Ask Me Anything with
Noah Learner

Are you currently or exploring legal action in the future against The Seattle Kraken and Kraken Rum for trademark infringement?

Hahaha: that’s great and no.

Great questions.

I love pineapple on pizza.

Don’t hate me.

Great communicator, geez.

I was in a play in high school called the Brute, and I was the lead in that.

And then after high school, in college, I didn’t really do much, but after college, I did multi-level marketing, eek, and I learned how to speak in order to present about our products there.

And then I also had a TV show when I lived on Nantucket Island, and also led a team at a bike shop called Young’s Bicycle Shop on Nantucket, and I consistently had to talk to 30 to 800 people in a day and just met a lot, a lot of people and had become better at communicating and I just put a lot of time and energy into the craft.

When I got into SEO, I spent a lot of time at conferences paying attention and I read a ton written by any anything by Rand Fishkin about speaking.

And others and learned how to communicate better visually by reading tons of blog posts.

Let’s see, single most important thing I’m prioritizing now is probably Learning how to work with AI LLMs in my workflows, and also critical thinking skills.

Those are the things I care about the most, and then also building the community like crazy, doing whatever I can learn to help that.

Pineapple...love it too!

TV Show?! What was it?

It was called the N-files (named after Nantucket not Noah) and we did it from 1999-2000. I was the “talent” meaning I interviewed people who I thought were doing cool things on Nantucket: artists, musicians, and more.

Yes to Pineapple on pizza! Do you have any recordings of the TV show? That would be fun to check out.

I couldn’t find them.

My day to day.

Has a little bit of fluidity to it, but in general, I spend my time building all kinds of software tools that our agency uses to compete.

Recent projects have been operational efficiency type projects helping us build better client retention through tools, and also planning around agency capacity issues.

Outside of that, I work with tons of different APIs.

Anything revolving SEO data that you’ve heard of, I’ve probably had to work with it, and I build end to end solutions around information and data in order to help us and our clients compete.

So that’s like figuring out answers or solutions to difficult data problems, scoping out the full end to end process for that stuff.

So whether it’s like figuring out where to get the data, getting the data, storing it up in databases, transforming it in order to visualize it, and then visualizing it in a variety of tools that generally is usually looker Studio look or studio stuff.

Yeah, that’s what my day to day looks like.

It’s super fun.

I get to solve really hard problems and it keeps me really jacked to get out of bed every day.

Working in bike shop retail and then transitioning into bike shop digital marketing gave me crazy amounts of domain knowledge over anyone else that I was competing with to do the marketing and to win that type of marketing business.

Also, it taught me to learn how to focus on the money.

It all started with the money, right?

And aligning around business goals.

And in our particular bike shop, it was all about reserving bike rentals ahead of time.

And so I spent a ton of time and energy learning how to maximize the amount of bike rental reservations that we could get for our shop.

And then that taught me a ton about conversion rate optimization, and starting with the checkout process and working backwards.

And I used to do a ton of A/B testing when I was at the bike bike shop.

And then I took those learnings and pushed those into, digital marketing, which then transitioned more into SEO stuff around 2015.

What were some of your best A/B test results? Maybe something you didn't expect?

I just tested single variable changes on our checkout flow over a period of four years and kept improving our conversion rates over time.

That in combination with ranking #1 for bike rentals, ranking well for jepp rentals and ok for car rentals, really helped us fill a pipeline for a business that did 85% of it’s business in 12 weeks of the year.

I read a ton of books. I also ask my smart friends like @e, @victor.m.pan and @renee.bigelow (among a ton of other pals) what they’re reading and read that.

*Systems Thinking Book List with Authors*

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

2. Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish

3. The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish & Rhiannon Beaubien

◦ Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts

◦ Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

4. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

5. Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness by Steve Magness

1. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

2. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

3. Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

4. A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden

1. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz

2. The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

3. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger

1. Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change by Greg Satell

2. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

3. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

4. Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work by Uri Gneezy

1. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

2. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

3. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

4. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

1. Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

2. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

3. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

4. Bigger Better Bolder: Live a Life Without Limits by Sara Blakely and Jesse Itzler

5. Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

6. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

7. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Why is it important? Because it is the foundation for everything we do and have control over doing in life. Life’s short and how I spend my time here means everything to me. I want to have impact and scale that impact. Making good decisions that help me not do stupid things along the way greatly increases my chances of accomplishing my goals.

