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In This Issue
The shift. Seven discovery calls told me advisory wasn’t how I help the most people. Seed & Society® is going all in as an education and media company.
The lesson. Nothing real gets decided in a vacuum, and nothing big gets built on an island, not even the famous solo founders. Solo with A.I. gets you to six figures, but a team, contractors, or partners get you past it, especially if you want a life.
Plus $300K+ in opportunities on the table. A nontechnical OpenAI role, a TEDx stage, and a $4,250 grant.
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Over the last couple of weeks I sat down and did seven discovery calls. Real conversations with the people I’m building for. The founder trying to get out of their own way, and the professional trying to become the one on their team who actually knows how to use this.
I went in thinking I already knew the answer. I was sure what people needed from me was advisory. Audits, custom builds, done with them. So I asked, and then I did the harder thing, which is I actually listened.
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Seven conversations. The same fears, the same desires, the same questions in every one. When it repeats like that, that’s the answer.
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Now, would most of them love for me to just do it for them? Of course. Almost everyone would, and that’s not a knock on anyone, it’s human nature. But here’s what those seven conversations made obvious. The fears, the questions, the gaps were the same ones, over and over.
So here it is. I’m winding down custom advisory. No more audits, no more one-at-a-time builds. Not because it isn’t wanted, but because doing it for one person at a time, on my calendar, was never going to scale, and it isn’t how I reach the most people.
When the same needs keep surfacing, teaching people to build, define, and design their own context reaches far more of them than doing it for a few ever could. That’s how A.I. opens up for you, and how you make what you actually need without waiting on me.
Seed & Society® is going all in as what it’s been becoming anyway: an education and media company. The teaching, the podcast, the book, and group workshops this fall tied to the Context Training™ book. Same people I’ve always served, professionals and businesses both, reached through teaching instead of custom delivery.
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When I teach you to train your own context, you don’t need me in the room. You build the thing yourself, and the next one too.
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This fall I’ll be on stages, running workshops and webinars, and sitting for podcast interviews. Every one of those is another room full of the people I serve, which means every one is more of what those seven calls just gave me: the truth about what people need, straight from them. And I mean rooms almost literally, because the math on that gets wild once you run it.
The room you’re actually speaking to
Say 300 people see your post, and you think, that’s nothing, only seventeen likes. Now picture those 300 people in one room. That’s a packed workshop. And seventeen of them cared enough to walk up and tell you it was good. You’d never call that a bad night. Get that same post in front of 4,000 people and you’ve filled a conference hall. Reach 100,000 in a month and you’ve filled a big arena five times over, all from your kitchen table.
Watch time is the one that stops me cold. Say a video gets 4,000 hours of people watching it. That’s the least a site like YouTube wants before it starts paying you. Four thousand hours is two years of someone showing up to a full-time job, except the whole job was watching you.
Now watch it grow. Ten times that is 40,000 hours, one person watching day and night, without stopping, for four and a half years. Ten times more is 400,000 hours, longer than most people work in their whole life, and it comes to you one hour at a time. You couldn’t shake that many hands in ten lifetimes on a stage. It’s huge, and nobody feels it, because on the screen it still looks like a small number going up.
To reach that many people one at a time, in meetings on my calendar, I’d need most of my working life. That’s the part people miss when they shrug at a number on a screen. The screen makes a stadium look small. It’s not. Which brings me to the only strategy I trust now.
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Nothing real gets built in a vacuum
I used to think the point of A.I. employees was that eventually you’d never need anyone. Automate enough, and it’s just you and the machines. I was wrong, and the last few weeks handed me the evidence twice.
The first half of the mistake is deciding alone. You decide, on your own, what your customers, your audience, or your leadership needs, then you go build it in a room by yourself. A founder designs the offer nobody asked for. A professional pours a year into the thing leadership never rewards.
The fix costs nothing. Have real conversations with the people you serve, ask what they’re afraid of, what they want, what they’ve already tried. Listen for the repeats, because one person’s opinion is a data point, and the same thing said five different ways is the pattern worth building for.
Then hand their exact words to your A.I. next to whatever you were about to build and ask it to find the patterns you’re too close to see. That’s context training pointed at your people instead of your calendar. Seven conversations just rearranged my whole business.
The second half is executing alone, and here’s where I changed my mind, so I’ll say it clearly. Your A.I. employees can absolutely run a five or six-figure business with you as the only human, and I stand behind that completely. Get good with A.I. on the technical side and I won’t even stop there. One person can start something bigger today than ever before.
