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  • Book review: Scale at speed

    Scale at Speed book cover

    This is a review of the book “Scale at Speed” written by Felix Velarde. This review is unpaid, and has no affiliate links.

    This book isn’t for me. And I’ll explain why.

    Recently I was at my local library and I was really surprised as to how well stocked its business books section was. Nearly every book on their shelf they had I wanted to read. Marketing books, accounting books, books on advertising strategy, scale ups, start-ups. The works. I ended up checking out 4 books, “The 10X rule”, “Unreasonable hospitality”, “IdeaFlow” and “Scale at speed”.

    Business books from local libraries can be really hit or miss. Sometimes you’ll get something fairly recent (by which I mean within the last 5 years) or more often than not, you’ll get books that are so old and out of date that whilst the principles are ok, the tactics and strategies just seem to fall flat.

    Scale at speed interested me because often at events I attend or watch, they’ll always be someone who is promoting themselves to work for scale-ups, or growth minded businesses. Once, I just want someone to say – this is what scale means, this is what growth means, what the materials you need are, and this is how you do it. I don’t want you to hide it away behind a four figure, five figure, six figure consultancy. As Alex Hormonzi says “give away the secrets, sell the implementation”

    I knew within 10-15 pages of Felix’s book Scale at Speed that this wasn’t for me. Written in 2023, the book takes an aggressive position on how to scale your business, or as Felix says it; “to triple the size of your business and build a superstar team” by setting a big audacious goal and creating a strategy around 5 areas, People, Customers, Sales and Marketing, Processes and Corporate and Financial.

    The book is clearly for corporate businesses, or start-ups, and written with the view that you already have a business, that its trading, and you have the capability, ability, resources to hire a team, and have this already humming; and sets what it calls a realistic goal of achieving 3X growth over a 3 year timeframe, and gives an example around £2 million profit (EBIT), where your gross profit needs to be £100 million.

    I don’t know about you, but these kind of numbers and size just isn’t who or what I want to have. There’s nothing wrong with being super ambitious, but in the post-COVID arena, and we are close to recession (if we aren’t in one already), and given recent growth trends in distributed nomadic workforce, AI, no code tools; I just feel that the book is written out of step of what is happening currently, and it seems to be for an audience I’m not just not part of.

    To his credit Felix does mention page 19 that “implementing it requires significant resources – and it’s extraordinary complex. To understand, implement and cascade all of its processes and tools is out of the reach of most small or medium sized businesses”.

    And this is the crux. As previously mentioned, I feel the book isn’t written for solo, micro, or any business smaller than the book’s primary target market: corporates, start-ups and already established businesses.

    To help understand the strategem, Felix presents a “2Y3X framework:. Though, I still don’t quite know what it stands for, the book doesn’t tell you. Not within the intro (I read the first 30 pages to double check), and certainly not in the chapter dedicated to 2Y3X.

    At first I thought I thought the 2Y meant two years, and the 3X is three times return/growth, but I’m not so sure. On page 14 it says it’s “a 3 year horizon is useful… long enough that you can get several things done between now and then”. So if 2Y doesn’t mean 2 years, what does the Y stand for? It took a Youtube video to work it out. Apparently It does mean 2 years, but later on in the video they say 3 years? Maybe it is 2 years? Who knows. The fact I had to dig it out, that it isn’t in the introduction, or in the dedicated chapter, or even on the back cover frustrated me.

    The starting block is to work from an audacious goal, and setting a strategy over 3 years, fixing the workflow, processes score cards (for analytics), building a team, how you motivate them, and scaling clients, and going for growth.

    Packed with some good illustrations, and explanations, I found the book to be quite readable – even if I wasn’t the audience.

    On page 20 it illustrates the framework over 3 years where people, customers, sales and marketing, processes, corporation and financials are plotted over a 3 year period, broken down into sections, and on page 32 it gives you a breakdown where:

    Average net profit over 3 years (400K) x 4 (multiple) = 1.6M; illustrated in a table below.

    2xEBITMultipleValue
    Year 1400K41.6M
    Year 2800K64.8M
    3X
    Table: Illustrating the 3x value of a business taken from the book “Scale at speed”

    The goal, task being asked is aggressive, way too big. The size of the ship you need, the team, the processes; everything is out of my league.

    There are some good take-aways, such as development of a team, your company’s core values, how to hire a-players, how to use a research, prototype, implement loop, a scorecard breakdown of customer service from The Drum (a website listing creative agencies), sales, KPIs and other tools.