If you want a "smart" distraction every now and then, I'd like to add to this list.

Two recent books I recommend for thinking are by Adam Grant. Extremely easy reads (based on his writing style with stories integrated) with high returns.

Think Again

Hidden Potential

I chose Think Again about two years ago to help me approach a world with rapidly expanding and improving AI.

I chose Hidden Potential to think about creating teams but got way more out of it. He gives a lot of frameworks for thinking and growing in it.

The biggest lesson I learned was that I couldn’t do it all by myself.

And what I mean by that is with agency automators, I ran out of gas over time, and I felt like I ran out of energy to give.

And so on day one, I asked for help from the community to get folks to help me moderate so that that wouldn’t happen again.

And also the biggest thing that I was really proud of was coming up with a code of conduct on day one that I think really helps frame how we treat each other here and hopefully out in the wider world too.

I started this community because I was super sick of trying to find all of my friends on all the different social media apps after the demise of Twitter.

I wanted to build a place where I could hang out with my friends.

That was it when we started.

That was the sole motivation.

And then, picked Slack because we all use it at work, and I had a lot of experience running communities on Slack in the past, and I just felt like the UX of it was, or the ways that you can communicate in Slack were the most similar to how Twitter worked.

And I had enough experience running communities that I felt like I could successfully build a place where my friends would want to be, and it just really grew and grew and grew out from that.

That’s pretty rad. Had no idea it started as just a friends group that kept growing. Thanks!

Learning how to speak in a way that didn’t cause me massive anxiety was a skill that I really started to master after I had COVID in 2022.

I had lots of experience speaking, but always felt hyper nervous before each one.

And what I learned to focus on was something called box breathing.

In box breathing is there there’s all kinds of variations, but the core one is you inhale for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and then exhale for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and then start that box over again with an inhalation.

I do a modified box breathing, which is inhale for 4, Hold it for 4, and exhale over the longest period of time as I could (6-8 seconds).

What that does is it puts your body into, I believe it’s called a parasympathetic response.

And what that means is that your body goes into a relaxation response and it kills anxiety as it begins to build.

And then I tap into, all of the really difficult things that I’ve ever had to do in life and how easy what I’m about to do on stage is in relation to all of those things.

For me, the hardest physical thing I’ve ever had to do was to dig a ditch underneath the house, one winter in Nantucket Island.

I had to dig a ditch that was 2 ft wide, 2 ft deep, and ran about 45 ft long, and I had to pull the dirt out starting at the side of the building one 5 gallon bucket at a time, and it took me about a month.

And so if I could do that, I could get on stage for 25 minutes and run the mouth with people, right?

And then I thought about COVID, which was incredibly difficult for me.

I had something like 15 different panic attacks during my first bout with COVID, and, learning how to deal with that and getting through that meant that anything else I’d ever have to do would be significantly psychologically easier than what I’d already gone through.

So tapping into those feelings and knowing that you’ve done great things and you’ve tackled really difficult problems, makes public speaking feel like a cinch afterwards, and then it becomes fun.

And when it’s fun, It’s just an amazing experience.

Love this! Thanks for these details - very helpful!!

Probably the most timeless skill that someone could learn would be SQL.

And outside of that, I would think about ways of getting information.

That’s like working with APIs.

I would think about ways of transforming the data, and that could be done with tools like DBT or SQL and then I’d learn basic ways of visualizing the data.

And for me, that first step would be Google Looker Studio.

Having said that though, who knows what the next 2 to 5 years look like?

I would probably play with different large language models as much as possible.

Really the core piece is really learning to explore data in different ways and understand hierarchy of data, meaning from big picture haystack of information and learning how to get down to needles or inferences or insights from that data.

And also learning that there is no precise truth to anything.

And becoming OK with that, and developing a mindset where the whole purpose of everything that you’re doing with this information is gathering enough information in order to create a hypothesis, or to have enough information to take an action.

It’s not about precision.

It’s about how do I have enough information to move forward.

I started Becoming way more technical after seeing someone do something crazy cool at a conference with data and Google Big Query.

