Hey Rebekah's Business Plan Part 1 🌱

It's Taco Tuesday!

The first day after the long weekend and also Ditch New Year's Resolutions Day. Yup, it's a thing. Seventeen days into the new year—having made promises to better oneself—is it time to abandon those unachievable goals? 😅

Not if they have anything to do with tacos!

For the Hey Rebekah team, tacos are a way of life. Our unified love for tacos is one of the many things we all have in common.

As we dive headfirst into the upcoming week, with visions of the ultimate tortilla and copious amounts of salsa dancing in our heads, we've donned our stretchy pants.

What's your favorite 🌮 ? We're also dying to know if you're keeping or ditching any resolutions?

As you probably figured out by now, we're animal people and we got a thing for dogs. One of our favorite personalities is Tucker Budzyn, a popular social media star known for his off-the-hook videos.

With over three million followers on Instagram and YouTube, Tucker has captured our hearts and those of pet lovers around the world.

Tucker's profiles are run by his hoomans, creators Courtney and Mike Budzyn. The Budzyn's have earned a few million dollars as creators on social media with their engaging content and Tucker themed products.

As we're all getting back to work today, we thought this would be a great way to start things off right. After all, it is work related. 😉

As we near the half way mark of warming up our email sender domain, we're getting a lot of questions from readers. A recurring theme: What the heck is Hey Rebekah and what are you doing?

To be honest, we're still trying to figure it out ourselves. But don't worry, we've got some pretty solid assumptions and a dependable data-pipeline to work from. So, how did we end up here? Let's just say it involved some unique experiences, a taste of the possibilities, and a pinch of pure madness. We'll be telling you all about in painstaking detail over the coming weeks, so don't lose any sleep. 😜

It all started mid 2020, just after taking on a new client. We were faced with the hard reality that highly personalized professional services weren't scalable and our business model was approaching it's peak. Something would have to change.

We've played in the digital marketing space for as long as we can remember. Rebekah's been one of the most sought after experts since forever, Ambreen the creative force, and Sam powering the tech. We've been helping companies gain digital marketing superpowers together, since 2014.

So it was logical and convenient that our focus remain in the field moving forward. We examined the landscape to identify problems companies were facing, did some competitive benchmarking, and identified a lot of possibilities.

However, something occurred to us as we continued to conduct a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative research in our market segmentation.

When examining our value proposition and what we've achieved together we honed in on stuff like:

But we overlooked the fact that we were self-employed professionals. When we focused on that basic premise, everything changed. It was at that point that our unique value proposition became clearer.

Oh, and remember that client we talked about from 2020? We were introduced to them by our favorite person who'd taken on a senior role there. It was a non-profit organization working to make higher education more accessible.

Our time there had a huge impact on our path forward. It redefined meaningful work for us. So we reframed our thinking and began to look at things in a new way.

What has made us successful self-employed professionals and how could we leverage that to help others?

Approaching the question from a new paradigm landed us on something unexpected. What made us successful as digital marketing professionals was deeply seeded in what made us successful as self-employed professionals:

It was about this time that we were contacted by a former colleague who was with us on one of our client adventures. They had written to check-in, say hello, and to let us know that they'd been promoted to the role of Engineering Manager at Meta.

What stood out about this story was their gratitude for things they said we helped them with or showed them during our time together. For some reason, they over estimated those simple things in lieu of their own potential and capabilities. We reminded them of that and were grateful for the check-in nevertheless.

That quick thread made us reflect upon some of the other people we worked with, many that had similar trajectories. Most of whom continue to remain self-employed. Where were they now?

There's the story of our former social media manager from Cebu who went on the productize her service offerings and establish a thriving agency.

There's also our ASP.net friend from Kharkiv who built one of the first Facebook payment apps with us. They now run a team of .net professionals working with big US companies on Azure. We're thinking about you K, stay safe!

There are a lot more of these stories and we'll share them with you in detail in future editions. However, what's curious about each of them is the profound effect of exposing high-potential, self-employed professionals to the factors that have contributed to our own career success, such as best practices, industry expertise, and business processes.

Ultimately, the path forward became clear. We were going to help self-employed professionals become better at what they do so that they can make more money and find their joy. How? We'll get to that in the next part of this story.

This is the first part of a multi-part series that we'll be continuing on Tuesdays and Thursdays until we're done boring you to death.

As you know, OpenAI's ChatGPT is all the rage and we're seeing hundreds of novel applications being released every week. But to date, the use of AI in a production environment for content has been limited, well at least we thought it was. Sure there were large experiments which failed a few years ago by major publishers, but nothing out there in the wild.

It came as quite a surprise to hear that CNET has been conducting an experiment using generative AI. Since November 2022, CNET Money's editorial team began using AI to create basic explainers on financial services topics. They've published about 75 articles using this method and they claim:

What's odd about this is how far they've gone to explain their thinking in reaction to the story hitting the news cycle. They've made it clear that every article is reviewed and fact-checked by an editor with topical expertise before it is published. In response to criticism, they've also updated all of the bylines for posts written by AI to include CNET Money Staff.

We're not opposed to the idea of AI generated content but we're concerned with the quality and accuracy like most pundits. The same experts who say that over 90% of content on the internet will be generated by AI by 2026.So how do you feel about early adopters like CNET?