The Exchanges

Q Okay, cool. So we got that. And then what happened?

A So logo, um, So the, and I'll walk, I'm not going to just like cover all the tweets here, but I do think this plays a part in sort of the story here. So, um, what you see me doing here is like, I, I post a poll about like, how do we style the noma, the domain? Do we do this, you know, capitalize the S lowercase, whatever, uh, post a screenshot of like proof that I've actually got something working and This entire time is me making this almost this community effort on some level. Um, to me, what's super interesting about social is not just constantly broadcasting, right? Like it's, uh, it's, uh, the interactivity part. It's me posting something and someone has an idea, me posting something, a logo, and someone responds with a different logo. Uh, you know, it's, uh, someone saying, like, I like that feature. What if you did this? And That's incredibly beneficial. Um, both to me as I'm sort of doing this sitting here in a box by myself, uh, but it's also building up a bit of hype on the product itself. Um, so I keep yapping about it. Um, and then get to the point where it's like, Hey, we've launched again. That was seven o'clock that night. Um, basically I worked on it for the better part of 12 hours or so that day. And, um, But I think later that evening, like I stayed up another couple of hours and was at, I mean, we did a thousand dollars or something in revenue within a couple…

AI assessment note: “we did a thousand dollars or something in revenue within a couple of hours”

Q If you had to, you know, If you had to say, what is the one killer feature of Stitch? Like, what is, you know, what is the one thing that Stitch does better than any other vibe coding tool? What do you think that is?

A Yeah, I mean, I think right now we're really trying to make it where a lot of vide coding today, you might write a long prompt, and then there's a lot of back and forth. And so what we've tried to do with Stitch is minimize that back and forth, and then give you the assets and the controls to kind of do common things. So like, one of the things I love about Stitch is you can also just go up here and say, edit theme, make it all dark mode, change all the corner radius, change all the font, like common things that people get stuck on We're really trying to focus on like the design quality here, but also making it really portable so you can move it to a tool like Figma if you want to go deeper. And I think that's starting with the design process is kind of how we're really thinking about stitch.

AI assessment note: “minimize that back and forth, and then give you the assets and the controls”

Q of wrapping, wrapping that up and selling that to other companies is a great business to start. You know, I'm talking about like a cash flowing business. Like if you're, you know, I'm sure someone would pay 29 dollars a month for that service set up. So have you seen people basically start using string? To create some workflows and agents and then selling that to, you know, other companies.

A Yeah, I mean, we've, we've talked a lot about it. I think it's a little, like, at least on our platform, it's a little early, but I, I think if you look at what's happened with N-A-D-N and all these, you know, they call it the, like, the automation bros on, like, Twitter and, and YouTube, you have this demographic of people that, you know, maybe we're in, you know, drop shipping, and then we're in crypto, and then are, like, they're in the business of making money on the internet, and they've sort of discovered this, like, AI agent category as a potential market to, like, you know, build products and sell them. Um, at least from my conversations with customers, I think most of those is more about today, at least generating views of their content and actually less about selling like quote unquote the templates. Um, but I think that there's a huge opportunity once these templates like are actually easy enough to implement for the end user that like, I think there could be really big businesses built in these. It reminds me a little bit of like the kind of like the website template world where Um, you know, the challenge is always can you actually get to value if you purchase it, right? And so these things need to be easy enough to implement for the end user, and then I think absolutely you could, um, you could build a business on this.

AI assessment note: “at least on our platform, it's a little early”

Q Before we get to the, to the next one, do you have any, you have one or two ideas for people if they were trying to build a big business on top of string, what, what they, what could they build?

A Well, I don't, I don't think we've built the tooling yet for people to build a business. And I was going to get a little, like little tech nerdy, but like, there's really no reason why every agent on string couldn't also be an MCP server. And we, we have a view that You know, there will be MCP server businesses built where people are like, here's an MCP server to, I don't know, like pick random examples, process refunds on this SaaS app, or, you know, write blog posts in this way, or, you know, do this other job function that people have. Um, and so, you know, we've talked a lot about once we can prove that we can create like scalable agents that's, you know, that are solving real business problems, uh, for companies, there's no reason not to enable people to just, Like turn that into an MCP server that you then sell in market. Obviously we want to build tooling there. So like, it's like a one click and you, you know, submit it to marketplaces. Um, but I, I think there needs to be more demand, frankly, on the MCP server side. Like it sounds good, but like, you know, we need more people consuming them, but that feels to us like that's the biggest business opportunity for like an end user of our product today.

