The Exchanges

Q That could go and do things, you know, uh, independently slash based on your guidance. So how can you use commands obsidian and open claw and reflection harmoniously?

A Yeah. So I think if you look at like, here's an example of one command that I do, it's just like a schedule command. Um, and so what I asked this thing to do is I said, schedule, I said, can I take a meeting with Greg Eisenberg today at, uh, Feb. 20 at two PM. Right. And what this does is of course it can look at my calendar and stuff like that, but it's also going to look through my daily notes. It's going to look through what I care about and then it's going to give me some perspective. So it says, your day is stacked. You're already recording on Greg's podcast this morning, followed by a team lunch outing and meeting with Peter and Vince. Your Feb. 17 notes show the Greg episode has been top of mind. The bulk has a dedicated Greg Eisenberg note. No, not a two. So the recommendation is no, not at two PM, but you might not need a separate meeting at all. Yeah, that's that's actually the correct answer. How does that relate to open claw? Well, OpenClaw is this like autonomous agent that can go and do things if you, uh, set it up to do that. Like it can do things without you having to prompt it all the time. It can just go and make decisions and build things for you, um, on your own. So now what OpenClaw can do is in the same way I just did this command, OpenClaw can do this on its own as well. And it can go and read my vault, find connections, and then make decisions On behalf …

AI assessment note: “OpenClaw can do this on its own as well. And it can go and read my vault”

Q I think are going to have an unfair advantage. I totally recommend you take this link and share it with a friend, because this is alpha that is not shared anywhere else on the planet. You're in for a treat. Enjoy this episode with Frey. It is a treat, because we have Frey on the pod. By the end of this episode, what are people gonna get out of it?

A Yeah. Thanks for having me on by the way, Greg. Um, yeah, by the end, I really want people to have a solid understanding of how to use cloud code to build AI coded directories with an emphasis on what I think is the hardest part, which is getting the valuable data. And we're going to go deep on that. But first I think it's only fair. We run it back. The last time I was on the pod, we played a game where I showed you a few cool directories and you guessed the traffic. So If you're down, I'll share three cool directories, and if you want, you can try to guess the way that these monetize as well, just because I think that'd be pretty fun. So I'll go ahead and share my screen, and we can dive into it.

AI assessment note: “by the end, I really want people to have a solid understanding of how to”

Q So can you, and can you just talk about Playwright and where you use it, how you use it?

A Yep. So Playwright is browser automation, and when you use it in an MCP, it allows Cloud Code to go and open up a window and do browser actions. So it can click through it. It can take screenshots of a website. Um, it can get all of the information, uh, that you need, say for design inspo or something like that. Let's say you're doing like Branding, or you're doing design, uh, you can easily access websites right here. So, in the past, before I used the Playwright MCP, my desktop was littered with screenshots, and I'd take a screenshot, I'd drag it into cloud code or whatever, but this really helps, and it feels smooth, kind of like when you're using it with voice, you can just kind of command, uh, what you want it to do, and, uh, you know, we're going out and analyzing competitors right here from a voice prompt.

AI assessment note: “Playwright is browser automation, and when you use it in an MCP”

Q And how important is like the first edition nature of it?

A That's important, um, because they printed all kinds of runs, so they, it has to be first edition from 1999, but then there's also some alpha in there. Some cards are misprint, like two to five percent of cards are misprints that are worth, like instead of 20 cents, they're worth 20 bucks, so you pull those out, um, and then some cards are like mint condition, and you send them in to get graded for 15 bucks each, and they're worth a hundred bucks, so The trick is to kind of cull out the best of the best and the ones that have flaws and get those graded, and then you can flip those right away to get all of your money back and then some, but other than that, you just sit on them forever. What do we think?

AI assessment note: “That's important, um, because they printed all kinds of runs”

Q That's cute. Yeah, exactly. Um, all right, what's your, what's your next idea?