    There are things the book doesn’t address.

    Scaling at speed, means your costs also scale. It never really addresses this. To move your ship this big that fast will need a team, technology and a whole lot of resources. That means payroll and your costs increase.

    It also assumes the golden path. There is no planning for a rainy day. Maybe that’s the intention with such a growth strategy.

    The questions I kept asking myself when reading this book were: What if you don’t want this big machine, what if you don’t want a 100-fold staff, what if you want to micro everything, make small bets? What if you just want a lifestyle business? What if you want an Internet business that generates passive income (incidentally I think passive income businesses are more a myth than reality)?

    There were also times reading the book that made me wonder whether the book was authored pre-COVID? The post-COVID trends of working from home, people wanting to start their own thing at home, distributing their workload to VAs or other people, the atomisation and democratisation of small-bet micro businesses, and the emergent growth trend of AI, no-code tools just don’t seem to be addressed at all.

    Overall, the book is well written, and has a good pace; at just over 200 pages long it isn’t too long; and whilst the audience for the book is clearly for corporates, start-ups and established SME’s, ultimately I felt the book just isn’t for me.

    Overall: 4/10.

  • My time as Innovation Coach

    Last week marked the last day of my time as innovation coach for the University of Sunderland. Working with the Entrepreneurial Development Team, my role was to help create co-curricular and extra curricular projects for students to help inspire and encourage students to consider entrepreneurship and starting their own business as part of their career path.

    Startup for good
    Start-up for Good was one of the projects I delivered as Innovation coach

    The role was varied and very interesting.

    For example, I worked with students looking to start their own business, and coached them to consider their business needs and where to start. This I found wonderfully rewarding. There were some occasions where I directly helped students clarify needs, but also helped them understand what to do next.

    I also got to design workshops, sprints to be delivered at the classroom level. I worked on early stage co-curricular delivery projects where I designed and used activities to help the students explore innovation, design thinking on their course work.

    Your the boss activity worksheets
    Example of: Your the boss activity worksheets

    I also designed a small game called “Your the boss” where students worked through a series of worksheets on their business idea, and gave them coins to spend on resources, people; and challenged them on what is money coming in, and what is money going out.

    In summary

    Overall, my time as Innovation coach was very rewarding. I got to work with different students and helped impact some into thinking about their next steps in their career.

  • User stories: Do users really care about signing in?

    When crafting user stories to document what tasks or Jobs to be done a user might be doing in a process or website or app, typically you may see a story similar to this:

    As a {user} I want to sign in so that {goal}

    Sometimes I’ve seen user stories where it just says a user wants to sign in without a goal context.

    My question here is — do users really care about signing in? Why are they signing in at all?

    I’ve often thought that signing in seems like a system or process problem, or even a business problem, not a user one.

    The user story should focus on the job at hand, or goal; not how to use an app.

    But what if I want, or need to put this information in?

    Then, the common daily tasks should be grouped together where possible; however such processes should not be higher in priority than key customer goals. Booking a ticket is far more important than signing in. Finding a hotel near the train station is more important than signing in.

    Prioritise your user stories by the users’ goals, not the system, business needs; and ask yourself – why is the user signing in in the first place?

  • Thoughts on Colonial: Europe’s Empires Overseas

    Thoughts on Colonial: Europe’s Empires Overseas

    Recently I played Colonial: Europe’s Empires Overseas (2011), a game I’ve played multiple times over the years – and I wanted to write some thoughts on how the game could be improved.

    I won’t go through all the rules or how to play, there’s many videos and rules online covering this.

    In the game players pre-program their cards in a row of 5, executing each card one by one resolving one action per card. These cards effect game state in several ways, all to aid the player to race to be the first to get 10 prestige.

    Over the years, my friends and I have dabbled around with several ideas on how to make the game a bit more streamlined, with additional decision space.

    These are some thoughts on possible improvements

    Make the rebel card more powerful

    The Rebel card adds unrest to a territory, or can spark a rebellion or remove a mission. However, in my multiple plays of the game I’ve often felt the rebel is quite weak. Firstly, you need multiple players to add rebels to make playing rebellion worthwhile, secondly multiple players might need to execute a rebellion.

    I’ve thought, what if you could pay coins equal to add more unrest into an area, or what if you could add rebels AND spark a rebellion in the area in the same turn where the consequence is you go down on the diplomacy track and no other player that round can move your goods via the Merchant card.

