The Wisdom Wall, every show

“The agents are going to be a commodity at some point. Your judgment about what to Point them to is the moat”

“Vertical SAS captures a fraction of IT spend. You're generally selling software licenses. Um, humans are operating the tool and you're looking at the 10 to a hundred million dollar outcome. Usually, of course, there's exceptions to that rule. Uh, vertical AI taps directly into labor PNL. So what I mean by that is…”

“code used to be the moat. I think by now, maybe by the end of this, you, you understand that, uh, distribution is the new moat, right? It's the most important thing is distribution. You know, it's scarce, right? AI can't build it. Product is really important, but it, you know, in lots of ways it is commoditized and…”

“There's an opportunity to use something like this and basically do client work, but the service is, instead of having literal humans do it, you, you, you have, I mean, you're going to have some humans manage it, but a lot less humans, maybe a 20th of the amount of humans, and then you have these agents go and actually…”

“I think you can expect at least four to five X multiple, you know, on conversion, which is, which is crazy, but it makes sense if you think about it because you're, When you Google something, you have, you know, a thousand blue links that you can go and click, but when you chat GPT or perplexity something, you've got…”

“Gone are the days where you create one brand account, right? You go and create one, like you create one brand. Let's go back to here in a second. Sort of the, the old way of doing accounts, brand accounts, social media on brands was you create one brand account. And that brand account might've been on multiple…”

“Instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire ChatGPT Pro. Like, the mistake that a lot of people make is they pay five, 10, 15 K a month for their first employee when they should just be paying 200 dollars a month for ChatGPT Pro.”

“The beauty is you don't need, it doesn't need to be special from like a product perspective. It's just a mark. It's completely marketing. And what, what matters in chat GPT rappers is really just like the brand. Is this something that people are going to tell their friends about?”

“It is a good time. It's surprisingly good time to be an agency owner right now because a lot of companies are cutting staff or freezing hiring, but they still need new products and new, new businesses to go out there. So they look at companies like, like our late checkout innovation agency and they're like, oh, hey,…”

“Like if you're a CEO and you're not spending 20 to 30% of your time in a discord server. You're not gonna make it.”

“in an AI world, we actually need directories more than ever because, um, there's just too much information. So when it's curated, uh, it's helpful. Also the whole like SEO game is changing right now. Like what's being, you know, like People are going to chat GPT, and they're going to Google AI overviews, um, to…”

“The human web monetized attention and the agent web monetizes useful resources.”

“the real compounding value of graph engineering isn't just that one task gets better. It's that your work starts producing memory. What do I mean by that? I mean that every customer research graph creates better customer notes. Every content graph creates better examples and audience insights. Every support graph…”

“Yeah, I think, um, yes, you can build anything, but people will pay for maintenance. That's sort of like the insight is that, you know, is if this thing works, I'm fine to pay for it.”

“So a small local model with web search, file access, the ability to run code beats a giant model with none.”

“The lesson is don't build your entire life On something that can disappear with a single letter. Own a part of your stack. Have the generator in the garage. Local models are the insurance, and this is the weekend I finally bought the policy.”

“So this is only possible now because sub-agents can hold distinct Personas and argue instead of a model agreeing with itself.”

“Every med, spa, contractor, and clinic runs on spreadsheets, group text, because custom software costs like 80,000 dollars a year. So you sell them internal tools for 5000 dollars flat, and you build it in two days. The interview prompt is your sales call. You run it with the owner on a Zoom. The spec writes itself…”

“The UI is going away. And, like, I don't know about you, but I'm spending more and more of my time in codex. I'm spending more and more of my time in cloud code. Like, those have become my operating systems. So I'm spending less and less time in apps, and it's easier than ever to create apps. Therefore, like, yes,…”

“Uh, mid-fi wireframes are bad. You know, I think that you want to start with low-fi or go high-fi. You know, you can't be half pregnant. You don't want to go mid-fi.”

“you know, in 20, 26, you know, you can have an idea Or grab an idea from idea browser by nine a.m., have something built by 9:15 a.m., have a product built by, you know, nine 45, you get the first customer by 10, and you iterate by lunch.”

“when digital is infinite and AI generated scarcity shifts to physical presence with other humans.”

“don't make the, don't make a mistake of trying to build something for a huge market because that's where the venture boys are playing. This is for the people who want to, uh, build a cash flowing startup that, you know, maybe they want, it could raise venture later, But, you know, right now it's about building cash…”

“the orchestration layer is the new interface layer. As we spend our day coordinating agent workflows in a model agnostic fashion, local and cloud, and validating outputs, human in the loop and resolving issues, the ultimate layer To own is where coordination takes place. Um, so, uh, I think he's absolutely right.”

“You might just be like, you know, AI is easy. It's so easy to create the product now. You might just want to build the product yourself”

“But now when you're living in a terminal, for example, and you're using MCPs to talk to LLMs, um, you kinda, you know, the nice to have is actually the, the, The UI. The nice to have is the SaaS. The nice to have is going to this website and look pretty. Ultimately what you care about is the output, and the thing is…”

“The, the fact, like, that if you are, if you are using, if you are serious about Using LLMs to take your ideas and put in and, and get the most out of them. If you're serious about building, you know, what people are calling a personal OS, uh, and you are not using a centralized note-taking tool like this. That uses…”

“Now, you don't, you're not going to create software and invite them to the software. You're going to create agents, and you're going to invite them to the agents, and then the agents are going to do work that creates value for these companies. So that's the mindset shift”

“Someone like Facebook is only copying your idea once it hits millions or hundreds of millions of users.”

“And if you just keep prompting it, I think you can get to places where you have an extremely well design app without any designers. You are the designer, right? You have to have the taste. You have to have the reference images. Um, and, but I think, I think you can go and design something beautiful and we've exited…”

“Uh, my recommendation to people is actually to follow all the founders of these businesses. So, V-Zero, Guillermo. Kodak, Sam Altman. Lovable, Anton. Bolt is Eric Simons. Replit, Amjad, et cetera, et cetera. Follow them, and then see who you believe in. Like, if you really connect with Eric, if you really connect with…”

“if I was trying to make my first million dollars right now, I'd either build some GPT wrapper, or I'd build this.”

“You want to look at high frequency daily use case, not weekly. You know, if you're seeing weekly use cases or monthly use cases, kill it.”

“In fact, I would spend nothing really on paid in the beginning. I would be working just on organic.”

“I just think that, you know, by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents, uh, you can decide if you want to be a VC backed Leverage agency, but this is just the best way to start so you have leverage when you want to raise or if you just want to get those dividends to…”

“for the first time ever, services are becoming software. It used to be software as a service, SaaS. Um, but now, uh, with AI agents actually having the ability to fulfill, uh, the, the service. So let's say instead of hiring a social media manager, you're hiring an AI agent that does the social media managing. Instead…”

“if you do good SEO, it's going to rank you well in ChatGPT anyways, and perplexity anyways”

“When you have a good name to something, um, it kind of sets a floor for how much it's worth just because of the name and the concept.”

“people don't want to read anymore. So if you're designing a website, if you're building apps and stuff like that, you know, they're used to Instagram stories. They're used to just consuming YouTube. They're used to consuming video.”

“So, meaning, you know, chat GPT when people are You know, asking chat GPT for, you know, product recommendations and stuff like that, you're more likely to come up if you have public facing tools, uh, either on your website or linked, uh, linked to your website.”

“This is basically what you're doing, because you're building a ton of You know, bunch of businesses with enterprise value, with cash flow. Uh, they're compounding each other, so I just think that you don't need outside investors.”

“80% of, or 90% of good LLM SEO is just good regular SEO.”

“And, you know, of course you can have a link that says subscribe to my newsletter, but that just doesn't work anymore. Subscribe. I guess that's the insight, you know, subscribe saying like, Hey, subscribe to my newsletter. Like people have hit fatigue. In terms of newsletter fatigue, but they are willing to put in…”

“You shouldn't tell your team to do anything until you understand it. So, The thing that you should do is Map out all the boring, repetitive tasks that people do in your business from, by each function, and then try to do those tasks yourself.”

“Step, step zero, build an audience. Then figure out what something to build is, and actually how you figure out, ah, how you, how you build something is you start teasing things with your audience, and they're gonna tell you what to build.”

“the point of this episode is not to show you how to take it from, you know, 80% beautiful to 90% beautiful. Um, because I don't actually, I actually don't think that matters.”

“This new world, and which gets me so excited about this new world, is, you know, you don't have to raise millions of dollars or have a huge team to actually go and, uh, And run with this. You basically need a single smart marketer with taste, of course. Uh, pair that with AI agents and workflows, and we'll get into…”

“Once you've done that, then, before writing a line of code even, go and build a landing page like this. Set up a quiz funnel, basically. Try to even further understand Your potential customer, your user, and you're sending traffic. I would start with free traffic personally. Send that free traffic from organic social…”

“The worst thing that can happen to your startup is mediocre, mediocre success. Enough to keep you going, but not enough to change your life. Most founders are trapped there.”