A That's, that's, that's a really good point. Um, alright, let me pull this bad boy up. All right, I'm going to take a, I'm going to take a left turn here, if you don't mind. It's going to go a little different. We're going to go right here. Guys, I'm amped up about this business. I'm a cyclist, and I hate washing my bike. Everyone hates washing their bike. Germany is the world leader when it comes to health and fitness trends, and those trends always come out west. Here's exactly how you make a thousand bucks a day doing this. This is a mobile bike wash automated on a trailer. You know how many places you can post this up at? Bike parks, bike shops, trailheads, cycling races with thousands of cyclists. All of them need this, and it's a perfect business right now because cycling has exploded in the last few years. E-bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes. There are millions of cyclists in the U.S. spending thousands of dollars on their bikes, and these aren't casual riders. They're people that have five to 15,000 dollar bikes that care about maintenance, but they also don't have time or the desire to wash their own bike. It takes an hour. You need a hose, soap, brushes, degreasers. Most people are in apartments. They don't have a good outdoor space. So what do they do? They just don't wash their bikes or they pay a bike shop way too much money to do it and wait a week to…

AI assessment note: “This is a mobile bike wash automated on a trailer.”

Q basically, so the, the, just so the audience knows, those examples that you're gonna give on the left hand side, If you scroll to the left. So you're going to go through Clio, TrustMRR, TeacherZ, Tally.so, LocalRank, MailScaleAI. You're going to tell them how much money they've made, what is the playbook they've used, you're going to break down the playbook, and, and what else are you going to do?

A Yeah, so I'm gonna take you through six different SaaS tools, how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal this playbook for your own SaaS. Great, let's get into it. Hell yeah, let's do it. So I'm going to just start over here with the six different playbooks, and then I'm going to go and show you the real examples. And the reason why I've given six playbooks is because everyone's going to have their own preference of how they want to acquire customers based on your skill set, based on your level of interest, um, in these different strategies. So I'm going to start right here with number one, which is the waitlist strategy. And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SaaS tool, Clio. And in fact, we also used it for our other SaaS tool, Mentions. So we know that it works because we ran it twice, and in both cases, we were able to grow to 60 K MRR for Clio and 20 K of MRR with Mentions in like a month or two. Ok, so here, we're gonna start here with Clio. So first of all, what is Clio? Clio is an AI tool that helps you create content for platforms like LinkedIn and X that is optimized to go viral, build an audience, and get you customers. So that's what it does. In terms of MRR, we are at 61, 62 K of MRR.

AI assessment note: “how much money they make, their playbook for getting customers, and how you can steal”

Q And how expensive, you know, are we talking like, you know, in terms of, you know, tokens and, and what, you know, how, how, how does it, how much does it cost?

A Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so the fun part is that, uh, the model is available, especially through this experience of, like, you want to build an AI app or build an app in general. It's completely free. Um, so you can go to ai.studio slash build, access this, like, start building your product or experience. It doesn't cost anything, um, which I do think is, like, part of this headline story of making this, this capability accessible. There are limits, um, and after you hit the limits, we, Uh, we sort of prompt you to switch over to a, to a paid API key and then you can sort of keep going as far as you want and use it as much as you want. Um, the actual model is two dollars per million input tokens and 12 dollars per million output tokens. Um, so it's priced below some of those sort of comparable competitive models like, uh, um, GBT, 5.1 pro as an example, and Claude 4.5. Uh, is, is like lower priced than both of those models, and that's for, uh, input tokens less than 200,000, and then over 200,000, the, the price, I think it's like doubles for both, so it's four dollars per million in, um, and I think 24 per million out though, I'd have to fact check that. Um, so similar, similar pricing pattern to what we've done in the past for all these pro models, uh, which is great. It's adding a bunch of features, which is exciting. I feel like I'm going to go build this, uh, thi…

AI assessment note: “actual model is two dollars per million input tokens and 12 dollars per million”

Q In this episode, I am going to include basically as many products that you've mentioned here in the show notes so people can actually go and try it. Um, but you still owe me an answer to a question, which is how much money did it, does it, you know, approximately how much money to create a Roberto Nixon-like studio?

