Happy Saturday! Here are a few things on my mind... Warren Buffett's game Great post on Farnam Street: Students often go to visit Warren Buffett. And when they do, he often plays a little game on them. He asks each student to pick the classmate they would choose if they could have 10% of their earnings for the rest of their life. Which classmate would you pick and why? Then he changes things up again. Who would you think least likely to succeed? Why? He asks the students to take out a sheet...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Hey friends, Not recording The Panel today (sorry!), but I do have a ridiculous new animated video to show you: This is an inside joke from the Mostly Technical podcast: Ian Landsman (one of the hosts) loves to keep restarting his programming project (outro.fm). He does this by typing `laravel new` (which initiates a new Laravel project) in the terminal. Aaron Francis isn't impressed. (I have a new technique I'm using for these; I'll update this post about it soon) Cheers,Justin Jackson –...
29 days ago • 1 min read
Hey friends, Justin and Brian are going live at 12:15 pm Pacific today: Here are a few ideas we might chat about: Distinct phases of a startup in year 1. Building a marketing website with V0 Brand loyalties. (Example: OpenAI vs Anthropic) People craving “calm” media? Derek Sivers’ “play the counter-melody” Robot butler? Come join us in the chat! BTW – anything else you'd like us to chat about? Cheers,Justin Jackson – BlueskyBrian Casel – Bluesky | Twitter PS: thanks to everyone who shows up...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Happy Sunday! Here are a few things on my mind... Jesse is not building a normal business. Jordan Gal's Offsite Podcast is one of those podcasts I listen to on the way to work to get inspired. His recent conversation with Jesse Hanley (founder of Bento) is worth listening to: Jesse is a solo SaaS founder who's built an incredible business while living in Japan with no employees. 🤯 Listen to the podcast How I'm making cartoon animation with AI I've always been interested in animation, and two...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Happy Sunday! Here are a few things on my mind... Why is it hard for founders to be successful a second time? In the latest Mostly Technical episode, Ian Landsman asks Jeffrey Way (founder of Laracasts) why he hasn't tried building a second product. Jeffrey: No, because I feel like it just never works. It's almost as if you can launch something and make money; it's like hitting a jackpot in a weird way. And you see it all the time: incredibly successful people try to do it a second time, and...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hope you're having a good Sunday! (And happy Thanksgiving Weekend if you're Canadian). Here are a few things on my mind... When customers lean in Another great article from Rob Snyder on what "customer demand" looks and feels like: "You'll hear concepts like 'pain points' and 'problems' that make sense and sound right... But, as you've likely experienced, you can have someone complain about their big problems and pain points, who agree that your product would solve these pain points and...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey friends, Sometimes AI gets me excited ("wow, look at what we can build now!") and sometimes it gets me scared ("are my kids going to be able to find a job?"). Brian Casel and Justin Jackson are going live at 12:15 pm Pacific today to chat about it: On today's topic list: Sora V2 app OpenAI eating more SaaS categories? Tony Dinh and TypingMind - super inspiring Agent OS 2.0 is out. What's next? Could we do Aaron's "no-devices vision quest?" How do you introduce tech (or entrepreneurship)...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hope you're having a good Sunday! Here are a few things on my mind... Thoughts on vibe coding and V0.dev I've been experimenting a bunch with Vercel's https://v0.app/ this week. I used it to build a free tool for podcasters: https://art.transistor.fm/ What blows my mind is V0's interface: you prompt it with your vision for how you want something to work and look, and it provides a near-instant feedback loop, showing you what it might look like. I had to get a bunch of thoughts out, so I did a...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Here are a few things I've been contemplating lately: ------- ⛈️ What kills motivation? Aaron Francis wrote about this in his newsletter, and I can’t stop thinking about it: “Maybe, working hard doesn’t lead to burnout, but the lack of hope leads to burnout. If you're working really hard for something that you don't believe will pay off, it's easy to lose motivation. But if you believe that the thing you're working on will have a payoff, the amount of work almost doesn’t matter.” Working on...
3 months ago • 2 min read