Welcome to the Friday Wrap-Up for July 17, 2026. This is a short newsletter where I talk about 3 things: What’s on my mind this week, Recommended Reading, and Something Fun. Here’s what’s on my mind…
On My Mind
When does implementation hinder you? I’m doing Kyle Adams’ Newsletter Power-Up Cohort, and it’s been fantastic. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 10 days working on a new welcome sequence and cleaning up my Kit account.
I thought long and hard about the experience, how everything is implemented, and what blockers I had to overcome to get my freshly-written Welcome Sequence out without it being a confusing experience.
I believe my bias towards action is good; I rarely get stuck in the “I just need to do it phase.” Where I do get stuck is the “doing it” phase. I consider the implementation and the long-term ramifications, even if this is an experiment.
Part of it is the burden of knowledge. I know what is possible, so I create interesting, creative, but sometimes overcomplicated things. Part of it is the tension of wanting to launch quickly with a phrase I’ve said for a long time: “Do it once. Do it right.”
The truth is there needs to be some balance. Occam’s Razor is another idea I think about all the time. It’s oft-quoted as, “the simplest solution is the right one.” But it’s actually that solutions should be constructed with the “smallest possible set of elements.”
Luckily when building online, very little is permanent. Iteration is our friend. I’m really good at doing that for other people. I need to be better about doing it for me.
Recommended Reading
The Hater’s All-Star Game: I’m a huge baseball fan, and love watching both the Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game. It’s cool seeing the best professional baseball players come together. It’s different from playing with your everyday team, and it’s cool to see how they show up for each other.
As a New Yorker living near Philly and lover of the game, seeing Phillies fans boo the non-Phillies All Stars annoyed me. It’s supposed to be a jovial celebration of the best in the game. And of-course Philly, the city that threw batteries at Santa, couldn’t abide.
But should that annoy me? Isn’t Philly just being Philly? It didn’t seem to annoy my guy Ben Rice, Jordan Walker, or William Contreras (someone who’s famously annoyed by everything).
That’s why I really like this article. It showed me that as much as I remind people that they are getting paid to play a game, I need to remember the fans are going to be the fans. And for Philly, that means doggedly defending your home from outsiders. Even if you originally agreed with them.
Something Fun
The Odyssey in 1 Minute: I’m SO excited for this movie, especially after finishing the book earlier this month. In a way only Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show can do, the cast came together to tell the entire story of The Odyssey in exactly 60 seconds, in dactylic hexameter. It’s so dope and I’ve watched it 1000 times.
Automation of the Week
Hunting down Optins with Claude: As I mentioned in “On My Mind,” I’ve been spending a lot of time on my mailing list and how it delivers my vast amount of lead magnets and content. I also have TONS of optin pages across multiple websites.
I don’t want any of those pages to lead to a dead end, so I uploaded Pages, Redirects, and Forms on my websites to Claude, and cross-referenced those with the Kit MCP. What I got was a full report on active forms, the ones working well, and all of the pages where optins live. Now It’s time to redirect, delete, and consolidate everything.
This would have been an incredibly time consuming or expensive task for my VA without Claude. It’s been incredible seeing what insights and data I can grab thanks to the connectors and automation tools that exist within the LLM.
All of this lets me focus my time on what matters most: helping you build better systems so you can step away from your business without worrying.
Until next week,
Joe
