Inspiration is Perishable
I’ve been feeling more connected to the creative force this year. Here’s the journey so far in the work “fun experiments” space:
1. Poker Coach
AJ invited me to a poker game. I played poker casually in university with friends, but as someone who struggles with not being good at something, I felt I needed to practice and learn some strategies before playing with this group. I started playing a free game online and sending screenshots to ChatGPT asking for the best next move. Constantly sending screenshots got annoying, and it sparked an idea: What if I built a poker game with a built-in AI coach that trains me using the leveling technique from The Art of Learning? I felt inspired, so on a Friday night I started building it. Four days later, the product is live, and I had so much fun building it. A few months later I killed it 😲. More on this below.
2. KindGifts
Zuri’s birthday party was coming up. We didn’t want her to get a bunch of stuff she didn’t really need. Last year we asked people to donate to SickKids instead of gifts, but Zuri wasn’t really part of that experience, so she didn’t feel the impact of the donations. On a flight to Vegas, I was looking at my todo list and thinking, “I need to figure out a better way to do gifting at her bday party.” Then it hit me: What if we could teach Zuri about helping others through her bday and she could still buy herself something she’s excited about? Four hours later, kindgifts.co was born. Each dollar gifted gets split between a charity + the birthday kid. Zuri ended up helping kids at shelters get music lessons, and Nika helped kids get clean water. They were proud of themselves for helping, and that made this whole project worth it.
3. Setting up agents
OpenClaw came out in January, and it was a pivotal moment in AI. Most people still use AI to ask questions and get answers, like a better Google. With OpenClaw, you can create agents that actually DO stuff for you. So I set up a whole team of personal and work agents, hooked them into my tools, and started playing with this new superpower I suddenly had at my fingertips. In social settings, I found myself constantly sharing how powerful agents are and the things they do for me → managing my calendar + email, trading stocks, documenting memories with my kids, writing blog posts for KindGifts, posting on X for Poker Coach and plenty more.
At this point, I was playing with this shiny tool, but it also broke often, so I was always spending time fixing it. I’d killed Poker Coach, and KindGifts was running for Zuri & Nika. I was feeling a little directionless about what to work on next. Then Am came to visit with Zozo and Khivi over May long weekend, and that visit changed everything.
4. A waitlist
Am is a go-getter. She juggles so many things — being a parent of two, running two dental clinics, running social media accounts, planning trips, and so much more. So when I told her about these agents that do stuff for me, she asked, “How do I get this?” I told her that you have to be a little technical to get them set up. Fortunately for us, our kids were lost in their own worlds playing (having kids the same age is the best!), so we had free time one afternoon and I helped set up four agents for her. Ever since, she’s been flying, and she’s now up to 12 AI agents to help with all the mental load she carries. It’s been inspiring to watch her flourish with her agents, and then her friends started asking how they could get agents too.
From Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, I remember taking away that you have to listen to signs from the universe. All of a sudden, I felt there was enough interest in people wanting this, but I didn’t have the capacity to sit with each person individually to get them set up. I thought, What if I built an online course for non-techies? But that’s a lot of effort, and I didn’t want to commit to building something unless there was serious interest. So I built a waitlist and set up an experiment: Could I get 50 people to put down a $50 deposit for a $500 course within 30 days?
The moment the waitlist landing page went live, I was filled with so much anxiety. “What if no one puts a deposit down?” “What if this is a dumb idea and I can’t even get 10 people interested?” Anxiety is funny, you worry about a future that hasn’t happened yet. The course sold out in 6 days! On day 5, it was at 41 people and I was like, “Oh shit, I don’t know what happens on the website when we cross 50. Damn, I think I need to build a waitlist for the next cohort.” I was simply focused on the next step. In all my years of building product, I don’t think I’ve ever actually validated demand by asking people to put their credit card down, which is one of the most common pieces of advice.
After the course sold out, I was initially very happy, but then quickly filled with overwhelm. “Shit, now I need to build this course... where do I even begin?” For a week, I was stuck in that feeling, scared to get started. Then I remembered what Dr. Becky said about feeling overwhelmed.
5. AgentsForUs
“The first step isn’t small enough.” So step 1: don’t worry about the course, just start by setting up my own agents from scratch like I did with Am. I got into a great groove, but I had a cold plunge scheduled for the afternoon. I did not want to go, I wanted to keep building, but I reminded myself how much better I feel after it. During the cold plunge, I had another moment of inspiration: What if I built an agent that could watch how I set up my agents and build the course material for me? Agent Zero was birthed when I got back to my desk, and every night he’d refine the course curriculum based on that day’s setup conversations.
Around the same time, a new Claude model came out, Fable, that was incredibly powerful, and there was a small window where you could use it for super cheap. I got Claude to build out the course website over a couple days. Then I started thinking about creating a community for everyone in the course and started reading The Art of Gathering at night. During the day, I’d apply the principles I was learning to the course.
Somewhere along the way, I completely lost track of time. Like Brad Pitt at the end of the F1 movie. For 6 weeks, I was flowing with all this creative juice. All I thought about was this course. I’d add delightful features that made me happy. I watched Amisha and AJ go through the first version of the course (another common piece of startup advice I didn’t do much in the past → physically sit down with your users). I kept building, iterating, improving. I learned to clone my voice, built videos using AI, re-imagined the online learning experience. I was having so much fun — barely golfed or cold plunged.
An hour before I was set to launch, in the middle of all the fun, I realized, “Oh shit, people are going to actually pay me for this course. Does the payment flow even work?” When I released the course to the first 50 people, my reaction surprised me. I cried. Happy tears. I played my favorite tracks to celebrate and looked up at the three pictures on my wall that represent my values → create, play, connect. All three were glowing. Earlier in my career I used to say that one day I wanted to be a high school teacher. This experience reminded me how much I love to teach. I’m deeply grateful to have been lost in the magic of flow state.