A Okay. Um, my, what would you say, Elijah? In this studio, there's probably, I don't know, maybe like a hundred grand worth of gear north, maybe a little north. In my next studio, there's probably gonna be 300 grand worth. I mean, like, um, but if you wanted to build this setup without all the gear, you know, you could go with a used M one Mac studio, I don't know, for like a thousand bucks. You can use whatever monitor you want. Um, all of these lights are very cheap versions of, Because I think you can build a studio just like this for the same visuals as me for under Five K probably. I mean, you know, um, but again, you can just do it with your iPhone, but I like overkill. That's my game.

AI assessment note: “In this studio, there's probably, I don't know, maybe like a hundred grand”

Q In this episode, I am going to include basically as many products that you've mentioned here in the show notes so people can actually go and try it. Um, but you still owe me an answer to a question, which is how much money did it, does it, you know, approximately how much money to create a Roberto Nixon-like studio?

A Okay. Um, my, what would you say, Elijah? In this studio, there's probably, I don't know, maybe like a hundred grand worth of gear north, maybe a little north. In my next studio, there's probably gonna be 300 grand worth. I mean, like, um, but if you wanted to build this setup without all the gear, you know, you could go with a used M one Mac studio, I don't know, for like a thousand bucks. You can use whatever monitor you want. Um, all of these lights are very cheap versions of, Because I think you can build a studio just like this for the same visuals as me for under Five K probably. I mean, you know, um, but again, you can just do it with your iPhone, but I like overkill. That's my game.

AI assessment note: “In this studio, there's probably, I don't know, maybe like a hundred grand”

Q I can spend smarter and move faster. And it's been a total game changer. I'm loving Brex so much. I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod. Start sleeping better. Your financial OS is waiting. Brex is giving SIP listeners 7500 dollars in perks at brex.com slash SIP. Cool. Um, ok, I took some notes on this. What else, what else do we need to learn?

A Yeah, I want to show a different screen. So going back to the normal kind of cursor window that most of you are familiar with, I have a few rules and commands set up that are helpful in my project. So this one, I'm writing a lot of content here, like docs and educational material, and I've kind of built this mega prompt of everything that I like about writing. And there's some things on voice and tone. There's some things on You know, being specific, but then I also just built this list of banned words and I'm sure I've cribbed some of these from different places online or books that I've read, but I've just tried to like delete the like marketing speak out of people's brains. So like mission critical, like performance, uh, seamless, like some of these things are fine and all rules can be broken. Right. But this is just a helpful list of me trying to, Delete some of these overused words or overused phrases. And my most recent addition here is also trying to catalog some of the LLM patterns, like the junk that it spits out. Like this is the most recent one I've seen people talking about. Like it's not just X, it's Y. And like, once you see it, you can't unsee it or the LLMs all generate the same style of writing. So, uh, this has been helpful for me as kind of just a quick pass when I'm writing something. It's like, Hey, am I, am I making sure that I'm not doing anything You kno…

AI assessment note: “I have a few rules and commands set up that are helpful in my project.”

Q And I don't think a lot of people realize is You committed, you made yourself on the hook for doing it, right? You publicly said, I'm doing this thing.

A Yeah, I, that's, um, that's my addiction to Twitter. So, um, I, I just have to, like, it's a, that's great content, right? Like, if I, if I say I'm posting about it, so, like, um, my previous startup was called Bear Metrics, like a business analytics platform. I sold it back in 2020. Uh, but like in 2030, I think I had a very similar tweet where, uh, Stripe had just started, like they were still at really early days. Nobody had really built anything on their API other than just like integrating it for payments. But as far as like apps built on top of Stripe, nobody else had really done anything. So like I made a tweet that said something like SAS or like Stripe analytics, uh, company. Um, I'm building it tonight. Like coffee brewed. This was like at like seven PM or something. And, um, And that was the kind of thing that like I, you know, over the course of about two weeks or something, I built this tool that ended up like I sold for like millions of dollars back in 2020. Like, but that, that resulted in this or it started at the impetus for it was this tweet that I made. And so like, I find myself doing that a lot habitually where like, if I think of something, I'll tweet about it. And then like that just brings up, you know, First customers a lot of times come from these kind of tweets, like it's self-serving, um, to some extent. And it does, it does provide a little bit of a…

AI assessment note: “And it does, it does provide a little bit of accountability.”

