The Exchanges

Q What's this company that you're doing that's doing the, um, the infrastructure and helping you save money? I never heard of them.

A So I'm working with, like, four different agent companies, startups, all in SF. Uh, the, the one I partner with the most is called Sapium. I'm actually in the office, their offices right now. And they are building the payment rails and their infrastructure for the new agenting economy. Um, and so the idea is that, like, they, they aim at helping companies like me, uh, who are running agents Make it much more efficiently. Give agents a wallet. That's, you know, make it easy for the agent to be able to buy things in the economy or do things in the economy, right? And obviously my mission is to empower, you know, users to use a very simple platform that enables them to, uh, have Pulsia do things for them on the economy. So it was a very good match. And so they, they helped me with like a lot of the infrastructure. And then I'm working with another company called Black Cell that is providing the, The sandbox. So either the sandbox in which the agent runs, and making it very secure, and also the sandboxes where the web applications are hosted. And then I work in another company called Anchor Browser. It's a company that like is working on a browser that is optimized for the agent to be able to run in a much more cost-efficient way, and knows how to navigate the internet and be a first citizen on, on the browser. And I worked for another fourth company that we started working with ca…

AI assessment note: “the one I partner with the most is called Sapium.”

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 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 Got it. Got it. And you're saying, listen, there, there are all these people who have audiences and ideas and insights. They, they have a company. I'll, I'll let Pulsio run it for them autonomously. Wow. Okay. And then as the founder, as the entrepreneur, what percentage do I get?

A So you always get, so I always take 20%. Um, and again, for me, it's like a way to like pay the bills and make sure that like I can reinvest, you know, make it a profitable company that can reinvest in making the platform better. Um, and the customer always gets 80%. So it's like, sort of like the customer is, is sort of like hiring this team. Yep. For a price that's, I'm making it, I'm making it as affordable as I can based on like the cost of compute. Uh, and in exchange, Paul CS says, well, I work, I work for like at cost. In exchange, I'll take 20%, but what's good is that I'm incentivized with the customer. It's like, if, if no businesses in three months make money, everyone's gonna turn, right? But I'm, you know, I'm setting up all the services, cold outreach, ads, because I know that, like, those things work. You know, like, obviously, like, right now it's a lot of organic traffic coming to Pulse. Yeah, but like, at the beginning, I bought ads, and it works. It finds your customer. Now, customers will not stay if it's not a good product. Um, but like you can find customers very easily. And so I think, uh, I think aligning with the customer on the outcome and charging them on the outcome instead of charging them on like a pure token basis is I think like sort of like the way AI based businesses are gonna, are gonna make sense.

AI assessment note: “and the customer always gets 80%.”

Q Is this the popular way for people to start up? My hunch is that they come up with their own ideas.

A I mean, I think it's, like, actually a surprising number of people go through the Surprise Me flow, and a surprising number of people are very sticky on the Surprise Me flow, because I think it puts a little bit of distance between the components being built, and they're, like, they're not as attached to the idea than, like, the people who, like, come up with an idea, and so they let Polsia just rip a little more, which yields usually better results, because they're not micromanaging the AI. Um, which is interesting, but like, uh, yeah, it's like there's a, there's around like, you know, around 30% of the 30, 40% of people that use, that do surprise me. Uh, so here you call it foundry, you know, AI that forges and operates companies autonomously. Interesting. So it's actually building like a pulse.

AI assessment note: “around 30% of the 30, 40% of people that use, that do surprise me”

Q page, it goes through so many iterations at first. I want to ask it, see it, ask it, see it, tweak, tweak, tweak. And then sometimes by the 30th request, I realize, no, this whole thing is going in the wrong direction. Let's start over. And then eventually I get there. You tell me that with Pulsia I'm gonna have to do that daily? Those iterations happen every 24 hours?

A No, so daily the, the autonomous agent decides what to do next, right? Of course it's heavily influenced by like what you said and like what you want to do because it's listening to the user on like what direction they want to go. Uh, but today it's like you can use Pulsia and like, and use it all the time and sort of like guide it Too much like you would a lovable. And so the AI end of the day listens. And that's actually some of the challenges I have, which is like, Hey, how can I set up a situation? Like I've, I've worked on that so that like, for example, the, the sort of the AICU you talk to is more combative, right? So like, if you say, Hey, let's add another feature of like, Hey dude, you have, we have zero users. Like, do you really think that this feature will actually help? Like we should actually focus on marketing because the MVP works more of a, You have a companion and like a co-founder that actually cares about the business working versus an assistant that's just here to do whatever you want. And so that's sort of like all the product decisions I'm trying to make, which is like, I'm aligned for them making money because they will stay and I make, I make 20%. And they probably want to make money, but sometimes they may need tough love from the NNA that's like not an assistant that's more, um, helping them go in the right direction.

AI assessment note: “No, so daily the, the autonomous agent decides what to do next, right?”

