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Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap on Streamline Solopreneur, a short episode

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where I talk about three things, what's on my mind this week, recommended reading

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and something fun.

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This is the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off,

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worry free, and hopefully this curation will help you think more about how you are

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spending your time. I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for

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July 3rd, 2026.

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It's about getting distracted.

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I almost rejoined Instagram this week. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was

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hurting my business not being there.

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This is a group of people I trust and they made some compelling arguments. My business

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has been slow lately, and I don't feel like my mailing list is growing the way it

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should.

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Wondering if this was a largely singular view. I was getting from a very specific

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group of people. This is a group of creators I was talking to after all. I took the

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question to some trusted friends who have known me for a very long time.

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They unanimously said, I shouldn't, making the argument that my audience probably

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isn't there and

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I don't like being on the platform, and if

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I don't like being on the platform, then I'm not going to try to do it. Well,

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after all, I rage quit meta. I didn't really rage quit it. It was like a long term

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thing I had been thinking about. And last October, right before my 40th birthday,

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I finally deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,

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TikTok, most of my social profiles leaving me only on LinkedIn.

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So trying to get back on a platform and then do it well, even though I don't like

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being there, would be an incredible waste of time and resources.

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So

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taking both of these arguments, both from groups of people

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I trust,

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I sat back and thought about what actually grows my mailing list.

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I am on LinkedIn, after all,

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is this social platform growing my mailing list?

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It's not more on that in the automation of the week segment, which is now public

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by the way. But first reviewing my analytics and then with the help of Claude,

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I realized that most of my good subscribers are coming from my own content on YouTube

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and my podcast as well as speaking events.

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This could be talks that I'm giving in real life or at virtual events or webinars,

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and it makes sense. I both love teaching and I am good at it.

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Instead of getting distracted with another social platform that I know all hate,

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this is where I need to double down

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YouTube, my podcast and other people's audiences

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speaking and providing real value is how I grow my list.

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Good thing I am speaking at a bunch of events this year,

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you can head over to casabona.org/now to see those.

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The point is this,

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we are going to get a lot of advice

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and a lot of it will be coming from honest, genuine people

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that you trust.

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But ultimately the advice is one factor in a decision.

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You need to figure out what's best for you.

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Consider the source of the advice

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and do small experiments to see what works best.

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After all, most people who recommend a TV show

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are not really saying

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you'll like this show.

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They are saying, I like this show,

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and it's only when a bunch of people or a few trusted friends recommend a show to

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me that I actually check it out.

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In my case, getting back on Instagram wouldn't be a small experiment.

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It would be a big shift. I'd have to sign up with a new account and figure out a

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new username, set up the profile, and then post consistently there, which I'm not

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doing right now.

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The small experiment

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is making more of an effort on LinkedIn, which I'm already posting to regularly to

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see if social actually works for me.

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The data

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is a little bit mixed now that I'm reviewing

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It tells me, no, not really from a UTM standpoint, but as Claude is pointing out

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to me,

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the source for referring URLs,

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more of them are coming from LinkedIn. So this does need to be a concerted effort

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on my part, but still the data is overwhelming. My own content and teaching

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are the ways that I get more people on my list.

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So that's what's on my mind this week. It's about not getting distracted, spending

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your time the right way.

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But there's also

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something I I I'm call in the newsletter. I'm calling it a smaller on my mind because

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it's just kind of a check

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with the Friday wrap up.

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I've been thinking a lot about the point of these Friday wrap up episodes and newsletters.

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They take me 90 minutes or less to do, and they are fun for me 'cause I do like curating.

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But I kind of say this in the intro, right? Like, what is the point of this? Hopefully

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this curation will help you think more about your systems. Is is what I've been saying

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for the past couple of months.

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But that's been missing the mark for a a bunch of reasons.

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I haven't really been talking about systems. I've just been talking about random

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things and recommending random things,

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and honestly,

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that's not what my whole thing is all about. Yes, the system is the feature.

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It's the plane ticket, right? My friend Seth says, don't sell the plane ticket, sell

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the destination. The system is the plane ticket.

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Or my friend Kat says, you know, sell the chocolate cake, not the broccoli. The the

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system is the broccoli.

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What is the destination?

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What is the chocolate cake

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that

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you may have heard in the new intro

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is spending our limited time

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wisely.

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This is what I want to help solopreneurs do. And I don't think the Friday wrapup

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has been helping with that. It's been more of just like a fun pet project for me.

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So I'm reasserting that mission,

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which again, you may have caught in the intro.

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I'm also doing two other things.

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The first is changing recommended media to something fun. You may have also caught

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that in the intro.

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There was just too much overlap between recommended reading and recommended media.

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And

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honestly, I was kind of getting sick of recommending YouTube videos or, or albums

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and then so like, what do I do here?

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But beyond that, something fun

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should be a reminder that there is more to life than working.

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You started your business for time freedom. Something fun

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will remind you to take time for yourself.

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I'm also adding automation of the week to the podcast.

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My near two month experiment of using that as the carrot to get people on the stick,

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that is my mailing list didn't work

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and I think I have a much stronger lead magnet now. So shout out to the one person

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who joined my mailing list

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because of that,

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but that's not really the efficacy I'm looking for here.

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Those are the two that's like the smaller on my mind.

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This show

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is going to focus more on

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time freedom so that you can stop missing the important moments in life.

