The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 268 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gil: Brinko condensed months-long government permit reviews to one hour
“And we basically took a few months of manual review, and we condensed it into, like, an hour, and then it still goes for a manual review, but we've repackaged everything, we point out the risks, I should say, by we, I mean the company, right?”
Gil: Cheaper software creation will drive massive customization around platforms
“As the cost of building new software drops, or the speed of building it drops dramatically, we should assume that there's going to be dramatically more customization, but that customization, again, is probably around a common set of platforms.”
Mohrer: Uber lowered prices every six months as a competitive moat
“Uber was very big about, like, time to cut prices. Like, we were, every six months, we were lowering the price, because that's a moat, you know, makes people, you don't want to get undercut”
Wave AI has failed to make Meta ads work for a year
“And I haven't been able to get meta ads to work in more than a year. Every few months I dip back in, I spend a bunch and it fails.”
Wave AI converts 10 percent of installs and gets 800 daily downloads
“Like if someone installs, there's like a one in 10 that they're going to give me money. And that's like, I'm told is pretty high for this sort of thing. And so, like, so I need more installs, you know, and so I'll do between 800 and a thousand installs a day.”
Wave AI grew from $1M to $6M ARR in four months
“There was a time where we did, it was a couple of years ago, where meta ads worked super well, and I grew from like a million ARR to like six in like four months, like it was crazy, because it was a first of its kind thing, and it just crushed it on meta.”
Walls: Claude Code fixes errors without requiring developers to use Google
“What's amazing about cloud code is it can see the error and then fix the error and you never have to Google it at all.”
Internal AI coding workflows will eventually commoditize across all firms, says Thummala
“Eventually everyone's going to have the same sort of, like, technical architecture behind it.”
Thummala: MIT report found 95% of AI pilots failed to reach production
“And that's actually why, you know, if you see, like, the MIT report, 95% of things didn't, 95% of, like, AI pilots never made it to production.”
Matze: Custom AI Voice Agent Booked a Listing Appointment on Day One
“And when I did that, I actually got my first listing appointment went to the first day.”
Matze: Rezora achieved over 80% sales conversion rate on demo calls
“And shockingly enough, we had above 80% conversion rate.”
Matze: No Off-The-Shelf LLM Is Designed For Sales Conversations
“The main thing is there's no LLM, there's no chat GPT, there's no cloud that is specifically meant to respond for sales or human-like conversations.”
Apfelbaum: Presold 100 copies of '99 Hacks' course for $10K before building it
“And then a 145 people voted, and so I created a Stripe link for 99 dollars, and I send it to a hundred people. I didn't even have anything created yet, and then a hundred people paid for it. So I had 10,000 dollars in cash sitting in an account”
Apfelbaum: EVAI will become a hundred-million-dollar business
“But in terms of, like, my baby, the thing that's going to be the hundred million dollar gorilla, that's heavy AI.”
Santos: Women make roughly 70% of Gillette razor purchases
“There's a few products that are like this, like the one I usually tell is like, is Gillette where, you know, usually the woman in the relationship is the one that buys the Gillette. It's like, I think about 70% of the purchases of Gillette are by women. Don't,…”
Warner: Zapier's founder automates employee meeting feedback based on management books
“Wade, the founder, likes the, what is it, the five dysfunctions of an organization, of a team. I forget the name of the book. Anyway, he likes it so much that that, at the end of each internal meeting, Everyone's individual contribution to the meeting gets ana…”
Foster: Zapier's peak monthly cash burn was only about $20,000
“The most money we lost in a month was about 20,000 dollars”
Hastings: Books inherited by Quanta from other providers contain widespread miscategorizations
“So when with Quanta inherit books from other providers, we see all of these things miscategorized, and it's actually very simple for us to get that understanding based on what we see as the memos and what we see as the receipt content and invoice content.”
Hastings: QuickBooks Does Not Match Payroll Records with Bank Movements
“From my payroll system, I see that a payroll ran, and then in my bank, I see that the money moved to run that payroll. We match those things together and make sure that they're consistent, and QuickBooks does not do that, but we built that from the ground up i…”
Hastings: QuickBooks is still not fully cloud-based
“QuickBooks is still not even fully cloud, which is very funny.
I think, so a lot of people still use QuickBooks desktop.”
Singla: Mercer reached $300M valuation using freelancers to train AI
“If you just recently saw Mercer, which went crazily to, I don't know, two 50, there is two fifty, three hundred million, like two fifty, three hundred million, where they're getting freelancers to Train on AI data sets.”
Singla: Changing headings to questions causes massive traffic upticks
“We've worked with customers where they've seen massive traffic uptick just on converting the H ones and H twos into interrogative questions.”