“What used to cost a lot of money to, to go in, uh, you know, hire a team, specialized team, uh, who understands all these regulatory changes. Now you can just use something like Manus to actually go and figure all these stuff, this stuff out.”

“Your first step is how do I get your, the, the attention? Next step is how do I get your data? And then the third step is, okay, how can I build assistance co-pilots? AI software to actually monetize and build a sustainable business.”

“The easiest thing you can do is get paid for a service. That's easy mode. Then like the medium thing you can do is build a software for B to B. Yep. And then the hard mode is like building software like this for B to C. Yeah.”

“Remember that formats have life cycles. So what I mean by that is a format might be really popular. Um, and then it kind of like dies down, and then people start ignoring it. So you always have to constantly reinvent yourself. Now that you, the life cycle used to have two years, uh, now it's like, sometimes it's almost…”

“the simplest way to think about it is ChatGPT or Perplexity, when you prompt it, it's going to give you a quick Answer. But deep research, it's almost like a junior analyst, a McKinsey analyst, uh, that they would probably pay hundreds of thousand dollars a year to give you deep research into the question that you…”

“I think people are monetizing directories wrong. Like they're just putting AdSense. We saw one example of someone literally selling a book. Um, the opportunity is actually to build software on top of these directories. So you use directories to get the traffic. You get all these eyeballs in a particular niche. You…”

“the future of building startups is not by building a startup. It's by building a micro startup. So the old way of building a startup was You had this big idea, and you went and go built this big idea, and you iterated your way to product market fit. But I actually think now, especially with AI and how easy it is to…”

“I actually think that the goal of every solopreneur should be to not be a solopreneur. Like, I actually think that just doing things on your own is, like, super lonely, and you're, you're, everything, everything is dependent on you, and that's, that's not very, that, that to me doesn't seem like a freeing life.”

“so he gives, he gives someone a small task with unclear instructions, and then he, you know, He, he basically sees if they ask any questions or they just guess. And he tells, what's cool about that is it tells you everything about their future behavior. So this is for like when you're interviewing, you know,…”

“Like the wealthiest people have the least amount of recurring meetings.”

“So my whole thesis, like what I'm betting my entire career on, is this one funnel that I call the ACP funnel. So it's basically, A stands for audience. You build audience up top, then you convert that audience into a community, and then you build a product for that community.”

“What you want to do is Low quality, high effort. That's where you want to be.”

“All that to say, there's a huge opportunity to build Anti AI products just in general.”

“I set up my holding company with the thesis that, uh, community-based products outperform non-community-based products. So when you start with an audience and you build a community, That's just the, a great way to create a moat, have customers lined up, and all of our businesses are based on that.”

“And I think that's a bit of, like, an unfair advantage, is if you create a product, and you just shift the business model. You know, people are doing subscription, you're now, pay what you want.”

“Now I think today you kind of need idea gal or guy and a funnel. Guy or gal.”

“And so, I feel like there's that trust. If you, if you made it public, it just, you lose a little bit of that trust. So, um, I wouldn't do it publicly, but for, I get it for small bets.”

“I think that There's, there's room for this, which is lifetime, but no community. I think the mistake people make is they open up a feed, and then all of a sudden, someone might poison the well, or there's too much promotion, or, you know, there's so many ways that a community could go wrong.”

“I do this with a bunch of new accounts, and I start from zero, and it's totally doable that within 90 days, you can start getting 250,000 impressions per month.”

“distribution is more important than product now, it's just from a, it's just easy, you know, it's hard, it's easier to build product. You can use like AI tools and other software to go and create those products. Um, but it's harder to get distribution”

“I don't think you should start with ads though. That's my take. Because I think in order to create ads that are really high, highly performing, you have to have your messaging Pretty dialed. And I think the best way to get your messaging really dialed is to do organic content. See what works on places like Twitter,…”

“I think that if you're creating a minimal viable product, I always think about it as like the minimal viable product is the social account.”

“I think there's also an opportunity when a market gets really big, there's just an opportunity to be a me too. And if you just, uh, innovate on like your five dollars less or your black, you know, your red, red and black, you know, just a color colorway. Um, that could also be enough.”

“I, like, basically don't even, like, Acknowledge short views anymore. It's all about long views in terms of affinity. So if there's a lot of long views, it means that there's a lot of trust here.”

“there's so much competition in the AI assisted AI led landscape that there's probably a lot of opportunity in the human stuff.”

“There are all these no code tools. They're either too limited or too complex. What you need is a product specific tool. Like Shopify is no code e-commerce. Then you would also build no code marketplaces. No code messaging app. No code Instagram.”

“People don't need another bookmarking app. People. No. No. Don't do it.”

“You gotta be crazy to put social media apps on your phone. Just, you gotta be crazy. Period.”

“I don't have a number because people I know who have numbers are just, they hit the number, and then the number becomes two X. And then they hit the number, and then the number becomes two X. And they hit the number, and it becomes two X.”

“If that thought is coming at least once per quarter, then see you later. Life's too short for it. You'll hire someone who actually cares a lot about, about it more.”

“every person has a ignorance tax that they have to pay down. So no matter what your goals are, there's a price that you have to pay to learn and To get to your goals quicker. And by living in San Francisco, New York, some of these places, yes, it might be two times more expensive to live, but you will, just by osmosis,…”

“It just doesn't have creator product market fit, and that's something for you to think about is, you know, when you're building your business, because, you know, every business now is a creator business, are you the right creator for it, or should someone else be? And being honest with that is really important.”

“So you take, instead of investing, you know, into the S and P you, you find an operator, um, and you use data to inform some of these bets and you like, this is a perfect bet where it's like, okay, if I'm going to invest five, four grand a month, three grand a month, share the upside, but this thing could potentially…”

“no agency works at a hundred percent productivity. Good agencies work at 70% productivity at best. Um, so realistically, if you're at 40 or 50%, you can use that 20, 3040, 50% on your own projects, and you don't have to pay for it.”

“I get why people optimize for conversion rate, but I think that people are making a mistake by just optimizing for conversion because it's not really long-term thinking.”

“startup valuation is literally a made up number. What I mean by that is that, you know, venture capitalists or people who want to buy your company in the early stages, based on fear of losing the deal, will literally make up a number. That is, you know, valuation is more Art, then science”

“Google is probably not going to copy your startup. Build your startup and ignore the incumbents that are going to copy your startup.”

“Look for opportunities that are low status now, but probably high status in a few years. So for example, building a bootstrap startup a couple of years ago was pretty low status. You know, cash flow was low status. It was all about how do I raise hundreds of millions of dollars, build a unicorn, billion dollar company.…”

“First find the niche, then learn from the community, then the startup idea will come to you.”

“Cash flow over valuation any day of the week. What I mean by that is, who cares if a venture fund is going to say your business is worth a billion dollars? It feels nice. But building cash flowing businesses is ultimately a huge reward from a financial standpoint.”

“I think there's something to be said about being constrained and building your own media. Building your own, you know, your own community and not being just like how you don't want to be, uh, dependent on VCs. You don't necessarily want to be dependent on creators.”

“I know people say, like, don't hire friends and stuff like that. Well, it's like, you trust your friends. Like, there's a reason why you're, you're friends with, with your friends. Um, and so, I say hire friends. I say hiring your friends is a great idea.”

“So I think there's, this is like a bigger idea around there's opportunities to buy some of these distressed assets in the public markets from all the specs and stuff like that. And then, uh, basically modernize the products and also build them with a more profitable mindset.”

“I question email newsletters that have high percentage of paid subscribers. So I don't think it should be your, like the only way you're acquiring users. I think the grassroots social Events, community, that's going to be your bread and butter, but definitely trying out different channels.”

“solopreneurs equals solo burnouts. Think you're a one man slash woman army. Cool. Give it a year. You'll be so fried. You'll hire a team just to get a day off.”

“my thesis is, you know, with so many podcasts and YouTube channels and, and so many people now tweeting, you know, you're the average of the five friends you spend the most time with, but you're also the average of the five podcasts you consume. I think that a really underrated way and a cheaper way, frankly, than…”

“You know, there, you don't need to be a full-time creator. You can be a part-time creator and you could spend one hour a week or two hours a week and still create a niche audience.”

“my take is that if you have investors, you have micro bosses and you have to manage expectations and you have to manage up. And sometimes subconsciously you're doing things that are, you're just trying to please them, even if it's subconsciously, because a lot of time you respect them”

“I feel like people, people listening should just, like, don't go to events, throw events.”

“if going zero to one is art, going one to N is more science and playing only in zero to one is a bit of a mistake when you're, you can, there's no reason why you or I can't be doing both. Like we can, we can still be incubating and buying.”

