The Wisdom Wall

“And in in order to survive in this new world, you're going to work a lot more, not a lot less.”

“And I think that's a new and interesting divide where before we were like, I need a technical co-founder and that's not really it anymore because everyone can code. Um, I think it's about your Your set of sensitivities and desire to make something new and go fast versus make something polished and really high quality.”

“capital is basically a commodity at this point. So the only differentiation is going to be like you being, you know, a cult leader personality.”

“Oftentimes, I got a lot of advice when I was, you know, running seven, absolutely about 7,000,010 million. They're like, it's people first. It's people first. You got to think about people. And what I ended up realizing is like, that's actually bull. It's not people first. In fact, nobody wants to run a business that's…”

“I think that oftentimes the quote is hire great people and get out of their way. I think that's a terrible idea. I actually think it's much better to hire people actually in your zone of genius.”

“I think that the only real moat is consumer mindshare or just, you know, mindshare as a concept of, you know, when, when people think of a certain category or Topic, you know, their mind immediately goes to just one project or one company, right?”

“I think to raise venture capital, the more you talk about your products and what you're working on, I actually think the harder it really is. Um, because I don't think any seed or lower investor gives the fuck about what you're working on. I think it's almost entirely, um, You know, investing in you and your ability to…”

“Personal confidence is what most founders should be working towards rather than like YC advice, because if you are confident enough in yourself, and again, you need to act like, I think the thing is that you still need to actually have good ideas and you need to be smart.”

“But I think that the primary lever to drive downloads to something like this would have to be paid ads or influencer marketing, where we could get into it more later, but it would play on the emotions of a little bit of fear mongering on the idea that they might have some kind of disease or problem.”

“moats are dead and brand is the only moat. It's like, we used to all talk about network effects and like, you know, build something like Twitter. But if you think about all the software tools you use right now, there's not really a network effect. There's not really a network effect for notion. Like maybe there's like,…”

“Every time you raise more money, your success chances go down, not up. That's, that's the big aha, is that every time you, you move the goalpost, You're the chances of you actually having a meaningful outcome go from, you know, 20% to 10% to five percent to one percent to half of one percent to. And when you start to…”

“100,000 software engineers can run the world. Like we don't need a million. We don't need ten million. And we'll, by the way, never get them anyway.”

“society benefits from everybody being plagued by these kinds of things, because it leads to human progress and, you know, woe to the Bay Area, you know, uh, adherent to mindfulness and meditation, you know, to find calm and peace. Like we don't get peace from progress. You need tons of disaffected individuals that…”

“Diversification is what you do when you're already rich. You don't get rich through diversification. You get rich through concentration with the caveat being that you choose right.”

“The agents are going to be a commodity at some point. Your judgment about what to Point them to is the moat”

“And I have to remind myself that like that is operating in 2015 world if I give all of them job titles that existed in 2015. So if I name them CMO or chief product officer and the person underneath it is a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer and all that stuff, then it feels like I'm operating in 2015 org…”

“You should not be paying Anthropic. You should not be paying Chad CPT to do an API call. You should be paying them to make the software that uses CPU to do the API call. Why are you paying this tax on tokens every time that you're trying to do this marketing activity? That's ridiculous. Build the software that does the…”

“In this world, you're just a SaaS provider. You're just hosting software. So there's no token costs. And so your margins are back to being like regular, a regular software business instead of being an AI business, which I think is great.”

“And I think the new world is, you know, if. 400 people in the United States own funeral homes, let's say like 20 of them are smart and no AI, they're all going to build their own software. And so what does that do? That means It's great for the consumer. There's now 20 different software choices that they can use.…”

“it's like anything that could be an API call is just cooked. So to me, that's like an API call business. That's like the first thing to get run over.”

“App building is just a feature now. It's a commoditized feature, and what it can actually do is, like, go and research the end-to-end of, like, here's actually the business context of what I'm trying to do, and then build the app informed by it, right?”

“Vertical SAS captures a fraction of IT spend. You're generally selling software licenses. Um, humans are operating the tool and you're looking at the 10 to a hundred million dollar outcome. Usually, of course, there's exceptions to that rule. Uh, vertical AI taps directly into labor PNL. So what I mean by that is…”

“code used to be the moat. I think by now, maybe by the end of this, you, you understand that, uh, distribution is the new moat, right? It's the most important thing is distribution. You know, it's scarce, right? AI can't build it. Product is really important, but it, you know, in lots of ways it is commoditized and…”

“prompt engineering used to be the big thing. It was like, here's the ultimate prompt for going viral on social media, or use this prompt for this. And now it's all about context engineering. It's about how well can you load up your agent with all the information about your business. So that your prompts can be stupidly…”

“you can build SAS products as full skills. Now you no longer have to pay for hosting. You no longer have to pay for a domain. You no longer have to pay for storage, handle authentication. You can download Products locally, and the whole, ah, look at what I built, local host meme has come true, because you can host this…”

“And now instead of like managing an agent or talking to another human about working on something, I just focus on managing this vault. This is like the new source. I just continually try and make it so that this vault has all of the information needed so that I can delegate to an agent and, um, the agent can just pull…”

“There's an opportunity to use something like this and basically do client work, but the service is, instead of having literal humans do it, you, you, you have, I mean, you're going to have some humans manage it, but a lot less humans, maybe a 20th of the amount of humans, and then you have these agents go and actually…”

“I generally wouldn't go over 50%, meaning like the anthropic model Opus 4.5 has a 200,000 token context limit. The moment, in my opinion, you've got over a 100,000 tokens, meaning you're using the same session. It starts to sort of deteriorate. That's when you have people, Greg, who say, oh, like I started off good,…”

“I think you can expect at least four to five X multiple, you know, on conversion, which is, which is crazy, but it makes sense if you think about it because you're, When you Google something, you have, you know, a thousand blue links that you can go and click, but when you chat GPT or perplexity something, you've got…”

“Gone are the days where you create one brand account, right? You go and create one, like you create one brand. Let's go back to here in a second. Sort of the, the old way of doing accounts, brand accounts, social media on brands was you create one brand account. And that brand account might've been on multiple…”

“what I find is that some products are so important or some capabilities are so important that they always deserve their unique entry point. Their unique URL, their unique interface dedicated to that problem, and you might actually outcompete the giants in things like this”

“If you do what I just described, like you get impacts, like literally 24 hours later, right? Um, and it's way different than traditional SEO where it's like, oh, it's this very long buildup.”