    I like the idea you are fermenting insurrection; I just wish it was more powerful.

    Make the ambassador actually worth playing

    The Ambassador card is perhaps the weakest card in the game, as it really doesn’t do anything other than move any player up one space on the diplomacy track and remove unrest.

    What if the Ambassador allowed you to move goods to market from locations where you have discs (presence) but you are limited by your logistics track.

    What if the Ambassador allowed you to trade goods from the market, limited by the economy track only.

    What if the Ambassador used missions in an interesting way.

    The navy track should connect to game state

    The navy track only allows you to build more naval units; but it doesn’t affect anything during game play.

    What if the navy track could be linked to the idea of “gunboat diplomacy” in some way?

    What if the navy track could connect with your seafaring or logistics in some way?

    Pirates – an overhead we don’t need?

    During the game, players may need to do a pirate check if players are moving goods from the booming city whilst it has an unrest token there. Its fiddly and hard to remember. Having said that, pirates are painful because they can sink merchant ships.

    What if it was a bit clearer about pirates, or what if players attracted pirates which they put into their merchant fleet and they must deal with pirates either by paying them off, or fighting them with their navy, or they use dice to see how many goods they can move through

    There is almost no reason to say no to letting a rival shipping your goods via the Merchant card

    During the game a player may play the Merchant card. This ships goods to market. You can ask rivals, and if they say yes they will get paid immediately; and the shipper gets multiple goods to the market.

    However, there is no reason to say no. Early on you want the money, so obviously you are going to say yes. And later on you are just giving rivals money, effectively king-making them, so you should say no; although players rarely do – because, money!

    So, what if there WAS a reason to say no?

    Perhaps its a diplomatic reason?

    You could tie Merchant to the diplomacy track, that is to say, you can only ship goods of rivals if they are at the same level (or higher) in diplomacy.

    Another idea is you can only ship a certain amount of rival’s goods by looking at your current Logistics level.

    Whilst the above two are limiters, they don’t a reason to say no to a rival. If there was, that would be an interesting decision.

    Strangely, whilst there is no reason to say no to Merchant, there is more incentive to say no to the Trader action; as you can play it yourself and its easier to do because its linked directly to your economy + native power strength.

    Do we even need dice to explore?

    This question has come up before in my plays. Yes its fun to roll dice to see success or fails, but you can fail – and badly and you’ve wasted your action.

    Players have asked – do we even need dice. Could the sea faring limit your exploration in locations based upon the integer. For example, 0 is Africa, 1 is Middle east and India, 2 is India, Indonesia, China 3 is Australia, Americas.

    Players could use treasury to explore.

    Euro-ify the end-game scoring

    The current end game trigger is immediate win when a player hits 10 prestige. But what if you could make it about a score, and that is what is why you to win, and the 10 prestige is simply a trigger for end game.

    Options could be that everything at end game state is scored, how many merchants you have, your navy units, your economy, your 10 prestige, the tech levels, whether you have the booming city in your territory, how many flags you have made, where you are in the diplomacy track, etc.

    I do like this idea, but it needs a consistent way to measure the value of items in the game.

    Summary and other thoughts

    Colonial is a game that has me on two sides, yes; many people do not like the hit the weakest player (Munchkin style), and yes – if players consistently help the winner by always saying yes to trades and merchants, it can make the game too easy.

    What I like about Colonial is the ability to plan your moves, and with enough experience, know what rivals are going to do and the sequence they are likely to do it. This part of the game, the meta play, is really fascinating to me. I like planning on a rival will play Explore so I can Viceroy and piggy back on their exploration. Couple this with on-table discussion and add the pressure of the end game trigger, the game just hits another level.

    There are things I don’t like sure, but I do think Colonial is worth playing – but it needs the right number of players (5 or 6) and is worth playing at least once.

  • My favorite 3 board games of 2022

    In 2022, I was able to play a number of designer, strategy games and I have selected the following three games as my favourites.

    1. Findorff

    Findorff board game box

    BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360617/findorff

    Designer: Friedemann Friese

    What is the game about?

    Set in Findorff, Germany, the game is essentially a race engine builder game where players build brick, rail and peat factories so that they can eventually buy cards from their hand, which requires brick, rail or money.

    Players race against time, as action’s may result in rails being placed onto the board, which is the game’s internal timer; and it can race up on you very quickly.

