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Hey beautiful human 👋,
How have you been?
Before we dive in, I wanted to let you know last week I got to watch the new TRON: ARES movie.
I have to say I really enjoyed it and if you haven’t seen it, get in there!
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October has been one of those pivotal months.
After many years of being known as “the Figma guy” or “the UX guy”… things are changing.
From here on out, I’ll be documenting my journey as a non-technical founder building a portfolio of apps that I use everyday, and making a series of asymmetric bets along the way.
My focus from here:
→ Entrepreneurship
→ Product development (I’ll talk about design when relevant)
→ Startups
→ Personal finance
If this isn’t what you signed up for, feel free to un-subscribe… but I’ll also be cleaning up my newsletter list with in-actives etc.
Let’s get into this month’s update.
The brand pivot
I’ve already started shifting what I talk about on X (Twitter) and Instagram and launched a brand-new YouTube channel called Mizko Manual.
Why a new channel?
Because every time I posted something outside of Figma or UX on my main channel, the algorithm buried it.
My audience came for design tutorials, so when I talk about startups or personal finance, YouTube assums “bad video” → “limit reach.”
But I don’t want to be boxed in by the algorithm.
Mizko Manual is where I’ll share the real journey… building companies, launching products, managing finances, and making asymmetric bets as a non-technical founder.
We acquired Choppity
This month, we officially completed the full acquisition of Choppity.com — and it’s now part of the Mizko Media family of apps.
Why Choppity?
Because I lived the exact pain it solves.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve grown my YouTube channel to 212K subscribers with over 200+ long-form videos.
One of my biggest frustrations was turning those videos into engaging short-form clips.
Even with an editor, it took forever and often didn’t make sense financially.
That’s why we acquired Choppity… probably the best AI video app for long-form → short-form conversion.
→ Automatically finds engaging clips
→ Smart auto-zooms and reframing
→ Auto-adjusts landscape b-rolls for portrait
→ You still maintain full edit control
We’ve already rolled out a few improvements, and my goal is to make this the go-to tool for creators who want to scale their short-form content.
We already have a few hundred paying users and this is one of those asymmetric bets:
✅ Small acquisition
✅ Clear problem
✅ Real users
✅ Upside if executed well
A new product enters Alpha
In two days, we’re launching the Alpha version of a new app my team and I have been quietly building behind the scenes.
We’ll be onboarding a small, closed group of creators and teams who produce content for themselves or their clients.
The vision?
To build the operating system for content creators and content-led businesses. One where you can plan, script, produce, and schedule all in one place.
I’m super passionate about solving this problem because it was one I faced for nearly a decade.
Over the last 8-ish years in business, I paid $0 for ads but rather leveraged content to drive over $10M in revenue for my businesses. I have to give credit to ‘content’ for my successes.
We’re building this app from the ground up.
So we’re not trying to compete with giants on day one. We’re building for a small but painfully underserved group.
— Mizko
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Useful lil' links
Choppity - Generate engaging short clips with AI
Atlas - OpenAI’s new browser
Posthog - Product analytics
Shadcn - UI framework for product builders
Strapi - Headless CMS