Often, I write these journal entries to brainstorm how I’m going to make more money, or optimize my schedule, or squeeze more juice out of my products.
Today will be different!
Today, I am writing because I believe the state of the economy has changed, and if I don't change with it, all I have built will be irrelevant in ~24-36 months time.
On November 6th, OpenAI wrote a post that confirmed what we all knew was coming. If you haven't read it, my TLDR: the cost of "execution" (AI doing stuff for you) is dropping by ~40x per year, while the capability and reliability of said execution is skyrocketing.
I have sat on this for the better part of two weeks, thinking through what this means for me and how to react to it. In hindsight, this was unnecessary. I knew what to do all along, I merely lacked the conviction.
My conclusion: we are fast-approaching a world where "building automations" will be considered as quaint as hand-stitching dresses in the 1850s, or building TCP/IP infrastructure in the mid-2000s.
It is hard to verbalize, because for the last year or so, I have been the "king" of this field. I have made many millions of dollars teaching people how to wire together various APIs & drag and drop various nodes together, out-earning everyone in my industry.
But looking at that announcement, and then looking at my day-to-day calendar (which is primarily filled with "Loom roasts", "live builds", "content planning", etc) it is clear that what I am doing is akin to polishing brass on the Titanic.
if you haven't seen the Titanic, spoiler: things do not go well for the brass
I am not saying this to be alarmist. I am saying this because I want to play where the ball is going, not where it currently is.
So, this journal entry will not be about how to scale to $500k/mo, or shave out a few more marginal percentage points of return on my time.
It will be about a fundamental pivot in both my business model and my mindset. I am going to tear down (some of) what I built to lay the foundation for a career that can withstand impending AGI.
Here is my plan:
Thesis
My career has been built on simple arbitrage: I knew a bunch of technical things (APIs, webhooks, JSON) that your average business owner didn't, and I was also fast/competent/sociable enough to sell the implementation and the knowledge at a premium.
But the value stack has since shifted.
Knowledge is already mostly free. Soon, implementation will be free as well. And market economics dictate that, with infinite supply, demand drops to near-zero.
Rest assured, both of the aforementioned things (knowledge and implementation) will indeed be in infinite supply. They'll also be done orders of magnitude better than anything I could do, because silicon brains work faster than biological ones ever will.
Basically: if I stay here, I become an outdated commodity. If I move now, although risky, I will have a chance to capture a slice of unbounded upside as we transition to the next leg of the economy.
Strategy
Right now, what I am is a "high-end operator".
I have spent the last ~2 years squeezing out every ounce of value a knowledge worker in my industry might create. Similar to overclocking your CPU, or tuning your engine, or wringing out every drop from a wet towel.
In my earnest opinion, I have won this game. By augmenting myself with systems and leaning on my natural capabilities, I have scaled about as high as one can go in the creator economy (at least if we count revenue per staff).
This is fun and all, and has earned me a bunch of money + recognition + invites to fancy conferences. But I don't care about most of that. I would prefer to have true generational impact.
What I believe I must become in order to achieve this is some flavor of "guide" for the new economy. Things are going to change at a breakneck pace, and people will need a trusted filter by which to make sense of it all. I would like to be that filter, and believe I have the right combination of skills, tenacity, and old-school work-ethic to make it happen.
This sounds pretentious, I know. But, in my opinion, "pretentious" is simply another word for "ambitious" before what you're doing works.
What does this look like, specifically? It means I must move from Level 1 (selling implementation/knowledge) to Level 2 (selling the orchestration of both, and the vision to be able to do it). Eventually, we will move to Level 3 (where I will sell how to navigate a future owned by intelligences that far outstrip our own).
If I stay at Level 1, I will become a commodity. I am already seeing it happen to a bunch of my competitors. Also, anecdotally, my growth has slowed considerably—probably as a result of the reduced barrier to entry.
So I will now focus on moving to Level 2, with the eventual goal of moving towards Level 3 and beyond.
Steps
As always, I will write these as step-by-step actionables, since these historically result in the highest probability of me achieving them.
1. Remove silly day-to-day tasks.
I cannot think or discuss the future of civilization while I am recording 30-second Loom videos criticizing someone's Upwork profile. Or writing spintax for cold email campaigns for a dental business. Or fiddling with various filters on OBS Studio.
All of these are a massive mismatch of leverage and me doing them is a byproduct of the scarcity mentality I grew up with.
