Last week, I spent 3 gratifying hours trying to record a 1-minute video clip that maybe 20 people would see. That doesn’t include the hours I spent writing a 5-reel series about my R&D journey, or the dozens of times I re-recorded because watching myself back made me want to leave the internet again.

Oh, and before posting my first reel, I threw a filter…

Read more

Most of my friends work outside CPG and have been curious about what the R&D process for WIT actually involved. One friend even called me for advice because he wants to start a a CPG company once he retires from tech. Luckily, the process is fresh, so I thought I’d document it for him and anyone curious about what I’ve been doing or interested in how I …

Read more

The good stuff: the announcement reached 86K views, which shocked me because I don’t have a large following on X and my algorithm led me to believe people only care about AI or raccoon videos. I received an unimaginable amount of support and encouragement from friends, the broader CPG community, and people who’ve been looking for a product like this. After working on this alone for so many months, it felt amazing to put this out there and have it so well received. I was excited! We were all excited!

And then the crash landing:

• The manufacturer search I started in August turned into almost two months of hunting.

• A key ingredient became backlogged for six months, sending me scrambling for alternatives.

• Separately, the nutrition numbers needed revisiting, sending me back into the lab.

• Production can take up to twelve weeks from a purchase order, so all of this has pushed back the launch date.

But this is good, I promise

When the ingredient issue surfaced, my mentors all gave me some version of “always have backups.” Yes, of course. Duh. Redundancies.

But it’s not that simple to just “have backups.” Different suppliers use different processes to make an ingredient, which can affect its nutritional profile, taste, and texture. When you’re developing something as specific as I am, there aren’t many 1:1 replacements for key ingredients.

I went through the Yellow Pages (LLMs) and texted friends and mentors to find suppliers or brokers who could help. Dozens of calls and even more “Just Following Up” emails later, I have a promising set of samples arriving at the R&D lab, where I’ll be headed next week to test them with the team. I’m hopeful we’ll come away with more than one viable backup because, between the protein craze and the supply constraints, I’m planning on this happening again.

Testing alternatives means the nutrition numbers could change again. Working through the alternatives now will help us understand what adjustments each ingredient change requires if we ever need to rely on backup options. Then we can pray that the backups to the backups don’t go out of stock, too.

It’s only been three weeks since my announcement, but it legitimately feels like it’s been an entire quarter. One mentor told me that some of these lessons took him over a year to learn. I’m getting them all at once, and I’m feeling it. Did I mention I had a wedding in the midst of all of this?

Lightning doesn’t strike twice, right?

At the risk of sounding obnoxiously positive, I’m grateful for what I’m learning. This has been an aggressive bootcamp in CPG operations and supply chain, but my biggest takeaway has been that these surprises will continue to happen, and the only option I have is to confront them with less shock and more preparation.

So why share all of this? I hesitated because I worried it would make me look careless or incompetent, but I need an artifact to point to if future Sandy makes these errors again (God forbid).

If you have a friend starting a CPG business, please tell them to find their backups and backups to backups yesterday. I’m trying to collect good karma points and if this saves even one person some operational trauma, I’ll be happy I shared it.

This has been a hard batch of lessons to learn at once, but my superpower is figuring things out, and my greatest motivation in life is a deadline. So here we go!

ooxxooXoXXx,

SK

I’ve spent the last two months writing about the experience of building a company while avoiding the part where I share what I’m building. The cover was that the product was still taking shape. The truth is that I’ve been scared to find out whether people think it deserves to exist.

I need to learn to stop getting in my own way, so I present: WIT, a plant-based protein milkshake that tastes so good, I’m hoping you’ll ask, “What’s in this?” (Get it?)

It took a couple of detours to get here, so if you’ll indulge me...

Everyone Says to Build for Yourself, So I Did

Here’s me, a baby ninja. I started competing in martial arts as a kid and have since replaced it with basically every hobby that requires moving my body. Movement is oxygen to me, and eventually the protein math required to support it became second nature.

I’m also lactose intolerant and one of those people whose commitment to eating plant-based returns on a seasonal schedule. This has led to years of studying nutrition labels, trying to wedge meal prep into an already packed life, and consuming more carbs, fat, or calories than I wanted just to hit a protein target.

Plant protein has its own version of the triple constraint: taste, macros, ingredients. You can only pick two. A few products are “good for plant protein,” which has the same energy as “you look great for your age.”

I wanted enough protein without a pile of calories, an ingredient list that didn’t require a research project to understand, and a format that worked for the life I actually lived. More than anything, I wanted to look forward to consuming it. It’s 2026 and LLMs are promising singularity, so none of this felt like an unreasonable thing to ask for.

The Commercially Responsible Identity Crisis

I started with plant protein because it was the product I wanted for myself. Then I looked at the market to ensure that my savings weren’t about to fund an expensive personal snack project.

The early research wasn’t encouraging. Whey powder was growing 13.5% while plant powder had fallen 6%. You don’t really need a market study to tell you this. Visit any shelf and you’ll see the Cambrian explosion of whey-based products like protein donuts, boba-flavored powders, and even gummies with protein. Plant products, meanwhile, sit near the floor looking like they had been designed for women named Moonchild.

“Build for yourself” suddenly felt like a potentially unforced error, so my R&D partner and I changed course and decided to formulate with whey. My brilliantly sensible plan was to make a protein product I couldn’t consume, earn customers’ trust, and eventually make the product I really wanted.