Q And like, how does someone who doesn't have an idea for this format or a format, like how do you come up with ideas for formats?

A Yeah. So that's like the first step, honestly, and getting into like organic social media is you need to find ideas and it's actually not hard. Um, all you have to do is what I do is I make a new account for whatever business I'm in. That's the first step to doing this. You make a new account because it's just easier this way. And you can then use this new account and follow content in your niche. You're going to find a ton of content that's already viral. For your target audience. If you're scrolling and only engaging with your niche and then you just save it for later. Like I found a video when I was scrolling on this page, my curiosity quench page, which is one of my apps. Uh, I made this had zero followers and I was scrolling in my niche, which was like hobbies, um, anti doom scrolling, like these niches. And I saw like this two by two video. I had like a million likes. So I tried it with, um, I tried it with first, like, things to do instead of scrolling. That didn't work. I iterated. I went to hobbies. One of them blew up to, like, 10 K views, which was abnormal, because I was stuck below a thousand, and then I made it again. One of them had, like, a hundred K views. That is a very quick example. It usually takes a few tries, like, 30 to 40 to a hundred, but, like, if you don't have ideas, you just scroll. In your niche and save videos. Like click that save button when yo…

AI assessment note: “if you don't have ideas, you just scroll. In your niche and save videos.”

Q I mean, you, you've been around this for a long period of time. If you've, if you don't have the, the kernel, which, you know, you have here, Is it reasonable to ask ChatGPT for, hey, I'm trying to create a pharmaceutical ad. I don't know, you know, how to create something that's viral. I'm inspired by SNL. Give me some ideas. Like how would you recommend people do it?

A Yeah, that's a great idea. Okay. So like I came up with the viral twist, but you're, you're totally right. You could probably have ChatGPT come up with it. In fact, I would say it would pitch you some crazy ideas. So like, maybe that's kind of the, the viral formula for, for For beginners, if you will, is basically like, okay, I know I can explore this type of commercial. I, but I want to have some sort of twist. Can you give me five different twists on a pharmaceutical commercial? That could be really funny if it's, you know, like, let's just say it's SNL style. So then it would give you like five twists. And then if that's not, doesn't work, I'd be like, okay, I mean, heck we can do it now. Um, give, I want to Do a pharma commercial, but have some sort of satirical SNL style twist on it that makes it funny and could be viral. Give me 10 ideas.

AI assessment note: “You could probably have ChatGPT come up with it. In fact, I would say”

Q Yeah. And it's, it feels like, um, this is a business, I mean, that people would pay for, how much would you pay for something like this?

A I mean, I think I would pay substantially more than the classic 10 dollar per month subscription. Just because it is, I mean, if you think about an eight sleep costs thousands of dollars, an aura ring costs hundreds of dollars, many of these other things like Strava you're paying 10 dollars a month for. So I think there's an awareness that those things that people are spending money on are not quite giving them the information that they need to make it actionable. And so Maybe I'm more ready to pay than the average person, but I would for sure pay at least 30 dollars per month, especially in instances where I'm trying to solve an issue like what the example I just gave.

AI assessment note: “I would for sure pay at least 30 dollars per month”

Q So this isn't just, um, an LLM, you know, making stuff up, right? It's actually true. This is, this makes sense.

A Yeah, this is, uh, this is not just an LLM making it up because what we're doing with this MCP integration to the workflows and in it in is we're pumping all of the right contexts into Claude here, you know, so basing all of this around real data, uh, that's out there. So there's no hallucination. It's not just making things up around, you know, what they might think, uh, people are interested in. It's actually Understanding the demand. So it's finding the keywords. And then we selected a group of keywords and we're like, Hey, go out there and read all of the ranking articles, posts, and websites on the front two pages of Google and tell me exactly what's missing. So this gives you like such a targeted spear. If you're a newsletter platform to know exactly how you can go and attack the market.

