How I Started Taking Action

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to take more action than I ever have before.

For so long I was stuck in the habit of leaving everything I wanted to accomplish for later.

This was for no reason other than I was scared to start.

I’ve always been passionate for programming but I’ve never been consistent with it up until a few months ago.

I think it stems from the belief that “there’s always time later”.

Once I started to question myself about this I realized how stupid it was.

I’ve known a goal of mine is to start a software company, but I always felt I had to be “qualified” to start.

I now believe that so long as you’re not doing something that would kill somebody in the case you mess up, being qualified is irrelevant.

I’ve always learned the most by doing, and in the last 2-3 months where I’ve began coding nearly every day on small projects I’ve learned more than I had in the last 3 years.

The small act of coding at least 30 minutes every day (though often much more) has started to build the belief that I am the sort of person to take action.

On Thursday night I had bought a design eBook from TailwindCSS as I’ve been wanting to learn more about UI design for my projects.

I found out about Humata.ai the other day, which lets you chat with PDFs and I had used it to ask some additional questions about a few of the pages.

Afterwards I wanted to store it somewhere I’d remember, not just dump it into google drive.

I couldn’t find anything which gave me an idea - a site specifically meant to store your eBooks / digital downloads, and with Humata in mind, where you could ask questions about it.

Humata’s free plan didn’t give enough storage to store the entire eBook, so I saw some opportunity there.

I thought about it more into Friday and decided I’d run an experiment - write 0 lines of code and use Framer to whip up a landing page that I’d run some ads to.

I watched a video last year about this method of validating ideas and have wanted to try it since.

Regardless of how good or bad the idea is, I know that going through this process will be a crash course in idea validation.

I’ve spent ~$20 so far on the domain and hosting, and will spend about $80-100 on facebook ads.

These ads will link directly to the landing page which has multiple call to actions to ‘request early access’ - this is just a tally.so form which collects emails.

If ~3-5% of site visitors enter their email, it’s some indication people care about the idea and I may consider building it. If not, I’ll leave it at that and still be happy with myself that I did something new.

After all, I need to get my failures out of the way.

I’ll report back in a week or two with the results.

9 AI Tools I Actually Use

I wouldn’t call myself an AI fanboy but there are certain things that I find it great for. This video covers those.

Things I’ve found interesting

links to valuable stuff I thought was worth sharing. product links are amazon affiliate links.

Owly - the landing page that I built. If the idea sounds interesting to you and it’s something you’d use, would love your feedback.

LG Ultrawide 38” - My main 34” monitor died on me this week, and I’ve been wanting to switch to a single one anyways. 38” is the perfect size for me, tons of screen real estate and I love the aspect ratio. 144hz is suuper smooth.

Vegan Leather Desk Mat - For $20 this is a great mat. Doesn’t slide around, looks sleak and feels smooth. I was going to go for a proper leather mat but don’t think I need to now.

Walnut Valet Tray - Found this the other day while browsing Amazon. I have it on my desk at the moment and it’s super nice to hold my phone, keys etc in a simple tray. Looks great too.

Amazon Echo Spot - The original one got discontinued a few years ago and I still get comments about it to this day. I saw they came out with a new one and I bought it immediately. Something about the circular design looks so good.

Have a great week.

Cole

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