The Week Of Working And Exploring Istanbul

This Week:

• Pictures from a week exploring Istanbul.
• Did I get scammed getting a haircut?
• Sharing a journal entry from behind the scenes.

February 2025

Where In The World Was I?

• 🇹🇷 Istanbul, Turkey

Metrics From The Week

Health stats have been crushing it lately and I’ve been getting some great quality sleep. My heart rate (calculated from sleep) got below 40bpm for the first time a while.

In fact, the last times I got it below 40bpm was when I was in

1. Budapest, Hungary (early-mid November)

2. Granada, Spain (August)

3. The end of my trip abroad last year – Da Nang, Vietnam / Tokyo / 2 days in Kansas (April)

I can’t help looking at this and thinking the common pattern is… NOT being in the U.S.? 😂 Like what?

The last and only times I was outside the U.S. were:

1. Budapest, Hungary

2. Granada, Spain

3. The end of my trip abroad last April – Da Nang, Vietnam / Tokyo / 2 days in Kansas

🤔🤔🤔

Past 12mo RHR data:

My first thought for explaining this is the lifestyle, particularly how much you walk in European cities. I still think this is plausible, but I hesitate to say it can be explained by this because it drops so quickly. Who knows, but I’ll take it.

Business Update

So as a creator, I’ve posted 4 new YouTube videos up until this point, all using inspiration from my software. I’ve now been running into the problem of wanting to know what topics are popular so I can dive deeper into specific topics. I already have my question algorithm but I want something more synthesized than individual questions.

I had an idea for what I could do, but it’ll take a couple steps.

This week I started on a new improvement, something I thought might be pretty straightforward, but it ended up taking a LOT longer than I expected.

On the Channel Explorer page I have this “My Niche” filter. The algorithm to figure this out is very basic, I kinda just threw it together.

The problem is that it’s not really that accurate. So this week I set out to make it accurate.

I dove into topic modeling video titles and playing around with different algorithms. Pretty quickly I got something working, but it was only getting topics for about 40% of video titles. I spent a LONG time trying to get this more accurate – messing with configuration setups and parameter tuning endlessly.

The result of this was a new topic overlap percentage I could use to compare channels.

I deployed the changes, then quickly realized that I broke a bunch of things, getting OOM errors (out of memory) and the channel search job taking hours to finish. So, I then spent time fixing all of those things.

I fortunately got everything stable and so the channel job does the new calculations, but the new topic overlap variable just doesn’t really work as well as I wanted.

At this point in the week I decided I had spent way too much time and pivoted to working on getting another video scripted and recorded.

So it’s not done and needs more debugging, but the groundwork has been laid. The problem is that getting this done is a key requirement for the downstream improvements/features.

Personal Brand Update

I mentioned last week that I’ve been thinking about making shorter more concise videos. This week I got a video scripted, found a coffee shop (EspressoLab, from the fiasco last week, because it has 2 private meeting rooms!), and recorded it.

It was interesting to note that I felt like I was struggling to get a good conversational flow when I was speaking. I’m trying to find this balance between natural conversational tone while also have a structure and hitting specific topics without rambling on.

I’m not quite sure what other people do. I’ve been converting my scripts to bullet summaries, which sort of helps, but it’s not quite there yet. I’m hoping maybe this is just a skill that’ll develop with practice.

Snaps From Istanbul 📸

The streets

The cafés cat-fés

The mosques

The water

What’s not really pictured here is the air quality, which isn’t great. It’s been between 75-150 AQI this week.

Moments From The Week

The Cat

I went to Coffee Orient Co, they have a little work area upstairs. This cat came by, I pet it, it jumped up into my lap and napped there while I worked. I came back 3 days later and the same cat came by and immediately jumped back up into my lap and took a nap there while I worked 🥰

The Runs

I haven’t found a good gym here so I’ve just been going on runs. It’s honestly craziness running anywhere here. There’s just a lot of people, first of all.

