My September Moment

On September 21st, 2024, I wouldn’t have believed you, if you told me:

• I would build classicscondensed.com and then launch gregslist.ai on product hunt less than a month later.
• That I would update my personal website, launch ai-execs.com (with my friend Hamel) and build a custom youtube-downloader application by October.
• That I could re-imagine an old video game intro trailer from scratch or build an advent of code solver.
• That I would help launch SpecStory’s website, docs site, Github page and Cursor extension in December. Not to mention the 10s of internal apps and prototypes I have no good link to point to.

I wouldn’t have believed you if you told someone with a barren GitHub history until right before that point that I would be building something new nearly everyday.

I wouldn’t have believed you because my intent to build had been long locked away.

I had grown more comfortable delegating people than my own ideas directly.

But Cursor, the AI Code Editor, changed all that. And not just for me, Gregs — like the Fays of the world — are now legion.

Connected to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and supercharged with Composer it is my indisputable pick for 2024’s most indispensable product.

I’ve spent more time with Cursor than other time sinks: Reddit, X, LinkedIn or even some favorite video games I had grown accustomed to occupying my time with.

When I talk to people directly about this or post about it on social it’s near impossible to convey the impact.

I know now that it is something you must experience first-hand to truly understand.

Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream. — VI. 31

The truth is that my friend Hamel was my catalyst. We were discussing an idea I had for a venture and he off handedly asked if I had tried Cursor yet.

I knew what GitHub Co-Pilot could do and I didn’t understand how Cursor — something being hyped to no end — and which I viewed as a mere analog could be worth it.

The truth was: no, I hadn’t.

He suggested I jointakeoff.com to get my bearings.

I did. I’m glad I did.

I got initial inspiration from Greg Isenberg, Riley Brown and McKay Wrigley on YouTube (I watched this first and share it frequently).

I learned helpful productivity enhancing tricks from Jason Zhou on X (this is a favorite).

And then I kept at it. Everyday. For the last 103 days.

Results compound rapidly when you “awaken” to the fact that LLMs when employed correctly can help you learn most things. Paths unfamiliar before become easy to trod. Especially with the right mindset and writing precisely.

I’m in the process of building an AI code editor ranking app with data sourced from Reddit that I started on December 27th.

The front end right now looks like this ??

In just a few days, I’ve built:

• Flask Backend: Which powers the main application server and API endpoints.
• PostgreSQL Database: Stores posts, comments, and sentiment analysis data with optimized indexes.
• Reddit Scraper and Sentiment Analyzer: A service for data collection with robust error handling which has already processed 3K posts and 45K comments.
• Admin Panel: Flask-Admin based interface for system management and job scheduling and monitoring.

By early next week I’ll have deployed the backend with Railway and have it connected to Vercel to serve my frontend. If I get stuck, I might lean back into Google’s Realtime Streaming API for help ??

But I know now that I have easy to access, incredibly powerful options at my disposal.

Options and newfound abilities that just 103 days ago were beyond my belief.

2025 is your year to build

I want you to have my September 2024 moment this year. Or better yet, this January.

What seems impossible to you today can become your daily reality tomorrow.

Maybe you've got a folder of unfinished projects, or ideas you've filed away as "too difficult." Maybe you've convinced yourself that building isn't for you, that you're better at managing than making.

I was there too.

2025 isn't just another year – it's your invitation to build.

The tools have never been more powerful, the barriers never lower.

The only question is: Will you take that first step?

Will you be the one, a year from now, writing about how you couldn't have imagined what you'd build?

Your breakthrough is waiting. Start building.