I was prepared to live with the shame of not being able to drink my own product until we started tracking whey-price forecasts (FYI: they’re going to keep rising) and the economics stopped making sense. The “safer” choice wasn’t safe either, and I couldn’t tell if the tea leaves were telling me that I shouldn’t be building this product at all.

Reinventing the Wheel

When I revisited the research, I realized I had mistaken declining powder sales for declining demand. Plant-based bars had grown 16%, and ready-to-drink products had grown 15%. The convenient formats were growing, only powder was struggling.

I had also defined the audience as “vegans,” ignoring everyone who is lactose intolerant, avoids dairy, or sometimes chooses plant-based products without making it their identity. I had used one struggling format and one narrow label to define the entire market.

My notes from a dozen-plus plant powders made it obvious why that format was struggling: gritty, tastes like peas, too many ingredients, decent for plant protein. Conventional wisdom says “don’t reinvent the wheel”, but if the wheel is gritty, pea-flavored, and sitting untouched on the bottom shelf, it deserves another pass.

My R&D partner had found newer ingredients that gave us reason to try again, so we returned to the lab cautiously optimistic. We sourced, mixed, sampled, and adjusted until I nearly made myself ill. Eventually, we made the best plant-protein formulation I’ve ever tried. And I promise, I don’t mean “good for plant protein.”

Speaking of Moonchild, it felt like the research, detours, and attempts to talk myself into a more commercially obvious product led me back to the thing I wanted to make. A divine reroute, as one of my spiritual friends would say :)

So, What’s WIT?

WIT is my stubborn refusal to accept plant protein’s triple constraint. It tastes like a milkshake: a creamy shake base with crunchy protein crisps, freeze-dried fruit, and responsible amounts of indulgence in the form of cookie pieces. Everything fits into a macro profile that gives you permission to indulge (under 150 calories, always). And it’s made with ingredients I feel good about, without the sensory punishment I’ve come to expect from plant protein.

Then there’s WIT’s party trick: the package is also the shaker bottle 🤯. Add water, shake, and drink directly from the pouch. No blender, shaker bottle, or cleanup required.

Current Status: Coming Soon

We’re aiming for a November launch, which is unusually fast for a CPG product, but I’m still an impatient millennial who worked in tech. I’m also learning how to create content after spending more than a decade off of social media, which should be fine and produce no neuroses. Whatsoever.

The people who have tried WIT have given me encouraging feedback, but I know a friendly group of willing testers isn’t a market. I’m gearing up for the vulnerable chapter of getting it into people’s hands, and earning my place in their pantries.

Wish me luck :)

I feel relentlessly busy and, somehow, like I’ve hit inertia at the same time. Writing this recap reminded me that a lot has actually happened.

What I did in August

• Flew to SF for a baby shower, stayed for the chain reaction of unplanned meetings. We flew out to SF to celebrate one of our favorite couples who are expecting. While there, I sent a cold DM to someone (something I never do), which turned into a coffee meeting, then a chain of introductions and conversations with founders whose trajectories I’d been admiring from afar. Say what you will about SF, but the founder density is special. There’s also a real “rising tide lifts all boats” effect where people seem genuinely excited to help each other.

• Held off on signing a manufacturing agreement and reopened the search right before leaving for a silent retreat (😭). Just as I was preparing to sign, a change in circumstances made me reconsider. I decided not to force the decision and instead, started the hunt for a better fit… right before turning my phone off. Both making a decision and delaying one can be terrifying, but it was the mental exercise I needed heading into a week designed to teach me how to pause.

• Spent a week in silence at Zen Mountain Monastery. Not my first silent meditation retreat, but my first sesshin in the Zen lineage and the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time. I wrote about the experience and what I took away from it. Still debating whether those reflections are something I want to share or keep for myself.

• Oh, and I got married 🥹. On 8/8, surrounded by a close group of friends in NYC. Our dear friend Jack officiated in his new underground wellness sanctuary and our friend’s adorable pup was our “ring bear” (see photo above!). We ended the ceremony with a giant 30-person group hug. A friend told me that the period between your engagement and your wedding is when you’ll experience the most love from those around you, and this was a highly concentrated dose of that.

Fun things

• Weird Hobby Night, hosted by Long Journey Ventures. Activations including: a pop-up barber shop, a sword-fighting tutorial by Neal Stephenson, lightning talks on spherical panorama photography and dream tending, and a roast of a Silky Chicken (which I now know have black flesh). A display of just how wide the aperture of human curiosity can open, and how singular each of us becomes in following it.

• Rubell Museum in Miami. I was texting a close friend about Yayoi Kusama’s book when we made plans to see her infinity rooms at the Rubell. Her passing was announced two days later. I’d already started reading her book, but it felt melancholic to sit inside the physical legacy of her artistry so soon after.

Things to share

For the belly 🍽️

• Arsicault Bakery in SF. The hack is to go to the Civic Center location where there’s usually a shorter line. It might also be the only home of the Blackberry Almond Hazelnut Croissant. I would risk type 2 diabetes for it.

For the soul 🧘🏻‍♀️

• The Zen Mountain Monastery podcast. Shugen Roshi is a poetic teacher with punchlines that can land like the best stand-up. He has an approachable way of translating dharma and Buddhist teachings into something relatable and human. I’m lucky to have heard these episodes IRL during sesshin.

