Hi there,

OK so where did we leave off last time..

That’s right…
HACKATHON.

For International Women’s Day!
And no I will never stop telling people I did this.
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Did any of you go in your city?!
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Well here we all are.
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All 60ish of us in Lisbon and somehow I’m the only person in the photo who can’t contort her hands into a heart or open her eyes on command.

But let me introduce my… HACKER buddies.
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Melissa and Joana are the two women on my right (KILLING it with their hand hearts I might add) and Melissa just updated our Whatsapp group chat today appropriately titled “Supernerd Mom Coalition”:

Not only have we been sharing all week what we’re building and working on…. I scoped out another AI build meet-up that DUH we are going too.

What is even life.
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But this event…. a room full of women who’d mostly never coded before, all sat in a room and we all brought our ideas to life using AI and Lovable and (For me) Claude Code and My StoryPro. (which is going through a MASSIVE facelift.. Like more than the ponytail kind…so stay tuned!)

And by the end of this event…
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Woman, after woman, after “I’m not waiting around anymore for someone else to tell me my idea is good enough” woman, got up and presented what they had built in the span of only a few hours.

Like this investor hub that had detailed info of every single start up and investor in Lisbon coupled with metrics deemed important through the lens of this female- A fully functional site built EXACTLY how she wanted it and ready to deploy.
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Or the woman who built a Tamagotchi app (REMEMBER those 90s digital pets you had to keep alive?) except hers only stays alive if she goes to the gym 3x a week.

Deceased.

The whole day was amazing and not sure a man hack-a-thon would have an intentional video-setup shimmy on the front end…

and a bottle of Vino Verde being toasted on the back end….

But this is how WE do.
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But I want to address another side to all of this that I experienced in the same week.
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​Feeling behind. ​
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I attended an UNBELIEVABLE Claude Workshop this week by my brilliant friend Gemma, whom I’ve spoken many times about in this newsletter.

This is us at my house when she was living in Lisbon for a few months over the winter with her family.

And while I already knew a lot of what she was teaching in her Claude workshop, there were things she was doing with AI that I have never even considered.
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And after the workshop I had a low-level thread of anxiety.

Voices whispering at me:

• I’m not doing it her way.
• I should know more by now.
• I need to be learning more.

UM… irony not lost on me.
Kicks off week hacking, waving my arms and vibe coding like I just don’t care…

And then a mere 3 days later feeling like I was left behind firmly in 1957 with me and my supercomputer taking up a whole city block.
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This is not a rational thought process and I knew it.. But still didn’t stop me from WhatsApp vomiting every spiraling thought to my co-founder Wiebke at midnight.

Her response (in her hypnotically calm half-German, half-Chilean voice):

“A year ago everyone was freaking out about custom GPTs. Now it’s Claude Code. Next month it’ll be something else. This is just how it is. Stop it.”

Yes ma’am. 😂​
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And then the kicker:
​“You will ALWAYS be “behind” in AI.”

And she’s right.
​BTW, does this have a name!??!
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​Because I know I am not the only one who feels like this…check out just a FEW of the comments on a recent LinkedIn Post.

And so I sat with this a lot this week.
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This notion that there will ALWAYS be a new tool.
A new model.
A new life-altering work flow.
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Someone will always be further ahead.
The tools will keep evolving.
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What I’m doing now in Claude Code will probably be archaic in a few months.
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It’s why being a Custom GPT wrapper and calling it a SaaS tool is on the radar of so many investors.
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In my investor deck I have a whole slide on “why we’re defensible in this AI market.”.. In other words, “how are you protecting yourself from OpenAI coming to eat you for a mid-morning snack and how are you NOT a GPT wrapper?. “

The anxiety probably isn’t going away if I’m being honest. (It’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.) ​
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That feeling of “behind” is just always going to be part of the landscape now.
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So after talking to Wiebke and her bringing me back from the brink of AI despair, I asked myself this:
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Patrice, how are you using the tools in the best way to move YOUR mission forward?

And my mission?
Help people connect with who they are at a deeper level – so they know how to show up as themselves (through storytelling) and build businesses and careers that actually matter.
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So that’s what I brought my mind back to.
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And let me give you an example of what I mean.
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Earlier this week I was connected to a woman who runs an agency whose clients are in the B2B tech space. We hit it off immediately and she’s also trying to move out of the States to Portugal so we had immediate connection.
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Her clients are desperate for storytelling and AI operational skills and she wants to bring me in.

So instead of spiraling about all the AI functionality I don’t know…
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​I used MyStoryPro to brainstorm what me and Vee bring differently to this AI space then took the MOST PERFECT MyStoryPro copy to Claude Code to build a mock one-pager with our brand colors.
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Sent it to my developer. (I want to make a landing page)
​Sent it to my VA. (To finish the full execution)

Didn’t learn a new tool.
I didn’t master a new complex workflow.
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I just used what I already knew to move my actual business forward.
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Why am I telling you all of this?
​Because this stress is not something us women need added to our already FULL mental loaded plates. ​
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We’re all starting at different proficiencies. (what I just listed above might be WTF huh to some and “amateur hour” to others.)
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​Yes the overwhelm is real, but it doesn’t have to be the reason you don’t start. But first, you have to stop comparing yourself. (guilty as charged.)​
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And please remember that the majority of people currently setting the pace in AI are mostly men who don’t have kids, aren’t caring for aging parents, aren’t juggling the seventeen things most of us carry before 9am.
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Their entire life is the build. (looking at my entire AI LinkedIn feed from dudes telling me their latest AI WORKFLOW that is SICK and to comment “KEYWORD” to get it.)

***and don’t worry I always comment😵‍💫 why am I the way I am.
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​So why are we letting them set the pace for us?

Find YOUR people in this space.
Learn from people whose lives actually look something like yours.
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And keep asking yourself if you think you are using all this amazing tech to move YOUR mission forward?

Because that is what this is all about.. Not learning a new LLM for the sake of it.
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Once I got out of my “I’m behind” spiral, I realized that Gemma’s Claude workshop reminded me that even I have gaps, and they are gaps in areas that I want to improve upon.

I don’t need to implement everything that she does in HER business from an AI standpoint.
Because mine is different.
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But I do want to learn AI from “My people” and she’s “my people.”
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A fellow female builder in this space trying new things, figuring it out on the fly and then not gatekeeping any of that knowledge.
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​I bought Gemma’s AI All Stars because I think not only is it NECESSARY to support females building in this space, but because learning from someone who actually gets your life makes the whole thing feel possible instead of paralyzing.

I think about all the women I met at the hackathon (THAT I WENT TOO.. never gets old)

None of them showed up saying “I need to learn Claude Code.”

They all showed up with an idea they HAD to get out of their brain.

An investor hub.
A Tamagotchi that makes you go to the gym. (I can’t.)​
A business they’d been sitting on.

They didn’t master the tool (literally IMPOSSIBLE.)

They used just enough of it to build the thing they actually cared about.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret.

Start with what you want to BUILD — not what you think you need to learn.

Find people in this space whose lives look something like yours.

And do a little. Because a little is a lot more than nothing.

We forget that we’re all human.

You’re not behind. (not yet at least… haha..we are still in EARLY days here!!)​
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Now go build something and if you need a place to start, I cannot recommend Gemma’s training enough. ​

Oh and if you’re still like “Sorry, Patrice still feeling anxious..”

I read a post that says the average female career peak is 39.

The average female entrepreneur starts at 42.

The average female millionaire is 49, and the average women creative peak is between 45 and 55.

You’re not behind; you’re just getting started.

XO
Patrice