Hi!

This is what I've been up to lately...

🐣 How I used AI to pick the perfect egg

It all started when I decided I wanted to own a giant decorated egg.

Last month there were over 100 eggs being auctioned off for charity, each painted by a different artist, after being displayed across London (and somehow, miraculously, not vandalised).

I wanted one. But which one to bid on?

My grandad always used to say: if you're going to own an inconveniently large egg, make sure it has the potential to be worth something one day.

So with that in mind, I turned to AI-assisted coding.

First, I used Cursor to write a script that scraped the URL of every listing, extracted the artist name, and filtered down to those where the current highest bid (if any) was £500 or less.

With those logged to a spreadsheet, I then asked ChatGPT to develop a system for evaluating an artist's commercial potential. It came up with an elaborate scoring system including where they studied, any prominent exhibitions they featured in, and public sales records of their previous work.

Back in Cursor, I had it write another Python script that would use the ChatGPT API to iterate through each artist, running web searches to assess each contributing factor and giving each a final "commercial potential" score.

Finally, given that I'd need to shout "STAY AWAY FROM THAT!" at our kids 36 times per day for the next 15 years, I wanted to make sure it was something we actually liked. So my wife and I went through the top scorers, and identified our favourite: Jay Kaes, with a ChatGPT-approved score of 85/100.

And this is where an already pointless story takes an even more disappointing turn.

Interest seemed generally low, so I placed our bid just before going to bed ahead of the next day's 9am deadline – pretty confident that no-one would snipe in at the last minute.

But they did! Which came as something of a relief, because by then I'd properly thought through just how big these things are.

In one final twist, the winner pulled out and I was offered the egg a few days later as the next highest bidder. But by that point I'd lost interest in the whole thing.

I'm now thinking that £500 and a lifetime of smash-related anxiety would have been worth it to have a photo and a more satisfying end to this story, but hey.

The point is: I figured out how to do all this in less than an hour one evening. It's truly incredible what non-coders can now do – and while it's probably better applied to something less monumentally pointless, having little "I wonder if..." personal projects like this is a great way to learn.

📈 Portfolio analysis: Beyond the spreadsheet

After I wrote last month about the stupid amount of effort involved in rebalancing my portfolio, my friend Ricardo recommended Snowball Analytics – and it's pretty amazing.

It's a tool to track your investments, with my favourite features being:

• It's dead easy to import your holdings and transaction history
• You can categorise investments however you like. So (for example) if you have mainly index funds but a few individual stocks, you could bundle all the individual holdings together as "stock picks" and see how that segment has performed for you
• OK not a feature, but the design and UI is slick so you actually want to interact with it

I'd pretty much given up on tracking performance accurately because it's such a nightmare to do in a spreadsheet, but now I can see my exact IRR and performance over time against any benchmark I choose.

I'm only a few weeks in but so far, highly recommended.

💼 Starting before you need it

I was informally advising a startup founder last week (which is something I'm thinking about doing more of), and we were chatting about the huge trust-building advantage of publishing content.

This is something we've done at Property Hub with great success. Trouble is, I feel a bit like Taylor Swift collecting her award and saying: "This proves that if you want it badly enough, you can make your dreams come true".

Which no, Tay, it doesn't: it proves that there are outliers and survivorship bias. And in the case of content as well as music careers, there's no such thing as an overnight success: results take time.

Algorithms mean you can have one hit YouTube video or LinkedIn post or TikTok straight out of the gate... but that's not enough to build a business upon, and you can't engineer going viral every month.

We now have a high volume of scorching-hot leads getting in touch every month – but that's because we started a decade ago and have never missed a week.

So why did I advise him to do it anyway?

• You can use content tactically to build trust and perceived authority as part of the sales process ("take a look at our founder's video about X"), even if it's not generating leads yet
• A relative "hit" (even if the overall numbers are still low) could point to a fruitful angle for paid ads, partnerships or outbound
• The best time to plant a tree etc etc: everyone wishes they'd started earlier, so just get going

Ultimately, you need to be both farming and hunting: doing what keeps the lights on today, as well as what builds the flywheel you'll rely on tomorrow.

🧑‍💻 Other bits

I got a free Remarkable

After 12 years of podcasting, thanks to a kind listener, I snagged my first freebie: a Remarkable e-ink tablet.

I'm still figuring out exactly where to fit it into my life – so if you have one, I'd love to hear your tips.

Do you have recommended templates? Ways of staying organised, or syncing all your notes back somewhere? This is all totally new to me, but I like the idea of writing manually again.

My favourite new website

This month I finally cancelled Spotify, because I realised I'm already paying for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music has a bigger and better catalogue anyway.

But I've actually gone a step further, and recently I've been listening mostly to... the radio.

Radio Garden is a site that makes it easy and fun to discover radio stations from all over the world. You can find a station for exactly what you're into, or just spin the globe and tune into something brilliantly random.

(If you're in the UK, due to licensing restrictions you need to implement this workaround to get it working.)

Fancy playing football?

Throwing this one out into the universe...

I re-discovered recently that I love kicking a ball around... but my 7-year-old gets tired and moany quickly, so I thought it'd be fun to get together with a few people for a kickabout.

I reckon full-on 5-a-side is a ruptured achilles waiting to happen, but if you're in London let me know if you fancy getting together for something casual and non-competitive – especially if you're free during the week.

(Also: Well up for trying out archery if anyone wants to give that a go.)

👋 Over to you!

That’s it for this month.

The whole point of this newsletter is to stay connected to friends, meet new ones, and throw some ideas into the world to see what sticks.

So if anything here sparks a thought - or you just fancy a catch-up - hit reply!

I’d love to hear what you’re building, thinking about, or trying to figure out right now.

Speak soon,

Rob

p.s. You can also follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.