This Week:
- What is #vanlife like in Denver?
- Can you bulk while intermittent fasting and eating vegan? I have data.
- The incredible progress we’ve made towards our next valuable offer.
April 2023
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 4/1 |
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 5/1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Where In The World Was I?
- Denver, CO
Urban Van Life In Denver, CO
So, what’s it like living in a van in Denver?
Parking overnight on the streets…
*not pictured :)*
Espressos in the morning…
Walks and runs in the park, with warm sunshine and birds chirping… (Wash Park, Confluence Park)
Afternoons in the gym (1/2 the time)…
It’s felt good to some errands done so I can get back into some of my daily routines.
On a more real note, I’ve been falling behind on some of the good habits (meditation, prioritizing walks, reading) in exchange for watching entertaining YouTube videos. If you’ve been following along, this isn’t really a new challenge to be honest.
It felt good to get back on track yesterday (Saturday) as I picked up a new book to read (Show Your Work by Austin Kleon).
Coffee Shops
- Downpours Coffee
- Queen City
- Wash Perk
- Frank & Roze
- Pinwheel
- Huckleberry Roasters (Berkeley)
*see pictures above*
Things Are Moving QUICKLY (Work Update)
Last week I shared that our first offer was live and we were starting work on the next offer in parallel.
Well this week, things have been moving really quickly.
Offer – Content Strategy
I put out a couple more tweets linking to the Content Strategy offer. Here’s a summary of how that offer has been performing:
In total, we had
- Maybe 2-3 more tweets/links posted
- 6 downloads that weren’t us
- $6 donated
- Call it maybe ~20 views
- Apparently a ~60% click through rate on the landing page??? That seems bonkers, maybe the data is skewed haha…
Halfway through the week I had Dan Koe, the man himself, respond to my DM and he downloaded it as well and checked it out!
His response:
Nice.
That message is unfortunately not a payment of $42,000 though, so still working on that validation 😅
Offer – Ghostwriting as a Service
It feels like all the foundation is in place (the tweets/data have already been gathered) and now it’s just a matter of:
- Creating hypotheses
- Pulling out valuable insights
- Packaging up those insights into tangible offers
After some research and discussion, we decide to more-or-less break up this Ghostwriting as a Service hypothesis/offer into multiple offers, the first being: Outperforming Tweet Formats. Understanding or calculating tweet formats that outperform seems to be a prerequisite or requirement if we were to ghostwrite someone’s tweets.
So we thought, well this could be valuable by itself, so why not make it its own offer?
With that in mind, here’s the progress we’ve made this week:
- Ghostwriting as a Service offer research/discussion
- “Pivot” to sub-offer: Outperforming Tweet Formats
- Created landing page AND Gumroad draft pages that are now live
- Created Google Sheet that compiled the top 95% percentile tweets for a list of creators
- Created NLP script to cluster tweets using kmeans (thanks for the help ChatGPT!)
- Crafted first-pass ChatGPT prompt to generate format from the tweets
- Created script that iteratively calls ChatGPT API
- Started generating tweet formats from all the outperforming tweets
Example:
Man, it feels like we’re just right there, within grasp of something valuable.
From here, the next steps are:
- (Optional) Run the tweet formats through a kmeans clustering
- Start collecting a list of tweets+formats+prescriptions
- “Package up” that list into another PDF
- Upload
- Announce
- …
- Profit?
The Take-A-Break? Dilemna
This week I’ve been working pretty hard. It’s been incredibly rewarding seeing tangible progress every day.
Honestly, it feels like I haven’t really been this excited to pursue a problem in a while.
Each day I’m just excited to make more progress, tackle the next challenge, and see how much closer I can get to that goal output that we can package up into the PDF.
In a way it takes me back to the early months after I just joined my team at GitHub. There were so many unknowns and new information was being uncovered every day. We had a vision and we were just going after it day after day.
That time felt scrappy, chaotic, and exciting.
I like that process a lot.
And so scaling our product to maintenance mode after 2 years was exactly one of the reasons that contributed to my loss of motivation and reason for deciding to quit.
But tangent aside, the question of when and how to take a break from morning work sessions resurfaced again this week.
I started to feel like my focus was dropping in effectiveness later in the week. There were more moments of breaking from flow, lost in thought rather than focused on the task at hand. Usually these feelings are indicators for me that I need a morning off to just recharge, relax, etc. Typically I’d go ski, but now that I’ve returned my ski gear… 😅
However, now that I have a tangible *thing* to create, the lure of pushing and testing my limits continues to dangle.
The idea of taking this time in my 20s to really understand MY work limits – how much I can focus in one day, how many days I can push in a row, what recharges me the most, how I can most effectively operate, etc. – feels really valuable to me.
So, I don’t really have a resolution or answer here.
This is one of those questions that has continued to resurface over the past 12 months. I believe it’s come up many times in my weekly Life Update posts.
This morning (Sunday) I took an hour to walk around Sloan’s Lake before grabbing some coffee, and kept the work session a little more chill.
Is this the solution I’m looking for?
Not sure…
More to come as I continue to explore my own energy and habits.
Weight/Lifting Progress Update
So I’ve been tracking my weight, but only recently I charted it because I’ve noticed being pretty consistently higher weight than 6-12mo ago.
That’s a pretty substantial increase (~15lbs) over 6mo!
Notes: It varies so much b/c I don’t have the LUXURY of, say, always tracking my weight first thing in the morning. Sometimes it’s in the morning, sometimes at night, sometimes right after a big meal, sometimes not, etc. etc. #JustVanLifeThings
I recently checked out some of my past pictures I’ve taken and was honestly shocked!
The visual difference is WAY greater comparing back 6 months than what I see in daily changes (which feels like an obvious statement to write).
- Left: November 13th, 2022 – 172.4lbs
- Right: April 21st, 2023 – 188.2lbs
- +5mo, +15.8lbs, +0.37in beard length
Wow! Something is working!
Honestly some of my biggest takeaways (and reliefs) is that you CAN gain weight while
- Intermittent fasting
- 90% Vegetarian/Vegan
Those were huge question marks for me that seem to now be resolved.
Note: I’ve been intermittent fasting (~16-8s) probably 95% of days since ~August 2021. I’ve been *mostly* vegetarian/vegan since around the same time.
Hoping to do another one of these comparisons in the future!
Cheers to progress.
Food From The Week
Speaking of food and weight…
*Not pictured: Quesadillas
What’s Next?
A special week coming up! 👀