Welcome to the 132nd edition

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

Vacations are over... for July! We had a real blast on the Belgian coast! We've enjoyed the sun, the wind, the icy water, as well as (too much!) fresh Belgian beer ❤️. I now feel recharged, and super motivated!

It's now time for me to get back to work and re-open my solopreneurship lab 🎉 🚀

Ok, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

The lab is open again. As I've explained last week, I took some time during my vacation to think about my next steps. I really want to work on my courses, but I also want to make progress on the Obsidian Publisher plugin. I really feel the need for a better publishing approach, and am certain that there's value there for many other content creators.

I've started by taking a look at my stats for the last month. I always find it interesting to see whether my inactivity can be felt in the numbers or not. In this case, everything has remained quite stable, which is good in a sense. I've sold 27 copies of the Obsidian Starter Kit ($809), 7 copies of the PKM Library ($100), and the MRR of this newsletter remained at $32.

The one part I'm disappointed about is the MRR of this newsletter. As I write edition after edition, week after week, I notice how little progress I manage to make. You are now 800+ subscribers, and I've only managed to convince 6 of you (❤️) that my work is worth supporting (i.e., 0.75%). This means that the perceived value of my work is too low, which means that most of you expect something more/different from me. And I need to find out what! If you have a minute or two, please take some time to reply to this mail to tell me why you're not willing to become a paid subscriber; no need for kindness, I just need raw honesty ;-)

This week, I will resume recording my Obsidian Starter Kit Course (i.e., the video course to accompany the Obsidian Starter Kit and its existing user guide. I thought about it a lot during my vacation and have decided to record a single video instead of many short sequences with a complicated outline. My rationale is that it'll take me less time to record, and to edit. Of course, I will probably make some mistakes here and there, but at least I'll make faster progress and will be able to gather feedback more quickly.

Last but not least, I also need to start looking for new freelancing clients (part-time & fully remote). My current contract is about to end, and I have nothing else in sight for now. The only alternative I have in mind is increasing the number of PKM Coaching sessions I organize...

New articles

No new articles this week, but I have multiple drafts to publish:

• One about the concept of continuous note-taking
• One discussing progress and its various forms
• One highlighting the importance of non-goals
• One exploring the concept of inertia and why fighting against it is key to success
• One article about why it's important to keep planting "seeds"

As you can see, there's quite a lot of coming, and my backlog is still a kilometer long 🚀. Don't hesitate to tell me what you would like me to write about!

Quotes of the week

• My overall goal is to get free of being forced to work — Vernon Richards
• The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything

Thinking and learning

Obsidian now has a cool roadmap:

Obsidian Roadmap

We’re chipping away at improvements to Obsidian. Learn about what’s coming next.

•Obsidian

Don’t ask to ask, just ask

A really cool lecture about writing:

On transformation essays:

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

My failure to build a ghostwriting business

So last year I built a one person ghostwriting agency. Ran it for a 6 months, grew it to $10K+ and then shut it down. Here’s why I failed and why you sh…

•Indie Hackers Ayush Chaturvedi

Oh the first 10K...

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-first-10-000-internet-dollars-46317e628f

Discover Profitable Startups & Online Business Ideas - Startups.fyi

Learn how successful founders are building profitable online businesses and making money online with their side-projects.

•🦄 Startups.fyi

Tech

Patterns for Building LLM-based Systems & Products

Evals, RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX, and collecting user feedback.

•eugeneyan.com Eugene Yan

Discover Profitable Startups & Online Business Ideas - Startups.fyi

Learn how successful founders are building profitable online businesses and making money online with their side-projects.

•🦄 Startups.fyi

AI

How to get ChatGPT to stop apologizing:

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

If you've enjoyed this article and want to read more like this, then become a subscriber, check out my Obsidian Starter Kit, the PKM Library, my PKM coaching page, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

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If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.