Hustle Hub #17

Hey friends,

It has been quite some time since I wrote my newsletter in the 5-point format. So I want to bring it back for today’s issue where I share 1 tip, 1 mistake, 1 learning, 1 book, and 1 tool, that I’ve learned from my data science and startup journey.

Compared to my past issues, this 5-point format will be more like bite-sized content with my takeaways on different topics.

As I’m still experimenting with different formats to see which one works the best for you, let me know if you prefer this 5-point format or the previous format (deep dive into one topic) by replying to this email? Your voice will determine how Hustle Hub looks in the future! 🤝🏻

Okay, enough of me talking. There are many interesting stuff I’m gonna share with you in today’s issue.

Let’s get started! 🚀 

🛖 What's in the hub today?

• Tip: Why you should learn Git as a data scientist

• Mistake: We lost our focus on customers

• Learning: Focus on your customers

• Book: The Psychology of Money

• Tool: Write viral tweets in seconds

⭐️ 1 Tip

Why You Should Learn Git as a Data Scientist

I once thought that Git is only used by software developers, and that data scientist has nothing to do with Git. But I was wrong.

In fact, Git is extremely important when it comes to collaborating with team members and version control.

Say for example you are a data scientist working with a team where you and another data scientist are working on the same function to build a machine learning model.

• You first make some changes to the function and uploaded it to a remote repository and the changes are merged with the remote master branch.

• So the model now becomes version 1.1.

• Another data scientist also makes some changes to the same function with version 1.1 and the new changes are now merged with the remote master branch.

• Now the model becomes version 1.2.

• At any point in time, if your team finds out that version 1.2 has some bugs after the release they can always undo and restore the previous version 1.1.

⚠️ 1 Mistake

When we started fundraising for Staq last year, we slowly lost our focus to build a product that customers would truly find useful.

Because we wanted to impress investors, so we pitched something without proven validation from our customers or the market.

The result?

We lost our focus as we kept adding more and more features that were not useful to the customers. We wasted months of product development and shortened our runway.

Wrong move.

🧠 1 Learning

We didn’t realise this mistake until a few months after our fundraising journey started.

🧠 Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Be relentlessly customer-centric to build something people really want.

• Investors might want you to build A, B, and C. But if your customers don’t find them useful, your product is still useless.

• Listen to your customers, know what problems they face, and focus on building features to help them solve those problems.

• FOCUS is key. Don’t be distracted by external voices.

📚️ 1 Book

The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

Written by Morgan Housel, this book has absolutely changed the way I view money. Most importantly, I’ve learned the timeless lessons to make better financial decisions with the right behaviour and mindset.

📚️ Here are my takeaways from the book:

• Your behaviour will determine your financial success.

• There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.

• Always factor in room for error in your investment to serve as a margin of safety.

• Less ego, more wealth.

• Never underestimate the power of compounding in money.

• Money buys freedom, freedom buys happiness.

• Freedom is the ability to do:

  • WHAT you want

  • WHEN you want

  • With WHO you want

  • For AS LONG AS you want to

Have you read this book? What's your thought on it?

🧰 1 Tool

Tribescaler is a platform to help you write better hooks in seconds.

Simple as that.

Recently they also announced their latest feature to use AI chat with ChatGPT + Google Search shared by the founder - Alex Banks.

As I’ve been writing on LinkedIn for some time, having a good hook is crucial to have a wider reach of audience as more people will see my posts. So I’m excited to use Tribescaler for my LinkedIn posts and see how it goes!

Pretty cool if you ask me 👀

🚀 Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

1. Book a coaching call with me if you need help in the following:

2. Promote your brand to ~1000 subscribers in the data/tech space by sponsoring this newsletter.

3. Watch my YouTube videos where I talk about data science tips, programming, and my tech life (P.S. Don’t forget to like and subscribe 💜).

4. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter for more data science career insights, my mistakes and lessons learned from building a startup.

That's all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond