A FEW WEEKS AGO... I posted that I had made a business, spun-off of one of my competition entries. Full disclosure, it's not exactly any of them (if you happen to go look). I just took what I had learned while building and applied it to a business strategy I wanted to try. And you know what!? I got a client. It's the first client I've gotten for another venture, outside of the main business I've been running. Considering I have spent 10's of thousands of dollars on other "tests," over the years, this was a HUGE win to actually make money from something. AND NOW I BUILD... Now I'm using ICM to automate the dumb stuff and enrich the good stuff. I'm constantly asking myself if what I'm building make sense, or if I'm falling into the trap that Jake talks about, where folks overbuild or build something that doesn't matter. I am pretty sure I'm doing it right because newer AI models won't affect what I've made, except to streamline the dumb stuff more... Anyway, I'm looking at the unit-economics of the business I'm building now, based off this one client that I'm trying to give the most amazing experience to, and I am blown away by the potential. It feels like it can't be real. I'm probably putting the cart before the house, so to speak, but I can't help to be optimistic looking at the numbers, of which, I will admit, I'm making a lot of assumptions about. SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES... I have been studying business for a long time now, to try to understand how riches are truly made beyond what the typical small-business owner does (average is like $50K a year or something). I feel I will lose my mind if it takes me 20 years to build wealth because I had tunnel vision and chose a very slow moving vehicle to get me there. And look, I know it's *all* hard, the grass is always greener, yadda yadda yadda (Seinfeld, anyone?), but it's still true that there ARE easier opportunities to make wealth. There just are. I've come back to this fact time and time again while searching for my next business model.... In simple business terms, if your CAC (cost to acquire a customer) is extremely low, 0, or even negative, and your LTGP (lifetime gross profit -- what the client pays you in total, for the entire duration they use your business) is high, then you're printing money. And if the profit margins are 80% or more? Then you're swimming in gold.

I hit my token limit for the first time and it did not feel good lol. I am still loading all my projects into VS Code every time as a single large folder that houses them all... I'm wondering, if I stop doing that and JUST load what I'm working on, if that's going to significantly decrease token usage. I am aware that having it point to one project at a time is better, but I'm wondering if it's going to be substantial or just a little thing. Does that make sense? Thanks! Ruby

Is there a link to book a call to discuss buying a seat in the Lyceum? I did a search on skool and I didn't find anything.

Last month I was speaking with a friend who works for an engineering firm in Australia about ai, and all the cool things we can do with it these days, and he mentioned that he was trying to push to get a monthly newsletter out to their team to inform them of upcoming professional development courses and workshops. Of course it takes a lot of time to manually search the relevant websites, and put together a newsletter, etc. so no one has done it. I asked a few more questions about the tools they use, and then went and built out a small, structured ICM folder system, with the exact same blueprint that we have been learning in here and using for the competition building. I then made a loom video showing how it worked, and then emailed it to him along with the fully company branded email that it output. It was near the end of financial year at the time, so they were a bit busy, and he said he'd get back to me. Today, 1 month later, he came back and accepted my quote of $600, which includes 2 rounds of revision. To get the draft up and tested, it took me probably about 4 hours, and then there will be another few hrs in finalising it (with the revisions). In reality I probably undersold myself, but this is a side project at the moment (I run a cafe, not an ai consulting business...yet!), and I was excited to have the opportunity at a real client to test against. Let me be clear, I'm not selling a fancy Ai loaded website or app or anything... It is literally 5 folders, with a top level claude.md file, instructing claude co-work (or claude ai or code - or any other Ai tool that can follow structured instructions with a renaming of the claude.md file) on exactly what to do. This is exactly what Jake has been teaching here, and it will stand the test of time. As Anthropic updates their interface, and Open Ai starts to take over claude or another better tool comes along, this ICM folder system will continue to do its thing. It may need some tweaks along the way, but it's not going to need it's whole codebase updated or anything, because it's all plain language, english instructions.

Intros for The Connection Hub - The Vault 👤 Who I am: (name + where you're based) 🛠️ What I actually do: (the specific work — not "I'm in real estate" but "I run a 3-agent team doing residential resale in Austin") 🤖 What I'm building with AI right now: (your current project, workflow, or the thing you're stuck on) 🎯 What I'm looking for connection-wise: (pick one or two) 💡 Someone who's solved [X] 🤝 A collaborator / accountability partner 👀 Just here to learn from people in my field 🧰 Trading workflows & systems 📬 Best way to reach me: (DM here / comment / link)