“Instead of hiring your first employee, you should probably just hire ChatGPT Pro. Like, the mistake that a lot of people make is they pay five, 10, 15 K a month for their first employee when they should just be paying 200 dollars a month for ChatGPT Pro.”

“there's actually a newsletter play that I see a lot of people use for local newsletters. Uh, they go to a subreddit, uh, for that, that area. So like Toronto as an example, and they're like, here's 20 things you can do this weekend in Toronto. And then it's like, you want more like this? And then at the bottom of the…”

“I would unironically sponsor a fresh account made this week versus a YouTuber with a million subs if they had similar views, and I don't even think it's a controversial opinion.”

“if you have somebody that, um, you know creates good content that's getting similar views, like let's say, MengMingduck has 300 K followers, and then there's like, MengMingBear over here that has 20 K followers, and they both have similar views, you know, like you could probably get MengMingBear for like a, you know,…”

“one of the biggest mistakes that founders make is they hire to discover revenue. What you need to do is hire to scale revenue because it's your responsibility to discover it.”

“The founder is the hardest part, hardest working person in the room. The CEO is the laziest. The job of the CEO is to have nothing on their plate.”

“You know, I just think that there's no room today for like the bland, you know, you just have to like stand for something and you can't do that. Like if you take feedback from everybody, you're reverting to the mean.”

“Like I find that YouTube converts second best only to email when it comes to selling to a product, when it comes to selling or promoting a service. I find YouTube converts really, really well compared to other platforms and at least at a per user basis.”

“The, the correlation between being really good at graphic design and really good at thumbnails is actually pretty weak.”

“And then I would say this is arguably the most important to understand on YouTube, and it's where almost everyone Goes wrong in my opinion, which is, I like to build channels where each video, I look at it and say, does this have 80% plus? I should actually add like a plus there, because videos can have higher than…”

“I think the moat for the next couple of years, cause, and I, I'm willing to argue this is design. Design and user experience becomes the moat. Um, cause at the end of the day, like if you can make the experience much richer, much better, and you can actually solve the problem, um, you know, that's, that's where you…”

“If to get ahead, you just have to ignore the brand signals, I guess, to start, and then once, once you get up to the six figure MRR, then you can revisit that”

“I think one of the other reasons why the consumer apps are having such a boom is because of, um, uh, the double tap to pay. Like, I think that Apple pay that simple, like UX change has changed people's perception of, um, Uh, of iOS subscriptions.”

“Because the TikTok algorithm is for you page based, it's all about making good content so you can skip, you can skip the audience part. So if you find, if you cut out the director role and the audience role, You can now hire creators just as actors, like just to be the talent in the video so they can have zero…”

“I believe that you should optimize for like number of users raised to the N where N is greater than one multiplied by profit per user. Um, I will take at least at a just pure conversion basis. I will accept a lower LTV on a per download basis, um, in exchange for more people being able to use the platform.”

“So the like shittiest looking funnels we have tend to be the seven figure funnels and the nicest looking stuff we have tend to not make any money at all, which is very annoying because we're like also a design agency.”

“in directories, if you get to stable five K visits a month for a B to B directory, you will sell four or five ads and you will make three, four K a month on that. And, and that it will stay that way. And even if you do nothing, it will just grow because you have SEO as your channel and SEO tends to grow.”

“Because at the end of the day, like, the reality is today, content formats are not defensible. Uh, personality and perspective is.”

“I'm going to look at what works on YouTube and try and piggyback off of that. Cause that's like the quickest path to audience growth on YouTube, plain and simple.”

“The way agents are built today are kind of a hack. Like it is not really trained to be agentic.”

“the only thing that matters in EcomDude is first order profitability. It's just the only thing that matters. And if you can't be first order profitable and scale, then it doesn't matter. It's your, basically the market will tell you if the idea is good or not based on that metric and your ability to obviously put good…”

“Some people think of art as like The most important cultural artifacts of a generation, and to be real, many artists are not making the most, most important cultural artifacts of a generation. They're making pretty things, and what are pretty things? Decorations. So if you're selling decorations, and you can realize as…”

“The beauty is you don't need, it doesn't need to be special from like a product perspective. It's just a mark. It's completely marketing. And what, what matters in chat GPT rappers is really just like the brand. Is this something that people are going to tell their friends about?”

“the capital provider by themselves with just the income share agreement, wasn't getting properly compensated for how much risk they were taking. It was basically a mediocre or crappier version of a consumer loan, but you were getting paid either the same or slightly less. And you had headline risk.”

“In fact, my theory is that not only is there no moat, there's whatever you would call, like, the opposite of a moat. There's actually an incentive for people to leave your product. Why? Because the favorite moment, the favorite experience of people who use such apps is starting over with a brand new blank slate. It…”

“we go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us. And then we, we pay that person a lot of money per hour. And then we hire a more junior person who cares probably a little bit more about AppSumo. And then they, it's kind of a nice, nice merge versus somebody who's like elite people that we think…”

“of all the businesses that we've built in the past three years, we've learned that the group coaching model is the fastest to scale, probably most profitable, like probably doing another group coaching program would be low hanging fruit. Cause you can get a group coaching program to, to five, ten million. Like if you…”

“people in the media, businesses and media creators often don't price discriminate. And especially if you're in business media, if you can attract information, that's extremely valuable to a very small subset of people, you should be charging a ton.”

“the thing that matters most in business is not how well I run a business. It is what game am I playing? Like, I would much rather play a really good game and be in a super good business and do that not very good than to be the best at a really hard business because the hard business always wins.”

“Funny enough, I found that the bigger the name of the guest, Is completely, almost inverse proportional to how well my listeners like the episode. So, uh, it doesn't matter. I care more about the content than, you know, the name of the person on the show.”

“And I think there's a big opportunity between the sort of, you know, lifestyle business and the venture funded business. There's a lot of businesses in between that I call bootstrap giants. There are these ambitious but self-funded profitable companies that can grow for a really long time.”

“So I think the same thing is going to happen where like, there's going to be these incredible AI generated movies and scripts, but I just don't think there's going to be an as large an appetite as people think of for audiences to consume this. Cause like what we really crave beneath it all is the story is that human…”

“It is a good time. It's surprisingly good time to be an agency owner right now because a lot of companies are cutting staff or freezing hiring, but they still need new products and new, new businesses to go out there. So they look at companies like, like our late checkout innovation agency and they're like, oh, hey,…”

“if you want to stay small, you're a bootstrapper, you're an indie hacker. It's only good if a competitor builds something like you, because they have the money to create awareness.”

