#125: The Person You Could Have Been, Open-Source Photoshop Alternative, Becoming a Dangerous Digital Marketer

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

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This week we will take a look at a heuristic for becoming your best self, the opportunity behind AI-native services, how to become a dangerous digital marketer, and more. Let's dive in:

The Person You Could Have Been

​Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke shared a life-changing heuristic on The Knowledge Project: "I will meet the person I could have been at the end of my life. The work of my life is to reduce the difference between that person and me as much as possible."

Most goal-setting is about becoming someone else, and this is the opposite. The work is built upon closing the gap between who you are and who you already could be, which reframes ambition as an act of honesty rather than reinvention.

Newer, Better Alternative to Photoshop

​Pieter Levels recently shared a free and open-source image editor for Mac, called Compositor. It was made by Robbie Tilton, and he built it because Photoshop costs too much and GIMP never felt familiar enough to stay in flow.

The whole app is 12MB, whereas Photoshop is over 6,455 MB. It's built around compositing, using layers, masks, blend modes, liquify, spot healing, clone stamp, and the rest of the tools you are familiar with from previous from previous workflows.

Because it is open source, you can download the Xcode project and add or remove any feature to fit how you work. You can download it here.

How a Card Counter Solved Horse Racing

​Bill Benter got kicked out of every casino in Vegas for counting cards in 1986, so he flew to Hong Kong with $180,000, started betting on horses, and walked away with almost $900 million. The mechanism behind it is an idea called expected value, which is just a way of deciding whether a bet is worth taking.

Every bet has a price, which is the odds someone offers you, and a true probability, which is how likely the thing actually is. You only bet when your estimate of the true probability is better than what the odds imply. If a horse is priced like it wins 20% of the time but your homework says it wins 30% of the time, that gap is your edge, and Benter spent years building a computer model to find that gap on every race. He never bet on a hunch. He bet only when the numbers said the price was wrong, and he did it thousands of times until the small edge compounded into a fortune.

The reason this is useful outside gambling is that expected value is a filter for almost any decision where you are risking something. Starting a project, taking a job, spending money on ads, all of it comes down to the same question. Is what I might get worth more than what I am risking, given how likely it actually is.

AI-Native Services as a $100b Opportunity

​Greg Isenberg lays out why the best business to start right now is an AI-native service. The clearest way he frames it is with one example:

A business pays about $10,000 a year for QuickBooks and $120,000 a year for the accountant who uses it. For years, software companies fought over the $10,000 because that was the part you could sell at scale. The $120,000 was locked behind a human, and you could not scale a human without hiring another one.

AI can now do most of what the accountant does, at software margins. That is the money that just opened up. An AI-native service does the work for the customer, which means for the first time you can productize judgment. The differentiator becomes knowing which work is worth finishing.

Becoming a Dangerous Digital Marketer

​Pounds wrote a full breakdown of how making money online actually works, and it comes down to three parts:

1. You make something valuable for a specific group of people
2. You get that group to know about it
3. You get them to buy

It's worth noting how the three pieces connect. You start with a desire people already have, like a freelancer who wants to earn more or a dad who wants his joint pain gone, and you figure out what is actually stopping them.

Then your product is the answer to that specific blocker, and your marketing is just you talking about that same blocker in the words your customer already uses. He is emphatic that you never sell the feature. Nobody cares about insulin tracking, but they care about trying on dresses at the mall and feeling good, so that is what you talk about. The blocker, the product, and the content are all the same sentence.

The piece that will change how you actually do this is his point about the ask. Only about 3% of people who see your content are ready to buy the moment they see it, which means a hard "link in the description" throws away the other 97%.

The fix is to make the next step feel like part of the process instead of a favor they owe you. If you are walking someone through how you made a great AI video and you mention the Claude skill that matches your scenes to your images, the reader wants the skill before you ever offer it.

When the product genuinely continues the value you just gave them, the ask stops feeling like a pitch and starts feeling like the obvious next move, and that is when people buy.

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