AI assessment note: “there will be MCP server businesses built where people are like, here's an MCP server”

Q Are formats universal? Meaning, could you look at, you know, do you have to scroll your niche? Because sometimes you'll find a format in another niche that, you know, in your niche people actually haven't tapped into, and there's an opportunity to use that that's proven in that niche and bring it to yours.

A Yeah, that's actually a really good angle. I think most people, you could definitely, yeah, you definitely could bring formats to like that aren't in your niche to your niche. I think that works. Um, cause like this two by two format is just one example. There's, you could do anything, but this could be applied in like a million different ways. You can write a different caption. You can have different pictures of anything. Um, and that could be applied when I first found it in hobbies to Food. And that's what I actually did do that. Um, just cause I was slow effort. I did do that. I made this page and I made 30 posts on it, um, for my food app. And one of them hit like, I think two million because this is like a four, a format that's validated in another niche and it brought it to this one. So yeah, to answer your question, yes, you absolutely can bring other formats over. The reason I just said for starting a new account is like, For algorithms to know who to push your content to, if you have a new account, it's best if you only scroll in your niche, just because then when you make your first video post, it knows who you're going for. So that's important, I think, to know. Um, but if you're like scrolling on a different page and you see a format, you could definitely still reuse it.

AI assessment note: “yes, you absolutely can bring other formats over”

Q Cool. Alright, so step one is you're scrolling in your niche, you got a fresh account, you're figuring out a format, what's next?

A Um, first, definitely don't rush that phase. You don't want to post content on a brand new account in the first, I'd say week. I used to say two days, three days, but like a week, because you don't want the algorithm thinking you're a bot. You want them thinking this guy is a human and we want to push his content out there when the time comes. So for the first week, I would not post any videos. And when you do post your first video, Only post like one a day. Um, if you're going to post multiple, spread them out a few hours, at least like three, four hours, especially for new accounts. So I just do one a day. Then you have time to iterate on content. And you want to keep that account in good standing. You don't want any algorithms thinking you're doing like some bot behavior. So you also want to post manually. Um, I've run a social media scheduling tool and I tell people do not use my tool for the new accounts. You want a good, uh, like a good standing account, which means you want to do everything, I guess, by the book, like a human would do it at least for the first like bit until your accounts warmed up. Um, and then after that, after you've warmed up the account, you've waited a week and you post your first content. Um, really it's all just about testing new pieces of content. Um, I think something important, which I mentioned in the guide is obviously you're doing this to g…

AI assessment note: “for the first week, I would not post any videos”

Q Yeah, this is cool. Um, this is this, what's cool about this and the lens I'm using for, for everyone is This could be applied to a million niches. There is, and I'm curious, like, have you thought of other niches where this could work? Like peak for X.

A Yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, like nutrition is definitely like eating, uh, eating, diet, health, kind of all, all sort of related, right? Um, now I'll tell you like a habit I wish I had that I do not have because it takes too much effort. Um, I want to be more specific about, like, The types of food that I am eating to, like, reach my goals, right? Whether it's like, oh, I want to, like, build muscle for this, like, competition I'm doing in the summer. Maybe for others, it's like, oh, I want to cut, right? Um, Now, getting, like, uh, everything tracked, and then being able to, like, personalize the goal, then being able to, like, plan the meal, and then figure out where to buy the meal, because, you know, you have to go out and get groceries, cook, whatever, and then, like, give continuous feedback around how the plan is going, right? Because iteration, like, it might not be perfect the first time. Like, I would love that, right? I mean, if someone's building that today, like, I, I, Would love to take a look, but it's the same kind of concept of, like, you know, you, you have to, like, capture not just the tracking and the numbers part. It's like there's so much more, so many more steps to ultimately getting to you taking an action and then seeing the results of the action. So I think this applies to so many different, so many different areas where, um, you know, where there…

AI assessment note: “nutrition is definitely like eating, uh, eating, diet, health, kind of all”

Q No, that's great. I think maybe, what's a V, what's a V one? You know, how do I feel good enough about where I'm ready to sell something?

