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As a solopreneur, it can feel hard to take time off. I mean REALLY take time off. Not take a vacation where you still respond to email.
The problem is that for many solopreneurs running a one-person business, taking time off means the business shuts down. As a result, you’re constantly worrying about it. But what if you had great systems in place to automate your business?
That’s exactly what you’ll get with Streamlined Solopreneur. You’ll learn how to turn manual tasks into reliable systems, so you can take time off worry-free.
Joe Casabona knows about this firsthand. He went from worrying so much that he had a panic attack to taking 4-6 weeks off every year. Worry-free. And he’s helped hundreds of solopreneurs do the same.
If you’re ready to automate your business, and take time off to do what you want (instead of waiting until you have a panic attack), start listening to Streamlined Solopreneur.
Subscribe now or visit https://streamlined.fm.
Speaker 1: Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday Wrap on Streamline Solopreneur. A short episode where I talk about
Speaker 1: three things, what's on my mind, recommended reading and recommended media. This is the show that
Speaker 1: helps you automate your business so you can take time off worry-free and hopefully this
Speaker 1: curation will help you think more about your systems. I'm your host Joe Casabona and here's
Speaker 1: what's on my mind. The first thing I want to talk about today, the thing that's been on my mind
Speaker 1: all week really is, are we beholden to an algorithm or is content creation worth it? See,
Speaker 1: I left social media except for LinkedIn completely about six months ago. I left Twitter
Speaker 1: over a year ago. I... And to say, I...
Speaker 1: I left means I deleted my accounts. I've actually been off of social media for a lot longer than that.
Speaker 1: And it's been nearly two years since a social media app has been on my phone for more than 10 minutes.
Speaker 1: And it's because I didn't want to feel like I was beholden to some algorithm. But this week,
Speaker 1: I've been working on my SEO strategy for my search engine optimization strategy. What key words?
Speaker 1: I want my website and my podcast and my YouTube channel to rank for.
Speaker 1: I've been back and forth on whether or not I should start a new YouTube channel from scratch
Speaker 1: or just rebrand the current one.
Speaker 1: And it got me thinking that even not being on social media,
Speaker 1: how much of what I'm doing is to appease an algorithm.
Speaker 1: Part of this too is I've been using vid IQ.
Speaker 1: I signed up for vid IQ.
Speaker 1: That's VID and then IQ,
Speaker 1: which is a service to help you do keyword and competitor analysis specifically on YouTube.
Speaker 1: I've been using it and I can't help but wonder if I'd actually be better off with an actual YouTube coach because I want YouTube to work.
Speaker 1: Now that I'm not on social media, I need some way to be discovered.
Speaker 1: And so I'm going back to these kind of pre-social media ways.
Speaker 1: Not that YouTube is like really pre-social media, but it felt different, right?
Speaker 1: It felt like it was recommending videos that, you know, it thinks I would like.
Speaker 1: And with search engines, right, Google has been around for a very long time,
Speaker 1: nearly 30 years, 30 years this year maybe. And it's still an algorithm I need to appease. And with
Speaker 1: AI, now we're talking about GEO, right? Generative engine optimization. So is content
Speaker 1: creation worth it? And are we always going to be behold into an algorithm? And the truth is, yes,
Speaker 1: to both of those questions, right? Is content creation still worth it? Absolutely. There's a ton of
Speaker 1: slop, which means that if you make good content, you will stand out. But yes, we will always be
Speaker 1: beholden to an algorithm because there is so much content that something needs to surface
Speaker 1: our stuff to the right people.
Speaker 1: And so as long as you keep making good content, content that you're actually putting time into,
Speaker 1: it should behoove Google and YouTube and even large language models, even social media,
Speaker 1: to show us stuff that we will eat.
Speaker 1: engage with that we will like, that will help us. Because if it just keeps showing a
Speaker 1: slop, we're going to leave. So it's something, you know, I don't, I don't really have a good
Speaker 1: solution for this. It's just a thought I've been having a lot this week. Because as I
Speaker 1: revamp my content strategy, I keep thinking, how is my stuff going to get found? Some people
Speaker 1: people will tell you that search engines are useless because they're just going to clip the
Speaker 1: important part and show it to people right on their site, right? Google's AI summaries or
Speaker 1: Google's snippets so that people don't have to go to your website or watch your video.
