Toys

My first startup was LAMO. Our ecosystem included a video game, an augmented reality collector’s app, and physical collectible toys.

Before launch, we had an early run of the toys shipped to us ahead of TwitchCon, the annual fan convention where our signed influencers would be giving them away to fans.

When the samples arrived, it was a disaster.

Bleeding paint. Wrong colors. Malformed bodies that caused the figures to tip over. And those were only a few of the issues.

We canceled the TwitchCon giveaway, and it was decided that I would fly to China to figure out what had gone wrong in manufacturing.

The problem was, I knew nothing about making toys.

After long flights and many hours in toy factories and conference rooms, we were able to identify the issues and get them fixed. I have never looked at toys the same way again.

It was a full week of drinking from the proverbial firehose.

For the past several months, I’ve felt that way every week with AI.

If you are building with AI, as I am, or using it in your daily work, it can feel like the ground is constantly moving beneath your feet.

Almost every day, there are new models, new platforms, new tools, and new applications. Believe me, everyone feels behind.

The real skill is not knowing everything. That is impossible.

The meta-skill is building an orientation system so you can stay focused, keep learning, and continue making progress.

How To Stay Oriented

I didn't need to know everything about manufacturing toys. I needed to know enough to ask the right questions and recognize the right patterns. In other words, I needed a systematic way to orient myself and not get lost in the swirl.

The system has three parts:

• Anchor - What stable foundations did I already have as reference points?

• Filter - Where did I need to specifically focus and what do I ignore?

• Loop - How could I iterate through problems and learn quickly?

Let’s walk through how do use this with AI:

Anchor - What’s Your Reference Point

AI feels overwhelming because most people are consuming it without a reference point. Every new tool sounds important because there's no internal question to measure it against.

Your anchor is your own work. Specifically:

• What are you trying to build, sell, or improve?

• What are the two or three bottlenecks slowing you down right now?

• Where does an extra hour of leverage actually compound for you?

Focus on the friction, not the feature.

When you evaluate a new tool, the only question that matters is whether it solves a problem you already have. Without that lens, the limitless potential of AI feels noisy and overwhelming.

Your existing expertise is part of the anchor too. It keeps you grounded in environments that feel foreign.

My love of cooking and baking helped tremendously in those Chinese factories. Heat, cooling times, and materials determine toy quality. It turns out, making a toy is a lot like baking a cake.

Filter - Remove The Noise

Once you know what you're solving for, cut your inputs by 90%.

The mistake is trying to follow everything. The fix is choosing a small set of inputs that are:

• High signal - operators sharing what's actually working, not influencers performing expertise

• Aligned to your anchor - sources that cover the part of AI relevant to your work

• Boring enough to trust - people who don't post about every release, who wait for things to settle

A working filter might be:

• Two or three newsletters

• A handful of people whose judgment you respect

• One weekly review block on your calendar, not a daily scroll

Everything else gets ignored on purpose. They might be useful but your attention is finite.

The hardest part is psychological. You'll feel like you're missing out but you’re not. You're trading the illusion of being informed for the reality of being effective.

Before my trip to China, I watched a lot of YouTube videos about how toys are made. Not the polished, high-production ones, but raw factory footage from the kind of mom-and-pop operations we were actually using. I didn't need to know how Mattel made Barbies. I needed to understand how the average factory in China functioned.

Loop - Learn By Doing

The third part is where most people struggle. They read, they bookmark, they intend to try things but build nothing.

Don’t be a LARPer. LARPing stands for Live Action Role Playing, internet slang for someone who’s performative but not actually doing the thing. Execute the loop.

The loop is simple: pick one tool or technique per week, apply it to a real problem in your work, and decide quickly whether it stays or goes.

No grand strategy, just a simple experimental loop to help you progress.

Three rules that make the loop work:

• One experiment at a time. Parallel experiments turn into no experiments.

• Real work only. Toy projects teach you nothing about whether something fits your business.

• A clear yes or no. If you can't decide whether it helped, it didn't.

One experiment a week is 50 in a year. The compounding effect of those successes and failures is tremendous.

It's like losing weight. You won't see changes day to day, but the before-and-after pictures a month from now will surprise you.

One more thing about those Chinese factories. Before you assume the manufacturing issues were the fault of a careless supplier, let me set the record straight. I sat with the painters in the spray booths. I watched how the molds were built and how the models came out of them to cure in the heaters.

Iterating through every step made the real problem clear. Our designer hadn't coordinated well with the designers at the factory. Our designs were too complicated and were working against the realities of toy manufacturing.

The loop didn't just fix the toys. It corrected our assumptions about where the failure actually lived.

The Next Step

The firehose isn't going to slow down. New models, new platforms, and new tools will keep arriving faster than anyone can reasonably absorb.

The goal was never to keep up but to stay oriented.

Anchor to your own work, so you know what matters. Filter ruthlessly, so the noise stops crowding out the signal. Loop frequently, so learning turns into something real.

My goal with The Leap is to provide you each Saturday with the knowledge, tools and lessons learned to help you get started and keep going toward building your future. 

Whether you are making the leap to startups, solo-entrepreneurship, freelancing, side hustles or other creative ventures, the tools and strategies to succeed in each are similar.