Singla: LLMs now index on-screen text in Instagram and TikTok videos
“So if you see most of Instagram and TikTok they've just become indexable on search, Instagram specifically. So which means LLMs can now actually go through your video and see all the text you have on your video and then prop that video up specifically. So it's…”
Smith: Most Webflow LLM signups came from existing SEO work
“So I would say most of the signups from LMS were from SEO work that we had already done or we're doing.”
Ethan Smith: LLMs frequently cite YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn, but rarely X
“It generally, so LMs, the classes of domain types of domains that are cited frequently, video and UGC are huge.
Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, I am not seeing X that much.
And then video and YouTube shows up a lot.”
Ethan Smith: LLM video citations require only hundreds of views, not millions
“What I will say is that for many questions, the number of views is not millions or hundreds of thousands, it's hundreds or a few thousands.
So it's still pretty, it's still something that you could win without being an influencer.”
Smith: Search volume is 5x to 10x larger than LLMs
“I think it's five X, at least five X LMs, maybe 10 X, depending on the category. So it's way bigger than AEO.”
Smith: ChatGPT Will Eventually Offer Prompt Search Volume Data Through Ads
“I don't anticipate they'll do that soon. I think that they'll eventually do that as they build out ads, but they don't give you that information.”
Smith: ClearScope will launch the first AI content optimization tool
“I believe by the time this podcast gets published, ClearScope will show the first optimization tool.”
Pujji: AI Model Updates Will Force Clients to Repeatedly Rehire Transformation Agencies
“Because every time AI changes, some new model's gonna launch, and then the same people who you did work for a year ago are gonna like, ah, shit, we need to do more work here, right?”
Shipper: Claude is near capable of dynamic agentic copy editing via Notion
“Claude is very, very good right now at, you know, longer horizon agentic tasks. And so I would, And it now also has file use. So I would bet that we're getting close to, if not currently at a place where if you pointed it at a notion page and said, read the no…”
Patel: No Audience Members at HubSpot Talk Saw AI Increase Revenue
“When I asked how many of them are using AI or chat GPT, almost everyone raised their hands. When I asked how many of you guys are seeing an increase in revenue, literally no one raised their hand.”
Patel: AI summaries pushed client pages into Google Overviews within 48 hours
“Within 24 to 48 hours, quite a few of those pages started popping up in the AI overviews on Google. Cause more traffic. Cause more revenue. The revenue wasn't astronomical, like 20, 30%. It was in the single digit percentiles from some of the changes we made, …”
Tan: People are increasingly treating ChatGPT as a therapist or psychiatrist
“Apparently one of the biggest behavior changes in ChatGPT recently, for instance, is that people sort of treat ChatGPT as a counselor or as a psychiatrist or therapist.”
Shim: 'Magnificent Seven' companies use thousands of paid Read.ai licenses
“We've got mag sevens using us with thousands of licenses that are paid for where they're aggregating 200 product managers, five customer calls every week per product manager, and they've built this silo or this kind of storage of intelligence of customer inter…”
Shim: Vast majority of Read.ai users use multiple conferencing platforms weekly
“So for our users on a weekly basis, we see that they use more than one platform for the vast majority of our users.”
Warner: AI agency StealthX closes $80,000 engagements from how-to trainings
“This is a company called StealthX.co. He's closing, I think, 80,000 dollar deals, engagements, after one of these types of how-to things.”
Czech PE group bought Groupon and redesigned its data using Keboola
“Groupon as an original Groupon is now run by Czechs as well. You know, some of our friends and client, and it's our client actually have bought in as a private equity. Yeah. Yeah. I have redesigned the whole coupon and data using Kabula.”
Herold: A legitimate Chief Operating Officer earns $300,000 to $400,000 annually
“A true COO, you're usually three to 400,000 a year. You know, I was three 2010 years ago. It got junk.”
Herold: Kolbe index profiles show CEOs are 'Quick Starts', COOs 'Fact Finders'
“In fact, we use some profiles at the COO Alliance where we profile all the CEOs and the COOs that are members and everyone's Colby profile that is the entrepreneur or high quick starts. All the COOs are very high fact finders and follow throughs. They're just …”
Herold: Hired Kimbal Musk and Peter Rive as painting franchisees in 1993
“I hired Kimball Musk to be a franchisee for mine. I hired his cousin. No, Elon's brother. Brother. Okay. And then I also hired his cousin, Peter Reeve, who built solar city. They both were franchisees for me in 1993.”
Yang: Messenger bot multi-step micro-interactions achieve 95% to 98% CTR
“It's 95 to 98%, and it doesn't get lower.”
Yang: 10K-user health bot achieved 80% opens sending 14 messages weekly
“So we had one bot that had over 10,000 subscribers, and they messaged, like in the span of a week, they messaged their audience 14 times. And? And they got 80% open rates and 10%, 10% CTR on each one of those messages.”
Yang: WebViews will be huge for Messenger by enabling complex use cases
“I think web use are going to be huge for messenger because they unlock so much of more complex use cases that are not just not possible through bots.”