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  • Next Steps for My App

    I did my first practice pitch to relatives this past week. I had my colorful pitch deck of 13 slides ready to go and presented them. Most importantly, the slides did their job in presenting:

    • The problem it solved
    • How it solved it
    • How it was monetized
    • How it would be taken to market
    • The target user
    • Timeline to release
    • Cost of bringing the app to market

    The above was conveyed clearly and the information landed the way I intended. I’d also discovered after the practice pitch that there was large missing piece if I am going to take this to venture capital (my end goal) to have them invest $1M – $1.5M to bring it to life. What I was going to need in addition to my pretty slides was an MVP — Minimum Viable Product.

    This is basically a functional prototype of the app. Built and running in Apple Developer’s TestFlight to allow someone to launch it and run a minimalist version of the app. This shows potential VC investors proof of execution (yes the app can be built) and give a feeling of how engaging it is.

    How long is this going to take? I have no idea. I’ve never done it before. There’s the possibility of using AI tools like Cursor to help build it. I get the sense it’s going to take awhile, as there’s going to be a lot of debugging and back and forth to build out a testable version of the app. Hopefully it’ll allow me to speak more about the coding side of things during the VC pitch and allow me to answer questions that come up.

    It may also shorten the roadmap as the app post-VC-funding could build off the TestFlight version.

    So next up: Register some trademarks and get coding!

  • Happy Two Weeks

    Welcome To My Brain is two weeks old! I think milestones should be celebrated and posting every day for two weeks seems mild, but it’s still something. How many projects do we start and never finish? No one ever has an idea and instantly makes it or becomes rich; it’s in the execution of the idea that brings success.

    We can have the best of ideas but there will always be plenty of reason’s not to pursue it. Oh, I’m busy right now. There’s other things I have to do. I need to focus on my job. Maybe after the holidays. Or the most vile, devastating self-given reason of all: Maybe someday.

    So a fortnight of working on an idea is worth celebrating. This blog is two weeks older than countless other ideas I’ve had. That’s two weeks committed to an idea, of sticking with the idea, of continuing to breathe life into it. I still don’t know what it is yet. Is it just a blog? Is it a public meditation? Am I writing a book in slow motion?

    This is the journey. I set out to do something not knowing where it will lead. And, truth be told, it’s exciting. There’s no pressure because I haven’t put any deadlines or requirements on it. There’s no measure of success or likes or follows or reposts or comments. It’s just writing.

  • Job Searching

    There’s something wrong with today’s job market. I’ve thought about this a lot recently as I’ve applied to a few jobs looking to bolster my income. The economy is in a stage of transformation (or upheaval) and business for my company has slowed. (Some of this is also because of the time of year — August is notoriously slow for business as people take vacations, get ready for back to school, and hold off on purchases to make sure they can stretch their budget into the last quarter).

    I haven’t applied for a job since 2014, but I can tell you it’s very, very different now than from a decade ago.

    There are three big changes that have occurred that are causing difficulties in the job market outside the normal ebb and flow of applicants to positions. First is AI. Most companies now utilize ATS (Applicant Tracking System) as the first line of defense. ATS filters resumes for keywords, filtering out any resume that doesn’t meet enough of them. This is done to lighten the load on HR departments and automatize reading resumes. The problem is, submitting a resume is now buzzword bingo and you have to get enough hits to pass through. If you put on your resume that you “reduced costs” but ATS is looking for “increased profit” you’re filtered out.

    So job applicants are now using AI tools like ChatGPT to fight back against ATS. You can drop your resume into ChatGPT along with the job postings’ requirements and ask it to optimize for ATS. ChatGPT comes back with your resume rewritten for what it thinks will beat ATS — but how does it really know? The keywords are likely set by the HR department of the hiring company. Regardless, this has now led to an AI proxy war where AI is on the front lines and distancing applicants from job posters.

    The second big change is remote jobs. After 2020, many jobs went remote. Companies could now expand hiring to candidates in other states if the work could be done remotely. But this has led to a local company potentially hiring someone remotely not in your city and an exponential amount of applicants than if the job were local/on-site. So if you’re applying for a remote job, you’re up against a much larger pool of candidates, reducing your chances of landing the job.

    The last thing is ghosts jobs. This whole concept is awful. A ghost job is a job opening posted by a company that has no intentions of hiring for it. As a company cuts costs or reduces its workforce, it’ll post jobs to give investors the impression the company is growing. Applicants apply, but the resumes aren’t read and no one is ever responded to.