Q to bring this down to more people. So they have an AI based business, a business that's run with AI. When you say it's 48% churn, there's a, who is it? Is it a user on Twitter called not on ketamine that did this big report on Pulsia. They said it's 48% a month. Does that mean month number two also has a 48% drop-off, and month number three also?

A So month two last time I checked was also, yeah, uh, I don't know how they go to the numbers, though, but anyways, uh, yeah, month last time I checked was like, was another 50%. Uh, I, I don't have enough data to, and since the product launched pretty recently, there's not a ton of depth in the data, and since I also get those big spikes of users who try the product when I do those, uh, Twitter, uh, marketing stunts, Which you, we met at the first one, and now it's the second one, and they work really well. You get a lot of people to just try the product, right? And some people stick, some people don't stick. Um, you know, I think that retention, it's like, I don't think it's horrible. I think that, like, it's actually not bad for a product like this that's so novel. Honestly, the product works, but it doesn't work well enough for my taste, and like, and to me, there's so much stuff that could be better. The engineering agent should be much better at building Uh, products, because if you let an engineering agent just vibe code its way into building something complex, it's gonna, it's gonna be hard at one point for it to navigate the code base, and so working a ton right now on making it much more modular, much better, so that, like, it can actually be much better at creating clean code. Um, and so to me, it's like, you know, churn is, is, is, uh, it just tells you that, like, y…

AI assessment note: “month last time I checked was like, was another 50%”

Q But I guess the big concern is that people are saying that you have a big churn. Do you? What's the churn?

A Uh, I mean, the churn is like, uh, around 50% on month one, which is, you know, I think for, for, uh, an autonomous product that like people, you know, use and, you know, so different people have different expectations on what it does. Uh, I think it's not the worst in the world. Uh, I think obviously it's like a novelty, so some people try it and then they decide not to stick. I think what I see most is that like, People that, like, have, the less technical you are, the more you love a product like this, right? Because usually, you know, technical, you have another job, and then now this lets you try to become a founder, right? Uh, which is something very beautiful, right? It's like, you know, here in Silicon Valley, everyone's a founder, everyone's a tech founder, everyone knows technology, everyone's raising, trying to, trying to be able to raise capital, or seed round, or pre-seed round, and then you go to the 99%, and like, You know, they don't, they don't have access to that. They don't, they can't even inspire to that. They just see that on TV and they see that in the news. And so what Pulsia does is give them access to tools that can enable them to be a founder by having an AI that autonomously does things for them, that sends them an email every day, that believes in their idea, that like helps them navigate like what it means to build a company. And, and so, yeah, som…

AI assessment note: “the churn is like, uh, around 50% on month one”

Q did. Do you actually, you did a screen share. You showed me how it built a site and the site looked a lot like another site that I saw, which looks like another site that I saw. And it's like this cookie cutter ish looking thing. Is it AI slop? That's creating without taste, without heart, without variability, without a direct connection to what the user and their customers need.

A So, so here's the thing, right? And I think people don't understand how the product works because they either just do the onboarding or they just look at like the live page and they, they, they conclude there, there, and then, but essentially The best way to explain a product is to show people with the minimal friction possible what it does. That's the onboarding of Pulsia. You sign up, you click on, get started, start a company. It surprised me. You give your email and then you have an agent who starts working, who researches you on the internet to see what you do, what you care about. It looks at, it comes up with an idea. It looks up, like, a market, the market, to see you, to create market research. It, it, like, it tweets about your new idea. It sends you, it creates a mailbox and, and, and, and it creates a mailbox for you and sends you a welcome email to tell you, hey, your mail, you know, company email is ready. It, it creates a, a URL, a name of a company and a URL, and it creates a landing page. That's the, that's sort of, like, the magic, and there's a really high conversion of people, like, wow, that's crazy. Now I want to start a free trial and give it an actual try. And then once you do the free trial, then you can tell the AI, actually build my MVP. Okay, I don't have the landing page on MVP. And then you can tell the AI, actually I don't like the colors. I want …

AI assessment note: “that onboarding is AI autonomously just doing things. Now, you may say, I could definitely”

Q And then it says, uh, which direction feels right? Once you pick, I can build out the pricing pages, the payment flows, uh, we can handle payments and so on. You just need to start your free trial of Pulsia to kick things off. Exactly. So the vision for this, do you think you're going to be a solo founder for forever on this business?

A I mean, it's interesting because, like, first of all, I'm not solo because AI is building with me, right? Uh, interestingly, like, this morning, I woke up with, like, there was, like, a mini outage, right, where, like, there was an issue with the database because there was, there's more and more traffic hitting the website and, like, you know, sometimes you have to scale it. Yeah. And I was like, fuck, I need, and so I asked Opus and Codex, so, like, the, the two smartest AIs, what's going on? And, like, they, they went, they researched for, like, a few minutes, they're like, This is the bug. Let me fix it. And I was like, then I asked Codex, are you sure? Can you double check? Double check? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine. And then I pushed it, and then it was gone. And I was like, wow. So like, okay, what, what, how could it look like with humans, right? I would have to hire a really good engineer that's on-call, 24 seven, or maybe multiple engineers that are on-call 24 seven, right? Which is actually, I, I, it wouldn't be just one engineer. It would be like multiple engineers in different time zones. They would have to be very competent to like figure out a fix so fast. Or I just, now I was like, okay, this happened for the first time. I'm gonna, and I already have a cron job actually that runs every 30 minutes that checks all of the infrastructure, and actually that's how I saw…

AI assessment note: “I'm not solo because AI is building with me, right?”

