The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 583 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Nixon: AI-generated visuals have entirely replaced stock footage in my workflow
“I never use, like, stock footage anymore. Everything's generated for, like, perfect to be in perfect context of what I'm saying, and just to be a little bit more visual compelling.”
Courtney shifts profitable digital products to hard-to-scale in-person experiences
“Over the last year, I've been moving a lot of the digital elements of my company, which are very profitable and scalable because they're digital to a much less easy to do in person version of these products.”
Courtney paid $5,000 just for Alex Hormozi's physical playbook folder
“I spent 5000 dollars only for this folder.”
Simons: StackBlitz was preparing to shut down in 2024 before Bolt
“Last year, in twenty-twenty-four, we were getting ready to shut the company down. When you're dealing with that sort of situation where it's like, are we gonna shut down the company, or what are the other outcomes? We're gonna go and turn over every stone, and…”
Cheung: The Rundown requires employees to query GPT before asking humans
“Basically the model then becomes don't ask questions. You haven't asked GPT first.”
Schneider: Apps with 100 Monthly Search Volume Paid Rent for 10 Years
“This is literally like apps that have a hundred search volume a month. I've paid my rent for the last 10 years.”
Pigford 'vibe codes' prototypes before passing them to professional engineers
“So like at maybe there's four of us working on that product. And one of them is I, I'll, I would say another engineer because I'm doing a ton of coding, but he's the actual engineer. Like he's the one who's actually really knows what he's doing on the engineer…”
Pigford: Shelved Twitter bookmark AI tool over $50,000 monthly API fee
“There was a Twitter bookmark AI processing thing that like I was building, got real close to finishing it, but then I realized, oh, I'm going to have to spend 50,000 dollars a month for Twitter's API to like actually make this work.”
Woodward: Google AI Products Will Move Beyond Chat-Only Interfaces
“But I think across Stitch, across Flow, definitely across the Gemini app, you're going to see a lot more features like that photosynthesis example, where we're trying to get people into a more natural state. Chat is not always the most natural state for intera…”
Courtney: AJ&Smart's $6.99 book funnel feeds $14,300 in-person training
“What I can tell you as the person who's built it is I have built this funnel to generate call bookings for my sales team to sell some of our very high ticket stuff. So let me show you, you're looking at this book, right? And you're like, I'm buying this book f…”
Fricks: Do not use my scheduling tool on brand-new social accounts
“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 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 b…”
Fricks: AI tooling cannot yet successfully identify viral content ideas
“I know that that's probably not the answer most people want, but I don't think, like, at this point, I have been able to successfully use AI tooling to help me find those ideas. It's just, like, it's not something I feel like is outsourceable yet.”
Jiang: Peek combines Claude for reasoning with Gemini for fast tool calling
“As for the LLM side, we actually string together a combination of, ah, Gemini, as well as Claude, ah, depending on like the, I guess the function, but a lot of the initial insights, like, These kind of I would say like more detailed insights. We use three seve…”
Courtney: AJ&Smart requires staff to keep AI tools open full-time
“Well, you know, eight weeks from now, we will launch our first, like, we will have launched our first funnel, which is every team member at AJ and Smart having the ChatGPT tab, Claude tab, whatever else they're using, open the entire time as like an internal r…”
Wilkinson built an automated local newsletter with Lindy AI in an hour
“I recently, I own like a local newsletter business and I was goofing around with Lindy and I was able in about an hour to build a Lindy agent that could go through. It would basically like choose this. I chose a city like a city near me. And I said, every day …”
Howell hires specialized developers to finish the final 15% of AI code
“What I do now that this is like a real agency is I kind of have a dev that specializes in this kind of stuff. Go through and do like the last 15% and kick the tires, right?”
Park: Jenni AI manages massive influencer spend with just two people
“For us, we only have two people running influencer marketing, even though we spend, you know, 50 to hundreds of thousands per month. And it's just two people running it. It's myself and one other very talented individual named Shane.”
Park: Jenni AI acquired an entire external SEO agency in-house
“We basically churned through so many different SEO agencies, and there was one agency I really liked, and we did something super unorthodox, which is we acquired the entire SEO agency so that we could get, we could become their main client, and they only did S…”
Park: Jenny AI Doubled an Acquired Startup's Revenue Without Marketing Spend
“We have one startup doing like, 1.2, 1.5 million a year in revenue. We acquired them when they were, like, half that, and we've doubled that startup in, like, five months. And we didn't put any marketing budget into it.”
Greg Isenberg: We build live product prototypes during meetings using AI
“Sometimes what we'll do is I'll put, you know, we'll have a product meeting and in the meeting we'll literally use replet or bolt. Or lovable to actually, you know, build what the prototype looks like, and then be like, what do we think about this by the end o…”
Courtney outlines his funnel for securing profit-share advisory deals
“Someone listens to my podcast or reads my blog. They come to a free training. Then some of them come to a paid event. Then some of those people who have companies that are making over a million, End up being part of our partners program where we take a cut of …”
Dalen plans to build a streamlined, luxury alternative to Alibaba
“I'm very, very sure that there's going to be a point in my career where, you know, I would, you know, take it up, up, up on like an Alibaba and create the luxury version of it, you know, just to streamline that part in itself.”
Dalen reveals his business generates multiple eight figures in revenue
“Our business is doing you know, like multiple A figures, and I don't necessarily talk about that in my content even.”
Hudack invested in YC AI debt collection startup despite initial skepticism
“There's another one I invested in recently.
