The Exchanges

Q heart was pounding before you got on here. My heart is still just trying to settle in. I've done a thousand of these. I'm still nervous. I thought at some point the inner resistance, the lizard brain would quiet down. Can we ever conquer that part of us that creates this insecurity that keeps me from focusing on my questions and has me just focused on my inner, inner demons?

A Well, uh, Steve and I disagree with this about the resistance, but I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem. That trying to make the fear and the lizard brain go away is what distracts us and takes all of our time and energy. And in fact, you can befriend it. You can welcome it back. You can say, oh, I'm getting that tingling in my toes and that little pain in my stomach. It means I must be doing something worthwhile. And so I look forward to that feeling It's a good way to remember that you're alive, but it's also a good way to know that you're on track.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it can be conquered. I think that trying to conquer it is the problem.”

Q All right. Speaking of then, how did you not get your domain banned with all the people who are sending out email, both like cold email was part of the product and people were finding ways to do it. How did you not get your domains, uh, banned?

A I mean, first of all, because it's an agent that's very smart, that is there, that is researching the recipients that makes sure it's relevant and, and that writes very thoughtful emails, right? And actually the cold outreach from, from Pulsia Is, is, uh, gets, gets responses, right? People respond to it, right? I sometimes respond to call that reach from false yet to be honest. I saw it sometimes, like, they ping me, and I'm like, yeah, I respond. Uh, people respond. There's very low spam complaints, right? Which tells you that, like, it's, it's a pretty well thought out e-ending, and we have those, like, limits where, like, it was maximum one email per day per person, so that, like, if a recipient, specific recipient, Cannot receive more than one email from any Pulsia app, right? I see. And then we, and then we, we implemented, not in a good way, but like we implemented an unsubscribe button. Not in a good way because it was like a, a native, Gmail native unsubscribe in the header, but it wasn't at the bottom. So like if you opened it with another client, somehow it wasn't, sometimes it wasn't showing up depending on your email client. So now we have a, at the bottom, an unsubscribe button, but that unsubscribe button unsubscribes you from all marketing emails from any Pulsia app. Versus, for example, if someone uses OpenClaw to do cold outreach, first of all, there's not goi…

AI assessment note: “because we had all these guardrails, um, well, there's very low spam complaints”

Q And so were you also teaching software or just big concepts like this and then letting them know there's software to implement it with?

A I don't like the big concept teachers, right? There's plenty of them out there. I don't think they're bad. I just don't think it's very valuable. What I like to do is we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're going to go practical and into a piece of software, right? And I'll say, yeah, you could use this, you know, we might use Chattupt, but you can do this with Grok or with Claude or with, you know, deep seek, whatever the heck you want. There's a lot of different options out there, but These principles apply across all these things. Now let's try it. Everybody take five minutes and have a conversation with your AI about this. Great. What did, how did that work? What did you guys run into? You know, I, I'm a, I'm a practical teacher. I want people to come away knowing, okay, I can do this now. Not just, oh yeah, AI seems cool.

AI assessment note: “we'll touch on a big thing, but then we're going to go practical”

Q a consultant, you turn that over to somebody else, right? You might install HubSpot. Now HubSpot's a core piece of their business. Here, you've got it yourself. Okay, um, and then the other thing that I kind of missed and brushed past, actually, no, let's talk about pricing. How do you think about pricing? Why do you charge more than others who are doing the same type of AI transformation?

A You know, I really just looked at what would, what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal, right? You know, I believe that every company, every single company should have somebody in charge of AI. I don't care if it's, you know, director of AI implementation or a chief AI officer. Somebody needs to be in charge of AI and their job is to go around and keep people accountable. Hey, we have these tools. What are you doing? You know, are you trained on this? Do we need to do training on that? Do we need to do this? Why are you still doing this manually over here? You could, I can do that easily. You gotta have somebody that's in charge of this. And I also was bringing a level of, uh, sophistication in terms of, I, I'm not a 22 year old out of college. I had, I've been around the block. I've built companies. I've sold them. I know how to run a business. And so I just said, you know what, in order for me to provide ongoing support, and really this is what drove it in the beginning, in order for me to actually provide ongoing support, it's gotta be worth my time. So I'm gonna charge it kind of at a, you know, a good, good employee, 15 K a month to start. And, um, and then we'll, we'll go from there. And, and, you know, it's kind of like, you know, once someone runs the four minute mile, like it's easy to run the four minute mile for people that are at that level…

AI assessment note: “I really just looked at what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal”

Q But I still don't understand then why not build this social network thing that you had in mind instead of building this for other people?