“in actuality, what the reader cares about is you in the context of the niche that solves a problem for them. And the moment you step out of that niche, Completely. And you start thinking it's just about you and how special you are and how famous you are and how big your audience is. The great dissension begins.”

“people think all of these other jobs are getting automated away, but the number one job that's getting automated away is actually the software engineering job, right? Like why is software engineering such a valuable skill? It's because we've automated the crap out of it so that the people who are still able to do it…”

“And the truth is, if you can't write it, you don't actually understand it. So you can pretend that you get it. Uh, but the truth is if you read the Bitcoin white paper and you haven't actually implemented it, you don't actually understand it. You don't actually understand what the math is.”

“Like, I can build Gumroad in a weekend, um, and I can outship basically any, it doesn't matter how awesome your team is, if it doesn't have engineers on it, I will beat them. Right? I would just, I will win.”

“If you are on holiday and you're like, I love being on holiday. I'm sorry to say that, like, you know, doing a startup is probably not for you, right?”

“Yeah, so, I mean, so many media companies, it's, it's easy to get to 10, 20, 30, relatively, to get to 10, 20, thirty million, to get to a hundred million of revenue is incredibly hard.”

“It's very hard to build a media company if you're not building B to B or you're not building for high income earners.”

“300 viewers that will watch you when you go live. Every time that 300 viewers is literally worth more than 300,000 views on YouTube. 100,000 percent. Because these 300 people are like, they're all ambassadors. They're sitting here for hours, dude. They didn't watch your video. They're here with you and they want you to…”

“And I feel like that's the new playbook in DTC is get the brand to scale in DTC. Open up wholesale relationships, thoughtfully, strategically, perhaps some brick and mortar, and raise less than twenty million dollars, certainly at the high end.”

“we know that psychiatrists and therapists are not going to voluntarily reduce their rates. We know they're not going to voluntarily join and affiliate with insurance companies that takes down their after tax. And we know that insurance companies aren't going to Pay more money than they currently do for…”

“40 something million in capital in about a day and a half in a DAO around an idea. I mean, holy shit, that changed politics forever. People just don't know it yet.”

“there needs to be another contingent of players, which does exist in most games. It's the whales who are spending more money than they earn out. And that is the only way that the economy of the game can be in balance without necessarily relying on the poncinomics of new players, depositing money and therefore like…”

“we have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in computing, especially on the consumer side, less so on the enterprise side, you shouldn't seek to do it. And by that, I mean, there's this classic example of we've always known that a quote unquote federated identity system in the internet would…”

“Retail wholesale revenue is as good as software. It is like clockwork every 20 days. If you have a product that repurchases, meaning that that's the good sign, right? If people are coming back into their grocery habits or any of those, like it's, it's like clockwork.”

“founders need to start taking back not control, but conviction that we are the people that are on the front lines doing the stuff. We are the scarce ones. Money's of abundance. Investors are of abundance. Boards are of abundance.”

“Twitter needs to be decentralized, one, into a protocol so people can use a different client. The second is they can use their algorithms of choice, right?”

“like I'm a big believer in in-person and physical space. A big part of automatic culture is actually meetups where we would bring either the whole company or teams together a few times a year. But it just felt like the best, most talent in the world was not in San Francisco, regardless of all the smart people was…”

“local banks you can actually go to, and they'll have You know, very loose, easy terms for small amounts, like 50,000, a 100,000, a 150,000, and there'll be maybe no personal guarantee, they won't want the first position on the debt, and you can stack them, you know, so you can go to this bank and get a hundred, you go…”

“Sustainability is not about cutting back and doing less and eating less and, and so on. Sustainability is about driving technology forward. Meaning, can you make the same products that everyone wants more of, And can you make them cheaper, but can you make them without carbon and without pollution? And the answer is…”

“I think there is such a thing called personality market fit. There are just some personalities that literally cannot go viral, that literally cannot be relatable. And there are some personalities that are just make one video and you'll be immediately in love, people in love with you, like Charlie D'Amelio, for example.”

“You have a shelf life that either the market dictates or your mental health dictates, which is basically like say five, six years, you know, even the algorithm on Facebook and YouTube does not like you forever, right? At some point, the algorithm's best interest is to recommend other creators on the platform to keep it…”

“VCs do a lot of performance art, right? Or they do this weird, like, power flex with other stage entrepreneurs, where they're like, oh, show me a business plan, like, calculate your TAM. I'm like, I don't fucking know what their TAM is, because nobody's ever built this before. Like, what are you gonna do? This is like…”

“after being on the inside, it takes about a year of collecting data for them to even think about building something like this or building something they see happening in the market. And then it takes three months of like a framing process where you do research, you put together slide decks that you send around to…”

“companies exist for like big tech companies exist for the egos of the founders. And at the end of the day, he just wants to be liked. Uh, he just wants to build something that helps people.”

“creativity is the new productivity. You know, we're going to stand out increasingly in our work. And on social media and on any other thing that's, you know, amplifying our opportunity stream through our creativity, you know, it's not about doing things faster. It's about standing out and doing things more beautifully…”

“The reason I went into NFTs more than currency is my theory is if Ethereum loses, I can bridge over my crypto punks, right? So to me, the NFT asset class feels in a lot of ways, like an easier bet. If you feel like you really know which NFTs you want to invest in.”

“Like if you're a CEO and you're not spending 20 to 30% of your time in a discord server. You're not gonna make it.”

“So basically all that's happened in the last 12 years and beyond is the unbundling of Vanguard. Right? I want to own the S&P, 400, less these six destructive, I'll own the S&P, two 94.”

“once you've got a workflow that's working for you, you want to get rid of all the ambiguity. Uh, so I could have GrokBot write the blurbs every week and it does a really good job. Uh, but if the model changes or I don't know, just depending on how the bot's feeling, it might write them differently because that's just…”

“What you should do is set up an automation that goes on Monday that goes, okay, your job is to Add five prospects to our list. And then on Monday, okay, pick the top three prospects and create an ad package custom to them and draft an outbound email and then send it to chief of staff. And you'll make more progress…”

“the cost of creating digital things is going to zero. There's no friction there. Uh, actually making something physical, uh, a brand that you can just like build over time. I think that, I think that's a smart thing to do.”