But here’s the part the internet leaves out. The one-person companies everyone points to were never really one person. Look closely and you find the work that needs a license went to licensed pros. The legal and safety side ran on another company’s system. Other businesses handled the actual customers.
One person on paper. In real life, a whole web of other people doing the parts the founder couldn’t. So let me call it what it is: no one is doing this alone. Everyone leans on someone else, whether that’s contractors, partners, other businesses that fit with yours, or a team of your own.
You are not on an island. And you really are not if you want any free time, or a life.
Here’s what A.I. does change about all of it. The work stops being the manual doing and becomes review and judgment, so a small, A.I.-native crew, plus the partners and services you lean on, now does what used to take a whole company. I’m not talking about a thousand-person org with layers and departments, that’s a different conversation.
I’m talking about lean, able to turn on a dime, a speedboat instead of a cruise ship. That’s how you get more money and more time at once, because the weight gets carried, and not all by you.
A.I. changed how many people the work takes. It never changed whether people are part of it. Decide with the people you serve. Build with a few people rowing in your direction.
| Grants & Other Opportunities |
A $300K A.I. role, a TEDx stage, and a $4,250 grant
Three rooms this week where the whole point is getting close to the people you serve. A six-figure job built on adoption and feedback, a stage that makes you sharpen one idea for a live audience, and a grant for owners betting on what their market told them.
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Customer Learning Program Lead, OpenAI
What: Leading how OpenAI’s customers learn to actually use A.I. well · Pay: $266,000 to $300,000, plus equity · Where: San Francisco, hybrid · For: 10+ years in customer education, adoption, or digital learning, no engineering required
This is the clearest picture I’ve seen of where nontechnical A.I. careers are going. The job is helping people use the technology with confidence, turning complicated ideas into learning they can actually follow, and, in their own words, using customer evidence to decide what to build next. That last part is this entire issue. It’s Context Training™ with a salary attached, and it never asks you to write a line of code.
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TEDx Doncaster A.I. Salon Speaker Application
What: A TEDx talk for the A.I. Salon, theme “Undermined: From Coal to Code to A.I.” · Cost: Free · Deadline: None posted, open now · For: Anyone with an original idea about transformation, technology, creativity, or humanity
The application asks for a draft script or detailed outline, up to 1,400 words, and they’re clear that previous speaking experience isn’t required. So the bar isn’t your resume, it’s the idea and whether you can explain why it changes what the audience understands. Nothing sharpens an idea like knowing you’ll have to defend it on a stage.
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Galaxy Grant, Hidden Star
What: A grant for women and minority business owners, new, experienced, or aspiring · Amount: $4,250 current award · Cost: Free, about a 30-second form · For: Women and minority owners in the US, including people still planning a business
This is about as low-friction as a grant gets. It comes from Hidden Star, a nonprofit that has given out more than $420,000 since 2016, and the application is a short form, no essay and no fee. They award on rolling cycles, so you can enter now. And if you’ve been sitting on an idea you never started, aspiring owners qualify too.
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| More Money, Time, & Options |
This Week on the Podcast
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S3 E2: I Almost Built My A.I. Employees an Office
I almost gave my A.I. employees titles, handoffs, and approvals, a whole office, before I stopped and asked why. On telling the difference between a process you actually need and one you’re copying out of habit. Your old workflow is evidence, not law.
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S3 E3: I Wrote a Book With A.I. and I’m Still the Author
I wrote a book with A.I. right beside me, and I’m still fully the author. Those two things don’t cancel out. Where the line sits between the raw material only you can bring and the drafting the tool helps with, and how context training keeps your voice at the center of the work.
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See all of Season 3 and follow the show →
Love the show? Rate it on Apple or Spotify, then grab your free Six-Figure Month Calculator (instructions included).
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🛠️ One Thing To Do Today: ask for useful feedback
Send this to three people who are closest to the work you’re building or improving:
“I’m improving [the offer, workshop, process, or work product]. You don’t need to be nice about it. What is the first thing that feels unclear, incomplete, or harder than it should be? What would make this genuinely more useful to you?”
Don’t explain or defend it when they answer. Save their exact words. Give those responses to your A.I. beside the current version and ask it to identify the repeated patterns, and recommend the changes that it can make to address them virtually immediately.
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