Max Bernstein

You have probably built a prompt. Maybe it was for some marketing copy, maybe for extracting insights from transcripts (my fave). Maybe it took you six hours and a glass of wine that became three glasses. You sent it to a client. Posted a version on LinkedIn. Got some likes and a few digital pats on the back. Then nothing. No one used it. Not realllly. The engagement was real but the implementation...not so much. This is the last mile problem. It has buried more courses, templates, and prompt...

This article first appeared on Beware the Default newsletter. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." -Shunryu Suzuki The plan was simple… Test Anthropic’s new Cowork feature, see what it could do and share what we found. An hour later, we had something more useful than a demo reel. We had an honest record of what happens when you actually try to do complex things with a four-day-old product. The YouTube Version You’ve seen the posts. “I...

Was watching the Rams / Panthers playoff game and the commentators were talking about Ram's head coach Sean McVay. "When he came in he took the league by storm and was giving defenses fits. Now you look around and you see it everywhere." The specific innovation they mentioned is using 3-4 tight ends who can all catch AND block. McVay didn't invent the tight end. He just saw something others didn't and built a system around it. Now every offensive coordinator in the league runs some version of...

My buddy Zain and I are starting something new. Every week, we work with AI to solve weird, specific problems. Ours. Clients'. Random things that actually probably don't solve anything outside of our weird curiosity. But we got good at it. Fast. So we thought… What if we did this live? And what if we had no idea what problem we'd be solving until the moment we hit record Here's the format: The cryptic vault Working with clients recently, I've discovered I have the most fun and do my best work...

First Saturday of the new year. I should be recovering from cake and cinnamon rolls. Instead I'm on a livestream in my boxers demoing a personal dashboard I built. Halfway through, my friend Zain says something I had to write down: "I just feel like a kid again." His wife doesn't code. She had an idea at dinner for something that would help her friends. They sketched it on the counter and just... built it. The two of them had a working prototype in about an hour. Same thing happened to me....

For the past few months, I've been co-writing Jay Abraham's newsletter alongside Michael Simmons. Jay's one of the most influential business strategists alive. Almost everyday, I've been reading his transcripts, studying his case studies, building systems around his thinking. Somewhere in there, something shifted. The frameworks stopped being content I was editing... They became how I see things. I stopped asking "how do I find more clients?" and started asking "who already has my ideal...

This week over Christmas (still apologizing to my girlfriend) I worked with a business development lead at a VC fund. Smart guy. Hustling hard. Doing "all the right things." More demo days. More cold emails to founders. More LinkedIn conversations that go nowhere. His boss saw the effort but nothing was closing. He came to me thinking he needed better outreach templates. A sharper LinkedIn strategy. More volume. Instead, we pulled the data on what was actually working. The deals that closed....