Founder of Mint Media | DIGITAL MINT HOLDINGS. 🦅 Building a stealth healthcare brand and @stepcapture
Joined July 2020
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Jonathan Sokol retweeted
stop whining about @Railway
any fucking service provider can experience outages, leaks, or anything else
don't be a whiny baby, go rotate your fucking API keys and credentials 💪
SEO and GEO are not two pitches we stapled together.
The technical work overlaps. How a page is structured, how it gets indexed, how a source becomes citable. Google is already moving answers into AI summaries. A lot of the same signals show up in how certain models cite sources.
So we treat them as one system. Rankings are part of the story. Being the page that gets referenced is the rest of it.
If you only report positions, you are describing a thinner outcome than the work actually produces.
I bounce between Grok 4.7 and Claude Opus 5.5 depending on the job.
Grok 4.7 is fast. I like that. The 256k context drop is the part I do not like. Long sessions lose the thread right when the codebase is finally loaded.
Opus 5.5 is phenomenal when it is actually running. Then I get blocked. Constantly.
So the harness is not one model. It is which one is usable right now, and which step of delivery that model is actually good at.
Churn staying low is not mostly about freebies.
A lot of it is communication cadence: getting ahead of the follow-up instead of waiting for someone to chase you.
Status before they ask. Clear next steps. Change-order clarity when the scope shifts.
Extras help sometimes. Predictability helps more.
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
Dev is super cooked.
Marketing is mega cooked.
Designers are cooked.
Ad agencies are cooked.
Gaming and video studios are cooked.
Legal is cooked.
Management is cooked.
Were all cooked fam. 😆
Been moving more of my day out of Hermes into a small fleet of specialist bots on Grok Bot.
Personal side: Package Tracker watches shipping mail and nudges me when something is ready for the mail room.
Work side: a social poster for my LinkedIn/X drafts, plus ops bots in group chat for email triage, finance handoffs, infra checks, and general Mint Media ops.
Not trying to build one mega-assistant that does everything. Narrow jobs, shared context, less context-switching.
Still early, but the group-chat surface is the part I did not expect to like this much.
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
I discovered that 1000s of bots are actively monitoring X for new links posted, probably not just on my account
I noticed when everytime I'd share one of my sites new features or pages, the page would get a bit slower just after posting, then I asked Claude to analyze it
I tweeted a test URL as a reply somewhere deeply hidden in a thread (so not even a main post)
And within 8 seconds there's thousands of crawlers opening the page!
One is a military intelligence firm, that scans social media for breaking news and sells alerts to newsrooms, banks, companies and government, it specifically follows accounts with many followers
Another one is a social media monitoring company that tracks what people say online
I knew of course high frequency trading firms use online news to trade fast on things, but interesting to see it in real life
Twitterbot (X) of course is first, within 0 seconds of sharing, it opens it (probably when I wrote the tweet)
The first non-X bot arrives just 8.40s later, which I think is pretty fast considering it's a reply by me deeply hidden in a thread somewhere
TL;DR they're watching you!
The delivery bottleneck I see most is not speed.
It is mind-changes late in the project. Design revisions after development is already underway, or a new direction after the agreed design phase is closed.
Our approach is pretty simple: stay respectful, then either add a charge or phase it. Launch phase one as agreed. Treat the new stuff as the next phase.
We keep a clear paper trail on that path, so companies usually get it. Pushback is rare.
Clarity beats arguing about "just one more tweak."
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
AI will make everything free, including itself. The last domino to fall will be free energy, which is humanity’s final frontier.
Shopify is often the right call for ecommerce work we do, including Shopify Plus.
It is not the only stack we build on.
We also ship WordPress with custom themes and meta fields, completely custom frameworks, and custom CMS builds when that is what the project needs. Different teams get deployed based on the stack and the quality bar.
We are a design and development agency. Platform choice is judgment, not loyalty to one stack.
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
98% of US households aren't paying for AI yet
More charts in State of Markets II: a16z.news/p/state-of-markets…
Introducing our State of Markets pt 2, along with a companion podcast where we unpack the data and discuss what comes next.
Tech is the everything cycle.
Supply: putting the buildout in context, just passed railroads as % of GDP. The wisdom of Elon is real: the factory (or the datacenter!) is the product.
Demand: diffusion is so, so early. Median AI vendor spending in the top 1% of companies is 8x that of the top 10%. Only about 30% of S&P 500 companies report a quantified AI impact, which means there’s a substantial opportunity in connecting models to a company's data and workflows. Diffusion into companies is one of the main themes of the next 5 years.
We’re entering the agent work period. Only a few million users today, but applicable to billions of internet users with massive surplus created. META/GOOG monetize US users at $200+ per year today. Agent opportunity is much higher.
Mega-trends the next 5 years: Consumer agents, Robotics, Autonomy, AI x bio, Personal health, Diffusion into enterprise, New era of American Dynamism.
Much more in our SoM report here - a16z.news/p/state-of-markets…
@a16z @sarahdingwang @aleximm @santiago__rdz
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
Scope creep isn’t always bad.
If you never give good clients anything extra, you’re probably optimizing the wrong thing. A little generosity goes a long way. Our churn is mega low and I don’t think that’s an accident.
The problem is the unconscious yes.
“Tiny thing” turns into three tickets and everyone feels weird.
My rule: if it’s not in the scope doc, it’s a change order, a trade, or a conscious freebie. Not a shrug.
Jonathan Sokol retweeted
I was seeing all these posts about Opus 5.5 being able to one-shot a SaaS launch video, and I thought, there’s no way, this has to be exaggerated. It can’t actually be one shot.
But then I copied a one-shot prompt for one of the tools that we built a month ago from, and copied the prompt from @fatjoedavies , and I am absolutely mind blown at what came out of it!
We’ve been running more of Mint Media’s day-to-day on Grok Bot, and it’s been genuinely useful.
A bunch of the Hermes automations I used to keep in my personal AI assistant live there now. The interface helps. Group chats with specialist bots feel less like managing scripts and more like handing work to a team.
The personal win I didn’t expect: Package Tracker.
I used to bounce between Shop, shipping emails, and individual carrier trackers. Having a bot that watches for packages and pings me when it’s time to hit the mail room has been a quiet game changer.
Business tools that also clean up tiny life friction tend to stick.