Build What Lights You Up & Serves Others: Speaking at Nimman AI Hackathon

As you embark on your fun day of creating, I want to inspire you with a few things that I have created. I love building things that get me excited, but that also serve others, and I feel like that will possibly be a big focus of what you're up to today.

Just to give you a little sense of who I am and why I love speaking about AI: I feel like AI gives you superpowers. It's not even about what your imagination can think of, because often it actually builds you something even more amazing than you could have thought of. So there's really no limits.

Who I am, in one slide

I went to art school. I lived in San Francisco for 18 years, so I'm a very, very early adopter of tech, I built my first website in '97, which is probably before a lot of you were born.

I've been a self-employed entrepreneur for a long time, since 2003. I founded several businesses and co-founded startups in the Bay Area, raised money, did the whole thing. Then I launched my first online video series back in 2011, and my first course in 2012. So I've been doing this a long time. Then I got certified as a coach, and I've been a business coach, doing keynotes and speaking and writing and helping other creatives, ever since. I also moved to Hong Kong in 2014 and then Chiang Mai in 2017, so I've been over here in Southeast Asia for a long time, and I love it so much.

The thread through all of my work has always been helping creatives grow online, and clearing the fears that stop you. I even wrote a book about it. I really love all the sides of it, the perspective that you need, and the fact that anytime you're building something you love, imposter syndrome and fear are going to come up. I love that piece of it. And I also love helping people make money, and grow it, and scale it.

I've now created over 20 courses and over 70 lessons. I should also add: I wrote that book without AI. You have to make that disclaimer these days. I'll have more books come out and I will use AI, but that one was blood, sweat and tears, and same with all these courses. It's all based on my own experience.

Packaging 20 years of work more dynamically

But now with AI, one of the things I got super pumped about was taking all of the work I've done, including my book and all my courses, and starting to package it in more dynamic ways. Because I believe we're all learning in more dynamic ways these days. We want to talk to AI about the video we just watched, things like that. So that's when I launched Evolve Your Genius, which also helps other people who are creative in this way and are looking for new ways to deliver it online.

I'm also teaching here at 4Seas. I have two weekly classes. Monday mornings is right here, we do AI Goddesses, and some really, really fun, playful things where we try out a new app and create something. So that's for women, on Mondays. And then we dive even deeper on Tuesday nights, upstairs. I'm obsessed with Claude Code, but you can use Codex, you can use whatever, and we go deeper into vibe coding.

This is the part I've just been obsessed with: seeing these women light up about what's possible to create. We all have ideas, but then when you have this thing that can help you really bring it to life, it's been so cool to watch. It's my favorite thing in the world.

So everything I've created, and that I'm going to walk you through today to give you some inspiration, has either been for my clients, for me and my business, personal projects, and then others just for you, for fun.

Two principles

These are the key principles I teach my students, the AI Goddesses, the vibe coding group, and any of my clients. This is a very important thing whether you're building businesses or building with AI.

One: Be willing to fail forward

This is entrepreneurship in a nutshell. You have to be willing to fall flat on your face and fail so many times. And that is very humbling. Holy cow, is it humbling.

Two: You're the boss

This is so important, especially in AI, when it's trying to tell you that it thinks it knows and it's really, really smart. You need to learn how to come back to being discerning within yourself, knowing within yourself, "Ah, that doesn't seem right. That doesn't feel right."

And the more you fail forward and grow these muscles to know what's possible, the more you're going to be able to call it out and say, "That's not where I wanted to go. Here's where I want to go." So always stand in that.

Remember: you're the boss.

Evolve Your Genius

Let's dive into some fun things. This is Evolve Your Genius, actually one of the first websites I created with AI, which I did with Lovable. If you have any experience with Lovable, it's really, really fun.

With almost every single one of these projects, and this is what I want you to be thinking about, the more data you give to AI, the more it can do something fun with it. You all have this somewhere in your chats, whether it be ChatGPT. You've been talking about a business, what have you, and then you can hand that over and say, "I want to create a website about this." That's exactly what I did with this one.

The Visionary Vault

This is the 20 courses I created, turned into something. For my clients, in some of these courses where there were previously exercises to go through, I've made all of those dynamic, because now we can use AI.

So for example, I created this whole Premium Copy Lab, so they can open the copy generator and create a full sales page, landing page, email sequence, single email, all based on whatever their offer is, whatever their business is.

And every single thing I've created in there, I always do an AI Pro Mode. Because inevitably you're already in AI and it knows a lot of this. So my AI Pro Mode lets you copy those questions, paste them into your GPT, paste the answers back in here, and then it has all the information it needs. You're not having to constantly fill out a new form all the time.

There's also this Spark Post thing, which was part of one of my courses. Some of these are for clients only, but just to give you an idea of what's possible.

The Lighthouse Library of Magnetic Invitations

That's my fancy word for lead magnets. When people are creating lead magnets for their business, I wanted to give them ideas, if you know who you serve and what you do, how can we spin that into all these different fun ideas?

If I hit Build, it takes a few seconds, maps your audience, and walks you through some questions. It's so dynamically helping you use my frameworks and all of my models, but then generating the actual outcome. I didn't test this this morning, maybe I should have. Oh, there it goes. Good.

So then it double-checks: does this match your people? And you say, "Yes, this resonates." Then it asks what feels most true, are you serving analysis paralysis, or imposter doubt, or isolation, and so on. Let's say it's imposter doubt, and you break that down. It gives you what I always call the presenting problem, what people are challenged with. And then your lead magnet speaks to that presenting problem: "Are you having this challenge?"

