Recent content on Stefan's blog
A few months ago, I realized the thing I’d built my identity on—intelligence—might not survive the AI era. It hit harder than I thought it would. If AI keeps getting smarter, cheaper, faster… what exactly still makes me human? That question sent me into a quiet existential crisis—and down a rabbit hole. I’d always thought intelligence was what made me—me. But if it’s not, then what is? What does…
Since I’ve started on SSRIs, there aren’t many things that bring the cortisol-spike knot-in-my-chest back. This tweet did. Hello anxiety, old friend. Cost of intelligence goes poof The cost of intelligence is on a path to becoming negligible. Large Language Models are improving so fast that it’s hard to even understand . If you’re using LLMs daily, maybe you can relate to…
My main goal this year is to reach ramen profitability with TypeCharm. The odds are against me. Most startups fail in the 1st 2 years. Time to revenue can (did!) stretch beyond the initial rush of optimism and willpower. How to trick my brain to put in the effort for its own sake, suspending judgement? What could I do that pushed my performance to the limit, with more certainty for a pay off?
In December last year, I had finished a proof concept for a chrome extension that determines people’s DISC personality type based on people’s LinkedIn profiles. The plan was to spend the following two months (January and February) on user discovery - understanding what my potential customers really need. In this post I’ll talk about how that went, what progress I made since then, and what’s next.…
Hi and welcome to another post on my entrepreneurship journey. This is the last post for 2023, so let’s get right to it. 😶🌫️October In my previous post, I mentioned how I was still talking to someone from my last founding team about building something together. That didn’t work out - hard to find a common topic. I had a few other co-founder dates but none that grew into something more.
Hi and welcome to my wantrepreneurship blog! The past two months have been yet another roller coaster that ended in… well it didn’t end the way I hoped. I wish the title of this blog was “First customers using the app - learnings”, but today’s post is more of a post-mortem. In fact, it’s two post mortems in one. However, that’s not a bad thing (well not completely). In 2023 alone, I can count 5…
Hi there! Today I want to share a bit more about Iro - the project I started at Antler, with my cofounder Nalla. Before I dive into that, a quick note on the new blog frequency: I’ll now try to share bi-weekly updates, instead of weekly. You can also now subscribe to be notified when there’s a new post. Just add your email here (you’ll receive an email asking you to confirm - make sure you do 🙂)
Hi there! It’s been too long since my last post. The truth is that the Antler experience started taking more and more time and headspace, including on the weekends. I tried to use all of the down time to rest and recharge, but now weekly posts are back on. In this post I’ll cover three things: 🅰️A quick summary of my Antler experience 🗿Personal update: How’s it going, Stefan? 🧠 Next steps Let’s…
Hi there! Thanks for coming to my blog where I write about my entrepreneurial journey! I’m writing this from a train going to Le Havre. Somehow it feels like I’m sending a postcard into the ether. This post card is the second in a series I will be writing while participating in the Antler program. The 1st post is here . The first week of Antler was intense, but the second week even more so. Almost…
Hi there! Thanks for coming to my blog where I write about my entrepreneurial journey! On Monday, I started the Antler program together with around 60 other founders. It’s amazing to see so many curious, driven people, that all want to build something great, all in one place. I’m very grateful to share this experience with them. For the coming months, I’ll be writing about my progress at Antler,…
Hi and welcome to my wantrepreneurship blog! Quick update this week: I focused on building up new capabilities for SquidGPT, based on learnings from discovery interviews. 🦑 Updates to SquidGPT After talking to around 10 product managers, I prioritized the first few frameworks that fit the following requirements: Widely used by product managers across companies AI can write content on them from…
Hey there! Welcome to my blog, where I write about my entrepreneurial journey. Last week I spent most of my time meeting (>20) people from my Antler cohort, doing a few more discovery interviews and starting to research the insights coming out of these interviews. 🅰️Preparing for the start of the program I’ve been meeting more and more potential co-founders last week, and I’m getting more and…
Hi and welcome to my weekly blog, where I write about my progress in building a company! I spent the last week mostly talking to people - I’m starting to get to know the awesome people in my Antler cohort (co-cohorters?), while also doing more discovery interviews. 🅰️Preparing for the start of the program The first few weeks of the program are about testing the compatibility waters by getting to…
Hey you! I’ve been heads down in the customer discovery process, so today I’ll be sharing a quick update on how that’s going + some stats on you 🥁 🙋Customer discovery progress Let’s start this off with some numbers. In the chart below you can see that around 1% (2/161) of cold messages get converted into interviews (🥲). Half of those messages were very lightly personalized, and half of them I…
Hey there, thanks for coming! This week I started customer development efforts. The goal is to talk to people that could benefit from using SquidGPT , and understand what problems it could help them solve. That should translate into improvements and new features in the app, which will turn it into a product people actually find helpful. Also, big announcement this week: I got accepted into Antler…
Hi and welcome to this week’s update! This week I was heads down coding the bot installation and user management. I finished that in good time and spent some time iterating implementing first feedback in SquidGPT’s website + some minor formatting improvements in the actual app. Finally, today I found out OpenAI is working on their own Slack app (⚠️) - no surprise there, but still . 🛴Road to a…
Hi and welcome to this week’s update! It’s been a month since I’m working on SquidGPT - a Slack bot that answers business questions according to pre-defined frameworks. I was hoping to have a working, installable version of the bot by the end of February. It looks like I’ll be extending that deadline until next week (for now 😅) - turns out user management is more difficult than I thought.
