I’ve been thinking about you. Yes, you. The person reading this with your actual human eyeballs. I know that sounds obvious, but I don’t think I’ve been treating it like it’s obvious.

Since I revamped this newsletter, it hasn’t grown the way I hoped it would. My Instagram hasn’t grown the way I hoped it would either. And when that happens, it’s very easy to start thinking in platform language.

Audience. Growth. Reach. Conversion. Distribution. Funnel. Strategy.

All useful words. All words I care about. But lately I’ve been wondering if those words can secretly make you forget the most important part: there are real people here.

Hundreds of you open these emails. Real humans give me a few minutes of their attention every week. That is not a small thing. That is not a vanity metric. That is time. And time is one of the most generous things a person can give you. So before I write anything else, I want to say thank you for being here.

I am not writing this as an expert. I am not writing this as a guru. I am not standing on some finished mountaintop with a clean framework and a perfect answer. I am writing this as someone doing the reps. And more and more, I think that might be the whole point.

This week, the tech world feels especially loud. Microsoft is reportedly planning more layoffs while increasing AI spending. OpenAI just published research about agents becoming a new interface for work. Cloudflare and beehiiv announced new ways for publishers to control how AI crawlers access their writing.

Everywhere you look, the message is some version of: work is changing, content is changing, expertise is changing, hurry up.

And I understand the anxiety of that.

The tech world keeps telling us to hurry up and optimize for the future. But the durable skill might be smaller: noticing one real person’s problem clearly enough to make something useful.

And I lived that out because this week I helped launch a prototype app for one of my best friends’s massive swim.

It is not trying to solve the world’s largest problem (even though she’s swimming a very large amount!!) It is not some massive venture-scale idea. It is a tool that tracks the details of her swims, what happens before, what happens after, and the information that matters around the event.

That’s it.

One tool. One person. One specific problem.

And honestly, building it was scary. There were moments where I had no idea what I was doing. How do I connect the backend? How do we make the data work? How do I make sure the right information is captured? How do we keep the scope from ballooning into something too big to actually ship?

But that is what made it useful.

Because the rep was not “build a perfect company.” The rep was: can we understand one person’s problem clearly enough to build something useful? Guess what - it’s still not perfect, but I’m in the terminal, I’m in the arena gathering feedback.

And that skill? I’m addicted to growing it. Not because every small tool becomes a massive business. Most won’t. Some will flop. Some will break. Some will be weird little experiments that teach you one thing and then disappear.

But I think there is something powerful about training yourself to notice problems at human scale.

One person needs a better way to track a swim.

One team needs a cleaner way to manage a workflow.

One reader needs a sentence that makes them feel less behind.

One annoying task needs a better system.

That is where the reps live. I think more of us need to stop waiting until we feel fully qualified to begin. Because AI can generate a lot. It can summarize, draft, code, research, organize, remix, and accelerate. I love that. I use it every day.

But it still needs someone to notice what matters.

Someone has to choose the problem. Someone has to care about the person on the other side. Someone has to decide what “good” looks like. Someone has to keep the thing from becoming bloated and soulless and technically impressive but emotionally useless.

That part still belongs to us.

So no, I’m not the expert. I’m the person putting in reps.

Writing the newsletter even when it isn’t growing the way I want. Building the small tool even when I don’t know if it will matter. Learning the backend. Asking the basic question. Watching the thing break. Trying again.

And if you’re here, you’re early. Not early to some guaranteed outcome. I can’t promise that. But early to the process.

Pay attention to the small problems right in front of you. The ones that seem too tiny to matter. The ones that belong to one person, one workflow, one moment of friction.

Solve one of those.

Not perfectly. Not forever. Just enough to learn.

Because sometimes the small thing unlocks the next thing. And sometimes it doesn’t.

Either way, it counts.

If it works, it’s proof. If it flops, it’s a rep.

And right now, I think the reps are the point.