Where I've been, part 1

It's been the craziest year of my life, and for the past 10 months, I've wanted to write about it.

In fact, I first started to create this in the middle of July. I dumped all my thoughts down into a microphone for about an hour...but an hour is a lot of words, plus it's really hard to write in the middle of a storm. But now that it has passed and I stand at the other side, I think finally I can.

Around the beginning of November last year, I found out I was going to be a father. That changed everything.

It was scary and exciting news. Jarring and scary sure, but I had wanted this for a while.

And as I got the news, I had this sense of peace, joy and determination settle in my stomach. Felt like I could pierce into the future in my mind's eye, as the water fell all over me in the shower later that day, I saw all the pieces fall into place. Like playing tetris with the blocks all stacked up and getting that one piece that cleared everything. That is how it felt.

It made sense why I had recently reconnected with some friends for the first time in over a decade. All my discontent and turmoil was coming to an end. I knew the path to take, I knew I was moving to Cape Town and everything that needed to happen. So I embraced it.

Living through it though, that has been quite the experience.

I took most of November to adjust and come to terms with it. In December I went to see my girl and we talked about the way forward, and at the end of the month we started telling our parents. By January things started kicking off. In March we did the introduction. In April my son was born. I called him UsungAbasi (The path of God). And in mid-June I moved down to Cape Town.

So in the space of about six or seven months, my entire life changed drastically.

Oh shit, how do we pull this off?

One of the first big questions I asked myself was whether I could support a whole family with the business. I thought I'd been doing relatively okay so far, I could take care of myself and those around me but this was a whole new level. If I was going to walk into this responsibility, then my business had to go to a whole other level. It had to actually do what I wanted it to do, needed it to do. Just being okay wouldn't cut it. If I said I wanted it to reach a certain target, then it needed to reach it. I couldn't faff around hoping I'd figure it out. I had to sit down and figure it out. I had to change.

So since January that has been my main mission. Really digging into this thing. What is Base X Studio? How much do I want to make a month? Oh that much? Okay wow, cool goal, but what do I actually need to do to get there. Can I get there in a sustainable and healthy way? I've made half of that before. But it almost killed me, because of how much I had to work for it. All the projects and all the things I took on always came at the expense of my health, my energy and my time.

There had to be a better version of this. A version where I could put out good work and work well, where I could be happy with what I was doing, where the value I delivered, the model I did it in and the commercial mechanics of that just made sense. I needed to crack the formula.

For the past 10, 11 months, I've been trying to figure that out. While responding and adjusting to all the many changes.

Move

The first lesson was to move.

To not think about or wait for the conditions to be right. To even have the money to do any of the things I need to do. In fact, that was the word that settled into my heart at the time - do not allow the lack of money stop you from doing what you need to do. You need to trust that the resources will show up when you need them, and you need to move. Boldly.

So I moved, and in those initial months, having to travel a lot and get things in motion, provision met me, things would sort of just fall into place.

As I moved, something interesting happened...

The conversation that moved the bottleneck

One of the first core pivotal moments came around December. I am chatting with my friend here in Cape Town on one of those early visits. He was talking about how he used AI to do certain things in his business and figure certain things out.

Before then, all I used it for was to generate images here and there and ask questions. December was the first time it clicked for me, that maybe AI wasn't just for generating images and asking questions. Maybe I could actually do things with it. Maybe I could even build with it.

So I decided to test it out on an old project. I had always wanted to build a digital version of something I'd offered for years - my brand sprints. It was a workshop I learned about back in 2016, and over the years I had run it and evolved it.

It was a quick workshop designed to help clients understand the essence of their brand and define it. Too many times, I had clients always wanting to jump straight to design without really understanding what their brand actually was. Eventually they'd end up with brands that weren't strong enough, defined enough, or interesting enough.

I always saw that as a gap, and I tried as much as I could to encourage the sprint and sell it. Not everybody bit, but it was always a good exercise.

So I asked myself: What is the next version of this? What is the AI version of this?

In January, I tried it with ChatGPT and got a whole recipe of what to do. Use Notion, use Make, connect all these things. I tried, I really tried. I worked on it for an afternoon, two days, maybe three, and I couldn't get it to work. I kept hitting problems, and I couldn't even trust that the directions it was giving me were correct, because it would make mistakes and I would find the right thing and fix it myself. So I abandoned the project.

Some weeks later, I don't know why or how, I heard about this Claude thing, so I tried it. I opened a chat and said, listen, I'm trying to make this. Here's the PDF, here are the worksheets I designed two years ago, here is what the output usually looks like, how could we do it? It gave me a whole plan, and in five, ten, fifteen minutes it was done. It had built the thing.

That was my road to Damascus moment.

I had gone from a tool that told me how to make the thing, and not always reliably, to a tool that just made it. I don't mind working. I'm a maker, that's what I do, but give me the right recipe and point me in the right direction. Going from a tool I wasn't sure would even steer me right, to a tool that just did the thing, meant that the bottleneck was no longer what I could make or what I knew how to do. The bottleneck was what I could imagine, and how I could use this tool.

That one experience was the beginning of my descent into the agentic rabbit hole, and since then I've been digging deeper and deeper.

Working with AI as a whole new class of creative tool. Stress testing it, seeing where it's good and where it isn't, where it fails and where it succeeds, where it has revolutionised the game and where it still falls short.

Running what I now call...The Loop.

What is this business, really?

At the beginning of the year I wrote a piece about how to move fast without losing yourself, because as the year started I knew that was what I needed to do. By the time we found out about the baby we were already three months in, so we only had six months to prepare, and I had to go really fast and really hard. In that piece I wrote that to move fast you need to focus. You need to be on the ball, focused on the most important things. You can't be distracted, because if you are, time passes, and you can't take your eye off the ball, because you'll crash. You go for it and stay as alert as you can through all of it.

All of that came with a lot of financial pressure, needs and things to do at the same time. At the same time, I am trying to restructure and figure out my whole business. If I needed to achieve all of what was set before me, I had to find a way to build the business to that level, but I didn't know exactly what to do. I had ideas, and all I could do was keep testing and experimenting with them, but it was going to take some time. That is why I needed to go fast.

So I discovered AI as a thinking tool, a sparring partner. A place where I can say: listen, I want to do this, what do you think? And we go back and forth, stress test ideas, try things. I come up with things, and maybe they work, maybe they don't.

I came up with many ideas, different ways to make money.

My work, my business was to design brand identities, design websites and help with strategy (when they let me). Those three things. Now I was trying to sell a retainer on top. I'd done retainers here and there with some clients, and that's the usual way of selling design and graphics in this creative business. But between the numbers I wanted and what people were willing to pay for certain things, nothing matched. There was always that disconnect.

So I had to sit down and really figure out what this business was, what it needed to be. I tried selling different tiers for a month or two, and it didn't really work out. I sold maybe two. One client fell off because they couldn't pay, and the other one is still on, but it wasn't quite the thing I was looking for.

So I sit with it, for weeks and weeks, and to an extent still now, trying to figure out the commercial architecture of the business, how to structure it.

I know what it is, what it has been, but I can feel it could be something else. I feel like there's something underneath all of this, and so I keep playing with it. One thing becomes clear to me over time though.

For someone who thought he had a handle on branding...my positioning was trash...