BR#10: How to Validate Your Ideas

Productivity

Last Friday, I was listening to this very long, but really terrific podcast episode from Tim Ferris. On it, he and his guest, Noah Kagan, both accomplished entrepreneurs, spent a whopping 4 hours talking about entrepreneurship, marketing, and more.

There were a lot of great takeaways in there. But above all, I felt really inspired to practice the following exercise:

See how I can simplify a content idea I had to the point where I can test it out after just one weekend of work. And so I wrote a guide on How to Implement Agile Marketing, which is available (for free) as of yesterday. You can get it here.

It was a fun challenge, because the weekend constraint meant that I had to be very intentional about how I use my time.

One thing that helped a lot is that I already had an outline for a guide on this topic. I drafted it a while ago when I did some research on what else is out there.

In order to spend as little time as possible on design, I used a PowerPoint template from Envato Elements. I replaced all of the brand colors and fonts in the theme editor to match my own, and otherwise left the layout and sections mostly untouched. This allowed me to use most of my time to focus on the content.

The time constraint meant that I really needed to try to explain each concept as concisely as I could. I think this worked in everyone’s favour. The guide is concise and easy to read, but it still clearly explains all the concepts and their value.

So there you go! A great exercise that’s ideal if you’re looking to validate if an idea is worth pursuing.

In my case, my goal was to see if anybody cares about this topic. The number of downloads will give me my answer. 

Creativity

Should creatives be worried about AI?

I think I can be considered largely objective because I’m not a creative and I often work with and request work from creatives.

Therefore, when AI promises some capability in the realm of generating creative assets, I’m interested, not concerned.

However, so far, I find outputs from AI to be quite underwhelming. I can definitely see it as a tool that professional creatives can use to speed up their workflow, but as a tool to replace them? Not so much.

The difference in quality between what AI can generate based on my untrained prompts is (at best) only as good as the cheapest option I could outsource to. So maybe AI creates “competition” for people who compete on price.

But it comes nowhere near the quality I get from professional designers.

In fact in every industry that you look at, AI is becoming more and more of an enabler, a tool that speeds up work and enhances efficiency, rather than a solution that can replace the status quo. And that’s probably a good thing.

Mindset

On picking your mediums:

Part of the reason why I write this newsletter is because I’ve just never enjoyed creating the kind of short-form content that’s typical of social media (i.e. Linkedin Post, Instagram Reels, Carousels etc).

One thing I’ve come to learn over the years is that you don’t have to do things in one certain way in order to have your point of view heard.

While I was an Upwork Ambassador, I had, through them, an exceptional platform that enabled me to speak and facilitate discussions that helped a large number of freelancers in a lot of different places. I didn’t need any social media following to do that.

With regard to this newsletter, this is only my 10th edition, which I’ve not promoted in any way, and the number of people reading it each week has nearly doubled compared to when I started.

That’s great for me because writing short posts just doesn’t come naturally. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with people who post on social media and gain a huge following through short-form content.

But that’s not something that everybody is naturally good at. And if it’s not for you, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get your point of view heard. You just have to find the right medium that suits your communication style.

P.S. Do you have feedback about this newsletter or how I could make it better? I’d love to hear it! Feel free to message me on LinkedIn or email to tell me more.

Kind regards,

Cata