That moment of seeing someone do something that I couldn’t lit the fire underneath my butt that made me want to learn all of the skills that would make whatever he was doing on screen possible.

So at that point, I, I decided to learn tons about Google Sheets, and I learned about Google functions like the query function in Google Sheets, which was super powerful.

And then from there I learned Google AppScript, and after I learned some core stuff with AppScript, I learned how to work with APIs with AppScript, and then from there I learned.

, how to use Node.js and I learned how to build Google Cloud functions after doing an agency automators episode with David Sotomano.

That one really blew my mind.

And from there, once I learned Google cloud functions, that was really like the The, the real everything else opened wide open, and that that made it possible for me to build data pipelines.

And by learning how to do, incorporating Google Cloud functions with something called Google Cloud task uses, it enabled me to build long-running applications that could do things like data pipelines or building all kinds of stuff in the cloud.

Really though, all of this stuff starts with some kind of spark, and that spark is having something like an itch that you just have to scratch.

And we all have those moments where we feel like there’s a gap between what we know and what we want to know, and crossing the chasm between the two things and putting in that time and energy to get there is what separates people, right?

and I think a willingness to put in hundreds and hundreds of hours on self-improvement in terms of learning technical skills to be be able to do whatever it is you want to do is the big separator between some folks and others, and being willing to suffer and being willing to put the time in really is necessary.

I think SQL is important to learn. I think JS is more central to learning how the web works than Python, but Python is more important IF you want to do data science.

Python is also much easier to learn than JS.

They are important to lern for folks who want to really go deep with the data. I think it’s important to have T=shaped marketer level knowledge around them for everyone and deep level knowledge if you’re dealing with data as a core part of your role.

Having those skills and soft skills = ???? + :pinched_fingers + career advancement.

Blessing and a curse is kind of how I feel about it.

I think you can vibe code simple things, you know, single functions or a simple application that does a few different things.

The real problem though is when people who don’t understand the underlying Software that they’re building and they don’t understand like the language involved, means that they could end up building something that’s broken or doesn’t actually work the way that they think it’s supposed to work.

The tool might output code, but it might not actually give the correct answer to what they’re building.

I find it incredibly frustrating because I do a combination of vibe coding plus A process where I kind of architect the solution and check every single output that the that the LLM builds, and I often wonder if it’s just faster to build without, even though I know at my core that I get results faster doing it.

It’s just incredibly frustrating process. I just always feel like I’m coding with a drunk 13 year old.

Makes sense. Especially when you see people building stuff and then trying to sell it and get hacked because they don't know what they don't know about security and finances with software.

Thank you!

100% .

I know how to build software and I watch how the LLMs work inside a code repo. They will build all kinds of test scripts and alternative approaches that will make it really hard to maintain a codebase.

I like workflows (where we control each step tightly and have humans in the loop of the process and have not built or experimented enough with agents to know how good /or useful it will be).

My sense of things is that LLMs still way underdeliver on their promise and generally feel like broken tooling when I use them. We’ll see when my opinion changes…

There are companies that are building workflows like airOps that are approaching ai agents, but not quite unleashing an agent do do things.

I don’t know.

They key thing is toi find your ikigai (your purpose for being) and to try and have work go in alignment with that as much as possible over time. With each new role try and get to do the things where your strengths are what you get paid for as much possible and your weknesses get pushed off your plate).

I’ve been able over time to do more and more of the work that I’m great at and less of the things I’m awful at. I’d also focus on what will be useful for the next 3-5 years and to keep modifying that list over time.

This way of approaching my work has helped me have a super meaningful career / job and I’m the luckyist guy I know.

and I’ve found that joy all inside agency life.

Great question, Nick!

I have not spent enough time on this particular problem to provide a useful enough answer, period.

I would think though that Dana DiTomaso has provided a ton of value on this question and has also provided a great solution for this as well.

I’ve been cycling through my 12 pairs of shorts.

Great questions, Brett.

In terms of new dog owners, I think it’s super important to spend as much time with your dog as possible for the first year or two, and then keep spending consistent time with your dogs on specific things that you want to improve in terms of their behavior.

That sounds like I’m being militaristic about it, but really like getting your dog to sit, stay, lie down, leave it.

You know, so they don’t mess with other dogs or or people or anything like that, or just like super important and super foundational skills.

