Lots of ideation this week as I get back into the swing of things. Being sick last week was a bit of a momentum killer, but I’m feeling fully recovered and ready to tackle way too many projects.

This weeks ideas:

• Pipeline Pipe Dream

• An Infinite Book

• Too Many Books

• Building an Audience from Scratch

• AI Business Ideas

Pipeline Pipe Dream

The secret AI Pipeline project - a division of divs.cloud - is still alive and well.

Not as much progress made this week, mostly got sidetracked with refactoring the UI to work a little more dynamically using htmx and Go templates.

I still need to add a few other tools to this pipeline, including:

• speech to text with Whisper AI (although there may be better alternatives these days)

• video manipulation with ffmpeg

• image generation - most likely a cloud deployment of Stable Diffusion XL, but flux.1 [pro] is looking promising

• video generation - BlackForestLabs announced (BlackForestLabs are the creators of flux.1) but in the meantime there’s Runway’s Gen 3 Alpha, and these are just placeholders for OpenAI’s yet-to-be-released Sora

• and a database connector, maybe a vector database too…

Not too bad!

Ok each of those bullets is probably it’s own full length post, but my goal is to create a tool box that can connect to all of these services interchangeably and give AI more access to AI.

Right now it’s becoming pretty unmanageable to keep up with all the new versions and upgrades, so I’d rather build something that can easily update to the new version or completely swap to a different tool effortlessly - properly abstract each service.

Basically I want to be able to generate or modify:

• text

• images

• video

Not one tool can do everything yet, but it’s getting close.

In the meantime, better to have a toolbox or pipeline that can connect the different tasks together.

Time to get back to coding…

An Infinite Book

Since I’m still practicing my newsletter writing abilities - almost to 50, this is newsletter 47! - I can’t help but click on thumbnails offering ideas for a profitable newsletter.

In this video, Nicolas Cole go through his success growing 2 different newsletters to 6-figures per year and how he would do it again.

My goal isn’t so much to make $200,000 per year from this newsletter, but I do want to make it a better newsletter, so there’s certainly some overlap in those goals.

Cole details there’s really 2 main approaches to newsletters, free and paid.

Paid can be tricky. A lot of people thing they can just sign up on Substack, set a price and expect the money to roll in but in reality it’s not that easy, unless you already have a huge following and/or you are an expert on a specific and valuable topic.

Typically you have to justify that you provide value in your writing first. Once people recognize the value you’re providing, then they don’t mind or are even happy to pay to access your newsletter.

The part in the video that stuck with me the most was the infinite book idea. He made a great comparison about getting to the end a really good book and feeling disappointed it was over. A good newsletter can fix that problem by essentially be an infinite book where a new chapter is released every week.

It’s a fun idea, and a new take on newsletters I hadn’t heard before.

The rest of the video is also full a valuable strategies for building a newsletter so it’s worth a watch if you’re considering joining me on this weekly publishing commitment:

Too Many Books

I might have unintentionally modeled some of my grander business plans after Andrew Wilkinson and his Tiny empire.

He started with a web design agency, and eventually grew that to buy other businesses and now has a massive private equity firm.

Given that, I’ve referenced him a few times before because he usually has really solid advice or observations about business from his experience.

And it turns out we share some common qualities that I didn’t fully realize.

Explaining different types of entrepreneurs and business leaders, he talked about himself as “an inch deep and a mile wide” and “wanted to be all over the map” which I can relate to, if you haven’t figured out from all the different topics I cover in this newsletter.

He also mentioned looking at your personal life and if you have a stack of books that you haven’t read (I’ve finished 2 recently!) and an overwhelming Netflix queue (YouTube queue for me) and a full letterbox (which I’ll interpret as email inbox) then you may be a person that should embrace that quality.

Focus on being a CEO for one company but also recognize you’re a distractible person and like to have a good amount of variety.

Good advice, Andrew, thank you! I’ll be taking that to heart as I move forward with the multiple companies I’ve already founded…

The entire conversation is full of interesting ideas, insights into the lives of billionaires and the forever stressed business leaders of the world. Worth a listening if you have the time. I would expect nothing less from Chris facilitating this podcast:

Building an Audience from Scratch

There are a number of these “build an audience from scratch” videos out there so most of them end up saying the same thing.

I liked that Shaan called that out immediately at the beginning and tried to offer something a little different.

Tactically it’s all the same, post quality content regularly, engage with people every day, comment on bigger posts.

Shaan just provided some ideas on what to write about so have plenty to work with.

I really liked this one.

First, Last, Best, Worst, Weirdest.

Apply that to any topic and you’ve got plenty of personal material to work with that’s original and creative.

First job, last job, best job, worst job, weirdest job sparks plenty of ideas to write or talk about.

And then apply that to whatever topic.

The full list is pretty good, I may be sneaking in some of those ideas here and there soon.

AI Business Ideas

And finally, I’ve seen this video in my queue for a couple weeks now and kept meaning to come back to it, so I finally checked it out and it did not disappoint.

We may be peaking in terms of the AI hype cycle or AI may just be normalizing, but I think the opportunity is pretty endless, and Sarah Guo seems to reflect that sentiment.

This conversation is pretty rapid-fire jumping from idea to idea but there’s plenty to work with in terms of inspiration.

Pick a “wedge” or “niche” and use one of the big AI models to make a tool helps that wedge.

They fly through a bunch of examples, many of which have inspired the AI pipeline above, including video generation for training videos or for product placement on social media, or chatbots to act as a secretary or call center for small businesses.

Maybe the most encouraging thing for me was how dismissive VCs can be about building a “lifestyle business” from an app that makes a few million a year.

That sounds good to me.

Any way this was just a fun, higher energy conversation with a lot of AI app ideas to think about. I’ll be overthinking about it for a while I’m sure.

And that’s it for this week! May finally embrace that this an AI newsletter, among other things…

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

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!