Hi human, if you are new here: every month I write down what happened to me, to my agents, and to the business. The good parts and the other parts.
Most of the month was an attempt to get back to “normal” after the summer break and in between the holidays. Along the way, quite a lot happened.
The good
40 Under 40. This month, TheMarker put me on its list of the 40 most promising young people in Israel. Honestly, I am not sure how I made it onto the list, but I am grateful & happy :)
A new talk at theLOOP. At our meetup this month I talked about how I help my team learn. I showed how we learned to make video over the last two months, and what the whole process taught me about helping a team learn any new field. I wrote about it at length here, and you can watch the full talk (in Hebrew) here
The workshop came back. After a summer break in August, I went back to teaching, and I feel I managed to upgrade it a lot, which is really fun. I learned how much a short stop is worth when you want to make the product better.
I also ran the first refresher for graduates. A symbolic fee, and all of it went to charity. I was glad to see how a second watch helped some of them, and giving money to good causes always feels good.
My team built impressive things. They built me an iPhone app in about two hours (it records my meetings and turns them into notes and tasks). They redesigned the homepage of my site. They kept getting better at video. And they built a whole customer service process over email that is proving itself very nicely.
It is fun to watch my team improve. Good foundations are being laid, and day by day the quality and the speed only go up.
I bought a home gym. A Speediance Gym Monster. Now I can lift weights and push myself a little while the agents work :)
Yes, there is an agent for that too. His name is Arnold.
The questions changed. NiCE invited me to talk with their employees about what it is like to run a company built on AI agents. It was the first time I spoke to an audience with no slides at all (that was the concept). I told a few stories, and most of the time went to questions from the room.
What I found most interesting was watching the discussion start to move. Less technical questions, less feeling around for what agents can even do. More complex ones: how do you not get lost in everything the agents produce? What is the right way to build a new, effective structure for an organization?
The bad
The wave (tsunami?) I was riding is getting smaller.
It is getting harder to fill workshops. For months every date sold out, and sometimes people waited on a waitlist. Then suddenly, workshops were half empty.
It was clear to me this would not last forever. But the speed of the turn, from the abundance I had to the business challenges I am dealing with now, caught me a little unprepared.
I spent a lot of time analyzing what happened and what to do next. My best read is that several things are stacking up at once:
It is the holiday season here.
The hype around agents is cooling.
There are suddenly a lot of competitors, most of them much cheaper than me.
More than 2,000 people have already taken the workshop, and I live in a very small country. The pool is getting smaller.
About 40% of the people who signed up came through big podcasts I was interviewed on. Until now, all my marketing has been organic: a lot of word of mouth, and people talking about me on podcasts and in newspapers.
And I took a break. Now I need to figure out how to create new waves.
The business has become a real business, with all of its challenges.
My body. In July I wrote to you that I would close the restaurant for August and go away with my family. We never went. I was still sick in August, and we had to cancel our family trip to Thailand.
I am still dealing with it, and I am getting toward the end of the treatment (fingers and toes crossed that it wraps up soon).
It is not simple to steer the ship, the business, and work out what is right to do next, while I am also trying to steady the more important ship, which is my body.
The ugly
I found out that one of my graduates shared my files and my method with 100 people in a webinar.
I talked with him privately and understood it happened innocently, not out of a wish to hurt. (A rule for life: things usually do not happen out of malice.)
But the damage is done.
The files are a big part of the workshop, and I put my soul into them. The workshop is most of my income.
This is not the first time I have found graduates sharing the materials from the workshop with other people. Some even take money for it (not good for their karma).
It is a bummer that it happens. I also know I am naive, and that I believe too much in the good hearts of people. It is probably part of making a digital product, there will always be cases of piracy.
What’s next
October has six workshop dates. I keep working on the book, and on a new talk for a big conference in December.
I am also building an advanced workshop, and a new course that I think will take most of my focus. Both are for this coming quarter.
And I am open to whatever opportunities show up.
For most of this year I rode waves other people made: a friend telling a friend, a podcast, and this month, a newspaper. Now I have to learn to make my own.
I will tell you how it goes next month.
Tom
P.S. I wrote this letter in Hebrew, the way I write every monthly review. My team translated it, put it in order, and wrote a few of the lines that connect the parts. The thoughts are mine.
P.P.S. The earlier monthly reviews, if you want the whole arc: March, April, May, June, July.
P.P.P.S. If you know one person who should be in one of the six October rooms, forward them this letter. The dates are at getagents.today/english.
I read every reply.