I Have Two Weeks to Build Something and No Idea What I'm Doing (Yet)

Turns out leaving your job involves more interviews than I expected. And none are with HR.

Welcome to day 78 of this wild public experiment: walking the path to leave my corporate job. And, as it’s Tuesday, that also means career coaching day with AI 🤖

🎯 April Goals Reminder (details here)

Theme: Product-led experiments to test value
Measure: Time spent creating + 1 prototype tested

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When I started my AI career coaching session today, I opened with a confession:
It’s mid-April and I’ve made exactly zero progress on my experiments.

Apparently, I took last month’s lesson about spending more time offline a little too seriously.

I also said: I have so many ideas, I don’t know where to start. So today’s session was about prioritization: figuring out which idea to prototype and test this month.
I have just two weeks to go from “idea” to “designed and tested.” But before I let that overwhelm me, I reminded myself: I’ve done this before in a weekend.

(Didn’t work. Still overwhelmed. Anyway…)

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Here’s the idea dump I brought to my coach:

Audience Building & Writing Reach

• Start writing Instagram threads

• Write on my product/leadership newsletter

• Find a writing course to meet like-minded people

Small Digital Products or Services

• Create a guide on MVPing your life

• Guide on how to coach people (for leaders)

• Guide on how to give feedback

• Guide on financial freedom & planning

Small Business Ideas

• Optimize subscription flows for media companies

• Launch a print + digital magazine for writers

• Create a career coach AI bot

Physical Products

• Launch a shop for vegetable leather notebook covers

• Relaunch the Letters Club

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Then my coach asked me to rate each idea across four dimensions:
ease, excitement, signal (is there interest?), and alignment (with my values + the Slow Ink Society mission).

After going through the exercise, the two clearest wins were:

✅ Start writing Instagram threads
✅ Find a writing course to join

Easy to do. Aligned. Energizing.
But… it feels a bit like cheating.

It doesn’t really count as prototyping a big idea, does it?

Sure, those things help grow my audience and spark energy. But the whole point of starting this project, back in January, was to challenge myself, to test exit paths, to move faster than fear.

So even if it scares me a little (okay, a lot), I proposed a second goal to my coach:
Pick one of the startup ideas and build a real prototype. This month.

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Here’s the plan:

This week: validate which of the 3 startup ideas to prototype.
That means interviewing 3 people per idea (so, 9 in total) and see which gets the strongest signal.

The 3 startup ideas in the running:

1. Optimize subscription flows for media companies

2. Launch a print + digital magazine for writers

3. Create a career coach AI bot

🙋‍♀️ Know anyone who fits these?

• Writers (especially ones who dream of submitting to a magazine or that read already a literary one)

• People working at media companies (especially in subscriptions/growth/product)

• Anyone who wants to leave their 9-to-5, and maybe finds AI a little curious

Please send them my way! (Or if that’s you: DM me!)

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This week’s goals, in summary:

• ✅ Start writing on Instagram threads

• ✅ Find a writing course (got any recs?)

• ✅ Interview 9 people. Yes. Nine. What have I done.

I’ll leave it here because I have some serious time management planning to do.
Especially because... there’s still an offline life to be lived.