Just do it.

Personal Brand

Got distracted?

Remember what this blog was about?

It’ll take a long time, but over the course of the lifetime of this blog, I’m going to become a millionaire.

— Initial Commit

I got pretty distracted, it looks like.

I’ll keep the reflection for a later post, exactly one year later. Or a bit later than one year later. You get me.

What worked in the past

I remember, something like 4-5 years ago, I was on fire. I was posting stuff everyday. Sadly, it was on Discord, so it’s kind of lost to time now.

I was helping a lot of people out, answering their questions, etc. Basically, I was doing what ChatGPT is doing nowadays: a bunch of research and summarization.

I’ve got plenty of job offers that way, and one person started mentoring me.

… and how I wasted it all

I am not sure exactly what happened. A breakup? Taking drugs? My health decreasing? Onset of ADHD? Starting to travel more? Getting a job and somehow getting comfy with it? Or getting burned out a little? Getting burned out from working on a stupid side project that led to nowhere?

I don’t have a clear timeline. Something happened and I stopped being helpful online; my mentor felt it I think and now he barely speaks to me, which hurts. But I guess I deserved it?

How I am going to get BACK on track

I am on a good streak now, and I feel like I am getting back on track.

1. Posting tutorials

Lately, what has been working is: posting helpful tutorials. I am talking about blog posts.

This is quite easy.

  1. Work on something interesting
  2. Take notes along the way
  3. Make it a helpful blog post

In the age of agentic coding (I bet this won’t age well), it’s a breath of fresh air to have to research a topic manually. It’s impossible to write an article without having “deep” knowledge behind it.

When I talk about research, I basically mean: trying things out and diagnosing them by myself, rather than having Claude Code doing everything (unless I’m pretty sure it’s something stupid and it’s just a chore to debug a build error, for example).

2. Creating a personal website

I also created a personal website and plan on posting there. Don’t worry, I’ll keep posting here also. I have a Beeminder goal that forces me to do it anyway.

I think that’s what’s important is to build a personal brand. Having a bunch of content to my name, I bet, is really good to find potential customers. It helps to appear on search engines. I just have to write it, and it’s going to appear in search engines or AI chats at some point (hopefully).

3. Open-source

I am creating small open-source projects. Nothing complicated, but stuff that was missing and could be helpful to others.

Having a lot of open-source projects also signals something to people.

I am sending links to the above when it’s appropriate in online discussions. Well, sometimes even when it’s not appropriate. I added it to my bio, and I hope that people will look at it whenever they see an interesting message from me online.

Wrapping up

I hope that this will help get customers.

If it doesn’t, that’s fine.

It makes me happy to write articles and open-source projects. It also improves my thinking and writing skills. The only downside is that I am a bit less focused on work. But my focus was shot anyway… So I am not sure if it’s really a downside.