A I went down this vibe coding kind of rabbit hole after I built this first thing called Echoes is what I called the app was the, you know, memories of the past, right? Um, so anyway, this Echoes app was cool, but then I said, oh, I wonder if I could do this. I wonder if I could do this. And so I ended up, I, you know, a few months later, I'd built 20 apps and, and, uh, and then people started asking me, hey, Could you help me do stuff, whatever? And I said, hey, have you tried this? And, you know, I was able to do things for them so much faster, and I realized that there was an opportunity there, and then it just kind of, this just kind of happened.

AI assessment note: “I realized that there was an opportunity there, and then it just kind of”

Q What, what about AI? AI is such a big thing. Is it like, how do you prompt ChatGPT with questions? Is it how do you build with Replit? It's a, it's a company with multiple people. How can you teach one thing?

A Yeah. You know, there, there are principles. There are principles that are, that are good. It's learning how to think differently. That's what I really like to focus on is, you know, how do you, like today, there's a concept of like throwaway software. Like you can literally vibe code a solution. Like you might have a task that was going to take you six hours, but instead you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again, right? But you wouldn't think like that back in 2020, right? Or before vibe coding was a thing. Right. Back when I started my company in 2016, that was not an option for me. And most people have no idea that AI is capable of just whipping something up quickly. They can actually execute on things and build stuff and do incredible things like that. And so learning, learning how to think a little bit differently, how to approach problems. There's principles like throwaway software, or even, even just a very simple thing. Like I mentioned earlier, have AI interview you. Right. That's a great skill that a lot of people haven't thought of, right? That helps you really flesh out an idea and ensures that you stay in control and your AI doesn't go off on some tangent on its own.

AI assessment note: “There are principles. It's learning how to think differently.”

Q the same thing that you sold to the other one. And now so far, what we're talking about is, um, for people who are just listening, he's nodding. Yes, this is enthusiastically. This is the way that he found his recurring revenue model. For one, I understand you went beyond teaching to actually become more of a CTO to having some kind of frameworks that you're installing. What is that?

A Yeah. You know, the, the fractional chief AI officer model that I came up with, I, I realized that there were three kind of buckets that, that made sense. And I said this on the first call and it has stuck, right? But it's S T E is the kind of framework that I like to say it's strategy, transformation, and education. I was already doing that education piece a bunch, right? I had been teaching people and coming in and helping them get up to speed, but I also had been doing strategy as well with a lot of these CEOs, you know, before A call or before an education seminar thing I would do with people. I would sit down with the CEO and having, I had the benefit of again, having been a CEO for a decade. And so I, I had experience, I had ideas. I could, I could actually consult at a decently high level. And so, um, I was able to say, look, this is what I think it means for your business. This is how things are going to change. Here's technology. This is what it means. And then that transformation piece in the middle there is a, and I'm really good at building. I can build stuff super fast. I can vibe code. I can show you guys how to do it and work with you, work Alongside you. But ultimately I want you to really start becoming an AI, you know, first company where AI is doing things. It's taking tasks away from you. It's saving you money. It's saving you time. It's giving you back time…

AI assessment note: “it's S T E is the kind of framework that I like to say it's strategy, transformation, and education.”

Q And by the way, demo mode is what?

A So demo mode is this cool little skill I built for myself because I show off these workflows all the time. People want to see this stuff and I want to show the real thing, but the challenge is my real stuff has my real work in it. Personal information. Uh, so I made this like skill that is, I call it demo mode. And basically it allows me to run real requests, real things that I might actually do in the world, but demo mode, um, Basically like rewrites it so that they're like redacted or like changes the names of things. So it doesn't actually show off stuff that, uh, might actually, you know, leak zap your confidential information.