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's true. I think that people, especially more now, want to connect with
Speaker 1: the people that they are learning from or that they're being entertained by.
Speaker 1: So I don't, again, I don't have an answer. It's just been on my mind a lot this week.
Speaker 1: I'm going to move forward with optimizing my website for keywords, actually making good content
Speaker 1: that people are searching for. I think I've adopted a personal social media strategy for my
Speaker 1: content sites. I'm just like, yeah, I'm feeling this way, so I'm going to write this way.
Speaker 1: But that's especially not how YouTube works. And so I'm trying to fix that. And yeah,
Speaker 1: vid IQ has been helping me. Claude has been helping me a little bit, I suppose.
Speaker 1: But again, I think going back to that algorithm versus people thought, I think a YouTube coach
Speaker 1: could actually help me. And I guess the other,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the solution, right? We need the algorithms so people discover us. We need to be found
Speaker 1: some way. And then we need to make sure that we give those people who find us a way to stay
Speaker 1: connected to us. Because one of the things I heard this week was, it doesn't even matter if you're
Speaker 1: subscribed to a YouTube channel anymore. You can't guarantee that
Speaker 1: the YouTube homepage will show you the things you're subscribed to.
Speaker 1: And even if you go to the subscriptions page now, it's like, it's not just a list of videos
Speaker 1: published in reverse chronological order. It tells you the most important ones or whatever
Speaker 1: wording it use. It's using an algorithm to figure out which one of your subscription channels,
Speaker 1: which one of the channels you're subscribed to, you'll like the best, followed by a bunch of
Speaker 1: So you want to give people the ability to connect with you once they discover you.
Speaker 1: So like a mailing list is the way to do that.
Speaker 1: My call to action always for everything is join my mailing list.
Speaker 1: It'll be at the end of this episode as well, which by the way, I'm trying something new for
Speaker 1: this episode.
Speaker 1: If you usually listen on the feed, I do have a video.
Speaker 1: of this where I have some fun lower thirds. I'm messing with e-cam a little bit. And so I'm trying this out.
Speaker 1: This is a format I probably try every six months. I think this is my favorite version of it.
Speaker 1: So if you want to see what that looks like, I'll have a link to the YouTube video in the description.
Speaker 1: But I also have this YouTube video up.
Speaker 1: So I think the solution is use the algorithm to your advantage.
Speaker 1: and then capture people by getting them on your mailing list.
Speaker 1: So that's what's on my mind this week.
Speaker 1: Moving on to recommended reading,
Speaker 1: it's really recommended listening.
Speaker 1: It is an episode by Cal Newport on his podcast, Deep Questions.
Speaker 1: He has this series called AI Reality Check.
Speaker 1: and now last week the question was, is Claude Mythos terrifying?
Speaker 1: And I really love this episode because he takes the time to tell you what's going on with Claude Mythos,
Speaker 1: which I'll let Cal catch you up, but Anthropic decided not to really really.
Speaker 1: it because the CEO of Anthropic and security quote unquote experts were saying, oh, this is
Speaker 1: dangerous. It can find vulnerabilities more efficiently than any other model before. So, you know,
Speaker 1: Cal gives you a much deeper insight into that. And then he goes into all of the studies and all the
Speaker 1: that have been done to show that no?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he started up, if you find the YouTube video,
Speaker 1: it's, he straight up tells you no in the title, which I love, right?
Speaker 1: Is Claude Mythos terrifying? No.
Speaker 1: And he has a lot of receipts for why Claude Mythos isn't doing anything
Speaker 1: any more impressive than previous models,
Speaker 1: which is, which just goes to show you that the loudest,
Speaker 1: I've said this before, but like the loudest AI voices are the ones
Speaker 1: who have the most to gain.
Speaker 1: And Cal Newport makes this point, too.
Speaker 1: The CEO of Anthropic, it would behoove him
Speaker 1: to talk about how scary
Speaker 1: and how advanced his models are.
Speaker 1: Billions and billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Right? This is why Sam Altman talks about that too.
Speaker 1: Billions of dollars are at stake for these guys.
Speaker 1: so they have to make it seem like they are crossing the Rubicon with every release.
Speaker 1: When the truth is, there's a very definitive end to how large language models work.
Speaker 1: And I've talked about that before, but I think it's good to hear it from a computer science guy.
Speaker 1: I'm also a computer science guy, but he still is deeper into it than I am at this point.
Speaker 1: He's really smart, and he does the research.
Speaker 1: And so I would strongly recommend this episode.
Speaker 1: I'll have it in the description in the show notes over his streamline.fm.
Speaker 1: The other thing I'll mention is that the main episode for this week,
Speaker 1: I talk about lessons from Ryan Holiday's discipline is destiny,
Speaker 1: specifically lessons for solopreneurs.
Speaker 1: This was something, I won't rehash the entire episode here, but I was really struck by how much it seemed he was speaking to solopreneurs.
Speaker 1: Especially like he talks specifically about delegating, which I thought was really interesting.
Speaker 1: So I would recommend Discipline is Destiny, the book.
Speaker 1: I think I would recommend the, I've read half of the Stoic Virtue series at this point, and I've liked both of them a lot.
Speaker 1: But if you want to hear my thoughts on Discipline is Destiny, that's over at streamlined.fm slash 526.
Speaker 1: And then finally, I want to wrap up with some recommended media.
Speaker 1: And so this is, I think I mentioned on last week's Friday wrap up, but Scrubs, the, I think they're calling it the revival, Scrubs season 10, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 1: calling it season 10 is weird because they've kind of retconed season 9 or Scrubs MedSchool.
Speaker 1: Scrubs MedSchool was supposed to be a spin-off that suddenly became season 9 of Scrubs.
Speaker 1: I thought season 8 ended so perfectly.
Speaker 1: And so for season 10 or the revival, whatever, the one that just wrapped up this year,
Speaker 1: they have retconned everything so that season 9 slash Scrubs MedS.
Speaker 1: school doesn't didn't exist. But the cool thing about the original run of Scrubs is that they shot it
Speaker 1: in an actual hospital. So everything you saw there was an abandoned hospital. It wasn't an
Speaker 1: active hospital, but they had a lot of real things to work with, real sets and real equipment
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Part of the reason why they got rid of Scrubs med school was because that season
Speaker 1: opens with them saying they knocked down the old hospital and put up a med school.
Speaker 1: And so they couldn't do this revival in the same hospital if they hadn't retcon season
Speaker 1: nine slash med school.
Speaker 1: Anyway, the video I am recommending is from Architectural Digest.
Speaker 1: And the original cast, Zach Raff, Donald Faison, and Sarah Chalk, give you a behind-the-scenes
Speaker 1: tour of how they rebuilt Sacred Heart Hospital.
Speaker 1: It is astounding because I didn't know this until I, until after I saw at least part of either the trailers or the first episode.
Speaker 1: And it completely fooled me.
Speaker 1: And I have watched Scrubs at least once a year, every year for 20 years.
Speaker 1: So I just think that it's so cool.
Speaker 1: that they took this time to recreate the hospital exactly.
Speaker 1: And the reason I'm talking about this here is because it shows what they felt was worth
Speaker 1: putting their time, effort, and money into.
Speaker 1: They knew who would be watching the show, and they wanted it to be hyper-realistic,
Speaker 1: hyper-accurate and very true to the old show.
Speaker 1: They could have phoned it in and made a few sound stages,
Speaker 1: and it probably would have looked good enough.
Speaker 1: But they weren't going for good enough.
Speaker 1: And so as a solopreneur, as you build out your systems and you think about these things,
Speaker 1: what is it worth spending time on how?
Speaker 1: What's your version of rebuilding Sacred Heart Hospital in Scrubs?
Speaker 1: It's also just a dope video.
Speaker 1: So, like, I think it's really cool seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff, but I wanted to bring it up here because I thought it was cool as a recommendation.
Speaker 1: And I like to think about the people who know how and when it's worth spending their time, because this is something I think about a lot.
Speaker 1: So I'll have that in the show notes as well.
Speaker 1: But that's it for the Friday wrapup for April 24th, 2026.
Speaker 1: If you liked this episode, if you want to get the show notes, if you want to get the rest of this podcast, head on over to streamlined.com slash wrapped.
Speaker 1: You'll also get the opportunity to join my mailing list and get my daily three task journaling method so that you know what you should be spent.
Speaker 1: spending your time on.
Speaker 1: But that's it for this episode of the streamlined solopreneur.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: And until next time, I hope you find some space in your weekend.