So it’s the Friday before Christmas and the end to 2024 is just around the bend.

It’s been bit of a crazy year for me, and an especially crazy last 3 months. I feel kind of like I’ve lived an entire new life time over the quarter.

I suppose a few of you new readers don’t really know me that well, so it would be good to give a quick update on myself and why I write this blog in the first place:

• I’m Ramsey

• I just moved to Chicago and turned 27

• I’m the founder of Uptrends AI, a media analytics market intelligence company

• I write blogs, host founder events, teach startup classes, build dumb AI apps

Here’s a quick status update on each of the projects I’ve been working on this year, I think I’ll start doing something like this once a quarter to keep myself accountable and make it easier for friends to follow.

It’s funny I used to think it was a competitive advantage to be stealth mode and never share intimate details of your work lest someone might steal it. But all my most successful friends are the most overly candid, and I’ve experienced the same firsthand. You really get what you give.

Uptrends.ai 🚨

Stock Market News Monitoring Platform

We launched Uptrends.ai v2 in February, our target customer was retail investors. By July we had 20,000 total users, but only a few hundred paying subscribers. The economics weren’t great — some of that might’ve been our ability to deliver on the app development and marketing, but I think mostly a consumer subscriptions for an uber-niche discretionary alt-data product is just a tough market for a first-time founder.

By August we pivoted. We explored ~10 other ideas (full blog post on that) and landed on building an AI data pipeline to derive stock market insights from long-form videos. I’lll save the details for a future blog post, but TLDR; we’ve built a really impressive data model and have few hedge fund clients already. It’s crazy how quickly it came together, and now we’re fully focused on scaling it over the next year. I’ve never been more excited about a project :-)

SlawNearMe.com 🥗

Stupid AI-Generated Coleslaw Maps App

In October I got a little bored and infatuated with AI coding apps. I thought it would be funny to use v0 / Claude / Cursor / Replit to try and deploy a real, live app without much coding experience. I’ve always been a fan of coleslaw (a bit of a schtick tbh) so I decided to build a maps app that could find the best coleslaw restaurants in your area ranked from best to worst: ColeslawNearMe was born.

In about 25 hours I was able to design, orchestrate, implement, and deploy a website without writing any first-hand code. AI pretty much did the whole thing for me. A few weeks ago I launched it to SlawNearMe.com, and posted a few videos documenting the journey along the way. The funny thing is that it kind of took off — in the first week I had over a thousand website visits… and now I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to take it. Currently the site only has data for 3 cities (Chicago, NYC, LA) so next I’m looking forward to adding more cities and seeing if I can monetize it. KFC if you’re reading this, let’s talk.

MNFounders.org 🍻

Startup Community and Events for Minnesota Founders

About a year ago (while I was still living in Minnesota) a few startups friends and I started hosting happy hours for founders. It was a genuinely organic thing — we wanted a way to simply get together with other people building cool sh*t on semi-regular basis. So we’d buy a keg and rent out a coworking space on a Wednesday evening every other month, and the reaction was electric. Our first event had 20 people, the next had 40, and by our third we had 100 people show up.

Corporate sponsors started offering to pay our way to put on larger events. We hosted a few cornhole tournaments and a pickleball tournament. Our email list and MN Founders LinkedIn Group grew collectively to more than 500 people. It got to the point where we had to start taking it seriously to keep up with the demand, but none of us really have much extra bandwidth — then I moved to Chicago. We plan to host another event in February, and exploring options to maybe partner or merge with another startup community in MN.

ILT Academy 👍

10-week Startup Course for Early Stage Entrepreneurs

In November I joined the team at ILT Academy as a program facilitator and recruiter. ILT is a virtual instructor-led startup program built to help early-stage entrepreneurs go from idea to launching their business. It was started by one of my great friends Nick Tietz, and I actually went through the program myself 4 years ago when I was first thinking about starting Uptrends.

When Nick approached me this fall and asked if I’d have any interest in helping him scale the program and reach more entrepreneurs, I simply couldn’t say no. I care a lot about startups and specifically the startup community in the upper midwest, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to make an impact. We just finished our largest cohort to-date, wrapped up this week with a 100+ person virtual demo day to rival even the best of them (looking at you gener8tor and YC!). I love it, and plan to stick around in 2025.

Daily Wisdom ☀️

This daily blog of startup ideas, life-hacks, and dumb thoughts

At the end of September I started this blog. More than anything it was an excuse to organize some of my thoughts and improve my writing. Also a way to keep me accountable by forcing myself to sit down and write about the things I’m working on as often as possible. It’s been fun, and it’s been challenging. I guess that’s what I was hoping for.

Now roughly 3 months in and I’ve managed to get out nearly 60 blog posts. Some of them about things like starting a business, learning AI tools, writing good to-do lists, getting good SEO results, scaling email marketing tactics, building communities, and some about dumb philosophy, my favorite quotes, good books, and other things that come to mind. It’s great that now people like you read them!! But mostly, it’s for me, and I try to remind myself that — I think anytime you make content it’s important to remind yourself this, otherwise it can feel overly transactional and performative.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to this year. Most of that really transpired over the past few months.

There’s been some really exciting up’s, and some frightful days. My bank account hit <$100 for the first time since I was 12 this year. I hired and fired employees. I got lost a few times. But mostly I had fun. And ultimately, more than anything, I’m really excited and energized about the things I have going for me right now.

If you read this far I hope that you take away one thing, and that’s that you really can just go out and do things.

The only person stopping you from putting yourself out there and trying and failing and incrementing and succeeding is yourself. You may not get where you want to be right away, but that’s kind of the whole point.

I think when we look back on life we’ll all realize that there was no destination. The journey is everything. Enjoy it tenaciously and enthusiastically.

Cheers to 2024, and to an even better 2025.

And if you built anything cool this year or have plans to build something in 2025, I’d love to hear about it :-)

Peace,
Ramsey