“I think pay what you want is, is the new add to cart because in our world and the creator world, because when you build all this goodwill with communities, you're going to get a bunch of whales and spend a lot of money.”

“I think the, the MVP of being a multipreneur is, can you create content in one niche that people resonate with? Like, can you, before you create product market fit, can you create content market fit in one topic? Then can you do it in two topics? And then can you build one product? And then can you build two products?”

“building a community-based product is building a startup on easy mode, basically. In a lot of ways, because you get to, you get to learn from your audience and your community, what they want, their likes and dislikes, and then you just feed it back to them.”

“the most amount of equity you're going to give away is going to be now pre product market fit. So therefore I'd much rather spend a little bit. Get further along, prove that, and then have to give up less equity after.”

“I mean, if your graveyard isn't, you know, bigger than your house, then you're doing it.”

“You can't leave ChatGPT on its own to create content. You have to, um, like, if you want to create incredible content, It needs to be AI enhanced. It can't be AI driven just yet.”

“it's not about spending, you know, creating one video a year, basically. It's about creating one video an hour and building a brand for yourself.”

“building AI based social networks is a lot easier than building Regular social networks, because if you're building Instagram in 2009, you have to figure out how can I get really interesting content creators on one side? How do I get the right people on and to post the right content so that they interact with it and an…”

“And I believe that, you know, we exhaust after five. Um, for some people, it's actually three. I think it's in the three to five range, but it's basically, you can't be a diehard fan Slash, the biggest part of it is your identity. Like, you can't have the identity of a One Direction fan, and the identity of a Jonas…”

“My hot take on, you know, being a professional creator part-time or professional meaning like a B, you know, we're in like the B to B world is it is the highest leverage thing you can do with your time.”

“When I, when I go to websites where it's like, Hey, it's this product for Gen Z or it's this product for millennials. Like that never works. Like you can't say it's for that person.”

“if you read fiction, you're just gonna be more creative, period. Like, you're not gonna come up with the idea for Neopets after reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel.”

“I think the mistake that a lot of people make when they're building consumer products is they build something and they take ads out in the New York subway, like step, like that's a bearish signal to me. Um, because I think that like, um, You know, having ten million users on step on day one is actually more chaos than…”

“you also don't even initially need to build the product for them. That's the, that's the hack that no one talks about, which is if you could tell a story that resonates with them, they'll bear with your product that isn't all there.”

“Starting a bootstrap business really allows the founder and founding team to intimately understand the business and all portions of it, unlike when you raise venture capital at, at, you know, the early stage. So I actually think that, and it was a great reminder that Don't be so quick to raise venture capital if you…”

“What venture does a lot of the time is it takes you from being authentic to inauthentic. Because when you have the venture influences you to grow, grow at all costs. Um, and when you grow at all costs, you have to Compromise. Sometimes.”

“obviously the best way to, like, win a market is just to, like, give it away for free, and then as you're learning about it, Then you just add paid products, monthly subscription”

“90% of web three ideas, MVP it in web two and just learn. And then if you can add a web three component, once you've understand the problem set a lot better, I think that makes a lot more sense just cause it's harder to build on web three.”

“The word even founder, like, I'm just thinking out loud here, but like, it's almost like an outdated term. Like, because like, I feel like the products of the future, you know, it isn't one person, isn't, you know, these like multiple founders, it's like, it's your micro affiliates, right? It's, it's your co-creators.”

“The actual more useful question to ask actually is, is this model good enough for the job, and does running it locally make the product better?”

“People hear, you know, open model and immediately want to train their own model, and I get it. I get why. I was actually the same way. Um, it sounds really cool, but I feel like that's like an advanced move. The practical move, the beginner move, where you should start is just to find a repeated workflow.”

“The filter is pretty straightforward, so I look for a customer with sensitive data, repeated review work, bad software usually, uh, expensive mistakes, like And mistakes that will cost them a lot. And a workflow that happens close to the, to the device. That combination is like the interesting zone for me.”

“The key, basically, is to produce a file, a memo, a checklist, a brief, a report, or a review that you can reuse. A chat answer is nice, um, but a useful artifact changes that workflow.”

“a lot of the writing tools make your writing cleaner, but sand off the interesting parts and make everyone sound the same, and if you're gonna sound the same, it's hard to stand out.”

“you don't want to sound like generic AI because, you know, people are going to feel it. Uh, they might not say this was written by AI. Like, they might not respond and say it. Uh, but they'll just trust you less.”

“if I were using this, uh, I wouldn't try to automate my whole YouTube channel on day one. I think that's way too much, and I think when people use a repo like this, uh, on day one, and then they start, and they don't get the results, it's because they just ask for too much. I would start with one small repeatable…”

“So most people use one chatbot today, but builders are already assembling their own AI work environments, like a coding agent, a research skill, a design skill, maybe a browser tool, a video workflow, and at some point, your setup starts to look like a little operating system for your work, and once that happens,…”

“Agents are moving from answering questions. They're operating tools and phones is one of the biggest tool services in the world.”

“what's interesting about a lot of these, uh, GitHub repos is, you know, you can, you can install them. Step two is have a small workflow, uh, get it to work, add value, and step three is then should I be productizing this for other people or just continue, continue using this in my own workflows to be more productive,…”

“Every time the technology changes, the most valuable kind of marketer changes with it.”

“Basically, marketing moved closer to product because the product itself could become the growth engine.”

“if anything, taste, you know, people talk about this all the time, but taste matters more now than ever because AI is about to make average marketing, marketing just unbelievably cheap.”

“And the first thing I would build is a growth repo. Yeah, I know it sounds a little bit nerdy, um, but you know, even if you're non-technical, I believe you can do it. So you're going to want to go and create a GitHub repo, um, or honestly just a structured folder. Ah, you can call it something like Growth OS, and it…”

“The problem it's going to be solving is that most people use AI in these random chats. So they'll open up a ChatGPT or Claude, Gemini, they'll ask for 10 posts, and maybe they'll copy and, you know, copy one into a doc that they like, and then the work just disappears. Next week, the AI is starting from scratch again.…”

“And local AI matters when the data is, you know, particularly sensitive, or there's private customer transcripts, or regulated notes, pricing plans, basically anything a company Would feel weird sending into a cloud tool. Um, also things that are expensive, too expensive to do into a cloud tool.”

“The tools are going to keep changing, but the workflow is the thing to actually learn.”

“The metric is going to be positive replies, From qualified accounts, because a marketing engineer cares about business results, right? Not activity counts. Uh, messages sent is activity. Qualified replies is going to be your signal, and the whole point the marketing engineer is trying to do is to generate pipeline…”

“And you train these agents the same way you train a new hire. You start with small tasks, you watch at work, you correct the mistakes, You add the correction to memory, because now we have memory, and then you expand the scope as you increase your comfort level.”

“bad outbound, uh, usually starts with a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet full of names, but good outbound starts with timing.”

“I would start with services first, so you do the work by hand, you build the same system for five companies, 10 companies, and you notice the pain that repeats, and then that's when you turn it into software. Um, that's all, and that's also how you avoid building something that nobody wants.”

“I think the best marketing engineers are going to feel like part marketer, part product person, part rev ops. Part data analyst, part creator, and part engineer.”

“if you think about SEO, right? It was like, can Google understand the page? And then we had, uh, AEO, which is can AI cite the answer? And now we're entering this web MCP era, which is basically, can the agent finish the job?”

“a lot of people use AI. And they get slop, and a big reason is they don't have tight skills.”

“If you want to, if you want Claude Code to act more like an employee, you need to give it the same basic things you would give a person joining your company.”

“it can work on small branches, but before touching things like dependencies, before touching migrations, before touching payments off things, these like bigger things, you basically want to make sure that the human owns those trust decisions.”

“If you don't have all, you know, an optimize, the optimized MD files and the optimized, uh, places, uh, and folders, then you're, you're, You know, Claude code is going to trip here and there.”

“The way to think about plan mode in general is that anytime you're doing meaningful product work, you're probably going to want to do planning or meaningful work in general. Actually, you're going to want to do some planning. It's worth it. Um, the way I think about it is it's like, you know, the quote measure twice,…”

“Claude has to guess, guess what matters. And once it starts guessing, you're no longer managing the work. You're cleaning up the work.”

“if it's a small ticket, you can manage it, but if the ticket is massive, you end up with a giant pile of changes that might look impressive, but, you know, it's hard to really trust it.”

“once Claude can build things click quickly, as you see the bottom, the bottleneck moves to the judgment.”

“I wouldn't start by asking Claude to ship production code while I'm asleep. Um, I would start by just giving it a recurring operator task. Eventually you can get to more cool, glamorous tasks, but I would just start by, you know,”

“You give the AI room to work and boundaries Um, and I wish more people did that. You know, going YOLO mode, um, it's, it's a bit too risky. Um, so thinking about permissions as a strategy is going to be helpful to actually be able to scale your team of AI employees.”

