I lied... but for a good reason 👀

Last week I told you I needed to get back on TikTok and start posting again. This week? I posted nothing.

But here's the thing — it wasn't laziness or lost motivation this time. It was actually on purpose.

I've realized that given where things are right now and the assets I have, basically all my energy should go into vibe coding with AI. That's the single highest-leverage thing I can do with my time at this moment, and it's not even close.

Let me explain. AI coding is only getting better, and there's still this huge arbitrage where most people either don't use AI or don't use it well. It's early — sure, everyone's heard of ChatGPT, but very few people are actually using agentic tools the way we think they are. That gap is the opportunity. You can use it to get ahead, ship software, build leverage, run a business.

And for me, the asset is RaffleLink. The whole game right now is to modernize the platform, ship the features people want, and get RaffleLink 2.0 out the door. The more we build, the stickier our customers get and the more market share we take. With AI I can pump out features fast and well — not fully autonomous, it still needs me to set direction and strategy and oversee it, but it can one-shot a lot.

So when I do the math: I could spend an hour making a TikTok with a real but slow-to-materialize payoff… or spend that hour coding features I know will turn into usage, value, and revenue almost immediately. The certain, high, right-now ROI wins

That's the question that keeps nagging me. Is pausing TikTok smart focus, or is it just giving up dressed up as strategy?

I keep landing on: it depends on your assets. I have a software business with customers and a clear product gap to exploit — so coding is obviously my leverage. But someone else might have a content niche with real momentum, and for themTikTok is the highest-ROI thing they could do. It's not one-size-fits-all.

(Also, full honesty — I bought the $200 Claude Max plan and now I'm a little possessed by the need to max out my credits every week lol.)

TikTok will always be there. At some point the marginal value of each new RaffleLink feature will flatten out, and that's when I'll reassess and move to whatever the next highest-leverage thing is — maybe TikTok, maybe something else. For now I'm all hands on deck, and it's genuinely fun. This week alone I shipped a PayPal verification flow, an in-person ticketing POS system, and killed a bunch of bugs.

You also learn so much doing it daily — what AI can and can't do, where it gets confused, what you can trust, what you need to vet harder, and how to actually lead and direct it.

Random reflection from this week. I still get FOMO from the venture-backed startup world — people raising cool money, growing fast, hiring, doing AI startups — and a part of me goes "should I be doing that too?"

My friend John and I brainstormed one of his startup ideas this week (a job application / career matchmaking thing) and landed on something genuinely cool. I also had my own indie idea brewing — basically a Letter Loop copy I'm pretty bullish on.

But here's what's different now. I used to get so excited by a new idea because I was naive about what it actually takes — customers, tech, all of it. Now that I've done it with RaffleLink, I know. So instead of just chasing the vision of becoming a billionaire, I ask: what would it actually take? Am I genuinely interested? Would I commit my time to all the steps, not just the fun idea part?

That maturity feels like the "smart people know when to say no" thing everyone quotes. It's hard — novelty is seductive and it's so easy to say yes and get distracted — but staying focused is the whole skill.

If you want one thing to chew on this week: I've been working through Dwarkesh's blackboard sessions. They go deep on how something actually works — like actually, down to the math. They've done ones on how AlphaGo works, how LLMs really work under the hood, how chips work.

I think I love them because I miss learning. Not learning-to-do-a-thing, but learning for its own sake, the academic kind. These are a contained little hit of that — a way to scratch the nostalgia, keep my brain fluid and sharp, and pick up something genuinely cool and relevant today without signing up for a whole course or falling down a rabbit hole. (And when something goes over my head, I just use Claude to help me digest and actually understand it.)

If you've got stuff in this vein — podcasts, essays, anything that's reshaped how you think lately — send it my way. Reply here or email me at [email protected] 😎