Kyle Guilfoyle

💻 Guy at a laptop growing restaurants.
🧠 Cracking AI, automation & psychology to drive more guests.
⚡ Building the ultimate restaurant growth playbook.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

The important, not urgent day:

- 1 hour learning
- 1 hour journaling / creation
- 2 hours prospecting + outreach + sales
- 2 hours product dev
- 2 hours audience building

Then, automate or delegate last 3 -- to maximize first 2.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

There are a ton of great old books about how to advertise.

But the best one I’ve found is Obvious Adams by Robert R. Updegraff.

It’s not about creative genius.

Or any gee-whiz copywriting tactic.

It’s about doing the obvious things.

A hat company in the book had two stores in the same city. One made money. The other didn’t.

They’d spent lots on ads, but the ads only seemed to help the successful store.

So they sent in Adams to figure out why.

He walked past the struggling store three times while trying to find it.

It was on a busy shopping street, but the store was hard to see.

“People didn’t see the store; people couldn’t find the store easily.”

They were paying for advertising to bring people to a store people could barely notice.

That’s what I love about this book.

There was no clever campaign.

Adams just saw what the people inside the business couldn’t.

It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Day 2/30

I love learning about AI - how to build with it, power things with it, and make cool machines with it.

But when I first got interested, I had a hard time figuring out where to start. I wanted to learn how to actually make things, while also understanding where all of this might go.

These three resources have helped me:

• Matt Pocock’s free AI Skills for Real Engineers course. He takes things that sound boring - like engineering fundamentals - and makes them insanely useful and fun. It’s clear he has a teacher’s heart.
https://t.co/WQRXb2UjAI

• Nate B. Jones on YouTube. Very level-headed, no hype.
https://t.co/jkMotlaVqD

• Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. A bunch of super nerds exploring the frontier and where this all might go. The episodes can be long, so I pick whichever one has a title that really grabs me.
https://t.co/GjlhjzDbdW

That’s been a good mix for me: learning how to build, keeping up with what’s happening, and staying curious about what comes next.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

I blew my entire weekly AI usage in one day.

Then paid another $400 in credits.

That’s one of three things I’ve been thinking about lately:

1. Getting agents to do a buttload of work - without breaking the bank

I have this system I’m pretty proud of.

At least I used to be.

It’s my /client-comms system, and it basically looks like this:

1. Read all my client communication.
2. Figure out who needs a response.
3. Pull together the relevant context.
4. Identify work we should do.
5. Produce something meaningful.
6. Draft a short, useful client update.

Sounds pretty good, right?

But alas - I broke the bank.

And failed.

And now I think a lot about how not to do that.

It’s basically the same with humans. You need to chunk things way down and have clear ways to evaluate as you go. Otherwise, agents can run amok.

2. The Holy Grail of AI Harnesses

At work, I think about AI more than anything else. I’m obsessed with it.

By “harnesses,” I mean the tools and setups we use to work with AI agents. These almost feel like the major social media platforms, but for building.

Which is way fucking cooler.

One of my favourite ways to learn is to ask the agents to research best practices for their own platforms, especially how to set up instruction files like AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md.

Then create a cheat sheet for me to reference.

Then come up with a benchmark to score my existing setup.

Then apply it to our existing systems.

3. Oldschool Advertising

I just LOVE reading guys like Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Albert Lasker, and Gary Halbert.

They use simple, fun language to share timeless lessons.

I’m reading Claude Hopkins’ My Life in Advertising right now.

“Try to hedge or protect yourself, and human nature likes to circumvent you. But remove all restrictions and say, ‘We trust you,’ and human nature likes to justify that trust.”

They don’t make 'em like they used to.

It would be great to connect with other people interested in these topics. If any of the above resonates, feel free to reach out!

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Writing people will want more of going forward with AI:

(Weird + Imperfect) x (Experience + Insight)

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Your next best move is obvious. Here’s why + 3 dead simple action steps at the end.

Yesterday, I found this short gem and read it in one go.

(It was comforting to hear an early 1900s advertising man face the same challenges I do)

It tells the story of how Oliver B. Adams went from unknown (as we all do) to “Obvious Adams — Medicine man of business.”

Everyone’s first impression of him was bored / underhwelmed.

But he would leave them thinking / stewing.

That’s because—after deep thought—he just did the obvious thing!

(Rare)

For example, after learning how a paper company made its paper, Adams suggested they advertise their paper making process.

The owner, Mr. Merritt, was disappointed.

“I didn’t need to get an advertising man from New York to tell me that. What I wanted was some original ideas. Every one knows these things about bond paper.”

I love Obvious Adams’ response:

“We aren’t any of us paper-makers, and no one has ever told us these things. I know there is nothing clever about these advertisements. They are just simple statements of fact. But I honestly believe that the telling of them in a simple, straightforward way as qualities of your paper, month after month, would in a comparatively short time make people begin to think of yours as something above the ordinary among papers. You would be two or three years at least ahead of your competitors, and by the time they got round to advertising, your paper would already be intrenched in the public mind. It would be almost a synonym for the best in bond paper.”

And then my FAVOURITE part:

“But we should be the laughing stock of all the paper-makers in the country if they saw us come out and talk that way about our paper, when all of the good ones make their paper that way.”

(get this all the time from restaurants lol)

Adams bent forward and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Mr. Merritt, to whom are you advertising—paper-makers or paper-users?”

So while others look for a “royal road through some short cut in the form of a clever scheme or stunt,” Obvious Adams does the thinking + analysis—then shares the obvious.

Here’s a DEAD SIMPLE way a restaurant can action this lesson in 2024:

1) Make short video clips showing how your most popular items are made

2) Share them on social media

3) Put $1 - $5 in ad spend per day behind the ones that perform best.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

You don't need to slap your logo on everything.

Human-To-Human > Business-To-Consumer.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Apathy Is Boring. That was the name of my friend Mackenzie’s first company. Great name. But apathy isn’t just mind-numbingly boring, it’s dangerous. It scares me. Like an infectious disease, it sucks the air out of the room, the wind from a sail. Violent action is the antidote.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Offering something for free casts the ultimate vote of conviction. You’ll give of your time, energy, and other resources because you believe something better is on the other side for everyone.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@nathanbaugh27 🛠️

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@awilkinson Bar Raval, Bar Isabel

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

"Nice" has an agenda. "Kind" does not.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@danmcdme @awilkinson This should give a good idea (from @IMScalable) https://t.co/I7o68qiogq

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Just posted a photo https://t.co/miSZ7nArCJ

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Frame for content creation going forward: "Don't listen. Just watch."

Prevents the mere peddling of information.

Encourages sharing of experiments, activities, results, built things, uniqueness, etc.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@danmcdme @JoelKlettke Not this one!

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@CurtisDuggan Jonathan Livingston Seagull

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

@awilkinson Or what about free food — monetized by ads. @kylevamvouris

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

Building a business = projects and systems. Everything else is random activity.

[Kyle Guilfoyle @KyleGuilfoyle]

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” - Henry David Thoreau

Put another way: there are a thousand reaching for "hacks", shortcuts, and shiny objects to one who is relentlessly building one thing.