Hi everyone, and welcome to this new episode!

In the previous episodes, I've talked about:

* The reason I've got into tech (the magic)

* Some learnings about hyper freelancing

And today I want to share about the actual magical product I want to build. The focus I will have for the upcoming years.

So, what am I up to? 🤔

I want to start this podcast with these episodes, because it starts with something that is really deep inside me actually.

Some big personal questions and reflections I had when I left alone to Indonesia alone for more than two months.

Now, I have this idea I want to try working on it. I want to focus on it  — for the next 10 years of my life (let’s say).

I think it's interesting for you to know what were the questions I asked myself to be so deeply aligned with everything I want to do right now because maybe you're kind of lost — a bit like me.

(I don't say that I'm not lost at all anymore, but I was really lost, six months ago, as a freelancer.)

Today I feel that I’m working on something that is perfectly aligned with me — not only in terms of why I want to build this, but also about the form it will take (software).

All the questions that I asked myself were :

* Does it make sense to me?

* Does it align with my values and everything that I described previously? Like, does it feel like magic? Is it fun? Is it something really new?

* Is it possible to make a great amount of money with it? Because money is still important (of course). I don't want to make a charity for now. I want to make something that makes revenue.

* Is the job funny almost every day? Meaning: I'm enjoying creating, and working on it right now — because if I don't, I think I won't keep it up for a very long period of time.

Asking those questions was really helpful to me.

Moreover, one of the questions that was the most helpful was :

What would I be willing to dedicate a decade to (of my life) without any regrets?

Even if the outcome is not what I expect.

Again on this idea of not optimizing for the destination.

But just appreciating every minute, every single day of my life as someone working on this company.

What I’ll be doing for the next 10 years of my life:

First of all, right now I am learning to code, to fix my frustrations (I think I won’t regret it).

My biggest weakness in business has always been impatience. And, to learn coding, I will have to be patient! Because it's hard (everyone knows it).

But I think it's worth it and I won't regret it, as I need to be crafting things on my own.

And as I said, the best way to express myself — what I want to share to produce to the world — I think is by creating software.

So I need to have my hands in the dirt for this software I want to build (that's why I'm learning coding).

I also noticed that I cannot enjoy just creating something (even if it's software) that makes money, and “that’s it” doesn’t work for me. I've tried this before and it didn't work.

I think things have to make sense…

For instance, I tried to sell things with e-commerce on Shopify (like almost everyone in the 20-25yo range right now 😹) but I just can't if it's not something that resonates with me, and the reason I am on this planet.

Speaking about the planet, I think eCommerce and dropshipping are of course terrible for the planet. That's also why I decided to stop it.

I also tried previously to do a newsletter (and a podcast) with my best friend, Antoine — and it made perfect sense to me.

But in the end, we gave up because of three reasons.

* The potential was limited – to sell online courses about productivity (in French).

* Our implications: we were both not really 100% dedicated to the project.

* I didn't feel comfortable at this time selling online courses.

More recently, I tried again to do what they call a “lifestyle business” with a pure B2B product (the idea was to sell leads online). But my motivation flinched (again).

My current status as a freelancer:

I'm really happy with how it is going right now.

I don't see any reason to stop it — except to be 100% focused on this new company.

And that's how I make money, for now. That's how I make a living.

I don't need to work a lot to have enough money for what I spend because I don't spend much. And the relationships with my customers are going well. So I don't see any reason to stop it.

It's working well, it's fun (most of the time). I also see the money that I make as a freelancer, as a tool for developing this company that I always dreamt of working on.

The problems I want to solve…

… With the software I want to build.

It starts with my story:

* When I was a student, I was traveling from the suburb of Paris to my school, and then work for one hour and a half, so taking the train every day.

* And during this commute, the only thing that I was doing was actually consuming content to learn new things.

* From reading books to listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, reading articles online, etc.

And I am 100% sure that what differentiated me at school, at work, as a freelancer now is this curiosity that I had and all this work I put in when I was commuting.

Meaning being curious and always striving for new learnings.

“Being curious” (right now) is a terrible experience

To name a few examples:

* It is incredibly difficult for workers to keep up with the information they need to have to keep improving and to get better at work.

