Hello Reader,

Great to be here again.

This week I’ve been webinarring, discovering new toddler ailments from daycare, and did my first beep test run in a long time.

But let’s talk AI.

This week I look at:

• Some cool ways n8n is used for ADHD
• A newsletter deep dive and building in public
• Building an app with “vibe coding” tools

There’s a lot to rock’n’roll with so let’s make like a shake and get steady 🥤

-Marshy

Some cool ways n8n is used for ADHD

I follow a lot of the n8n (an automation workflow builder) is used and came across a novel post that wasn’t showcasing their latest “hack”.

With the tool, the writer was able to use the tool to create ways to make his life a little more manageable.

Including:

• a timer that starts when a task is put “in progress” and checks to see if it’s still happening 45 minutes later
• if there’s any tasks that haven’t been touched in 14 days - gently checking if it’s still needed
• matching tasks based on how they’re feeling - for “foggy” days, high-volume low effort tasks suit better
• Voice memo brain dump -> becomes searchable notes

The learning curve on these tools is getting better and eventually I see a world where everyone just has custom and personalised solutions for the work they do.

I met another ADHDer on Lunchclub recently and their friend had built a “podcast generator” that creates podcasts that are personalised to what the person is interested in, and the ADHDer said they had to stop using it as it was too interesting.

Crazy huh?

Newsletter deep diving and building in public

An early Internet trend was “building in public”.

The best example of this I can think of in earlier times was Pat Flynn.

He ran a website called Smart Passive Income and would write a monthly income report detailing where his earnings came from and where.

I just had a trip down memory lane and sure enough his first report was October 2008 where he earned $7,906.55.

He became quite Internet famous thanks to this (and a lot of knowledge sharing and hard work in the process) and is still going today.

​Ben’s Bites is a newsletter that I’ve been following since inception, and not just because he’s a fellow twin-Dad:

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It’s far bigger than this one, and their COO released a report going into the nuts and bolts of monetising a newsletter with 140k+ subscribers.

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I like nerding out on this stuff.

Some other people that have shared deep dives I think are valuable:

• Nick Sararev is a one-man power house and his recent reflections on his AI and automation teaching business share quite honest and open insights into how a high-perfomer thinks
• Sari Azout is the founder a Sublime.app - and is quite open with her shares and loose associations about what she’s focusing on, and why she’s building it - you can get a flavour of her output in “A Library of Possibilities for Reimgagining the Web”
• Another one I’m a fan of is Nathan Barry (creator of ConvertKit, now Kit) and how this newsletter is delivered to you. He wrote a heartfelt blog about changing the way he distributed team stock options that reminds you that not all successful leaders in tech are “brogliarchs”

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Vibe coding an app

If you listen to tech influencers, some of them will tell you that making money with AI tools is “braindead simple”, there’s a “Great Equalizer”, and that “AI wrapper businesses are the new gold rush”.

I’m not here to to tell you what to believe but I will point out that nearly all of these posts come from men with privileged backgrounds that are probably a little out of touch with what’s happening on the ground.

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Sidebar: Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s interview with ABC on AI’s potential was an exercise in “how not to talk to media” about this stuff.

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But what I will say is that the tools are getting exceedingly good for doing new things.

Over the last 12 months I’ve been building increasingly more sophisticated automations for my clients that help them create new content.

One one end of the spectrum you’ve got specific research that gives a business a great reason to reach out to another customer (hey - I noticed you posted 40 jobs in the last 3 months) and on another end there’s the ability to create entirely new assets for them (I noticed your expensive video has 300 views and goes for 10 minutes, I’ve choppped this into social-media friendly cuts).

But I haven’t done as much for my own business.

So this week I’ve been building a quiz app that moves founders through 15 questions about their business in a way that’s easy to answer, gives them a sense of what I do work on, and gives them a report at the end.

Here’s some of the things I did:

• Fed a YouTube video transcript describing the quiz method into an LLM and asked it to summarise what I needed to do
• Fed Claude examples of recent quotes, discovery call transcripts, and pitch videos to summarise what I’ve been doing client-work wise and unearth some suggested discovery questions
• Designing the questions and introductory copy
• Asking Perplexity to unearth all of the challenges with connecting Lovable.dev (an app builder) with Airtable (my database of choice) and what the potential workarounds are
• Giving that information to Claude Code in VS Code and Kilo and then building a back-end database structure that suits the above
• Uploading and then checking the data in Airtable with an unofficial MCP server
• Settting up a database in Supabase with its MCP to connect and parse data to Airtable
• Generating a prompt to share to Lovable and building a front-end for the quiz app
• Exporting it into Github and then refining the build with my code editor

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I am not a coder.

But what’s possible now is pretty good if you know how to leverage it and those barriers are going to keep getting lower.

I don’t think these tools are going to help you “print money” or whatever the hell these hype guys pitch - but I do believe there’s a lot of benefits to be had in learning how to do things like this over time.

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And to illustrate that point and to keep rewarding the people that read these things through to the end (I see you and <3 you) - I’ve finally got off my bottom and shipped the working Skool community - GrowTechGood and a functioning about page.

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I’m making it free to join for the first 50 members and will answer any questions you’ve got about this stuff.

I’ve been getting a lot of good questions in the webinars and so here’s a vehicle for getting answers.

(Apologies to the people that joined the old one I had to close it to get the better URL - https://www.skool.com/growtechgood/about)

Thanks and have a great weekend!

-Marshy

p.s. I’ve had a few people ask what I’ve been doing client-wise since my last big project and did a post about it here​