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- Losing Money, Making Money, and a One Month Day
The Weekly Variable
Unlike last week, I am short on the podcasts this time, but don’t you worry, I still have a few hours worth of content to recommend. Let’s lose some money, make some money, and get a month’s worth of work done in a day.
10 Divs Done
I’ve been participating in Pat Wall’s Deep30 since the beginning of March. which is supposed to be 30 days of deep or focused work for 2 hours everyday if possible. My goal was to build 10 landing pages in that commitment, which surprisingly, I was able to hit! They’re not all the best quality, but I developed a good pattern for building a full landing page in 2 to 3 days with Webflow and learned a number of fancy micro-interactions and animations to spice up the experience. A few more months of practice and I’ll be ready to build sites worthy of an Awwward.
I ran out of hosting space on Google’s App Engine so I had to settle for leaving the sites hosted in Webflow. I’ll have to re-approach my hosting strategy with that in mind, but Webflow works for now.
So finally, here’s the result of 30ish days of deep work:
Some of them aren’t half bad, but let me know what you think! Next step is to add a little more flash to all of them and get them featured as a portfolio on divs.design so potential clients can know what to expect. Looking forward to having more business than I know how to handle.
More Midjourney Tech
As I got further into different approaches to building those 10 sites, I ran into more ideas of how to use Midjourney. I had already starting using Midjourney to generate UI/UX colors and design ideas, but I found myself using it to generate fake product photos of watches and then I ran across the idea of using it for background art as well.
Brett from designjoy.co, the primary inspiration for divs.design, posted on X that he’s been generating some amazing backgrounds using Midjourney. He didn’t provide any prompts specifically on how he was creating them so I skipped it at the time. When I later decided I could use a better background, I came back to Brett’s post, then did some Googling and ended up with this video from the DesignCourse channel, showing the exact same concept.
It shouldn’t be surprising, AI is only going to continue to amaze, but this was another powerful use case, complicated and intricate graphics with a single sentence. Crazy stuff.
symmetrical flowing paint red paint stream against a dark blue background —ar 16:9
A simple prompt like that gives something like this:
With a little Photoshop magic, you can remove the background and use the paint graphic anywhere you want. Pretty incredible. With practice I’m sure I’ll be using this technique more and more, but the full example from DesignCourse is below if you want to try it out for yourself:
Losing Money
Normally Alex Hormozi documents his success with money, but this week he dropped a great video explaining his biggest financial losses, and it’s a little scary. These are some costly mistakes, totaling him more than $100 million in very valuable lessons.
I’m not sure you can ever be completely prepared for what will go wrong in a business, but Alex talked about a few eye-opening situations I would never even considered. Particularly the case of spending more than $1 million on unnecessary legal fees.
Basically he did not realized he had layers of legal teams reviewing every ad and training video they made. In some cases multiple lawyers would watch up to an hour of content, meaning 4 different lawyers would bill $200-$500 each for not only that hour of watching the content but also their time to write up notes on that hour, then charge for meeting with other lawyers and Alex’s team multiple times a week all totaling in $100,000s in fees every month.
I could easily see this situation happening though, the team didn’t realize how expensive it was, they were just trying to make sure everything was in legal compliance, but clearly there was a more cost-efficient approach to accomplish the same goal.
He has some other fun stories, starting with losing money in crypto, which I have personal experience with, and ending with a $5 million loss due to bad margins, which I hope to avoid personal experience with. Worth watching the whole video below:
Gaining Money
On the flip side, Codie Sanchez released another great presentation this week about making millions in business (which Alex Hormozi has also done), continuing her Boring Business approach.
It really is a mind blowing concept that you could acquire ownership of a business without having to pay a dime, but it feels so approachable when she breaks it down. A business owner is ready to get rid of their business, but rather than shut it down and make no money, they can give partial ownership to someone else, and let the new owner run it instead. The original owner makes a little less money, but still makes money and also works way less. And, if the new owner grows the business, they could both make more money. Not a bad trade!
I must not be the only one that finds the idea interesting because there’s a room full of people there to listen to her talk about it, and she has been trying to spread the message about this secret tactic for a while now since it’s not exactly common knowledge.
I’m not sure I want to own physical locations, but in the spirit of her mission, I’d like to try a Boring Software approach. Acquire boring software companies and build them up. That’s the long term goal anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes in the future. In the meantime, here’s the full presentation from Codie:
The One Month Day
Browsing YouTube as I often do, this title caught my eye: How To Finish One Month of Work Today. It sounded too good to be true, and I’m sure for some people it is, but I like the idea behind it.
I’ve seen Rian Doris pop up in a few places now, and flow state seems to be his main focus: getting into and maintaining flow state.
In this case, he’s talking all about strategizing an entire flow state day, preparing for it like a holiday. Remove all possible interruptions, leave your phone somewhere else for the day, setup your workspace to be clean and ready for work the day before, plan for multiple flow blocks of work, schedule recovery activities like a massage or a workout between those blocks, have your favorite snacks and wear your favorite clothes, and ultimately commit to the One Month Day as a special day unlike any other day.
It’s a bit extreme, but I like the idea. I’ve done 11+ hour sessions of work before, not usually by choice, though. Properly preparing for a full day session and only doing it once a month could produce some huge results. I’d like to give it a try at some point, I’ll report back on how it goes.
You can prepare for your own One Month Day by watching his video below:
And that’s it for this week! Making money, losing money, getting a month's worth of work done in a day. And only a little AI.
Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.
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