But also people just don’t really make any effort to make space. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been running on the side walk, approaching a group of people walking the other way, taking up almost the entire sidewalk, and LITERALLY make eye contact with the person in my path, and they just don’t move 😂😡 It’s frustrating. I do tone it down/slow down in the really dense areas because I’m literally the only person running here and have to weave in and around people 😅 but man I dunno, people just seem to be in their own bubbles. I noticed this in Porto too. I feel like people look at me like deer in the headlights like they’ve never seen someone running in their entire life 😂

Steak

I’ve been trying to balance not over-spending while also getting enough calories to not lose too much weight. One post-run I was looking for something big, like a burger. I was conflicted though because I knew it would just knock me out after and I wanted to get another hour in of work. I had the idea, ah, what about a steak instead?

I felt quite good after, no carb crash even with the fries. (it was ~$22)

Two days later I came back to the same area, checking out the menus, and came back to the same place. The guy who sat me down last time comes back out to greet me.

“Brother! Good to see you” then kind of claps/rubs his hands, like a *getting ready* look, and goes “today I give you the Dallas steak” ($45) 😂

I greeted him, laughed, and kept looking at the menu.

Then he goes “see these prices, these are all on-sale. Tomorrow the prices are going up.” And he pulls out his phone, opens up WhatsApp, and shows me a picture of the new menu with the new prices.

I told him I would think about it, he nodded respectfully and said something like “okay see you,” and I walked off.

I believed him, I just thought it was hilarious.

What’s A Diet?

I’ll post my food at the bottom of the post as usual, but I’ve kind of given up on trying to eat well. I just don’t feel like there are enough good options and I’m only gonna be here for a short time.

🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ I figure I’ll balance it out with walking a lot and running.

Uh, Am I About To Be Scammed?

So I was looking for a place to get my haircut on Google Maps. I narrowed it down to two places. One of them was rated highly but some of the reviews said something like “they charged me 70 euro for a haircut that was listed as 20 euro” or something of the sort.

I went to the other place that didn’t have reviews like that, but with that framing, still maintained a bit of caution.

I walked in, asked him if he spoke english, he said “little bit,” and I asked how much it was just for a haircut, no beard/anything else. He pulled out his phone and punched in 650 TL ($18.12) cash for just haircut, 780 TL paid with card ($21.86). I agreed, and clarified “only haircut,” and sat down.

It was one guy cutting my hair, there was another barber there, and then what looked like a third also wearing the apron thing, but he was a young guy, maybe 15 years old?

They were all speaking Turkish to each other the whole time. I couldn’t help but wonder what they were talking about.

Anyways, we finish, he goes a great job, and I pull out my card to pay.

There’s a card terminal sitting on the table and it’s on, but he goes something like “You don’t have any cash? It’s not working,” said something about a commission (credit card fee?) and said “go to ATM, 50 meter.”

I was like, ehhhhhhhhhh… alright fine, but I’m taking all my stuff. I agreed and he points me to follow the young guy.

So we leave and I start walking through the streets, following this kid, who kept looking back to make sure I was following.

I felt pretty confident, but my “red alert red alert” signals were definitely flashing.

All the thoughts were going through my head, where is he taking me? Is he gonna take me to an crappy ATM that charges exorbitant fees? Is he gonna take me to an ATM that has a skimmer? Does this happen with every foreigner that comes in “ohhh yeah the card machine JUST stopped working?”

It was a fairly popular touristy area with lots of restaurants and shops, so I wasn’t worried about going into a dark back ally, but I pulled out my phone to check the ATMs and saw we were walking toward a main bank ATM.

I did a quick check of the card slot, then put my card in. I think I made a user error because I pushed the button but it just spit my card back out.

He took me over to the ATM 10 feet to the right. I put my card in, selected 650 TL, checked the fee (52 TL, $1.46, not bad), hit submit, took the cash out, took my card back, handed the cash to the kid, he said thank you, I said thank you and I walked off feeling like I just did a drug deal 😂

I was pretty sure everything was fine, but there was always that chance that something happened I didn’t see (like those pickpockets that redirect your attention). After all, following a kid through the streets to some random ATM in a city I’ve never been to isn’t exactly a normal occurrence when I pay for a haircut 😅 But, I still had my card and he had his money.

I walked off thinking, that was strange, but alright! 😅

It’s hard to know how much caution is too much caution. I had heard Istanbul is very safe, just to be aware of scammers. But kind of like last week with the random guy that started a conversation with me, I think I’ve come in with TOO much caution than what seems necessary.