I have ~$400,000/mo in profit and many millions of dollars! This is not just income anymore, it is basically a war chest. I can use it to buy impact at far larger multiples than I could buy compound returns in the S&P.
Step-by-step:
- I will fire myself from all non-crucial tasks. This means removing myself from the day-to-day of LeftClick, Maker School, MMWM, and the companies I have/am in the process of acquiring.
- First, LeftClick. No more sales calls or implementation. I will essentially become a
referral agency, where inbound inquiries get routed to trusted service providers that borrow my credibility. I will provide a set of instructions and expectations surrounding client management, some high-level overviews, and then schedule a monthly sync with the providers in my network (and in doing so act as an advisor, not a manager/CEO). - Second, Maker School. I will bring on the most talented and capable community contributors and pay them for their assistance in answering user queries. This will greatly reduce my daily time investment. The #bugs category in particular would benefit from someone much more technically inclined than I. I will not manage any of these contributors; I will get all of their daily updates in a thread, and review it every once in a while. My direct Maker School management will transition to ~15mins/day of responding to interesting posts, rather than all posts.
- Third, companies I am acquiring. I have now negotiated 30% of a dental marketing company and am in the process of acquiring others. These are great boons and give me solid case studies to record content on, but I cannot be directly involved in their management. I will ensure all acquisitions build me in as an advisor, not a manager, and my time will be limited to ~thirty minutes per week (or ~2 hours per month). I will find pre-existing call templates that assist me in advising and making efficient use of that time, as I am currently running blind in that regard.
- Fourth, sunsetting MMWM. MMWM currently takes me at least seventeen hours per month. That's approximately as much as Maker School. But it also earns me far less (~1/12th). To top it off, the branding is ineffective given the upcoming market shifts—namely, specific automation platforms are likely to become deprecated and I should avoid associating myself with just one wherever possible. To fix this, I will give everyone currently in MMWM free access to Maker School for life. I will then also refund annual subscriptions over a certain # months. This will cost me ~$40,000, but buy me back far more than that in time.
- Fourth, implement a strict "no" policy. No more one-off meetings, one-off conferences, one-off travel requests, or anything that is not explicitly advancing the mission. My work henceforth will be composed primarily of strategy, advising calls, and content. I will also probably do podcasts (hosted by people with large distribution) to grow further, as is the way with bigger channels.
2. Build Maker School into a place for the "future of work".
What will I do with this time? I will use most of it to improve Maker School and my content (more on that part next).
Rather than just discussing a specific agency model, Maker School will become the community that helps people navigate the impending economic transition.
Many of our members have already joined because of some sort of economic difficulties; they've either been let go, find it difficult to hold a job, or believe entrepreneurship is the straighter line path to achieving their goals after being mismarketed various education/degrees/etc.
Additionally, Maker School (and other communities) have tremendous value in an era dominated by AI. They are places humans can talk to other humans, make sense of what is going on, and apply organic—read: human—strategies to ensure their own livelihoods. This does not seem that valuable now, but soon models will enter every aspect of our lives, and I anticipate this will make human connection a premium commodity.
I will, of course, keep the same curriculum and the same business model: offering a daily, focused roadmap with accountability built-in to succeed with your goals. But otherwise...
Step-by-step:
- I will, in parallel, build new curricula surrounding the orchestration of agents, how to manage/control/verify the outputs of agentic models, and everything else that will be important over the next few years. I will start by publishing a short series called 'The Future of Work', and make stream-of-consciousness videos discussing various topics the norm.
- I will remove the standard 1:1s in Month 6, and replace them with just sending DMs to members I find interesting and capable. The mandated 1:1s are taking up too much time. I should have done this after the last journal entry, but inertia propelled me forward and I didn't have something good to give them. Now I do—they'll get access to one of my MMWM programs.
- I will have other people do Looms, and only record them occasionally. These are reasonably time-efficient, to be clear, but there is also an energetic component to effort; I don't really want to focus that limited resource on roasting profiles or cold emails when I can be strategizing higher-level plays.
- Rather than focus specifically on cashflow, I will use Maker School as a source for high-level, ambitious operators that I can install in my own businesses or the businesses of people I'm associated with. I will do this by creating a defined path to acquisition/advising.