Outside of that, spend as much time as you can building the bonds with them as you can because they’re gonna want to spend as much time with you as they can get their little paws on.

I love going on dog walks.

I love spending time with them, working on leash training skills so that they heel, and really what that’s about is just not being yanked by two big hunting dogs.

I feel like your answer on ????s applies to people in my life too…

In terms of finding your why or your Ikigai in life, I think it’s super important to let your, your inner self, your soul, your body kind of lead the way a little bit.

I noticed that for me, I had this crazy drive to scratch itches, to create, or build things.

And I also realized that I had this real drive to learn and to grow skills, and to become a better communicator.

The communication piece was really about me having a hard time communicating with people and wanting to not have a hard time communicating.

And so I practiced and practiced and practiced.

You saw that, when we worked together in the bike shop, how I struggled with talking with people and how I got better at it over time.

But really look inside yourself to find your purpose.

You’re gonna notice when you go to sleep at night or when you wake up in the morning, there are gonna be trends to things that you think about.

You’re gonna notice that there are certain, blog articles that you read, certain podcasts that you really listen to, all of these things are going to kind of point the way as to, what you should focus on learning, and really just use that as a direction to start the journey in, and you’re gonna have forks in the road, and you’re gonna find your way making choices and going down different paths.

And with each of those different forks and each of those different decisions, what you’re gonna find is, you’re gonna react to those decisions, and you’re gonna become, it’s gonna become more and more clear to you what you excel at and what you have to focus on over time.

And those directions will change as you accomplish goals or fail to accomplish specific goals, and you’re going to find yourself moving in new directions, and that’s totally cool and expected.

, that’s how I think about it anyway.

And I think it’s really, really important to spend time intentionally thinking about this a little bit.

And some of the ways that I force myself to do that is by taking showers, spending time in a hot shower, and just letting my mind go, or going on a dog walk, or, in the past couple of years, I drive a lot, going fishing.

And a lot of times I’ll turn off the radio, and what that does is it unlocks my brain to just roam.

And it’ll go on these like free wheeling.

Little odyssey as we’re driving, and over time, what starts as like just flashes of thoughts happening, it’ll start to have a thread in a narrative, which will turn into focused thinking on specific problems.

those are some of the tricks, tactics and strategies, I guess, to finding your way.

Thanks Noah ❤️

I worked in cycling retail for about 20 years, most of which was in a bike shop called Young’s Bicycle Shop on Nantucket Island.

It Really taught me a ton about grit.

It taught me a ton about problem solving, taught me a ton about people, and taught me a ton about how to conduct and run a small business and also how to treat people morally and ethically in a great way.

I'm glad that running a business made you a better person.

I use LLMs every day in my practice building software for our agency.

Generally, I’m doing that using a tool called Windsurf, which is an AI powered coding tool, and it’s enabled me to get more work done faster for our agency, and it allows me to iterate and learn a specific problem domain that I want to solve for much faster, period.

Having said that, coding with LLMs, while it helps me be more productive in terms of getting stuff actually pushed live, it’s incredibly frustrating, just the experience of working with an LLM constantly feels like I’m working with a broken tool.

It’s super frustrating, but I get results faster.

They're frustrating for a non-developer too. They get caught in loops often and can't get themselves out of them even when the issue is straight forward. But it's all we've got so far ???? And it's changing rapidly. Thanks for the response!

I'm looking forward to VibeDebugging, because until then it's essentially a track meet where the runner sprints faster than you ever could and then makes a sharp right turn to headbutt the stands.

word.

100%. And if you are not 100% reading every edit you will miss when that happens.

Word on the street is that Windsurf aka Codeium is going to be acquired by OpenAI. The gap between what AI labs have but haven’t released and what we’re using seems almost unbelievable large. Literally unbelievable. Maybe we haven’t gotten our hands on those models for a reason. I’ve also heard labs are running tests using their models to do coding for Upwork jobs to see if they can deliver real economic value. If they do, I could imagine the pricing could change quickly.

I’m so bummed about the potential aquisition.

Come back to Cursor! I read that they have $300m ARR so turned OpenAI down. That’s $25m MRR or ~1m devs paying each month. How can 1m devs be wrong?

I probably will.