For the brain 🧠

• Infinity Net by Yayoi Kusama. A story of relentless self-belief and using art as both relief and communication in a world that constantly misunderstood and misrepresented her.

• Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. An entrepreneur I’ve long admired. I finally got around to reading it. Helpful framing for what I’m building, and a good reminder that how you make someone feel is often the difference.

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

The truth is that most days, I genuinely don’t know what I’m doing. I spent years building the experience and confidence I felt I needed to start a tech company, did it, then left after 1.5 years of building. Then, something came over me and I decided to pivot into CPG despite having zero network, experience, or subject expertise in the thing I wanted to build.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was overwhelmed sometimes (a lot of times). The overlap between building a software company and a CPG company is limited. Some of the mechanics are the same, but the amount of upfront cash you need to commit, the time it takes to generate a POC, how much of your timeline depends on someone else’s schedule, none of it maps cleanly onto what I already know how to do.

Throughout the last decade-plus in tech, I built an operating manual through the public writing of credible builders and operators (”thought leaders”). It’s a great time to build in tech because LLMs that have indexed all of that knowledge AND can code for you.

Then I pivoted into CPG and the optimism I had about it being a great time to build died after 10+ phone calls with co-manufacturers.

Building in CPG Feels Like Returning To The Stone Ages

Building a software POC today involves punching vibes into Lovable or whichever harness you’re using, and testing a working prototype (and for most people these days, raising an egregious seed round off of it). In physical goods, you’re buying raw materials, mixing ingredients like a mad scientist in your kitchen, and making yourself ill by sampling 100 different variations of your product.

Once you’re ready to build a sample batch, you need a manufacturer or R&D facility, and none of it is self-serve. There’s no 2 week trial you sign up for with a credit card. You’re just on the phone with producer after producer until someone says yes.

Oh, and want to make a change to your product? It’s not as simple as changing a few lines of code or swapping out an API key and transferring data. Let’s say I want to modify my packaging. I either need a new supplier or I need my current one to customize it - both paths trigger a delay and a cost. Pull requests are, ostensibly, free :’)

But Strangely, That’s What Makes This So Worthwhile

While struggling through writer’s block for this post, samples from my packaging supplier arrived with a handwritten note tucked inside and it unexpectedly made my eyes well up. I pictured her rummaging around the warehouse to find representative samples, sitting at her desk to write the note, packaging everything up, taking it to shipping, mailing it out, then returning to her laptop to share the tracking details.

This also brought me back to one of the earliest calls with my R&D partner where, before we even agreed to a contract, he excitedly shared all of the research he had completed to help me figure out how to bring my product to life. To quote him, “Even if you decide not to work with me, I think this information will be critical for whoever you end up working with.”

The same things I find frustrating about CPG - the human-centered bottlenecks, the manual effort - are also becoming the things I appreciate about it. There’s something moving about how many people have to genuinely care to bring a physical product into the world. It’s reconnected me with a kind of work built on people showing up for one another (beyond a Slack message or email) that I hadn’t realized I missed.

So, How Is This New Endeavor Going?

I’m mentally exhausted most days and yes, I’ve had to fight the urge to pivot back into tech and build software to fix everything manual about this industry. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ve never felt more motivated, inspired, and grateful to be on this path. My bank account might not feel the same, but as the proverbial saying goes, “follow your dreams”. Hopefully they accept payment via credit card.

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

I loved this series by Philip Thomas. I initially drafted this for myself, but decided to share in case this inspires anyone else to do the same :) Thanks for the inspo, Philip!

What I did in July

• Turned a year older and launched this Substack on the same day. This has been rewarding on so many levels.

• Visited my R&D facility and iterated on dozens of formulations for my new protein product. Teaser: it’s plant based. The market’s overdue for a plant-based formula that doesn’t taste like wet cardboard. I’m chomping at the bit to get this out there.

• Built myself a 14-day crash course in protein science. I have since caught myself woman-splaining muscle protein synthesis and PDCAAS and DIAAS without anyone asking.

• Started auditing my time with an AI agent. It’s been a uniquely busy time in my life, but it can be hard to measure progress when you work alone. So I decided to replace vibes-based productivity with actual data.

Fun things

• Went to a circus at Green-Wood Cemetery. It was as charming as it sounds. This only happens for 2 nights each year, so keep it on your radar! Credit goes to my friend Vikram who’s always sharing experiences in NYC that make you ask, “How did you even hear about this?”

• Escaped to the Hudson Valley with friends. The Hudson Valley has become my reset button, and there’s nothing like recharging with people whose presence feels like therapy.

• Stepped out of my comfort zone and took a figure drawing class. I’m hooked on trying new things. If anyone in NY wants a partner in crime for new hobbies, I’m your gal.

Things to share

For the belly 🍽️

• Bistrot Ha. My friends and I rated it a generous 5/10.

• Librae Bakery. The pistachio rose croissant lived up to the hype. I also experienced the unfamiliar sensation of only wanting half of the pastry because it was that decadent.

For the soul 🧘🏻‍♀️

• WTHN. Eastern medicine translated for Westerners. I had the best night of sleep in a while after my treatment. Thank you to my friends Natalia and Peter for gifting me this sweet experience.

