Stetson Blake's Blog

Stetson Blake's Blog

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What I learned launching my first successful e-book

What I learned launching my first successful e-book

Let's get meta. Today I'll write about writing Shell Samurai, which I officially launched yesterday. Enjoy. On February 10th, I pre-launched a book about Linux while on a flight from San Francisco to Cincinnati. I'd been thinking of launching some kind of technical course or project for years. The final

Reflections on Midjourney

Reflections on Midjourney

Last Thursday I paid $30 for a subscription to Midjourney, the AI image generation tool created by a team of 11 or so people. In return, I received access to unfettered AI image generation. Founded by David Holz, previous cofounder of Leap Motion, Midjourney is HUGE and getting bigger by

How to get a job in IT as a complete n00b

How to get a job in IT as a complete n00b

A friend reached out to me today because he wanted to get into IT. His current gig wasn't working out great and he'd heard the promises of YouTubers that 6 months is all it really takes to land a six figure job. (spoiler: wrong) This post is for people like

Leverage - An Army Of Robots to Do Your Bidding

Leverage - An Army Of Robots to Do Your Bidding

A few years back, I heard about this Naval Ravikant guy who had just published a "tweetstorm" on twitter about all of these crazy ideas on wealth, happiness, finding passion and a bunch of other things. Who? Naval? Like the orange? Why should I listen to Naval? Naval [https://en.

Lessons in growing a Facebook Group to 85,000 members

Lessons in growing a Facebook Group to 85,000 members

Sometimes, I feel like I just got really lucky. Besides, all I did was accept and decline member requests nearly every day for 3 years, post memes and funny content often, build branding that fits my audience's niche, get verbally berated and not berate back, post useful career advice, engage

Choose Yourself - James Altucher Book Takeaways

Choose Yourself - James Altucher Book Takeaways

I first heard of James Altucher [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Altucher] via Twitter. I wasn't really sure who he was, probably a quack – he's into cryptocurrency and has crazy hair. A few weeks ago, I listened to James' interview on the My First Million podcast [https://podcasts.apple.

I Tried to Buy 4 different (tiny) Startups and (mostly) Failed

I Tried to Buy 4 different (tiny) Startups and (mostly) Failed

Have you ever had a hobby that you're not good at? They can still be kind of fun. For me that has been acquiring online businesses or SaaS products. It is not easy, but it gets easier, I think. Ever since I took Ryan Kulp's MicroAcquisitions [https://www.microacquisitions.com/

Why Buying a House is like Buying a Startup 🏚

Money pit or fixer-upper with potential? In the past few years, I've gotten very interested in online businesses and SaaS. I've tried to acquire a few SaaS businesses but all of my deals so far have fallen apart. (I'll write about that soon). I'll find one some day. SaaS and

What does number 6 on the HN Front Page look like?

marketing Featured

What does number 6 on the HN Front Page look like?

I hit Number 6 on Hacker News today. It was...in short, fucking awesome. Seriously, this is a drug I didn't know I needed. I made my girlfriend take a picture to commemorate the moment. Then I ate some tacos and poured up a bourbon mule. This was better than

I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

coding Featured

I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich

In May of 2018 I decided I wanted to launch a SaaS product. There was only one problem. I'd never worked on, built, designed or even coded a fully fledged web app or SaaS product. y tho SaaS was to be the holy grail. A magic money machine that you

Scraping Chipotle Store Locations

webscraping Featured

Scraping Chipotle Store Locations

Introduction Web scraping has loads of interesting use cases. From financial forecasting to lead-gen, web scraping has several creative uses that you might not think about at first glance. For example, a burrito shop opening a new location might want to place their location further away from a Chipotle. What

Building a Serverless Ecommerce Store

Building a Serverless Ecommerce Store

Yes, it's true! You can build a storefront in an hour without spinning up a server. > WTF, how?! -- you, probably Gone are the days of paying expensive devs or fiddling with strange Wordpress extensions. I run a Facebook group, This is an IT Support Group [https://www.facebook.com/

Best Remote Job Boards

Remote work is becoming more and more common, especially for jobs that can sustain it. I work remotely and although there are some trade offs (not leaving the house for days, loneliness) I wouldn’t trade it for a traditional job. 37Signal’s book, Remote, praised the virtues of Remote