I didn't think Cursor had a non-developer option. Can I fully vibe-code or is it not at the Replit / Bolt level?

You can fully vibe code and run stuff on your local machine. I’ve demoed to a couple of non-devs and they took to it like ducks to water.

Ok good to know, I'll give it another look. Hopefully I'll be paddling around in no-time.

(You need to install stuff, but Cursor will tell you how to do that or just do it for you in agent mode).

Yes, it's installed, thank you, I'm switching between giving feedback in Bolt to this insanely silly loop it has itself in, while getting Cursor set up ????

It’s not perfect, but I like Cursor Agent mode for just getting something working quickly (or… learning where your problem lies on the jagged frontier).

Have any of you used tools like , or ? I started to work with them a while back, but basically stopped in favor of things like and "no code" tools like , AirOps & n8n. Though, looking into them again.

I don’t know what best would be. I think more about how I feel, and the slope that helps me feel the most flowy is Corona at Eldora.

I’ve skiied a lot of tough ones and I feel great after doing em, but I love flowy more.

I skiied Great Scott in Snowbird this winter and it was tough / rad.

We need to try to find a time to get on the slopes together. Bummed we missed it when you were out in Utah this last time.

Next year my friend.

There are probably a few, but I think “showing Up” consistently over a long period of time is probably the bigger takeaway.

Consistently learning.

Consistently making new friends.

Consistently helping others.

Being Authentic.

Being Honest.

Trying Hard.

Learning to speak, and honing that craft until I got on the biggest stages.

I think the folks who are “successful or whatever that means” have a huge inner drive to do, to build, and to keep pushing over and over year after year.

(not a joke question)

yes I think so. I think optimizing for it feels like the same thing thing we’re already doing. Kind of like AIOs right? If only I could see them inside GSC…

spits out drink.

Speaking of things we don't see in GSC...I'm sure there's some technically challenging aspects to getting visibility on things like AIOs, featured snippets, etc. Yeah?

Has there been talk @softplus of adding more SERP features there?

What's the general talk around doing this?

And @softplus thanks for being such a great voice here. We really appreciate how much you help us all here! I personally am super grateful to you.

WOW THE JOHN MUELLER joining the AMA, Noah has ascended into SEO royalty ????

I really hope I get to hang out with John IRL soon. Maybe y’all can have me to Zurich for a Search Central video with @areejaabuali where we talk about building community?

Maybe you know the apocryphal story of a university final which just asked “Write the ideal question and its answer” and someone copied down the question twice and got a 1st? Well… that won’t fly this time.

I don’t know what the best question would be, but I have thoughts about what I’d want to share with the wider world and it’s this:

• Be a good person. Be Honest, be humble, be kind.

• Try hard. Learn hard skills and go deep into things to learn their true nature.

• Be Curious.

• Care about People. Not just in our work, but genuinely care about others. Build empathy inside yourself for others (even folks you disagree with) and help others as much as you can.

• Your perfect job /role exists somewhere (including where you might be right now). Put the time to think about what you love, what you’re great at an being intentional about getting yourself in situations where those skills shine is really important.

• Building your web of pals is everything. Building a huge surface area of friends is so important, especially in times of great turbulence.

• Keep pushing, keep going, and keep trying.

• Be Vulnerable

• Spread Love out in the world. I’ve become comfortable telling my closest pals I love em and I hope it brings us closer together!

Love this! Being curious and loving and always be building are definitely the secrets of happiness for me too.

This makes me want to see what @noahlearner would pick from a prompt something like this in ChatGPT:

Knowing what you know about me and all my chat history, what would be the best question someone could ask me? include topics you don't know about me but could be inferred. List 3 questions.

what came back…

Why it's powerful:

and I’m too mentally tired to answer any of them right now! ????

Look forward to hearing what you pick once the batteries recharge.

Not enough to be frank. Everything I build is documented in the code, in our agency doc site and also usually with accompanying videos. I’ve wanted to teach inside the agency and am hoping to make that happen in a more structured way over time.

It's a challenge for sure, thanks!

How do YOU do it @ray?