A Um, well, I think you can do a lot of the heavy lifting, uh, on the V one with looking at Manus, chat GPT, uh, idea browser of like, okay, here's a product that's going to work most likely. And it's not, I always think about it as like, what's, is there a one killer feature? So the V one is basically one killer feature. Plus there's just certain table stakes features that you're going to need to have for launch. So for example, uh, If you're launching with a marketplace, you might need to have, you know, user profiles or ratings. You know, these are things that you have to have. So, uh, that's what V one is. And then a V two is like, okay, you've got a thing that's working. You know, if it's a marketplace, you have supply and demand, you have people, you know, posting what they're selling and people buying the products. Um, you know, there's other, a V two might be like, oh, you know, Something, an adjacent killer feature, basically, adding to that.

AI assessment note: “the V one is basically one killer feature. Plus there's just certain table stakes features”

Q Okay, and if I actually use this workflow, what is the potential outcome of that? Like, why, why do, why should I, I even care about this?

A Yeah. The outcome is that you're going to be able to test content angles, hooks, and topics way faster. So instead of like going, getting a subpar result just from opening up Claude or ChatGPT, this is going to get a lot of context, a lot of information, and it's going to create top performing content based off of that. It's even going to create an image for you and it's going to post automatically. Now, oftentimes AI isn't quite there to just push a button and go end to end and post for you. Uh, I recommend doing that to test things out. I've heard you talk about this a little bit too. Sometimes you'll throw out a tweet, you'll see if it catches or you'll even use like maybe a secret account and then you'll delete it. So I'll do the same thing. I've been doing that actually, uh, for the past couple hours on LinkedIn. So you'll be able to test, you'll be able to refine, but I threw in a step here so that if you want, you can, uh, actually edit the content before you, before you put it live as well.

AI assessment note: “The outcome is that you're going to be able to test content angles”

Q And it could be one of those businesses that you actually sell to, I don't know how this works, maybe you know, but as like a perk to businesses, right? So like companies would, you know, pay for their employees, like no, at no cost to employees to basically use this product.

A Totally. I don't know why I haven't seen this more in the US, but When I was in the UK, friends of mine would be on health insurance plans that would incentivize them to do healthy things. Like, this already existed. My friend's like, do you want a free coffee at Starbucks? And I'm like, why do you have a free coffee at Starbucks? And he's like, well, my insurance plan has given me points or, you know, free dollars to certain things because I have, you know, if he's wearing an Oura ring, I have achieved a good health score or sleep score, or because I've gone to the gym a certain number of times, or I've seen my doctor You know, I don't, on a regular basis. I don't remember what the inputs were, but he specifically was like, my health insurance plan has done the, you know, data analysis to determine, like, this is worth X to us for someone to be a healthier person, and therefore we're going to incentivize this through rewards.

AI assessment note: “Totally. I don't know why I haven't seen this more in the US”

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 Ok, well, where do you want to start?

A I mean, we can kind of start with just the obvious picks on that list. Um, you know, Cal AI is a great example of how to use, you know, classic tools and AI that are publicly available to everybody. But then if you package it nicely, if you create a good onboarding experience, you create like a user investment in that onboarding experience. Um, if you kind of package these simple tools the way that they did, That's why they've seen the success that they've had, right? You know, the reality is anyone can go and make a calorie tracking app, but they built an amazing funnel, right? So I think like the key lesson in a Cal AI is they packaged it really, really nicely and made it seem even more valuable than it is, which I think is, you know, part of the genius of, of an app that simple.

AI assessment note: “we can kind of start with just the obvious picks on that list”

Q Cause they have the daily prayers. They have sleep meditations. They've got minute meditations. Um, and then they've got like, Kind of a multiplayer experience around community challenges. So I think that if you're creating a spiritual app, think about it as like single player first. How do I create the best daily driver single player? And then how do I add multiplayer? How, how would you think about it?

