Copy
View this email in your browser
Hey there! It's the end of August already, another month that went by extremely quickly. The Year Progress Bar tells me that we're 66% through this year now. Time to make the last 34% count.

This month, I'm going to go over some of the content I've written this month, then I want to share some of the great things I found around the web this month. The last part is reserved for some personal updates.

Content

Aligning Incentives is so 2020

Imagine if it was in the best interest of politicians to make the world a better place? What if the pharma industry would only get profits for making the world healthier? How would social media look like, if they were trying to only connect you with friends, and let you disconnect after?

This month I wrote about the power of incentive alignment. This post was somewhat out of my comfort zone–I was told that I was seen as the "Machine Learning Guy" this month–but it was something that fascinated me.

There are a few developments going on, especially in the US education system and the presidential race, which are all about incentive alignment. I see great potential in that–not only for the people creating it, but also everyone who is profiting from these aligned incentives. 

Dom's Declassified Remote Work Survival Guide

Ever went a week without talking to someone? If you're not making an active attempt to do so as a remote worker, this may be well possible. It's also absolutely not healthy.



If you're just starting out working fully remote, or you're looking to do so – setting a few ground rules is important. In this article I'm introducing somewhat of a "Wellbeing Triangle" for remote workers.

Try to actively improve all of these three areas, and you'll be fine.

Around the Web

Ever talked to AI before?

Let's explore some goodies I found on the web this month.

Talk to Transformer
OpenAI, the AI company famously co-founded by Elon Musk, recently released a language model called GPT-2. On this site, you can easily try it out.

Can you find the sentence in this newsletter I generated with AI? Let me know :)

Ness Labs
Hitting the frontpage of HackerNews is an art. Doing it multiple times in a few weeks is magic. This neuroscience blog has some interesting insights into human behaviour, creativity, wellbeing, learning... A must-read!

Remote Work Report
The big drop of this month. The folks at UseFYI have asked close to 500 people about their experience about remote work. This is the result.

Projects

NoHQ: Newsletter Sponsor & Big Launch

With the folks at Proofreading Pros, we've found our first newsletter sponsor over at NoHQ. They are sponsoring our tiny, but engaged newsletter until November.

NoHQ reached the frontpage of HackerNews this month, and this came with over 30 inquiries to sponsor our newsletter, have a spot on our toolkit page or working together on a sponsored post.

As part of that, I've also been working with OneBar to create a spotlight story and help them have a successful launch with a HackerNews frontpage appearance (our 2nd one) and a few more upvotes on ProductHunt.

MentorCruise: Sessions

My shipping speed is suffering a bit lately, but I've been working hard to get close to completion of a major MentorCruise milestone: The sessions product.

The core offering of MentorCruise is going great - 150 mentors are matched with a longterm mentor right now. Historically, we've had 650 matches. Many of the matches are being cancelled in the first few weeks though - many times, people don't need a longterm mentor.

With the Sessions product, people will be able to book casual coachings, consultations, CV reviews and similar, at a very friendly price point.

Excited to ship this soon!

Personal

Reaching my MRR goal?

I made somewhat of a "soft goal" at the start of the year that I wanted to reach $1k MRR with MentorCruise this year. I was doing maybe $150 MRR at that point and this milestone felt way out of reach.

Well, MentorCruise is not quite there yet, but matching it together with NoHQ, I made $900 with my own products last month. This feels close, and with a few more launches happening soon and a bit of a more formal marketing strategy, I'm getting more and more optimistic that at least my cumulative MRR will be north the 1k mark by the end of the year.

Twitter
Website
Email
Copyright © 2019 Monn Ventures EF, All rights reserved.


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp