The Cheese #78 🧀 - Drowning All Week, My L4-5 Again, and Another Record Month

A Week That Rocked Me

This week was a week. One of those weeks where I never caught my breath off the jump. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I felt like I was drowning the whole way through.

Looking back at it now, though, I think I had a ridiculously productive week. I am kind of proud of myself lol.

The mental beating was probably my own fault. I stacked way too much into five days: 26 scheduled meetings, which is honestly not wildly above my average week, and one of those was in person. Then I threw an orthopedic surgeon follow-up Monday at 8:30 am and a dental cleaning Tuesday at 1 pm on top of it. Then I decided it was also a good idea to push several larger projects forward at the same time.

Those projects all needed a lot of back and forth with Claude, which is normally fine. Three of the first four days this week had intermittent API issues. I checked status.claude.ai and sure enough, they were called out. Nobody's fault, just brutal timing when you are trying to move big things.

We also had a very good friend staying with us this week. He used to live here, lives in Texas now, still has a ton of friends and family in town. Great to see him. Not exactly a light week to be hosting someone lol.

Now the proud papa AI moments, because both Kent and Cameron put some genuinely impressive things in motion.

Cameron automated our product restock information to his team. He used to manually update the Whatnot team on what was back in stock and available for them to sell. Now he is completely hands off, and the agent does it for him.

Kent's is the one that really got me. We have an app on the site that has given me issue after issue, and to be fair, that is only two issues, with the latest being an email over the weekend telling me their pricing model changed, and we were out of impressions for the month on our paid tier. I wrote up a delayed email asking if we could just code this ourselves and be done with it, set to hit the team at 8 am Monday. 24 minutes later, Kent replied. Not that he would take a look at it. He had the .liquid file ready for dev to drop into the theme. 24 minutes.

On Whatnot, Cameron and team set the new monthly record, exactly as expected. Today is the last day of the month, and we still have a couple shows left, so I will report the final July number to you all next week.

Amazon is humming along. Membership is in close to the best spot it has ever been after last week, where we absolutely crushed it.

BattlGames is close. I was hoping we would close out Season 3 sponsorships today, but the three deals we have been waiting on are not in yet. One of them is absolutely my fault. I was supposed to send an email, and I never did. It is going out on a delayed send to hit in the morning. We are also on track to have our official 10 contestants selected, which is the part I am most fired up about.

One of those larger projects I mentioned is something we are working on for a major network. More on that when I can actually share it.

A few loose ends from recent weeks. Still no replacement for Whop. Still on Visually for A/B testing, though Shoplift is now in the mix and I will be at one of their events next Friday out in the Hamptons. Redo did not move much this week since Patrick was on vacation.

Two last things. That orthopedic follow-up Monday confirmed an L4-5 issue, a bulging disc, same as last time. The fix is the same as last time too. Stay at a healthy weight, stretch, work on my core. Last go around, it took close to a year to recover. Joy.

Johnny is almost fully past the herpangina. All that is left is a cough he cannot shake yet. Happy to see him not so sick; would love for the cough to stop soon.

Let's get into the rest!

How We Built an AI Agent to Catch Discount Code Fraud Every Morning

Our agent runs every morning before I am awake, scans orders and discount codes, and flags anything that looks like fraud or a code that should not exist. Full walkthrough of how it works and how you could build your own version of it.

How Angelica Nwandu Built The Shade Room Into a Media Revolution

Lhea's latest. How Angelica Nwandu turned an Instagram account into one of the biggest media outlets in the country without a newsroom, a budget, or permission from anyone. Good operator read.

Tesla Model X Road Trip to Disney World: What We Learned

I mentioned this drive a couple of issues back, and here is the full write-up. The charging stops, the battery conditioning I did not know was a thing, what actually surprised me, and whether I would do it again. If you have an EV and a long drive coming up, this one is for you.

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That’s a Wrap on This Week’s Cheesy Delight! 🧀

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Stay cheesy, and see you next week!

Warmest queso wishes,
Team Online Queso