Platforms Are Levers
Platform is often used in terms of a speaking platform, or an engagement platform — a space one occupies that allows others to hear their voice. A platform is a channel, a conduit, a megaphone.
The guy preaching in the corner near the Eaton Centre has a platform, as does Donald Trump on Truth Social. Anyone has a platform on Reddit, and anyone with followers has a platform on X or Instagram or LinkedIn. The more followers, the more leverage you have on the platform, the louder your megaphone is.
However, there are other ways to use this word — noun, adjective, idk what it is — the word platform. A platform is often used to describe a product, or a user interface.
I like to interact with a platform like Netflix. What is your favourite streaming platform?
In this sense, a platform is anything that gives you leverage. Netflix gives you the leverage to browse and watch thousands of shows and movies. IG gives you the platform to view content in the form of reels that range from interesting and artistic to absurd and foul in nature, while at the same time letting you see what your friends are up to.
A platform acts as the lever. You can have far more output towards a given goal when you have the right platform or lever.
See below: the stick man is using the correct platform or lever for his goal in the first image, but he is using the wrong platform in the second image. In the first image he easily lifts the rock, in the second he is unable to do so.
So many things in this world come down to using the right lever.
The Right Lever for the Goal
If you are reading this blog post on Avant AI, you are one of the few. That is because I have chosen the wrong lever or platform to post this on. If my goal was to maximize viewers or readers to this blog post I would have published it on LinkedIn or X, which are the platforms that give me the most leverage to achieve this goal of highest possible view count.
In reality my goal is not to get the most views on this blog post. I want this blog post to serve as a place where I can share my thoughts and become a great writer. I want this blog platform to grow over the next 3-5-10 years as I hone my craft as a writer.
More importantly I want to recycle the content from my blog posts into more palatable short form content to be posted across all mainstream social platforms. I have a Claude workspace dedicated to recycling my blog posts.
This is a personal example of how I have strategically chosen the right platforms for my goal. Meaning I am strategically using each platform where it will create the most leverage.
This is similar to how when dealing with people, Dale Carnegie suggests that we must bait the hook to suit the fish. I may love strawberries and cream, but the fish likes worms, so I am going to use the worm on the hook. If I used the strawberries, I would not catch the fish.
This idea can be extended to using the right platform for the desired goal. This is obvious for social platforms — everyone knows that you choose the right social channel for your target audience, this is Marketing 101.
However few extend this idea to other platforms, or few are apt to think of other software in this way. But with the recent explosion in the capabilities of everyday software tools, everyone should reconsider what platforms they are using.
What platforms could you use to create more leverage for your goals this week, this month, this quarter and this year?
If you continue using your old processes — for example if you are still manually formatting word documents — you are like the stick man in the second image. You may lift the rock, but you will have done so using far more effort than is required. Or you may fail to achieve your goal and end up with a poorly formatted word document.
Instead, you could easily use AI to achieve your goal. Blah Blah Blah, you have heard this before I am guessing?
You are probably thinking "well the ChatGPT formatting always comes out differently and it is generic, not like how we do it at my firm." And you would be right — you are using a complex artificial intelligence tool, firing it up and just hoping it will work first shot with no setup or fine tuning.
You cannot just choose a platform and expect it to do all the work. Even with leverage, the stick man still has to apply effort or force to lift the rock and achieve his goal. It is on the user to educate themselves and harness the platform to their needs.
Build the Lever Around Your Workflow
But how does one do this when it is difficult to choose the right platform? Many users of AI tools and software in the last year have felt this new crushing burden of indecision. Have I chosen the right tool? Have I optimized the tool for my context and preferences? How do I know if I have done so?
My answer: custom software built for dedicated tasks and goals. Build the software around your workflow or projects, connect the software to Claude or ChatGPT, and iterate with real time feedback. The only metrics are: am I achieving my goals faster, and am I achieving bigger goals than ever before.
Avant sets up custom AI enabled software that gives you exactly what you need — the right platform. We are in the business of maximizing leverage. We do so by matching the right platform to a desired goal, and tuning this platform specifically to achieve that goal.