“in an AI world, we actually need directories more than ever because, um, there's just too much information. So when it's curated, uh, it's helpful. Also the whole like SEO game is changing right now. Like what's being, you know, like People are going to chat GPT, and they're going to Google AI overviews, um, to…”

“I feel like managing agents feels like I am their direct manager, and I'm like, Susie, go over there, and Betty, go over there, and Jeremy, go over here, and I feel like I am three rungs above at like an SVP overseeing level where I feel like I am setting up the infrastructure and then They are figuring out the best…”

“And the third that very few people are talking about, but is probably one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities because of how good the models are now. Is to, instead of building out the thing, build the factory for the thing.”

“The leaning into the weirdness of what it looks like to have not just an AI workforce, but to have a multiplayer AI workforce that other humans can chime in on and have it be proactive, right? That is absolutely the second thing. And giving it that flexibility to more roam free. Um, and the third is what it actually…”

“The human web monetized attention and the agent web monetizes useful resources.”

“A lot of the times you don't need it. It's just bloat. You can just have a very simple, like a very simple solution for these finite problems, right? It doesn't have to be this over complicated or over engineered thing.”

“the real compounding value of graph engineering isn't just that one task gets better. It's that your work starts producing memory. What do I mean by that? I mean that every customer research graph creates better customer notes. Every content graph creates better examples and audience insights. Every support graph…”

“So on the Facebook ad side, so for, for targeting on Facebook anymore, um, after Andromeda, you don't do interest-based targeting. Historically, how I would probably do this is I would actually go and I would target people who have a WordPress interest on Facebook ads. Um, now you don't need to do that. You just…”

“This is what this turns into is like your job now becomes like, I'm an agent jockey. You're taking your domain knowledge that you have, and you're basically like building this into code and like, I'm not technical. Right. Like I can set this up now. Like the models are smart enough now. We're like a semi-technical…”

“Essentially you are a manager of agents now. So no matter what you used to do, whether it was a people manager, an IC, you are going to become a manager of agents now, and you need to be the best in the world.”

“the more you become a better agent manager, um, actually the more technical you become.”

“what I really like to do is mark up the upsell an extra thousand dollars and credit the assessment towards it regardless. So that way I'm still making the same amount of money, but psychologically they feel way better about it because they're like, oh, I'm getting a thousand dollars off.”

“door knocking is the single best way to learn sales, period, full stop.”

“Yeah, I think, um, yes, you can build anything, but people will pay for maintenance. That's sort of like the insight is that, you know, is if this thing works, I'm fine to pay for it.”

“So a small local model with web search, file access, the ability to run code beats a giant model with none.”

“The lesson is don't build your entire life On something that can disappear with a single letter. Own a part of your stack. Have the generator in the garage. Local models are the insurance, and this is the weekend I finally bought the policy.”

“So this is only possible now because sub-agents can hold distinct Personas and argue instead of a model agreeing with itself.”

“Every med, spa, contractor, and clinic runs on spreadsheets, group text, because custom software costs like 80,000 dollars a year. So you sell them internal tools for 5000 dollars flat, and you build it in two days. The interview prompt is your sales call. You run it with the owner on a Zoom. The spec writes itself…”

“And believe me, when you give the agent the floor to give assumptions, most of the time it's going to get it wrong, but not only is it going to get it wrong, it's going to burn a lot of money.”

“when you and I are trying to use AI to build something meaningful, I hundred percent, hundred percent, hundred percent stand in the fact that the human still needs to be in the loop. AI can replicate sauce. It can't create sauce.”

“the only place a loop makes sense is in a very confined, constrained process with a very fixed feedback loop, a very defined feedback loop, and that's in code review.”

“The challenge is, I think there's inefficiencies there when it comes to cost. Like, if I have to go to my CEO and say, hey, build me, uh, you know, a thumbnail for my latest YouTube video, and then they go to, like, the product manager, who then goes to the graphic designer, who then goes to the intern, You have call…”

“you can go to any of the templates that you find on VZero, Lovable, um, you know, all of these other place Framer, Figma community for, for people who are more familiar with designs, and the problem with those is that they are highly close behind the techniques and the, the rectangles and the pixels of Figma or Framer…”

“as someone who works in AI, your mode is basically, you have to be new, you know, you have, like, I, I don't, I'm sure anyone can relate, But you always, when there's a new model that comes, you have to talk about it. Otherwise you're kind of losing a lot of that sort of, uh, edge that you have all over all of these…”

“And I think that creativity is just, um, compromised based on how the number of people between your vision, uh, and execution.”

“Now I just think software is free. Anyone can make it. Anyone can rip it off.”

“The UI is going away. And, like, I don't know about you, but I'm spending more and more of my time in codex. I'm spending more and more of my time in cloud code. Like, those have become my operating systems. So I'm spending less and less time in apps, and it's easier than ever to create apps. Therefore, like, yes,…”

“Uh, mid-fi wireframes are bad. You know, I think that you want to start with low-fi or go high-fi. You know, you can't be half pregnant. You don't want to go mid-fi.”

“I don't download skills because your agent needs the context of a successful run, which you then turn to skills, right? Um, and this is the big thing I see. You see skills marketplaces. You see download this and that. First of all, it's a easy way to attack somebody. So I would be very, very careful with downloading…”

“So there's like this early area of investment that you have to make that sucks that nobody will tell you, especially agent harnesses company because they wouldn't raise as much money if they did. But like this, maybe I would give it two weeks. Because it took me two weeks.”

“you know, in 20, 26, you know, you can have an idea Or grab an idea from idea browser by nine a.m., have something built by 9:15 a.m., have a product built by, you know, nine 45, you get the first customer by 10, and you iterate by lunch.”

“when digital is infinite and AI generated scarcity shifts to physical presence with other humans.”

“To mitigate that, I actually recommend just like set it up on a local Mac. Um, because there the risk is much lower than if you're setting it up on a VPS. Like a VPS is this thing that's in the cloud and it's like constantly connected to the internet. And it's just like much easier for hackers to get into it if they…”

“It is an iterative thing, so a lot of people try the Larry skill, and they tell me, it didn't work, I got 700 views. I was like, that's your first post. I got 700 views on my first post. You need to keep iterating the content. You have to spend the time letting it learn, find out what's best, and honestly, don't mark…”

“I think with things like OpenCrawl, it's not so much how the model works, it's how you're working with it, and how you're using skills and the context it has around those skills.”

