This is my first actual Substack post. Maybe I’ll write one like this every week. I’m planning to!
What caught my eye
A great post by Delbert Ty on ‘Justification Costs’ in big companies. “One way leadership unintentionally increases the cost of justification is when they intentionally or not don’t articulate fully how and why they are feeling what they are feeling.”
I somewhat binged the writing of
, starting with this brilliant piece. Concepts I have put into immediate use to explain myself better on these topics are:The Try Harder Fallacy (I used to call this the ‘bang your head against the wall harder fallacy’
The Infinite Effort Illusion. This is a self-defeating pattern where you’re betting on having more bandwidth in the future. As a leader this is particularly malicious because it assumes that your team is not working hard enough today.
I am quite convinced that Biden did a great job as president.
wrote a good summary about what his administration got right (a lot) vs what they could have done better (also a few things).Also from
a kind of mindblowing set of charts showing that Poland has actually grown faster than China.Found a place that sells nice caps. Have been looking for a new one for some time.
Spent some time using Cursor to update my personal website
I’ve had some maintenance tasks for my website on my backlog for quite some time. I wanted to embed more of my LinkedIn writing on my website, add a way for people to subscribe to my Substack and add a footer to all pages. I’ve also been wanting to try out Cursor for some time and when I found some pockets of time I decided to combine the two! Cursor is a fork of VS Code with deep AI integration. Here is how the built-in AI workflows helped me complete the LinkedIn porting task at least 10x faster than I would have before.
To embed an article, I need to create a new page from a template, get the post link and the embed link from LinkedIn, create a title and then link to the new page in my /articles page. I had tried this a few times with ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity but it turned out to be a remarkably AI proof process. The embed link is in no way reproducible from the post link, scraping LinkedIn is quite hard to do. With Cursor the process was:
Prompt: “Create a new page based on this page (link to another post with embedded linkedin). Change the post link to: {post link} and change the embed link to {embed link} Change the title to something fitting based on the post content.” DONE! It was perfect every time
To add the footer to all pages, I prompted the editor to create a footer with the specs I wanted, add the definition to my styles.css file and then add the footer to all pages. It was done in less than 5 minutes. Manually adding the footer to all pages would have taken me probably close to an hour.
I can totally imagine myself creating more complicated things with Cursor.
Added new quotes to my quotes page
When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
Warren Buffett
All ideas you have are downstream from what you consume. When you choose what to read, and who to follow, you're choosing your future thoughts in a way.
James Clear
After adding these two, something made me wonder about the gender distribution of my quotes. So I asked ChatGPT to analyse it and write a Python script for a chart whic looked like this:
Gender Breakdown of Quote Writers
Male: ######################### 73.3%
Female: ###### 13.3%
Unknown: ###### 13.3%
So I went to search for a couple of good quotes by women. It gave me the broader realization that the vast, vast, vast majority of the content I consume whether books, podcasts, or blogs are from male creators. In any case, I added these two great quotes from legendary women:
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie (who did unfortunately get killed by the stuff she worked to understand)The most effective way to do it, is to do it.
Amelia Earhart
Original thoughts
Replacing your job with profitable SaaS: If you want to make US$ 15k per month from a bootstrapped SaaS business you need to get close to $45k USD per month in recurring revenue which is 540k ARR. At $10 per month per customer that’s 4,500 customers. That’s a lot! On average SaaS startups take several years to get to $1 Million ARR. It turns out, there still is no get rich quick scheme.
I want to move my writing to Substack. What if I exported every email address I’ve ever sent email to or received email from, gathered them in a sheet, and used a mailmerge tool to ask them to subscribe. How many subscribers would I get? Maybe 20? Or maybe 250? It’s worth a shot, I get worse spam than that every day.
Why can’t I send a calendar invite via Whatsapp? Why can’t I do many things via WhatsApp actually? Email is dying.
I’m missing something in the CX data stack. An easy way to integrate different data sources. App figures is a super simple tool. App figures is also missing native Google sheets and excel integration. There could be an opportunity in generating this kind of data with native gsheets integration.
Singaporean versus American customer service template
Singapore:
Dear valued customer,
[ChatGPT: Rewrite "go fuck yourself" as politely as possible]
Thank you for your kind understanding
USA:
Hey Shithead, lol jk
I'm so sorry that should definitely not happen. Let me bend over backward to ensure you have a good experience with our brand! I will fix this right now, whatever it takes.
Thank you for raising this and we'll do better!