The Exchanges

Q you're creating like the UX, you know, right now you're just doing it from your, your head. Cause you know, I'm sure you're, you're going through a lot, a bunch of apps in your mind right now, but do you, do you go and just be like, let me go look at five, 10 apps or like, how do you think about, you know, figuring out what the UX is?

A Yeah, that's a good point. I do usually think, or so if there are similar apps that have already been released, I'll go look at those for inspiration. I'll usually actually put them in the Figma file. So while I'm designing, I can take inspiration, something like this. If we look up on the app store, Actually, um, yeah, everyone can look it up at home, I guess, cause I'm not screen sharing that and it's on my computer, but there is nothing called Dr. AI on the app store that comes up. And so there's not much inspiration to take. So then the closest thing to do is looking at other similar apps. And I think looking at these AI apps are a good example. So I kind of took inspiration from two apps that were released recently, one Cal AI. And then also RizGPT. RizGPT kind of had the three questionnaire pop-up here of their three features. One was like chatbot as well, one was analyzed text messages, and then something else was pickup lines. So that was the basis which I held in my head while coming up with this.

AI assessment note: “if there are similar apps that have already been released, I'll go look at those”

Q And, uh, like, what are you, like, are we talking to 99 cents, like, a doll, you know, two dollars, like, how, how do you think about, like, I know you're going to test it, but, like, what are you seeing, I mean, you're building a bunch of these types of apps, like, what are you seeing being, like, the sweet spot for, for apps like this?

A So when I think of weekly, usually I go for four dollars or seven dollars a week. I think seven dollars is pretty steep, and you could debate whether it's ethical to price that much for an app like this, because it comes out to close to 30 dollars a month if someone stays subscribed. So I think four dollars is pretty fair to do, but ultimately I AB test a bunch of things. So what I'll usually do is I'll AB test four dollars a week, seven dollars a week, I'll try variations of a free trial on both of those. I'll AB test 10 a month, eight a month, 15 a month, 20 a month, and 30 a year, 40 a year, 50 a year, 70 a year. Every single variation, I'll try the free trial as well, and ultimately see what works the best. What is the highest proceeds per download on the app?

AI assessment note: “usually I go for four dollars or seven dollars a week”

Q No, it makes complete sense. I, you know, maybe this is too in the weeds, but when you're building something, how do you think about using Supabase versus Convex? Like they're both such great plat, you know, platform. So how do you, how do you know what to pick?

A Yeah. It definitely is going to get in the weeds because generally they're both great at what they do. Now, Convex wins when it comes to real time stuff, right? So if you wanted to build a chat application or something where real time, like you need some sort of real time notification or you're building some sort of like collaborative tool and you need people to see what other people are doing, I think Convex wins. Not that Supabase can't do it, but Convex by default Is, uh, real time. So anything you do with Convex, you get the data real time, which is great. But there are people, and this might be too technical, who might need a Postgres database, right? That, that's the main database that Supabase offers, and they're the best at that. No one does Postgres the way Supabase does, in terms of DX, developer experience especially, right? So it really depends on the application the user's building, The best way I would, I would say for someone who might not be as technical as your average developer is, I would ask an AI model. I'd go on ChatGPT Cloud and be like, this is what I'm trying to build, and I, I know there are these two backend as a services, which one is better for my specific use case? There might be one where Convex is better, and there might be one where Supabase is better, but generally speaking, both are great solutions.

AI assessment note: “Convex wins when it comes to real time stuff... who might need a Postgres database”

Q So it's interesting. You're, you're designing from your head, you know, your mind. So do you not go and look for inspiration before you start pushing pixels?

A Great question. So I actually look for inspiration constantly. I never even, I never turn it off basically. So like I have a notion database and I can even give you like a YouTube link if you want to point people that way that shows how it's built. But I'm constantly, constantly, constantly dumping things in there and categorizing them and creating all these different views. Like I'm a total nerd about it. And so I have, I, you know, I don't know if you ever talked to like David Perel. He has this idea of like writing from abundance. Like you don't like go look for notes and start from the blank page. You're like constantly contributing to this database of ideas. That's kind of the way I think about it too. We're like a lot of these in my head, but only because I've saved stuff before. And if I really actually don't have ideas, my first step is I always open up my notion and I just start copying images and pasting them. And I mean, I might even be able to find, like, if we go I bet I have pages with examples. See, look, this is where I was designing the blog page. The first thing I did was like, I just went into my notion. I was like, all right, what's interesting. Paste it in. And I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. And then I'll just zoom in and like recreate a little part of that. And maybe I'll use it in a different way or something like that. But my, my very first step, if I…

AI assessment note: “I actually look for inspiration constantly. I never even, I never turn it off basically.”

Q you know, maybe it makes more sense to use something like Lucid, um, or, you know, that is, that is more friendly to CSS, for example. Like, are you thinking, are you thinking, my question is this, are you thinking about how do I make a beautiful page, or am I thinking how do I make a beautiful page that's going to connect easily with Framer or something like that?

A Great question. I'm pretty much always thinking about how it's going to be built with the disclaimer being like, I'm actually like a little bit more of a technically minded designer. Like I'm not an artist. I can't draw anything. I don't even have a, I don't even sketch things like just that part doesn't come natural to me, but I know how front end works. And so a lot of the decisions, especially as I'm fine tuning things, I'm going to use those best practices, and honestly, if you're building in Figma using auto layout, it almost just comes out of the box a little bit free, because if you can build something in auto layout, that means that it's very easy to build in Flexbox. That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to, like, you can get away with it, but It's going to like, if you don't use auto layout and you're just randomly positioning things in the frame, that's effectively the equivalent of just absolutely positioning something in CSS, which like, yeah, it's, it's, it's possible, but it's not great. It's not, it's always, you, you probably want to avoid that. Um, So even something like this, so like I have a frame, I'm going to hit shift a to turn, like if we zoom in here, by the way, hitting enter allows you to drill in, in the canvas and then shift enter is moving back up. That's like how I traverse the layer tree really, really great way to move more quickly, basica…

AI assessment note: “I'm pretty much always thinking about how it's going to be built”

Q It's interesting that you have integration between port codes because, you know, from my understanding on the Warren Buffett, Andrew Wilkinson type model, uh, they don't do much of that. They keep it very separate. You know, what's your thinking on that? And are they, you know, why are they so anti, uh, Coordination between, and collaboration between companies.

A Yeah. So I think, um, I think a couple of things, uh, one is, uh, I think that the level of centralization you should have totally depends upon your asset type. So let's say you build a whole code where you have, uh, 14, uh, 14 restaurant franchises. Right. Um, and like, let's say seven of them are Burger King and seven of them are Wendy's. Like this is, this is a very common American holdco style where there's families that Are multi-unit operators of franchises. They have built great businesses this way, and they're making millions of dollars a year. It would be stupid for you to have an HR person and a marketing person in every single one of those like stores, right? Like you should centralize that kind of stuff. You should centralize your bookkeeping. You should centralize your ordering. And so to me, the level of centralization that makes sense where you have like interaction between the individual port codes where you're Where you're centralizing stuff at headquarters, that totally depends upon the types of assets you have and what you need from those assets, right? And so the more homogeneous those assets tend to be, the more you can centralize stuff. And so the, you know, the other end of the spectrum is you decentralize those things. You push things out to the edge, uh, into the individual portfolio companies, and you let them do that stuff. And you don't centralize th…

AI assessment note: “they have built a level of centralization that ties to the asset type”

Q that. One is you, you look at the costs and then you're like, okay, here's the cost. Let me go and, uh, add 60% margin or whatever to it to create a sustainable business. And the second way, which you actually, you talked about it in your first idea, I think, which is what is the ROI of this thing? And then how do you just anchor to the ROI?

A I mean, if, if it runs all the time, you literally have three full-time developers working on your code base. So like three shifts of eight hours of full-time developer, 24 seven. Um, so you are replacing somewhere north of 200,000 dollars in, uh, in just fees that this person would cost you in a year, right? So you could also anchor it on, on the, the, the job to be done value. Like the job to be done would be to have three people work on your code base all day long. If that's what the tool does, then, you know, that's, that's what the price might be. Although I guess, 300 K a year for a single tool, that is quite the expense, right? So you would really have to have a higher impact than what three developers could do with that time. But this, this also depends on the, the, uh, the potential, um, capabilities of that agent, right? If that agent really can try Wildly different things. Not just write new code and maybe run it, but maybe spin up a different kind of tool, right? You're using, I don't know, RabbitMQ as a message queue between your servers, but the thing is trying to experiment with an AWS Kafka queue or something, and it just changes some part of your infrastructure just to see if that would increase performance, but also reduce cost. Like, if that tool could have the agency to do this, this could save you millions in a year. So, you know, like the question is, what…

AI assessment note: “you are replacing somewhere north of 200,000 dollars in, uh, in just fees”

Q The product. Like we kind of, you know, we said it's an all in one product, but like, how do you, how do you take an idea? How do you take this idea and actually flesh it out and make it a real product? Like, how do you think about it?