• Riko Med Spa. This is your sign to skip the trip to South Korea for skincare treatments.

For the brain 🧠

• Strangers by Belle Burden. RHONY in a book.

• Essential Buddhism by Jack Maguire. If you’re an aspiring student of Buddhism and want to understand its origins and branches, I highly recommend this!

August is an exciting month. Already looking forward to sitting down to reflect on it in a few weeks :)

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

Instead of sharing something I’ve worked on over multiple days (writing, rereading, deciding I hate it, and starting over), I’m giving myself 30 minutes to let my fingers land on some text, and then I’m going to push publish.

I set an arbitrary goal for myself to write more and share something here once a week. The point was to practice refining and structuring my thoughts so I could think, communicate, and operate with more clarity. After all, writing is thinking. But somewhere along the way, “practice writing” became “produce something insightful and interesting enough to justify taking up someone’s attention.” I’m only 4 posts in, so this is an unwarranted amount of pressure to place on myself.

I’m currently in week eight of The Artist’s Way. This is my third round with the program, and while I haven’t been militant about completing every exercise, it continues to be undeniably effective. One of its central practices is the artist date, where you dedicate a block of time alone doing something that engages your curiosity or creativity. For this week’s date, I signed up for a figure-drawing class.

For the record, I consider myself artistically...blunted. I’m also always afraid of being the worst person in any room. Which, conflictingly, is a position I seem to seek out with some regularity. Before walking into the class, I came across this sign:

I needed the words of encouragement because the second I walked in, imposter syndrome splattered itself across me like a Jackson Pollock. This was a figure-drawing class in lower Manhattan, so naturally, everyone looked artsy af and like they’d come out of the womb dressed in Rick Owens while holding a charcoal pencil.

The class began with the model moving through ten poses, each held for one minute. Then came a series of two-minute poses, followed by three-minute poses, and so on. The first two poses passed before I drew anything. I spent both minutes staring at the model and then back at my empty sheet of sketch paper, trying to determine how I could possibly translate what I was seeing into something resembling a human body.

By the time I had considered all of this, the model had already moved. The format allowed zero room for planning my way into competence. I couldn’t map out the entire composition or wait until I thought I understood how to draw the model “correctly.” I had one minute. The only available move was to put the pencil on the paper.

It made me think about a passage in The Artist’s Way:

“Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity.”

After the first two poses, I forced my hand to draw. The drawings were, to put it gently, trash. There were limbs of medically concerning lengths and at least one torso that could not support a human head. Without enough time to judge every anatomical crime I created, I became absorbed in the flow of making them. I stopped trying to produce an acceptable drawing and started paying attention to the curve of a shoulder, the shadow cast by the atrocious overhead light, and the angles in the model’s back. For once, I felt myself stop overthinking my way out of doing and found so much joy in the actual practice of it. After a few iterations, I even impressed myself with drawings that, if you squint and walk backwards, almost resemble a body.

Walking home from class, I started to think about how often I delay action because I overthink and over-research every possible decision before I take action. There is a time and place for this, but there’s a cost to waiting until you feel ready. You miss the chance to find joy in the process and deny yourself the repetitions that might make you better.

So today, instead of spending several days correcting this post into something more polished or useful, I gave myself 30 minutes (okay, it’s been 40). This is my one-minute-pose version of a blog post.

If you’ve also been hesitating to make, say, share, or begin something because you’re afraid of doing it badly, this is your sign to just do it. Be brave enough to be terrible!

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

Neither this post nor the calculator should be used as a definitive guide for your recommended protein intake. It also doesn’t cover chronic conditions or illnesses, which requires actual medical advice. Please make sure to consult your doctors and dietitians.

The question that started this whole side quest: “why are you targeting these macros?”

Turns out that question is more loaded than it sounds. Especially when it’s from the R&D and food science big brain you’re working with, who spent 20 years at Coca-Cola creating things like... protein shakes. And since I cherish this new partnership and want to be a ✨ value-add collaborator ✨, I decided to teach myself everything I can about protein in 14 days so that I can come to our working sessions with a more thoughtful toolkit.

Your Protein Target is a Formula, Not a Flat Number

If your protein targets have been determined by a random headline you saw that said you only need 50g of protein a day or 1g of protein per body weight, you’re not alone.

Turns out, the amount of protein you should ingest is a formula, and lucky for you, you only need to know PEMDAS to calculate it! These are the key inputs:

• Body weight - the baseline.

• Pregnancy, breastfeeding, or menopause status - pregnancy and breastfeeding set a hard floor, menopause nudges you toward the upper end of your range.

• Age - adjusts the baseline.

• Activity level - adjusts baseline.

• Your goal: maintain, build muscle, cut, or endurance - adjusts baseline.

• Your protein source, and whether you’re combining sources - adjusts recommended amount.

• How many meals you’re spreading your intake across - helps you calculate how much you should consume per meal.

Breaking down each component of the Protein formula

Body weight

Body weight sets the baseline and is the main driver of your number. Every protein guideline in the research, from the basic Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) to the athlete ranges, is expressed as grams per kilogram of body weight. Everything below scales off this.

Pregnancy, breastfeeding, and menopause

Women’s bodies require more protein based on what they’re creating or sustaining in a given season of life. A body growing another person or making milk for one is doing more than a body just maintaining itself, and the numbers below reflect that.

