”Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.” Alice Walker
Previously at the Volcano Base I was doing some research into how small businesses in the UK are using AI (or not). Since then, well, this is how AI summarised the last week:
“Overall, the period was marked by significant achievements in deal-making and networking, despite some challenges with campaign management and occasional productivity dips.”
AI is quite the raconteur.
Mission Briefing
Surprising kindness
The surprising word of the week was “kindness”. People have been replying to this newsletter. Mostly just to have a chat, or sometimes to make introductions. It’s been really nice. Off the back of that, I met a few new people and we got on really well. It felt like we were on the same wavelength and would have had a great chat in a pub.
When I can afford the train fare into London, I’ll be setting that up.
For now, I’m very happy to have a set of geeky pen-pals.
Still alive then?
Yeah, just about. Having secured a small amount of business, I’m more positive about where things might go, but I need to put the effort in.
Pretty much everyone has warned me off helping small businesses, though. 100% of the people I spoke to said variations of “SMEs are too much effort” or “they can’t afford you” or “you’re better off targeting enterprises”.
I’m not convinced, but we’ll see. So far, my attempts at marketing directly to SMEs have been crap. As in zero results. Every opportunity I’ve had, has been referred by someone I already know. That’s great, but not sustainable.
New products
I should briefly mention some new “packaged systems” I’ve created.
- lead generation system (a fair bit of interest in this one)
- proposal creation system (only anecdotal evidence of demand for this, but I’m using it myself anyway, so why not bundle it up for anyone else that wants one)
Agents in Tana
Tana came out of stealth on Monday. I’ve been using it as my core workspace for over a year now. So I’m glad more people get to use it.
In my quest to stop working so hard, I discovered Tana has AI agent-like capabilities built directly into the knowledge graph. It’s very cool. Here’s a video of me using something similar to a custom GPT connected to my own data.
Classified Intel
Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.
Their AI app directory. Want to convert an image to video, create 3D models from a jpg, synthesise speech, etc? Search the directory, have a play with it, then add it to your project.
The Replit agent is now available on their mobile platform. So, if you have an idea for an app, open Replit on your phone, tell it what you want to make, and it’ll make it for you. Boom.
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