We talk about folders all day, but the folders are FOR something. I want to know what... 🎖️Bonus points: comment with the single most painful manual process in your industry. The best comp entries come from exactly those answers.

I wanted to mark this one out loud. @Bas Rosario is the first member who isn't an admin to reach Level 7 in here. He earned every bit of it. If you've spent any time in the forums, you've run into Bas. He's the one greeting new people on the welcome board before anyone else gets there. He's the one leaving real feedback on your work, not a thumbs-up and a move on. And he teaches by meeting you exactly where you are. He's teaching his wife, a cosmetologist with no tech background, to think in systems. He explained ICM to her with a birthday cake. A cake is a system, he said. It has steps. You gather the ingredients, you preheat the oven, and you do them in order. That's what ICM does with the AI. It hands it one step at a time. That's the gift. He can take the thing some of us are still wrestling with and make it small enough to hold. And when you try to hand him the credit, he won't take it. On Saturday's call, the room joked that he's the new authority around here. He shot it down on the spot and pointed at the people he learned it from, naming them one by one. He builds things to route you to the right help, not to put himself at the center of it. He does this constantly. Not in bursts when he wants attention. Every day, in the background, for people who didn't ask and couldn't repay him. That's the whole thing. Level 7 isn't a reward for showing up. It's what showing up for other people looks like after you've done it for this long. And no, he's not a bot. I know the running joke. The steadiness almost makes the case for it, in a room full of people building AI. But that's the tell. Bas has said he shows up here every day on purpose, out of genuine gratitude for what this place has given him. A bot can post every day. It can't be grateful. Bas comes back because he is. That's the most human thing in here. Bas, thank you. This community is better because you're in it. If Bas reviewed your work or helped you when you were stuck, say so below. He should hear it.

Drop your biggest win from your projects last week, or if you're stuck on something, what’s the one thing you’re struggling with right now? For me, my big win is that I finished the mechanics of my app and now I’m just getting into the detail of the design. But my biggest struggle right now is the format. My husband is the tech guy with all the development know-how, and he thinks I should start it as a web app first to let people try it out before dealing with the nightmare of building a phone app and dealing with Apple and Google specs. Development-wise he is totally right, but I know my niche. My app is for hair stylists who are facing burnout, and honestly, most of them aren't tech-savvy at all. The app is supposed to cut through the noise and help them use tech without the stress, so if I make them go to a website every day, it's just not going to happen. They aren't going to figure out how to pin a website to their home screen, and I feel like launching as a web app might just kill the momentum completely. Let’s see where everyone else is at with their wins and struggles, and if anyone has any thoughts on the web vs phone app dilemma for non-techy niches, let me know!

Looking at the numbers in this group got me thinking about how we measure engagement around here. Coming from the hair industry, social media analytics are basically life or death for us to keep our chairs full, so I always notice this stuff. We have like 39,000 people in this group, but the highest response I saw on a survey was around 7,000. I think a lot of people see that gap and think it's bad news, but honestly a 17% engagement rate on a single post is kind of insane. From what I've had to learn about marketing just to run my own business, you are usually lucky to even get 1% or 2% of your audience to wake up and click a button on regular platforms. But at the same time, it does feel like the daily comments come down to the same 20 or 30 people, and a massive chunk of the group is still sitting at Level 1. They probably just jump in to grab the classes and then ghost the social side completely. In my line of work you learn that there are always tons of people who are getting value from what you do but they just stay quiet. They don't have the social energy or the confidence to post. Especially in a tech heavy group like this, it is so easy for a beginner to scroll through, feel some major imposter syndrome, and just decide to stay quiet. I'm super curious, for anyone who actually made it past Level 1, what finally broke the ice for you? Was it wanting to rank up in the levels, or did you just wait until you had something cool to share?

My brother @Jason Roy is now a member of the community! Please give him a warm welcome. He is looking for some help setting up systems with local LLMs as this is currently all he has access to at work. This is one area I have only dabbled with so if anyone can help him out please give a shout!