“So the shift is websites become resource layers. Content becomes indexes. Expertise becomes scalable. Data becomes metered and tools become agent accessible.”

“Now, I think, uh, the types of businesses to create are businesses like this. They're not like little tools that could be vibe coded. These are startup ideas that, you know, could be profitable on day one, uh, that, you know, have some moat that are, you know, are reinvented for an internet that's AI native and AI and…”

“In the early days, your first customer is often the person already selling into the niche. So instead of trying to sell agent readable competitive analysis to a med spa owner, which is a phrase that is just confusing to the average person. Um, sell it to med spa marketing agencies, consultants, freelancers, software…”

“You're not selling the future. You're selling the screenshot. You show them what AI says about their company today. And that becomes the whole sales deck.”

“A lot of people get lazy at this part. They throw everything into a vector database, and then they just call it a day. That usually gives you a search box with confidence. But a real product needs structure.”

“Prompt engineering is how you ask the AI for a better question. And context engineering is how you give AI better information. But graph engineering is how you design the work around the AI so the whole thing stops living inside one messy giant AI chat.”

“One model in one pass decided what mattered, researched the market, interpreted the evidence, wrote the recommendation, and graded it in its own confidence. That's a lot of trust to put into one blob of text.”

“What's cool about a graph is it lets you design the work more like a small team. One part plans. A few work in parallel. Another checks the work. Another merges it. And then the human approves the final step.”

“normal rag often retrieves Chunks of text that look similar to the question, but it can struggle when the answer actually requires connecting different people across companies and topics and claims and events.”

“A lot of AI research fails because the same model that writes the answer also grades the answer. That is like asking someone to write their own performance review and then being shocked when they describe themselves as a vision, a visionary.”

“Like, a big reason why graph engineering matters is it makes quality less dependent on someone remembering a perfect prompt to ask their LLM. It makes reviews way more consistent. It makes delegation in general way cleaner. It makes approval way more explicit. It gives you a place to add tools and memory and checks and…”

“Now there is one mistake that I want to warn against, which is more agents don't automatically mean better output. Sometimes actually more agents mean more noise. Sometimes it means five AI workers confidently repeating the same wrong idea. Sometimes it means the system spends more time coordinating than thinking. So…”

“The goal is actually to make the smallest graph that improves the quality of work, and that's a really important distinction, because a good graph should remove fake waiting, and it should separate workers from checkers, and really it should put human approval where mistakes are expensive, and it should stop when the…”

“the play is basically, how do you find plugins that have validated demand that don't have an AI component and building the AI first version of each? Cause You already know that, you know, there's proven demand, people are paying for it, and then you just make them 10 X better with agents.”

“you're pitching to people at a company and people at a company, I'll say the thing that people don't say, which is they don't want to get fired. Right? Like they want to get promoted actually. So your job is to help them get promoted. How do you help them get promoted is probably not by moving from one ERP to another…”

“People forget that in services businesses that there's always a more luxury, luxury, luxury experience that, a certain ICP is going to want, and by focusing on this group of people, you're kind of missing out on, on those.”

“My belief is the best ads are actually, I mean, if you have millions of dollars to spend, yes, the best ads are hiring the best humans on the planet to go and do that. But not everyone has millions of dollars to spend or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on the best agent, you know, ad agencies on the planet.…”

“Actually, the way I would think about this, Ellie, and, and tell me if I'm wrong here, I would actually do a bug loop separate from a feature loop. So the bug loop would be around, um, like uptime, you know, like the, the, the objective metric would be more around uptime and, and things like that. But the product…”

“You know, you kind of want to start with a smaller loop, right? Like the, the minimal viable loop, the MVL in the sense of first start by just creating incredible posts. Um, and, and just optimize around the posts. Um, And, and maybe the, uh, verifiable outcome isn't a 100,000 followers, but it's 10 likes.”

“these LLMs are, are obviously amazing and, but they, they do lack like the vertical specific context and stuff like that. So you're seeing MCPs, you know, sort of, you have the mob in MCP for designs. You're seeing the idea browser for business building MCP. You're seeing, Just MCP after MCP, and that's, by the way, a…”

“labor is a multi-trillion dollar market, right? So I think why people say agents is bigger than SaaS is because the total addressable market for agents is just way bigger. You know, it's human capital.”

“SaaS sells software. Agent SaaS sells work. A normal SaaS product says, here is a tool a team could use basically. Um, but an agent SaaS product will say, here is a job your team no longer has to do by hand.”

“And so when you're thinking about coming up with an idea for a startup here, think about, I handle this one annoying job better than a junior employee, faster than an agency, and it's cheaper than adding headcount.”

“If people are already paying for the work, they're paying an employee, they're paying an agency, a receptionist, a coordinator, dispatcher, they, there's an opportunity to sell that service cheaper And then unload some of that work that that person is doing to do more high, highly creative, creative work.”

“So if a workflow is too basic, um, basically the problem is basic automation, you know, zaps and stuff like that can do it. Um, if it's pure human judgment, uh, the first version will break. So the sweet spot is repetitive work with enough judgment that AI can help.”

“you actually want to shadow the human before you build. So once you find the job, right, you, you've identified what the job is before you like prompt, before you start coding, just shadow a human being who does the job. Uh, I know a lot of founders want to skip this. Um, but it's usually what's going to help you get,…”

“when you're specking out your, your agent, you know, I think it should have seven key parts. What wakes the agent up? What context does it need? What tools can it use? What is it allowed to do itself? Where does it need approval? When should it escalate and, and bring a human in the loop there? And what does success…”

“Many agent problems should start actually as workflows. So a workflow follows a predictable path. An agent decides more dynamically. Founders should earn autonomy by starting with the predictable path and adding judgment only when it creates value.”

“And I think what separates a cool automation from a real Agent first SaaS product is the agent does the work, but the wrapper creates the trust.”

“It's also like low key, a really good sales asset, because imagine telling a property manager, You know, we tested this on, you know, 50 of your old maintenance requests. It routed 42 correctly, flagged six of them for human review, and made two mistakes. Here are the two mistakes, and here's how we fix them. So it…”

“So the fastest path is usually a pilot where you manually do the work with AI, and then you productize the repeated parts.”

“Workflow teardowns is what I'm seeing in real time that's working really, really well.”

“I think the opportunity is basically to find the smallest painful workflow that repeats all day, uh, in a niche that you understand, uh, and make it disappear.”

“The mistake people I think make is they try to build an all knowing agent first, these really big agent projects. Uh, the better move is basically just to build a small agent to start, get it to be very valuable, schedule it, have a clear success metric.”

“In an AI world, we all know building products are, you know, is really easy. Building demand is just getting more and more important. So when anyone can ship a landing page or an app, You know, or build a SaaS. Uh, the bottle, the bottleneck moves to the question of, can you make people care?”

“This skill is so rare, uh, because it sits between worlds. Uh, software people often avoid hardware, um, and hardware people sometimes avoid distribution and AI. So the person who could connect open source AI models, physical prototyping and manufacturing has a shot at building things that feel like science fiction,…”

“as more work moves to agents and chats and tools and feeds, real rooms actually become more valuable.”

“people have been building mobile apps since 2008, and it became increasingly harder to, um, to build something that people are going to download and pay money for. Until two things happened, actually. AI came. Anyone could create something, but more, even more than that, you can create these AI first experiences that…”

“We've all been building our businesses, our workflows, our entire creative process on top of models that live on someone else's servers, controlled by someone else's terms, one government letter away from disappearing.”

“A twelve billion model is the sweet spot for a machine with 16 gigabytes of RAM. This is where most people should live.”

“It's not good at writing because you haven't put the right inputs, the right strategy, the right weekly engine, and then connect it to Fable.”

“So what's great about doing these tournaments. So I use fable five high over here. Is it basically, uh, instead of getting one option that maybe is okay, you're basically getting it, you're pitting it against each other, and you're getting just a lot, a lot better, a lot better output.”

“There's an opportunity Especially now with Fable Five to actually go buy things for not a lot of money, kind of flip it, um, you know, or renovate it, maybe flip it or just keep it for profit and cash flow.”

“It's only possible now with Fable because it reads the tables and schedules insides, and schedules insides hundreds of PDFs without dying, which is exactly where the money hides.”

“I think where, where the output is binary, meaning black or white with no creativity, there is a room for loops.”

“one of the biggest problems that people have with vibe coding and agentic engineering is they build something and no one No one's, uh, no one's going to it. Well, you know, if you build games, for example, that actually generate buzz around what you're, the bigger, you know, the, the product you're building, that's a…”

“Um, I think that a lot of people are going to use codex sites to make, like, personal web pages, to make, like, little apps and stuff like that. But I actually think that the, the real unlock here is to make products that Codex can keep operating for you.”

