Hello to my 35 subscribers :)

I haven't felt as productive this week as I thought, but have still managed to get stuff done; I need a way to recognize small wins;

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Business side:

I'll start with the business side of things; I'm getting thin and need to reshape some of my time spent on side projects. You might not know, but my short/medium goal is to reach $ 10k/month (I'm not yet (far) from this). I guess having a goal in mind should allow me to stay focused. I'm not expecting anything to change once I reach that goal; it's just a number, but numbers can be tracked more easily than feelings.

I'm not a salesman, and I'm not confident advocating my service to my "close circle" (Jack community being most of my activity time). I also realized I hadn't productized many blueprints, so I will be spending this month refining some of my offerings. My issue is that I can 'touch' most of the automation aspect. I wish I could niche down!

To achieve this goal, I (re)started on UW (Upwork) I was active in the platform last year and had a very successful first gig, however, the dev team was so not well organized, and 24h before the launch, they pushed a big code change (10k+ line code), making the build failing. I ended up working that day for 24 hours to discover that the team had changed something in the .env and did not update in the CI/CD. This threw me off, and I went off the platform for some months. The reward of receiving such feedback is, however priceless :)

At the time, my status was set to "raising talent", after working on some more gigs, I'm now "Top-rated" for the last 2 weeks which has increased my job interviews I received

I did mention as well that I need to start streamlining my time. I'm thinking of refraining from working on some "interesting" project and instead focusing on the paying project.

That being said, a good way to celebrate this week:

• I have found another retainer; I'll be helping a fitness gym with their cold email setup and method to increase their conversion
• I have found via Upwork another client 7h/week whom I help moderate his community (French AI Agency on Discord) - It is interesting to see how I can help and show them how to use make.com (they seem to be all targeting Instagram)

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Automation side:

I need to find a way to diversify my reach. I'm a huge believer in sharing first, and if people like it, they will eventually reach out. This might be the wrong approach, I'm unsure. There is a different platform for this; I have settled on Reddit this week and made an automation on n8n around it

This would use a Reddit API call, analyze each post that is no later than 7d hold, go through an evaluation process based on criteria, and if qualified, put the information into an Airtable. This would allow me to have a curated list of posts to go through and chime / provide value easily. I need to work on the last portion, where a message on Telegram would be sent if the qualification post is above 8/10.

n8n is truly amazing, but I have spent too much time with this automation, I need to sharpen my skill even more as some of the concepts that take me 2min in make take me hours in n8n due to the rabbit hole (you see the code node top right? this is me making a JS function to parse a JSON with regex support to remove the ```json from the LLM 🤣)

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Life side:

Today was an amazing morning—one of my best mornings in a long time. Why would you ask?

First day of the dog kids and garden for Brevka, picture this;

We walked to the spot (7 minutes away from home). The registration happened 2 weeks ago, and only 6 people could go into a group, so we locked our spot.

From the distance, we saw another Whippet that seemed really familiar. As we approached, I said hello to everyone and then looked at Aneta (my partner), and she looked back at me: "Is this not her brother?!"

We managed to register at the exact same time as another couple that took "Pimpek," the brother of Brevka. I had such a blast watching them play together and run like crazy in the field. It was truly one of my best mornings in a long time.

That is for this week's newsletter, everyone.

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback and read my rumble. This helps me share some of my feelings with an internet friend!

See you next Sunday!

Happy making!!

Quentin