Client work, coaching, AI and business. What else could you ask for?

Topics for this week:

• divs development

• Price’s Law

• AGI Competition

• How to Make $5M a Year with Your Business

• 13 Years of Business Advice

divs development

I’m starting to understand why the trend of “design” specifically has gotten so popular. There’s enough work in coming up with the redesign of a webpage on it’s own, let alone the work needed to bring that design to life.

I quickly realized I’ve taken on much more than design with this current client and I underestimated the amount of work involved even though I shouldn’t have. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken on the work of building a full website so this has been a good learning opportunity and a hard lesson in asking questions upfront rather than jumping at the first opportunity that comes along.

Luckily the client has been amazing to work with and it’s not their fault, websites aren’t their business, it’s my business, but I’m anxious to do a retrospective on how I can improve the process for the next client and make sure the opportunity is the right fit.

I should have their site live by the end of the month, maybe even by the next newsletter, but until then, the work continues…

Price’s Law

Speaking of work, I heard a new concept called “Price’s Law” from one of the latest episodes of The Ben and Marc show. Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of employees generate 50% of the output. Here’s a tweet breaking it down:

Having worked in a large corporation, it’s not hard to believe there is an imbalance in who’s doing the most work, but this seems a little pessimistic. Square root might be a little too low, but I could believe less than 50% of employees produce more than 50% of the work in many places. It just depends on how many A players and high performers there are, and what they work on.

I posed this question, and a few other work percentage based questions, to Will and Eric in our podcast The Dev Sync on Monday if you want to hear more about Price’s Law, the Pareto Principle and a few other popular work theories going around these days.

AGI Competition

Google is working diligently to catch up to OpenAI in the race to artificial intelligence dominance and eventually Artificial General Intelligence.

OpenAI released their new model this week, GPT-4o where “o” stands for “omni”. It still uses the GPT-4 model, but it’s much faster and it can handle image, audio, video and text communication surprisingly well.

It’s kind of mind-blowing to see an AI similar to a real-world version of the movie Her, a movie that features a lifelike AI voice assistant played by Scarlett Johansson. Coincidentally or not, OpenAI’s GPT-4o has a voice that sounds very similar. OpenAI’s showcase for GPT-4o is below.

Paid subscribers can access GPT-4o, but you can now jump into GPT-3.5 for free without signing up right here: https://chatgpt.com/

Around the same time, Google also demonstrated their upcoming AI features rolling out through the rest of the year.

I was caught off guard by the virtual podcast they created with 2 AI agents in NotebookLM. It sounded so natural, my brain had already bought-in that it was a real conversation so I was really impressed when the presenter asked to jump into the conversation to explain the topic in simpler terms for his son.

Between creating natural sounding conversation and something that can manage my gmail inbox and pull out invoices into spreadsheets automatically, I’ll be keeping an eye on all of Google’s AI features.

AGI or not, we’re inching closer to having a fully capable virtual assistant that lives in the cloud and does whatever you ask of it both quickly and accurately, simply by talking to it.

How to Make $5M a Year with Your Business

Now let’s do some math. I love see simple math applied to real concepts, it feels way more approachable, even though there is also some heavy glossing over of the work involved in the steps.

This week, Matt Gray showed Ali Abdaal how to create a $5 million per year business and it blew Ali’s mind.

Ali’s know for productivity on his channel and he’s looking to offer a productivity product.

Matt Gray has been building his online brand focusing on business systems, which I’m always a sucker for a good system, and he suggests building an online community that gives direct access to Ali through coaching and also provides private group member support, as well as a course. There would be 3 tiers to join:

• $24k per year for a full membership plus coaching and group access

• $8k for 3 months of full membership plus coaching and group access

• $1-2k membership that’s only good for the course and limited group access

With 209 members at $24,000 per year, that’s a business making $5,016,000 annually.

It’s big numbers, but Ali commands a big audience, with more than 5.5 million subscribers to his YouTube channel alone. 0.004% of his audience would need to sign up to get 209 members. I’d say his odds are pretty good.

Even if at half that, only 105 members, he’s still looking at $2.5 million per year. Not too bad I’d say. We’ll have to wait and see if he takes Matt’s advice.

13 Years of Business Advice

And a little more business to wrap up this week. Alex Hormozi dropped this passionate and straight-forward conversation with himself and it works. I’ve listened to it almost twice through already.

It’s way ahead of where I need to be, but can’t help to listen and plan out what I’ll need for the future.

It’s more of the same thing’s he’s been saying for a while now, but it’s presented well and it’s still valuable advice:

• Sell to the rich, the margins are better and easier to work with

• People and talent are the most important part of the business

I took the transcript and threw it into a ChatGPT bot so you can talk to Alex’s advice for fun if you want! Doesn’t hurt to see if it can offer advice for your business depending on where you’re at and what needs to happen next.

Or you can watch or listen to the full thing yourself below:

And that’s it for this week! Another AI and business. This is the future!

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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