A I mean, I think that in an app like this, like this is very much single player first. I think you look at the multiplayer side as like a way to leverage like a different growth lever, right? So if you have, you know, you have a really good single player app, it's easy to then add like some kind of multiplayer experience or some kind of social experience where you're porting in contacts or you're connecting socials or they're sharing something to socials. I feel like all of that is like great growth levers. Uh, once you have an amazing single player experience, once you have some kind of habit that you formed, Then, you know, you can add a little gate, right? You can, you know, you can gate monetization with some kind of share mechanism. You can, you know, encourage them to invite their friends and family for a discount. A lot of things that you can do in that realm, but you do need to crush that core experience before you can do this.

AI assessment note: “you look at the multiplayer side as like a way to leverage like a different growth lever”

Q So once you've done that, say you've got close to 90% or 90% or more, what do you, what, what's next?

A Um, at that point, then you want to continue seeding it, right? Because now you've, you've, um, you've proven that you can get enough people to complete the action in the app. So now you need to seed it with like a really, like you gotta, you kind of did the test content, you got users on, you iterated. Now you need to kind of take all those learnings and then apply more pressure, and then just start trying to seed it in different audiences, different niches, um, you know, work with creators in different countries, Um, in different time zones that have different kinds of audiences. Um, you know, just really like push. Like once you know that you can get people to do the core action, your job is now just to get more people onto the app. Uh, and what I like to do is like part of the core action. I do like to have some, some kind of sharing or inviting in that, in that core action, right? You know, um, you know, we've seen apps like, you know, uh, that have a hard invite gates. We saw that with, uh, with Laps, for example, very viral photo app. You would invite, I think, three to five friends to get in the app. Um, so a lot of people would, you know, hit that wall and maybe not go over, but if you got over the wall, you are an extremely valuable user because you brought in all these people with you. So it's like, if you have some kind of loop in the app or some kind of way of invi…

AI assessment note: “at that point, then you want to continue seeding it, right?”

Q And while you bring that up, what is an agent swarm?

A That's a good question. An agent swarm is the ability to send a list of You have things to do to an AI agent, and for this AI agent to do all these things reliably, quickly, and in parallel. Because AI agents are awesome, and they're super powerful, but over long-term, like long-time horizons, they fail. They lose coherence. And so, for example, if you give an AI agent a list of things like, hey, take these 500 people and send personalized outreach to them. Like personalized lead outreach is a very big use case for AI agents. First of all, it's going to take forever. It's going to be pretty expensive. And by the 200th lead, it may fail. It may just become unreliable. If you use an agent swarm instead, it's going to, basically, you know, like in the matrix, you have like an agent Smith that duplicates himself. It's like the agent Smith thing. It's like the agent is going to duplicate himself and send one copy of itself to each lead. Yeah, so this meeting prep Lindy here uses, it's actually, it's funny, it's a swarm of swarms. So what I do is every morning you wake up, you check my meetings for the day, and then you deploy an agent swarm for each meeting that I have. And then inside this swarm, you deploy another swarm for every attendee of every meeting that I have. And then this is really good because this Lindy actually uses the meeting notes that the other Lindy brings togeth…

AI assessment note: “An agent swarm is the ability to send a list of”

Q I love it. All right. Is there anything else you wanted to cover?

A Um, let me think. I'll, okay, I'll show one last example that the conference is showing is my, my CRM manager. So I have this Lindy that helps me, um, manage my, my, my network. And so I, every so often I talk to her and I'm like, Hey, I just met this guy. He's awesome. I really wanted to stay, stay in touch with, with him. So, um, I'll show you an example here. Um, well, we're going to have to, we're going to have to blur it out, but, uh, I added this guy, uh, was like, Hey, like this guy is, is awesome. You know, apparently he's the best that other guy has ever worked with. I did him to a spreadsheet. Another really cool thing is that I can talk to this Lindy and I can be like, Hey, who should I hit up when I'm in New York? Or who are, like, really good salespeople that I know? And then it finds me a list. And then this Lindy, I actually also made her observe my inbox and notice when I have booked a flight. Which, by the way, soon is going to be a Lindy booking flights for me. And so she sees when I booked a flight because I receive an email confirmation. And she's like, and I can, I can actually show you because right now I'm going to, to New York. So she's like, Hey, like you're going to New York. This is just like a test email. I sent it to myself. And she's looking at my CRM and she's like, Hey, these are the contacts that you should meet up when you're going to New York.