“don't make the, don't make a mistake of trying to build something for a huge market because that's where the venture boys are playing. This is for the people who want to, uh, build a cash flowing startup that, you know, maybe they want, it could raise venture later, But, you know, right now it's about building cash…”

“the orchestration layer is the new interface layer. As we spend our day coordinating agent workflows in a model agnostic fashion, local and cloud, and validating outputs, human in the loop and resolving issues, the ultimate layer To own is where coordination takes place. Um, so, uh, I think he's absolutely right.”

“You might just be like, you know, AI is easy. It's so easy to create the product now. You might just want to build the product yourself”

“the only thing I've found with, like, Nano Banana is that I, I sometimes have trouble, like, getting it to stay on brand, and if I'm trying to just, like, figure out the messaging variations that I'm trying to go after, This can be a faster way to do that.”

“But now when you're living in a terminal, for example, and you're using MCPs to talk to LLMs, um, you kinda, you know, the nice to have is actually the, the, The UI. The nice to have is the SaaS. The nice to have is going to this website and look pretty. Ultimately what you care about is the output, and the thing is…”

“The, the fact, like, that if you are, if you are using, if you are serious about Using LLMs to take your ideas and put in and, and get the most out of them. If you're serious about building, you know, what people are calling a personal OS, uh, and you are not using a centralized note-taking tool like this. That uses…”

“Now, you don't, you're not going to create software and invite them to the software. You're going to create agents, and you're going to invite them to the agents, and then the agents are going to do work that creates value for these companies. So that's the mindset shift”

“And I think you don't even need images for a directory to rank and get traffic.”

“what I think ChatGPT perplexity and all these other LLMs do really well is they help you discover things or get more information on the thing. But by the time someone's on a directory, I think they're in the decision-making phase and with any more complex decision where the consequence is too much to risk, if you mess…”

“Your job is to promote your business. Of course you want to build all the cool stuff. Of course you want to make the thing, but your actual key job, and then you build around yourself and, and build things that support that your key job is getting out there and promoting your business.”

“I don't think being efficient right now is the, is the play. I think the play is scaling up like crazy. So like for me, I don't think the play is, oh, all of these processes can now be done by AI. So I'm just going to just do everything myself. I think the play is if you already have a small team, keep them. And just…”

“So, high level, what that means is Claude is better when the task is understand everything first and then decide. Uh, GPT Thrive Five Three Codex is probably better when the task is decide fast, act, iterate, more of that, you know, pair programming, you know, mid-task change, uh, behavior.”

“I think that's one of the very good things, uh, for like, Investors in Anthropic, right, is with agents and agents now being, I think probably the new killer feature in Opus. You're going to take whatever token usage and multiply it by the number of agents.”

“The hardest thing to do is to find something that somebody actually wants to use, right? Like that's the hard problem. If I have something that I vibe coded and I launch it, and if it crashes under the weight of 50,000 people beating my door down because it's the next best thing, I guarantee you I can find new…”

“I think the best path for the average person, honestly, is a Mac mini. Um, actually, I take that back, like, if you just have, like, a computer laying around, uh, using a computer. Basically, my recommendation is the cheapest computer you can find, use that. A local device. The reason why I recommend that is, like, you…”

“don't over obsess. Obsess on MCP skills, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not saying don't get into these. I'm not saying don't read about them. I'm not saying don't use them, but I can almost guarantee you these things are not the reason why your product isn't working, right? Most of the time it's your plan sucks, right?”

“I, in my opinion, everything is scalable, right? So the, the question, I, I just hate it when people say like, is that even scalable? Like, yes, it's, it's scalable. The right question is how hard would it be to scale to that, to whatever number?”

“nothing goes viral without half of people thinking you're dumb.”

“And so when we share our ideas, the only chance of someone stealing it is if that other person has had like the exact same life as us. They had the same work history, the same personality. They're also an introvert. Their mom also divorced their dad at age 14. Like these random things that we could never really…”

“Someone like Facebook is only copying your idea once it hits millions or hundreds of millions of users.”

“what I found in my own experience working with some of those things is that, um, you end up moving a whole lot, but not actually making progress on things. You know, you like have this complicated productivity system, but you're not actually, uh, you know, creating progress on the things that you were supposed to work…”

“if you want to use ads to scale your SaaS, you can't do it with a low ticket offer. And when I say low ticket, I basically mean anything that is below a thousand dollars per month. If your SaaS is 50 dollars a month, a hundred dollars a month, this probably will not work, because you will not be able to acquire…”

“And if you just keep prompting it, I think you can get to places where you have an extremely well design app without any designers. You are the designer, right? You have to have the taste. You have to have the reference images. Um, and, but I think, I think you can go and design something beautiful and we've exited…”

“Uh, my recommendation to people is actually to follow all the founders of these businesses. So, V-Zero, Guillermo. Kodak, Sam Altman. Lovable, Anton. Bolt is Eric Simons. Replit, Amjad, et cetera, et cetera. Follow them, and then see who you believe in. Like, if you really connect with Eric, if you really connect with…”

“people sometimes fear that like the one model is going to take all the jobs. In reality, most cool things happen when you combine models, combine ideas, market it well, focus it well, create easy interfaces, et cetera.”

“you don't need anything. Cause when I go to hotel rooms and I just do it on my iPhone, it, it looks the same. It performs the same. It does not matter.”

“I think that there's a massive opportunity or lots of massive opportunities to take a look at what's happening in the AI space, the social media space, the content space, just go the opposite way. And you're going to find that a lot of people want exactly that.”

“I only have like 1000 people or 1000 to 2000 people listening to my podcast. And all my podcast is the only audience for the people coming to my other in-person events. And still I can fill, you know, one to two, 35 people events per year and add a high ticket price.”

“if I was trying to make my first million dollars right now, I'd either build some GPT wrapper, or I'd build this.”

“This is the only way we've found to like mitigate a lot of the kind of like AI disruptions, changing everything, customer pushback. And so, like you said, if people are laughing kind of the whole time or they're entertained, one, they're more likely to watch the full ad, which is what ad brands want. And two, they're…”

“really any idea has the potential to do very well. Cause you can just pop it into a preexisting structure, or you can take a structure and plug in one of the ideas that you're trying to include in your brand.”