And what you get is what I call hand-raisers. You get people raising their hand going, "Oh my god, that's me. I need that." And then they step into your world.

Quizzes and inquiries

I've also done a lot of questionnaires and inquiries, quizzes, and you can build those really easily with AI. It'll even help you make them more amazing than others. Here are some results for a different one, where you could become the Dreamer, or the Muse, or the Maker. It came up with all these fun things.

Making my own admin more fun

A financial management app

All of you are budgeting. This is something I did for myself, and you can totally do this for yourself. This is a test account, so these aren't real numbers, but basically I had all of this in a fancy spreadsheet, and I thought, there's got to be a way to do it more fun. So again, in terms of what you can grab to then infuse into your app: this was a fun spreadsheet. And now I can see what's due next, and all of my expenses.

But I think some of the coolest things in it are the snapshot across the year, because sometimes you have monthly expenses, sometimes quarterly. And it does that same thing with your income, as a snapshot. So if you have a quarterly client, or depending on how your payments come in, you can take a look at that.

It's really just inspiration for you to think: what are the things I'm already doing? And really, my question is always, how can I make it more fun?

Escaping black-and-white Notion

I did that as well with another thing. This was all in Notion, a Notion database, to-do list, and so on. And I was like, Notion is so boring, it's just black and white. So this is a maximalist theme. I was a designer way back, so things not only need to be functional for me, they need to be pretty and fun and inspiring as well. This is a way for me to do the same thing, but actually get excited about my tasks and to-dos.

I also infused it with my own frameworks. This is something that was in one of my courses, and every single time I refresh, it gives me some inspiring thing, and then I can strategize with it in an AI chat.

And then Magnetize is basically what was in Notion, but again, just more interesting. All of this is just database, but in a different view. It also tracks if I'm closing clients, and the progress of client deals.

A client hours tracker, in under an hour

Recently I spun up, I needed a way to track individual hours. This is just a demo, but I spun it up in, no kidding, probably half an hour to an hour, just by saying: I need a simple way to track client hours. Some of them pay me in a package, some of them pay me hourly, and I just need something really fast to track that. And again, maximalist, to make it really fun.

It shows you, obviously, if you go over, and you can check what your hourly rate is actually coming out to be if it's a package, and keep an eye on it.

Willo's 411

Okay, let's get into the fun ones, these are ones you can actually use, which is always what I like to help you play with.

You most likely, if you're anything like me, are a traveler. I have traveled so much. Too much, possibly, sometimes. People were always asking me, "Can I have your tips for Chiang Mai?" or "I'm going to Bali, give me your tips for where to go." So I created this Willo's 411 site. 411 was a number you used to dial in America when I was a kid, for information, so it basically just means information.

I had some fun with this, again design-wise. You think about traveling and you've got these little Polaroids, so you can click on them and they run through fun facts, stats and data you can pull from here.

And for every single one of these there's a full tip. You can go to willo411.com/chiang-mai and get all of my personal tips. If you were to walk up to me and say, "What are your favorite restaurants?" or "Where do I get my nails done?", all those little things, these would be all my tips. All my favorites, organized up here: Thai language basics, accommodations, and so on.

And then most importantly: for almost all of these, I've curated a Google Map. As I've traveled around the world, I've got a map for Lisbon, a map for Chiang Mai, a map for London, all these different places. You can grab all of my Google Maps, so when you land, you save it, and you can just see what's around you that I've been to or recommend. Just so fun.

The backstory: mining data you didn't know you had

I should share the backstory of this. I had all of these lists before, just in a static Evernote document. It was static, it was hard for people to share, it was kind of done, you couldn't really save it. It was just boring. So it's much more dynamic now.

But I was also able to mine my data from TripIt. TripIt is where I forward all of my trips. Think about it, these things were tracked in so many ways that we almost don't realize. Whether it be even in your WhatsApp messages, in the background, there's this little thread of data somewhere. Mine was TripIt, and I was able to bring all that data in.

And on the About page, if you go to About Willo, I created this really fun full timeline of all the places I traveled to, across all the years and the cities. You can see it got a little crazy in 2023 and 2024 when COVID was finally over and I was like, "Bye! Time to travel again."

So that was really fun. And again, you can do personal little geeky projects.

Devouring

My last little geeky project for you is one I just recently launched, and it's called Devouring. It's at devouring.app, or devouringtv.com, or devouringbooks.com. It tracks all of the TV, movies and books I read.

It's got my Currently Devouring right here, showing what I'm currently watching. And then it tracks what I've recently watched, and whether it was worth it or not.

So if you're ever thinking, "What should I watch?" or "What should I read?", I actually created specifically that. You go to this fun little dynamic thing and you choose: I want a movie, or TV; here's where I stream, if you only have one of them; how fresh. So if we said, okay, Netflix, recent, a TV series, then you can shuffle, and it gives you something. And you can shuffle again until you see something you might like. Same thing for what you want to read. So you get to have some fun ideas.

This was, again, a very similar project, where I was able to grab data from my Goodreads. I even had a few WhatsApp groups with friends where we'd always talk about the show, so I exported those and imported them. I had blog posts going back 20 years, and I was able to mine data from whenever I said, "I'm watching this show and I love it," or "I just read this book and it's great." So, super, super fun personal project.

What I'm building now

Right now I'm working on getting my website, which has been on WordPress for 20 years, completely off of WordPress, so that I can just use Claude Code with it. That's been so fun to play with. It's a big one. 20 years of content is a big one.

So that is it. I really hope that all of these inspire you to create something amazing today that not only lights you up, but also serves others. Thank you.