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When was the last time you took a real vacation...not one where you're still answering emails? If that question bums you out, you're in the right place.
Streamlined Solopreneur is the podcast where solopreneurs learn to build simple business systems and automations that keep your business running — even when you're not at your desk.
I'm Joe Casabona. A few years ago, I was so overwhelmed by my solopreneur business that I had a panic attack. Today, I take 4–6 weeks off every year, worry-free. No team, no 60-hour weeks. Just systems and processes that do the heavy lifting.
On this podcast, you'll learn how to:
- Create playbooks and SOPs to make building systems easy
- Automate repetitive tasks with systems that don't break
- Use AI for grunt work (not creative work) to reclaim hours every week
- Capture every task and idea without relying on your memory
- Take real time off without your business falling apart
New episodes twice a week on solopreneur systems, business automation, and AI-powered productivity.
Free resource: Get my solopreneur automation starter kit → https://streamlined.fm/kit
Subscribe to stop being the bottleneck in your own business.
Hey everybody and welcome to the Friday wrap on Streamline Solopreneur, a short episode
where I talk about three things, what's on my mind this week, recommended reading
and something fun.
This is the show that helps you automate your business so you can take time off,
worry free, and hopefully this curation will help you think more about how you are
spending your time. I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and here's what's on my mind for
July 3rd, 2026.
It's about getting distracted.
I almost rejoined Instagram this week. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was
hurting my business not being there.
This is a group of people I trust and they made some compelling arguments. My business
has been slow lately, and I don't feel like my mailing list is growing the way it
should.
Wondering if this was a largely singular view. I was getting from a very specific
group of people. This is a group of creators I was talking to after all. I took the
question to some trusted friends who have known me for a very long time.
They unanimously said, I shouldn't, making the argument that my audience probably
isn't there and
I don't like being on the platform, and if
I don't like being on the platform, then I'm not going to try to do it. Well,
after all, I rage quit meta. I didn't really rage quit it. It was like a long term
thing I had been thinking about. And last October, right before my 40th birthday,
I finally deleted Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,
TikTok, most of my social profiles leaving me only on LinkedIn.
So trying to get back on a platform and then do it well, even though I don't like
being there, would be an incredible waste of time and resources.
So
taking both of these arguments, both from groups of people
I trust,
I sat back and thought about what actually grows my mailing list.
I am on LinkedIn, after all,
is this social platform growing my mailing list?
It's not more on that in the automation of the week segment, which is now public
by the way. But first reviewing my analytics and then with the help of Claude,
I realized that most of my good subscribers are coming from my own content on YouTube
and my podcast as well as speaking events.
This could be talks that I'm giving in real life or at virtual events or webinars,
and it makes sense. I both love teaching and I am good at it.
Instead of getting distracted with another social platform that I know all hate,
this is where I need to double down
YouTube, my podcast and other people's audiences
speaking and providing real value is how I grow my list.
Good thing I am speaking at a bunch of events this year,
you can head over to casabona.org/now to see those.
The point is this,
we are going to get a lot of advice
and a lot of it will be coming from honest, genuine people
that you trust.
But ultimately the advice is one factor in a decision.
You need to figure out what's best for you.
Consider the source of the advice
and do small experiments to see what works best.
After all, most people who recommend a TV show
are not really saying
you'll like this show.
They are saying, I like this show,
and it's only when a bunch of people or a few trusted friends recommend a show to
me that I actually check it out.
In my case, getting back on Instagram wouldn't be a small experiment.
It would be a big shift. I'd have to sign up with a new account and figure out a
new username, set up the profile, and then post consistently there, which I'm not
doing right now.
The small experiment
is making more of an effort on LinkedIn, which I'm already posting to regularly to
see if social actually works for me.
The data
is a little bit mixed now that I'm reviewing
It tells me, no, not really from a UTM standpoint, but as Claude is pointing out
to me,
the source for referring URLs,
more of them are coming from LinkedIn. So this does need to be a concerted effort
on my part, but still the data is overwhelming. My own content and teaching
are the ways that I get more people on my list.
So that's what's on my mind this week. It's about not getting distracted, spending
your time the right way.
But there's also
something I I I'm call in the newsletter. I'm calling it a smaller on my mind because
it's just kind of a check
with the Friday wrap up.
I've been thinking a lot about the point of these Friday wrap up episodes and newsletters.
They take me 90 minutes or less to do, and they are fun for me 'cause I do like curating.
But I kind of say this in the intro, right? Like, what is the point of this? Hopefully
this curation will help you think more about your systems. Is is what I've been saying
for the past couple of months.
But that's been missing the mark for a a bunch of reasons.
I haven't really been talking about systems. I've just been talking about random
things and recommending random things,
and honestly,
that's not what my whole thing is all about. Yes, the system is the feature.
It's the plane ticket, right? My friend Seth says, don't sell the plane ticket, sell
the destination. The system is the plane ticket.
Or my friend Kat says, you know, sell the chocolate cake, not the broccoli. The the
system is the broccoli.
What is the destination?
What is the chocolate cake
that
you may have heard in the new intro
is spending our limited time
wisely.
This is what I want to help solopreneurs do. And I don't think the Friday wrapup
has been helping with that. It's been more of just like a fun pet project for me.
So I'm reasserting that mission,
which again, you may have caught in the intro.
I'm also doing two other things.
The first is changing recommended media to something fun. You may have also caught
that in the intro.
There was just too much overlap between recommended reading and recommended media.
And
honestly, I was kind of getting sick of recommending YouTube videos or, or albums
and then so like, what do I do here?