AI assessment note: “I'll show one last example that the conference is showing is my, my CRM manager.”

Q I'm curious, your perspective on this, like that other company rise spent all this time and money, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars. Figuring out this ad, an ad copy, and then in, like, a few seconds, we're, I mean, we're kind of, we're remixing it into, you know, for AD one, so I'm curious, like, how do you, is it dirty, or am I just too clean here?

A I mean, to be honest with you, the way that most of these, um, companies work is they are finding inspiration ads. There's like 50 companies that do this. They provide you inspiration ads, or they're getting templates, which are recreated ads in Figma files or Canva files. There's companies that basically just do this, um, at scale. And this is how people are making ads right now. So I don't, I don't think this is dirty because I think this is, was already happening. Um, it was just happening physically. People were looking for inspiration. They were, um, they were using templates. Now, um, ChatGPT just lets, just does it for you. So, I mean, from what I've seen, this was already happening.

AI assessment note: “I don't think this is dirty because I think this is, was already happening.”

Q business and AI will get you started with just the right design. We have a lots more coming on this front. So he's teasing it incredible, incredibly excited about how much more accessible entrepreneurship will become due to the power of AI tools. So again, like we talked about competition when you see things like this coming from Shopify web flow, Um, you still think it's a good business idea?

A Hundred percent. I, I mean, that's just Shopify, right? Like, think about, I mean, I think Leadpages does fifty million a year, if I remember correctly. Like, that means it's a huge category. Like, this is a huge category that you can go. This is the same thing. Like, I mean, there can be Mailchimp's and Klaviyo's and, uh, you know, uh, kits and, uh, beehives and all of, all of these email service providers, and they can still all be massive companies because it's such a huge category. This is one of those categories, right? Like this is the fact that perspective can come in and in, you know, years bootstrapped go from zero to ten million ARR, like signals how big this, this audience is, right? Um, so again, if, and also if the big dogs are doing it, that is a strong signal that people want this. So, I mean, you just got all the validation you need. You have the search following value validation. You've got the incumbent validation and they're going to move super slow on it. I mean, you can probably like a crack team of two engineers go do this and then you just run Google ads to it for landing page builder, or you go sponsor YouTubers that run, uh, that do Google ads videos, right? Like how to do Google ads for real estate agents or whatever, right? And you go, they, You, you pay them to use your tool within their video when they're teaching people how to run Google ads.

AI assessment note: “Hundred percent. I, I mean, that's just Shopify, right?”

Q Cool. Yeah. So yeah, let's, let's start with number one. So organic short form content. You basically say, you talk about the fresh account versus not fresh account and, and how you should think about the format, finding a face, craft a viral video series, multiply your accounts. What do you, what do you mean by this?

A Yeah, so I mean that, uh, traditionally on social media, um, there was a lot of clout associated with, like, a million followers, or, like, check marks, or just, like, I think, I think there was this idea that the history of someone's channel meant a lot, but nowadays that's not really the case at all. Like, um, there are many cases where founders will just make one video on their TikTok, and that video will just immediately go viral, uh, which, which, You know, no matter how many times I say it, people don't really seem to believe it until they, it happens to one of their friends, but, I mean, I'm sure you've had many guests that, you know, say the same thing. Like, you can literally just make Uh, straight up ad about your product. Uh, if the hook is good and the content is, you know, high quality, you have a good shot of getting, you know, 1000 thousand, a million views, and that's obviously, you know, costs you very little or nothing to do. So this idea of, like, fresh accounts with, um, you know, one follower, 10 followers, versus an account with a million followers, it's not hyperbole. You know, we've had, we've done a lot of A-B tests at January. You know, we've, we've posted the same, same content, literally the same content on, you know, our main account that has 70,000 followers and an account that had, I believe at the time, like 50 followers. And it's not really that…

AI assessment note: “this idea of, like, fresh accounts with... one follower... versus an account with a million”

Q So you say here, when you get a new creator, just follow this basic guideline. Repost vids on all platforms. Reels, TikTok, shorts. Post one plus videos per day. Initially post vids similar to what the influencer posts on their main account. Then start experimenting with videos that feature your product. Uh, you can get someone cheaper, uh, for similar results. Uh, how important is the daily post?

