Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The Last Six Months Have Been A True Adventure

The last six months since leaving my role as a Voicebot Product Owner has been liberating and terrifying at the same time. For once I could focus all my attention on research, creating content and writing. And the positives exceeded all my expectation. Here I talk about writing, LinkedIn, webinars and what the future holds…

Cobus Greyling
4 min readAug 25, 2022

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Writing

I have never been paid to write and had no other incentive apart from feeding my own deep curiosity for understanding the Conversational AI landscape better.

I tried various avenues of monetising content, but in the end it just made sense to give it away for free.

I have found that writing is a way of purifying my thoughts. Once I start putting my thoughts down on proverbial paper, it is in essence a moment of truth. That moment of truth is where what you write really resonates with you, and you truly believe it can be of value to someone.

There are times when I start writing, and I realise I’m on a false summit of understanding, where I know I’m overestimating my understanding or knowledge in a certain area. The best is to scrap the mental deadline I have set for myself, and go back to prototyping, reading and tinkering.

As seen in the image below, my number of views on Medium has started to exceed 1,000 per day, which is a result of dedicating more time to the process.

There has also been a steady growth in Medium followers and people subscribing to email notifications since I started on Medium.

As some of you may have noticed, for a while I received sponsorship from HumanFirst on Medium. However, due to various conditions, I had to remove it and am looking at what the Medium conditions allow in terms of affiliation.

I am obviously interested in promoting organisations I truly believe in and journeys I would like to be part of. Even if it’s in a slight way.

LinkedIn

I found that LinkedIn is the area where I get the most traction, in the span of seven days, I reached 53,775 post impressions. The feedback and networking on LinkedIn for me currently is truly meaningful.

There are many quips on LinkedIn regarding sales tactics and receiving creative sales pitches. However, I have found that if you contribute to the community, and try and establish give-give relationships, the value can be immense.

The only thing I regret is not being able to get to every outreach I receive on LinkedIn and every meeting request…

Webinars

Public speaking was something new to me…I was wondering if it something I could manage to do and do I have anything to say which is worth listening to?

Well, again, the response was overwhelming and the allocated time always seemed to short. Which I guess is a good thing. 🙂

To be honest, speaking is something I started to enjoy and hopefully it’s something I can do more frequently in the future.

About The Future

What would I like to do in future…I would love to speak more, write more, and earn money of course while doing so. I would like to continue my momentum on LinkedIn and Medium.

Working with who you want to work with, on what you want to work on, is actually just play.
~ Naval Ravikant

Currently there are many opportunities for which I am grateful for. But I have also come to realise how finite time is, and the importance of what you work on, and with who…

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cobusgreyling
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cobusgreyling

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