THIS WEEK: SHIPPING IS ALL THAT MATTERS

x🌟 Editor's Note

Thanks for reading H4CKER, my weekly brain dump and sauce-sharing exercise. Here I share my thoughts on what’s new, hot, and weird in the AI world, plus what I’ve learned from my experiments over the last week. Shamelessly steal my best ideas and then tell me about it on X at @nathanabinford and (or connect on LinkedIn). I want to hear from you!

🚀 Ship Like Your Future Depends On It (Because It Does)

The world is crazy and full of distractions, but it’s never been more important to ignore them all, stay focused, and “lock in” to whatever you’re buiding —whatever excites you to create.

Time isn’t our friend. Anyone who spends their days trying to keep up with everything that’s happening in AI quickly becomes overwhelmed with the feeling that they simply can’t move fast enough to take full advantage of the opportunities in front of us all.

It’s partially because of the breadth of revolutionary change: one day Nano-Banana comes out and reinvents product photography and video, and the next there’s radical new AI models, human-like voice agents, and even more agentic platforms rolling out.

There’s no way to wrap your head around the enormity of the AI revolution, much like AGI, it’s a reflection of everyone everywhere dreaming up wild new possibilities at a scale beyond human capabilities; and it’s not going to slow down any time soon.

Since it’s impossible to keep up with the breadth of AI any longer, it’s time to go deep; specializing in a few areas of all the new territory opened up by AI (and let others stake their claim in the rest).

Focus is a superpower.

It’s time to pick a lane, find your groove, and move from learning and building to shipping…constantly.

🕵️‍♂️ What’s Your Niche?

Doesn’t that phrase take you back? To the good old days of web 2.0 and niche sites and the promise of finding “the riches in the niches?”

But it was true then (for a time) and it’s true now again (also for a limited time). As AI creeps into every facet of technology and culture, most folks aren’t set up to integrate easily into this new era.

This is obvious from the extreme levels of AI cope that you can find everywhere outside the X / Silicon Valley bubble.

But it just shows us that there is a gap to be filled by folks who “get” AI natively that will be very profitable.

Filling that gap is how we go from spinning around the endless hamster wheel of AI experimentation and enthusiasm to plugging in the money printer and letting it spin instead.

So let’s talk about some of the biggest gaps I see and how we can fill them:

1. Education and adoption: This one requires patience and so it’s not for me, but there is undoubtably a place for people who can make AI more accessible for the normies:

   1. Basic prompting skills

   2. Terminology and best practices

   3. Building custom GPTs and prompt libraries
      

2. Integration with existing systems: This one is more my personal speed; consulting on AI transformation for small enterprise / large SMBs.

   1. Integrating legacy systems with AI tools

   2. Extracting insights from proprietary data

   3. Adding efficiencies / removing redundancies
      

3. Coding custom solutions: Vibe coders of the world unite. This is going to be big. Get paid to build custom apps to solve unique pain points.

   1. Agency services, offering vibe coding

   2. Automating business processes with AI

   3. Agentic tools with custom setups
      

4. Niche B2B apps: One (big) step up from the custom coding model, building software for underserved B2B niches is really appealing for its potential scale.

   1. Employing AI for previously complex tasks (optical analysis, etc)

   2. Vertical-specific, UI-heavy apps that streamline business processes

   3. Service + software model to compete directly with big names

✅ Product, Not Promise

I’ve become convinced over the last year that the traditional approaches to selling knowledge / professional services like by the hour, by the project, on retainer, etc. are simply dead.

But selling an outcome: a defined project, a result, or even an info product that simply talks about doing a thing, is fundamentally easier than selling the service of actually providing it.

I’m not sure that’s a positive move in the grand scheme of things but we can only sell what people are willing to buy; so, for now at least, we’ll need to package our offerings more like off-the-shelf products and less like custom craftsmanship.

And it’s AI and its ability to write code that gives us the advantage we need.

The speed to build and deploy quickly. The ability to fill gaps in our understanding quickly with AI-powered learning. And now, the ability to work with agents who handle the tasks too time-consuming or out of our area of expertise semi-autonomously.

In my own endeavors I’m working on standardizing, productizing, and scaling my services as subscription-based productized offerings. And I believe, and am betting, that the key to making this work really, really well will be establishing my unique value proposition through software first -and services second.

So I’m in build-mode right now and moving as quickly as I can into ship mode.

And I suggest you do the same.

⚙️ The Laboratory: Prompts & Automations

Steal my prompt for generating content briefs and outlines automatically to scale your content marketing efforts without losing quality and originality.

Here’s what I show in the video:

✅ Using Perplexity DeepResearch For RAG Data : Ask complex, layered questions of Perplexity DeepResearch to get deep responses full of great data for articles.

✅  My Prompt For Generating An Outline From Data : Give it a topic, your research data, and your own personal take, and generate a full outline / content brief in seconds.

✅ How To Go From Idea To Article In Minutes : Combine Perplexity for research, ChatGPT for outlines, and article generation, in this powerful workflow for fast results.

Nathan Binford
AI & Marketing Strategist

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Please, tell me what you like and what you don’t, and how to make this newsletter more valuable to you.

And if you need help with AI, marketing, or automation, grab time on my calendar for a quick chat and I’ll do my best to help!

Thanks For Reading H4CKER!