jack gamrot

AskMaisie is live Less than a week ago it was an idea, now it's live and I'm taking on a small number of weddings: askmaisie.com

@claudeai  Me pretending my evening isn’t ruined by Fable 5 right now

Introducing Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use. Its capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available.

gotcha! we’re talking about distribution & marketing Depends on the product - if you’ve got an audience, use it. If you don’t, go find the people with the problem and put the idea in front of them. If the proposition is strong enough, some will sign up. Loads of ways to try paid & free

@jgamrot @alex_lrz_nmv I dont mean what do you build, landing page is easy enough. How do you get the users to the landing page and to sign up to the waitlist?

Founders, would you rather - launch with 0 users and a finished product - launch with 500 users waiting and an unfinished product

@kbanta11 @alex_lrz_nmv Probably a landing page, mockups, or a demo. I’ve not exactly got a strategy for this yet. In concept you’re not trying to prove you’ve built it. You’re trying to find out if anyone cares. Easier said than done - I know

@jgamrot @alex_lrz_nmv Whays your strategy for getting people onto the waitlist? To care enough without something to show them?

@alex_lrz_nmv Honestly no, but I think I should. look at what @jurree is doing with Gotcha! Such a brilliant idea, I’m on the waitlist

@jgamrot Yeh exactly I agree with that! Do you build waitlist usually for your products?

Why does every washing tablet smell like jasmine, lavender, or some wild flower? I don’t want to smell like a flower. I want my clothes to smell like a brand new t-shirt straight off the shelf in Abercrombie

It's not sexy to say, but most of AI transformation has nothing to do with AI. There are 10 steps in the sequence of making an internal process or external product AI-native. Only 1 step is AI, and ironically, the other 9 steps are the far harder part. Step 1: Identify the problem - find the manual process worth automating. turn your brain off autopilot & turn on your "suck meter". - funny enough, your company becomes more efficient just by mapping out your processes even if you don't introduce AI. Step 2: Understand the workflow - Map how people actually work today. grab an 8.5x11 piece of paper or @excalidraw and create a flow chart of the workflow from beginning to end. - Least sexy part, but generally where the people driving transformation (FDE, GTM engineer, etc) should spend the majority of their time. - Before you reimagine a process you have to become an expert in that process. Which means you either need to have the business context yourself or absorb it through osmosis (See what @DBredvick did at @vercel) Step 3: Collect the data - Gather sample inputs, documents, edge cases - Example: for my content machine ai workflow, I gathered past slack messages/notion transcripts to test automated ideation & I pulled past X/linkedin posts to build .md files of my content voice Step 4: Build the prototype [The AI Part] - Whether its engineer-led or SME-led the goal is to test your hypothesis that there's a better way of doing things for yourself as customer zero. Don't worry about code cleanliness, don't worry about scalability, just worry about proving there's a there there. Step 5: Test & iterate - Validate with real users and edge cases - Before you take the process from single player (only you using it) to multiplayer (many users), you want to beat it up with as many rounds of work & feedback + edge cases as possible. Turning every process into a self-improving loop before scaling is key. Step 6: Integrate with systems - Point-in-time data is good for testing the workflow, but live data is necessary before going into production. - Example: for my content machine, i'm hooked up to notion/gmail/slack for content ideation & i'm hooked up to X & Linkedin to post content once it's ready to go. Step 7: Roll out & train - Whether the new process lives on a live link, on GitHub or an internal library, next step is hand-holding your peers/users through the onboarding process of your new workflow/product. Step 8: Drive adoption - It's actually pretty simple (just not easy). Introduce a new workflow that saves someone a lot of time and integrates with their already existing behavior so they don't have to deal with re-education. - Embed the workflow in your culture where adoption is tracked, ideas & feedback are celebrated, and new/creative use cases become social currency in your business. Step 9: Empower contribution - Treat your new process like an opensource project. Allow users to become contributors. Whether they are literally pushing code or are simply empowered to add ideas/feedback to a kanban board that gets serviced by engineers, make everyone feel like a builder. Step 10: Measure & capture value - Everyone is ROI obsessed atm. If you're in the experimental phase of AI adoption in your company, fuck ROI. The goal is to empower people to throw a lot of shit at the wall & see what's worth focusing on. You don't need to be scientific during this process. Intuition is more than enough in gauging what's working vs. not working. - If you're in the scale-up phase of AI in your business, and you need to realize hard ROI, you need to reskill employees attached to this process, undershoot your approved hiring roadmap, or measurably increase ACV/conversion rate/sales cycle speed.

@alexanderrX_ I tried this but heavy sessions left me dead the rest of the day. Frying my nervous system at 6/7am. No amount of white monster would get me through the work day.

switched from working out after my 9-5 to before it. massively better. you start work awake, fuelled and ready, then after work there’s no pathetic internal debate about going to the gym. you get your evening back, and feel better than everyone else.

@marclou Love it. We had karaoke at our wedding too. The one thing we were determined about was not starting married life with wedding debt. Waking up the next day married, happy, and not owing anyone anything was a great feeling.