It's a struggle for sure. Basically everybody we hire has to come from a pretty strong search and / or technical (web dev, data, etc.) background or there just won't be a good way to ramp them up for what our clients need. If they have that background, then we involve them pretty quickly in client deliverables with guidance in new areas for them and provide on the job training / guidance. I also buy a lot of courses, etc. for my team, and try to provide incentives to complete them.

We had a pretty sweet Learning system when I was at Big Leap. It was tied to advancement and everything. Basically, if you're at this level, here are all the things we expect you to know/have mastered, and when you master the next level, we're happy to pay you more and move you up. Would be happy to make an intro if you're interested in seeing how the operate it.

I like that a lot, would love to chat with them, thank you!

I have tried to make that a filtering question when interviewing for roles. If I can’t get off a poor fit client I don’t want to be working at that environment.

And the agency SHOULD be motivated to make that happen becauise poor fits === lost engagements.

I’d also make sure anywhere I work has a no asshole policy.

Then I can lean into both when I ask to not work on that account.

Maybe too, you could talk to the leader that has a say, explain the situation and how it makes you feel. Then come up with a plan together. Perhaps that looks like bringing it up with the client and setting expectations for how the relationship will work best. That's also a good thing to talk about up front when onboarding, expectations.

I just had an interview and was able to use you guys' insights to shape the question I asked about this. Worked awesomely. Thank you!!!

the power of great questions FTW!

I just wanted to help.

Automated reporting using LLMs was my biggest fail over the past 2 years. We invested a lot of time and energy on solving the automated reporting problem and came away feeling like LLMS were just not currently capable of providing the kind of accurate / hallucination free outputs we’d need and our clients would expect.

Another thing that comes to mind is that failure is always a potential outcome (and is often a likely outcome) when trying to solve a problem for the first time.

And that can be psychologically the toughest part of innovation work: I’m constantly dealing with broken things until they finally (hopefully) work.

And sometimes they don’t.

Reminds me of watching early SpaceX launches where things blew up and the control room stood up and clapped. They have a strong mindset that even from "failures" we can learn so much...that's the cost of innovation!

It’s hard.

I try and do my community stuff early in the morning, work during the day, family and dog time after work.

On weekends I’ve been spending Sunday Morning doing the Newsletter (which I’m beginning to really enjoy).

My wife is at home these days which has reduced the strain on how our family works (though both of our kids are in late teen years now), and that has made it easier for me to do more.

Not going to lie… It’s really really hard and I’m incredibly grateful to my wife, kids and to Sterling Sky for supporting me as much as they have.

1. Thanks a ton.

2. Scaling… I wonder how much bigger the group will get? 5k? 6k? It feels like the systems we’ve put in place are scaling pretty well, but I’d want feedback from folks that are active here to learn if they still get a lot of value.

a. I have been asking for more help and folks have stepped up to jump in.

i. @eaboose has started to help with Promotions

ii. @adrienne.kmetz will be helping with the actual website content.

b. Times are tough right now for a lot of us and I’ve slowed down asking members to support us financially (although I really appreciate it when it happens), and will start to ask more down the road.

c. I would love to have more orgs joining us as community partners because I’d love to hire some folks to make the community more consistently better.

3. I love using LLMs to ideate with and for helping me iterate with UX designs.

4. They are frustratingly useful for pushing out code, but still often produce broken code.

5. They are NOT a keyword research tool and are not reliable for doing anything with Math.

Hey Tyson, sorry for the late answer here!

The truth is that there’s a tiny minority of folks who are actively asking folks to connect on calls.

Because there are so few, you will have great odds of getting folks on a call.

My advice is this:

• Find 1-3 people you look up to and to follow them on socials and interact with them there.

• Start with folks who are 6 months -5 years ahead of you in your career journey as they’ll have a ton to teach you.

• Like their posts.

• Over time, you can comment on their posts in authentic ways.

• If they comment back and you feel like you’re building rapport, send them a DM

• Be short and direct, “I love how you talk about [topic name], I also do a lot of work on that would you be willing to do a knowledge share on the topic?

◦ This approach has had a 99.99% success rate for me.

• Once on the call try and figure out how you can help them.

• Offer targeted help.

• Find ways to collaborate with them in the future.

• Rinse and repeat. I try and meet 1-3 people a week before and after work because the more pals I have, the more parts of life I know about, the more people I can help, and conversely the more people who’ll be there for me when I need the help.