    Using a personal player rondel-like mechanic, players select 1 action; and perform said action depending on how many times they can execute the action.

    At the end of the game, players score up their cards constructed, materials collected in their storehouse and remaining money to get an end-game victory point score.

    What I like about the game?

    The pace. Its an incredibly fast game. You can easily play this in 45-60mins, if not sooner (dependent upon players). As soon as you do your action, it’s your go again!

    I also like that you can quickly pivot, but you must be careful as buildings can easily become very expensive, very quickly.

    It’s also very easy for new players to pick up and play. Except for some cards where its not immediately clear how they work, the rest of the cards are pretty straight forward to understand.

    Things I did not like:

    All cards in the game are worth 50VP each, and it seems like not all cards are balanced. Some cards are very cheap to build, whilst others require multiple resources. There is a card that cannot be built until card number 8 is built; and the card number 25 has to be built/purchased multiple times.

    The tiles that represent constructed buildings, placing them on the board, do nothing in the game. There are some outliers, and 99% of the building tiles have no game effect. Also, there is no logical numerical ordering in the way they are placed on the board. I wish the UX of the placement of numbers was more logical, rather than having players having to find them.

    Other than producing money and consuming peat, houses do nothing in the game. There is a weird rule where it states you place houses on house spots on the board, until that is when they are all full; then it says just place them anywhere — where they sit on the board has no effect; it literally does not matter where the house is. We play with the rule you just group them in front of you.

    There isn’t much variability in each game. You get about 25 cards in the game, and you see pretty much every card in every game.

    The board is very big, and a majority of it is not used.

    Things I would improve:

    The game really needs more cards, more variability

    I would have liked to have seen the cards grouped or staggered. So, some cards would be 15VP, 35VP and 50VP; where there are more 15VP and 35VP cards.

    I would have liked to have seen some strategic decision about where you place houses on the map. Put them in the North for more peat consumption, put them in the South to sell bricks for money; etc.

    Overall, I really like Findroff; it’s very fast, easy to play. I just wish there was more in it.

    —

    2. Tiletum

    Tiletum board game box

    BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/351913/tiletum

    Designers: Simone Luciani, Daniele Tascini

    What is the game about?

    Set in Tiletum, Europe around the middle ages (I believe), players draft dice to take actions that relate to taking contracts, resources, moving their merchant wagon, moving their architect, building cathedrals and other sundry actions.

    Why do I like it?

    The game is very interesting, players draft dice for their colour and pip value; the colour relating to a resource, and the pip value is the amount of resources you get. Then, players get a number of actions which is the inverse number of the pip value.

    So, for example; if you took a 6 value die, you would get 1 action.

    In addition, there are lots of little combo’s players can trigger.

    You can make long-term, short-term plans; however, you may get scuppered if the die you wanted has been taken.

    What I don’t like about it?

    The game may take a long time to play with 4 players.

    It’s been stated on the BGG forums that the first player has a big advantage. I haven’t noticed it yet, but I can understand why its been stated.

    It’s been stated on the BGG forums that advancing up the King track can be very powerful, and if you then further combine this with contract actions; then your position cannot be competed against — however, I haven’t noticed this.

    Things I would improve:

    Player’s get powers, like the designer’s previous game Voyages of Marco Polo

    Player’s get different starting powers and positions; there is a mini expansion that does this – and changes the way you play the game.

    Perhaps more maps.

    Overall, having played Tiletum four times now, I’ve really enjoyed the game.

    —

    3. Terracotta army

    Terracotta army board game box

    BGG: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/350458/terracotta-army

    Designer: Przemysław Fornal, Adam Kwapiński

    What is the game about?

    Players try to construct the famous Terracotta army statues and place them within the tomb in such a way that they score victory points.

    Players use a 3-layered wheel in a rondel like display to take up to 3 actions; and use the benefits and outputs of an action to construct statues, position them in the tomb and try to score victory points or meet conditions to score end game goals.

    What I liked about it?

    It is very tight, and also focused specifically on constructing the statues; there isn’t any side game – and so, you can focus your attention on long-term strategies about what resources, actions you need to take and try to mitigate against rivals taking and blocking actions you wanted.

    What I didn’t like about it?

    During the game, players can rotate one of the wheels one space. This change of state can really hurt the player in last turn order position.

    Further, the amount of downtime, and AP can be very long. Having only played it at 2 players, I cannot imagine what the AP is like in a four player game. I found it to be very painful.