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Okay,

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Recommended reading this week is from TechRadar. I watched Disney's next Gen audio

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animatronic transform from a pirate

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to a skeleton.

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I am gonna be honest here, there were a lot of good stories that came across my desk

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this week.

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I had a bunch to choose from, but ultimately I picked this story not only

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because of my affinity for Disney or Pirates of the Caribbean, which is one of my

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favorite attractions at the parks,

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but because it is legitimately cool for a number of reasons,

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Disney has always been on the forefront of audio animatronics. When Walt himself

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revealed the first one, the closest thing

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to a living, breathing Abraham Lincoln in a hundred years, it was a marvel. His face

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moved. He stood tall and spoke, and his mouth moved accurately when he spoke.

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Disney has been iterating on that very first audio animatronic

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for the last 70 or so years,

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and within the last 10 days, they did it again and really

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knocked it out of the park.

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And I am sharing this story because

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I think it's really easy to get down on technology right now. AI is a vapid soul

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sucking industry that's eroding work quality and human connection.

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Lots of people are concerned with data centers getting put in their hometown, mine

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included.

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But this, this is

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really,

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really cool tech

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and it's serving an important purpose. And this is, I want to directly quote Leslie

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Evans, executive research and development Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering Research

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and Development.

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What a very long title.

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she said,

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we don't build technology for technology's sake.

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Everything is about telling a great story to our guests,

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telling great stories,

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something that has connected us as long as humans have existed.

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This is a truly great use of technology. And something more of us should lean into

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is, is

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using it to tell great stories, but also

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we don't build technology for technology's sake.

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Again, I I can't help but mention AI here and I wonder how much of us are using these

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new

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large language models, agents or whatever productivity tools just to say we're using

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them.

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This is something that you should think about because

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that's more wasted time, not saved time. And yes, we do need to experiment,

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but they should be purpose data-driven experiments. Maybe that's like the mission

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statement

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of this week's Friday wrap up.

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Okay, let's move on to something fun as we go into a long weekend, at least here

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in the United States. Happy Independence Day to all who celebrate,

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I wanna share with you my latest Lego build,

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the Nintendo game. Boy, there's a picture in the newsletter, which you can get over

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at streamlined FM slash rap. I will try to include one in the description as well.

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This was an easy build. So if you're looking for something complicated or challenging,

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this is not that, but it is super cool. It is complete with working buttons that

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give you feedback when you push them.

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It gives you a way to insert games and it even has little cards that mimic the game

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screens. It's really neat and I enjoyed building it. My kids enjoyed watching me

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or helping me build it. So if you're looking for a relatively cheap, this is around

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50 or 60 bucks fun activity this weekend, especially

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if you are in the oppressive heat of the Northeast US or parts of Europe.

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This is a fun one. I had a lot of time, a lot of fun time building it.

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So that is my something fun. I hope you enjoyed that new segment. I'm, I think I'm

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going to enjoy doing that as the new segment.

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All right, let's wrap up with automation of the Week. The automation of the week

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is using Claude with Kit. For all of my druthers about ai, I do use Claude every

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day.

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this isn't really an automation per se because it's not running routinely or automatically.

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There are a few things I am doing with Claude,

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um,

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and Kit to run them automatically on a schedule,

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but this is lots of automated things. If you couldn't tell this week, my mind has

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been on my mailing list. It's actually been for the past few weeks. And so this week

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I wanted to get some computer assisted data crunching done. And thanks to Kits MCPI

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was able to do a bunch of cleanup. I was able to mark low engagement, likely spam

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or fake emails, which I deleted, cleaning up my list, improving my deliverability.

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I was also able to, and this is shout out to Kyle Adams here,

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I was able to use it to figure out the first names of subscribers who didn't fill

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in their first name.

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So I was able to use Kit to guess the first names based on the email addresses,

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which goes a long way towards personalization, right? Instead of saying like, Hey,

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there, or hello there, I'm greeting somebody by their first name and if you're interested,

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let me know, like leave a comment.

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And I will share,

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like the exact heuristic I guess in a future episode for how I did this. But like

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we

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working with the large language model and its understanding of, of language and patterns,

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it was able to confidently guess the first name of about 260 of the 600 something

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people who don't have first names on my mailing list.

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The other thing I did was split first and last names for anybody who used both.

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I was also able to find my high engagement subscribers based on the signals I have

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so I can interact with them more people who have purchased for me or, or sent a hand

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raise or email or clicked a a, a link, uh, that they were directly interacting with

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something interesting I was doing.

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And finally, I was able to crunch all of my data over the last two years to figure

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out

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where my subscribers coming from.

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This was a much better task for the Kit MCP because the kit dashboard doesn't make

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it easy to expose this sort of data, even if you're on the pro account.

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And so using my findings and circling back to what's been on my mind this

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week, I can make a concerted data backed effort to grow my list in ways that work

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for me.

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So it did give me some concrete data

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and it gave me some things to try.

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But that's it for this episode of the Friday Wrapup. If you enjoyed this, you should

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join my newsletter over at streamlined fm slash rap. As a thank you, you'll get my

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solopreneur system starter kit, which is the best way for you to create more time

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and space in your business without wasting a bunch of time figuring out how to get

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started.

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Again, that's over at streamlined fm slash rap.

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Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, I hope you find some space in

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your weekend.