Welcome to the July rewind, Reader!
I'm writing this from a lake house in the Adirondacks, surrounded by roughly 400 of my husband's cousins, aunts, uncles, and family friends. I haven’t counted, but I’m also not exaggerating by much.
July is always the month where I kinda disappear from my business. Here's the recap:
〰️ We ran Draft Week.
This was the biggest update AI All Stars has ever had. 14 new team members, organized into squads, revealed one squad at a time over the course of a week.
I loooved the creativity of this campaign. Do I play baseball? No. Did I love using it as inspo for all the graphics and vibe of the campaign? 100%.
But my favorite part of that whole campaign wasn’t the campaign itself. It's that I wasn't there for it.
Every email, every video, every graphic, every sales page, all of it was written, built, and scheduled before I got on a plane and checked out to hang with my kids. Obviously my team fielded the questions that came in in real-time, but this was a great example of using our AI team to pull together a rad (and successful) campaign in a matter of days.
〰️ Then I went to the mountains.
10 days in Canmore with my family. Banff, Lake Louise, the Rockies, all of it. That water is a color that does not look real in photos and somehow looks even more fake in person.
We hiked a lot. We swam every day. We ate a truly unreasonable number of snacks. And my kids got into Seinfeld. The Rusty episode (the horse that eats the beef-a-roni) had my son crying with laughter.
〰️ Then we came home for 3 days and immediately left again.
Packed the car, drove down to the Adirondacks, and here we are. This is the annual big family gathering and it is chaos in the best possible way. Kids everywhere. Boats. Someone always cooking. Multiple conversations happening at once in every room.
I love it here. It is the least productive I am all year and I look forward to it for months.
〰️ The other thing I did in July: I stopped opening Instagram.
Not in a dramatic, deleting-the-app, announcing-my-digital-detox way. Just quietly stopped.
Here's why: I'd open it, get 3 funny videos and something genuinely cool, and then hit a business post. Someone's launch. Someone's revenue screenshot. Someone's strategy carousel. And my brain would click, audibly, into CEO mode.
Suddenly I'm mentally rewriting my Q4 plan while standing in a lake.
The scroll itself is fine. It's what the scroll does to the shape of my attention that I can't seem to negotiate with. And I don't want to be half-here for 3 weeks of the summer because I saw a reel about the latest launch hack.
So I'm off of it (mostly... I've cheated twice).
The very funny irony of this is that I also hosted a webinar in early July with Kate Kordsmeier about building a business entirely without social media. I totally get the appeal!
〰️ A few other things that happened while I wasn't looking:
- We relaunched the 2-Hour Brand Book as an actual app, which I've wanted to do for about 12 months.
- I ran my own evergreen funnel through “Sally”, my sales detective AI, and found 2 leaks I'd been staring past for months. Neither of them was where I assumed. Nothing humbles you like having your own AI team member point at your numbers and go, well, obviously it's this. (Draft Week is over, but if you're curious, you can still watch Sally call me out in this demo.)
〰️ Also, one actual pitch and then I'll go back to the lake:
Teachery is raising the price on their lifetime plan. I've hosted my courses there since 2017 and I pay $0 a month, which is a sentence I enjoy saying to anyone still bleeding out on 6 different software subscriptions. Pay once, keep it forever, build unlimited courses.
They just rebuilt the whole platform too, so this isn't a nostalgia recommendation, it's a genuinely better product than it was a year ago. If you've been meaning to get off a monthly plan, this is the moment. Grab the Teachery lifetime plan before the price goes up →
〰️ Newsletters and articles you might've missed:
That's July. Mostly mountains and some very good work that happened without me hovering over it.
If you're in the thick of your own summer right now and feeling guilty about not working enough, consider this your reminder that the guilt is not doing anything useful. The work will be there. It always is. Take the season of rest.