• Pregnancy raises the floor to about 1.1g/kg because you’re building an entire additional person on top of yourself.

• Breastfeeding raises it further to about 1.3g/kg because producing milk has its own real metabolic demand on top of everything else your body is already doing.

• Menopause research shows a blunted muscle-building response to protein after menopause (tied to declining estrogen), but the evidence is mixed and a 2026 review found it isn’t settled enough yet to support a hard new floor. So instead of jumping to a new tier, aim toward the upper end of your normal range if this applies to you, especially alongside resistance training.

Before we move on, can we just take a moment to acknowledge how incredible women’s bodies are? Okay, next...

Age

As we age, our bodies become less efficient at using the protein we eat due to something researchers call anabolic resistance. Aging muscle needs a bigger dose to trigger the same muscle-building response. Less blood flow delivers amino acids to muscle less efficiently, more of what you digest gets used by the gut and liver before it ever reaches muscle, and the signaling pathway that recognizes that amino acids are available to build muscle gets desensitized over time. The PROT-AGE study group’s geriatric nutrition guidance recommends at least 1.0-1.2g/kg for healthy adults 65+ regardless of activity level, with a higher range of 1.2-1.5g/kg for anyone managing an acute or chronic illness.

Activity level and goal

How much you move and what you’re trying to do with your body work together as one factor.

Start with your baseline activity level to find your target range:

• The RDA: 0.8g/kg, the previous reference for nearly all healthy adults.

• The newer 2025 federal guidelines: 1.2-1.6g/kg.

• Sports-nutrition guidance: 1.4-2.0g/kg, for people who exercise regularly.

• Elite or physique-focused training: up to 2.2g/kg.

Then adjust for goals:

• Maintaining or training for endurance: no adjustment.

• Building muscle: add about 0.1g/kg on top.

• Cutting calories while trying to hold onto muscle: add about 0.2g/kg on top, your body needs a stronger signal to protect muscle while you’re cutting.

Quick note on GLP-1 medications, since they’re a big reason protein’s suddenly everywhere: according to a 2024 meta-analysis, people on these drugs lose roughly 25% of their weight as lean mass (which muscle is one part of), not just fat. I’m not an authority on the full clinical picture, but functionally that puts GLP-1 users in the same bucket as someone cutting calories while trying to hold onto muscle. GLP-1 users should prioritize preserving muscle by increasing protein intake, while incorporating resistance training.

Protein source and quality

A few terms worth covering before we continue:

• EAAs (essential amino acids): the 9 amino acids your body can’t make on its own and that you can only get from food.

• Complete protein: a source that supplies all 9 EAAs in the amounts your body needs. More on that below.

• PDCAAS (Protein Digestibility-Corrected Amino Acid Score): It checks a protein’s weakest EAA against how much you need, then adjusts for digestibility by reading your stool. This is an outdated way of measuring protein quality, but the US nutrition labels still use this method to publish claims like “excellent source of protein.”

• DIAAS (Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score): Recommended by the FAO in 2013 to replace PDCAAS, but not yet used on US labels. It measures digestibility earlier and more precisely (at the small intestine) and doesn’t cap high scores the way PDCAAS does.

When you read a nutrition label’s protein content, the real thing to evaluate is how much of that is usable protein. That breaks into two sub-questions: how much of it is complete (all 9 EAAs in the amounts you actually need), and how much of it is digestible (does your body actually absorb what’s there).

When a nutrition label says “20g of protein,” it means the food’s protein source has 3.2g of nitrogen. The FDA lets companies calculate the grams on a label by measuring nitrogen and multiplying by 6.25, because protein is roughly 16% nitrogen and there isn’t a way to measure protein directly. This calculation doesn’t cover which amino acids you’re getting or how much your body can actually use. Two products can both say “20g protein” and deliver very different usable amounts of protein.

What it means to be complete: Protein is a chain of amino acids, and the 9 EAAs only come from food. A protein is “complete” when it supplies all 9 in the amounts you need.

What it means to be digestible: Even a protein with all 9 EAAs can fall short if your body doesn’t actually absorb much of it. DIAAS scores this using the weakest amino acid. It checks how much of that specific amino acid your body actually absorbs, then scores the whole protein based on that. A 1.0 means it fully covers what your body needs.

Whey isolate scores around 1.0 to 1.09. Rice isolate scores around 0.42 because its weakest link (lysine) falls short. This just means that rice (on its own) delivers meaningfully less usable protein than its label number suggests.

This is a natural point to talk about vegan and vegetarian diets specifically. This exact completeness question is where a lot of outdated advice about protein combining comes from...

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ position on vegetarian and vegan diets: “an assortment of plant foods eaten over the course of a day can provide all essential amino acids; thus, complementary proteins do not need to be eaten at the same meal.”

To put this plainly: if you drink pea protein, which is short on sulfur amino acids, you don’t have to pair it with rice or another sulfur-rich source right away. Amino acids get absorbed in your small intestine over several hours after a meal, and everything you eat throughout the day pools together in your bloodstream. So it’s important to remember to aim for variety across the day if you aren’t consciously pairing complementary proteins at every meal. That said, if you’re exclusively eating pea protein, then you’re consistently low in one EAA and each gram of protein is doing less work for your body.