“You want to look at high frequency daily use case, not weekly. You know, if you're seeing weekly use cases or monthly use cases, kill it.”

“In fact, I would spend nothing really on paid in the beginning. I would be working just on organic.”

“Like we'll see this all the time, especially with smaller creators that are like 10,000 to 50,000 subs, they don't know what their value is. And so if I reach out to a hundred, say I get 50 to respond, And then of those 50, 10 are going to underprice themselves so dramatically that, like, they're basically a marketing…”

“when they come back with a number, you can negotiate down. Like, I guarantee it. I would cut that in half and, like, work your way up from there.”

“Inside of this code base, which I can show in a second, I'm using TypeScript, I have a linter set up, I have formatting set up, I have tests, And all of those things, the agent can read its own outputs and then just self-correct and fix itself without me having to do anything.”

“from what I've seen, you kind of reach a point where eventually you kind of have to look at the code and it's going to make your life a lot easier as you start to figure out how the code works. You don't need to be an expert, um, but you can start to kind of tune those skills and it gives you a superpower that…”

“in the past I've talked about how front end and back end went to more product engineers. You were caring a lot more about the product. And now that product is becoming easier and easier to build, there is something here to this distribution angle where, okay, I've got a product. And I'm, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm trying…”

“Like if, if search, if organic search is working for you, paid search will work for you. I guarantee it. Most like nine out of 10 times, like very rarely, 99 out of a hundred times it will work. Very rarely does it not work. It's, it's a, it's a skill issue. It's not that you're actually like Like, it's not a channel…”

“Facebook has gotten so good at understanding the person that's most likely to sign up for this thing that you're trying to promote. All that matters is you make good creative now”

“what happens when you, as the person who like has a story to tell or like some idea, you have to like put it through this translate, this translation layer, especially when the translation layer is sometimes like a, you know, a bunch of people or something like that, you lose a little bit of the fidelity of the story.…”

“sometimes just ramping up the emails is the simplest way to increase revenue. Like if your Black Friday campaign usually makes like 400 K and you're sending three emails, You might literally make 600 K by sending six emails.”

“over the last 14 years, we've also done a lot of testing. And pages with crap tons of copy tend to do better than our slick short pages.”

“I just think that, you know, by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents, uh, you can decide if you want to be a VC backed Leverage agency, but this is just the best way to start so you have leverage when you want to raise or if you just want to get those dividends to…”

“for the first time ever, services are becoming software. It used to be software as a service, SaaS. Um, but now, uh, with AI agents actually having the ability to fulfill, uh, the, the service. So let's say instead of hiring a social media manager, you're hiring an AI agent that does the social media managing. Instead…”

“you don't need to worry about like all this different, like volume and, uh, you know, keyword metrics and competition level and stuff like that. I think a lot of people get hung up on it. So just want to clarify that all you have to do is ask AI what keywords you should focus on for your website.”

“when you work with like an agency or something like that, that can take a long time. They have to get access to your code base or whatever. And now there's this beautiful sort of like power that someone has who can build the website, uh, and go and fix all this stuff on their own, uh, really quickly and make sure it's…”

“The way you show up in ChatGPT is by doing good SEO. There's, there's really like, I have not seen really one, uh, unique strategy that is different from just doing good foundational SEO to go and show up in LLMs.”

“if you do good SEO, it's going to rank you well in ChatGPT anyways, and perplexity anyways”

“When you have a good name to something, um, it kind of sets a floor for how much it's worth just because of the name and the concept.”

“the business composition or the biology of the business for an automation agency is just really hard. Like you have to be really good at getting like top of funnel leads. You have to be really good at sales. Cause it's like typically kind of higher ticket. So it's like you're, you're, you're, you're having to like go…”

“for high ticket stuff, like short form video is never going to sell a high ticket thing. I don't know why people even try. Like, that is the wrong thing to be doing. Like, if you're trying to sell something that's three to five, you know, five, 10 grand plus a month, there's zero percent chance you're going to sell…”

“people don't want to read anymore. So if you're designing a website, if you're building apps and stuff like that, you know, they're used to Instagram stories. They're used to just consuming YouTube. They're used to consuming video.”

“It's like the webinar is just the, the excuse to send the emails.”

“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.”

“Zero followers is actually usually an advantage because if I have an account, let's say I have a personal account and I start posting content that is not relevant to my audience. Instagram pushes that video out to your audience first or like whoever your audience was or thinks it is before. And if it doesn't resonate…”

“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…”

“If you have like a huge channel on social media, regardless of how bad your product is, as long as you have the functionality, people will buy it.”

“So, meaning, you know, chat GPT when people are You know, asking chat GPT for, you know, product recommendations and stuff like that, you're more likely to come up if you have public facing tools, uh, either on your website or linked, uh, linked to your website.”

“So, if you don't do the automations yourself, or can't build AI agents yourself, which you can, hire someone to audit your process and build agents before bringing in full-time employees.”

“This is basically what you're doing, because you're building a ton of You know, bunch of businesses with enterprise value, with cash flow. Uh, they're compounding each other, so I just think that you don't need outside investors.”

“I kind of feel like this is a better place to start than a text app builder, because like I said, it's going to build a big fancy thing. And what you're going to end up in is like seeing a bunch of terminology code being written tests failing. They're all to do with now you have to help the AI solve these bugs. That's…”

“And, you know, of course you can have a link that says subscribe to my newsletter, but that just doesn't work anymore. Subscribe. I guess that's the insight, you know, subscribe saying like, Hey, subscribe to my newsletter. Like people have hit fatigue. In terms of newsletter fatigue, but they are willing to put in…”

“You shouldn't tell your team to do anything until you understand it. So, The thing that you should do is Map out all the boring, repetitive tasks that people do in your business from, by each function, and then try to do those tasks yourself.”

“Step, step zero, build an audience. Then figure out what something to build is, and actually how you figure out, ah, how you, how you build something is you start teasing things with your audience, and they're gonna tell you what to build.”

“the point of this episode is not to show you how to take it from, you know, 80% beautiful to 90% beautiful. Um, because I don't actually, I actually don't think that matters.”

