Week #1
Move Over, Mr. Beast? The Next Big YouTuber Has Arrived!
It’s been 1 week since I started the challenge. I want to send out frequent reports to share what I've learned and where I've struggled. This is not a well-thought-out essay; it’s rather a quick diary of what I have been doing
Thank you so much your time.
Debt Free Jobs
I'm making a request: if you know anyone interested in appearing as my guest, please let me know. Here's my podcast teaser for more information and a quick glimpse of what it's about.
In the meantime, if you have any feedback on what I've done so far, please let me know. I really appreciate it.
First Episode Out: Yay 🎉
I managed to publish the first episode of Debt Free Jobs. I interviewed James; he shared his career story of rapid career success, the importance of empathy and friendship, and, of course, his setbacks. As a recruiter, he also shared some tips for folks who didn't take the orthodox career paths on how to present themselves in their interviews and resumes. If you haven't watched or listened to the episode, you can access it on YouTube (see below) or on Spotify.
Even better, if you know a high school student or anyone who might be interested in this topic, please share this podcast with them. And don't forget to 'like and subscribe and hit the notification bell' 😁 (What? I'm a YouTuber now).
Current Challenges
This is certainly something that I'm not qualified for, at least for now. I am enjoying the ride.
Here are the challenges I'm facing. If you have any tips to share or can even perhaps help me with a few of them, it would be a tremendous help.
Securing Guests
The biggest challenge right now is finding guests. Even though I've reached out to several people, I still haven't been able to schedule this week's interview.
I'm actively contacting people on LinkedIn, Facebook, and over the phone.
Perhaps the most effective way to be taken seriously has been showing up in person. I'm not sure if there's another way to find guests with a higher impact-to-effort ratio, but I do find myself being taken more seriously when I show up.
Airing the first episode has helped with credibility. For the same reason, I'm currently working on a Gatsby website for the podcast: https://debtfreejobs.com.
At any rate, I currently have more than 9 leads, but I still don't have anything scheduled for this week. This is stressing me out.
So, I'm making a request: if you know anyone interested in appearing as my guest, please let me know. Here's my podcast teaser for more information and a quick glimpse of what it's about.
Nevertheless, I can't wait to have some of my guests on. They have exceptionally unique stories to tell.
Improvements
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback on my first episode. I am currently working on improving my setup, especially lighting and sound. I'm also picking up a thing or two about video editing.
I've also noticed that my speech in the videos isn't very coherent, and my tone doesn't come across as natural. I'm working on that as well, but it might take a while, so please bear with me.
In the meantime, if you have any feedback on what I've done so far, please let me know. I really appreciate it.
IngreCheck: Ingredients Lookup Product
TL;DR: this fell apart. I’m replacing it with another project (see below) for Q1.
As I described in my earlier post on LinkedIn, one of the projects I defined for myself was to create a browser add-on to analyze the ingredients of health and cosmetic products and cross-reference them on PubChem and other public domain scientific databases.
I wanted to compete with EWG, Yuka, and Clearya. As a balding man, I had already tried EWG and Clearya. My approach was to update the database more frequently (e.g., Clearya is mostly out of date) and make it more usable compared to EWG.
I created a Chrome add-on and was working on training a generative text AI model on the databases. This also required doing more research on the nature of the problem.
After finding a bunch of Reddit posts and the awesome channel of Dr. Suarez, I realized that if I went ahead with this project, I would likely be making money off fear-mongering. Probably most of my users wouldn't realize it, but that's not what I want to do; I want to provide actual value first, then make money.
Anyway, here is one of the key pieces of content that changed my mind. I highly recommend watching:
“Why now?”
This failed experiment made me realize the importance of the question "why now?" – a query commonly posed by startup investors. If I had made a better effort to answer this question, I could have saved myself a few valuable days.
I still haven't formed an educated opinion on this topic, but I have already drafted some essays to share.
Side Ideas
IngreCheck wasn't a total failure after all. One of the databases I was working with was the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (www.cir-safety.org). Their efforts to avoid getting web-scraped gave me another startup idea. After consulting with Mahyar, an old friend and teacher of mine, I think it could be viable.
I'll keep you posted if it proves to be viable. But it will be something for the second quarter of the challenge.
Conclusion
That's it. This marks the end of week 1. So far, the only outcome is one episode of Debt Free Jobs. I’m confident that I will have more to present soon.