Some Truth About Our Content

Colin here!

You may be wondering, wtf could this section be about?

Well, I'm gonna tell you.

In the past few years, you've probably been hearing more and more about "AI". It's hard to escape at this point, and it can be a pretty controversial topic - some people love it, some people hate it. Personally, I'm kinda in the middle of the road - I think most of what's available is over-hyped, but would be lying if I said it's useless. And to be up front, I do use it. And, tbh, we will probably develop our own type of "AI" eventually. What I've found it to be most helpful with is learning efficiently, helping to develop skills, and filtering out a lot of "noise" that usually comes with searching and research.

Another thing I use it for, which I'm not thrilled to admit, is creating quite a bit of the content we have across our website, socials, emails, etc. Not all of it, this section and some other content (you can probably tell) are 100% created by myself or Casey, but a decent amount was at least assisted by use of AI. The truth is, as a two person team bootstrapping with our own funds and trying to save as much money as possible until we are making revenue, we need all the cheap help we can get from wherever we can get it. To add to that, neither Casey or I have much of a background in content creation and the "creative" side is definitely something we've struggled with. We also tend towards "perfectionism" which, if untreated, can lead to never putting any work out there.

So in keeping with our value of honesty, I wanted to put the truth out there about the fact some of what you may see from us is AI generated or created with the assistance of AI. Now, that doesn't mean we just asked AI to come up with a business idea and a story and a website and so on. It's more like us having a clear idea of what we want in our minds, then us not being very good (yet) at communicating it so we use AI to try and get the thoughts into words/content.

Also, part of the reason I'm telling you this, AI actually isn't very good at creating this type of content. This is one of the areas where I feel it's way overhyped. The sh*t it puts out is, in my opinion at least, cheesy and pretty cringe. There's definitely a formulaic quality to it as well, and it lacks something that makes human created content feel...well, human.

That being said, it's somewhat of a necessary evil for us at this point. We can't spend forever trying to perfect everything before we put anything out there, so we kind of have to just iterate to the point where content is "good enough" and publish it, then improve it on the next go around. I'm working on my skills in this area, and over time our goal is to use AI less and less for our content so we can really channel authenticity and emotion.

And hopefully we'll eventually be able to bring on more people with these types of skills to help us communicate loud and clear. Until then, please "pardon our AI dust."