Checking In

After what felt like spinning my wheels for most of the week on this topic modeling, I felt like my actions weren’t aligning with what my goals were. I ended up doing a journaling 80/20 session to get everything from my brain into words.

The more time that goes on, the more I’m realizing that users don’t come without actually putting in effort to get them, either through direct reach outs or enough content.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to balance building to solve problems (for myself and for others) with marketing to grow/sustain a business. Marketing and selling has not been something within my comfort zone.

I’m very grateful that last year I decided to start trying to solve my own problem, because at the end of the day I can use my software rather than have it be completely dependent on someone else.

Anyways, I’m seeing the content creation and reach outs side of all of this as friction, but that it’s literally the requirement for growing this. Reconciling those has been producing tension.

I think this is probably a result of wanting things faster and just “growing pains” of moving into something new (changing my content up). I’ll figure it out and find some system that I can work with eventually, but I’m also here to document the reality of what happened in my week, so here we are.

GPT seemed to think this was a sort of “burnout,” but I characterize burnout with a more of a systemic de-motivation.

If you want to read my raw entry:

#journal #80-20 #business 

Time: 1 hr 54 min (1 hr 15 min writing, 40 min updating Q1 goals)

Review last 80/20 analysis

Context (what's changed since last 80/20):
- Hey, feels like it's been a while.
- I'm in Istanbul right now (been here the last week). Just spent the last 3 weeks in Porto. I'm slowly on my way back to SE Asia. Planning on heading to KL next in 1-2 weeks.
- Just spent the last week-ish (Sun-Thurs) busting my balls working on this new topic modeling to improve the niche algorithm of VideoHawk. Felt like too long. Kinda broke everything yesterday too.
- Been feeling some friction because I also need to keep up with personal branding and pick+script+record+edit a video for next week. I also want to start getting into posting shorts and wanted to ambitiously record 3 shorts this week, but haven't gotten to it.
- Then last week I removed all the free user access to my software, moved everyone to founders discount. No one has signed up (yet). But that means any and all users need to sign up for a free trial with their CC and/or pay. I'm down to no active users and it feels like I'm back to square one.
- Also feeling like I'm spending a lot on food, particularly in Porto and here in Istanbul, though housing (hostels) have been good value prices ($16-20/night). I thought last night, why am I here again? I feel like I'm back to square one and I'm a lot further from getting paying users and leads for my software than I optimistically imagined. Feels like I need another grind phase, go somewhere cheap, stay in one place, and just build up the foundation (personal branding).
- Then Jacob put a message in the chat, "reflection day" and asked a question. Got me thinking, I think I need to take a step back and refocus. So here we are.

What's going well?
- First 3 new YouTube videos have done very well, very happy with the results so far (900, 275, 800 views vs a usual 20-60 on my DailyVs). Getting good feedback and energy back from the energy I'm putting in. First three have done well. 4th that just went live is kind of a flop so far, not sure if the algorithm is gonna pick it up, but it also hasn't been 48 hours yet.
- I spent 3 weeks living in Porto. I spent the last week in Istanbul. The Instagram story content has been fire.
- I feel like my Instagram personal branding is on lock right now, it feels good. I've been posting daily pretty much since I got back into it in Budapest. Only thing I want to change/add is posting shorts to start getting organic growth. Right now it's all just "nurturing" type of content, showing off my life for those _already_ following.
- U.S. stock market is still doing well. I'm fortunately in a position where I don't _need_ money from this business YET. I _can_ be the long-term guy just laying bricks.
- Added some useful features to VideoHawk recently: improving video idea generation, viewer insights, and the recommender feature.
- My HRV last night dropped to 39, the first time under 40 in months. The last times I got it under 40 were: Budapest, Granada, and Japan. I'm sensing a trend here 😂 (not the U.S.)
- I've been putting initiate social exchanges with strangers on my weekly plans and I've been getting more little wins lately. Slow to start, but for not being in a place where like Tribal Bali where it could be a lot easier, I'm happy with 1. identifying the change 2. working towards changing 3. getting a collection of little wins to lean back on.
- I have 5 actual testimonials for my software and another like 10 comment reviews. They're okay quality but hey they're real and on my site. I feel like that part is the hardest, getting the early social proof.
- I picked a business last year (CommentCompass and pivoting to VideoHawk) that solves my OWN problem rather than someone else's as an opportunity. This means while I don't have any other users, I'm literally using VideoHawk for myself. So maybe it's "overkill" as a system only to be used myself, but at least it's actively helping me.