AI assessment note: “Basically like rewrites it so that they're like redacted or like changes the names”

Q What's an automation that somebody would do today here versus somewhere else?

A Whenever I wanted to just like easily update my kit newsletter with my circle, uh, course students, like I'm using Zapier. I'm not going to go custom build something. You can just pay for Zapier and then use Zapier to like automate all those things together. When I was selling my books on my Shopify store, I was using Zapier for some of those automations as well. It's just, it makes it so easy that I really believe that you should have kind of like a bimodal approach to automation where You just use Zapier for most things, but then when you want to get, like, crazy in the weeds and, you know, build Felix, like, then you go to code, but if you're not gonna go that crazy, you just use Zapier.

AI assessment note: “Whenever I wanted to just like easily update my kit newsletter with my circle”

Q Like what? So now I'm understanding what you're doing. I wouldn't have thought of it two years ago, but go ahead.

A I'll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did, I had the war council help me out with on, uh, analyzing our sales data. What that was, was I had four different spreadsheets. Those each spreadsheet had like 10 or 12 tabs in it. They all had like hundreds of rows of data in it. And so I don't know about you, but, like, I don't consider, like, a spreadsheet my natural habitat, and so I'm looking at all this stuff, and I can, like, I can start to, like, poke out some interesting things going on in there, but I'm like, it's hard for me to spot it all, and so I just fed all four of those spreadsheets into my AI system, and I said, help me review, first I said, just, like, help me review this stuff. Like, walk me through what's in In these, these spreadsheets, because I don't, I'm not exactly sure how to go through them. And so, as it's going through, it's like pointing out different things to me. I always like to start here, too, because I don't want to assume, I don't want to try and one-shot the dang thing. Like, I like to, I like to check its work, and if I say, like, hey, help me review it, like, step by step, I can sort of get a feel for the files in the same way that it has a feel for the finals. But then eventually, when I get to the end, I'll just say, like, Analyze all the themes that you see in here that you think are important for me as the CEO to know. And then it…

AI assessment note: “I'll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did”

Q Eliasson. I don't know if you've seen his experiment where he's using OpenClaw to create Felix. This agent that is going on Twitter and making money for him, and he has these updates. I think it's every week with how much revenue they're making coming from, ah, Felix and Nat's account. Ok, I see that. What else is there for growing revenue? What else are you doing to help them?

A I mean, today, so today it's, like, mainly, uh, cold emails that, like, can work in, like, in some niche, and, like, if you, if it's, if it's niche enough, you can actually find people, and it works. Um, and then, uh, meta ads is, like, the big one, but, like, I'll introduce, like, other, other types of ad platforms. Um, and then there's all the whole influencer thing, where, like, you could actually, you know, hire influencers to post UGC, or, like, to post content online on their channels, and there's a lot of, Third-party platforms that offer that, and that I could plug into, ah, to offer that to customers. And same thing, it's like, you could do it yourself, and go through those websites, and do all the work, and send them to a subscription, and like, figure out how they work, or you go to Pulsia, and like, you, you, either it's, you just tell Pulsia, let it rip, you know, like, just go for it. Here's my budget, go for it. Or you just say, okay, specifically I want to do mid-ads, or specifically I want to do influencers, and you click a button, and it just runs with it.

AI assessment note: “today it's, like, mainly, uh, cold emails... meta ads... the whole influencer thing”

Q that's off the shelf dead? Did we go from software that's literally off the shelf at Staples on a CD that you bring home to software that's on the web that you download to your computer to software that just exists on the web to now no longer software that exists on the web software in your imagination and no one's going to pay for this. What do you think?