A So, okay. First off, I think that similar to what I was saying about split testing different Uh, hooks across different niches about why people should download your product. If, for example, with career AI here, if we're embedding multiple different tools into the platform, what we can do is we can also split test different product hooks. So we could test, let's say we have three different tools within the application. Then we could test different tools on social media to see what's going to go the most viral. And we can engineer around virality with you max. For example, this was the, uh, facial analysis ratings. We found that this sort of six factor Madden rating system. That's what people were most drawn to. That's what people were most likely to like comment, engage with, and therefore went the most viral. I want to, I want to, to make that clear from the start, because that is kind of how I begin my ideation process. What are the tools that are going to do well on social media? X, Y, and Z. So, so that will inform design. And then my process for design is usually I do wireframes. I have either a professional designer or someone on Upwork convert that into more fleshed out UI. Uh, and then it becomes time to build with regards to building. I, myself, I use ChatGPT to teach me, uh, how to code to build RizGPT and UMax. Now, if you have capital, this is not a route that I rec…

AI assessment note: “that is kind of how I begin my ideation process. What are the tools”

Q And that's, and that's why, you know, I saw on Twitter someone, someone say, isn't this just Zapier? And so the difference between Zapier, which is automations, and this is there's intelligence, correct?

A Yeah, there's a huge difference between an automation on the one hand, which is what Zapier is really good at, and an agent on the other hand. Right. And so, yes, I think the two biggest differences are going to be that, uh, one, um, is that you can use AI at any point in, uh, Lindy. So I'll give a super concrete example. Like I have, uh, some investment properties in France, which is terrible financial decision. Um, and I, I, I received these, uh, confirmation emails. I've put them on like the French Airbnb. And so I received this confirmation email. It's like, Hey, you just made 200 bucks because you, you rented your place on, on Hollywood. And I have a Lindy right here. What she does is, okay, when I receive an email, which is a reservation confirmation, you go to these Google Sheets, and you append a row to the Google Sheet. And you can see here, the cells, each cell is a prompt. So I was like, okay, please extract from the email the day of the reservation. Extract the total amount of the reservation. And you'll notice I don't have to, at any point, inject data from a previous step, like In Zapier, each step is an island. It's isolated. Here, it's an agent. It's an agent that is aware of the entire context of everything it did, and so if you want to do this with Zapier, you're going to have to write, like, an HTML parser. You may not be able to do it. It's going to be hard.…

AI assessment note: “there's a huge difference between an automation on the one hand... and an agent”

Q What else, uh, what else you got that you want to show?

A This, this one, I'm going to talk about, we've been talking about digital a little bit, and I think this IRL to URL lead magnet is so good, and this got me probably in 2020. And it's, it's still living rent free in the brain. So this is Forte Labs, building a second brain. There's a bonus chapter at the end on how to build a second brain, creating a tagging system. He gives you the URL in the book. So I, if I bought this in the airport, he's going to end up with my email, even though that he didn't sell it, sell it to me. So I get, get the chapter. And then this is another thing that, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs and builders need to be thinking about is segmenting their audience so they can give them offers that people want. Instead of sending an email to 10,000 people, you can send five emails to 2000 each exactly what they want. And so Tiago, friend of the pod, Is using this thing called right message. You can see it's a segmenting tool, but he basically breaks, breaks people out into like, Hey, cool. Got the bonus chapter. Now you see him looking to sell you on note taking, you know, services or products. So it's like, yes, I take notes on paper or no, I'm digital. If he has 808,000 people do paper, maybe he builds a paper product. If he has Mostly on digital, maybe builds a digital. Um, so I think this is a really well done capture, pulling people out of your, your,…

AI assessment note: “So this is Forte Labs, building a second brain.”

Q I think these are hypotheses. This might work. It might not work. This, this is the insight, you know? So I, I do, I do think that that's, it's worth, it's worth putting in there. And it's like a TBD will, you know, in the future, we'll, we'll go explore. You had a really, really, really good insight, which is people who, how did you describe it? People who follow,

A Oh, like, yeah, I think, so there's, like, status where it's, like, I can wear the status myself, or there's status, like, who's, who am I in the room with, right? And so you're, like, looking at the people who I'm in the room with, and implicitly thinking, I have high status. So online, you know, that'll be, like, who's followed, who else is following me on Twitter? If, you know, like, you're following me on Twitter, or Paul Graham's following me on Twitter, or, like, Elon Musk is following me on Twitter. It's, like, okay, even if I only have, like, tens of thousands of followers, Maybe I actually am a high status or accomplished, like up and coming person that is worthy of being included in some pool.

AI assessment note: “there's status, like, who's, who am I in the room with”

Q doing your follow through execution? Cause my problem is always like, I have the idea and I have the social funnel. Like I, I have similar audience to you and stuff. But I think you're doing a far better job of figuring out how to actually monetize it and track the funnel and stuff. Who's doing that for you? Are you doing that yourself or do you have a team?

