After a long hiatus (nearly nine years), I’m back to blogging—inspired by the vibe-coding IDE Windsurf. If you don’t know what vibe coding is, here’s a definition from ChatGPT 4.1: “Coding in a flow state, guided by intuition and creativity, often with the help of AI tools.” And if you’re not familiar with IDEs: “An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a software application that provides tools for writing, editing, testing, and debugging code—all in one place.” ...
Twitter is for Robots
Like most people, I’ve never been a big Twitter user. The firehose-style feed and tweet storms were always too overwhelming. But around 6 months ago, I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see if I could grow my personal twitter following without actually using twitter. I also wanted to do it for free and didn’t want to resort to automated following tools or retweeters. Here’s what I did: Opened up IFTTT and browsed various connectors. Connected the RSS feed from a bunch of blogs I like, such as blog.samaltman.com, to a free buffer account. Set up a few connectors to add people to lists if they tweeted hashtags I was interested in, such as #growth, #golang, and #datascience. And voila! My twitter feed came alive with content. ...
Lil Dicky - Professional Growth Hacker?
If you don’t know Lil Dicky, he’s the biggest white rapper since Eminem. Only he’s nothing like Eminem. Lil Dicky isn’t a hard ass from the trailers. He’s a well educated Jewish American who used to be a copywriter. He hacked the system with his copywriting, game spitting, and internet promoting skills to turn himself into a sensation and potentially disrupt a genre. He even made a music video complete with mansions and McLarens. ...
4 Simple Ideas That Led to Amazon’s Explosive Growth
2015 was a good year for Jeff Bezos. His personal net worth is now nearly $60 Billion, making him the 15th richest person on the planet. Going into the holiday season, AMZN reached a market cap of over $300 billon. But it wasn’t always this way. 10 years ago Amazon was just a $20b online retailer with low margins and a relatively normal growth curve. 20 years ago, it was just Jeff Bezos and a few hackers crowded into his Seattle home. ...
Steve Jobs Was Wrong - Stop Trusting Your Intuition
Steve Jobs was obviously a great man who left an amazing mark on the world. His ideas on focus, simplicity, and design have had an enormously positive influence on technology and the lives of countless people, including me. That said, I don’t agree with the idea of trusting your intuition as a guiding principle in life or in business. It may have worked for Steve, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that on average, our intuition is often wrong. ...
3 Growth Tools to Supercharge Your Experiments
The key to growth is experimentation. You need the ability to rapidly generate, test, and act on different hypotheses. Then double down on the ideas that work, scratch the ones that don’t, and keep testing… That’s why these are my top 3 growth tools. They allow you to implement tests and measure results much faster than ever before. 1. Segment Segment.com is a brilliant tool that adds a small snippet of code to your site’s head tag. This snippet effectively acts as a collector for site data. ...
Manage Your Users Like You Manage Your Money $$$
Compounding It’s the first concept they teach you in introductory finance. Compound interest is a simple, yet powerful idea at the heart of all modern financial markets. Albert Einstein once called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world, and man’s greatest invention. Smart money managers know that they can leverage compound interest to grow their investments and beat inflation. The longer the hold period, the higher the interest rate, and the more frequent the compounding, the higher the returns will be. Exponentially higher. ...