Two Million Dollar XLSX 💰

Yesterday, we were on what we thought would be a long and difficult call with our friends at Gusto. Being 100% remote sometimes makes it hard(er) to get things done, like adding new payroll and benefits.

In one of the awkward silences, we heard a familiar sound. It was the voice of Logan calling out to Maggie—two Great Pyrenees that our friend Pattie at Gusto recently adopted. Oh, what an ice breaker!

We digressed on a tangent about their activities, demands, and of course the joy they bring. A connection was made and what we expected to be a mundane call turned into an unexpected reprieve.

Interestingly, in a recent reader poll, 94.7% of respondents indicated they're dog people.

Really, no cats? 🙀

At Hey Rebekah, we have 6 dogs amongst the 3 of us. Rebekah's Rolo and Brinkley only have eyes for Dean. Ambreen's Juno, Nacho, Tuco, and now Coco, just can't get enough of their doggo daddy—Sam.

You'll be seeing a lot of them and we'd love to see your pets too. Share them with us!

Admit it, you've wasted countless hours of your life viewing or organizing data into spreadsheets. Microsoft Excel was released in 1987. Now, it's a ubiquitous tool relied upon by most businesses. The true beauty of Excel lies in its complex formula system.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of triumph when you crack the code on a tricky VLOOKUP. And let's not forget the joys of troubleshooting your SUMIFS. 🤓

But this isn't a sponsored post about spreadsheets. It's a fascinating introduction to how a "painfully shy girl" from Long Island became a self-employed role model.

Kat Norton was a senior consultant at a global firm in 2020 when the pandemic hit. She was living at home with her parents and was "buried in student debt". Her work travel stopped suddenly and she found herself meditating on: What do I love to do?

And that's exactly how it all began. She made the bold decision to make learning Excel fun! In June 2020, she posted her first TikTok on Left/Right Functions x Toosie Slide by Drake. 🎶

The rest is history!

Miss Excel—or should we say—Queen Excel, has raked in over $2,000,000 in sales teaching people and companies how to use Microsoft. Freaking. Excel. 🙌🏽

It can be hard to take a step back and see the big picture when we're busy with client work. The key is to slow down and think about things from first principles. And trust us, slowing down will help you find your flow.

Your goal should be to figure out a way to productize your value proposition, and match it to a deep understanding of your market and customers. For example, Kat found a way to make Excel training more tolerable for people and companies who needed it to get their jobs done.

Maybe you create Lightroom filters, or love working in Notion. It could be WordPress themes or Webflow templates. You could be designing NFTs or client logos. Whatever it is, use Kat's case study as inspiration.

Think about how you can bundle up your work in a repeatable and scalable way. Be bold, be innovative, and always be selling. Become a part of the booming creator economy!

Are you tired of attending boring zoom conferences? Well, the folks at designevents.guide have a solution for that. It's a curated calendar of UX/UI, motion, and design events from around the world.

So mark your calendars, designers! A world of endless creative events awaits.

By now, you're probably sick of hearing about OpenAI, GPT3, and ChatGPT. You might have even spent a small fortune trying out a bunch of apps that promised to transform the world, only to be devastated by their limitations.

These large language models can come in quite handy, even though they're not showtime ready. The best part is, you don't really need to spend any money to take advantage of them. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Most of the tools out there depend on OpenAI's technology. GPT-3 is the current stable release and ChatGPT (3.5) is the beta. Anyone can create a free account today and get started.

After a lot of experimentation, a couple of hundred bucks in subscription fees, and a $#!t ton of disappointment, we found something that it's pretty good at—brainstorming and idea generation.

Instead of trying to figure out the right prompts to give to GPT3, let it prompt you. Think of the way a book is organized. You have the title, then chapters, then sections, and so on. Otherwise known as information hierarchy.

Keeping this in mind, go sit down at your computer and run this experiment on ChatGPT. You'll need a free OpenAI account before you start.

We're going to come up with a detailed content outline for a book. The title: How to procrastinate without getting caught. 😇

You can copy and paste each prompt below into ChatGPT to generate the response:

Rinse then repeat for each topic, then the same for each talking point. And voila! In just a few minutes you have enough content for your Mark Manson like takeover of the publishing world. 🥸