80/20:
- I successfully pivoted my YouTube channel from DailyVs and proved that I can make videos intentionally.
- I successfully dropped my van in the U.S. and I'm back abroad. Grateful to be able to explore Porto and Istanbul.
- I _am_ making progress towards my goals.
- I've got a software and early social proof testimonials I can leverage.
- I'm actively using VideoHawk now that I'm intentionally working on building my personal brand and content.


What's not going well?
- No new leads from my YouTube videos yet.
- No founder (free) users have transitioned (yet?).
- I'm back to no users except me.
- YouTube API application, they said we're backed up and have no expected timeline yet.
- Feels like at my current rate it's gonna take me a whole year to build the base for this personal brand and software that could take 3mo if I really focused.
- Feels like I'm working on "bottom of funnel" work (or "after funnel" work), making improvements to the inside of VideoHawk when all my effort should be on top of funnel because no one knows about it??? i.e. improving the retention of 0 users is still 0.
- Eating and working out hasn't been good lately. Porto was decent in terms of health quality, but the downside was it was costing a lot more $35-45 per day and it wasn't enough to be bulking properly. Istanbul here is worse in terms of healthy food options. And similarly not enough to bulk.
- I feel like I'm not putting in the work required to actually market and sell my software and fix the problem of having no users. i.e. 1 video a week and posting on Instagram isn't the solution. I feel like the solution is somewhere in 2+ long form a week plus multiple shorts. I'm just not getting my name and word out enough.
- I'm struggling with reach outs. In fact, I haven't done any. And I think this would be fine if I were supplementing or complementing it with something that achieves the same thing (posting more content), but I'm also not doing that.
- I feel like there's a bit of an opportunity (lost opportunity?) in the micro level and raw authenticity from my DailyVs now that I'm doing these 1 video per week videos. I want to be authentic. I want to share and document what I'm going through to show it's not all roses, but I haven't figured out how I can do this yet.


80/20:
- Not having any founders transition with my coupon AND being back at no users is de-motivating.
- I don't objectively see how doing what I'm currently doing will get me the results that I want.


Ideas on my mind:
- Shorts: Getting into posting shorts consistently on IG (and YT shorts), for growing Instagram organically and getting my foot in the door to be able to send Instagram DMs to creators as another volume lead source.
- Marketing actions: Volume, volume, volume. 1 YouTube video a week just feels like not enough. And posting on my Instagram story isn't the right action for _growth_ or fetching leads.
- Features requiring time building: I want more help with _topics_, what topics should I talk about, forget titles. And I have a path to get there, it's just I need to put in probably a couple weeks worth of work to get there: 1. get the niche algorithm actually accurate finding creators in your niche 2. change comment compass to run on your whole niche not just watchlist 3. topic analysis and grouping of comments now that it's run on your whole niche to surface the top/hot topics and questions.
- Pivoting business model? Because the API quota application is taking so long and I'm back to no users and struggling to get users (though again, I haven't put it out in front of that many people yet), I'm starting to wonder if pivoting to more of a specialized service is the right way to navigate this situation. Like going straight to $1000 for 12mo, but I, Peter, also help you as a service in addition to the software. This moves _away_ from my goal of detaching my income/business from my time, but maybe it will give me a better success rate given this situation. And it aligns more with what Tom said about the high ticket synthesizer route, which if I understand correctly is: provide an unscalable service to a few people, scale up that service to more people, then the last step is turn that service into a SaaS. He pointed out that I'm _starting_ with SaaS, which is the hardest. It seems like the upside here would be high volume low ticket, but that's not really the type of customer I'm trying to attract either and I want to try to NOT compete with the other products on the market (because I feel like it'll get me into a race to the bottom/cheaper and I'll just lose and fizzle out my business).
	- If I were to do this, what would be the pre-requisites? Probably focus heavily on content and building the personal brand, because fundamentally if I can't show success and results myself, then how would anyone expect to trust I could do it for them.
- Try out more structured time blocking? So that I "can't" spend 5 days on VideoHawk and content gets sidelined.
- Go to KL next week and instead of stay there just long enough to do my checklist, actually stay for like 6 weeks, go to Komune Living, or find a co-working space, get into a routine.

