A Better Lemonade Stand #325

💛 Sponsor

Omnisend analyzed 23+ billion emails to uncover the following:

• Top 10 most-used emojis (Time for a refresh?)

• Most-mentioned artists (Taylor, Drake, or Beyoncé?)

• Cats vs. dogs vs. chickens: inbox animal showdown

• Pop culture: TV, movies, and sports in emails

• Overused phrases and “oops” moments

Discover 2024’s trends and what’s next for 2025!

📈 Trends

🎭 Why Solopreneurs Must Master Soft Skills in the AI Era

As I mentioned in our workforce trend report, AI is eating the world—but it can’t replicate human connection, influence, or creativity.

If you’re a solopreneur, you know that technical skills alone won’t cut it anymore. While AI automates tasks, your advantage lies in mastering skills that AI can't replicate—often called 'durable skills.’

Let’s explain why soft skills are your ultimate “hard” currency in the AI economy and how to sharpen them to thrive in this new landscape.

🤖 AI Can Work, But It Can’t Lead (for now)

For years, we have dismissed soft skills as fluffy, secondary, or "nice to have" additions you find on job requirements, but now they are more crucial than the advanced technical skills you need to succeed as an independent entrepreneur.

Here’s Why:

• AI can generate ideas but can’t validate them: Creativity isn’t just coming up with ideas—it’s knowing which ones will work.

• AI can automate customer service but can’t build trust: People buy from those they trust, and human connection has always built trust.

• AI can analyze data but can’t make judgment calls: Business decisions require intuition, experience, and adaptability.

🎯 The Essential Soft Skills Every Solopreneur Needs

1/ Adaptability: The AI Economy Moves Fast—You Have to Move Faster. AI tools are overnight shifting SEO strategies, content marketing, and sales funnels.

Are you finding experimenting and evolving easy, or are you still clinging to outdated tactics?

How to Build It:

• Train for uncertainty. Run small, low-risk experiments in your business.

• Pivot when needed. Don’t get attached to methods—stay attached to results.

• Follow AI news & trends—not to compete with AI, but to understand where you’re most valuable.

AI + Adaptability → AI predicts trends, but as a solopreneur, you must pivot your strategy accordingly.

Recommended Book: Atomic Habits – James Clear. AI can automate tasks, but discipline and consistency are still human-driven—this book helps build sustainable success habits. (If you haven’t read it already).

2/ Persuasion: AI Writes, But You Have to Sell. ChatGPT can write a sales page but will not close the deal. Buyers trust humans who demonstrate authority, authenticity, and emotion.

How to Build It:

• Use storytelling. Instead of listing features, craft a compelling narrative.

• Sell with empathy. Talk less about what your product does and more about how it makes life easier.

• Study copywriting & negotiation. These skills increase revenue without increasing effort.

AI + Persuasion → AI suggests data-driven messaging, but humans create emotional resonance.

Recommended Book: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini. This book helps you master human persuasion to stand out and close deals.

3/ Emotional Intelligence: People Buy Connections, Not Just Products. AI can analyze sentiment but doesn’t understand how to connect genuinely.

Customers stick around because of how you make them feel. A study found that 91% of top performers had high emotional intelligence (EQ), while only 26% of low performers did.

How to Build It:

• Read your audience. Be hyper-aware of their pain points and desires.

• Respond, don’t react. Pause before sending that email or social post.

• Master non-verbal cues. Your energy and tone matter more than words on calls or in video content.

Recommended Book: Emotional Intelligence 2.0 – Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves. This book teaches relationship-building and self-awareness to differentiate you from automation.

4/ Resilience: AI is reshaping entire industries, and solopreneurs who can handle setbacks and reinvent themselves will thrive.

How to Build It:

• Develop a "fail fast" mindset. Treat every setback as feedback.

• Control what you can. You can’t stop AI but you can control your skills, mindset, and marketing.

• Surround yourself with adaptable people. Join a mastermind, community, or mentor group.

AI + Emotional Intelligence → AI detects sentiment, but entrepreneurs nurture authentic relationships.

Recommended Book: The 5 Essential People Skills – Dale Carnegie: Helps entrepreneurs navigate challenges, negotiate better, and build strong relationships.

💰Turning Soft Skills Into Hard Revenue

Here’s your 3-step action plan to getting started:

📌 Step 1: Identify Your Weakest Link

• Ask past clients for feedback on your soft skills. Do they say you’re a great strategist but lack clear communication? Fix that.