A I have a business partner. His name is Jordan and Jordan is your quintessential funnel guy. So You know, you wake up in the morning and you're excited about ideas. He wakes up in the morning and he's excited about how do I, how do I squeeze this funnel? And I think that, uh, the, the old way of creating startups was, you know, technical founder and maybe, maybe a designer, maybe a business guy. Now I think today you kind of need idea gal or guy and a funnel. Guy or gal. So I basically come up with an idea, give it to Jordan. Um, you know, now I'm using, I don't know if you've used V zero, but I use Vercel V zero, which is basically a tool to use AI to wireframe out the ideas. So I wireframe out the ideas, um, and he, he really takes those ideas and then he dispatches it to a group of people. I will say ideas die unless they, unless they, you need an owner basically for an idea. Um, and so that's something I've learned is unless I have like one GM or one person on this idea, The idea loses steam despite the funnel, uh, funnel guy.

AI assessment note: “I have a business partner. His name is Jordan and Jordan is your quintessential funnel guy.”

Q good probability chance, they'll get hundreds of thousands of views. But you think in the early days, going zero to a 100,000, do you think that they created content and were like, you know, some of these people here, like, hey, you know, in, in these reels, be like, hey, I'll give you a hundred dollars if you post it on your Instagram. You think they did stuff like that?

A Yeah, I, a hundred percent, uh, that's, uh, What lots of these people do. Uh, I mean, sometimes they are very good at content themselves for, for this specific case. I don't know. Sometimes they aren't very good at, at creating content. And there is this guy who has an app parallel live. Uh, he basically creates fake lives. And when you, when you open the app, it looks like you are having hundreds of followers or thousands of followers in a live session. And it's. He does very good organic videos and he goes viral repeatedly. And he's the one, the founder is the one making the video, the videos. And there is like this dating app recently, also a French app, uh, Gigi, the CEO, she, she raised money with Sequoia and she has a team, but she still creates content for her on TikTok and with her own face and is doing super well. So sometimes they do post themselves because they are very good at content, but sometimes indeed they outsource this. To other existing creators. Um, a cool example I've talked about recently on Twitter is like a young kid who created a calorie tracking app. So AI calorie tracking app looks like a terrible idea that tons of people have done already.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, a hundred percent, uh, that's, uh, What lots of these people do.”

Q So if I'm understanding this correctly, it's almost like a Venn diagram. So on one, one circle is formats and compelling formats. And the other circle is what am I uniquely equipped for? Is that right?

A Yeah, I think it's, it's, uh, You know, we, we, we often talk about this as a, uh, uh, concept of content market fit, which is, uh, you know, three things have to be checked. One is, uh, what you want to make. That's actually something that it sounds ridiculous, but a lot of people skip that step. It's like, do I actually want to make this? Uh, because to do it successfully, you're going to be making it for years and years and years, and you have to just love the process of making it. So do I want to make it? Uh, the second is like, is there an audience for this? Is there, is, is this content that somebody actually wants? Uh, uh, which is another honest question you have to ask yourself. And then the third is like, does this match the platform's wants and needs? And actually those three can, uh, evolve over time. Like just because they're all checked and like green light on all three, one week does not mean that it's the same thing the next month. Um, those all kind of oscillate and change. Like again, if you look at where YouTube is heading, Even with their announcements that made on YouTube two weeks ago, like the, the, you can, you can gather that they are heading in the direction of more and more connected TV viewership. Connected TV viewership means 30 plus minute videos that are organized into series, um, that can be watched. You know, they, they launched a new UI update …

AI assessment note: “concept of content market fit, which is, uh, you know, three things have to be checked”

Q And maybe explain to folks, you know, why, why are you using GitHub? Why are you pushing into GitHub?

A For sure. So, uh, GitHub is a, um, uh, version control system and a collaboration system. So if you want to, uh, put something open source so that other people can contribute to it, other people can use it and open issues, uh, for you, um, and tell you, like, here's what's missing, here's what's working and what's not working. Uh, you can, you can use GitHub for that. And so you can think about a Replit. Replit is the sort of real-time interface for creating applications. You can use Replit for deployment, for editing, even for collaboration, but it's more real-time. You can think about GitHub as the more long-term sort of storage for your app. So if you want to, uh, keep it version there, they have a lot of really interesting tools to help you manage your application. Uh, people can download your code. And again, there's this feature called per requests where people in open source or people on your team can send you, can send you a per request. Uh, this is true of GitHub and other places like GitLab. You can do all of that from Replit. So here we are, I think, in like, you know, uh, you know, 15, 20 minutes, we were able to build an application, we deployed it, we did a data migration, we moved it to SQL, we pushed it to GitHub, and we're on our way. Like, if this was a real project, I've already made real progress, uh, towards my Scenic Drives startup. Which, if you built tha…

AI assessment note: “GitHub is a, um, uh, version control system and a collaboration system.”

