Monthly roundup: best book, movies, most useful video, the skill I worked on, a hypothesis, a habit, and the month's key insight. May-June 2025.
I didn’t get around to writing this post last month, so I’m folding in some of May’s results here too.
1) Best book
“$100M Leads” by Alex Hormozi. Everything Hormozi writes I consider a gem for growing a business. His books are a whole new level of thinking.
2) Movies and shows
Went to see “Amateur” with Nastya. I liked it.
“Teacher of the Year” struck me as warm and touching.
We watched an interesting 1996 movie called “The Substitute.” Not a lot of action, but a good message.
3) Most useful video
This month I discovered the YouTube channel Deya. A really likable woman who talks about business and her own journey toward serious money. I sometimes pick up useful ideas from her videos.
4) The skill I worked on
Business automation.
For the last 2 months, my team and I have been working on not doing every process manually. We now have a specialist dedicated to automation.
We started building one-page sites for all our courses. We started mapping out and building a funnel (the customer’s journey inside our online school). We rolled out a CRM system (software that makes managing our customer base easier).
5) A hypothesis I tested
In June, we started selling our courses through Telegram chatbots for the first time.
This is a new stage of growth for our school. We’re moving from manual, one-on-one messaging with customers toward the ability to buy our courses in a few clicks, with no need to talk to a manager.
The option to DM us directly will still be there, because some people have unique questions, or simply never buy through tools like a landing page or a chatbot.
We just think it’s important that people who want the full picture and want to buy on their own have that option.
6) The habit I was building
Looking up translations of English words I don’t know. Ever since I started reading books in English ordered from Amazon, my level has improved a bit, but I still run into unfamiliar words and phrases sometimes.
7) Key insight of the month
You implement automation tools first, and then you grow. Not the other way around.
I know a lot of entrepreneurs who keep putting off implementing CRM systems, chatbots, landing pages, and other automation because they think their customer base isn’t big enough yet, and they’re managing fine as it is.
In reality, we stay small for as long as we keep thinking like a small business built to serve a handful of customers.
Once we start thinking about how to serve 1,000 customers a month, the tools we need to implement are exactly what lets us grow bigger and reach a new level.
We use the tools that big businesses use first, and only then, maybe, do we actually become big ourselves. Not the other way around.