* Then, once the information has reached us, we are really likely to just forget it and don't know where to search to recall it when needed.

* 80% of the articles I've read were useless. We are constantly flooded with irrelevant information.

* We are entering the age of AI and people are still taking notes with the Zettlkasten method, a note-taking method that was popularized by a German sociologist born… in 1927.

* Social media algorithms are a major cause of mental illness in the world (I've written recently a post about this on LinkedIn).

And from all those problems, I'm pretty sure that we can create something lovely that people want.

Again, the point is:

As a worker, the best way you can become better and produce better work, to grow a company… is to learn new things by consuming content.

But this experience is not good at all.

Finding good content is not easy

Because it is spread out across channels platforms, different types of media, feeds, algorithms, etc….

It is quite difficult to consume content “smartly”.

* What I mean is that we are still reading articles the way we were reading articles 100 years ago, whereas technology is ready for us to customize and reshape any content the way we would like it to be.

* Meaning that for instance, with AI, you can summarize any type of article. You can make it the length you want.

* You can almost instantly rewrite an article for you to understand it, better (based on the words you are used to read and understand for instance).

* You can also transform content types:

* As we can do speech-to-text, text-to-speech (and so on) you can imagine transforming a podcast into an article, that you can then reshape to the way you would like it to be written.

So for instance, if you like bullet points and really short and clear sentences, you can transform a podcast into this (and make it the size you would like it to be).

Recalling things is a nightmare

Right now it's almost a second job to take notes, and recall things.

It's a permanent effort and you have to put so much work into it to get the results. I believe that's wrong.

People don't have time for that. They have many more things to handle and it's becoming another mental burden.

How to make sure any content you’ve consumed is really useful?

Last, but not least problem (so, the fourth one I've identified) is that we often have this feeling of:

I've consumed a lot of content. But I actually don't know why. And I don't know if it will be useful one day for me or for my colleagues, at work (or in my life).

This could be addressed by simplifying the way we leverage the content we consume at work.

I believe the best way to do so is to share what you've got from that article/podcast/video you've consumed. With your coworkers, colleagues, and fellow people around you.

An example: let's say you've read a book. Let's say you've read the Jobs to Be Done book.

Maybe you've got many things from this book, and many ideas came from what you've read.

You've highlighted some things, you've taken some notes and you have key action points to implement in your company, with your colleagues and your coworkers.

All of this could be simplified.

* Finding this good book

* With good recommendations from your colleagues or your inner circle of people you work with frequently.

* Taking notes:

* You can imagine highlighting something and automatically creating notes the way you are used to write.

* This way you can recall it when needed (because it appears in your note-taking system quite easily).

* Share this summarized / "what you got" version of the book with your colleagues (your employees if you're an entrepreneur) or anyone you want, actually.

The idea is to create an app that simplifies all of this, especially for companies.

I just believe that learning new things, being curious, and sharing those learnings with your colleagues should be easy, simple, and fun.

Nothing more than that.

Apart from that, I believe this thing could be addressing other bigger, broader issues. To name a few:

* Mental health.

* We are a generation of unfocused people. The average attention span has never been that low.

* If we create an app that makes it more exciting, and easier to learn new things than to go on social media… That's super nice.

* If you use Duolingo, for instance, that's a great example of that (many learning apps are making it as easy and addictive as TikTok to learn new things).

* As AI lowers the barrier to entry to create content, it will be easier for anyone to produce more content.

* But our brains are still limited to a certain amount of information we can ingest in the day

* So why not try to leverage AI on the other side? Not to produced content, but to consume it in a better and healthier way.

So there are many, many ways to address the different problems.

And, it is not obvious to know where to start, what angle and positioning we should take but it's still quite fun to work on that.

It doesn't matter what issue we are addressing first because any of those is nice to fix in my opinion.

All right, so that's it for today. Thanks for listening/reading.

Please let me know in the comments or by DM, whatever, what you think about this format of podcast.

I'm loving recording it, editing it, and posting it.

In the next episode, I will share about how the product “is different”, and many more of the ideas that I have in mind.

See you there!

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