Day 7 - Hackathon Detour (Day 1)
One week down! I have been having doubts that this build in public activity is worth pursuing - or if this is the right medium to do it in. I expected some more activity on this topic - even people criticizing what I am working on. But today I got a comment on my post and so I will keep posting here at least until the end of the month.
Knowledge Graph
As much as I have complained about prompt tuning, having the prompts ready has allowed me to quickly churn out quality flash cards, clean them up, and create metadata that will power the knowledge graph. I taste the finish line of having a strong understanding of how the knowledge graph will be used as a recommender system.
Hackathon
I signed up for a hackathon in Tokyo because they have such a good vibe for building. Usually, however, I just use them as an excuse to work on a feature for my app. And this is what I end up presenting. But they are also a great place to meet other driven colleagues.
I signed up for a hackathon by JVA and DMZ - and this one took a different approach than other hackathons. We were placed in teams and given themes to work on. This is not really my style of hackathons but I am open to meeting other driven colleagues so I told myself that I would attend day 1 and keep day 2 as TBD.
My original team was MIA so I got placed in a new team which was also a hodgepodge of orphaned teammates. We were forced to watch some pretty boring info sessions about how to use AI tools but I just focused on my app during these sessions. But when we got a chance to work together, we came up with a pretty good idea. And we had multiple sessions with mentors throughout the day which also reacted well to both our idea and our teamwork. Vibes were high yesterday and I could see myself working with these individuals beyond this project.
One may hear this and think that it's completely unrelated to my general plan of 'building in public' but I see these things being related. Some relationships have such a high upside in the longer term. As I was walking through Shibuya I had the thought that coming to Tokyo for these months would be one of the best decisions I had made.
P.S. day 1 of the hackathon was hosted at Bitcoin base and this is where the Satoshi monument is! I had seen it before online but never considered visiting it. Was nice to see it in person.
You've hit on one of the biggest leaks in the "build in public" funnel: emotional validation replacing financial conversion.
You're finding justification to continue based on a single comment and good "vibes" at a hackathon. That is a half-win at best, because it replaces the non-negotiable metric: generating qualified, monetizable leads.
You correctly note that those new connections have high upside. But "upside" is a vague promise.
The superior strategic lever is this: Immediately stop focusing on the next post. Your financial gain is maximized by weaponizing those relationships. Convert those "driven colleagues" and "high-upside relationships" into Conversion Certainty.
Deploy a targeted, high-scarcity outreach sequence to secure their pre-launch financial commitment or guaranteed high-stakes feedback. Turn the good vibe into a contractible asset. That is the only non-vague measure of that Tokyo trip's success.
ok I first appreciated your response to my other post but this is a repeat of your last comment. its obviously some AI generated slop and not a real person giving feedback.