Intention, Obstacles, and Waitlists

The Weekly Variable

Author

Jay Peters
March 22, 2024

The Weekly Variable

You’re in a for a doozy this week. Hopefully you have about 5 hours of travel time to fire through some podcasts. Or save them for later. Or let me just give you one interesting idea from each of them.

This week:

One Week Left

I have a little more than one week left to hit the goal of 10 websites this month. This last week may be a bit of a scramble, but this weekend should help catch up. I usually get a bulk of the site done quickly, and then end up losing way too much time learning one particular micro-interaction like making an underline that slides out when you hover over a link. All in the name of learning though so I suppose it’s worth it.

Right now I’m at 6.5 sites done so I need to blast through 3.5 sites this weekend and next week. Time to pick up the pace and trade some podcasts for web dev time.

Looking back at last week, it is nice to see this list growing:

One of these days I’ll have a walkthrough of my full process, and may even look into automating some of those steps, which would be a fun side project. In the meantime, check out the sites so far and send your friends to divs.design if they could use a new landing page!

More Super Prompts

I’ve been researching SEO here and there, leading me to Wes McDowell’s videos on YouTube which have been seriously valuable. He provides really detailed outlines of his work and exact AI prompts he uses in his business.

It can be overwhelming, staring into a compressed void of all written knowledge of human history, trying to figure out what’s the best question to ask, but Wes provides some great options with specific phrases to summon up detailed, useful results.

Ultimately, the greatest trick is prompt the AI to ask you how to get the best prompt, which Wes also recommends, but one prompt that stood out to me was a frame to learn at lunch.

The prompt begins: 

I’m dedicating my lunch break to improving my skills in [insert your topic]. I need you to scour the web to comprehensively research this topic...

There’s more to the prompt in the video, but this is a perfect example where AI excels, a pointed and unique situation for it to deliver a focused, specific answer.

The rest of the video contains all the prompts, also worth checking out. I’ll try them out and report back if they become a regular thing for me, but here’s the video if you want to give them a shot:

The Power of Waitlists

YouTube noticed that I watched Andrew Bustamante on Diary of a CEO last week, so this week it recommended the DOAC episode with Daniel Priestly, a successful entrepreneur, best-selling author, speaker and leader.

Daniel covered details on how he’s created successful businesses in the past, what to do if you only had $100 a month to invest, and the power of changing just a few words on a website.

He and Steven Bartlett both broke down examples where a waitlist can be much more powerful than a simple Sign Up or Purchase button.

Steven gave an example where he suggested that a company change the button on their website from “Become a Member” to “Join the Waitlist” and just doing that caused 500% more people to sign up and 300% more to become members. Before the change, people would click the button, sign up for a tour, then often not show up. After it became a waitlist, they always showed up because it sounded more important and exclusive.

It is an interesting flip in psychology. Rather than asking “do I want to spend money on this?” it becomes a much easier question of “am I interested in this?” Once someone’s signed up, now there’s a way to build moment on that interest with reminders and sign up numbers to let you know that others have signed up too and there’s limited spots.

During the conversation Daniel emphasizes the importance of networking as a place to start for a budding entrepreneur and suggests that if you only have $100 a month to invest, you should just use that money to get to know more people and build contacts by hosting lunches and dinners.

But the biggest and simplest piece of advice he gave was “with or without you” energy - an easy way to show confidence and convince people to join. I’m doing this thing, you’re welcome to join, you don’t have to, but we’re going to do it regardless. A subtle way to frame an offer into an opportunity.

Daniel also touches on the Boring Business concept from Codie Sanchez, and that there’s a huge opportunity in business that owners are looking to get rid of at discounted rates. That and more in the full conversation, I’d recommend it if you have the time:

Sam Altman and Lex Fridman

Sam Altman and OpenAI are at heart of the current AI hype cycle after unleashing ChatGPT to the world, so you can’t go wrong with any conversation with Sam. Seeing him on Lex Fridman's podcast meant your guaranteed a long and in-depth talk.

Lex tried to press Altman for details on what happened when Sam was briefly removed from OpenAI, then brought back in, but clearly Sam wasn’t going to give much more detail on it. It was interesting to see that Altman did seem a little more reserved, which he admitted himself. After that incident, he became less trusting than he used to.

At one point, Sam talks about how he’s essentially unsatisfied with GPT 4’s capabilities right now which is always a bit jarring to hear, but makes sense. He’s seeing the cutting edge versions that haven’t been released and he’s planning for even further out versions of AI, but it’s a wild comparison to something that’s so new, people are still having a hard time grasping what AI really is and what it can do. At some point I’d like to expand the future of AI in particular, because I think I get where he’s coming from, but for now a few paragraphs won’t cut it.

Until then, I can’t do it justice, I recommend listening to the full conversation. It’s always fascinating to hear where Altman stands on the company and the future of AI.

Writing A Good Newsletter

It’s been a few weeks since this has been the writing slot, but it makes a triumph return with Shaan Puri appearing on David Perell’s How I Write podcast.

I need to listen to this one again because Shaan created and eventually sold his crypto newsletter Milk Road a few years ago. I’m not looking to write a multi-million dollar newsletter like his, but I am always looking to improve the newsletter.

One main suggestion Shaan gives on how he wrote his newsletter and grew it to several million readers, was to write like you’re talking to one person in particular, like a conversation. When he hired writers, he would coach them that if they can’t explain it in a voice memo, then they probably shouldn’t write it. I’m going to have to start trying that. If you wouldn’t talk about it to someone, then don’t write it.

Shaan also talks about story writing and at it’s base, story writing is really simple.

Explaining the standard story structure, he borrows from Aaron Sorkin, who says it’s just intention and obstacle. The hero intends to do something, something stops them from doing it. They overcome the conflict and that’s the end of the story. Surprisingly simple, but not always easy to remember to do.

It’s a long but entertaining conversation, Shaan’s great at keeping things interesting but grounded. My final podcast recommendation for this week for anyone interested in writing:

And that’s it for this week! A few sites from me, and a bunch of podcasts.

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!