“And for people who are trying to find ideas for their pets, one of the good ways is just look at what people are doing for human beings.”

“Having Genspark Claw monitoring restaurant closures and liquidation auctions in your city, um, it pulls equipment comps, it pulls, it, it basically calculates the arbitrage spread and brokers the deal between the estate and the new restaurant for 15 to 30% fees with zero inventory risk.”

“GenSparkClaw is going to monitor job boards daily for hiring signals, because that means budget is being spent. So a head of growth needs an agency, you know, three SDRs need outbound tools, um, enriches the company, finds a decision maker, and drafts personalized outreach referencing the exact post.”

“GenSpark Claw scans product hunt launches from two to four years ago. It finds one where the site is dead, but the SEO traffic is still alive. And you reach out to the founder who will sell to like, you know, maybe 25 K five K just to stop paying their AWS bill. And there's a lot of these founders who are just like…”

“This is when people say, you know, agents are the new SaaS. What do they mean by that? They mean, you know, you're selling an agent with, with an outcome, you know, moving from a per seat model to an outcome based model”

“the way to think about it, just from a, you know, framework perspective is you have a feed, Goes to an asset, goes to a trigger, goes to a buyer, goes to monetization. These are the boring, tiny ideas that you can use AI and use Claw to go and build some of these ideas.”

“My, my, you know, my issue in general with like vibe coded projects is that Because anyone could, you know, create apps and products like this, it's almost like you need to have some credibility layer in order to listen to the content.”

“I think it's not just so much that the tinkerers win, is that people, the tinkerers who aren't afraid of looking dumb, uh, win, right?”

“I didn't tell it to say share this win, but I know as someone who's built social products that millions of people have used, That if you say share this win versus share this on Facebook, share this win is going to convert a lot more. And what does that mean tactically? That means that you're going to get more…”

“One of the things I love most about Claw Design, funny enough, as a first reaction, is doing the questionnaires. Because in doing the questionnaires, I, as like the product manager, can get so much more clear as to what exactly I'm building. Of course, I grabbed an idea from my idea browser, or if I come up with an…”

“I think that, you know, it's not necessarily a thousand true fans anymore in the AI age, and this is something I've been thinking about. I think it's more like the hundred true, true fans, because agents are cutting your costs so dramatically that a hundred people paying you is a real business.”

“It's now like not crazy to build a free tool a week. Whereas in the past, these things would have taken you months. So you can vibe code a free tool in a day, ship it by lunch, and then markets itself forever.”

“ask what does my user want to brag about and then make that That thing, beautiful and shareable.”

“Your logo actually should be subtle, but present. I've seen some examples of artifacts that the logo is super big and it's just, no one wants to share someone else's logo. It should be, it should feel, uh, it's about you.”

“you can go and like buy a 10,000 subscriber newsletter for five to 20,000 dollars. You inherit that trust from day one, you plug in your product immediately, and then you can repeat that across niches.”

“you're going to get slop by default, so you have to optimize to not slop, and a part of that is having a really good brand and reference images.”

“So the way I think about my agent stack, um, is that every builder, if you're listening to this, you're probably going to need five different layers. You're going to need an agent harness. So that's going to be something like a cloud code, cursor, codex, or idea browser pro. Uh, you're going to need something that…”

“I believe that people are sleeping on the web data layer, um, and if you understand how to get, you know, great data out of, you know, tools like Firecrawl and Exa, you can build, you know, the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush.”

“take a big idea that's already generating hundreds of millions of dollars. You recreate it very quickly. With a very niche spoke, uh, focus.”

“A VC will pay 5000 dollars for a report that saves them from a bad 500 K bet all day long.”

“Amazon sellers will gladly pay 99 dollars a month to find product gaps before, uh, competitors do.”

“Because Autoresearch lets you run hundreds of experiments instead of a few, you have a simple pitch. We do a hundred times more testing than other shops for the same or lower fee.”

“Shift that's happening right now that instead of basically going to a tool to automate a function, you say to yourself, okay, if this was an AI employee, how can I spin this up?”

“You don't need to worry about, you know, is OpenAI a little bit better than Anthropic? Like, the reality is, you know, you can think of it as like Ferrari and Lamborghini, like both cars are going to go fast. And, you know, one day one car might go faster, and another day another car might go faster. Um, but that's the…”

“You're going to not just want to create a product, my friends. No, no, no, no, no. You're going to want to create media. You're going to go on ahead and, you know, create an Instagram, create a TikTok, create an X, pick one channel that you're going to focus on and build an audience around that.”

“Step 18, uh, you're gonna wanna store user preferences, so as people are using, uh, using the product, uh, that's gonna be a little bit of your moat. The user preferences, how they're using it, and then the memory, uh, long-term memory into your, you know, agent SaaS is going to be an important piece as well.”

“don't just, uh, create like articles, tweets, that sort of thing. I'm talking about like full on send a camera crew or go yourself and film these people, uh, and, and, and showcase that and then put paid spend around that as well.”

“Yeah, and that's, that's sort of the problem that a lot of people are facing with cloud code is like, they're using it, and then they're saying, well, it's, it's okay, it's not like game changing, and the issue is they don't have, they're not, they're not feeding the right context at the right time.”

“Even if you have an agency or whatever, or you want to hire an agency, you should start by doing this because you're gonna, you're gonna dial it in yourself. You're gonna really understand yourself by doing this.”

“there's, you know, washable pee pads for senior dogs and the average rating is 3.88. So like that's a bad rating, right? So that means that there's an opportunity to create great products and it's giving you, it's, it's telling you why people aren't enjoying the products Uh, on Amazon.”

“A common question is, well, why wouldn't I just use a project within Claude? Well, um, you could use a project, but projects are context specific for a specific, like, you know, there's a beginning, middle and an ending date to the project. So for example, like maybe you're working on a, you know, Christmas campaign,…”

“the trick to creating effective skills to make your AI think like an expert, not just to follow steps.”

“the apps that do the best are just sort of the, the simplest apps that you can explain so simply that, you know, just in a few words that you can, very important, Uh, have one visually heavy element because that's going to be helpful when you're creating organic content that you hope to go viral.”

“find the three to five extremely talented people you want to work with them and just figure out how to work with them. Like, don't worry about the, the what and don't get too super attached.”

“A vague request might be something like, fix this grammar in this now, you know, but the problem with that is, you know, it leads to overly cautious, pre-canned, or basically just less helpful responses. As the model tries to deescalate.”

“using advanced prompting terms can trigger more sophisticated modes of operation. So models, um, are trained on a vast amount of text about AI itself. So using terms from the field activates specific powerful behaviors.”

“therapy sessions, you know, AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, um, you know, doing recovery notes, um, you know, different religions. The Muslim faith, mosque sermons, the Jewish religion, Torah study groups, meditation journals, marriage counseling notes. These are just a few to get your creative juices flowing that I think,…”

“people hate guessing what a room, a garden, exterior could look like. An AI finally allows you to unlock that. So the visualization removes the uncertainty and makes design decisions feel safe, fast, and fun.”

“Most users don't want five different AI apps actually. They want one place to ask questions, generate media, summarize PDFs, Analyze images and search the web. Bundling creates daily usage and stickiness.”

“A visual three D scan that shows precise measurements and progress over time makes fitness efforts feel tangible and addictive to track.”

“Is find a group that, one, spends money. Two, has a repeating problem. Three, uses photos and videos as inputs. We've seen how important that is. Four, cares about accuracy. And five, had, has bad existing tools. If they check all five boxes, you might be sitting on a 50 K MRR mobile app idea.”

“Uh, the niche that they, uh, that, you know, a niche works when it has an identity. It has, you know, collectors or professionals, uh, church goers. Urgency, I need an answer now. Stakes, money, reputation, time, and repetition. Same job to be done weekly and daily. If the niche has all four, AI can eat it, and AI app…”

“The, the hardest part, uh, of building a vertical app is figuring out what is the workflow, figuring out what is the social aspect, um, and then obviously figuring out, uh, what is the vertical.”

“The big piece that people miss with vibe coding is they vibe code stuff, but then the copy sucks. So then people, you know, they're, they're converting at one percent or less than one percent and they're like, why? And then, and they come to the conclusion that, oh, vibe coding, you know, doesn't work for me. Where…”

“One is you created a mascot, which we're seeing that as a huge trend right now, which is like, especially with AI first apps, like people see, see it as like an animal, a person, you know, someone they're talking to.”

“Most founders don't fail because they run out of money. They fail because they don't know they're running out until it's too late.”

“Daily is your pulse, weekly is your vitals, and monthly is your full physical. You need all three to stay alive.”

“The truth is, your P&L is a liar. It's not really trying to deceive you, but it's written in a language that doesn't really care about your survival.”