A I think it's going to persist or some subset of software persist. Obviously some will get eaten away by AI, but if something works and it's already been Um, battle tested for security and a bunch of other stuff, and it integrates with a bunch of things. Um, if it's cheap enough, you'll just keep using it. Like, why even spend time on it or worry about it, right? So part of it also comes down to, like, what's your relative cost of something, and how much do they charge you, and how, how onerous is it to replace it, and if you replace it, are there other dependencies, and eventually, you know, your coding agent will be able to deal with some of those dependencies, but is that the highest value thing for your coding agency to do? This is why internal tools often aren't, don't get, have giant teams at companies, right? It's because they want to deploy those engineers against The bigger product development, right? The bigger fish to fry. And then they realize that, oh, we really need internal tools and we need internal tooling team. And sometimes those are amazing people and sometimes the people aren't as strong because they're really strong people want to work on product, right? The coding agent thing may be similar in that you may only want to deploy them against the things that are highest ROI. You're going to have some limited budget for what you're doing.

AI assessment note: “I think it's going to persist or some subset of software persist.”

Q through a tough divorce, so he's got a divorce AI. But if he were going to productize this email marketing customized solution, maybe people wouldn't sign up to that. Maybe they would say, I like that. Hey, Alex, build the same thing for me. And then Alex builds it for five businesses. He keeps adjusting and he keeps improving it based on what he's learning. And is that the future?

A Well, it sounds like it's just repeated, building repeatable software then. I don't know, what's the difference? Where's the line? Is it five customers versus a thousand? Is it, you know, why doesn't he just start selling that to everyone? So, you know, it just sounds like a different size customer. Now, if you look at certain types of industries, government, certain really big institutions, et cetera, they always did this. They're still doing it, right? The, um, I don't know if it was the FBI or CIA or somebody spent like eighty million dollars to build an ATS. They hired a third party consulting firm. I remember here with Accenture, Deloitte, someone built them an ATS for like, eighty million dollars. They could have just bought Greenhouse or in a more recent era Ashby or something.

AI assessment note: “Well, it sounds like it's just repeated, building repeatable software then.”

Q Is it just introducing, like, ideas? Are you building software for them? Are you helping them buy software? How does it work?

A It's, uh, building stuff. Yeah, it's basically asking what are, um, things that would be very high ROI to implement? What would, what would create good returns for these customers? And what can be done in an expedient manner based on what we've built to date? So that that way we have some, you know, a set of modules that we're using that we've already built. There's a platform that we've already built. And so how do we rapidly accelerate something so that We can show very fast success, and then once we show success, we can add the next thing within a vertical and build against that, and it may take a little bit longer, but now they trust us, they know us, you know, we may have access to data or other things that can be used to sort of implement these other things with the idea that that basic fundamental module tool can be customized and cross sold to other customers in the same vertical over time.

AI assessment note: “It's, uh, building stuff. Yeah, it's basically asking what are, um, things”

Q like vibe coding this thing, or somehow he's coding it. You're, you're saying There will be a software provider that does it. It'll be the new MailChimp. If you're, if you have that idea, don't give up on it and say it's going to be eaten away by vibe coding software and people will create it themselves. Create that software. There's a future in that. Am I understanding you right?

A Yeah. I mean, he may create the next MailChimp, right? I don't know. So that, that's the question is, um, you know, where does, where does the innovation come from and where does scale come from? And in general, what you find, I mean, this happens all the time, right? Where, say you do have an internal tools team building something for you. This, this happened with a company that I helped out with quite early called Braintrust, where, um, you know, they basically provide like an eval suite for enterprise amongst a bunch of other stuff, right? They have sort of a series of products now, but what they kind of started with was, um, can we help make eval really easy as you adopt the LLM so that you can change the model and you can see what are, how do those changes propagate in terms of performance relative to some test stuff that you have? And, um, and, you know, a lot of companies are using them now, uh, in terms of sort of the leading companies that have adopted AI. And I think that, um, that was a good example where I helped them with early customer calls, and we call a customer, and, um, those customers would often say things like, um, oh yeah, I already have an internal team working on this, we don't need it. And then they call back three months later and they'd say, actually, we really need this. Our internal team, the resources should go to something else. This is important…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I mean, he may create the next MailChimp, right?”

Q That's, that's the idea you ended up pursuing. What are some of the other ones that you didn't? I'm trying to understand how you figured out what to do or what to play with.

