Hi and welcome to another post on my entrepreneurship journey. This is the last post for 2023, so let’s get right to it.

😶‍🌫️October

In my previous post, I mentioned how I was still talking to someone from my last founding team about building something together. That didn’t work out - hard to find a common topic. I had a few other co-founder dates but none that grew into something more.

Meanwhile, I ran the Eindhoven Marathon, but much slower than I hoped (4h45m vs 4h15m). My body wanted to give up so many times towards the end. Why would anyone do that to themselves? Anyway, It took three weeks before I decided to do another marathon. This time in under 4 hours. It’s in June, and prep starts in February.

The rest of October was a daze. Days were getting shorter, and I felt I didn’t have much to look forward to. I focused on brainstorming, reading, guitar practice and keeping some sort of exercise routine (got better at bouldering and discovered hot yoga). Speaking of reading, Flowers for Algernon was a touching, tragic read that resonated on a very personal level. Book of the year for me

🧙November, December and Lumos

About a year ago, ChatGPT was becoming hyped. Things were moving so fast (they’re moving faster now) and it felt overwhelming (feels less overwhelming now). Although my first and second tries at building with this generation of AI didn’t workout, it got me using ChatGPT. A lot. One year in, it’s become one of the tools I use most.

So here I was, on the couch. Sad October turning into sad November, making silly images with DALL E and listening to Christmas music (if October wants to be sad, I can just pretend it’s December, or whatever). The series below are family pictures of aliens at the Christmas dinner table in France, Moldova and (North?) Korea.

aliens

So ChatGPT knows a few things about Moldova, but surely it can’t know people. Not like people know people. One thought led to another, until I asked myself if I could get ChatGPT to guess my MBTI personality type (ENTJ if you’re wondering). Click, click, turns out I could. I freaked out.

In consulting you hear a lot about how you need to adapt your message to your audience. After exploring sales-related topics for the past few months, and seeing the explosion in personalization tools in that space, I figured personality-based personalization (yes) could be a good angle. So I decided I will build a tool that can predict anyone’s personality type from their LinkedIn profile.

Sales people use LinkedIn a lot, and most folks put up a lot of stuff about themselves on there. Imagine a tool that takes in LinkedIn profiles you’re visiting, and determines their personality type. Then it gives an overview of the personality type and advice on how to interact with that person.

But LinkedIn doesn’t like it when you take their sweet data. So, to start, this tool needs to be a browser extension - if you install it in your browser, it can see LinkedIn “through your eyes”.

Anyway, with the year ending, I felt like I needed a win. What if I tried to build this thing before the holidays (roughly 5 weeks)? To call this a stretch goal is an understatement. But 2023 is the year of FILDI (fuck it let’s do it). So I did it. Meet Lumos 🪄

lumos

It works with the DISC personality inventory, which seems popular in sales. While it has many rough edges, it does pretty much what the competitors do (Humanlinker, Crystal, Humantic) : determine personality, give interaction advice.

➡️Next steps

I have a lot of ideas for features (more advice categories, more personalized advice, generating personalized messages with AI, etc.). But I’m putting building on the back burner for now. Lumos is exciting to build, but building something people want is even more exciting

Top priority is talking to customers. I’ll be looking to talk to anyone who does or manages sales. That means January and February will be about customer discovery & customer development with a slight detour to put up a landing page.

🗿Personal update

2023 was a rollercoaster year, and I can’t wait to see what 2024 has in store. Meanwhile, if you’re reading this in the holiday season, Happy Holidays to you! And if not, I hope your year is wild, whichever it is. To wrap the year up, I’ll share a new hobby of mine. ChatGPT now has both vision and image generation. This changed the way I visit museums. Now, when I see a piece of art that I like, I take a picture and try to remix it. Check out the series below.

Original: Jan van Kessel - Singerie

singerie_original