This Week:
- The improvements I’ve been making to my software and a new potential opportunity.
- The changing of the aspens at my first camp spot.
- The next insane camp spot that I found.
October 2024
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 10/1 | 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 | 31 | 11/1 | 2 |
Where In The World Was I?
- 🌲 The mountains of Colorado, U.S.
Metrics From The Week
Starting to get the sleep routine back under way like I talked about last week. And it seems like either my body is acclimating to the elevation or my whoop is acclimating to the new normal 😂
Business Progress Update
Title Formats
Maybe as expected, the “couple small tweaks” I had to make to the formats from last week ended up taking longer than expected. It turns out trying to generate title formats for 75,000 videos isn’t as easy as I thought it’d be 😅
This week I spent a good portion of my time running the algorithm to generate the title formats for the rest of the videos and trying to optimize that code. However, I did finish!
Now that I have title formats for all the videos I’ve analyzed, the next thing was to merge format that are similar and improve the relevance of the results for the formats and video explorer pages. This ALSO took more effort than I imagined. Solving this is a bit of a complex problem. I ended up deciding to go for basic solutions for both and come back to this later. For now, the default videos shown on the video explorer page are ‘good’ and the default formats shown on the formats explorer page are ‘eh.’
I decided that there were bigger problems and features to address (see new opportunity section below) and that I would come back to these later.
AI-Generated Thumbnails
This was an exciting one to tackle because I thought it might be possible but I had no idea how to solve it.
I started with playing around with ChatGPT’s Dalle3 image generation and was really not that happy with the results. I found Stable Diffusion and dove in messing around with that. It took me a little while to get the feel for generating images with Stable Diffusion as the prompting strategies are VERY different from a chatbot-like AI like ChatGPT.
The concept and problem to solve here is to take a video’s thumbnail that outperformed and twist it to a new thumbnail based on the creator’s style and the new video title. This is not trivial because there are basically infinite ways to try to do this. How much do you copy the thumbnail of the video being used as inspiration? How much do you integrate the style and keywords of the creator it’s being generated for? etc.
And layer on top of that… Stable Diffusion is NOT good at generating coherent text. Sometimes it just comes out as a total mess of characters.
But, I got something fully linked up and generating.
The results are a solid “eh” but at least they’re better than nothing.
There’s so much more to improve here (and more ideas I wanted to implement) but I decided that I’d rather get something basic working, deployed, and get feedback, than try to optimize this further. The intention right now is more to get SOME kind of thumbnail inspiration rather than a “here just copy+paste this thumbnail we generated for you.” I still don’t even really know HOW exactly I want to solve this.
I also decided to implement this in a way that users have to intentionally click on a video idea’s generate thumbnail button to get a thumbnail rather than auto-generating them for all video ideas. It costs about 3.5 cents per image right now with the API I’m using and didn’t want it to get out of control. On a similar point, I added a daily max limit so that I don’t get a huge bill out of the blue 😂 I would say the longer term goal is to get all new ideas generating with thumbnails out of the box though.
Gimme some time to get the image generation better and some money flowing in then we’ll talk 🙂
The Other Stuff
A bunch of little UI tweaks and refactoring the channel explorer page to use server-side pagination like the others now.
Opportunity is knockin’
Sooooooooooo I was chatting with one of my users this week. He said he’s building a course for growing on YouTube and suggested partnering up to use my software as an upsell inside the course…
(This guy’s got 20,000+ subscribers on YouTube and is making $40k+ per month)
I said “uhhh hell yeah I’m interested!”
And then immediately thought “uhhhhhhh wait I can’t handle more than a handful of users and STILL haven’t been approved for more quota… so how’s this gonna work?” 😂
When I asked him what kind of timeframe he’s looking at for launching, he said about 2 weeks. I was thinking maybe 1-2 months 😅
What’s kind of funny about this situation is that as a user he doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, the fact that I’m severely limited by quota or how things look in the backend, but to him everything just magically works 🪄✨
So if this ends up going through, I have about 10 days to figure out how to get my software in a state that can handle I dunno, hundreds of users? I don’t want to get too ahead of myself, but this could be a MASSIVE opportunity for me.
If it doesn’t end up going through, I will have just made a whole bunch of scaling improvements that I would’ve already needed to for launching. It feels like a win/win and just a big motivator with a deadline.
Let’s just say I’m kicking it into high gear right now.
Fall In The Mountains 🍂
Cool morning walks, afternoon runs around the lake, and too many beautiful views to count.
It looks like I somehow ended up timing my arrival to this spot perfectly because by the time I had left maybe 70% of the aspens had lost their leaves. What a special week.
Errands Day
I had my first errands day in this new slowed-down lifestyle (What it’s like to manage life on the road)
- Dumped greywater
- Dumped trash
- Filled water
- Got groceries
- Worked out (and showered)
- Filled gas
- Laundry
Easy peasy, onto the next week!
I found my next camp spot a little further south from the last one. I was CERTAIN that it would all be downhill from this last spot. I mean how could you possibly get any better than aspens at peak color and those incredible views.
That is… until I found this…
Mountain Views
HOW IS THIS FREE I DON’T UNDERSTAND
Back At It
Morning walks, coffee and work, lunch outside gazing at the vastness of the mountains, afternoon walk, make a video, more work (no coffee 😢), run/workout, dinner also outside, hanging out watching YouTube, Duolingo, reading, off to bed.
Then I get to do it alllll again the next day.
I wouldn’t have it any other way right now.
Thoughts From The Week
What my daily routine is like: What I tried changing in my daily routine yesterday
The privilege and beauty of van life and disconnecting (momentarily) from society: Snapping out of the daily chaos
Struggling to get Stable Diffusion to work: Feeling disappointed that it doesn’t go perfectly on the first try
I started a new book this week, The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington, but MAN has it been an uphill battle to read in the evenings after dinner. The combination of being mentally exhausted from working, physically exhausted from working out, and just carb-crash’d from dinner is rough. I’m still trying to figure out how to integrate reading into my day better.
Food From The Week
What’s Next?
Maybe a scaled software that can actually handle hundreds of users at the same time? 👀 I don’t actually know how I’m going to do this yet but I’m sure I’ll figure something out 😅
Can I pull it off in just 7 days? Find out next week…