“If cash and accrual diverge by more than, say, 20%, there's probably something that's broken. Maybe it's collections, timing, or discipline.”

“If you need three weeks to pull it together, you've probably already lost momentum. So it's actually really important that all of us founders keep lightweight data rooms ready.”

“When an investor or an acquirer is gonna ask you, how much are you spending on AWS? You should be able to answer that in 30 seconds, uh, if you're the founder. Not in three days. That speed is the difference between, we'll think about it, and, you know, we're gonna wire that money tomorrow.”

“Trust doesn't scale. Policy does.”

“Rule number six, track three to five weekly metrics, not 30. Most founders drown in dashboards or fly blind. Both are fatal. You need five numbers. Every Monday, same format. Same Slack message. Runway in weeks, not months.”

“You know, the one pager forces focus. If you do like a bunch of slides, like a 40 page slide deck, like that you'd give to a board deck, I find that you can hide more there, but the one page Just demands the truth.”

“If you got more than 500 dollars sitting in miscellaneous, something is broken. Miscellaneous is where money goes to hide.”

“You actually want to create 15 to 20 categories, categories max. Maybe it's payroll, contractors, cloud and software, marketing, office and rent, travel, just like the big stuff. And, and that's it. If you can't figure out what category an expense belongs in within five seconds, your chart of accounts is probably too…”

“Equity is the most expensive currency. This is the lesson almost every founder learns too late, especially first time founders. Every dollar you raise costs you ownership forever.”

“I've seen founders with better products, better teams, and better markets lose to average founders who simply knew their numbers.”

“If it's under 12 months, you're in the red zone.”

“Again, I think it's at least a 10 K MRR idea, um, is who is building the agency that just focuses on gamification for apps and websites. So you use that trend and then just be like, we help you take your existing company and make it more gamified.”

“I think where you're probably going to have the most success is in your smaller creators. So we're talking people with a hundred and 20,000 and followers across platforms and less.”

“Step two is you want to generate, uh, attach a generous affiliate percentage. I'm not talking about 10%, 20%. I'm talking about 30 to 50%, especially in the initial days. Uh, give it to them lifetime. Like, you, you want to get these people on board.”

“And I believe that the way to get the most out of creative AI is through two things. It's through understanding how to prompt properly and understanding different workflows. So actually stitching together multiple of these tools.”

“the people that could unleash creative AI have an unfair advantage because those are the people that are going to be able to create, uh, big audiences, ads that outperform, uh, you know, vibe coded websites and apps that don't look like every other vibe coded app.”

“I call it the ACP funnel. I've talked about it on the pod before. You know, first create an audience, then create a community, then create a product. So it's literally a funnel. Um, and You know, I think, ah, you know, you start with an audience, and you can tell stories. This is where you can tell stories, and this is…”

“That's really the key with creating AI video is really the images having great reference images, having great scripts.”

“And that's where you come in, right? You're the, you're the creative director. You have to push this thing.”

“So I believe that there's an arbitrage right now to use AI to, uh, create these accounts, basically like meme accounts, um, and then, you know, sell your software through them.”

“Basically XYZ community for that is the new app for that.”

“It's not easy. And it's a moat where, where it's hard to, you know, come up with a moat now. I think, uh, IRL certainly is a moat.”

“if you can scrape Facebook groups, subreddits, get data, and create validated ideas, then you have an unfair advantage.”

“computers didn't hit, you know, mainstream adoption until there was some graphical user interface on top of it. Microsoft windows, uh, or, you know, windows XP, I think it was, or, or windows. So I think it's, that's this moment in, in AI, right? We're putting, we're putting canvases on top of, uh, You know, sort of…”

“Because if you're able to create viral videos using Sora too, then you're going to be able to own a lot of attention. If you have a lot of attention, you'll be able to create startup ideas that sell to that attention. Consumer mobile apps, SaaS products, micro SaaS, and it'll make your life a lot easier. It actually is…”

“In the AI era, math is your edge.”

“Today, anyone could spin up A digital team with these artificial intelligence and build stuff.”

“So the mistake a lot of people make is they're trying five different channels, 10 different formats. No, I think, you know, the people that really crush it, uh, here are, are focusing on one channel.”

“And then you basically have maximum, 60 seconds in onboarding. And it's important to create value first. When you look at some of the, you know, some of these apps, um, that, you know, have a lot of, uh, virality to them, they basically have, you know, just a 60, you know, a very short, Value first mentality for…”

“I'm actually seeing seven days to be a little more effective.”

“If you can get success, like, that win within the first hour, 30 minutes, two hours, that is actually so much, it's an order of magnitude better than 22 hours, 18 hours, 20, you know, 40 hours, because it just, you might not be able to win them back.”

“The difference today is, uh, you know, it just doesn't cost that much to create the media, you know, with all these AI tools. So if you can actually go and, you know, attract a high value customer, uh, you know, and, and then ultimately pass them off From a lead gen perspective to someone else, get a cut of that. Your…”

“a lot of people talk about personal software for these utilities, but I actually think personal software as distribution software is something that not a lot of people have talked about. So how do you create a piece of software that, you know, goes viral on X or, or gets a lot of traction that, uh, builds you the…”

“By the way, there's only, like, a hundred hooks that exist. In short form videos. Especially for SaaS.”

“Like if you're not Google and you're a team of 20 people or even less, like you can put this on Google, I'd say you can put this on X or something or, or Instagram and People will be like, whoa, like, Where's this mural?”

“Just go nicher. Create an AI property management voice line for Quebec. Or Canada. Or, you know, with a specific type of brand.”

“You don't need to go full on a hundred percent voice AI agent. You can have some voice AI agents help you and that'll get your cost down and help you scale. And then when you actually want to do the sale or you want more of a white glove experience, that's when you do transfer to human.”

“That's, that is the secret to actually building an AI startup, is understanding a very, very niche Insight.”

“it doesn't matter if you have humans doing it. All that matters is the outcome is good for the client.”

“these agents are finally getting to a point where, uh, you know, you're, you know, they're, the outcome is, is good. It's quite good.”

“while you're getting really good at your fulfillment, you have to get really good at your audience development too. Like you, this, you have to live and breathe this. And I think that's a big part of what will make a successful one billion dollar, uh, business.”

“You want the customer that you're selling to, to want to do that multiple times a day, because if it's high repetition and it's high value, then that's where the gold mine is.”

“if it's a complex B to B, Uh, app or, or B to B SaaS. Um, you're gonna need a sales team. Um, so you, you probably don't want to do that. Um, and when I'm talking about that, I'm talking about like a healthcare company, you know, uh, uh, defense company, education, uh, you know, selling into the fortune 500. You do…”

“if there's heavy regulatory requirements, you're gonna need compliance. I'm talking fintech. I'm talking healthcare. Um, but if there's light or none, you're, you're Gucci.”

“You're gonna wanna start a one-person business with network effects. If you don't think that it's possible that there's network effects, it's going to be possible, but I think it's gonna just be extremely hard. Um, if you do have network effects in some capacity, I think it'll be a lot easier.”

“Now with vibe coding, It's way cheaper to actually go and create these, you know, micro SaaS or niche apps. So it opens up, uh, a huge opportunity for, you know, the list, you know, people listening to actually go and, you know, build these like niche apps at the same time.”

“the big problem that a lot of agencies have is at the end of the year, they're making five percent EBITDA, three percent EBITDA, seven percent EBITDA. Like, they're very hard businesses to run because, you know, people aren't utilized.”

“if someone's average utilization rate, let's say, is above 70%, like, make it red. Like, that's scary. The potential burnout mode... I've owned agencies long enough to know that you, that's not the way to build a sustainable Business.”

“Uh, and a successful micro SaaS might get you 10, 20, 30, 50 K a month of profit.”

“And in the age of AI, you can actually build, um, a startup, um, that is a feature of a feature or micro, micro SAS. Because it's just quicker, easier to build with tools like cursor, et cetera.”

“So first you're going to actually build an audience, uh, or community and or community... From that, you're going to learn about the acute pains of that audience and community. From that, you know, well, obviously you're going to build something. You're going to build the startup, right? And then it's going to generate…”

“Charge from day one. A lot of people create free products for their micro SaaS because they don't feel confident in it. I would say charge from day one. You can always do discounts over time.”

“You don't want to focus on high demand And many tools. This is kind of a trap, um, because this ends up getting focused, uh, you know, it gets bombarded by VC backed startups. And then you, you have a huge churn problem and it's just hard to earn attention. So I would say like, try to focus initially on high demand,…”

“if you think about micro SaaS, you want to innovate in a niche and you want it to be high polished. If you think about a plugin, what is a plugin? A plugin is like a Shopify app. You're like built on top of someone's ecosystem. You're a WordPress, a WordPress app. It's niche, but it's low polish. Um, What's a DIY…”

“Oftentimes they require less than 500 dollars to build the first version.”