If I project to January 2026, what advice would he give me right now (and for Q1):
- Build a strong authentic base of an audience ("1,000 fans"), because I can leverage that now even if VideoHawk as a business fails, the business model fails, or takes longer to actually get paying users.
- Pushing more than you were in 2023 and 2024 will help, but remember that this is a marathon not a sprint, and a sustainable 80% will help me more than pushing at 95%, being super negative and critical of yourself, and burning out before you even get to January 2026. I have _cash_ to make it to 2026 on current projections. After that runs out, given a more or less stable market, I have a lot more invested that I _could_ use to continue even longer, so 2026 isn't the end of the road, you're just putting that pressure on yourself.
- You're very comfortable with building and clearly very uncomfortable with selling and marketing. This is okay but it presents an opportunity that if you can learn the basics of solid selling and marketing for me, I won't need to worry about money even if VideoHawk stays at zero.

Any thoughts?
- Given this frame and the current context, I'm actually not sure if dropping VideoHawk feature work to zero is the best play and going hard to marketing. After all, _I_ am using it. I also am back to feeling like it's not a killer product that it was a month ago when I had some people actually using it and coming back weekly. The idea being, improving VideoHawk helps me make better and more content. But also, the flip side, making better and more content gives me more learnings to apply to VideoHawk and more evidence that people would use to believe in VideoHawk. I dunno, kind of a chicken and egg? 

Changes to make? What should I focus on? Should I change my Q1 12-week year goals ([[202501010000 Q1 Quarterly Note]]) at all?
- I dunno I'm almost tempted to say the Q1 goals are pretty accurate. It's just that the features/improvements to VideoHawk will _take_ more time than I anticipated. Maybe it's just this week that I need to get through and get back on the track to get into a groove of planning+scripting+recording content. Maybe flying to SE Asia will also help to slow things down and focus in. Maybe it's the instability of new cities (Porto and Istanbul) that's causing the unsettling confidence.
- Get to SE Asia and slow down.
- I tweaked my Q1 goals. Changed the outcome based goals to action based goals. Then added more outreach-based marketing goals. 
	- changed reach out to 500 creators to things I can control: collect list of 500 leads, reach out to 200, pitch to 10, schedule 5 interviews.
	- I also removed sign up 10 paying users and added create 2 pitch-able lead magnets.
	- And upped the shorts from 5 to 7, one per week for 6wk plus one extra.
- I'm starting to think, Q1 should be the foundation period. Take my own advice of not rush things, just build the content systems and foundations, get in the groove. Q2 we scale. Stuff like: I want to post more than 14 videos, but let's make that the goal.

Food From The Week

• Cafe da Giovanni – best croissant I’ve ever had (they warm it up, flaky, buttery, crispy on the outside doughy in the middle)
• Chuck Burger – ribeye steak
• Federal Galata – menemen, chicken bowl, omlette
• Giardin Istanbul – top 3 best pizzas I’ve had in my life (wood fire oven, perfect crispy doughy bread, great flavor)
• Napoli Gusto TomTom – great pasta
• Coffee Baroque – not quite the worst, but more like the most let down I’ve ever been for a croissant (felt like a day-old croissant, just hard; you pay for the location, right under the Galata tower)
• Karakoy Gulluoglu – great Turkish desserts
• HR Italy – best pasta I’ve had in my life AND best value ($9 for that plate) (never seen this where they put the pasta in cheese wheels; the creaminess and cheesiness is insane, out of this world good)
• Prados Pasta – another cheese wheel place, also insanely good
• Generic fish wrap stand on the corner of a street – fish wrap (listen, there was a constant line of people here, so I got in line like a sheep 😂; it was actually quite good though)
  • Speaking of marketing, the marketing on the guy at the fish wrap place was insane, I should’ve hired him. He would walk around with the credit card terminal in his hand “fish wrap! fish wrap! Master chef! My brother, my brother, famous fish wrap, master chef, best fish wrap, please” and would point to the line of people. Then he’d get you to pay while you’re standing in line instead of waiting until you got it. Legend.

What’s Next?

⛴️?

Location