• Take a soft skills assessment around that particular skill (LinkedIn, Coursera, or gamified tests).

📌 Step 2: Train Like It’s a Hard Skill

• Use AI for practice. Role-play sales call with ChatGPT.

• Learn from the best. Read books on persuasion, leadership, and influence.

• Implement daily. Every client interaction is a chance to sharpen your emotional intelligence.

📌 Step 3: Make Soft Skills Your Brand

• Show your expertise. Post insights on LinkedIn, Twitter, or a newsletter.

• Over-communicate value. AI can automate follow-ups, but you bring the human touch.

• Position yourself as irreplaceable. AI can’t replace trust, relationships, or intuition.

💡 Insights

💰 How a Non-Developer Sold His First AI-Built App for $750

You don’t need to be a developer to build and sell AI-generated apps. This step-by-step guide shows how one marketing guy used Replit’s AI coding assistant to create and sell his first app—with no coding background.

The 3-Step Playbook:

1️⃣ Find a Buyer Before You Build: Instead of guessing what people need, he finds businesses looking for solutions through Upwork, which guarantees the demand.

2️⃣ Use AI to Build Fast: Replit handled the entire app development process, from UI to database setup, at only $11 in computing costs.

3️⃣ Sell & Upsell Maintenance: The first deal was $750, but the actual play is how he charges for ongoing updates and feature enhancements.

This strategy isn’t just a quick win—it’s a repeatable AI-first business model. He’s building 52 apps in a year—one per week, repeating the same strategy and betting that at least one will be a breakout hit.

👉 Here’s How He Sold His Replit App From Scratch

🎥 The 6-Step Formula Behind a Billion Views

Viral videos aren’t just about luck—creators strategically engineer them to manufacture the ‘luck’ needed for success. Adley Kinsman’s Viralish follows this six-step playbook:

1. Hook Fast – 90% retention in 6 seconds or less by combining curiosity and emotion.

2. Build Suspense – Start with action, not the final result, keeping viewers guessing.

3. Deliver a Payoff – The last 3-10 seconds lock in engagement and shares.

4. Engineer Comments – Use hidden Easter eggs or bold claims to spark discussion.

5. Raise the Stakes – Higher risks, unusual locations, and more significant reactions to intensify content.

6. Test Before You Post – Use $5 ad tests to optimize thumbnails and hooks for better results.

👉 Get Adley Kinsman’s Full Strategy

🅰️ What Still Works For Google Ads in 2025

The rules of Google Ads optimization are changing. What worked last year might be hurting your results today. The key is shifting from keyword obsession to an audience-first strategy.

✅ What to Start:

• Using broad match on high-performing keywords instead of endlessly bidding on variations.

• Communicating more on Performance Max—spam leads are fixable.

• Prioritizing audience signals over keywords for better targeting.

❌ What to Stop:

• Bidding on every converting keyword variation—it’s expensive and ineffective.

• Dismissing Performance Max at the first sign of spam.

• Treating keywords as the core of your strategy instead of leveraging first-party data.

🔄 What to Continue:

• Constantly testing, questioning, and adapting—no single best strategy exists.

• Optimizing Performance Max through asset group review and audience insights.

• Leveraging first-party data for smarter exclusions and customer segmentation.

  👉 See What Works This Year

🏃‍♂️ How Hampton Built a Brand People Chase

Most brands chase customers—Hampton made customers chase them. In just 3 years, they turned a zero-following startup into one of the most exclusive entrepreneur communities.

Their secret? A dead-simple, highly repeatable 6-step playbook:

1️⃣ Leverage a Founder-Led Attention Machine: Sam Parr & Joe Speiser built massive personal brands before launching. Instead of relying on ads, they redirected their audience’s trust straight into Hampton.

2️⃣ Build a Media Engine: A brand can’t rely on founders forever. Hampton launched The MoneyWise Podcast, a 24/7 content machine that attracts their exact ICP—high-net-worth entrepreneurs.

3️⃣ Find the Core Pain Points: They didn’t guess their customers’ struggles. They surveyed them, gathered data-backed insights, and used that information to shape their marketing strategy.

👉 Get All 6 Steps to Hamptons Growth

🧰 Apps & Tools

🎥 Pickle.AI: Create an AI version of yourself to attend meetings. This guy tested it, comparing AI to reality in a side-by-side Zoom call.