6. Instagram account
I knew I’d built something special, and the feedback from folks who’ve gone through the course has corroborated this. Here’s an example of what one person had to say about the course. 137+ agents have been built in the course so far, all by non-techie people.
Now that the course was live, I needed to start thinking about how people were going to find out about it. I started with posting on LinkedIn — but first came all the anxiety. I’m not active on social media, so my first thought was, “Will I be judged poorly for what I post?” I could see how much my ego was getting in the way. Then I picked up The Practice, which is all about sharing your creative work. It made me realize this isn’t about me, and that sharing it is in service to others. Take my fears out of the equation. So I posted on LinkedIn and didn’t feel any fear after posting it. It’s my way of doing Seva, which means to help. As a Sikh kid growing up, it was modeled to me daily by my parents, grandparents, and the gurdwara. This aligns with my values.
I also had this transformational experience with Master Lee (8 month waitlist, thanks Sid for the recommendation!) to work on eliminating fear from my body and filling myself up with self-confidence. After that, I started an Instagram account, deep.withai, to serve busy parents, business owners, and professionals. It’s not actually about promoting the course, more so realizing I’m on the bleeding edge of AI usage and I use it in ways most people don’t even realize are possible. This is a way to inspire and educate non-technical people, so they can get time back in their days and live life with more intention. There’s no fear of being judged anymore. I’m working on removing my performance pressure to hit certain milestones and trying to have fun with it instead. And of course I’m using AI to help me throughout this whole process. Then the universe started sending me another signal that I believe I need to act on next.
7. Content Studio
I just finished a camping trip with the family, and it’s given me a lot of time to quiet the noise and listen. With the big companies launching personal agents in the past month (Muse, Grok Bot, Dots, etc), there’s an easier way for non-techies to get their first agent set up. I’m genuinely excited for more people to have this power. I believe my course still has a place in the world for people who don’t want to hand their data over to big companies, but a large chunk of users will want convenience instead of taking a couple hours to set up their own personal agents. And honestly, I’m not sad about it at all. Building the course was what I was inspired to build in the moment, and I knew eventually there’d be easier ways to get set up. I’m forever grateful for what that experience gave me, and I’ll continue to support new and existing members of the course.
But that was just the first course. I want to help people through social media within my boundaries, which means I don’t want to spend hours editing video content. I’ve built video editing skills that automatically take a raw piece of footage and produce a completely edited video. One shot. I’ve built a pipeline to track metrics on all the content, a way to feed ideas into a Notion doc, script writing, reporting. When I share this with other content creators, their first question is, “Can you show me how to do this?” So while camping, another spark: Why not build another course for content creators to get them set up with all the workflows I use?
I’m now feeling charged up to build the content studio course. AgentsForUs can evolve into AI education courses for non-technical folks. I have a lot of the infrastructure in place already, so the next course shouldn’t take me too long to build. And I’m so giddy to find that flow state again.
On Pause
Each of these paused projects contributed along the way. I learned something from every one of them. I don’t look at any of them as failures, just experiments that gave me more data and things I can re-use for future projects.
- Poker Coach → For how often I was playing poker (once every 2 months) and how low stakes it was ($50 buy-in), I found myself not wanting to train to get better. Instead I wanted to have fun with a group of dads and could simply learn while playing with them. KindGifts wouldn’t have been born if I didn’t kill Poker Coach. I needed that open space of having no projects to have the capacity to build something new. And I was able to re-use all the infrastructure from Poker Coach to build KindGifts in a quarter of the time.
- KindGifts → This isn’t a money-maker. It’s a free gift for parents and kids. It’s a paradigm shift to do birthdays this way, and birthdays happen once a year, so it’s not always top of mind for parents. I don’t want to convince parents to use this; how they celebrate their kids’ birthdays is their choice. This aligned with our family values, so I’m happy we built it and we’ll continue to use it for future bdays. I share it with friends and family in our circles, but given the other ways I’m inspired to help people, I’m not feeling a calling right now to market it to the world.
- ImagineLand → This was a way to show parents and children creative ways to use AI. I didn’t feel much of a pull for it, and built this simple doc instead. I was initially inspired to do something in this space because Zuri’s teacher had asked if there was something I wanted to share with their SK class. Instead of building out ImagineLand, I went into her class and we made this song together, with each kid sharing something they loved about their school year. The best moment was when they all started holding hands and dancing on the carpet to their newly made song.
- Sales for Everhand → After building a product for Rob, I tried to see if other recruiters faced a similar challenge and wanted a custom solution built for them. What I realized is that cold outreach was a slow way to sell custom software, and I’d rather focus my energy elsewhere. If there are organic opportunities to build custom software for a business, I’m still open to that. But I’m not going to try to force it.
- Lead Generation for Recruiters → Through my conversations with recruiters, another trend emerged. Recruiters wanted to find companies that were actively hiring and then try to fill those roles for them. So I teamed up with Ashok to build a spreadsheet that fed new leads every week to a couple of recruiters. But there were too many steps between a company hiring the recruiter and closing a candidate, so the commission model didn’t make sense for us.
At the beginning of the year, Shan shared this podcast with me where Naval said Inspiration is Perishable. That’s been a theme woven into this year. When I feel inspired, I act now. But I’m also seeing the value in resting and not forcing things. In pausing projects to create space to hear the universe. I’m grateful to be having fun building and helping people. One of my favorite artists, Karan Aujla, was sharing how his latest album was made in 2 months. 10 songs. It reminded me of the analogy of a lion who rests most of the time, and when he sees his prey, attacks with force. I feel like the lion now.
