School's Done. Now What?

📲 The Cold Open

Lessons from the week.

With finals wrapping up, my first year of college is officially behind me. But, the end of school does not mean the end of building. I want to use some of my extra free time this summer as a spring board to start really building something special. Here’s how I’m gonna do it.

School’s Done, You’re Not.

• Apply What You’ve Learned: School sometimes feels a little pointless, I mean will I really have to use chemistry in my CS career? But, I bet you’ve learned a lot more than you think over the last year. Simply navigating college life teaches you a lot. Identify pain points or areas of interest you encountered over the year and build tools that solve those issues.

• Find Joy In Improvement: In summers past, I’d stay up till 3am every night playing Minecraft with my buddies. I don’t regret those nights one bit, but this summer, I want to find joy in other places as well. Working towards my goals might not be as fun as playing video games, but its much more rewarding. I can build something that exists outside of a game, that solves real issues for real people.

Stay Structured.

• Set Goals: The structure of the school year makes setting and evaluating goals a breeze. But, in the summer, that responsibility falls to us. So take the time to set achievable, but lofty goals for the next 3 months. Create actionable items to complete every week, and on Sunday, review what you’ve done.

• Keep a Schedule: Time is by far your most valuable asset in the summer, so treat it with the care it deserves. I start by writing down each week’s tasks in a notes app, then block out time for each one of them accordingly on Sunday. It eliminates any uncertainty in what I’m trying to do, and makes getting meaningful work done much easier.

🗞️ Let’s Get After It, Together.

Holding yourself accountable is hard, let’s do it together.

I’ve done a lot of talking this past month. I’ve told you why you should start building and how to approach it with the right mindset. But, at the end of the day, I haven’t done much more than you.

It’s time to put my money where my mouth is.

I mentioned the importance of goal setting earlier, so here are my personal goals for the summer.

1 - Make $500 Dollars From Building.

Working on personal projects is an incredible way to gain experience, but I’m not just here to increase my technical prowess. I want a tangible way to measure my growth in both technical and interpersonal skills. Forcing myself to sell my work encourages me to solve real problems for real people.

It’s really hard to sell a shitty product, and it’s equally hard to sell a great product if you can’t find or convince clients to buy it. I cold called 15 companies earlier this year trying to sell websites, and got no deals. This goal isn’t just about the money, it’s about building the skills required to succeed in the startup space.

2 - Get Launch Letter to 100 Subs.

I’ve absolutely loved writing the first month of Launch Letter. It’s an incredible way to hold myself accountable, while also trying to help you guys learn from my mistakes. I want to get this message out to as many people as I can, and really start growing this thing.

This means investing more time into content creation, and being laser-focused on providing high value content for my readers. What this looks like isn’t entirely clear (X, TikTok, LinkedIn) but that’s something I’ll have to figure out going forward.

Hopefully, these goals will go hand in hand, and play off one another to drive my growth as an individual. I’ll keep progress bars of both of these goals in every edition (you can see them below) and have daily updates on my Twitter.

Respond to this email with your goals for the summer, I’d love to hear them.

We can get this thing off the ground, together.

✅ Goal Progress

This week, I’m really ramping up my work to build an AI tool for businesses that assists with client outreach. The goal is to have it understand the context of the specific client and the business to give suggestions for texting clients.

I’ve pivoted from building a full dashboard app to a simpler solution in the form of a chrome extension. I’m hoping this project makes a decent dent in that $500 dollar goal. The hope is to have a working MVP by May 18th, as I’m leaving for study abroad in Spain that day! (More on this in future editions 🇪🇸).

🚗 Fast Four

Four quick bullet points to think about!

• 🧰 Tool: Cursor just announced a free year of pro for students. This is the best AI coding tool on the market. If you’re interested in coding at all, sign up for this.

• 🧠 Mindset: Break large goals into small actionable items as much as possible. You can do big things by working in small increments.

• 🔥 Build Idea: Social media trend analyzer / dashboard for marketers. Companies often try to capitalize on trends to market their products, but usually fall short. Create a dashboard that scrapes and analyzes trends, and selects what ones to focus on based on a companies product.

• 📈 A Mistake From The Last Week: I was not very proactive in packing up my stuff from school to say the least. It took hours to get everything sorted. Lesson learned. Stay on top of your tasks, no matter what it is, and life is way easier.

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