    These things combined make job hunting almost a lottery at this point. If the job is real, you have to beat ATS to even get your resume looked at. And if it’s remote, you have to beat out a multitude of other candidates. This allows companies to sit back and wait for the ideal candidate (or the one who hits the most buzzword bingo in ATS).

    So how to navigate all this in 2025?

    The first thing is you have to beat ATS. First way to do that is to make sure your current job title matches what you’re going for. This may seem oversimplified, but I recently realized my job title on my resume was probably hurting me. I’m the co-owner of an IT services firm and I handle all operations for the company. I’ve been putting Chief Operating Officer on my resume and applying for jobs like Operations or Marketing Manager. I realized this week that’s probably been hurting me so I’m now A/B testing; I updated my resume by “downgrading” my title to Operations Manager.

    I asked the r/resumes subreddit about this, posting a question about job titles. The best response I got was:

    “Recruiter here, and you should change it. You are correct, if I sent a resume forward that had COO my Hiring Manager would send it back. Job titles are mailable, as long as you can in the interview say “My internal title was X, but what I actually did was the duties of Y” you are fine.”

    According to jobscan.co: “Jobscan analyzed over 2.5 million resumes and found that resumes that contained the job title of the targeted role received 10.2 times more interview requests than those without it.”

    I’m also afraid that by this point it’s a game of numbers. More applications, more resumes, more cover letters. I just signed up jobhire.ai to see if scaling with an AI tool would show any results (I’m not affiliated with them and this is not a sales pitch). We’ll see how it goes — there are, of course, priced add-ons to simplify and streamline things like autogenerated cover letters per job application, etc. It gets pricey really quick.

    I’ll leave with this: if you’re looking for a job, don’t give up. The world is so complex and the economy is made up of millions of little parts that any given day something could change and give you an opening. Stick with it!

  • Write For One

    “Write to please just one person.” — Kurt Vonnegut

    I found this quote in perfect timing. I started this blog in that very spirit. It’s the reason I post once a day (I’m the one person). It must also be the reason I gave up on journalism in college (I went to Pitt for English originally, and my mother — an English teacher — pushed me to move into journalism so I could find a job when I gradated).

    I write what interests me, be it a screenplay or web article. If it’s something that doesn’t interest me, how will I ever finish it? Screenwriters are notorious for this — we all start writing a new script before finishing the old one. Sometimes we go back to the old one to keep working. Sometimes. I always think about when I die and my laptop is opened, someone will discover a treasure trove of first pages of novels and countless first-ten-minutes of unproduced movies. And notes. Thousands of notes on ideas, concepts, titles for things that’ll never be written.

    I keep a Notes file on my MacBook Pro full of these fragments of lost ideas. I also keep a section for names. I found having a well of names to draw from keeps the writing process going on a script or (potential) novel. You come across a new character and you’re mid-flow you don’t want to take your fingers off the keys and wonder what their name is.

    I should break this names up into categories. “Heroic.” “Villain.” “Gunslinger.”

    If you want to write, write as if you’re the only person who’s going to read it. If you don’t want to share it, that’s ok too.

  • Free Your Mind

    I recently realized something interesting. The past twelve months have been rough for a variety of reasons, and it’s left me constantly checking bank accounts and investments, witnessing the eternal tug-of-war between profit and loss. The mantra of the day has been “where are my accounts at?” Did I make twelve cents in interest? At least it’s going in the right direction.

    The stress of it all leads to never-ending hypothetical situations that might happen down the road one day. Because they’re stress-induced they’re almost always negative or stressful. I’m constantly reminded of Seneca’s quote “We suffer more in imagination than reality.” I think of this, yet I continue to cause myself more suffering.

    But in the past two weeks I’ve begun building again, flexing creative muscles, and focusing on making new things. I started this blog. I began designing and building an app. I sit every morning after pushups and meditation and write down 10 ideas in a notebook. I started a new company and I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet. I’m starting new tabs in my phone’s Notes app to jot ideas and interesting phrases down. I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.

    What I’ve realized is that it’s all very freeing.

    The cynical person might declare that this freedom doesn’t fix financial issues. The pragmatist might point out the tug-of-war is going on still and I’m not paying attention to it. But my heart has been free the past two weeks and I haven’t even logged into my bank account. In my heart of hearts I know that I will create something that will obliterate that tug-of-war. I know not which idea scribbled in my notebook or blog post or digital tool I’ve formed from nothingness will be the one that catches fire, but something will.