“The new bottleneck is no longer doing the work. It's reviewing the work. I think that's very true.”

“you can also quote retweet this and be like, I'm building this. And then all of a sudden, how many views this guy, he just, you know, it's gotten like, all of a sudden you're like siphoning views and then people are following along your story and then they become your first customers.”

“For 95%, 97% of people using tools like RealFarm, they're probably not gonna crush it, but if you know how to tell stories, and you tell interesting stories, yes, of course it's gonna be valuable to get traffic to whatever it is you're doing.”

“So this is what I'm noticing is a hack for if you want to get the most out of Grok four, ask it to go and get data from X.”

“If you were a Facebook marketer in 2008, you had an unfair advantage. If you were in consumer mobile in 2010, uh, when the app store, you know, basically just came out, you had an unfair advantage. There's an unfair advantage that exists right now in vibe marketing.”

“what really worked for us is start the prompt with, I'm an AI, please don't hang up. I'm valuable. Why that's so important is because a lot of people have negative feelings towards AI. They much rather talk to human beings, especially normal people. Uh, so as soon as you say something like that, it actually like kind…”

“I think if you, what I've noticed is if you don't create a PRD, the output ends up being worse, like very diluted. So what's cool about the PRD is you, you can kind of like drip feed context and because of that, because of how tight the, the drip feeding is, you end up getting better results.”

“If you, if you include the text in a JSON format, it's more likely to give you the right text.”

“Why is this so key? Is that you can actually feed this in to Claude and say, you know, write copy on my landing page based on these pain points and specific language they use. And that's going to help you convert better on what, whatever it is you're working on.”

“social is a game of formats. So, you know, there must be a way to use his formats in another niche.”

“If you're repeating the same prompt weekly, that's a product in, in hiding in plain sight.”

“So these are manual, uh, workflows that are apps waiting to be built.”

“Literally talk to business owners about their daily Excel updates, because that's an AI agent waiting to be built.”

“Find two star Shopify WordPress plugins with high usage. So you want low stars, but high usage. That's like the holy grail. So people care about the space, but the experience sucks.”

“sometimes you can charge two, three, four, five times more when you have better design.”

“the little details, um, do matter, like the little, like the, you know, for example, logo is kind of like moving a little bit and You know, if you hover over the number one software to spot trends, like, uh, right there, like, yeah, there's like a little, you know, things move. This is the thing that, that moves the…”

“if you're building in public, you might want to have one really big goal. For example, I want to make a million dollars ARR in 12 months, and I'm building the next big tennis app. And that's a really big goal. And you can remind people of that goal, but you need to have sub goals. So if you want to bring people along…”

“No, you're gonna wanna get really good at one format and one platform to start, at least until you get to 25 or 50,000 followers.”

“there's a simple way to get to 10,000 followers on X that anyone could get to, and it's set up tweet notifications with people in your niche, and just be a reply guy or gal, and, and just create thoughtful content, not just like great thread or, I agree, thoughtful content to people in your niche, and you're just going…”

“So oftentimes, like, the best MVP is a service business with, you know, some automations, because it, you basically get paid to learn about what the Pain points are and what the workflows are, and then you can, over time, your V two can actually be the software that automates it all.”

“So I would say, you know, be generous with your rev share. Uh, you can always Uh, start really high, uh, to get them on board, because they're taking a chance, and then, uh, over time, once you increase, like, how many affiliates you have, you can start decreasing that percentage.”

“I think it's a good process to, to always, like, create new brands, new handles, try new content, and get feedback, uh, because at this point you might have thousands of followers, you might have customers already, and trying new stuff, um, it might be hard at that point.”

“I think that there's something really strong in building a portfolio. I think that, um, it also diversifies your revenue stream, so big, big fan of it, and I'm practicing what I preach, and what we preach is, you know, because we, we do operate a portfolio of businesses, and I do find that, I do sleep better at night…”

“So things like that where you're sharing hires, tools, learnings, infrastructure across products, and sometimes even customer lists, uh, is really, uh, an unfair advantage.”

“You know, if it's like tiny, uh, tiny, like Andrew Wilkinson, or late checkout, like us, like we end up building these private equity groups almost, that a holding company that people like to follow, it just helps all your products, both from a hiring perspective, acquisition, uh, good things happen when, you know,…”

“you wanna create an internal idea to launch pipeline, and that could be every 30 days you ship something, right? So you're holding company every single day, you're shipping an MVP, uh, sorry, not every day, every single month is shipping an MVP, you're putting it out there, you wanna create this system where You have…”

“I've noticed, and this is a tip for everyone listening. I noticed that when you go to an LLM, I use, I'm using Manus and I can talk about that. And you give it an image like that, you're going to get better results.”

“It, it might be the biggest hack of, of using LMs, like, well, is ask for the prompt. You will never be able to out prompt the, the person, the guy, you know, the software that sees all the prompts.”

“Um, and by the way, there's like, I don't know why people don't do this, but more people don't do this, but there's thousands of one million dollar a year plus business ideas, just taking Lindy's and gum loops workflows and just selling it into the real world, right?”

“This opens the door to a huge number two, uh, basically creating commercials for different niches. Um, this opens the door to, um, So many different like vertical niches that wouldn't have this level of cinematography and couldn't afford a 500,000 dollar agency for a commercial.”

“One thing I like to do is to look at ads that come up because that shows me if it's a good business or not. And like website builders advertise everywhere.”

“creating a list of, uh, top, let's say email providers, but having affiliate links is probably, and creating directories and creating guides around this sort of thing is probably the most, the easiest way to get started in this whole, like make money online space.”

“An editor of a newspaper doesn't write a lot of the actual articles. Like, basically, you have a bunch of journalists that are giving you all these articles, and as the editor, you're like, this is good, this is bad. Double down on this. You know what? Go research this piece. That's exactly the role of, like, the…”

“That's how everyone needs to be in front of their AI tools, is no matter what niche you are, You have to be like, okay, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna use these tools, and I'm just gonna be getting a bunch of really interesting ideas from it, and then I'm gonna say, that's a bad idea, that's a good idea, double down on this,…”

“And the number one reason it's interesting for people to start AI workflow agencies and AI agencies and service-based businesses that help implement this stuff is actually not, not because you can make millions of dollars a year from that, but it's to learn the workflows and learn the tools so that you can implement it…”

“See, you don't even need to know how to prompt really well here, right? Like, there's so many guides around how do you, how do you get the most out of v-zero, for example, but it's like, just ask Claude or ask ChatGPT how to do the best prompting. Like, it will tell you how to do the best prompting.”

“there's this arbitrage moment that exists right now where you can actually go and create Pixar level content that's gonna fly on social media if it's actually good, uh, and your competitors are not.”

“I think that if you can think in systems, not campaigns, creating these, like, systems, these flowcharts type things, you'll outperform.”

“Um, I think that from like a user psychology perspective, someone's net worth on a chart Is an extremely addictive, uh, thing to look at. And I think that's going to drive daily logins.”

“You know, this community lives on X. So, um, and X prioritizes video. So you're kind of crazy if you're launching a product without a video.”

“ignoring hundreds of millions of active people seems like a foolish thing to do or silly thing to do if you're trying to increase your probability success.”

“The sketching economy is the real AI revolution. When anyone can turn sketches into production ready designs, taste and ideation become the only scarce resources.”

“Really smart strategy is to rebuild traditional products with AI as your unfair advantage. Hiding the complexity behind familiar interfaces. I was actually thinking about mobile apps when I wrote this. Basically, just look at proven apps that have no AI, Make them AI first if it adds a ton of value to the end customer.”

“the way to get news, you know, one of the ways that I've noticed has been really helpful to get newsletters, uh, subscribers is to say, okay, how can you package up value? Um, and that's related to a piece of, you know, a tweet, an Instagram post, whatever, and give that away. And people who get that value also get…”

“you can't rely on Manus to, to basically say, hey, build me a million dollar business and just like say, go wild. You do have to do the right prompts here.”

“It does, it really does feel like an AI employee, but it's kind of like when you have a, you know, junior-ish employee, um, you do have to manage them, mentor them, and get them to be smart.”

“if you want to build an AI business, you need either a data advantage or a network effect advantage.”

“So if you could basically own, I'm the secure MCP guy. Everywhere else is not secure and create that positioning dichotomy. I think that, that itself is like going to help you win deals.”

“if you aren't getting engagement, start one level broader than your niche. You need engagement for reach before you can specialize sometimes.”

“the way to come up with your format is to look for formats outside your niche. Copying what's saturated in your space makes it harder to stand out, right?”

“I'm not saying don't do ads. I'm just saying that the best ads start by being organic first.”

“I mean, I think the, the number one reason why anyone should create an audience Is to have something to fall back on.”