Q Yeah. Go back to that for a second. When you, when you scroll on this list, what is one or two industries that you're like, whoa, this, there's something here and I need to dig in and why?

A Yeah. So I've broken these down, um, actually into like individual scorecards. So there's a couple that I really like here. So the first one that I love that I think is dying for a vertical SaaS business is machine shops. So, um, why is machine shops interesting? Well, going back to that list, it's two hundred sixty two billion or two hundred forty billion. In revenue. There's 22,000 of them, and it's beautifully segmented, right? So the higher this number is, the better. Um, out of, this is basically a score, so I'm taking all thousand industries, and you know, this is up at the top, 7763. So if I actually look at machine shops, it checks a ton of my boxes, because it's highly fragmented, there's a healthy amount of small businesses to go after, mid-markets to go after, and a few enterprise. And the average machine shop is doing two million a year in revenue, right? There's 17,000 of them. Uh, so this looks like a perfect place, uh, to build a vertical SaaS company right now. It's got a beautiful market size, beautiful segmentation. And then I have a couple on the list here that kind of things I look at after that initial piece that we'll go into.

AI assessment note: “the first one that I love that I think is dying for a vertical SaaS business is machine shops.”

Q I haven't heard you talk at all about conversion, really. Like, how much do you think about landing page conversion, conversion rate optimization?

A We, well, we definitely always, we think about it more like return on ads, ad spent essentially. So our ROAS and we are aiming, we're basically aiming for like, okay, we spent one dollar. We want to make one dollar 50 back. Right. And we have our funnel laid out essentially in every step. So we'll have a funnel. We'll have like 12 steps, 12 different things that are going on. And we're constantly, constantly tweaking it so that like our workshop or master funnel, which was, which is our kind of most successful program. We have been tweaking and like poking at this funnel to increase conversions for four years now since, since November, but it's not just landing page conversion rate. It's sales calls. It's like tweaking the video on the second page. It's like the survey we're constantly tweaking it. So the answer to the question is we obsess about it, but we don't obsess about it in the very beginning. We get the funnel out there and then we can really quickly see which things are broken, which things make no sense. Um, but yeah, a funnel from day one to day 100 usually looks pretty different or a landing page.

AI assessment note: “So the answer to the question is we obsess about it”

Q What about charging per update instead of going monthly? There's this monthly subscription fatigue. I feel like a no-brainer offer could be like, Per update. What do you think?

A Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And better expansion revenue too, because with the tier system, it's hard to get people to move up from the different tiers. You can, I mean, it's not possible, but there's friction there. You have to lock out a feature or lock out a number of seats. The person has to click a button. They have to then, uh, you know, decide on the next plan and I don't know if I really need it or should I just wait till next month? But if you just do it where, you know, it's the first 10 updates are free, or five updates are free, and then one dollar each additional update per month, then that, that's actually probably better.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And better expansion revenue too”

Q BoringMarketing.com, and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30 day sprint with a hundred percent money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend BoringMarketing.com. Who else, like, who do you look up to in terms of other brands that have done something similar that they're, that they're just amazing at building audience and building brand?

A Well, in meditation, like for example, I don't know if you know Dan Harris from 10%, he built a huge meditation brand where they were, you know, meditation was seen as like a woo-woo thing that you did in your garden, cross-legged, and he was a newscaster who had panic attacks, and he used, um, he wrote a book called 10% Happier about his journey from being a skeptic about meditation to Uh, someone that practiced it every day and then he created an app around that and they have a whole community and a brand. So he was able to take that and turn that into a brand for a specific niche within meditation. That is this like skeptical, uh, group. So that's one that comes to mind as built completely from scratch in a growing space. Um, that's one. How about you? Do you have any Greg that you can think of?

AI assessment note: “Dan Harris from 10%, he built a huge meditation brand”

Q rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO, and that's why I use BoringMarketing.com, and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30 day sprint with a hundred percent money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend BoringMarketing.com. Alright, next idea, uh, Number four, let's, let's, I like this idea. Tell me more about it.