AI assessment note: “this is not just an LLM making it up because what we're doing”

Q I am, but I, I, can you tell people why it's so dope?

A Yeah, yeah, okay. So Open Router is basically, it's basically a service where, um, If people are familiar with how they hook into LLMs, you usually go call OpenAI directly, or you call Claude directly, and you know, you feed it in messages, and then it kind of spits it out, but you have to integrate directly with them. OpenRouter has a service where they've integrated with, I think, over 300 models, and basically, you can just switch out the models with one line of code. Honestly, just like a string, just a piece of text. So if I wanted to call the Gemini API and just test it out, I can go do that. Then with one line, I can switch it to Claude or I can switch it to OpenAI. So OpenRouter has all of these different models. It shows all the price points, and I love using it for development because now I can test the different LLMs and see what kind of responses am I getting or how expensive is this with just one line. So that was another thing I wanted to share here, which I honestly, I think I learned like two or three months ago, but it's been so game changing. I think there is a bit of a fee On it. But in my experience, it's like totally worth it just because of the speed of having to switch these things out. And then once I think I confirm like, okay, I'm good. I know exactly the models I want to use. Then maybe I'll just go ahead and skip that and just go direct. But during d…

AI assessment note: “basically, you can just switch out the models with one line of code.”

Q Um, and just curious, like, are there one, two, three apps that you can think of that you look up to that you're like, they've done these things that people should look at as like a, uh, inspiration for, for, for, for, you know, mobile app ideas?

A Um, I think that, you know, if you want to look for consumer social inspo, I'd hope that people look to, to some of my apps, uh, specifically MGL. Uh, I think on the AI side, I do think that Zach, uh, and Blake and the guys at CalAI crushed that, really did an amazing job on the AI app side. Um, and then I'd say like, um, I mean, there's lots of apps that I respect. You brought up Lockit. That's a great example of an app that crushed on social. Um, and, uh, we didn't talk about that, but also Pengu. Um, I, I know those guys well, and I think that what they're doing with, you know, character animation and AI and kind of creating this more, this, like, human experience between an AI is very interesting, uh, and, like, definitely worth exploring. I feel like we're gonna see a lot more of those things for different, like, contextual-based use cases. Um, you know, not just, like, an AI friend, but, like, Different, you know, kind of personalities to help you on the way. So Pengu is a great one to look at. Um, yeah, I mean, those are the ones that like just jump out to me just from like pure, uh, memory, but, uh, very, very impressive apps.

AI assessment note: “on the AI side, I do think that Zach, uh, and Blake and the guys at CalAI”

Q Could you, uh, can you, can you, okay, if you're, if you're, if you wanted to do that, like, which tools do you need to do cold email?

A Sure. So, uh, starting off with your, your lead list. First thing you're going to do is you're going to go to an Apollo or just Google like, you know, B to B email, uh, data or better yet go to an Upwork or go to a Fiverr and find someone that already has a list of 10,000 agency emails. So you can go directly to Upwork and say, uh, I have 200 dollars for the first person that has a list of 10,000 agency owners. I don't want you to go out and scrape these. I want someone that already has these. And I'll pay you 200 bucks for them. So there's your first list. You have your first 10,000 contacts to reach out to. Then you're gonna go over.

AI assessment note: “First thing you're going to do is you're going to go to an Apollo”

Q And it's not like you, you know, come from, it's not like your family were storage kings, right? It's not like you, it's not like you knew really what you were doing, right? You're kind of learning as you go.