3. Change the nature of my content from "make money" to a blend of "future strategy/navigating the future of work".
Perhaps most importantly, I will begin changing the nature of my content from "make money online" to "navigating the future of work".
I will do this with low production quality, in podcast-style episodes, to maximize a) irreproducibility by AI, b) authenticity, and c) volume.
This will eliminate a fair chunk of my 'get rich quick' views. That is okay; some marginal losses here are worth it if I am to be viewed as the highest signal : noise source for understanding what's going on.
A great feature of this: it is an entirely new content stream. I haven't talked about most of this stuff before, which will intrinsically make it more interesting to me, and give me many low-hanging fruit to discuss.
I should be mindful that my average views will probably decrease (since the topics are 'less sexy'). Given long enough, however, I anticipate they will rise again, since I am carving out a new niche + I have extremely high credibility on the subject. It also positions me tangential to political subjects, which will let me make good inroads there, since government regulation and compliance are likely to be large topics soon, and I can always go into politics later if I'd like.
I will not do this all at once. I will start by introducing an occasional video here or there, perhaps once every 6. But this, and discussing AI more generally, will grow to be the main purpose of my channel.
Step-by-step:
- Build a "future of work" content calendar. I will come up with 30 topics I can begin discussing immediately.
- Ideate a simple workflow for these videos. I need a format I can stick to daily, like I did for my massive once-per-day Excalidraw run (which added over 50,000 subscribers) earlier this year. I like whiteboarding, so I will probably do this. Talking head is quite limiting and requires additional editing, so I'll avoid.
- Create a simple workflow for "news" videos. A lot of my future videos are probably going to be commentary on developments, since these developments will soon start coming out faster than people can make sense of them, and my audience will naturally start looking for ways to filter that information. I can probably do a simple screenshare format for this, though I will ideate a dedicated one.
4. Think in terms of "capital allocation" rather than "individual output".
This is more of a mindset shift than anything else. But I need to fundamentally change how I feel about work.
Today, if I don't spend all of my time laboring over a task, I tend to feel unproductive. This is... unproductive.
I need to internalize: I will only ever operate at the speed of a silly, dumb human. Unlike future models, I can not rewrite my software. To output more, I need to look for higher-level plays that allow me to output the equivalent of, say, a thousand people's work in a few minutes.
The time I spend looking for said higher-level plays will often feel definitively like "not work". E.g to the average person, a venture capitalist just sits on their ass all day—but to someone in the know, even a thirty-minute meeting with said VC can result in billions of dollars of value shifted over the next few months.
I have been working towards this already. You can view my move into content as a form of looking for a higher leverage plays—it is an asset that I invest into once, and that sells for me millions of times (even while I sleep).
But capital is a much better, higher-leverage way to play. So I need to overcome my blocker towards spending money. A preliminary task here might be setting aside $250,000 to begin funding agent-based projects that I consider to have a high likelihood of paying off. I will think on this further.
Risks
Pivoting on my business is not without its risks.
- On some level, I am concerned that if I stop "grinding," the revenue will drop. I can absolutely see revenue dipping 30-50% as I alienate most of my "get rich quick" crowd.
- But in reality, that is a cost I can afford. Anything over ~$100k/mo in profit is, essentially, infinite money for one person, and it makes no real difference to me at this point anyways. So even if I lose most of my income, as long as I keep on top of my spending, I will suffer zero difference in lifestyle.
- This is then a bounded downside (no lifestyle difference) for an unbounded upside (becoming one of the main, trusted voices for a transition that will impact billions). All I need to be is directionally correct for it to pay off big time.
- There is also the risk I am making a strategic error based on faulty assumptions. I don't consider this likely, but perhaps model progress plateaus, and government regulations or something lead to an inability to distribute this technology as effectively as I think.
- But if this occurs, I will have put my eggs in a basket that I think is probably likely to pay off eventually. If not in the next 2-3 years, certainly in the next 20.
Classic asymmetric bet. I am willing and happy to take it.
Closing thoughts
I don't fully know what starting to focus on orchestration will look like. I am also unsure of exactly the best use of my time day-to-day. But I wanted to get out some concrete actionables, because I believe that, at the end of the day, an ounce of movement is worth a pound of strategy.
To that end, I will likely answer a lot of my own questions as I proceed through these somewhat-murky depths. Either way, I am glad I confronted the big, scary thing at the corner of my conscience, and hope this is at least somewhat instructive for you too.
Time to get to work.