    What can be improved?

    I’m not sure. I found the game to be very interesting. There are some minor actions that could be better. For example, there is only 2 ways to get a skill token. I believe that there should be a third, which is perhaps quite expensive; but is available to all players.

    Overall, I enjoyed the game; though the AP and downtime may be very frustrating for others.

  • A few days with Go

    This week I have been dabbling into the foundations of the Go programming language. I’ve been hearing a lot about it, and decided that I wanted to do the absolute foundations, and not try to jump straight to building the next killer app.

    I’ve been following the online Go lang book and one or two basic introductions to the language from Youtube videos.

    My main motivation for learning the basics of Go was because I felt I needed to get back into programming, having not done it commercially for a number of months.

    I have done some basics, like learning how to do variables, for-loops, basic structs, functions, outputting to the terminal. I have yet to learn how to create tests, and I’m still uncertain what I will use it for.

    My initial thoughts on the language are that its reasonably okay to learn, it isn’t as straight forward as it likes to advertise itself with.

    I still prefer Swift.

    Yes, they are designed to do different things, Go is like an updated C and is more concerned with the compiled high-level programming side; the kind of things you might expect from desktop or more critical infrastructure; whereas Swift is aimed at getting developers into making mobile apps.

    They solve different problems.

    So why learn it? I wanted to give it a go, and I’ve been hearing a lot about it from forums, Youtube videos and I want to show that I am constantly learning, even if it just doing introductory steps.

    Whilst I do not consider myself an expert in all things Go; it is something I will keep a watch on, and will try to continue to do little bits to learn it.

  • 7 ideas for making YouTube better

    Over the past decade YouTube, the biggest video sharing website, has seen an explosion of content creators and regularly attracts millions, if not billions, of views across the world.

    For creators YouTube seems to have completely replaced blogging, and is fast becoming the first thing people use for solving problems; video communicates way more than a blog could – in addition, it connects an audience to a specific speaker, further consummating the creators identity into a brand.

    Whether it’s how to make a curry, fix a broken appliance, learning how to do code, or doing any other task, Youtube has changed the way that brands and content creators think about their content strategy.

    I decided to speculate on 7 ideas that could make Youtube even better in the future:

    1. Shops / Commerce : I could very well imagine an ecosphere where creators have their own shop, e-commerce platform inside their YouTube channel
    2. Battery life – One of the big challenges I see is that on Google Chrome, video playback and delivery consumes a lot of battery life on laptops and mobiles; it’d be cool to see if improvements browser could help with speed and energy demands
    3. Edit your Algorithm – I can imagine seeing the same content over and over again can be frustrating, or seeing content you would like to see more of; thus, a way to edit your algorithm to promote content or filter it to your needs; improving discovery tools would make it easier for users to find new channels and videos that align with their interests and viewing habits.
    4. Improved comment moderation – One of the biggest issues on YouTube is spoof accounts, bots, and clones of accounts trying to steal content. I would like to see better comment moderation tools to reduce spam, abuse in the comments section and have better way to alert users to spoof accounts publishing comments to harmful websites; this would make it a more positive and engaging experience for users.
    5. Better accessibility features – Improved accessibility features would make YouTube more accessible to users with disabilities; this could be co-created at scale with users with disabilities, charities and other, similar organisations.
    6. Copyright enforcement – Improving copyright enforcement would help to protect creators and rights holders; allow users to escalate. In addition, mitigation against those users seeking to weaponise copyright strikes for their own ends.
    7. Greater transparency and accountability – Greater transparency and accountability from YouTube regarding content moderation, demonetisation, and other policies would help build trust with users and creators alike.

  • Why 2023 is the year of AI

    It’s official. 2023 is the year of AI. ChatGPT, Bard, Autopilot, and others have changed the game of content, writing, coding, graphic artwork, research, and more; and is speculated to have an impact on jobs. Indeed, the ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quit Google due to its possible impacts.

    “According to Next Move Strategy Consulting the market for artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to show strong growth in the coming decade. Its value of nearly 100 billion U.S. dollars is expected to grow twenty-fold by 2030, up to nearly two trillion U.S. dollars”

    Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365145/artificial-intelligence-market-size/

    Having used only the free version of ChatGPT myself, I’ve found the tools to be very useful in researching ideas, writing and it certainly has uses. Bard, although I’ve heard it isn’t as restrictive as ChatGPT, I found to be quite woeful in its accuracy.