“This new world, and which gets me so excited about this new world, is, you know, you don't have to raise millions of dollars or have a huge team to actually go and, uh, And run with this. You basically need a single smart marketer with taste, of course. Uh, pair that with AI agents and workflows, and we'll get into…”

“when you're young, you, you want to take a lot of swings and a lot of risks and a lot of like, you want to have a lot of at bats, a lot of tries. So I do think that building consumer mobile apps is like the best thing to be doing. If you're a young person”

“Once you've done that, then, before writing a line of code even, go and build a landing page like this. Set up a quiz funnel, basically. Try to even further understand Your potential customer, your user, and you're sending traffic. I would start with free traffic personally. Send that free traffic from organic social…”

“I say like, do you want to compete against LeBron James or a fifth grade girl in basketball? The winner gets, the winner gets something amazing. Like you beat LeBron, you get a billion dollars. You beat the third grade girl, fifth grade girl, you get 30 grand a month. I I'd play against the third grade girl every time…”

“The worst thing that can happen to your startup is mediocre, mediocre success. Enough to keep you going, but not enough to change your life. Most founders are trapped there.”

“being an entrepreneur is Uh, a safer job than actually having a job. And I, I really, I mean, obviously you need to have like some good foundations, but I do think there's some truth to that because I don't feel at risk of losing income right now because I know that I could adapt in so many ways.”

“if people are willing to spend 30 bucks on a product they've never heard, tasted, smelled, whatever, that doesn't exist on a landing page that looks like it was a scam, that is probably a pretty good sign that this is a thing that people really, really want.”

“someone that has a big, or has like a strong opinion on a product they want to make, or a direction the world is moving, They're almost at an advantage with these AI tools relative to like a small or even medium sized team, because if you are someone that like has a very strong opinion of like what the world should…”

“What used to cost a lot of money to, to go in, uh, you know, hire a team, specialized team, uh, who understands all these regulatory changes. Now you can just use something like Manus to actually go and figure all these stuff, this stuff out.”

“in a lot of instances, it's like a sustaining innovation, right? And what I mean by that is it's a new technology that will drop the cost.”

“it's never been easier to build a million dollar business and it's never been easier to lose all your equity value.”

“Your first step is how do I get your, the, the attention? Next step is how do I get your data? And then the third step is, okay, how can I build assistance co-pilots? AI software to actually monetize and build a sustainable business.”

“Like think about like one password is not hard. Like anyone can vibe code one password. What matters about one password is everybody knows one password has not been compromised and they trust.”

“The easiest thing you can do is get paid for a service. That's easy mode. Then like the medium thing you can do is build a software for B to B. Yep. And then the hard mode is like building software like this for B to C. Yeah.”

“for a bootstrap business, starting with the audience just is the most Like you just, that, that's what you have to do. It doesn't make sense to do it the other way around.”

“Remember that formats have life cycles. So what I mean by that is a format might be really popular. Um, and then it kind of like dies down, and then people start ignoring it. So you always have to constantly reinvent yourself. Now that you, the life cycle used to have two years, uh, now it's like, sometimes it's almost…”

“And so with your content, originality is not the goal in the beginning. You're going to accidentally become original by just being yourself and having your own life experiences.”

“If you're wondering why we don't have an Ironman level Jarvis assistant is because combining these tools, making it work with the LLM is one thing. But then stacking these tools on top of each other, making it cohesive, making it work together is a nightmare itself.”

“I've seen competitors That really just crank it out, like, five videos a day. Uh, I didn't believe that this possibly could be rewarded by the algorithm. Like, how could you possibly want accounts? Like, why would you reward accounts posting the same videos, like, five times a day? But the views don't lie. I think…”

“That's maybe the only thing left that's, like, actually helpful with follower numbers is, like, if you want to talk with other creators or if you want to, like, do outreach like this. Otherwise, the follower's number doesn't really matter that much in terms of, like, actual Reach for content.”

“When in doubt, also don't be afraid of your video. Looking like a straight up ad. Um, even if it gets less views, it's will convert better.”

“the reason that I put SEO and paid ads at the end is I kind of feel like in many ways they're both a trap. When you're an early stage entrepreneur, you want really fast inner cycles, right? So you want, like, you want to be able to, uh, test something, see if it resonates, and then change up how you're doing it. Um,…”

“I'll just say like one open secret about AI tools. These BTC apps is like the churn can be insane, right? Like you'd have 50% monthly churn. That's like not unheard of. 40% to 30%. That's like kind of normal. And then, you know, 20% It's like, if you're really focused on your, your customers and 10% for a BCAI, it's…”

“And the way people really have been driving clicks to their newsletter over the last couple of years is they build like a really good thread and then they have a follow post that says, here's my newsletter, sign up for it. And that's kind of been drowned out and everyone's doing it and it's kind of, you know, filtered…”

“I would assume based on my experiences, you probably don't want to use the thinking model to do coding. Uh, you know, cause I've, I've tried oh one and it was just a pain to use. Uh, you lose a lot of speed.”

“Before this, everyone who was in AI, hey, if you're doing something recursive, you're doing something, make sure you break it down into micro steps. Make sure you break it down step by step by step to make sure it's accurate. I don't think that's the case anymore. I don't think you need to break it down into micro…”

“the simplest way to think about it is ChatGPT or Perplexity, when you prompt it, it's going to give you a quick Answer. But deep research, it's almost like a junior analyst, a McKinsey analyst, uh, that they would probably pay hundreds of thousand dollars a year to give you deep research into the question that you…”

“So why this works is because long tail exact domains still actually work for banking on Google with even all the algorithm changes and updates.”

“I think people are monetizing directories wrong. Like they're just putting AdSense. We saw one example of someone literally selling a book. Um, the opportunity is actually to build software on top of these directories. So you use directories to get the traffic. You get all these eyeballs in a particular niche. You…”

“If things were growing and going well, I guarantee you that founder is not willing to sell. And so there's probably going to be some things that need to get fixed.”

“my general sense of where startup ideas are today is like, you have to be as close or as far as possible from AI.”

“I genuinely think that the motivation and the vision and the intention behind something is something you can't fake. It's, it's a little bit woo woo. It's a little bit wishy washy, but I think that's how, I think that's how people make decisions. Um, it matters. Like, why are you building this? Like, I don't think…”

“I think there's two types of founders, broadly speaking. I think there's founders that operate less like business executives and more like artists. They have a creative vision and they're manifesting it, and they're not really solving a problem. They're just manifesting a creative vision. And the kind of, like, Counter…”

“I, you know, I just think that that's such a profound lesson for founders that wanna, I don't know, I'm gonna build you an AI co-founder. Like, no, like build an AI that will do one specific thing.”

