Month in Review — January, 2024
And 2 compelling tools: A Meme and Image-to-Image Generator
Hey y’all!
It’s the last day of January and I thought I’d share a bit of the “insides” of this novel newsletter that only started 4 weeks ago — 27 days to be precise. To be honest, I was pretty nervous to start publicly writing (again) and the vast majority of it was due to being insecure about what I had to offer this nascent yet growing industry.
In fact, I registered the domain in May of 2022 and then sat on it for more than a year as I summoned the courage to get started:
So on July 28 of 2023 I decided to start putting a few things together spending a week getting a custom domain setup on Substack. This process took way too long because, for whatever reason, I couldn’t easily setup the domain on the root.
But even then I hesitated for another 5 months as I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to publish or even if anyone would show up. Fear was definitely a factor here and more insecurity than I’m willing to admit. But, I felt like the industry was passing me by at lightning speed and my interest in the space was only growing.
I gave myself the silly goal of waiting until January 1, 2024 to start and when the first few days passed me by I started kicking myself for being weak. What did I really have to lose? Nothing.
Besides, I loved the generative AI space and I wanted to do this for me.
So, I went ahead and published two posts, the second of which is still one of the best performing articles I’ve put together and gathered the most subscribers to date in a single day. I was off to the races.
And even though I failed to reach my modest goal of 100 subscribers by the end of the month I’m so glad I hit the darn “Publish” button. And guess what? 55 of you have joined me and what I’m most proud of is the fact that more than half (> 51%) of you open it up every single day.
This means, among other things, that when you see my humble email jump into your inbox that you’re expecting something useful and that I’m able to deliver on that promise. Thank you, thank you, thank you! It means the world to me that you’d spend any time reading since there are so many other things to do with your time.
And of course it feels good to see a chart like the one below but it’s meaningless to me if no one is actually reading the content that I put out there.
A few more interesting statistics for those that are curious: The vast majority of my subscribers are in the US with a global audience slowly growing as well.
To end this “End of the Month Review” I’ll share a few thoughts that might encourage you to get started (on whatever you’re thinking about doing):
Just Start — I think fear and anxiety is normal but you learn more about what you think you want to do by getting out there and trying it. The cost of failure is as low as it can possibly be in the very early stages of a new project so get going.
You’ll Learn Something — You can’t learn something that you’ve never tried and perhaps most important is the fact that you’ll learn something about yourself. For instance, I believed in my head that I’d love the process of sitting down and writing a daily newsletter on generative AI but until I actually did it in a real way it would have been nothing more than an intellectual exercise.
Execution Makes You Happy — Is there anything more pleasurable than being right about something? I get a real dopamine kick whenever I sit down to publish and this has become a virtuous cycle that continues to accrue.
Again, thank you for everyone who’s commented on posts and who’s given me encouragement to continue publishing. I’ve even gotten so objectively negative comments but even those mean folks are reading the content and giving me feedback that matters. Thank you for that!
And, if you’ve made it this far, would you mind sharing this with post and the newsletter with others? I’m going to shoot for 200 subscribers by the end of February and let’s see if we can make up for the failed goal of January, shall we?
Appreciate it so much.
✌(-‿-)✌
— Summer
I thought I’d share two tools that have been very fun and useful! The first is a Meme Generator (because why not?) and the second is an Image-to-Image generation tool that has created so neat results. Enjoy!
Meme Magic is precisely what you think it is and the results have been hilarious. I did “Catrday” to start and I immediately bookmarked this GPT for future use. Have fun with it as I know I did.
Secondly, Shakker became instantly-obvious the moment I started test-driving it as you can create unique images from scratch as well as use existing images:
I input an image of myself and gave it a whirl and it immediately made me more pretty.
ヽ༼ ಠ益ಠ ༽ﾉ
I don’t usually wear makeup but this definitely was a minor glow up. Perhaps I should start using these as my profile and avatar images. Huh.
It’s pretty clear that it’s generated but I don’t mind that at all.
If I keep using Shakker I can see myself paying for it so I immediately gave it a bookmark and will definitely return to their editor for more use in the future. What a nice and performant tool!
Have a great day folks!
\( ﾟヮﾟ)/
— Summer