A I mean, the, the, I probably should have said this in the post, but the importance of, like, uh, frequency of posting is just, you want to be, uh, exploring before you exploit, you know. So if you're posting, like, one video a week, uh, you only have four tests per month, uh, to find a hook and, like, content angle. That really works. Whereas you post one video a day. Uh, I said one plus. You could post even more than one video a day. You could continually kind of try, you know, different Um, like you try, like, skits, or memes, or humor, or educational content, or straight up ads, or, you know, uh, like, play with different angles, play with different hooks, text on screen, like, um, you could try different, like, there's so many things you could kind of be experimenting with, and if you at least post one video a day, you can kind of be, like, methodically xing out, okay, well, my product will, if I present it like this, it seems to flop, present it like this, seems to do okay, present it like this, it seems to flop, Get the winners of your content kind of coliseum, and then the next week try with the winning variants and try more things, and eventually you'll get, ah, one thing that, like, one mega banger where it gets like a million to ten million views, and, um, it's like the most euphoric kind of crazy feeling that you have to kind of, like, you have to really experience i…

AI assessment note: “the importance of, like, uh, frequency of posting is just, you want to be, uh, exploring”

Q Cool. And then how do we negotiate with influencers?

A Yeah, so, uh, when you negotiate with influencers, uh, you wanna basically align the incentives between you and the influencers. Uh, you, you should both want a video that can, that converts, and, uh, one way to do that is you don't wanna give them all of the money up front, because you immediately lose leverage, uh, like, your side of leverage if you pay, pay for everything, and, uh, they, they, um, they just have to post afterwards. Um, obviously I love influencers. Most influencers are fantastic people, but some will try, will just take the money And, um, some of them will actually just not post any videos, and others will drop a half-assed video, um, because they already got their bag. Um, you want to try to split some of the payments so that a percent of it, percentage of it comes from, like, the number of conversions they bring if you give them their personal coupon code, or maybe, like, uh, the number of views that they get. Um, also when you negotiate, I don't, I mean, something that I do is I try to be, like, really straightforward with them. Like, oh, you know, like, we have, Uh, we usually do well in these countries, and we usually, uh, like, for these types of, uh, partnerships, we usually have this sort of, uh, budget, and just being fully transparent, um, and then they are transparent with, like, their demographics, and how their previous sponsor views go, so, um,…

AI assessment note: “you don't wanna give them all of the money up front, because you immediately lose leverage”

Q Now, Jake, I don't know if you've ever done this, but have you ever done something like taking a screenshot of, for example, the basics, going to ChatGPT or ChatGPT Pro, and being like, I'm thinking about creating a startup. This is the idea. What am I missing?

A I don't think that would be a bad idea, but I don't do it because my experience with experimenting with it has been that the, the way chat GPT looks at the world, it just tends to be like kind of the oatmeal version of things. And I'm so much more interested in like the opinionated, like weird versions of things that people come up with. Uh, I still feel like for weirdness, Humans have like kind of an advantage at that. And, and so I, I like, I like the founders take more than that. And that said, it's not going to hurt to do that. And I should totally be wrong. And I'm sure like thousands of people would shout at me, like you're wrong. Like you can totally get that great stuff from it. That's just been my experience. We had a, we had a founder recently who actually ran an entire design sprint. And this is a smart guy, like co-founder of a Google Gemini, real smart guy who left and found a new, a new startup. And he's like, you know, great. We're running this design sprint together, running this foundation sprint together. Great. But I want to see what, um, I'm going to create like some different GPTs, have them run through as if they were a team, right? Like see what they produce in their own foundation sprint and their own design sprint. And, you know, we looked at it and it was kind of like, eh, like what you came up with was so much, so much spicier as a, as a human going t…

AI assessment note: “I don't think that would be a bad idea, but I don't do it”

Q So when you're doing zero to one, should you be focused on net revenue retention? Or like, what are the things that you should be focused You're focusing on zero to one versus when you're scaling.