A Yeah, I mean, that was the one that ended up being the thing. I had another demo that I built that I'm actually have, like, revisited, and I can tell you about why, but that would basically take New York State legislation from their API, and you know, the sort of idea, like, no one reads the bill. Like, the bill comes out, and it's too many pages, and it's too confusing, and there's too many bills, so nobody reads the bill. You know, I got I got involved in government at Uber. Um, you know, I don't, I wouldn't say that I was interested in it, but it, it was interested in me, and so I had to get sort of into the weeds on that stuff, and AI feels like a good way to make sure that everybody reads the bill, um, and that things can't be, you know, released in the middle of the night and then voted on the next day. Like, so I made this thing that would take every bill coming off the New York State Senate, uh, feed and summarize it, and do some other things like, like ask it, who's gonna care about this? Who is likely to support it? Who's likely to oppose it? Things like this. And so there's an idea there that I worked on with a buddy from Uber that we actually have revisited, and like I just said, I'll circle back on that and, and kind of explain why, but, um, we're gonna be releasing that as like a side quest in the next few weeks. Um, so that was one idea. I, I feel like Customer s…

AI assessment note: “I had another demo that I built that I'm actually have, like, revisited”

Q don't see much is like what you just showed me earlier, which is here's how I'm thinking about drip campaigns. Here's how I'm customizing it. Um, how I'm thinking about getting new customers in the door. That kind of stuff doesn't seem to be getting as much attention. Is it because no one, no one's paying attention to it, or it's just not flashy enough for us to talk about?

A Uh, I think because marketing is the real work and people don't like to talk about it. Um, you know, actually your go to market strategy and your acquisition and your funnel and your CAC and your LTV, you know, these are actually the real business things that we all need to be thinking about. They're a little less sexy and a little, a little less exciting. Um, so I'll tell you this. I, I think the loop that I, I, you know, briefly mentioned is actually probably the most valuable thing I could talk about today, which is Every day, create, just go to amp, go to cloud code, go to your favorite agent and say, I want an email every day with key with one to two key actions I should take to acquire more customers at our, uh, desired CAC. Right. And you build out a little script. It's very simple. It's a cron job. It runs at midnight and you basically feed the right information into the model. And then you say the model, write me an email with your thoughts on our stats and what we should do today to increase our signups, to create our engagement, to increase our numbers. And actually that loop has led me, you know, very quickly to optimizing the business, you know, in a, in a real way versus like what features should I build?

AI assessment note: “I think because marketing is the real work and people don't like to talk”

Q come in and they watch this stuff and then they say, I need an idea. They come in, they subscribe to the product that helps them learn and come up with ideas. Say, I need to know how to build. They come and subscribe to, uh, the service where you teach them how to do it. That's the model, and so then YouTube comes in and says what to you?

A Well, they say that we have dangerous content. I believe they have some sort of automated moderation system. And I know that you, uh, Google as a whole is a very lean business. They like to automate everything. So I think they are going through a project right now over there where they are trying to figure out how to moderate content in this crazy AI faceless automated world. And, um, they essentially labeled our content, some of our past content in our library as Quote, unquote, dangerous content. Um, and that is a policy that they have on their website of what entails dangerous content. And, you know, if you get enough warnings or strikes on your channel, they can delete the whole thing. And then, you know, this whole thing that you built over years and feel like you own can just be obliterated overnight and vanish.

AI assessment note: “Well, they say that we have dangerous content.”

Q I think it's interesting. I, I imagine that you're laughing to yourself saying, I don't think that this is going to be a long-term success. It has to be developed like you do from scratch for the software to really hold up. Am I right about that?

A I, you know, that's, that's my thesis that there is a class of problems and a class of businesses that are associated with those problems that require more custom solutions. But at the end of the day, who, who really cares? Like who really cares about what it's made in or if it's custom or if it's Zapier, like the thing that you're, should be buying is the outcome for the business. And if people are able to deliver that value with a Zapier automation, Great. If that's the, if that's genuinely the easiest and most efficient way of generating that business outcome, and it grows and scales, go do that. Like, I think that's, I think that's perfectly okay. Um, I know, I, yeah, I work the other way, which is like, who needs the custom stuff, right? And like, who, who can't work with, like, just a Zapier, and then that's where we fit in.

