What I learned this week #3

Fintech startups are not small, easy, or simple

Reflections

I meant to send this out a few weeks ago but got side-tracked/quested into many other things before leaving for vacation. So here we go.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve started to push the limits of doing “a startup a week”. I always had confidence in my abilities, but I am also being realistic and adapting my strategy. I repeatedly hit some roadblocks that made me reconsider the approach. Right now, I’m feeling great. I love the new approach and I’m feeling very optimistic. Perhaps certain, in a way, that things will all work out.

Right before leaving on my ski trip in Revelstoke, I had a brief moment of panic. For the first time since I started, I was scared that somehow I was just wasting my time. I was worried that nothing would work and that I’d have to go back to work, licking my wounds. In retrospect, this was normal and expected. With any major life change, there’s always a honeymoon period and I was in it. I meditated on this and ultimately realized:

1. I chose this path because I wanted it

2. I continue to choose this path because I still want it

3. I choose not to define the outcome of this journey as something I need and that I’m open to whatever happens, though I want to be successful

Let me explain. I realized a lot of the negative feelings were coming from a place of feeling stuck. I was being hard on myself and I was framing it as something that I needed to do but had no control over. It’s true that I fundamentally have no control over the outcome, but I can move every day with the mindset that “it’ll all work out'“ and that I’m open to whatever happens. By adopting this subtle shift, I was able to overcome these fears and worries and get back on track.

Now, I feel a subtle sense of “it’s going to work out just fine” and I chose to increase the probability of things working because I want them to.

Again, this comes back to reframing life from should to want. Should’s have other people’s expectations built into it: I should do x — why? Says who? Want’s have your expectations built into it: I want to do y — great, now you’re choosing.

I also had some hiccups with video editors. I initially worked with Jacob (a guy I met at the All In Holiday Event in SF in December, great guy) and he helped produce the first weekly video. Since I was trying out different editors, I worked with someone else who I won’t name for reasons you’ll soon find out, but let’s call him VideoEditorGuy2. VideoEditorGuy2 is awesome and was really helpful in leveling up my content strategy and getting me to think about making content that is engaging and relevant to the audience. He helped me professionalize and systematize what I was doing. As we were working on the second week’s video, he messaged me on a Friday afternoon saying he was about to share the draft for review, then suddenly disappears… VideoEditorGuy2 was not to be found anywhere from that point on. I attempted to contact him for 1.5 weeks before I left for Revelstoke and was unable to get a hold of him. That’s odd, I thought. Anyway, when I got back I tried once more to contact him, to no avail. I also had a mutual friend try and contact him and same same. I don’t get the sense that he rugged me, since we spent a good amount of time working on strategy for the channel that was unpaid. The whole situation is very odd, and I’ve concluded that something happened to him. God forbid. I hope he’s OK, wherever he is. It’s just very odd that someone would drop out of existence like that. Hope you’re ok VideoEditorGuy2.

My last reflection is on the whole concept of “a startup per week”. Initially, I came up with the concept without much thought. I have about 100 ideas in a Notion database and I keep adding 1-2 per week. Since I have around 2 years or runway, I figured I’d have time to finish them all if I stuck to my schedule. I also reasoned that 1 week is a good constraint to focus on validating ideas instead of building. I have found over the past several weeks that this concept is flawed and needs to be tweaked. Here’s the issues I’ve found:

1. Very hard to fit 1 idea per week from concept to launch, even just to validate

2. Need a larger audience for this to work

3. Projects that run over tend to stack up and eventually I end up multitasking several different projects.

For this reason, I’ve decided to move away from the 1 startup a week concept and move towards more of a daily vibe coding update. Instead of producing a weekly video, I will just work 1 day at a time and set a daily intention of completing something relating to a current project. This gives me a bit more flexibility to structure content that is engaging, relevant, timely, and also gives me the flexibility to switch between projects as needed. All the while I engage more with the audience. It will take some time to adjust my content production schedule around this, but it’s worth it. It also saves me time recording, since I am no longer using and editor and am doing much shorter-form videos (up to 5 mins).

Weekly recap

This week is partially underway and somewhat of a carry over of several weeks, so I’m giving a partial update.

Last week, I was away in Revelstoke. We had fantastic conditions and did 3 solid days of skiing. I got a ton of photos and even test drove a cybertruck. I put out an X post about this and have a video coming out soon.

I started off getting some work done on 680 Club and making videos. I was able to release the updated version of 680 Club B2B version to the enterprise customer on Monday.