A Okay, so Shady Rays is a hundred and thirty million dollar, um, sunglasses brand, and their entire business was built on their lifetime warranty. And so forget like Patagonian, what all the other brands do, because that's a different expensive product. Shady Rays said, we know that you're going to break or lose your sunglasses. Don't worry about it. You know, we will replace them, no questions asked. So it's not like, you know, you have to return them if they're broken. It's If you lose them, we will replace them. And then they work like a, a restocking fee into it to where they, they break even on all the replacements. They work the numbers into it where they're like, all right, you know, most people replace their glasses .7 times over their lifetime. So, and then they, the, the lifetime warranty allows them to charge a lot more than a competitor and they crush it. So I just love the idea of copy pasting this exact value proposition in any other industries. Such as sandals, like flip flops, lifetime sandals. Um, same thing, right? You can go to AliExpress and buy nice looking flip flops for three to four dollars. Shipping is 50 cents to a dollar. Sell them for 50 to 70 dollars. You have amazing growth margins. You charge five dollars, um, every time someone needs to replace them. The five dollars covers the three dollars in shipping and the two dollar sandals, and you're great…

AI assessment note: “Shady Rays is a hundred and thirty million dollar, um, sunglasses brand”

Q they're going to agencies to find, to, to find these creators and deals, or they're just cold DMing people. Like they're just saying like, hey, you're an interesting YouTube channel. So I think what's, what you're suggesting is to flip the bottle on its head. What you're saying is, Logitech should actually create a page and say like, we're really interested to do this. Right. Is that what you're saying?

A It's, it's, it's exactly this. And I'm, I'm suggesting this because I, we, we kind of did it with, um, tweet hunter. Like, uh, I think, I think it was like at the peak of our growth. Uh, we, we realized that it made a lot of sense for us to sponsor a lot of people because, because we are a Twitter product, obviously it's super relevant to sponsor, uh, Twitter creators. But we were like missing out on, we're missing, uh, good creators to sponsor. And so we opened this page saying, Hey, we want to, we want to sponsor creators. This is a rough, just plug, plug your Twitter. And this is a rough calculation of how much we would pay you. If, if this is a good enough for you, just apply. We would get an email and we'll start the conversation there. It was super simple products. Uh, just one, one page. Uh, the calculation was super dumb. I think you can do something very good because it, it just works. Like when we just tweeted about that, uh, we get the hundreds of application that it became a nightmare to sort them and to, to spot the good ones. So that's, that's the real issue to solve.

AI assessment note: “It's, it's, it's exactly this. And I'm, I'm suggesting this because”

Q Yeah. They break down different UX flows and they basically, uh, kind of commentate it with, uh, they commentate it with, um, user psychology and stuff like that. And it just, it's, it's, it's absolutely brilliant. But I think that's another thing is it's animated. So you don't really like feel connected to anyone. Um, so yeah, I agree with you there. Um, makes sense. Alright, what else you got?

A Okay, here's another one. Before a startup is ready, actually, let me start with the title, which is like, Bounty Program for Dev Evangelism. Before a startup is ready for the first dev evangelist hire, they need to write docs. They need to write starters to like tutorials. They need to create like starter GitHub repos, uh, videos. There's a ton of dev evangelism that needs to happen even before you have the capacity for a full-time hire. And it usually falls on the founder who has a lot of other stuff they are doing. And at that moment would be very happy to pay someone to do like a 95% good job On the, like, basic stuff that they need to get started. You could imagine a bounty program where junior developers all over the world are like, oh great, this startup needs a getting started tutorial. This startup needs how to use their tool with Zapier. And, and just one by one, uh, is able to contribute.

AI assessment note: “Okay, here's another one. Before a startup is ready, actually, let me start with the title”

Q And you're, you're a paid ads savant. So how would you go about thinking about your paid ads strategy for something like this?

A Yeah. You know, one of the funny things, you know this, right? I've probably overseen over my career, two, three billion dollars in paid spend, right? We did it. We scaled Uber to a hundred million a year in 600 cities, Dollar Shave Club to, was spending three million a month with us for four years. Stitch Fix, Casper, you name it. And, and we basically ran and at least they're paid social, if not all of their digital. And when I started doing this on my own, I totally fucked it up, um, actually, because I was so used to running bigger things that I was like, oh, go, go create this special creative, go do X, go do Y. And it turns out that what you actually need to do in the beginning is the first month or two is what they call seasoning the pixel. And so you create actually five to seven static non-video ads that are very basic with your product, with the pixel, and you spend 50 bucks a day, 25 bucks a day. And the first week is going to be the worst results you've ever seen, and then you'll see Facebook will start to learn your audience a little better, and maybe every week you make a small adjustment just to what's working, spend a little more on what's working, pause what's not working, basically based on how much they're spending or what the metrics look like, and then you, and you kind of let it go. And so, what you should see is after two months, the, the pixel will be se…

AI assessment note: “what you actually need to do in the beginning is the first month or two”

Q is going to be at, you know, South by Southwest. And, you know, so I think that's, I, I do think that having that magical sort of experience is cool. If you were building something like this, and I mean, you built the product, so I'm sure you've thought it, thought about this. How would you actually get to, like, how would you get awareness and in something like this?

A Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, conferences are, are a historically fantastic place to launch products. South by Southwest itself is like known to you. I guess it's not anymore, but it used to be this place where like everyone anticipated the, the next social app to launch. And so, um, it's one of these things where it's like, it has a strong network effect, especially with these social features, which is like, You host an event at a South by Southwest or a Tech Week or something like that. These events, if you're in their distribution system, get tons and tons of RSVPs. We hosted one for Tech Week, 800 RSVPs. 800 people all download your app. Conferences are probably no more than like 20,000 people in the largest sense. So once you have that 800 people, you just do the next conference that these people are going to. That's probably how I do it. Obviously, you know, you're targeting Particular niches. So you may want to start with the crypto community or something, because these people tend to like hop from one conference to another pretty consistently. Um, you may want us to target like the tech community or another specific group of people that tends to show up consistently at these conferences. But, um, yeah, I think that's how it worked.

AI assessment note: “conferences are, are a historically fantastic place to launch products.”

Q want. And I think a lot of people need to change their mindset about that when they're saying, I can get a seven story house out in the middle of nowhere. It's like, yeah, you can. And you just need to understand the trade off. You can do that. And that's really cool. It's just about understanding these trade offs is important. Am I going down a bad rabbit hole?

A No, no, this is great. My take on, my take on this is that every person has a ignorance tax that they have to pay down. So no matter what your goals are, there's a price that you have to pay to learn and To get to your goals quicker. And by living in San Francisco, New York, some of these places, yes, it might be two times more expensive to live, but you will, just by osmosis, pay down your ignorance tax, ignorance debt, way, way, way faster. And the question for you is, or the person listening really is, You know, at this stage in your life, and with the amount of money that you have saved up, does, is it worth spending an extra 1500 dollars a month, or whatever it is, for the premium to potentially get an extra client a month, or learn about how VCs work, or, you know, XYZ? That's what it is.

AI assessment note: “No, no, this is great. My take on, my take on this is”

Q concurrently build the audience, even if I don't really use it. My qu I have a question for you on like that loom video strategy that worked for you because I mean, if, if I'm getting a DM from Natalie Ellis, like I'm opening that, um, But how important was the fact that people trust you? Or, you know, do you need a creator type co-founder with something like this?

A I don't think you need it. I will say it's definitely been an advantage for me, but I received this email from someone about a month ago, and she is a stylist, and she sent me this email, and I've never heard of her before, and she was like, hi, I'm getting back into business after taking the last decade off to have babies. I was a stylist. I'm getting back into it. It's just open, very honestly. It's like, I went ahead and pulled 10 looks for you that I think you'd absolutely love. I've linked all the looks in the PDF, You don't even have to reply to this if you don't want, just go ahead and buy the outfits if you love it. If you do like it, and you'd want to work in a more formal way, let me know. So I opened this, it was like this PDF made in Canva, and it was, um, 10 looks pulled for Natalie Ellis. Here's Natalie's style, summed up, and then it was 10 outfits on 10 different pages with all the links, and I went through, I absolutely loved it, and I got back to it, and I was like, okay, I want to work more formally with you, and I've just spent, I think, I think I've spent maybe 2500 dollars with her to have her pull all my looks virtually. I'd never heard of her before, but I feel like she reached out with such a personalized approach. She doesn't have an audience or anything like that, but she just put so much time and effort into it. It like really caught my attention. So…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you need it. I will say it's definitely been an advantage”

Q I love it. All right, man. What else you got for us? Or I think we're at idea number, I mean, I'm not even gonna count those bonus ideas, but I think we're at idea number seven, right?

A Yeah, I think we're at seven. This one would be quick. It's kind of, it's more of a tool than anything, but it's software. So, um, Canva doesn't have good video captions right now, where it's like, you basically imagine I upload a video into it and I just like want it to caption, just like all, you know, whatever, Adobe Premiere or any of these other tools. Um, have you built an app and there's some apps in this space, but again, they're not super good, but I think there's an opportunity to go and build this. Um, and it's like based off of search volume that I'm seeing, people are definitely searching for it. Canva is like one of the biggest tools. It's one of the fastest growing video editors. It's insane. When you look at it, it's actually nuts. And all the, all this is, is you would basically like, they put a video, imagine you put a video into it. There's like an app section that's in the bottom left-hand corner. They click it. It's like caption this video. It transcribes it. Just use like a large whisper model. And then that gets added and you have like a, Um, you know, you basically can tap into the font styles that's already built into Canva and then add some different variations with like karaoke, et cetera. But I think, I think this is like a, you know, a cool 20 K a month type company that's using the distribution, if not bigger, that's using the distribution of Canva…

AI assessment note: “This one would be quick. It's kind of, it's more of a tool than anything”

Q So first of all, I love this idea. Like, I feel like it's one of those ideas that would work, like just would work with a high probability that it would work. How would, how would you go about starting this? Like what, what steps would you take if you actually wanted to start this?