A I think the biggest mistake that a lot of founders make is they, they try to jump right into growth before they think about retention. I think it's so much easier to grow a business when you have incredible customer loyalty and then you're able to then throw gasoline on that fire. I think a lot of founders make the mistake of going, well, we've got something that's kind of break even. Let's just go and market it like crazy and eventually we'll grow. What ends up happening? You have massive churn. Um, it's hard to profitably grow. As we know, acquiring customers becomes harder and harder every single month. I think Sam, Sam Parr mentions like growing on, on these platforms is like buying real estate beachfront, but rent goes up every 18 months. So it becomes harder and harder. And so I do think you need to focus on retention upfront first and foremost before you ever worry about promotion. So I do think it's important. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “you need to focus on retention upfront first and foremost before you ever worry about promotion”

Q bunch of projects, I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, he's, I know what he's thinking. I know what he's thinking. Focus, Greg, focus. So how should people think about, you know, a lot of people are into product studios now launching multiple products. I call them multi multi-preneurs. How should people think about, you know, having multiple cash flowing businesses? Um, does it work? What are your thoughts?

A So this goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation, which is, are you a founder or are you a CEO? And founders found, builders build. And if you know this is your zone of genius, this is actually the most valuable part of the overall value chain. If you can get something, if you can discover flight, like that more than anything else is the most valuable part of the overall ecosystem. The problem that most founders have is they discover flight and then they abandon it to go start the next thing. Right? They spent 2000 years discovering flight, and then they go, okay, well, like, let me go build, let me go invent the helicopter. Where it's like, the last hundred years is actually where the exciting parts of flight happened. So you have to hand off the baton. You have to successfully hand off the baton. And so if, if you have discovered flight mid seven figures, your only job right now is go, am I the right CEO for the next phase of growth? And if not, the only thing you should be doing is either hiring a COO or a president, To execute on your vision or recognize this is actually not a business I'm very passionate about and hire a CEO to take your vision to the next level. Once you do that, go back to tinker mode because that's actually way more valuable for your skill set. But the problem that most founders face is they go right back to tinker m…

AI assessment note: “Once you do that, go back to tinker mode because that's actually way more valuable”

Q So I buy that. A key component of it, though, is figuring out what your zone of genius is, and the question is, like, how do you identify that? How do people identify what their zone of genius is?

A When you look at your calendar, where do you get excited versus what do you push off? If you get excited for certain calls, if you get excited for certain areas, where are you tinkering in the morning before you have any meetings? That's your zone of genius. If you find yourself dreading a sales call, that's an area for you to get out of. If you find yourself excited in order to tinker with the latest AI tool or finding yourself excited to jump on a customer call, not a, not a sales call, but an existing customer, you're probably thinking more in terms of delivery. And so ask yourself, where does your motivations go when you have an empty calendar?

AI assessment note: “When you look at your calendar, where do you get excited versus what do you push off?”

Q And would you pay, is it like a one-time fee or is there a subscription element to it?

A I, I think that, I think there would be like a one-time setup fee, but I think where the business could be interesting and recurring is There's like, as kids get older, there's things like, you know, they need like a green light as like a credit card or like circle to track where they are, things like that. So you could become an affiliate. These licensed people can become an affiliate and like recommend stuff or like, Hey, you know, like maybe your kid is like really into this thing. So like, like they should have this app. So I think there could be some recurrence and definitely like affiliate revenue. But I think that the idea of like a reset, like a family reset, people would pay like 2000 dollars.

AI assessment note: “I think there would be like a one-time setup fee, but I think where the business”

Q Like, how, okay, how, how big of a business could you create around this?

A Good question. Um, I think you could build a six or a seven figure business around what I'm doing here. Not necessarily for pizza ovens, but for anything undervalued. Um, it's just arbitrage. So, you know, if you're going to, if, if I'm going to clean out my garage and there's an old pizza oven in there and I want to sell it, even though I know about all these marketplaces, cause I've been just a side hustler my whole life. I'm just going to listen on Facebook marketplace. Because it's the most frictionless and it's local and I don't want to ship it and it's easy. Um, but if I had more time, I would probably list it on eBay cause it's a much bigger audience. Um, and so there is an opportunity for anyone to find any preferably high ticket product that is listed on one market at an undervalued price and then sell it on another market at a fair market price. Um, this is something that I'm not inventing. People do it every day, but they're either doing it themselves or using, um, uh, virtual assistants to do it. Whereas now this can all be done in the background for me.