AI assessment note: “that's my thesis that there is a class of problems... that require more custom solutions”

Q I think I'm getting where this is. Do you think there's room for other people to do what you're doing now?

A Yeah, definitely. I, I think it's actually a pretty blue ocean space. I, I, I probably talk to a competitor, um, maybe once every other week, once a week, you know, once every, and you know, I think it's, I think it's really blue ocean. Like the original thing that we talked about, which is like AI transformation is true. I think that every business that exists today will have AI, um, in their business moving forward. So I actually think that the opportunity space is expanding actually over time because Today, most businesses have zero or one agent or AI integrated into their business. If that, um, in the future, I'm sure that they're going to have hundreds of agents running within their business, and that unlocks an entirely new class of problems.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, definitely. I, I think it's actually a pretty blue ocean space.”

Q Give me an example. Like, what's, what's, um, what's a way that you're able to build faster with AI, and what's an outcome that you're able to give because AI is part of it? Hmm. Be specific.

A Yeah, I mean, they're not necessarily the same, um, the same answer, so I'll break it into, like, two parts. Like, the, the latter question can be answered by, um, what are the What are the solutions that are now possible using large language models in this layer of, like, sort of generalized intelligence that these large frontier labs have created that were not possible before? Um, a good example of that could be, um, Feedback driven and like natural. So like, for example, we worked with a, a really big, one of the biggest like family law, um, offices here in Texas. And, you know, they wanted to build something similar to like a Harvey, but very specifically around their data and their sort of SME feedback, guiding a chat based system that they could use both internally as a training agent, as well as externally to help new prospects and customers answer questions. Um, or new clients, I should say, um, answer questions about their divorce proceedings, for example. Um, that's something that requires a high amount of reasoning, right? In order to provide the correct answer. And that's the type of knowledge work that was previously gated. There was no computer application system that could really help with that because the corpus, the possibility, the world of possible questions is so massive, right? Like there's no way to, to hard code all those answers out. Um, so that's someth…

AI assessment note: “we worked with a, a really big, one of the biggest like family law”

Q might enjoy that, that this is an area that they could keep improving on. This is something that they could, uh, just keep building on because it's not going to change dramatically day to day the way software might. You on the other hand said, all right, I'm going into software. You started immediately thinking about how to turn this into software. How long before you got your first customer?

A So, I want to say I took at least a good month on it before I even decided to do Facebook ads or anything, just to, because there's a plethora of, uh, agent types people need, so expired listing leads, buyers, etc. But I want to say as soon as we launched the Facebook ad campaign, it took us less than, What was it? Four days? I think, yeah, I think it was less than four days to get our first customer, and then it was, it was the easiest, because I've never done something like this before, and it was the, I was so shocked of how easy it was to take leads and to convert them into paying customers, because we did a paper lead campaign.

AI assessment note: “it took us less than four days to get our first customer”

Q What was the role breakdown going to be Aiden? Let's bring you in here.

A Um, Evgeny is pretty much responsible for everything on the product and engineering side, as you've just heard. And then of course I kind of, you know, give my feedback and we, we collaborate on where we want the product to head and what we think is next. But obviously he has a better understanding of, you know, what's possible and what should be done and what comes next. Uh, so my responsibilities really lie on the sales and marketing side. So I'm doing all of the outreach and kind of brand creation, brand promotion. And then handling everything on the operations side, things around like, you know, legal and setting up new software and making sure that we're kind of maintaining relationships with people that we need, both on the client side and just regular colleagues like that.

AI assessment note: “my responsibilities really lie on the sales and marketing side”

Q Okay, so how do you go from an idea to actually building this software?