    For example, I was undertaking research about the early railway development in the North East of England and wanted some information about newspaper headlines and consulted Bard; it told me that was there no newspapers published in that time, but I knew that they did. When I further enquired about the actual newspaper and when it was first published; Bard told me, the result of which completely contradicted what it said in a previous answer!

    The net result of this is that results, should be checked. You may wish it to consolidate academic research and summarise the reading, but you should check that its not only reading the correct papers, but that its actually making a summarised assessment.

    Inaccuracies, false data, mis-information, algorithms are perhaps the least of the issue; the impact it is already having on jobs will no doubt continue for the years to come.

    Some organisations may try to ban the bots, crawlers or signatures from such programs, and there may be other tools that try to identify whether an item is AI or not; thus, it will be interesting in the years to come whether AI will be “regulated”, though what that term actually means in real-terms is anyone’s guess.

    I do think new economies will be created out of AI. I’m also interested to see what, if any, push back from consumers will be – will they reject artwork created by AI, will they care? Will they pick and choose companies that have human interaction, people at the helm; or will they always pick cost?

  • Review: John Wick 4

    Keanu Reeves in John Wick 4

    I saw John Wick 4 about a month ago and hadn’t had a chance to do a review of the movie, but I thought I’d give my thoughts about the movie.

    Heralding the fourth in the series, John Wick 4 see’s the return of Keanu Reeves into the world of the “High table” seeking revenge whilst an arrogant aristocrat high ranking member attempts to find and kill him in a high octane action movie; and probably the only movie I will see this year.

    The movie has other action stars whom I recognised from other action movies, notably Hiroyuki Sanada, Donnie Yen, Scott Adkins and others; the later, Adkins with his character Killa pretty much stole the middle part of the movie and perhaps remained the most memorable part of the movie.

    Yen, and impressed me with his ability to move; even at almost 60 years old seems to still move so elegantly on screen.

    The movie has a lot of action sequences, some short; some very long – each very impressive; the three main highlights were the fight sequence around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the top-down sequence echoing the video game Hotline Miami and the initial fight with Donnie Yen.

    The things I liked, were the characters, the overall redemption storyline; both Yen and Adkins’ characters stole the show for me.

    The things I didn’t quite like about the movie were that the idea of the bulletproof suit seems comic bookey, and it isn’t introduced or explained until later on in the movie. I believe the suit’s bulletproof nature was introduced in an earlier movie, but if you hadn’t seen any of the John Wick movies before you’ll not understand why point blank shots seem to do nothing.

    There were other contrivances similar to this, but I won’t expand on them too much; as I did enjoy the movie.

    One missed opportunity I saw was during the sequence where Wick is climbing the stairs towards the end of the movie, I felt there was a perfect opportunity for a small nod to John Woo’s 1992 movie “Hard Boiled” by having Wick slide down the metal bannister on the stairs; sadly, this doesn’t happen.

    The end sequence was okay; a pistols at dawn shoot out between Wick and Caine (Yen’s character); although I would have preferred a proper fight sequence. The reason I believe this was done was to tell the wider story of how both Wick and Caine were both seeking redemption, release from the grips of the “High table”.

    Overall, I enjoyed the movie — it’s not clear where it goes from here; and I’m not really sure if I want to watch spin off movies, and given nearly every other action movie seems to now be a John Wick clone, I’m hoping that the next big action series does and brings something new, fresh and different to action cinema.

    Overall: 7/10

  • Latest Updates and what’s happening next

    I haven’t written a blog article in many months, and I wanted to give some outline of what my latest update and changes will be happening this year.

    Goals

    • Create a writing schedule of posting 3 articles a week
    • Move hosting and content to a no code solution by September this year
    • Increase the quality of content created, possibly closing or moving blog content elsewhere.
    • Create digital products that leverage my own expertise, research and learning.

    I’ve been investigating various no code solutions for hosting content, for three main reasons:

    1. Security and maintenance
    2. On-going hosting costs, including SSL costs
    3. I only want to focus on writing content, not managing the site

    One of the things that attracts me to no code solutions is that they are very easy to manage, you don’t have the headache of security issues that seems to plague tools like WordPress and finally, I just want to focus on writing; managing the site just isn’t fun.

    I want to focus my attention on my learnings and expertise when it comes to design thinking.

    This will require me to archive this site when the time is right.

    Thanks now.