You might have noticed that pea protein powder almost always comes blended with rice protein. It’s because pea is short on sulfur amino acids and rice is short on lysine, so blending the two balances the profile in one scoop. That means every gram in that serving is immediately useful, instead of your body needing extra pea protein to make up for what it’s missing on its own.

If you just need a quick reference sheet, here’s the profile for common sources and what actually closes the gap if there is one:

BTW — Collagen’s having a moment in bars and powders partly because it’s cheaper than whey. It’s missing tryptophan almost entirely though, so it can’t work as a standalone complete protein for muscle development. That said, if your goal is bouncy skin and strong joints, it’s still doing real work, just through a different mechanism.

Meals per day

There’s a lot of debate in health and fitness circles about how much protein your body can actually use in one sitting. If your goal is to trigger muscle protein synthesis, there’s a per-meal amount that ensures it. Research puts that at 0.25-0.4g/kg, roughly 20-40g/meal for most people. Eating more than that in one sitting shows diminishing returns in the research, not a hard ceiling. Take your daily target and divide by however many meals you eat to see where you land: under that range and each meal’s giving you a weaker version of the signal, even if the daily total is adequate.

What’s the tl;dr ?

The tl;dr is that I built a calculator to incorporate all of this information to help you determine the exact amount of protein you might need per day, per meal, based on everything I shared above.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for being a part of this journey! This is my best effort based on what I learned, using the program I designed to become an “Expert” in 14 days. I’m sure there might be some misrepresented claims here, and I’m still actively learning, so please share anything that fills a gap or corrects an error in my understanding.

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

A couple of months ago, I decided to start a business in the CPG space - specifically, functional nutrition. Since I consume 3 full meals and 30+ pills a day, I assumed I knew a decent amount about food and nutrition science. Then, during an R&D meeting, I realized I could only go one layer deep on a question like “why are you targeting these macros”.

A trap I’ve fallen into in this age of information abundance is mistaking the collection of facts for real understanding. My imposter syndrome was quick to point out that mine was superficial at best.

I’d heard this quote just days before that meeting: “With the tools available to us today, there is nothing keeping you from being one of the 50 most knowledgeable people on a subject within a year.” Chris Sacca, on Dialectic.

He said it before the current LLM era, which made me think I could compress the timeline - especially since I’m not trying to become the next Andrew Huberman. So I asked Claude to build me the equivalent of a 101-level course, adapted to how I learn and focused on the parts most relevant to the business I’m building.

Building a Personalized Curriculum

Before LLMs, my safe space was a rabbit hole consisting of every podcast on a topic, a stack of blogs, X and Reddit threads, and research papers that I pretended to understand. This is how I decided on every vitamin in my stack. But ask me why I take something and I’d be impressed if I could faithfully recall a compelling reason.

I’m good at collecting information, but when material is too technical to actually sit with, I flatten it into whatever version I can make sense of and it’s usually oversimplified and incomplete. And then of course, I forget it.

So building the curriculum required more than asking Claude to “teach me nutrition.” I needed the prompt to do two jobs: make the learning mechanics rigorous and make the material interesting enough that I would actually stick with it.

What I asked for came down to four things:

1. Tailor every explanation to the way I think

2. Connect every concept back to the business I’m building - this was the part that fueled interest

3. Force me to retrieve, defend, and apply what I learn

4. Build toward one concrete artifact

Claude already had a head start - thanks to my second brain and years of chat history - and what came back was a 14-day curriculum building toward a single capstone.

The curriculum-building and daily review prompts are both at the bottom.

The Loop Behind the Curriculum

Every day, Claude runs through the same six steps during my tutoring sessions:

This loop is the part I couldn’t have designed myself, and it gives me some hope that I’m actually committing what I’m learning to memory.

Outside of that loop, I ask ChatGPT for second opinions, fact-checks, or to help reframe a concept when I hit a wall with Claude.

Status: Pending

I’m a millennial, so my calendar governs my life. I currently have 2 scheduled blocks each day:

1. A morning session, where I ask Claude to start things off and it tutors me on the day’s topics.

2. A shorter retrieval session, set up as a routine task that fires off on its own each day. It’s closed-book, tests the day’s material, plus something from a few days back so I can’t just cram and forget.

Bless LLMs, because it’s truly a miracle that I look forward to my tutoring sessions each day (if only student Sandy had access to these tools to help her in grade school 😭). BUT, enjoying the process isn’t evidence that it’s working.

For my capstone, I’m building something for myself with what I’ve learned, all from memory. I’ll share my project in my next post after I fact-check everything so I’m not spreading fake news. Wish me luck!

ooxxooXoXXx,
SK

P.S. If you’ve built a similar program for yourself using AI, I’d love to hear how you designed it!

Steal the Prompts

Here are the prompts I used - with placeholders so that you can adapt this to your specific goals and interests.

The prompt I used to build the curriculum:

I want to become highly competent in [TOPIC] over the next 14 days.

My goal is not merely to learn facts. By the end of the two weeks, I want to be able to:

1. Explain the topic clearly to both beginners and knowledgeable practitioners.
2. Understand the field's foundational concepts, vocabulary, frameworks, and major debates.
3. Evaluate claims, research, products, or strategies within the field.
4. Identify common misconceptions, failure modes, and unresolved questions.
5. Complete a practical capstone project that demonstrates real competence.