I got married in September 2020. I had $0 in the bank. My parents paid for the wedding, so we booked an affordable venue and invited only close friends and family. We played games, had a simple dinner, and ended the night with karaoke. The wedding cost less than $10,000. It was the best day of my life.

@dherealmark @levelsio Yeah fair point I was probably making a clumsy assumption there. X is just the most visible place I see people trying to solve distribution, but that doesn’t mean it’s where their customers actually are.

Followers are never a measure of revenue. Do you assume everyone's users are on X? This is the #1 mistake people make wherein they focus only on X and leave out every other platform. I was under 100 followers for years but I bank through referrals and emails. None of my friends ever saw me working but my team was working remotely. And I jag manged them in slack. Be a ninja, don't let it be known how you make your wealth

My friend went to an indie hacker meetup this week and said this: "i went to indie hacker meetup so what’s really interesting is that almost everyone is super focused on development. they build these whole spaceships that generate code, review it, make all kinds of reports, analytics, and so on. one guy built an entire factory: he has a list of ideas, and agents generate the landing page, the saas, the analytics, and pull everything into one dashboard. straight-up sci-fi. and they focused optimize all of it like crazy. and you can really see how comfortable that is for them. but the most interesting part is that almost none of them have money or traffic. and nobody knows where to get either one. you often hear something like, yeah, i should probably do on marketing, but first i’ll finish my super system and then i’ll start. or in best i would need to make agent that will post to instaram automatically before, the classic programmer would spend a year writing code, tests, preparing for scale in the basement, and not show anything to anyone. now it’s even worse: the amount of useless aislop nobody needs has grown massively."

@ryantalks1024 Thanks Ryan! Any feedback after taking a look? Still figuring out what parts people like the most?

@jgamrot Love it !

AskMaisie is live Less than a week ago it was an idea, now it's live and I'm taking on a small number of weddings: askmaisie.com

I think building is the natural starting point because it gives you something to share. It’s much easier to post “I built this” than “follow me because one day I might build something interesting.” AI makes that even more tempting. If it helped you build the product, it feels logical that you can also build a little tool to help solve distribution. That’s probably where a lot of the X growth tool graveyard comes from. The catch is distribution is more sensitive to slop. If the product feels AI-built, people might still try it. If your posts, replies or outreach feel AI-built, people bounce immediately. So a lot of people discover the distribution problem twice: first when nobody follows them, then again when nobody uses the product.

@jgamrot @levelsio Distribution being the bottleneck is so obvious once you see it but most builders don't feel it until they have a working product with zero users. The X growth tool graveyard is basically a monument to it. What's your read on why so many smart people still build-first by default?

@HudsonByrd77 I think your example of an ‘auto grader’ is maybe a bit niche. Take it or leave it, but I’d suggest a really clear problem olleey to help with. Suppose it depends on your target audience, but will vibe-coders know what that is? Oh and get the video on somewhere on the site!

@jgamrot Sweet glad you liked! Any feedback?

you asked, you shall receive lol quick demo (end to end) of Olleey helping a coding agent query what already worked before it starts debugging. That's how quick the process is to get started! LMK anything u would wanted added / questions u have

@igorhansachat @levelsio Or it results in all your posts / content sounding like AI 🤖

@jgamrot @levelsio I think it is really bad with getting customers. Best tools just have a good database and convert these your AI requests to some SQL query and give you result from the database. The AI itself is quite mhm... average on solving any distribution problem

@giacaglia @levelsio In what way?

@levelsio Feels like the early days of Youtube though

@FlowHaa Quality. If you’ve got the chance to do it, why not!? 🤘🌴

@jgamrot I was already building before with the plan to make money someday. The full-time traveling came later 😁

This is me & my indie hacker office in the middle of the Australian outback 👀 Location freedom✅ The sunsets out here are so beautiful 🤩 I won't stop trying to also achieve the money and time freedom with my apps! I'm currently at $0 MRR - long journey ahead 😉

@shipwithjay @alexcooldev I’m still waiting on the first sale. Made tiny bits online as a teenager, but nothing that felt like real internet money. Makes the first one feel like it’ll be weirdly exciting, even if it’s just one person paying.

@alexcooldev the part that hit me was products that never worked. shipped a bunch nobody wanted before one stuck. survivorship bias makes 20k look slow when it's actually rare air. how long did yours take to get there?

$20k MRR is a long road. When you’re scrolling X, it feels like everyone is doing $100k, $500k, or even $1M MRR. What you don’t see: The years of failure The products that never worked The sleepless nights The money they lost before making money If you’ve reached $20k MRR, be proud of it. That’s already life-changing for most people on the planet. Don’t compare your Chapter 3 to someone else’s Chapter 20. Everyone has a different starting point, different advantages, and different goals. Success isn’t a race. Enjoy the journey. Build at your own pace. And remember: the version of you from 3 years ago would be amazed by where you are today.