Streamlined Solopreneur Articles

  • February 10, 2025

    Homemade Pizza and Building Systems: When to DIY and When to Delegate

    Americans ate an estimated 12.5 million pizzas during the Super Bowl (according to a quick Google search).

    Most people ordered them from pizza joints, but some likely baked at home.

    I decided to be one of those people.

    Now, I had never made homemade pizza before. But since we didn’t have anyone over and had a late lunch with leftovers, I figured I’d give it a try. I was basically just making it as a snack for my oldest, my wife and me (my littles, predictably, did not want to try it).

    The stakes were low.

    It didn’t go particularly well. I didn’t leave myself enough time or space to really flatten the dough, so it was thicker than it should have been.

    That means I didn’t cook it long enough, so it was half-baked.

    I also didn’t have the right equipment, like a pizza stone, so when I tried to slide the pizza into the oven, the sauce, and the cheese moved, but the dough did not.

    Luckily, because the combo of dough, sauce, and cheese is good, and the dough wasn’t raw, it still tasted OK.

    But I learned a ton for next time:

    1. I need a bigger surface to roll the dough out flatter
    2. My small bamboo pizza paddle won’t cut it—I need a bigger paddle and a pizza stone
    3. I’d also like to try a different dough

    Over time, I’d like to:

    1. Make my own dough
    2. Make my own sauce
    3. Experiment with different cheeses and seasonings
    4. Get better equipment, like maybe an Ooni Pizza Oven

    I’m sure you see where this is going.

    It’s unlikely you’re going to do something very well the first time. There are a bunch of unknowns, even if you follow a recipe.

    I followed the instructions for making a pizza, but because I didn’t roll the dough thin enough, the recommended 15 mins on 400 degrees (F) wasn’t long enough.

    So you iterate over time. You learn the process that works best for you, and make adjustments each time.

    Once you really understand the process, you can put a system in place to make the process as smooth as possible.

    …or determine that you’re better suited to do other things, and have someone else perform those tasks instead.

    The truth is, while I’ll make a pizza here and there, I’m still going to order pizza most of the time.

    It will free me up to do other things, like play with my kids…plus clean up is a lot easier.

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  • February 6, 2025

    How Coaching Changed My Relationship with Meetings

    Baseball in its current form (“the modern era”) has been around for 124 years — hosting roughly 300,000 games.

    Did you know that out of those roughly 300,000 games, only 24 have been perfect—meaning no batters reached base through a hit, walk, or error?

    The point being, perfection is extremely rare. In this case, it’s around 0.008% of regular season games. And if we hold ourselves to a standard of being perfect, we will constantly set ourselves up for failure.

    I’ve seen countless cases where a pitcher loses a perfect game or no-hitter, then gets rattled and gives up a run, losing the shutout as well.

    Last week I told you how 2025 starts this month for me — it’s been a crazy year so far, and the weather is ensuring even fewer school days for my kids, making it crazier.

    And while I’ve been able to get my most crucial work done, there’s still more I want to do — I just don’t have the space to do it right now; it’s being filled up by other, more important aspects of my life.

    However, throughout the month, I’ve been compiling a list of automations I’d like to build, either for myself or as part of a live stream.

    That list got longer yesterday, when I discovered Google Docs has added tabs.

    So how am I supposed to manage this increasingly growing list of stuff I need to do, when things don’t appear to be slowing down any time soon?

    There are a few ways.

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  • February 3, 2025

    My Startup and Shutdown Routines

    It’s been nearly 15 years since Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending film Inception came out, and I still think about it regularly.

    If you’re unfamiliar, it focuses on a man named Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s known for stealing secrets from people’s subconscious by entering their dreams.

    He’s hired to do the opposite — plant an idea in someone’s mind. This is called “Inception,” and since the movie came out, I’ve been using it as a verb.

    If you’re in the dream world too long, you may forget and lose yourself in it. So Cobb has a token to keep him grounded in reality: a top. If it falls over, he’s in the real world. If it keeps spinning, he’s in a dream.

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  • January 20, 2025

    Why You’re Losing Money when You Mow the Lawn

    If you’re in the northeast United States, you know you need to mow pretty much every week in the summer. But there was a point a few summers ago, due to rain, lack of child care, and travel, that I didn’t get mow my lawn for nearly 3 weeks.

    So one day, I set out to mow the very long, still kind of wet lawn. On top of that, I had to weed wack, and take a hedge trimmer to some overgrown bushes. It was shaping up to be a big job. Something that normally takes an hour took an entire afternoon.

    And because I was choosing yard work over billable work for my business, I lost income.

    That was the last time I mowed my lawn.

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  • January 13, 2025

    Analytics is better than A.I.

    Imagine this: you’re in a new town, and you’re looking for a place to eat — not a franchise, but something local.

    It just so happens that a bunch of people you know live, or have lived in this town — people who understand what you like and don’t like (what’s important to you, and your general financial and dietary situation).

    In looking for a place to eat, which of these would sway your opinion more:

    1. Opinions from random people in town
    2. Top results in a Google search
    3. Recommendations from your friends

    For most people, it’s going to be recommendations from their friends, right? For all the reasons I listed above.

    Strangers don’t know you, so they’ll basically just tell you their favorite restaurant.

    Google and other search engines don’t know you personally. They rely on averages and a different set of signals.

    I’m speaking at Podfest later this week and I noticed something interesting about the schedule: there are at least a dozen talks on how A.I. can help you with your podcast.

    But as far as I can tell, there’s only one talk on using analytics to measure the success of your podcast.

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