My current level: [describe honestly, including which parts of the field I do and do not need to master]

My specific reason for learning this: [the actual job this needs to do for you]

How I'll actually be judged or tested on this in the real world: [a specific, concrete scenario]

Time available each day: [NUMBER] hours for the day's lesson, resources, case study, and exercise, followed by a separate [NUMBER] minute study session for retrieval practice, application, and testing.

Preferred learning style: [how you actually think, not how you wish you learned]

First, define what a realistic level of competence would look like after 14 days given my starting point and available time.

Then create a 14-day intensive curriculum. For each day, include:

* The central question for the day
* The essential concepts I need to understand, taught as one concise lesson
* The best primary or authoritative resources to consult
* One real-world case study
* One practical exercise that also functions as a building block toward the Day 14 capstone — the capstone should be assembled cumulatively across the 14 days, not started from scratch at the end.
* Five retrieval-practice questions — from Day 4 onward, at least two of these should draw on concepts from earlier days, not just the current day's material
* One "explain it in your own words" assignment
* A measurable definition of completion

Scale the depth and number of daily deliverables to my stated daily hours. Do not generate a plan sized for more time than I actually have.

Use an 80/20 approach. Clearly distinguish:

* Foundational knowledge
* Useful but secondary knowledge
* Advanced or optional material
* Disputed claims or areas of uncertainty
* Anywhere my existing instincts from a different domain could mislead me
* Anything where your own knowledge may be outdated

For factual or scientific claims, distinguish between primary research, consensus reviews, expert guidance, and your own inference. For anything load-bearing, give me the actual quote or metric from the source along with a working link, not just a citation, so I can verify it myself. If you can't produce a real quote and link, tell me instead of citing anyway. Flag any conclusion that should be checked with a practitioner, supplier specification, laboratory test, or other external source.

Do not let me learn passively. Regularly test me, ask me to make predictions before giving answers, and revisit concepts I previously misunderstood. Periodically challenge me by roleplaying as a skeptic in this field who pushes back on my claims — then break character and tell me what I missed or overstated.

Build toward a capstone project. Include checkpoints on Days 4, 7, 10, and 14. At every checkpoint: give me a challenging assessment mixing current and earlier material, diagnose my weak areas, update the remaining curriculum based on my performance, and tell me whether I'm on track.

Begin by asking me no more than five high-value diagnostic questions. After I answer them, generate the curriculum.

The prompt I use every single day for the review session:

We are on Day [NUMBER] of my 14-day intensive study of [TOPIC].

I already completed today's lesson, resources, case study, and exercise in a separate block earlier. This session is a focused retrieval and testing session — do not re-teach material I already covered, only fill genuine gaps.

Here is what I remember from today's lesson and previous sessions:

[WRITE FROM MEMORY BEFORE CHECKING NOTES]

Based on the curriculum and my previous performance:

1. Test my recall on today's material before anything else — include at least one question reaching back to an earlier day.
2. Correct my misunderstandings directly and briefly. Only re-explain a concept if I clearly don't have it.
3. Combine application and challenge into one step: give me a realistic scenario from today's material, then roleplay as a skeptic and fact-check my claims the way a real one would. Break character afterward and tell me what I overstated or got wrong.
4. End with a closed-book quiz.
5. Grade my answers strictly.
6. Create a short review plan based on what I missed, noting if anything connects back to an earlier day.

Do not accept vague answers from me. Ask follow-up questions until I can explain the concepts precisely and apply them independently.

This isn’t a benchmark, an architectural recommendation, or a best-practices post. It’s just the setup that survived contact with my actual life, built using Nous Research’s Hermes Agent.

Quick note: My feeds are full of increasingly advanced setups and capabilities, and it’s made the AI-adoption gap feel like it’s widening by the day. I wrote this for anyone still figuring out how to actually use agents, in case a basic system can offer more day-to-day leverage. For my actual work, I’m still using Claude and clinging to my dwindling faculties for dear life.

My Frankenstein CoS

After reading a bunch of setup guides and tinkering with other tools (there’s a rundown of what I tried in the appendix if you’re curious), here’s what I stitched together:

• Telegram for the interface - The gold standard for chatting with a bot.

• Groq for voice notes - So I can blurt out terrible ideas and to-do items for my bot to sort, file, and sometimes handle - all while I’m folding laundry.

• A dedicated Gmail account for the agent - Low-risk admin only: sends as itself, CC’s into threads, drafts docs and slides. Read-only on my real inbox, read-write on my calendar, so the worst a prompt-injection can do is wreck the bot’s life, not mine.

• Obsidian for my second, better brain - Syncs to GitHub, is version-controlled, and accessible from any device. Claude reads and writes it locally, my CoS does the same through the sync.

• Timed Mac wake-ups - Wakes itself at 6:55am. My CoS’s 7am cron has the briefing in Telegram before I’ve finished my morning routine. No VPS yet, since I’m not really running tasks overnight (yet).

How this changed my life

I’m being facetious, but it also feels legally required to include a section about how this “changed my life”.

In every job I’ve had, I’ve been the kitchen sink, which meant running the same operating system every day: record 1 million things, organize said things, plan around them, then execute or delegate. Here’s roughly how that broke down:

Now, My CoS runs most of that operating system for me. Most of the pre-work happens in conversation with it instead of inside my own crowded head. It knows that deep thinking and creative work gets the morning shift, and everything else is scheduled based on priority levels and urgency.