A If I actually wanted to start this, you need the, I mean, you need a doctor and you need a, this is a perfect celebrity business, right? So you need a doctor and you need a celebrity. And I don't think what you, so there's the, there's some Chicago bears, middle linebacker who got hair transplants, bald guy, I forget his name. Um, and he was like plastered all over the billboards. I don't think you need those celebrities. The first thing I would do is I would go get a, you gotta get a doctor. So I looked this up. You need a doctor and you need two assistants basically. Because the way it works is they take the hair out of the back of your head, put it on the front of your head. So you need like the doctor to do that and the assistants to help with that. So that's three employees that you need. You need a physical space. So let's say you're paying a doctor to hunt, you know, maybe let's say 300 K a year. Each assistant is a hundred K years. That's 500 K a year. Uh, maybe you need space in person in New York. So it's 20 K a month. So it's another two 50 years. So that's 750 K a year right there of costs. And then I think what you need is a celebrity. That's like big on Tech Twitter. So I would pick like, uh, you know, you have great hair, but if you were balding, I'd go to a Greg Eisenberg or I'd go to Sam Parr or Austin reef or Kevin Rose, or, you know, maybe I'd go to Tim Ferri…

AI assessment note: “The first thing I would do is I would go get a, you gotta get a doctor.”

Q I think you would never think of a newsletter costing 2000 dollars a year. Um, but it's all, I think what's really smart, what Motley Fool does that's really smart is it's all about the value, right? It's like, oh, if I get one good stock pick, it's worth it to me to pay 2000 dollars a year. And I think that's how a lot of people think about it.

A Yeah, absolutely. Especially depending on the subscribers that they have. Many of the people that sign up for the low price ones, they're probably working with, you know, five or six figure portfolios, maybe seven figure portfolios on their own, but they have plenty of members that are worth five, 10, 20, 50, a hundred million dollars. And, and for, at that level of clientele, for them to spend, you know, 10 grand a year on, on a service is like, you know, chump shames to them. So they've done a really good job at Segmenting their, their, their audience, their backend audience, um, and then upselling them over time. The other thing that they've done that's really fascinating is they have taken their, um, initial business, business model, initial brand name, and they have actually spun off from there, um, a number of different brands. So they have a hedge fund that they run, um, called one, six, two, three, three capital. And that I believe employs a fairly traditional two and 20, uh, model. Which is very obviously lucrative, and that is, they service a very small number of clients, but they have a very high net worth client base that goes in there. They have mutual funds that they've spun off. They have ETFs they've spun off. They've had sister brands that they've spun off that focus on personal finance and real estate. So they have just done an excellent job of taking this cor…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, absolutely. Especially depending on the subscribers that they have.”

Q but I just imagine that He went to the cultural tutor and was like, Hey, I'll give you X amount of dollars per month and just like continue doing what you're doing and just go do this full time and make it better. And then almost as like a patron of the arts, it sounds like, um, wait, you know, where you, yeah. Is that, is that, is that fair?

A Yeah. And I know in, in, in that specific use case, I think the cultural tutor was working at McDonald's. So he essentially said, I'll, I'll, I'll give you the same salary or maybe more of a salary that you're working at McDonald's, but quit that job and spend all of your time, uh, doing this. But I think there's an opportunity to apply that same thinking cobbled together for lack of a better term, um, a podcast network, but do it across different, uh, platforms. And if you build up a decent enough size and have a decent enough Uh, trajectory for the, um, for the accounts that you, you go after. I think for the small accounts, it gives them an opportunity to actually monetize their platforms without having to think about the back office way before they could reach any scale on their own to turn it into a, a full-time living. And in exchange, they're giving up some of the, of the future upside if they really hit it big. But I know a lot of small creators would, would happily make that, uh, would happily make that trade. And then the other side, if you're the one aggregating, Uh, you have to think like a venture capitalist, right? You just need a handful of those. If you have like, you know, 20 or 30 of these, um, on your payroll or in your network, you just need a handful of them to really make it big for the entire, the entire payoff to be big.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And I know in, in, in that specific use case”