Hi and welcome to my weekly update! I’ve spent the past 3 weeks working on a Slack bot that answers business questions according to pre-defined frameworks - SlackGPT. A minimum-viable version of SlackGPT is in progress. That includes a working bot that users can install onto their own Slack workspace and interact with from multiple touchpoints + a landing page. My self-imposed deadline ( see…
Hi and welcome to my weekly update, where I write about the day-to-day of my attempt at entrepreneurship. Last week I wrote about my vision for the Slack app that I’m building, and what needs to get done on the way to a working prototype. In this post I share some updates on said prototype. 🛴Road to a working prototype This week, I’ve been focused on two things: improving results from GPT and…
Hi and thanks for coming to my blog! In my last post I wrote about committing to build a Slack app that gives access to the GPT AI language model. This week I’ve thought more about what exactly this app should be doing and also had great progress in building a prototype. In this post, I will be covering: 🔭 Vision : When my bot grows up, what will it become? 🛴 Minimum Viable Product : Current…
Hi and welcome to my weekly post! It’s been too long since we spoke last time, so why don’t you schedule a quick call with me here ? In the last post, I talked about my ideas for Slack apps. They were either in the AI space or focused on productivity or integrations. In this post, I cover how I thought about my elimination process and what was left after it. 💡Choosing one idea to commit to On one…
I can’t believe it’s been two months (three including breaks) of writing! One of the cool things about writing here is that I go back to what I wrote, to check what I was thinking last week. When a lot of my output is “thinking”, that helps me build on top of what I previously thought. In today’s post: 💡 Ideas: Last week’s top ideas 🗿 Status : How’s it going, Stefan ➡️ Next steps : Step nexts…
Hi and thanks for coming by! Short update this week. In my last post, I finished with a list of ways to find micro-Saas ideas, that I planned to use. One of the ways was trying find inspiration in SaaS idea newsletters. So, for the past week-and-a-bit, I’ve been doing that, which produced some moderate results. Here’s a dump of ideas: Idea dump * Taxfix for solopreneurs * Bubble plugin that…
Hi there, and thanks for reading my blog and for your feedback 💚! It’s making a huge difference, in that it forces me to make my thinking clearer and it makes this “journey” less lonely. In my last post, I wrote about deciding to drop the field of employee engagement. As next steps, I proposed to: Write up my checklist for an idea worth exploring Try more ways to find micro-saas ideas. I also…
Hey there! This is my last post for 2022, and I’ll be back to the regular updates in 3 weeks. Thanks for reading my writing so far, for sharing your feedback and encouragement, and for keeping me accountable! ⬅️Last week, I set out to: ❌Prepare for customer interviews ✅Try to decide whether going into a super crowded space is worth it ✅[Maybe] Try to see how far I can get in building out one of…
Hi! Welcome to my blog, where I write about my path to building an internet business. I’m feeling better after last week’s cold, and excited about the holiday season: reading books and spending time with friends and family. Also, excited to share with you what I’ve learned this week. 📑Quick recap Three weeks ago I declared (😬) that I will be focusing on the employee engagement space. What I’ve…
Hi, and welcome to my building-in-public blog. This week’s update is a short one. I wasted too much time reading articles and too little time documenting research. Also got a cold. ➡️ Last week, I said I’ll be working on: Find potential customers and talk to them, starting with people managers and HR professionals in my network —> Will start preparing questions in the coming weeks, but will only…
Hi, and welcome to my building-in-public blog. The past week hasn’t been as productive as my inner critic keeps peddling, but I’ve managed to work on all the next steps I set out in my previous post. Next steps from last week ✅ Find common promising themes across brainstorming notes: expanding on that in the next section ✔️ Write about the top 5 ideas I’m considering to moving to the next phase…
Hi, I’m Stefan. If you’re reading this you probably know me personally, so you know that I’ve had an entrepreneurial itch since the pandemic started. Two and a half years later, I’ve built up enough courage to scratch that itch. I plan to spend the next phase of my life creating a software solution to a yet-to-be-defined problem. What’s in this post: Building in public - why I’ll be sharing my…