A What you need to do is you need something called an S, yeah, I need to first build something called an SRS. Do you know what an SRS is? An SRS is a software, uh, um, a software specification. So what is a software specification? You need very, very details about what it is that the software is going to be. That's what you need in your life. And so you can go to AI. Let's say, for example, Grok. I pay 30 dollars a month for Grok just to talk to it. It's my therapist. So I'm walking the dog. I open up Grok. I'm like, hey, Grok, good morning. I have an idea. It's okay. What's your idea? And I tell them, I have an idea. I want to set up a goal-setting masterclass. I want people to identify what their values are, their issues, their beliefs. I want people to figure out their roles. I want people to set goals. I want to come up with a strength finder assessment so they don't have to pay 20 dollars to the Gallup Center. I want to be able to come up with an Eniagram, a disk assessment, this, dah, dah, dah. I gave it a list of everything that's in my head that I wanted, and I said, give me some software ideas for a simple way for me to do this. And then it gives me a couple of different frameworks and different software ideas, and I say, ok, make me a detailed SRS out of this. And it gives me details of every specific page, and what page I need, and what's going to be in the page, and t…

AI assessment note: “I need to first build something called an SRS.”

Q Okay. And so you said, great. I, one day this is going to happen. How did you end up with kid stories?

A So I have a, I have a, well, actually, uh, interesting enough now two sons. If you, you know, I had a, uh, my second child, uh, literally a month ago. Um, but with my first son, we, you know, we, we, my wife and I, one of us tend to read to him every night. Right. And, uh, and I was, as I was reading to him every night, I, I realized that there was a disparity between the content that he was reading and the things I remembered from childhood. Uh, you know, I, I was a big fan of Tintin. Uh, you know, I wanted to be an adventurer, you know, explore the world. I, I literally have in my office, um, at home, the, um, you know, a big poster of Tintin goes to the moon with a, with a rocket ship, you know, and that was kind of, kind of my, my dream. And so I, you know, obviously that's also the dream I have for my child, right? I want him to be this adventurous person. And, and when I looked at the content that he was consuming and granted is a bit younger, I found it To be honest, a bit more mundane, uh, and there, there's content, I, I think it has high production value, but it feels a sort of like, for lack of a better expression, lowest common denominator to, you know, it's kind of like something that's very agreeable, you know, the, the dad in the family is a bumbling kind of funny character, you know, that's like, I don't really want my, I want my kid to see me as a fun person, b…

AI assessment note: “as I was reading to him every night, I realized that there was a disparity”

Q become a bigger slice of the pie. Um, so I do think that we continue to be movies. I do think there's going to continue to be a new tube. But also think that there's going to be this emergent behavior of creating content just for your own consumption, such as taking photos for yourself, which is not, it's not so foreign when I tell you in that way, right?

A Yeah. Yeah. I guess what you're saying is look, the, when the iPhone came out, it didn't stop, um, professional photographers from taking those professional photos. It just added more. And most of the photos that we take aren't even shared with anyone. It's just for ourselves. And you're saying the same thing's going to happen with AI. I might just make a story for myself to fall asleep. That is customized to me, and one to motivate me in the morning to wake up that is customized to me, and all of those things are additive. They're not replacing. I think that makes a ton of sense. I think that makes a ton of sense, and I could see that happening in a lot of different media. I have these songs that I've made in Suno that are just for me. They're customized to my little personal experiences, the things that make me happy, the things that make me, like, fired up or, or sentimental. You're saying, look, that's gonna happen for videos. It's gonna happen for movies. It's gonna happen for books. And the reason that you picked children's books from what I understand is you said, what are people willing to pay for? What are they so sentimental about that they want customized right now? It doesn't have to be super long kids books. So that's what you started out with, but your vision is much broader than that. You would like to get into making video stories for a kid so a parent can go an…

AI assessment note: “I think that makes a ton of sense, and I could see that happening”

Q I imagine digital marketing in general for online only businesses is an easy one, right?

A Digital marketing agencies, they're like, this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up because there is so much just low hanging fruit that can help any business be more, more successful. Mostly these lead management flows that we're showing off, like these are exceptionally impactful and they generate money, like speed to lead. You, it improves your conversion rate massively. And when you improve your conversion rates, it means you can now be more efficient in how you deploy your advertising dollars, because now you're getting a higher, uh, customer lifetime value, higher ACVs. So now you can afford to pay more for those leads than you were in the past. When you're able to pay more for those leads, you're boxing out competitors. And so these types of automations, it not just about being faster or more efficient and like saving you time. It is Actually like real money hitting your, uh, your bottom line when you do this stuff really well. And so you, like a lot of these folks understand this, uh, the, the marketing agencies deploying these, these workflows.