A Oh, I didn't know. I had no idea what I was doing. I posted an ad on Craigslist for somebody to lease my apartment and they said, I don't want to lease my apartment. I want to put my stuff in your apartment. So I got sweaty, went and made a 150 bucks and then I realized I couldn't lease my apartment. So I filled the son of a gun up with other people's stuff. Um, and yeah, man, like three, Three weeks after the idea, I had 3000 dollars cash sitting on the bed in my dorm. So we were profitable from day one. I didn't look, I think one of my advantages here is I didn't consider myself an entrepreneur. I didn't study entrepreneurship. I didn't fall into the entrepreneurship trap or a business like this would not have excited me, frankly, because it was hard.

AI assessment note: “Oh, I didn't know. I had no idea what I was doing.”

Q I love it. Um, would you be able to go back to the template section? And the reason why is I want to scan through some of these just to get people's minds primed for the types of stuff that you can use.

A Yeah. Let me open the full list of templates here. Uh, you know, lead enrichment, lead qualification, customer support. Like, and customer support over everything, because we just released last week, like, 1600 integrations. Like, again, well, by far right now, the top AI agent platform in terms of number of integrations. And so, wherever your customer support exists, if it's like Telegram, or Slack, or WhatsApp, or Zendesk, or Intercom, like, you name it, like, we can, we can automate your customer support over all these platforms. Um, the focus group here is, is a really interesting In this case, because LLMs are not super good at reasoning, but they are really good at pretending to be human. Because that's, that's what they all, right? They've been trained on, on so much text that's human written. And there's actually a lot of people that find that the end sales that LLMs give you are actually very correlated to what, to the end sales that a human would have given you. So if you ask, like, do you like this or that? Like LLMs are actually doing a very reasonable job at emulating a human. And so that means that you can, like marketing companies and like big firms, they spend fortunes on focus groups. And we use it ourselves as well. Like, we've created a Lindy that simulates our user. So we've prompted it to be like, hey, these are the different personas of users we have. And …

AI assessment note: “Let me open the full list of templates here. Uh, you know, lead enrichment”

Q What do you say to people who say the best businesses aren't started by looking at something like Google Trends? You have to go out there in the world And just fix your own problem. What do you, what do you say to those people?

A I, I think that's, I think that's totally true. And to be clear, like I was fixing my own problem. I wanted bone broth. This was like, I was talking to people in my CrossFit community. I was looking to start a business and it was a product that I wanted to help with my own gut, skin and joint health. This was not like a random thing. I'm looking for any, you know, any sign of life on Google trends. This was like literally a product I wanted That people that I respected in a space that I cared about and was passionate about were talking about. Then I just used Google Trends to validate that this would be a decent business as opposed to just like Justin's side project or something like this that doesn't actually go anywhere.

AI assessment note: “I think that's totally true. And to be clear, like I was fixing my own problem.”

Q Can I ask, can I ask you something before you get into it? When do you know to do a reference image versus not a reference image?

A So, okay. A super important thing to understand about these models is that they have a really good understanding of, um, well-known concepts, ideas, brands. So it knows Nike really well. It knows Adidas really well. Um, even like the classic online econ brands, like it knows Ridge wallets really well. And so in that sense, you can prompt it and you can just say like a Ridge wallet, you know, Um, and it will understand what you're talking about, but if it's your own product that is relatively new, relatively small, um, and you don't have a lot of online presence, and I'm talking like a lot of online presence, like millions of dollars in ad spend a month kind of, um, presence, then you should always provide a reference image. Um, but for like Adidas, everyone knows Adidas. And so it's going to do this. It knows it really well.

AI assessment note: “if it's your own product that is relatively new... you should always provide a reference image”

Q Right, and these people, these people are getting, um, they're getting the automation too, right? So, they're getting an email. Like, what happens, if I refer someone, what happens?

A Yeah. So when you get in all, so that's the other thing I kind of just skipped over, but part of the referral program set up is like, when you say that here is the reward that you get at one, the second step to this. Here's like what you actually receive. So directly in beehive, you set the reward. So step one was what is the reward and at what milestone, which I set to be one step two is like, what's the email that people receive when they hit that reward. And if it is like a physical good, you might send like a link to collect like their address. So you can send them something if you're like manually shipping things, because mine is a digital reward, which you can set here. Um, it's simply the embedded download link to download my series B deck. And like that's automated. Right. Like me as the operator, I'm not like once a week going through to see who has a referral and who do I need to send something to. It's like totally automated. Um, and so that leaves.

