Hi.

Okay, since you asked…

⦾ Blue Kazoo. A premium jigsaw puzzle brand I co-founded with Abraham Piper. He’s that TikTok influencer who walks around talking into his phone on train tracks. You may have seen our all-black puzzle that went viral. We sold $1m in puzzles in our first 8 months.

⬔ Brainjolt. I’m also co-founder of Brainjolt, an online media publisher that reaches hundreds of millions of users a month. We started this a decade ago in 2013.

⦾ Interrobang. Start this in 2022 (”a non-standard, non-boring investment fund”) but put it on pause while I jumped back into Brainjolt for a lil bit because baby needed help.

⬔ Bootstrapped. Abraham and I bootstrapped Brainjolt and Blue Kazoo (I still remember cashing the credit card balance transfer check when we started Brainjolt) and despite having never taken capital we’ve built 22 brands (owned + operated), 80m followers, multiple billions of video views, and sold over a billion dollars worth of Amazon products.

⦾ Back in my day… I co-founded a VC-backed enterprise SaaS solution that continues to scale. Before that I started an ad network (acquired by BuySellAds), what we would now describe as a “Groupon clone” (that didn’t last long), a design and development agency, a real estate crowdfunding platform (the SEC killed it because it was too early), a real estate listing platform (acquired by LandHub).

Inspired by this guy in the Time Bomb Y2K documentary, Emily and I made our own hats celebrating the survival of the human species from the Y2K bug. Get your own at the Hypertext Foundation website!

AI-gen music has been pretty bad, but it’s JUST getting to the point of passable. Suno.ai is the best I’ve seen, so I decided to make a lofi youtube channel using it. In this video I walk through the process of the music generation.

My first children’s book, designed for one special kid. It was surprisingly hard to find a good way to make something that works on all platforms (desktop, tablet, and mobile) and plays well with tiny fingers.

After discarding custom website options and storybook creator apps I tested an html export of Keynote which worked surprisingly well. But I wanted to publish changes easier, so ended up using Google Slides using a public link.

I really loved how it turned out. I used a mix of DALL-E 3 and Midjourney for the images, then extended and fixed them up in Photoshop.

I was nervous to show her, but she loved it! Read it a bunch of times, interacted with it (the zoom in is a nice feature), and then talked about it into the next day. (Update weeks later: she keeps asking for it! “Let’s play the Princess Game,” she implores.)

Read about it more in my newsletter #16.

A popup game / rickroll. Based on the windows dialog game I made in Dec with new features:

There are still some edge cases of bugs but I am too lazy to fix them and want to move on to the next useless website. If you find one, fix it and send me the code ¬‿¬

I discovered BeepBox a while back and kept wanting to play with it — a simple html/css/js tracker is just the thing to cheer anyone up. I grew up in awe of Screamtracker listening to Purple Motion who was a member of Future Crew. FC created Second Reality (youtube) in 1993 which I grew up watching on my Gateway 386DX/33 over and over because IT WAS SO COOL and imo is still the best demoscene thing ever created. Anyway back to BeepBox… I started at 6am with the idea of just playing with it for a few minutes and 6 hours later this silly homage to American Football’s “For Sure” was BeepBox’d out. (Bonus: An incredible deepdive into the source code of Second Reality by Fabien Sanglard.)

We set up a 501c3 nonprofit because OH WE HAVE PLANS.

I think this is the first original game I’ve ever shipped (?). I’ve made dumb little things for sport but I think this is the first that actually qualifies as possible a real game, tho even that is a stretch. My high score so far is 1790… can you beat it?

Inspired by Marvin Minsky's Useless Box, if you leave this running long enough on auto mode it will eventually overload itself and thus turn itself off. This is its only purpose.

I rarely talk about Real Work Projects here, but work got crazy busy in Q4, and although I don’t like to spill All The Secrets, I’m very proud that we launched a super successful newsletter that quickly built up to a million subscribers!

As soon as I got access to DALL-E 3 I stayed up late for weeks and created thousands of ads, stress testing their system and my sanity. A few of my favorites are on the Instagram pop-up gallery.

Over the course of two months me and ChatGPT created a full-featured website discovery platform using React and Firebase. I hadn’t done true head-to-keyboard programming in years and it was a perfect challenge to learn modern dev tools. It launched in private beta with a full suite of features from profile creation, posting, search, tagging, and commenting.

This is the output of a python mathlib script that connects to the Google Search Trends API (built using the help of ChatGPT of course)