I always start writing this newsletter on Friday with a few things in mind and I always worry that this will be the week I don’t have that much to write about. But by the time I bullet some ideas and review my YouTube history, I have a list of more than 5 things I’m trying to cut down. Plus this time there’s an unexpected development…

Here’s the list for this week:

• divs.marketing

• AI Fixing AI Issues

• Newsletter Writing

• Private Equity

• Warren Buffet’s Friend

divs.marketing

I’ve been bouncing back and forth on marketing strategies for divs.design at this point. I really want to go the YouTube route, but that’s going to take a considerable amount of time and effort.

The more direct route would be researching leads on LinkedIn or just companies I like and I would want to work with and cold emailing or message them.

In terms of getting a second client before the end of the month for Deep30, it’s not looking great. Directly reaching out to a potential client probably has the best odds if I’m going to get someone to sign in the next 6 days but we’ll see. I’ve got quite a bit going on these next 2 weeks though, so I’ve accepted I might not be able to hit all my goals. There’s always next month!

AI Fixing AI Issues

Perplexity is an AI built specifically for searching and it’s great at finding 4-5 sources to generate an answer, plus it links to it’s references. I tend to use it to search more than Google these days.

And I was particularly impressed with Perplexity this week when I asked it “is the chatgpt desktop client intercepting the command s shortcut on mac?” which it not only confirmed but suggested I update the client, fixing the issue!

I wasn’t able to use the Cmd + S shortcut in VSCode, which was driving me insane, but Perplexity told me how to solve it right away!

That’s typically a scenario where I’d expect more advanced Googling to find the solution buried in an AI subreddit or some forum post 8 links down in the search results, not broken down into steps directly in the result.

Google is doing their best to catch up to answers like this for search but they’re not quite there yet. We’ll see as they roll out all of their announced updates the rest of this year, but for now, Perplexity tends to be my goto search tool.

Newsletter Writing

This newsletter is the 33rd newsletter I’ve sent on beehiiv which is kind of crazy to think about. It’s not a particularly huge audience at this point, but thank you for reading and following if you are reading this far and especially if you’ve read any of the other issues!

And after 33 newsletters, this will be the first one with an ad in it! I chose beehiiv because I wanted this newsletter to be free, but also hopefully make a little money with their ad support network, so this will be the first true test for that idea.

I also want to keep things transparent which is why I’m telling you about this now, so let me know what you think about the ad inclusion!

But this sponsor in particular was surprisingly fitting:

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I’ve been lucky enough to work with a number of highly talented engineers in the LATAM region so I’m happy to endorse what CloudDevs is doing. I appreciate their transparency in pricing and operating so check them out if you’re looking to hire some help!

Private Equity

Don’t worry, I still have some podcast recommendations to wrap up this newsletter.

But first, a revelation.

It’s time to make a concept sound less scary. And you probably already guessed what that concept is based on the title of this section: Private Equity

Private equity just means owning part or all of a business that isn’t publicly traded.

It’s one of those terms that gets thrown around by business and finances types and it sounds impressive and complicated, but I think what usually happens is that the people that use that term are typically using it at a much larger and more advanced scale so it gets the reputation of being a fancy rich business person idea that’s out of reach.

In reality, any small business owner is in private equity. If people can’t buy your company’s stock on Robinhood, then congratulations, you’re in private equity.

Of course there is a highly complex strategy to private equity at the higher levels of the game, just like anything else taken to professional extremes, but at the end of the day, you just have to start a business to be in the PE club.

Codie Sanchez seems like she’s experienced both ends of the spectrum of private equity and I really appreciate her shining light on the idea. I’ve watched and recommended a few of her videos, but this time it finally ended up clicking for me what private equity really is. Hopefully you find some value in this one too:

Warren Buffett’s Friend

I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, which is saying something. If you’ve read any of these newsletters, you know that I listen to a lot of podcasts (or in my oddly specific case, I listen to a lot of YouTube videos…) but this particular conversation stuck with me.

I’d never heard of Mohnish Prabai before this podcast so big thank you to Shaan from the My First Million podcast for publishing this talk, because I found it incredibly valuable.

You have to respect someone that befriends two of the greatest investors in history, which Mohnish ended doing by accident after paying to have lunch with Warren Buffett (for a mere $600,000 of course) and after that lunch, was invited to have lunch with Charlie Munger as well, leading Mohnish to a friendship with both of them.

There were so many good takeaways from Mohnish but here’s a short list:

• good investors typically are also good at business and vice versa

• “Entrepreneurs do not take risks” - most do everything in their power to minimize risk

• surround yourself with people that are givers

• the most valuable skill is patience (love to watch paint dry)

I happen to highly value all of those qualities so there might be some bias on my part but it’s reassuring to hear from someone at the top of the investing game.

One more interesting take I can’t claim personal experience with, but makes sense to me, is that most highly successful CEOs had some sort of business as a kid. They ran a lemonade stand, or in Buffett’s case, bought their first stock at 11. Mohnish talks about how much people learn as children and running a business at that age creates natural business understanding that’s much harder to develop as an adult, leading to an unfair advantage later in life.

Those points and more in the full conversation, a long one at 2 hours, but I highly recommend it if you have the time:

And that’s it for this week! Business, AI, a peak behind operating this newsletter, and the first ad!

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!