It's a YC company that is doing debt, AI debt collection, which I would have thought was like a terrible idea.
I can't think of the name off the top of my head, but the way the guy explained it, which I thought was r…”
Girdley: All my business holdings roll up directly to me personally
“The way I'm actually personally set up is everything rolls up to me personally. Like I don't actually have a Berkshire Hathaway style Berkshire Hathaway style hold code because like, there's no reason to. Like, it's just an another tax return I would have to f…”
Isenberg: Late Checkout builds landing pages capped at 280 characters
“It's a, it's basically how we build most of our websites, or pretty much all of ours, right, Jordan? It's like basically max amount of 280 characters on your website, like just keeping it very, very tight.”
Courtney: AJ&Smart completely isolates sales funnels from main website URLs
“You actually can't reach the funnels From the website and you can't reach the website from the funnels. They're completely separate projects. They're completely separate URLs, and they're actually living in their own separate worlds and like project teams, con…”
Wilkinson: I have completely replaced Google with Perplexity and ChatGPT
“I don't use Google anymore. Like for everything I go on perplexity or chat GPT now.”
Isenberg: WeWork built internal AI to detect weapons and smoke via cameras
“I was head of product strategy at WeWork and not many people know this, but WeWork had one of the best AI ML teams in, in technology. And one of the most interesting use cases that we had, I don't think we ended up really productizing it, but it was this idea …”
Josephs: Autopilot sponsored UFC for brand differentiation, not app downloads
“Like that, that was the goal of the UFC. It was to Not to drive downloads, not even really to build out brand awareness, but to put Autopilot on the map and differentiate us from our competitors to be like, that's a cool company that I like because they're swi…”
Sophinos: Price new vertical SaaS products at 50% of the customer's ROI
“I probably try to start at 50%, and then I, like, listen to the market feedback, and I adjust either up or down based on that.”
Isenberg: I sold three companies before 30 working 40-hour weeks
“I started and sold three companies before the age of 30, and I don't think I've worked more than you know, 40 to 50 hours a week.”
Courtney: AJ&Smart Ditched Slack, Asana, and Notion for Basecamp
“We actually just moved from using Slack, Asana, and Notion back to using Basecamp after a four year break, and it is honestly refreshing.”
Robinson vows to never start a business without an audience
“So now that I have a large social media presence and I am in a position where I am respected in the startup ecosystem as someone who knows what they're doing, I will never start a business without that.”
Justin Welsh buys creator products as financial tips without consuming them
“I actually think like I buy from a lot of creators just as a tip. Like there are creator friends of mine who create something that I absolutely have zero interest in consuming. And like when it comes out, I'll buy it because like, you know, if I read a hundred…”
Louis-Lucas: 40 SEO mini-tools generated 70% of Taplio and TweetHunter's traffic
“And all the mini tools that we built, like, I think we built more than one per month. So at the end we had like 40 SEO optimized mini tools and all, all them together was bringing like we're bringing like a 70% of the traffic.”
Louis-Lucas: Taplio's LinkedIn video downloader drove 1M visitors per month
“Like our best performing mini tool was something that we gave as a test To a developer that we wanted to hire. We had no hope on this tool. It was download, download video from a LinkedIn post and it ranked first for this. So it was a very low intense keyword …”
Postma is migrating all his Python AI workflows to ComfyUI
“I'm now rebuilding all my Python stuff to Comfy UI because it's so much easier to work with.”
Courtney shut down his holding company to avoid cognitive noise
“I actually shut down my holding company after realizing that
Even though it makes sense from a financial perspective, the noise and complexity, even though it wouldn't, for example, be a problem for you, for me, that overwhelms me massively.”
Courtney: Prefers single-business simplicity over higher profits from a holdco
“I feel so much better when I'm working on one thing, like doing like it's, I like simplicity and peace, and I would always choose that over complexity. Even if it means way more money.”
Schneider: Ran Twitter Ads to Juice Greg Isenberg Episode Views
“I totally juiced the numbers by the way. I was like, just running Twitter ads. I just, I wanted the top spot on the Greg the Greg YouTube channel.”
Isenberg Uses Service Agencies as Internal Idea Labs for Ventures
“That's one of the reasons why I built a bunch of agencies, is because like, now my agencies are my idea labs. I have a design agency when I need designs. I have an SEO agency when I need SEO. I have an ad agency when I need ads. I have a, you know, community t…”
Courtney: Largest corporate deals were closed primarily through text messaging
“Some of the biggest Old school American corporate deals that I've closed have been like mostly text messaging.”
Yanowitz: Blockworks raised $12M at a $135M post-money valuation in 2023
“So then in May or April, 20, 23, about a year ago, we raised twelve million at a one 35 post money valuation.”
Courtney: AJ&Smart charges 3x to 4x competitors for corporate facilitation training
“We just launched something which could not be more boring on paper. A facilitation in-person facilitation training, essentially for mainly for corporate employees. And we repackaged it in a way that no one else in the industry is doing it completely like at a …”
Courtney: Product built in Sam Ovens' mastermind remains our top earner
“Previously I was in Sam Ovens Mastermind for three years. And Sam Ovens, maybe within the first or second day of being in the Mastermind changed literally. Like I joined in like, let's say on a Tuesday, the following Tuesday, I completely rethought everything …”
Kevin Rose swears off building social networks due to hate and spam
“I can't bring myself to ever want to build in that space again because, you know, controlling the masses or trying to create an environment where there's like just a real good civil debate and not hate and spam and everything else. It's just, it is an absolute…”