🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
Things built: 1 People watching: 0 Cashflow:-$20
🤖 🧠 Learning
A piece of content consumed and something I took away from it.
I’ve had directories on the brain, meaning I want to build one. I don’t know how, so I devolve to watching YouTube, because it feels like learning but it’s mostly entertaining. One dude’s a business guy, his guest is an AI tech guy. They build a directory for emergency plumbers nationwide using AI to scrub the data and build the site. My eyes glaze over slightly as things go too fast, across too many damn apps, when Kiril, the tech dude says “Don’t pay someone to do the work for you. Go break your brain on building it, you’ll understand it better, then you can hire someone to build it. Just ship it.” Or something to the same effect.
It reminded me of what I would tell my guests on LoveLine for Business (RIP), my now defunct podcast. Don’t work on business cards, work on business. I should really follow my own advice, even when some tech dude on YouTube reheats it and serves it back to me. Good old Kiril (if that is really his name) is the reason you’re reading this. If I want to learn AI, I need a forcing function. Something immediate and unrefined that must ship every day because otherwise I will plan, strategize, map out, develop, summarise, and basically spank the monkey in an endless feedback loop.
🍯 🦡 Building
What did I ship today and how did I use AI?
Deciding to make a newsletter is ridiculously easy. Setting one up is not hard either. I’m using Beehiiv because that’s the name I hear everyone using. It’s free until you hit 2,500 subscribers, the -$20 cashflow at the top is because of Claude. Right as you start, you’re asked for a logo (a step you could just skip, but like business cards, 9 times out of 10, that’s enough to get stopped in your tracks, embarrassing, I know).
Instead of overthinking it, I found an AI that can make images, Gemini, and prompted the following:
I need an 800 by 800 pixel publication logo for beehiiv where I'm launching a newsletter called Embarrassing AI which is about learning AI one embarrassing day at a time. Make something fun and irreverent
and I got this, plus a color palate for my newsletter.
The misspelling is intentional, and Gemini’s idea.
It’s that easy.
The rest of the work on the newsletter was manual but I’m sure I’ll learn how to fix that.
🤑 Selling
Here you’ll find either things I’ve made with AI or affiliate links to tools I’m using.
Whispr Flow - smart speech to text - you and I both get a free month when you sign up.
Beehiiv - used to make this - you get a free month and 20% off for three months, I get a nice little kickback
Last Word.
At all costs, ship. It may be ugly but at least you made a thing.
Till next time,