    The creative well has been tapped.

  • No Pressure

    I like blogging this way. The only thing I commit to is one post per day. That’s it.

    I used to have another blog called Quit Your Job. I liked the title and it was born immediately after I left my retain job in 2019. It was going to be a blog about doing the things to one day be able to quit your job and live financially free. The story behind it was good, but it didn’t drive me. Posting was inconsistent, some posts were in-depth with data while others were probably best suited for some other blog. On top of that, I wanted it to go grow really fast. Get popular quick and take off.

    Of course it didn’t.

    But for Welcome to My Brain, the drive is just me. I take my time. Share daily thoughts. I even built it slowly, working on one piece of the site at a time. I still don’t have the about section done. But writing this way is very freeing. I write, then maybe I tinker with the site.

    I’m not sure how to use the X posts yet. I’m not worried; I’ll figure it out. For now, the no pressure method of daily blogging allows me to focus on the writing.

  • I’m Building an App

    I’ve always been a fan of the manta that a good idea seeks you out. If it continues to come back to you, if you find yourself thinking about it for months or years, and it just wont go away, there must be something to it, right?

    The idea itself is for an EdTech app targeted primarily at Gen Z but can be utilized by anyone who wants to learn more. Apps can take a long time and be a long process with a big time investment, so I wanted to make sure I had something first. I market-tested the idea. I’ve pitched close confidents, my wife, her family, my friends — “So I have this idea for an app…”

    The response has been overwhelmingly positive: “That’s a great idea!” is the common response I get from Gen Z’ers, the target audience the app would be for.

    So it’s on to phase 2: building a pitch deck for it.

    I considered taking the time to build it myself, but I’m not a natural coder and even with AI assistance my gut tells me it could end up messy. The app is not a simple construct with one or a few pages. I expect it to take a team, and a team means funding. In the past I’ve made a feature film, I built a company from the ground up, so I can build an app…right?

    I thought it would be interesting to document the process here on my blog. Maybe by the end I’ll have a series of posts I can collate and reading them in order will form a path to making an app that someone else can use. It should be interesting at the very least because I’ve never done this before!

    As a side note: I’ve already tripped and fallen off the starting line. The name I wanted to use for the app ended up being a no-go. I landed on it and loved it immediately. It was perfect. Everything clicked on that name. It evoked everything I wanted the app to stand for and it was catchy, simple, and relatable.

    I wanted to call the app Gatsby.

    Gatsby was, of course, a reference to Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Evoked immediately in-mind was Americana and the American Dream, success, wealth, accomplishment. I loved the idea of using an American literary reference.

    A quick email off to a friend of mine who was a patent lawyer resulted in a URL to the U.S. Trademark search, some search filters related specifically to software/games/website. One of the results that came back was not an app, but there was some overlap. After letting my patent lawyer friend know, the response was swift and decisive: “exposure to a trademark infringement suit is high, based on existing registrations. Would suggest ripping the band aid off and unmarrying yourself from Gatsby.” I responded with a few followups hoping I could squeak Gatsby past Federal gatekeepers by changing spelling of it or capitalizing it. His final email response was simply: “Unmarry!!!”

    I have a new name (my brain has already gotten to work “theme-ing” the app based on it) and have moved to the next step: lay it all out in a pitch deck. I’ve learned quickly — with the idea still on the launchpad — that so much goes into an app beyond the code. I’m also glad I had to abandon “Gatsby” before I sunk countless hours into a pitch deck or, worse, actually pitched the app with that name only to not be able to use it later. I’ll share progress updates on here as I go.

    Now on to the next step.

    August 10, 2025

  • A Single Compliment

    I had an idea once for business called Compliment Cards. You could buy a small deck of little cards that had pre-printed compliments on them like “You’re doing a great job, keep going” or “I think you’re really cute.” The concept was to give them to strangers, leave them with a tip at a restaurant, leave them on employee desks, etc.

    I believe that the smallest, unsolicited compliment from someone can change a person’s day — maybe even their life.

    We’re so inundated with negativity between the news, the internet, social media, or even in real life that a simple positive thing is becoming rare. Couple that with younger people being shy in person (just look at the current statistics on young people asking each other out) and you have a whole lot of compliments and positivity not being shared.

    I try every day to give at least one strange a compliment.

