to the ultimate late-night programming session! Designed for night owls and dedicated developers, this video is perfect for those quiet hours of coding, debugging, and designing when focus comes naturally. These chillstep beats offer the ideal background for cyber work, programming projects, or any creative task that requires steady concentration at 3 A.M. With a smooth blend of atmospheric chillstep and ambient sounds, this playlist creates a deep, immersive vibe that enhances both productivity and relaxation. Perfect for all-nighters, marathon work sessions, or simply winding down with a productive beat, this is the music to keep you motivated without distraction. The tranquil sounds help you get lost in your work, making each line of code, creative idea, or cyber project flow effortlessly. Let these chillstep beats guide you through late-night moments of intense problem-solving and brainstorming. Find your rhythm, and stay grounded, inspired, and focused in the calm of the night. Tracklist 0:00 Code Flow 3:59 Afloat in Dreams 7:41 Code Dream 11:07 Cosmic Code 15:08 Digital Daydream 18:27 Digital Trance 21:54 Ethereal Daydream 25:55 Ethereal Dream 29:55 Floating on Stardust 32:36 Flowing Codes 36:36 Infinite Flow 40:36 Neon Dreams 44:36 Quantum Blanket 48:38 Serene State 52:39 Waves of Focus Ideal for: Coding, programming, and cyber projects Deep work and all-nighters Studying, journaling, or creative flow Late-night relaxation and concentration Take a deep breath, settle into the rhythm, and let this 3 A.M coding session carry you through. You’ve got this! Tags: #3am #programmingbeats #CyberFocus #codingmusic #chillstepmusic #ProductiveFlow #ambientfocus #codingsession #allnighter #latenightwork #programming #workbeats #chessmusic #studymusic #tradingmusic #codingmusic #gamingmusic Disclaimer: This music has been created with the help of AI tools.

AI

AI I This repository contains practical tasks for the Artificial Intelligence 1 course, that is based on book by Russel and Norvig Artificial Intellignece: A Modern Approach, 4th Edition. Tasks are designed to review AI algorithms and use them to play games. Requirements All assignments will be written in python. Task were created for python 3.9 however there should not be any problems with backward compatibility. You can solve all assignments while working exclusively with python standard library, however for game visualizations you will need to install modul pygame. For installation you can use pip: python3 -m pip install -U pygame --user If you need more detailed, platform-specific instructions you can visit pygame-GettingStarted. Assignments In total there will be 5 programming assignments whose solutions will be submitted via ReCodEx. In each of them you will write an AI agent that plays suitable games for corresponding lecture topic. Moreover there will by partial assignments, in which you will need to implement algorithms, that will allow you to implement suitable agent functions, however your agent implementation can use any approach you like. | Game | Suggested Approach | | ---- | ------ | | Dino | rule-based agent | | Pac-Man | uniform-cost search | | Sokoban | A* with custom heuristics | | Cell Wars | minimax or Monte Carlo tree search | | Minesweeper | backtracking search for CSPs | Note that information provided in the early assignments is omitted in later ones.

promptAI

Creative Content Tool Welcome to our Content Creation Tool, PromptAI, a web application that allows users to effortlessly generate unique content ideas and posts at the touch of a button. Our app uses OpenAI's powerful language model to generate content, and includes features such as the ability to customize prompts and save favorites for later use. As well as creating a space for creators to take notes and track their progress! Technologies Used JavaScript React.js Node.js OpenAI API Features Generate unique content ideas with OpenAI's language model Customize prompts by editing goals, use cases and platform formats. Save favorite content for later use Real-time updates for the list of saved content Writing assistant with grammar and spell-check more features coming soon! How to Use To use our Content Tool, simply visit our web application and click on the "generate content" button to generate random content ideas. You can customize prompts by adding an industry or goal or even a specific platform and save your favorites for later use. The more specific you are the more detailed your content is, but as a generator, you can also start vague to get some more ideas about what you should be asking! That way, creating content for your business becomes easy and fun! Once content is created you can then edit or delete that content. You can also click on specific content to add notes or organize your content. Installation To install our Creative Writing Tool on your local machine, follow these steps: Clone the repository onto your local machine Run npm install to install the necessary dependencies Run npm start to start the app You will need your own API keys to run this application! Acknowledgements We would like to thank OpenAI for providing their language model for our application.

Workflow Automation with AI and Zapier | CXOTalk #808

#zapier #workflowautomation #workflow #aiautomation The rising significance of enterprise AI presents a unique hurdle: seamlessly integrating AI-based business workflows into operational systems, especially for non-programmers. On CXOTalk episode 808, we explore these issues with Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and the company's AI lead. The conversation with Mike covers the rationale behind integrating AI, the technological advancements AI brings to workflow automation solutions, and its broader impact on business agility. Join the CXOTalk community: www.cxotalk.com/subscribe Read the full transcript: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/ai-workflows-in-business-a-practical-guide Key points in the discussion include: ► The potential of AI-powered automation to empower more business users with customized workflows. But governance, accuracy, and security are key challenges to consider when implementing AI workflows. ► Initial use cases include generating creative ideas, summarizing unstructured data, and making powerful business process automations easier to build for non-technical users. ► Customer service and marketing are excellent starting points for AI automation. Watch this conversation to gain practical advice on using low-code, no-code tools to automate AI in the enterprise. Mike Knoop is the co-founder and Head of Zapier AI at Zapier. Mike has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Missouri, where his research topic was focused on finite element modeling and optimization. Michael Krigsman is an industry analyst and publisher of CXOTalk. For three decades, he has advised enterprise technology companies on market messaging and positioning strategy. He has written over 1,000 blogs on leadership and digital transformation and created almost 1,000 video interviews with the world’s top business leaders on these topics. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in over 50 books. He has presented and moderated panels at numerous industry events around the world.

5 Best AI Automation Agency Services to Sell as a Beginner

📚 Join the #1 community for AI entrepreneurs and connect with 100,000+ members: https://bit.ly/3uRIRB3 📈 We help industry experts, entrepreneurs & developers build and scale their AI Agency: https://bit.ly/skoolmain 🤝 Need AI Solutions Built? Work with me: https://b.link/qv62vqy6 ⚒️ Build AI Agents Without Coding: https://agentivehub.com/ 🚀 Apply to Join My Team at Morningside AI: https://tally.so/r/wbYr52 In this video I share the 5 best AI automation agency (AAA) services to sell as a beginner and exact steps on how you can deliver them. These AI agency deliverables are not only easy to understand and deliver but also provide a ton of value for the client. If you're eager to start your own AAA then any of these is a great place to start. Since I created the AI Automation Agency model earlier this year I've been sharing my learnings from running my own AAA at scale here on the channel 💪🏼 Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:46 - What is a AAA 1:16 - My results 2:56 - Service #1 5:00 - Service #2 6:12 - Service #3 7:45 - Service #4 9:57 - Service #5 11:50 - Download my templates 13:04 - New Video