Human. Creator. Critical thinker. Exploring the intersections of technology, art, entrepreneurship, society & life. Connecting the dots.
United States
Joined November 2019
- Tweets25K
- Following4.2K
- Followers5.1K
- Likes40.6K
Pinned Tweet
GM X!
I've been MIA for a while. Life has taken me in some unexpected directions, and social media took a back seat.
Interesting report from the front lines. Take notes.
I've done 3 consulting calls this week
All w/ founders stuck on marketing/distribution
Here's all the advice I gave them:
- Build a free tool: take one annoying task your buyer does in a spreadsheet and turn it into a tiny web calculator or checker. Gate nothing. It ranks, gets shared, and sends warm traffic to your product.
- Comment before you post: spend 20 minutes a day leaving real replies on the 10 accounts your buyers follow. Their audience finds you before your own posts ever need to.
- Turn customers into the channel: ask your top 5 users for a 15 minute call, record it, and clip it. One honest customer story beats a month of your own posts.
- Make programmatic pages: if you have data nobody else has, generate a page per city, tool or role from it. Hand-check the first 20 so they're actually useful.
- Show up in AI answers: ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask. See which sites get cited, then get your name onto those (guest posts, directory listings, comparison pages).
- Build in public with receipts: share real numbers, screenshots and mistakes weekly. People follow progress, and a few of them turn into customers.
- Join communities as a member: find the Slack, Discord or subreddit where your buyers vent. Answer questions for 3 weeks before you ever mention your product.
- Do a partner swap: find a founder with the same buyer and a different product. Trade newsletter mentions or a joint webinar. It costs nothing and you borrow their trust.
I've missed the people, ideas, and conversations here.
I'm returning with fresh eyes, new projects, plenty of opinions, and a renewed desire to contribute to conversations about tech, creativity, society, and life.
Interesting opportunity. 🤔
GRANT‼️ Up to $500K for your AI project. You keep ownership.
This is the @mozilla Foundation Human-Scale AI Incubator.
What you get:
- $300K plus 12 months of coaching, starting April 2027
- Another $200K and 2 more years of support if you show strong progress
- Hands-on technical and community-building help
- A small global cohort of builders
- A platform through Mozilla Festival and Mozilla's network
Who qualifies:
- Teams with working AI tech already used or piloted with real people
- AI has to be core to the product, not a chatbot wrapper
- Nonprofits, individuals and for-profits can all apply
The catch:
- Only 7 projects get funded
- The project needs a charitable purpose, and for-profits face strict spending rules
Deadline: Nov 20, 2026, 11:59pm PT. No extensions.
Day 4: Milestone, I asked Lira to make a video. A few minutes later, she had one. Not perfect. Okay.
Here's the thing though: okay used to cost me an afternoon. Now it costs me a sentence of direction.
Perfect is my job. Okay is now hers.
ALT Life is breezy.
Wrote Threshold of Light last year, it still resonates with me a year later. Life is a journey, dont give up! I invite you to listen to the song and tell me what you think. Be kind, I wrote what I felt.....
suno.com/@vlaneart
GM friends. I've missed you. Life continues. Heres a beet salad with fresh greens from my garden. I am grateful.
Three days ago I added Lira to my team. Shes a synthetic intelligence running on a $10 server, and she's already drafting my content, keeping my calendar, and tracking my numbers while I'm in the garden. I set the route. She walks it. Documenting everything as it happens.
Good morning. Hope everyone is well. Lots of life being lived, planting lots of flowers and writing my next chapter. What is going on around here?
Petals, softness, shadow, and a little bit of mystery.
Lately I’ve been creating pieces feel like fashion editorials from another world - feminine, theatrical, and dreamlike.
Which image speaks to you most?
I learned a long time ago that real power comes from knowing the kind of life you want to build for yourself, not from buying into other people’s expectations of how you should live.
I'm in Wisconsin with my MIL, we're ready for the snowpocalypse. I'll keep everyone posted on snow totals.