✴️ How I'm Making... #21

Hey, it’s Ben.

I hope you’re having a nice weekend 🙂 I worked out and had a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s yesterday (I love their Netflix & Chill’d flavour).

✏️ Summary

• Don’t listen to people you don’t want to be like

• Pick and choose the best parts of others to copy

• Going against the grain is not always bad

This Friday, I had a call with a developer who reached out about my project. He messaged me about joining as a co-founder/partner. We had a 30 minute conversation where I called my own app derivative garbage, and hung up on him.

What happened?

First, context. This man is a developer who is interested in AI, but not in writing. When he approached me, he saw the app in it's current published state (which is a bare-bones placeholder).

His natural response was to ask the (sensible) questions. Who is the target audience? What is the user feedback like? How big is the market?

The problem is, we started from the wrong base. He does not write. He does not believe in the value of writing. I tried to explain that what he saw is derivative garbage. I tried to explain that the future of the app is a fundamentally different approach to writing.

But he could not see the future of the product, because he does not believe in the premise.

If I had a spare hour to chat, I would have shown him a podcast with OpenAI's founder, Sam Altman. The first 5 seconds of the podcast is shown below.

“Someone is going to build a great tool to write in a new way”.

I am trying to be that guy.

📈 The Lesson

I am a huge fan of getting advice and feedback. But there is a trick to getting good feedback. The most critical one is this:

Don’t listen to people you don’t want to be like.

More specifically, don’t listen to people who aren’t where you want to go in that specific domain. People can be awful chefs but great leaders. They can be bad at business but in great shape. The brilliant thing is, I can pick and choose the best parts of other people and incorporate them into myself! Like a big Build-a-Ben.

Going against the grain is not always bad. Trying to be exceptional by definition means you will be an exception. If anything, try to think of criticism as a leading indicator that you’re doing something right.

(Oh, I didn’t actually hang up, my internet dropped 30 minutes in so we called it there)

🔗 Progress Update

We are making progress! The first iteration of algorithmic highlighting has been added.

The sentence highlights calculate a live readability score based on the entire sentence that is being written. It’s not a lazy word count or a character count.

The word highlights are used to point out passive or unnecessary adverbs and phrases.

A great way to debug is to use WordRobin to write this newsletter. Problems discovered while writing this newsletter on my platform:

• Weird behavior with bullet points

• Out of bounds error when starting a new document

• My font right now is a bit difficult to read

• Algorithm for updating qualifiers only runs when sentence is completed

• Formatting issue with the highlights (padding causes issues)

What’s Next?

I am deep in the weeds right now, building this feature set which will be crucial for everything else to go on top of.

That’s all for now!

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Ben | X