AI assessment note: “this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up”

Q You know what, what, I guess what I want to know before we start diving into what this is, is who cares? Like essentially what we're looking at is some, it's, it's looking at a type form entry and then it's qualifying whether the person is a good customer or not. Why is this so important that this is what you're showing me?

A So every business Has to acquire customers. Like this is just one of the core competencies of every business from day one is you have to figure out how to get customers. And if you're any good at marketing at all, you're going to acquire a bunch of leads and not everybody that sort of comes into your funnel is going to be an actually good fit for the products you sell. So what this agent here does is it pretends that we are a fictional Uh, automation agency that specializes in selling automation consulting services to mid-sized regional insurance providers. That's who we're really good at. Like maybe you're from the insurance world and you just know exactly like the processes inside and out, you know, the tech stacks, you know, everything. And so you are really good at this kind of business. And so you have, you know, you're, you're putting advertising out in the world. You're telling all the regional insurance providers like, Hey, I can help you do this stuff. But, you know, occasionally you've got like a mom and pop person coming in. Maybe you've got like a mega, you know, mega company that comes in. Maybe you've got someone that's not insurance. Maybe they're real estate, or maybe they're, you know, some other financial services. It's like close, but not exactly what you do. And they're just reaching out because they're like, well, you know, insurance, but maybe, you know, m…

AI assessment note: “not everybody that sort of comes into your funnel is going to be an actually good fit”

Q But if, if you were smaller and trying to create content using AI today, what would you do? What tools would you use? How would you think about it?

A Yeah. So, I would recommend that don't go in for the staple, put it on chat, get whatever it's throwing out, and put it out. You need to make content more intuitive. See, what's happening is with this onslaught of AI sloth being put out on the internet, uh, people need to be smarter about how they create content. Uh, they have to, and especially, it's becoming harder with Showing up on LMS as well. So you need to build an authority into whatever you're doing. So here's what I would do. I would actually go and create videos, and I'll start putting myself out on LinkedIn. I'll use those videos and repurpose those videos into content, and then create articles about me, and then start referencing that he, ah, say, Anirudh Singla spoke about this on ABC, and start building more trust signals around it. I would create a lot of content on LinkedIn Pulse. Just as an experiment, you'll see, LinkedIn gets cited almost on 12% of ChatGPT citations. So, if I start, I want to build out a personal brand as a founder, um, you know, to drive leads for my business and eventually grow, I start putting out a lot of content on LinkedIn Pulse, which starts to drive this narrative of a UGC growth lever, which an LLM would want to promote, and Embed my video at the top of the article and then have a summary of that down there. So you got to become intelligent about the way you put out there yourself. …

AI assessment note: “So here's what I would do. I would actually go and create videos”

Q how to use AI to write in a certain voice. Like, you can kind of write using my voice. There's enough content out there. What about video? Are you saying now that you can even have talking head or do you need to have images only? Can you do a talking head like me and move and gesture and everything? You can. What are you using for that? That works.

A Yes. So there are a lot of proprietary tools right now. So these are not like, you know, mass tools at this point. Uh, we're experimenting with a lot of them. Nothing where I've seen huge success where I can tell you that, you know, hey, this definitely works, but I can tell you this entire concept of Synthesia. I don't know if you've heard of them. They, they've now obviously expanded into a much larger company. Uh, I used to, uh, you know, I had a friend who used to run this company called rephrase.ai. Which used to do this, which was basically, um, uh, synthetic voice cloning, and, um, they got acquired by Adobe eventually, because Adobe wanted to introduce them in their Gen AI, uh, you know, platform features, but there's 100,000 of experiments being built and run on these things.

AI assessment note: “there are a lot of proprietary tools right now... concept of Synthesia... rephrase.ai”