AI assessment note: “I think you could build a six or a seven figure business around what I'm doing”

Q there's a million people who can post about Reed Hastings, and there's weird rules, but only some people can post about the ideas piece of it. So I think that a sub point could be sometimes the biggest opportunities aren't in fixing problems, they're in making people feel better about having them, and that's kind of a prompt For people to come up with startup ideas. Does that make sense?

A Yeah, it does. So this is where, you know, my, my years as a ghostwriter, that part of my brain is kicking in, right? Because if, if we sort of change the lens for a moment, let's pretend that what we're doing, you are a client and I'm a ghostwriter. It's very similar. This is exactly what I would be doing with a client anyway, right? And you just said something really smart. And so I go, okay, that's great. I just don't know where to put that yet. So I think of it like a Lego block, right? You're like, that's a really great Lego block. I just don't know where it fits yet. Okay. So we, we put that there. Now we've got some ideas swirling around and in some way we can, let's summarize sort of our, our goals here. Our goals are, we want This piece to be, um, connected to startup ideas. We want this piece to in some way be actionable because a lot of the, a lot of the value that you provide is like how to, how to get started, how to do something, right? And ideally we want this piece to be connected to our Reed Hastings, you know, strange rule during Netflix's early days. Fair, fair enough?

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it does. So this is where, you know, my, my years as a ghostwriter”

Q know, Patty, you, You work with the biggest creators in the game. You've worked with Mr. Beast. You've worked with small creators who become big creators, the Noah Kagan's of the world. Um, I see you out there. So, uh, I'm excited to hear what you, what you've got in this cheat sheet. By the end of this pod, what's, what's someone going to be able to, to take away?

A I think the main thing for me when it comes to The sort of basis of what I teach with YouTube is that YouTube is not a video platform. Like everyone thinks YouTube is like YouTube videos, obviously. And you know, I'm being a bit silly, but realistically, most people look at YouTube and say, I need to make a video. What I love for people to think about by the end of this call is I need to make a video. But before that, I need to understand what video to make the strategy behind choosing ideas. Packaging. So when a YouTuber says packaging, they're referring to title thumbnail, basically like the packaging of a product, just in how, when you're building a startup or a consumer product or whatever it might be, you have to think about your marketing, your branding, your packaging. The same is true for a YouTube video. Um, and that's a big difference when it comes to other platforms, like even something like a TikTok where content is served to you, YouTube, there is still that decision made by the user of clicking on a video. Um, So I'd love for people just to have a really good understanding of how to think about that. And, um, I also have a bit of a, like a, a month by month plan. So if anyone is, you know, watching this podcast and is like, Hey, next 12 months, I want to like build a, a channel maybe for their personal brand, for their company to just like learn the game of YouTub…

AI assessment note: “What I love for people to think about by the end of this call”

Q I changed it to He built a startup using AI that prints money. Full tutorial in brackets. Put that, you know, it's a, right now it's already at three on 10, you know, 10 in an hour, it went from a 10 on 10 to a three on 10, and the comments section and everything, and it's like, damn it. What do you think? What do you think about that?

A Well, I think what you're describing is a very, like, It's a common thing that YouTube is often fine, which is like, Hey, like I've put effort into something. Cause you described this was like IRL. You got these cameras, spent this money. You put effort into something which is important, but it's less important than packaging. So like you could do incredible. I have a friend in Austin who is this like, He's shot advertisements for like Porsche, Aston Martin, um, Adidas. Like he's like this incredible, like creative mind. He gets no views on YouTube. You know, his videos are incredible. Every time I watch them, I'm like, this should get more views, but it's because his content isn't packaged. He's not actually a really good title thumbnail, uh, wizard when it comes to his content. So the point you're making, I don't, I don't think that contradicts the point of that YouTube is a stable algorithm. It's just that Maybe you dislike a little bit of what that game is in that sense. Like, hey, I put this effort into something that wasn't rewarded. But, um, to me, I would look at that and say, well, it's still, even if something is not, even if something is focused on being quite clickbait in some ways, or like being over the top, exaggerating, like using superlatives, At least we can say, well, that's what works, and we can build around that.

AI assessment note: “You put effort into something which is important, but it's less important than packaging.”