I cancelled two dictation apps last month and built my own.
Hold a key, speak, release, text appears. 5MB. No cloud. No account. I called it the “Dictator” haha.
That’s it. The whole app.
Tim Ferriss calls this the “minimum effective dose”.
The smallest input that produces the desired outcome. Everything beyond that is waste.
Most SaaS products are the opposite. They’re the maximum tolerable dose.
As much as they can pack in before you cancel.
Most tools are 20% useful and 80% someone else’s idea of what you might need. Features you’ll never open. Integrations with services you don’t use.
You’re not paying for the thing you want anymore.
So you have to build your own now.
The Copy/Paste Generation
Something I’ve been thinking about more lately is how I distribute content. I repurpose every YouTube script into 5+ formats. Posts, threads, newsletters, shorts and community updates. Distribution is king. But people do it wrong.
They treat each platform like a copy machine. Take the script, paste it somewhere else, maybe change the formatting a little. That’s not distribution. That’s littering.
What actually works is a flywheel. A LinkedIn post drives someone to the YouTube video. The video drives newsletter signups. The newsletter drives replies that become the next video topic. Each platform feeds the others. But the flywheel only spins if the content actually fits the platform it lands on. Copy-paste doesn’t spin anything. Again, it’s littering.
The best repurposed content doesn’t just reformat, it bends.
You take one idea and refract it through the lens of whatever community you’re speaking to.
The content stays honest, you’re not making things up but the framing shifts to match what that specific audience actually cares about.
This is where ai tools fall apart.
They fall into two camps. Camp one copies your script. Lazy. Camp two rewrites your script but adds things you’ve never said, motivation you’d never write, you get the point.
Neither understands what repurposing actually is. It’s not reformatting. It’s not rewriting. It’s finding the angle inside your existing content that this specific platform rewards without losing your voice.
I’ve been building something to fix this.
Will share details soon. But if you repurpose content across platforms you already know exactly what I’m talking about.
How to survive what’s coming next
Here’s the thing that connects all of this.
Everyone optimized for output.
Scroll any platform for 30 seconds. YouTube scripts have the same cadence. The same three-act structure. Posts that say nothing in the most polished way possible.
I use AI constantly. I built half my agency on it. But there’s a gap between using AI to move faster and using AI to avoid thinking. The first one is leverage. The second one is camouflage. Your content becomes indistinguishable from everyone else’s because it literally came from the same place.
The tools meant to help creators express themselves are making everyone sound identical.
Books that rewired my brain
I manage my audiobook library from the terminal because apparently that’s who I am now.
“The reason you can’t change is because you keep on making the decision not to change.” - The Courage to Be Disliked
If you’re a creator sitting on a draft or a product or an idea, waiting until you’re ready. This book will make that waiting feel expensive. Which it is.
Quick shelf:
- The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman. Business frameworks without the MBA price tag. I come back to this one constantly.
- The Bitcoin Standard — Saifedean Ammous. Monetary history. Dense. Worth the effort.
- Focal Point — Brian Tracy. Ruthless prioritization. Reads in an afternoon.
One repo worth your time
autoresearch by Andrej Karpathy. 57k stars. An AI agent that runs full research workflows, pulls papers, summarizes and runs experiments.
Karpathy keeps shipping small single-purpose tools. There’s a pattern worth stealing: build the smallest useful thing. Make it work. Move on.
I’ve been applying the same idea to my own content workflow. Built an overnight eval pipeline that scores my writing agents against my actual approved outputs and iterates until they pass.
End of transmission
Build your own tools when the existing ones don’t fit. Use AI to move faster and not to think less. Read books that make you uncomfortable.
