I spent a few hours looking around at prices, products and found a kind of nieche area last night. I can produce works of art pretty cheaply, easily and quickly. It's also with my budget and skill set. There are similar products, it's kind of a combination of two things I found to be popular, but nothing that combined the two art forms, or direct from the creator. It's not exactly going to be selling individual original pieces, and will fall more into the small-batch and limited edition high quality copy category. I'm going to sign them, number them and put them on a Shopify that I'm about to revamp this morning. The work will be more related to my other work, so it feels more aligned with my other goals. It should all be up and running, with a batch of 5 items for sale, by the end of the day.

I said we were going to keep each other accountable. Not particularly effective week for me, have this linger flu that won't go away, and it's slowing me down, but a few things did get done ( and a big one didn't. ). First what I failed on: 1. Record my first video of the year, detailing out my new business idea ( the why and how it begins ) - this did not get done, I just didn't have the energy for it, and I am quite disappointed in that. 2. Actually finish the development work on the new business idea. It's close, but not done, so again, fail. What did get done: 1. Started a Substack: The Business of You and migrated my old Ghost subscribers there. 2. Created a new business page on LinkedIn: The Business of You. 3. Created a new Twitter account ( I don't have high hopes for this ): @abusinessofyou 4. Wrote 3 posts for LinkedIn/Substack and posted them: 3,741 impressions on LinkedIn, 124 on Substack. 5. Wrote a long post for Reddit in r/Entrepreneur - Everyone Has a Business They Can Start…Everyone ( caught some flack ): 284,000 views, 149 comments, 2400 shares ( i'd count this as a win ). 6. Posted 7 notes and four comments on Substack (this is really how you grow) - nowhere near enough. 7. I did write a script (more of an outline) for my video (just didn't film it) 8. Had two glorious video calls with you folks (coffee chat & Q/A) What I wasted time on: 1. Writing and rewriting things like my Substack description, and About Page 2. Writing two posts that were just not valuable to anyone and throwing them out 3. Watching too many videos on writing code in cursor and lovable.dev (instead of just writing code I'm doing this from memory, which I will rectify with better tracking next week, and trying to keep track of the amount of time everything takes so y'all can see the effort going in, not just the results. No one else needs to go into this kind of detail, but let's hear it. Did we have productive weeks? Are we moving towards those Q1 goals?

I'm committed to making everyone who joins this community better. Better at marketing, better at sales, better at business. So, just for joining, I'm going to buy you two of my favorite books from a selection that have helped me the most in my career ( and in my life ). They're digital copies in .epub format, so you can read them in the Kindle app ( on your phone, tablet, computer or Kindle ) or Apple Books. I buy digital copies because they're easier to distribute ( I don't need your home address ). Sorry for those, who like me, love paper books, this is the future. So head over to this link to choose the books you'd like, and I'll get them to you ASAP.

This hasn't really come up yet, but a good note for everyone as they start going more "public" with things. Not everyone is going to like what you do. In fact some folks are going to be real dipshits about it. Case in point. Made a long reddit post yesterday, got real nice traction, I had 4 quality DM conversations, and dozens and dozens of interesting threads comments and replies. But. This is the first, and now top comment. Can't win em all. 😄

Ok folks, it's time to get to work. ( not that I've seen goals for Q1 from everyone ). Instead of launching a whole series of videos at once, I'm going to create the new course day-by-day. I'll open it with the activities I'm taking each day to launch and grow ( and figure out ) my new businesses, essentially as a blueprint for everyone to follow. I'll add in any of the things I use to do that, as I go along, and you guys can use ( or not use ) whatever fits best for you. And then at the end of each week, I'll post the results of those efforts, and anything that feels like it needs changing. We're going to need two things. 1. A product ( or service, or offering of any kind ) that is in market, and that people can buy. 2. A growing audience of people following what we're doing ( that we can sell to ). That's it. That is all we need to worry about. No crazy systems. No massive infrastructure. Just. An offer. A story to tell. Now let's go. Oh, quick sidenote: I changed the coffee hour to an earlier time on Tuesdays, for our European friends, so if anyone wants to join, it's at 1pm CST ( Mexico City )...and should be in your calendar.