My Entrepreneurial Journey Forward — A Self-Directed Contract

Aug 31, 2019

Though long in coming, the writing of this piece has been on the wall for a while. My interests are consistent but my track record on delivering things, not so much. So, here is my entrepreneurial contract between me and myself.

This is the type of post that Solo and Weekend Entrepreneurs love to write. We desperately want to get there and if airing things out in the public keeps us honest, accountable, and maybe even benefit from unsolicited feedback, we’ll be all over it.

The Focus, or Better Yet, ‘The Focusing’

You may know me from my data science blog amuanategui.github.io or ViralML.com, or even my youtube channel Youtube.com/mamunate-ViralML. If that’s the case, then a big thanks for following my work over the years. Honestly speaking, I don’t think I ever hit the subscription base I secretly longed for but the friendships, the professional networks, and the consistent constructive conversations have shown me the value in building a niche community no matter the size. So no fixing needed here.

My money-making professional ventures, on the other hand, have been unfocused and haphazardly delivered. It is time to change that as am not getting younger and this seemingly never depleting source of energy won't last forever.

I pen this paragraph ‘The Focusing’. I have had some financial success with online classes and ad-sense and very minor ones on the print publishing front. Yes, some have produced cash but was the inflow worth the hours put in? Maybe on one or two of my Udemy classes, but overall, it’s a big ‘no’.

Going forward, my work will be measured using a financial yardstick and when it doesn’t size up, it will be swiftly abandoned and I’ll move onto the next project.

The Avalanche Effect

I will not only tweet about this journey but blog, make videos and probably publish it in a course or a self-published book. This is the ‘Avalanche Effect’. Always start by producing the smallest unit possible while making sure it fits into a bigger picture. If you document the journey, even failures can make great ‘how-not-to’ guides.

KeepTheTalk.com

My first MVP is KeepTheTalk.com (it should be up in the next few days and hopefully evolve fast). This URL will hold a series of Twitter tools I have been using for a couple of months (and I may port them to other social media platforms only if they prove financially viable on Twitter). So far, I have two tools that I use on a daily basis.

The first one leverages natural language processing (NLP) to find new potential friends on Twitter with aligned interests with my channel. It is an ‘organic’ growth system based on ‘following’, just like we all do naturally.

The second product is a tweet generator that finds relevant content for a community and generates the tweet by finding the most important or informative sentence in that post. This makes for great tweets as they offer insight beyond the title of a piece. The title of a piece is usually a hook, while the most important sentence, the one that summarizes the work the best, is a ‘summative’ sentence. So, a reader in a hurry will still gain some insight by reading this. Here is an example around the topic of “twitter chats”, a topic of interest of mine as I want to include more community tools and Twitter chats may be a fun and easy way to set that up without dealing with backend headaches.

The piece is from Buffer, called “Twitter Chats 101: A Step-by-Step Guide To Hosting or Joining a Twitter Chat”

https://buffer.com/library/twitter-chat-101

And here is one of the release sentences, that give a summative picture of the value of the topic and content.

“Imagine a business networking event — but without a dress code and with a keyboard instead of a bar”

This process offers 3 valuable pieces of information:

1. What is on my radar - the radar of a "Twitter" author

2. The hook and the summative sentence

3. The option to drill deeper if they choose to

Back to the Journey

I will not only document the journey for this MVP (and my continuing parallel efforts around data science education and trading — my two other consuming interests), I will also document the steps and procedures to records the ‘how-to’ so myself and others can reproduce things quickly. I use both my twitter feed (@amunategui) and my blog on ViralML.com to organize this into some form of coherent information, never easy.

Wrap Up

So, this is my contract going forward. This is also an introduction to my style of work and my desperate attempts at formalizing things. It may be pretty or ugly, stay tuned (please do).

Thanks for reading!

Manuel Amunategui, ViralML.com, KeepTheTalk.com