AI assessment note: “step two is like, what's the email that people receive when they hit that reward”

Q Okay. So you've got me intrigued. I'm, I'm, I'm, that's where I'm at. I'm in the intrigue phase. Let's, let's get right into it. So where do we start?

A Okay. So we start, we need to find someone to buy, to buy the app before we build it. That's where most people get this wrong is they build something and then try to sell it or try to get users. But I found it's a lot easier to just find something someone wants to buy and then build it. And so if you don't know anyone that wants to buy an app, you should go to Upwork. That's where I sold my first Replit app is Upwork. And so, all I did was search for a technology that I knew I could replace with an app. Um, so I use Airtable a lot with past projects and clients from a marketing agency, and I was looking at these jobs, uh, to do Airtable consulting. And I'm sitting at my desk looking at this one job description, and I'm like, I think I could do this better and cheaper than in Airtable, because Airtable you have to pay 20 dollars a seat, right? And so, I made a prototype in Replit, and then sent a loom to the guy, and he's like, I like your prototype in Replit better. And that's how it went. So we're gonna try to look for something here real quick that we could, we could mock up to someone.

AI assessment note: “we need to find someone to buy, to buy the app before we build it.”

Q What other, uh, what other tools do you use?

A So I use, and then again, this is in the physical product space. Um, I use this tool called Particle. Particle basically allows you to type in a brand, type in any e-commerce brand. Um, so I was looking at, today I was looking at Vital Proteins. It allows you to type in an e-commerce brand. Uh, this data isn't public typically because these aren't public companies. Um, And it allows you to see not just their sales over time. So this is like vital protein sales just from their e-commerce website over the past four weeks, but it shows you the categories of which they have products in and what their best selling products are. So a couple of ways that I like to use this, um, is I like to see number one, what are the numbers that competitors are doing in my space? Um, but then even more importantly, what are their best selling skews? So oftentimes people will think, Hey, if I'm launching a brand, you know, I need to have I'm going to grow by expanding the set of skews or flavors or options that I have. And then you come in and you look at some of the sales data and it's like, Hey, 90% of this company's revenue comes from like these top four skews and they actually come from these two flavors. So if I'm a product in this category, making flavored supplements, for example, let me not go make a, you know, uh, whatever, like crazy concoction flavor, um, Because let me look at like the b…

AI assessment note: “I use this tool called Particle.”

Q best quality that I can get? Uh, you know, for whatever the category is in, and then people come in and they basically will tell their story. So that's kind of the high level of what this, what this looks like. Are you in this or do you, do you kind of like, are you a part of this G or did you just find it and find it interesting?

A Um, I, I heard about it. I just started perusing it. I saw, you know, one of the posts, I think it might have been this post, went on the front page. I gave my dad this Batman wallet 10 years ago. I was like four or five years old, and I got it in preschool. He uses it to this day. So from this post, I think I, I, I started just perusing, and, um, then I just started going to Google Trends, Um, I use, uh, an app called Glimpse. I'm not associated with them or anything. I just think it's, it gives you like a better view on, on Google trends. Um, so I saw that and I was like, okay, is this a big movement or is the small movement? And it seems like it's literally, I mean, it's, it's, it's gaining a lot of steam, 69,000 searches in the past month. And it just got me thinking that there's an opportunity. Uh, yeah, there's an opportunity to build some businesses on, on top of this trend.

AI assessment note: “I heard about it. I just started perusing it.”

Q Is that something that you figured out? You know, do you have, yeah, just give me context around every game of my building. Am I using that? Like, I, I just don't, I don't understand.