Today I spent the day working on Printboard, which I’ll tell you about in the Things To Come section of this newsletter.

680 Club

I have another enterprise deal in the works with a mortgage brokerage. The scope of the deal is that they want a dedicated instance of 680 Club that is branded to their unique standards. They then plan to roll this out to all their customers.

On the B2C side, I finished the redesign which you can check out here. I gave it a fundamentally new look, so let me know what you think. Note that it’s not fully live yet so you can still sign up but the service is not active until I finish a few things. I am using a different backend and need to finish working on the encryption. I found 2 scalable payments providers for Canada and USA. Next step after finishing the build it to work on the USA legal entity and rollout. For now, the USA is available on a waitlist basis only.

After that, my plan is to negotiate better pricing with the payments providers so I can get competitive margins that I can use to invest into the Ads strategy. I also plan to invest heavily into the affiliate program, where we’ll partner with personal finance influencers and people in the financial services industry to roll this out to their audience/clients.

Printboard

Printboard is a print-on-demand vision board service that is powered by AI, it lets users create vision boards from scratch just by talking to it. Imagine if ChatGPT had a baby with a vision board creator, you’d get printboard.

I have a video coming out on my story around printboard, but I will summarize as follows:

• Thought vision boards were bullshit, I was dismissive of them because I kept seeing “manifesting” everywhere

• I came across some content from Chase Hughes that explained the psychology of vision boards, so i changed my mind and decided to try it out

• I created a vision board and the stuff I put on there started happening

• While creating my vision board, I kept hitting roadblocks and asked myself, why doesnt someone just create a simple way to do this?

I put some thought into the company and product vision, which you can read below:

Company vision

We are not a software company, we are a dreams company. Dream bigger. Turn any idea into a reality. We fundamentally believe in the power of human ingenuity, creativity, and passion. We exist to make dreams a reality.

To make incredible achievements ordinary.

I believe in a future where:

• vision boards are in every home

• vision boards replace new years resolutions

• vision boards are considered cutting-edge science in the field of personal development

Product vision

Turn any idea into a reality

I believe in a future where:

• Couples use printboard to get married and build awesome families

• Founders use printboard to raise money, sell their vision to employees and shareholders, and build awesome products

• Coaches and clients use printboard to achieve personal excellence

Some aspirational milestones to come from our users:

1. A couple gets married or has a baby from a printboard vision board

2. A founder raises over $1mm from a printboard vision board

3. A founder IPOs their company from a printboard vision board

4. A client/coach lose 40 lbs from a printboard vision board

This is so exciting to me. It’s exciting that I can positively impact someone’s life.

Anyways, I plan to finish the V1 this week and get 3 paying customers. Keep you posted

What I’m reading and listening to

1. Jensen Huang Biography on Founders Podcast. Quick thoughts:

   1. Super insightful

   2. Jensen Huang is the best personification of hard work and urgency of any entrepreneur

2. Howard Lutnick on All In Podcast. Quick thoughts:

   1. Incredible storyteller

   2. Incredible insights into the backstory of the trump campaign and EO strategy

   3. Makes me incredibly bullish on US Stocks

3. Scott Bessent on All In Podcast. Quick thoughts:

   1. Bessent is a very clear thinker and has a very detailed plan for the economy, something that we have not seen in a long time

4. Doug Macgregor on Tucker Carlson. Quick thoughts:

   1. Didn’t know who Doug was, so i was interested in learning more about him

   2. I think he has a lot of wisdom and a perspective that is lacking in the world

   3. Interesting to see his perspective, he has an “adversarial"/military” mindset

5. Lyn Alden on Macrovoices. Quick thoughts:

   1. As always, Lyn smashes it out of the park. She is my favourite macro researcher because she brings a unique perspective combining engineering and finance

   2. Very bullish on Gold and Uranium

6. Some cool X posts I found:

   1. https://x.com/charlieimperium/status/1904576729122836659?s=12

   2. https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1901879970995286398?s=12

   3. https://x.com/0xperp/status/1901688714167746573?s=12

   4. https://x.com/levelsio/status/1901309317820600613?s=12

Things to come next week

1. Finish and launch the B2C version of 680 Club in Canada

2. Get the USA docs in place for B2C version of 680 Club, prep for USA release

3. Finish printboard v1 and get 3 users, start producing regular content for instagram with the help of my loving girlfriend (love you baby)

See ya later!

Also, don’t forget to get in contact with me if you want to catch up or give me ideas/feedback