But beyond that, something fun
should be a reminder that there is more to life than working.
You started your business for time freedom. Something fun
will remind you to take time for yourself.
I'm also adding automation of the week to the podcast.
My near two month experiment of using that as the carrot to get people on the stick,
that is my mailing list didn't work
and I think I have a much stronger lead magnet now. So shout out to the one person
who joined my mailing list
because of that,
but that's not really the efficacy I'm looking for here.
Those are the two that's like the smaller on my mind.
This show
is going to focus more on
time freedom so that you can stop missing the important moments in life.
Okay,
Recommended reading this week is from TechRadar. I watched Disney's next Gen audio
animatronic transform from a pirate
to a skeleton.
I am gonna be honest here, there were a lot of good stories that came across my desk
this week.
I had a bunch to choose from, but ultimately I picked this story not only
because of my affinity for Disney or Pirates of the Caribbean, which is one of my
favorite attractions at the parks,
but because it is legitimately cool for a number of reasons,
Disney has always been on the forefront of audio animatronics. When Walt himself
revealed the first one, the closest thing
to a living, breathing Abraham Lincoln in a hundred years, it was a marvel. His face
moved. He stood tall and spoke, and his mouth moved accurately when he spoke.
Disney has been iterating on that very first audio animatronic
for the last 70 or so years,
and within the last 10 days, they did it again and really
knocked it out of the park.
And I am sharing this story because
I think it's really easy to get down on technology right now. AI is a vapid soul
sucking industry that's eroding work quality and human connection.
Lots of people are concerned with data centers getting put in their hometown, mine
included.
But this, this is
really,
really cool tech
and it's serving an important purpose. And this is, I want to directly quote Leslie
Evans, executive research and development Imagineer at Walt Disney Imagineering Research
and Development.
What a very long title.
she said,
we don't build technology for technology's sake.
Everything is about telling a great story to our guests,
telling great stories,
something that has connected us as long as humans have existed.
This is a truly great use of technology. And something more of us should lean into
is, is
using it to tell great stories, but also
we don't build technology for technology's sake.
Again, I I can't help but mention AI here and I wonder how much of us are using these
new
large language models, agents or whatever productivity tools just to say we're using
them.
This is something that you should think about because
that's more wasted time, not saved time. And yes, we do need to experiment,
but they should be purpose data-driven experiments. Maybe that's like the mission
statement
of this week's Friday wrap up.
Okay, let's move on to something fun as we go into a long weekend, at least here
in the United States. Happy Independence Day to all who celebrate,
I wanna share with you my latest Lego build,
the Nintendo game. Boy, there's a picture in the newsletter, which you can get over
at streamlined FM slash rap. I will try to include one in the description as well.
This was an easy build. So if you're looking for something complicated or challenging,
this is not that, but it is super cool. It is complete with working buttons that
give you feedback when you push them.
It gives you a way to insert games and it even has little cards that mimic the game
screens. It's really neat and I enjoyed building it. My kids enjoyed watching me
or helping me build it. So if you're looking for a relatively cheap, this is around
50 or 60 bucks fun activity this weekend, especially
if you are in the oppressive heat of the Northeast US or parts of Europe.
This is a fun one. I had a lot of time, a lot of fun time building it.
So that is my something fun. I hope you enjoyed that new segment. I'm, I think I'm
going to enjoy doing that as the new segment.
All right, let's wrap up with automation of the Week. The automation of the week
is using Claude with Kit. For all of my druthers about ai, I do use Claude every
day.
this isn't really an automation per se because it's not running routinely or automatically.
There are a few things I am doing with Claude,
um,
and Kit to run them automatically on a schedule,
but this is lots of automated things. If you couldn't tell this week, my mind has
been on my mailing list. It's actually been for the past few weeks. And so this week
I wanted to get some computer assisted data crunching done. And thanks to Kits MCPI
was able to do a bunch of cleanup. I was able to mark low engagement, likely spam
or fake emails, which I deleted, cleaning up my list, improving my deliverability.
I was also able to, and this is shout out to Kyle Adams here,
I was able to use it to figure out the first names of subscribers who didn't fill
in their first name.
So I was able to use Kit to guess the first names based on the email addresses,
which goes a long way towards personalization, right? Instead of saying like, Hey,
there, or hello there, I'm greeting somebody by their first name and if you're interested,
let me know, like leave a comment.
And I will share,
like the exact heuristic I guess in a future episode for how I did this. But like
we
working with the large language model and its understanding of, of language and patterns,
it was able to confidently guess the first name of about 260 of the 600 something
people who don't have first names on my mailing list.
The other thing I did was split first and last names for anybody who used both.
I was also able to find my high engagement subscribers based on the signals I have
so I can interact with them more people who have purchased for me or, or sent a hand
raise or email or clicked a a, a link, uh, that they were directly interacting with
something interesting I was doing.
And finally, I was able to crunch all of my data over the last two years to figure
out
where my subscribers coming from.
This was a much better task for the Kit MCP because the kit dashboard doesn't make
it easy to expose this sort of data, even if you're on the pro account.
And so using my findings and circling back to what's been on my mind this
week, I can make a concerted data backed effort to grow my list in ways that work
for me.
So it did give me some concrete data
and it gave me some things to try.
But that's it for this episode of the Friday Wrapup. If you enjoyed this, you should
join my newsletter over at streamlined fm slash rap. As a thank you, you'll get my
solopreneur system starter kit, which is the best way for you to create more time
and space in your business without wasting a bunch of time figuring out how to get
started.
Again, that's over at streamlined fm slash rap.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, I hope you find some space in
your weekend.