A You really can use anything you want to build games. Like you can use, uh, Peter levels just came out with a great, uh, flying, uh, simulator that he built with pure vanilla JavaScript, right? So you really can build anything with any framework you want, but for like stone cold beginners, like me, for instance, I like to use built out frameworks already. And the reason why I like P five JS is you can test The game quicker than any other framework I've seen so far, uh, because they have this awesome website pfivejs.org where you can just click start coding. You can paste in your code and hit play and you just instantly have the game going on your screen. So this is, I found the best way to kind of prototype games and then you can take this and put it in cursor and make it more advanced, which we'll do in a second.

AI assessment note: “You really can use anything you want to build games.”

Q By the way, Frey, are you going to publish, like, are you going to publish this dog park directory?

A I think so. I think there's like a couple of things that I'm worried about. So I've noticed anytime I mentioned a website, People make copycats immediately. And SEO is one of those things where, you know, I'm not going to have any backlinks if I launch something like this. So there's a little bit of vulnerability, but yes, the short answer is I do plan on launching this eventually. I'm just right now optimizing the best ways to automate some of the data enrichment and some of the implementation on a CMS through AI and like using bolt.new. Playing around with different tools to streamline that, but I do want to publish this and just see how it goes.

AI assessment note: “yes, the short answer is I do plan on launching this eventually.”

Q your workflows. Um, it's the, it's your unfair advantage, frankly. Like, you know, most people aren't doing it. That's, that's the advantage. I think one of the things I'm thinking about, um, because I'm like, oh, how do I implement this on some of my companies is does everyone need to create one of these workflows themselves? Or is there, are there like templates that I can go and grab?

A Yeah. So that's a good question. You, we often see at companies that there's like a couple, like maybe five AI people who really love this sort of thing. They build amazing tooling and then everyone else just uses it. Um, and that's a, I'll show you a few features that really enable that. So like people can actually use the workflows without even seeing this crazy flowchart sort of thing. Um, but also we do have a template directory and we're going to be launching a marketplace where people can publish and even sell their templates. So if you wanted this like crazy enrichment flow that someone worked hard on, you could pay a few dollars and just clone it into your workspace. Um, but yeah, I think that's the future, like being able to share useful tooling. One, one thing we like to say internally is that, uh, understanding a problem should be the only prerequisite to solving it. Like you shouldn't need to have an engineering degree to understand like how to boost sales with automation. You should just need to understand how to write a great email or what data to look for in a good customer. So that's kind of what we're, we're gunning for. And I think templates are kind of a bandaid over the product being a little too confusing at the beginning. If we could nail this UX problem, I don't think you'll need templates because you can just get to something amazing in like five minutes…

AI assessment note: “we do have a template directory and we're going to be launching a marketplace”

Q We talked about, uh, kind of like going against the grain and weird ways to make money that goes against what other, you know, main people in your category are doing. What's founders doing that's different in terms of monetization and building the business around that?

A So this is another idea that I didn't even, that wasn't even mine, really. Um, so I've become friends with Jared Kushner through the podcast, and he's a very sharp and fascinating guy. I would highly recommend listening to the episode he did with Lex Friedman, the ones he just did with my friend, Patrick Shaughnessy. And really, his idea was just like, you have one of the world's most valuable audiences. He's like, I know all the elite people in the world. They're all listening to you. Uh, you're the best in the world at what you do. He's like, his whole thing, and That he's constantly reinforcing. He's like, constant refinement of association. Constant refinement of association. And he's like, inventory destroys value. So, uh, just getting in front of the audience you have is excessively valuable. To any company. He's like, so take your time picking partners. And then when you do pick partners, you know, this is what you do. You have two long-term partners. You're on two year contracts with them, right? Uh, it's finite. It's like, like I just did this with the ramp. So I got to know the founders of Ramp. I think they are the best in the category. Uh, I spent a ton of time with them. Two of them are in Miami. So I've been with them a couple of times a week, and I have been for a long time, way before we considered working together. And I was like, these guys are fucking geniuse…

AI assessment note: “You have two long-term partners. You're on two year contracts with them”