    No one is ever sad they received a compliment.

  • Morning Routine

    I truly believe few things will change your life more than having a morning routine. I think every single human being can benefit from a morning routine, but if you want to be successful you must have a rigid process after stepping out of bed.

    Ten years ago I started getting up early. I got up at 6:30am and after a few days my body adjusted and my productivity exploded. So I started getting up at 6am, then 5am, and for the past 10 years I’ve been getting up at 4am.

    This allowed me to work on my fledgling consulting business while having a day job. The early hours I hustled then lifted, showered, ate and went off to work. By the time I punched in for the day job I’d been up for several hours, exercised, and was wired for the day. My coworkers would stagger in five minutes before the shift sipping coffee to wake up and eating greasy breakfast sandwiches. They would hide on the back of the sales floor because it was “too early” and they were still waking up while I greeted everyone that came in.

    I outperformed and outsold them every day.

    My favorite response — and the one I always get — when I tell people I get up at 4am is “Oh my God, what time to do you go to bed??” Getting up at 4am willfully is so alien to people.

    But even more important than productivity to me is starting the day on my terms. The first instinct for everyone when they wake is to grab their phone and check messages or email. If you do this, it’s over. You’ve lost your day. You will now spend the rest of your day in reactionary mode. You’re not the one in control.

    I start the day on my terms and then the day reacts to me. I put off email and messages as long as I can — which, if you get up at 4am, means around 7am — and when I send them out it’s usually before people are up so I get all my correspondence out in one swoop and I can move on to the next thing. If you’re sending emails and messages while getting emails and messages it becomes a never ending loop. I like to say what I need to and move on to something else and pick up the conversation in a few hours.

    Now, the routine part. Getting up early gives you the time to do the routine. The routine ensures productivity and training your brain in the way you want to use it. My productivity increases ten fold easily with a morning routine; by the time I’m running out of steam in the afternoon or my kids are wearing me out, I don’t fret because I’ve already been hyper productive early in the day. Make your routine around things that important to you or challenge you. The best part? You can always add/remove stuff and change it up. Want to try adding something new like meditation or Yoga? Find a spot for it.

    My current daily morning routine:

    1. I mix one scoop of fruit punch flavored AdvoCare Spark into an ice cold glass of water that’s spent the night in the fridge.
    2. Do as many pushups as I can without stopping then immediately splash cold water on my face and neck (wakes me up instantly! No more “slowly waking up” that burns an hour of time)
    3. Write down 10 ideas in a journal (This is hard! But it unlocks my creativity and some really interesting things have come out). I borrowed the idea from James Altucher and loved it.
    4. 15 minutes of non-fiction (I read later in the day too, but I like to read something biographical or inspiring after writing down 10 ideas because by this point my brain is going full bore)
    5. 1 hour of learning (I’m taking courses on Coursera every morning 1 hour a day)
    6. 1 hour of exercise (Lifting weights or walking before the sun’s up)

    This is about 3 hours blocked off every single morning. I start at 4am and by 7am my kids are up and the daily routine takes over. Notice that for those first three hours there’s no email, no messages or phone calls. The day can do whatever it wants to me afterwards but I’ve already conquered it. No matter what happens the rest of the day, I’ve put 3 hours of productivity, creative thinking, learning, and exercise in.

    Want to change your life? Have a morning routine.

    August 8, 2025

  • Specialization is for Insects

    ““A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

    — Robert Heinlein Time Enough for Love

    I love this quote for many reasons. I think primarily because it brings me solace. For whatever reason I grew up thinking you had to choose a career and that was it — the rest of your life was building on the ONE THING. Instead of me buckling down, choosing that ONE THING, and getting on with it, it left me indecisive. What if I changed my mind? What if I wanted to change my mind? What about all the other things I was interested in?

    If you look at my career thus far, I’m scattershot. Looking at my resume it’s tough to discern a story — a path — where an early job led to a promotion or next level up that led to another and on and on. Instead, you get periods where I tried one thing, learned the skills associated, then pivoted to another thing that interested me. And I have endless interests. When someone asks me what I like I take a deep breath first.

    Heinlein’s quote speaks to the need to be multi-faceted as a human being. A diverse set of skills and abilities is also what helps the species (or individual) adapt to changes in the world around them. Embrace learning all sorts of things, even if they seem unrelated. Because the truth is, they are related through you. You’re the connective tissue between them.

    August 7, 2025