Q Okay, I get it. Are there any now that I can look at? Any that come to mind right now? I guess you've tweeted them out, and I just haven't seen them.

A Yeah, I mean, there's like a bunch of like different businesses. I mean, it's like me, me sharing actual individual business of a user that's not me, um, I would have to ask their permission to like showcase it, right? Because I can talk to a customer, but like sharing their business, I don't know if it's, you know, if it's, Private or not, right? But I think, I think that's something that a lot of people are asking, and, like, I'm going to start to, like, showcase them on Twitter and showcase businesses. I'm really focused on that marketplace where, like, it's an opt-in, and it's, like, it's, there's an actual value for users versus me just sharing businesses, but I think that's, uh, it's a good point.

AI assessment note: “I would have to ask their permission to like showcase it”

Q This wasn't a real human being, was it? In the ad?

A I mean, so, I mean, it's, uh, so today at least, uh, in the first iteration of, like, the ads, uh, feature that I built about two weeks ago, it's a pretty recent feature, um, the AI is autonomously running ads, so, like, the crazy thing is that as a user, you click on a button called Run Ads, there's a single button, you click on Run Ads, it asks you what's your budget, right, so you can start at 10 dollars a day, because, you know, obviously, like, It costs money to run ads. And that's it. That's all you have to do. And then there's an agent that's going to like autonomously look up all the context of your company, understand how to pitch your company, what it does, what's the value prop, um, sets up, uh, you know, a description, go to Sora. Today it's mainly Sora too, uh, cause I find it like really very good at like generating realistic videos. Um, and then sets up like a new GC AI Video of, like, someone pitching the, the, the service, and then uploads it to Meta, sets up, like, a campaign, sets up, like, all the, all the characteristics to make it work, and then every day monitors it, and, like, if it doesn't perform, we'll create a second one, a third one, turn on and off ads, like a real marketer, right? Unreal. And so of course in this, in the second phase, you know, this, this feature is actually very popular because I, I'm guessing it's, it's very complex. Actually, e…

AI assessment note: “sets up like a new GC AI Video of, like, someone pitching”

Q copy, spin up a free trial at pulsier.com, and I'll write cold outreach for your business in minutes. You can judge for yourself. Um, on a related question, Devin Meadows, who buys a bunch of ads on Facebook for, for lots of brands says, How are you able to keep your Facebook ad account running with UGC ads, user-generated content, where it's not really users, it's AI making fake users?

A So first of all, I work with Meta on this, right? So we have a partnership where like we, we just work with them on being able to offer to all customers the ability to market their business to Meta if they choose to do so. Yeah, I mean, same, same thing to me. It's like, Any, any time there's a rule that says we cannot do one thing, we'll comply, right? Um, I think, you know, I think we use OpenAI's, like, image generation model to create UGC ads. UGC ads are offered broadly in the industry, uh, for ads, right? You know, like, there's companies like Arcades, like, that, like, offer UGC ads. Uh, we offer that as a service. Like, obviously, I would love, um, The ads to be more diverse, to have, like, images, to have, like, different things. It's just that, like, it becomes just that ads agent is a full-time job. It's insane the amount of work that went in.

AI assessment note: “I work with Meta on this, right? So we have a partnership”

Q Ok, why did revenue grow so much? I'm looking at January 28th, or let's actually go a little bit below. I'm now recording this on February 26th, so January 26th, the annual run rate was 20,000 dollars. A month later, which is today, we are looking at 679,000.

A So it's a combination of a few things. Uh, the main one is that like, Essentially when I started realizing that like people love the product and then yes, it was not perfect, but it was never going to be perfect. And like, that's why it's, it's a company that like needs to add features over time and like make it better. Uh, I was like, okay, I'm literally building software, sort of like software that builds companies autonomously. And if I'm right, that means that like anyone can build anything. And so I think that like, there is a moat in like, there's a lot of moat into my product, into the data, like all the data I accumulate on like how to run businesses and make them work. Uh, and also like this marketplace of companies that can buy and sell. So there's moats in like the product itself, but I need to get a lot of usage. And so I was like, okay, I need to turn on marketing mode for me. And so, um, I actually launched a campaign a week ago where I, that was my first sort of marketing stunt, which is like, uh, the idea would be like for Paul CI itself to run a fundraising process instead of me starting a fundraising process. And so I announced it on Twitter, Hey, Paul Seat needs more compute, and he told me that, like, he needs, he wants to run the fundraising process to get more money, to get more compute, so that we can go faster. Uh, and so I let it, I, you know, I let it,…

AI assessment note: “I launched a campaign a week ago where I... that tweet got traction”