“something I usually do is I'll, I'll respond. Well, I'll create a post and just add as much value as possible. And then at the end, just sign my name and like Greg and then, you know, Greg from buy it for now products.com and just link that. So you're not even saying like, go here, check this out. It's just like people…”

“The reality is you need with all these, a lot of these tools, it's as good as the prompt that you can do it, right? So you do need to know design terms and like what's trending and what people call taste to get the most out of it.”

“Every export button in software represents a business opportunity. So think about this. When a user clicks export, what are they saying to us? They're basically saying this software doesn't need, doesn't do what I need to, so I'm taking my data elsewhere to do manual work. So each export represents a workflow…”

“Basically where, where, where there's places where people say, I wish these two, uh, things work together. Um, that's, You know, aha moment for, uh, an opportunity.”

“the most successful AI SaaS businesses are niche. They focus on one painful workflow. They make it 10 times better with AI. They let the AI suggest next actions, and they charge immediately, and they charge immediately. If you're solving real pain, people will pay from day one.”

“You price based on time saved, 20 to 30% of manual labor costs. You focus on quantifiable ROI.”

“You need to have a format product fit. So don't, don't, you know, this makes sense for you. Point of view, you have an essay due. If you're building Jenny AI, that makes complete sense. Now, if you would have done the, a guy drinks a cup of milk for every thousand followers he has, and then you're like, okay, sign up…”

“Actually the way to, the way to do it is you take a video of yourself playing the game and the tweet has the video because the link is going to suppress the algo then, and then after a few hours as a second tweet, you can include the link.”

“If you're building an AI startup, building a unique data set of what works is going to be your moat.”

“in this you're going to have to prompt a little bit more. This you're going to one shot it more often. ChatGPT you're going to one shot it more often.”

“find underserved software. Number one, then it's build an agency, productized agency, turn that agency into productized agency. Then it's build templates, digital assets, sell them, high margin, 90 plus percent margin, and then it's Can I, you know, add plugins?”

“there's a lot of service based businesses that, you know, their agencies, consulting firms that do a service, a painful task for a business. You don't have to have humans do that anymore. You can now use technology to go and automate a lot of that stuff. Um, and they might seem like boring businesses, but you know,…”

“this is the difference between if you make. 50,000 dollars a year in sales, or you could make five million having these tight systems that just automatically You know, are in your workflows. Um, it's the, it's your unfair advantage, frankly. Like, you know, most people aren't doing it.”

“When a company is doing well, they don't want me involved. Like they, they, they honestly, like, I don't have like the context that They might have. I shouldn't say they don't want me involved. They don't want me to, like, in the weeds. They want the strategic advice. Um, they want, you know, access to connections.…”

“Netflix wasn't actually competing with Blockbuster. They were competing with guilt.”

“the mistake a lot of people make around Twitter bios or Instagram bios is they focus on people who follow them already, not followers. Sorry, people who follow them already, not non-followers. Your, your bio is for people who land are not following you, and your goal is to convert as many people from not followers to…”

“a bio needs a few things. It needs, um, so let's just come up with a framework for X or social bios. So it needs credibility, it needs intrigue, and it needs a value proposition.”

“When you post something, these people are not engaging with it. And then it just suppresses you in the algorithm. It's better to have like literally 94 followers than to have 31,000, but have those 94 people super engaged.”

“On Twitter, on X, that means you should be posting one to two times per day. On YouTube, that means you should be posting one time per week if you're doing long form. If you're doing short form, that means you're doing three to four times a week.”

“I have this framework we talk a lot about in the pod called, you know, build an audience. Convert that audience to a community, or a portion of them, and then go and build a product. For that community.”

“The algorithm gods will always love you trying new features for, for the platform.”

“It's, it's like building a social account is like a startup where you have to iterate your way to product market fit, except this time it's content market fit. And oftentimes it takes six, 1218 months, 24 months, it takes time. Uh, and your job is to be the chief experimenter.”

“And now with AI, not only could you find a SAS tool, uh, you can build one, right? So you can use tools like rep, rep lit, like bolt, like V zero, uh, like lovable. And actually go and create these tools yourselves. Um, and that's another beauty about a newsletter business, right? Instead of, you know, you can build…”

“Pre CTAs and post CTAs are, are just, you know, some of the best ways to get people to, to, from your, your social audience, X, Instagram, TikTok, and get them on your newsletter.”

“If you have 2000 subscribers and they're all C-suite execs, you hit a home run. Sponsors are desperate to get in front of these decision makers.”

“Look for ads that have been live the longest on high spending accounts. They're literally consistent high performers.”

“This type of newsletter is trickier to monetize because there's no clear niche, but it's a great way to grow a broad audience fast.”

“Local newsletters can grow to six figure businesses in one city with the potential to scale to seven figures by expanding into multiple cities.”

“That's, that's like the, the big learning from running a holding company is, is that, is like you, you, you throw a lot against the wall, you make a cash flowing, uh, you evolve it, uh, into something that excites you. You simplify it wherever you can. You know, last year, going, 20, 23, going to 20, 24, I said, my…”

“Use platforms like VZero, Framer AI, platforms like that to get, like, the basics done. And then iterate from there, either on your own, ideally you know some code, excuse me, code, but otherwise you can still, you can still do some like light animations that, um, or honestly go to like, go to Upwork, get someone to do…”

“how do you build a smart agent that is going to be valuable? Start with one action that matters. Add LLM understanding. Build tight feedback loops, learn from every interaction, and expand slowly.”

“What I suggest people do is turn on notification bells for a list of creators that you care about and just be the first, first person to write something thoughtful. Don't write like cool video or, or great thread on Twitter, right? Like, are you kidding me? Don't do that. Um, but add value through comments, and you'll…”

“Quora is there's so much value. There's so much good stuff on Quora because you can understand what people are asking for and, and just go and make like going to make videos based on top Quora questions and answers in and itself is such a huge insight.”

“I think the easiest startup ideas with some of these data sets is database as a service. Um, so I've seen that trend pop up more and more, DAS, database as a service, which basically, what does that mean? It's a fancy way of saying you're taking some data, you're curating the data, you're putting a paywall against it,…”

“But I think the mistake a lot of people are, you know, will make with it probably is that they'll start getting a lot of traffic and they'll monetize via like Google AdSense. Um, but I think that the bigger opportunity is go sell software to restaurants, you know, um, like just use this to be a powerhouse of, you know,…”

“Everyone thinks of discounts. I'll give you 10% off, 20% off, 30% off. If, if the average, you know, order size is a hundred dollars, and, and you were gonna give 20 dollars off, right? Instead of saying you have 20% off, because everyone is saying you have 20% off, the whole internet is saying you have 20% off. Say…”

“if you're looking for something to bundle, go reach out to companies that you like, and they're happy because they're getting distribution, like a digital product is free to distribute, um, and you're happy because you're adding value.”

“The first step is just building one idea, building one project that turns into a product that turns into a company that's profitable. And then once you get to that point, then like, like some of your buddies could, could be like, you know what, I'm actually going to go acquire another business and then kind of build my…”

“Another reason I really like this idea and people who listen to the pod know this about me is it's a, it's a wedge that could evolve into something else. So If you build the horse publication, personal publication, Step one, and it starts taking off. Step two could easily be building SaaS for that community.”

“it's way harder to get a stranger to drop a hundred dollars on some product from an influencer that they've never heard about And way easier for them to just double click on, uh, you know, download an app, double click again and spend five bucks, you know? So that's another interesting thing about, uh, digital products…”

“The difference between an exceptional thumbnail and a great thumbnail is actually a big difference. Like Colin and Samir could have just put in a great thumbnail. Um, their click-through rate might have been like five, six percent. Um, but having an exceptional, uh, unique Uh, thumbnail could be the difference of a,…”

“So, it's basically cheap to launch a dating app, whereas it used to cost a couple million bucks.”

“with programmatic SEO, um, IE, you know, looking at what people are searching for and creating landing pages at scale. Um, there's a huge opportunity right now, um, to, to basically create a bunch of directories.”

“I will say ideas die unless they, unless they, you need an owner basically for an idea. Um, and so that's something I've learned is unless I have like one GM or one person on this idea, The idea loses steam despite the funnel, uh, funnel guy.”

“the problem with, the reason why people can't get a lot out of vZero is because, frankly, they don't have the language to understand what good design is.”

“There's two ways to, to build AI apps. One is you come up with like a completely new idea like they have and spend a lot of time thinking about a unique product. Um, they have this canvas that I think is really cool. Um, and it really is a beautiful product. The other way to do it is, and which is what we're going to…”

“just because you know how to build a product doesn't mean you know how to build a product that retains and drives Engagement and word of mouth. So those, that's a whole separate ability of product optimization that cursor or bolt or whoever or whatever isn't going to help you do.”