🧵 Tapestry: Merge social, RSS, podcasts & YouTube into one chronological, ad-free feed—no tracking, no algorithms, just your content.

🔎 Bextora: Skip biased blog posts & paid rankings—this community votes on the best tools, methods, and products. (Built with Lovable.dev)

💰 Expenses Day: AI-powered OCR scans receipts, invoices & bank statements—process multiple expense types in seconds.

⭐ TrustLoop: Capture 3X more 5-star reviews and gather real-time feedback—set it, forget it, and let AI do the work.

💳 Fina: Ditch spreadsheets—track personal & business finances your way with bank sync, auto-categorization, and flexible budgeting.

🤖 Product Updates

🎬 Pika’s New AI Tool Lets You Add Objects to Videos

Want to drop a knight on a horse into your clip? How about a tsunami flooding a city? With Pikadditions, you can now add objects, people, or elements into any video—real or AI-generated.

Why It’s a Game-Changer:

🔹 Upload any video—AI-generated or actual footage—and edit freely.

🔹 Insert anyone or anything—want to be in your favorite movie scene? Done.

🔹 Keep original audio—your edits blend naturally, with no weird robotic sound swaps.

People are already turning AI characters into Simpsons intros, remixing viral clips, and making mind-blowing edits. Check out Jon Finger’s wild experiments, including a tactical Amazonian security guard who reads on lunch break and more mind-bending AI-generated scenes.

👉 See More Pikadditions Examples in Action

🧠 Sam Altman Teases GPT-5: What’s Coming Next?

Sam Altman just hinted at OpenAI’s next big move—GPT-5. He acknowledged ongoing work on the model at an event in Berlin but kept the details under wraps.

Key Takeaways:

• OpenAI is actively developing GPT-5, but there is no launch date yet.

• It’s expected to be more intelligent, capable, and potentially multimodal.

• The focus seems to be on better reasoning, memory, and real-world applications.

Altman’s approach? Underpromise, overdeliver. But the AI arms race is heating up—Google just dropped Gemini 2 Pro, and OpenAI won’t sit still for long.

👉 Expect More Announcements Soon

💬 Why Use Gemini 2.0 After the Flash Update?

Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash update makes its chatbot smarter, faster, and more useful than ever, especially for non-developers who want to streamline research, content creation, and automation.

Here’s Why You Should Start Using It:

1️⃣ Smarter, Faster Answers: With enhanced reasoning and a 1M token context window, Gemini 2.0 summarizes reports, fact-checks, and organizes complex data instantly.

2️⃣ Real-Time Search & Video Insights: Search the web, analyze YouTube videos, and get key takeaways in seconds with just the link—no need to sit through hours of content.

3️⃣ Multimodal AI (Text & Images): Gemini processes images, documents, and text, making it great for document analysis, visual descriptions, and AI-powered edits.

4️⃣ AI-Powered Content & Automation: Generate blog posts, reports, or full HTML pages with structured formatting—perfect for business owners and content creators.

Gemini 2.0 rivals ChatGPT and DeepSeek, offering free access to Google's best AI tools—without the $200+ monthly fee

👉 Learn More About Flash2.0 Here

🖇️ Everything Else

🔮 2025 Predictions vs Reality: VR was supposed to replace phones, print to die, and offices to vanish. Reality? VR adoption is 5%, print thrives, and remote work needs a pandemic. (🔗 What 2025 Predictions Got Wrong)

🤖 Building a Marketing AI Agent: Andrea Bosoni used Lovable to auto-reply to Reddit marketing questions. Andrea built it in minutes. (🔗 See How He Created It)

🧑‍💻 Your Website Copy Is Too Long: Most SaaS founders write novels instead of clear messaging. Ditch the fluff and vague buzzwords. (🔗 Why Clarity Wins)

👶 Growing Up AI-First: Kids prefer ChatGPT over Google, making AI the default way to learn instead of search engines. (🔗 How AI Is Changing Learning)

💻 Google’s AI Search Mode: AI Mode organizes search results into structured answers, letting users ask follow-up questions like a chat. (🔗 See Google’s AI Mode)

📩 The Dark Side of Newsletter Growth: Agencies sell fake "active subscribers" by scraping emails, tanking ESP reputations, and ruining trust. (🔗 Full Breakdown)