The percentages don’t capture the best part, which is that I’m no longer carrying the cognitive load of everything I need to remember and follow up on. That has done more for my day-to-day peace than any of the actual time saved.

A day in the life with My CoS

(I would share a screenshot of my briefing but it’s long)

Here’s a peak into a random Tuesday:

5:30–6am - Wake up and hurkle durkle before starting my absurdly long morning routine. I’m way more present and way less panicked about figuring out the day because I already know it’s handled.

6:55am - Mac wakes itself up. My CoS’s cron fires at 7, and the brief is waiting in Telegram: what’s on the calendar, what’s going on in my inbox, what’s at the top of my reminders file, a draft schedule for the day already built around all of these things. It asks if I want to change anything before adding time blocks in my calendar.

7:15am - Admin and email first, because I’m a creature of habit. Whatever plan I had 15 minutes prior usually shifts once the inbox clears, and my CoS sees that shift too since it’s monitoring the situation (my inbox). We make updates to the calendar and take on the day together.

8am - Deep thinking hours: writing, digging into whatever needs digging into, working through saved bookmarks. If something random comes to mind, like booking flights for a trip to SF, I tell my CoS and it pulls options for me.

11am - While walking to the gym, I send a voice memo to ask my CoS to begin planning Ryan’s bday trip. I include research criteria, things to consider, etc. My CoS comes back with a planning brief with date and location options, cost per person, viable villas, sample itineraries. All before my last hip thrust.

1pm - P1 territory: design mockups, formulation research, or whatever needs priority attention. I’ll sometimes have my CoS dig into the same question in parallel so we can compare notes.

3pm - I need to prep for a call, so I ask my CoS to pull context on who I’m meeting with. It provides a summary of our last conversation, open questions, anything else I might need to know (like what they recently posted on LinkedIn). After the call, a Granola summary is saved under an .md file for the person, and any action items or tasks are added to my reminders.md file.

5pm - P2 territory: I book that flight I asked for it to research (still not comfortable having it handle this for me), poke at wedding odds and ends, or deal with the personal admin that somehow reproduces by the hour.

7:30pm - I tell My Agent to wrap up my day. It folds in anything new, summarizes what we ticked off, and helps set tomorrow’s priorities - mirroring the morning in about five minutes.

TLDR; I’m still figuring it out

I hope this gave at least one person a more concrete sense of what these things can actually do - and if not, that’s okay, too 😭

My CoS is still in its infancy, so it’ll likely look wildly different in a month or two, especially given the rate of new tech and capabilities. If this was interesting and you want to see how the setup evolves, lmk and I’ll write the update!

And if you’re a more experienced builder who sees obvious ways to level up my current stack, please advise.

ooxxooXoXXx,

SK

Appendix: AI CoS/EA Amuse-Bouches

A shortened list of what I tried before landing on Hermes:

• OpenClaw - Stopped after Anthropic cut off Claude subscriptions and a wave of CVEs I didn’t have the aptitude to debug.

• Lindy - Good starter EA, but more assistant than execution engine.

• Zo Computer - “my type on paper”, but ultimately too buggy and slow.

• Claude, using /remote-control. I’m on a budget pre-revenue, so i’m using open models via Openrouter instead of tokenmaxxing with Anthropic.

Today is my birthday, which I usually spend dodging because I’m uncomfortable being the center of attention. Apparently I'm leaning all the way into the discomfort this year, because I’m also getting married and starting a business as a first-time day 0 founder.

Writing a public diary is a terrifying departure from the person I’ve been for the last 30-some years. I’ve spent most of my adult life offline - not as an ascetic, but because of a background hum of fear of judgment, of being misread, of taking up more space than I had a permit for. I’ve lowered the volume on shame in recent years, partly because I’m marrying someone who celebrates my weirdness, but mostly because I’m tired of fighting myself and dgaf anymore.

The other reason I’ve stayed offline is that I’m a face-to-face person who has always believed we can’t truly see each other through a screen. I find fulfillment in making people feel seen, because I know what it’s like to want that and not get it. The internet has always sandpapered that down to something flatter, or manicured people into versions of themselves they don’t quite live. I’ve learned I don’t need to resolve or make sense of that duality and just need to embrace both ends of it more gracefully.

The same shift in gears is also responsible for a delusional confidence I woke up with one morning. Which was apparently enough to start a business in an industry I’ve never operated in, with a skill set I can’t order on Amazon. I’ve also always been a proud #2, co-founder, first ops hire, head-of, the person quietly championing somebody else’s dream. I was good at it, I liked it, and I could avoid public judgment. This is the first time the door has my name on it, and that is a different flavor of vulnerable.

If you happen to be in the same boat as me - wondering if you’re delusional or writing a new mode d’emploi for your life - you’re not alone. And selfishly, if you’re a few steps ahead of me, please say “hi” and share words of advice or encouragement.

I usually overthink and plan everything, so this is a rare exercise in flow and in shamelessly sharing whatever’s in my head as I figure 100 things out*.

ooxxooXoXXx,

SK

P.S. for those wondering: no, AI is not writing my posts. My hard-working, atrophied braincells are piecing these words together on their own, so please be nice to them 🥹

*including an overview of the agent CoS I built - up next