“the future of building startups is not by building a startup. It's by building a micro startup. So the old way of building a startup was You had this big idea, and you went and go built this big idea, and you iterated your way to product market fit. But I actually think now, especially with AI and how easy it is to…”

“I think the most effective thing a founder can do, I mean, there's the meme of, like, first founders think about products, second founders think about distribution. I think that's spot on. I think you need to think about, like, what is the headline that will make this thing go viral? And I think the headline for a…”

“I just genuinely think that no idea will become mainstream if it's not like captured in a meme.”

“whatever you're doing, if you love it, just do it until you die. So like, don't start anything new, just like keep doing what you're doing forever. Like if you think about the people I study, it's like they just find something and they usually do it for, for decades.”

“There's nothing that a two minute clip on the mainstream media can tell you about the guy that you've heard talk for a thousand hours. There's no edgy form of education that could take place. You know who he is because you've heard him speak for so long.”

“And then, then when you read more biographies, you realize that every person that lived a life so remarkable, somebody wrote a book about them, all read biographies.”

“So if you add AI into the equation, it's not that AI removes people's jobs. AI becomes the stress test of, do you know how to use this to double, triple, quadruple your output? If yes, you will make even more money than you were making before because you are more valuable.”

“the thing that most writers and most people who want to write don't realize is that many of the decisions get made before you start writing. So if you start, if you come up with an idea, and your first thought is I should open a Google Doc and I should start writing, you've already failed. You already did it wrong. And…”

“every time you sit down to write, your brain is cycling through previous quote unquote templates that you have seen work. Either something you've read and were inspired by, or something that you've done already and you received a positive response from.”

“You could reverse engineer 99% of all nonfiction writing back into these 10 ways.”

“I actually learned how to, like, fully integrate multiple APIs into an app before I even knew what API stands for, because you can, you don't need to know with a, uh, with, with the AI tools.”

“At the start to me, it really is about numbers and just getting stuff out there and just getting used to posting videos and not really worrying too much about ideation.”

“So like another language like this is like, you know, um, nevertheless, like I hate that word. Cause that like makes people think it's like a summary of the video and it's going to end. So like to recap, another thing I hate, like whenever someone does that, I just like feel like getting sick.”

“It annoys me when people say, I've got this great idea, but I can't title thumbnail it. I would always say, well, you don't have a great idea then. Like, that's not a great idea for YouTube if you can't title thumbnail it, unless you just can't think of one. There is one out there, but if you can't Realistically in…”

“if you're funded, you have a ton of money, you have a ton of time and you have a ton of resources. So you, when they ask that question, like, where should I be? It's like everywhere. You should be everywhere. That is why you raise money.”

“It costs so much money to do that. It is so hard. What's way easier is find an idea that people already have. That's common. You attach yourself to it and you cannibalize it and you're going to make it evolve into a new thing. You can always like, you can always morph it into something else, but it's, It's very hard to…”

“I actually think that the goal of every solopreneur should be to not be a solopreneur. Like, I actually think that just doing things on your own is, like, super lonely, and you're, you're, everything, everything is dependent on you, and that's, that's not very, that, that to me doesn't seem like a freeing life.”

“I think you could be Jim Henson without leaving your home. You don't need a production studio, and a whole staff, and a crazy budget. Like, I could literally stand right here and create the next Sesame Street, or the Muppets, or Mr. Dress Up, or whatever it is.”

“You know, if you, if you view your work as art, you have no competition and, uh, you have no fear of failure, and I think it just removes this anxiety that you have over it needing to be perfect or, or anything like that.”

“Honestly, O one mini in my experience for agentic behaviors, sometimes falls short. Um, just because it already has kind of like chain of thought embedded on it. It tries to basically like Figure out everything itself without using any tools and kind of like outsmart a little bit what you're trying to do”

“so he gives, he gives someone a small task with unclear instructions, and then he, you know, He, he basically sees if they ask any questions or they just guess. And he tells, what's cool about that is it tells you everything about their future behavior. So this is for like when you're interviewing, you know,…”

“But I would say just make the front end look as nice as possible to grab attention. If you're not as, you know, in a position to be easily creating traffic, just to grab that attention and clearly communicate what it is that, you know, like what makes your car drive. And then the product itself, I mean, it could be, it…”

“when you think about, um, um, D to C, there's always money flowing every month. Like as long as the business exists, there's money flowing. So, so to justify a 499 dollars a month subscription within that, like flow of money is so easy to figure out as long as you solve a problem big enough to just, to keep justifying…”

“Like the wealthiest people have the least amount of recurring meetings.”

“I feel like we're kind of entering this area, era of, of, you know, call to action kind of becoming dead, um, where I, like, I feel like even throughout, like, throughout my content, like, I never, like, asked necessarily anything of, like, Check out my business, or check this, or like, like, or subscribe. I feel like…”

“So my whole thesis, like what I'm betting my entire career on, is this one funnel that I call the ACP funnel. So it's basically, A stands for audience. You build audience up top, then you convert that audience into a community, and then you build a product for that community.”

“you're also probably not going to create like a hundred billion dollar company in doing that, you know? If, if you want to do that, you got to go consumer, I think.”

“I think there are just certain primitives or certain ideas that become commonplace and, like, should be replicated by everyone. And you have to be, like, you know, it's, like, impossible that you're gonna come up with all of those yourself.”

“with an AI company, it feels really clear to me that you look at the number, the amount of human input that you're saving, And the cost of that human input, and I mean total cost, I mean salary, emotional damage that you have to sustain in doing the work, you know, all of that stuff. And, and, and by the way, those two…”

“if you build a thing, which is like, Beautiful and people love and has a place in their lives. You can charge more for it later. And, um, you know, that goes against conventional wisdom. And I think if you have that knowledge, uh, it's a secret weapon because it's easier to get distribution for something that costs…”

“And I think that's also why people who make a lot of content are actually usually the most successful people. Like it's just, It's impossible to compete with it. If it was like a video game or a board game, it's like the overpowered skill is the ability to keep producing content.”

“What you want to do is Low quality, high effort. That's where you want to be.”

“This is another thing where you could just look up chatbot on the App Store and pull out the UI. It does not need to reinvent the wheel. The only thing that's important to reinvent here is the prompting, and that's probably, so before we go into that, I want to discuss something else, but the prompting is something…”

“showing it on an influencer video, when it, when the phone is only on the screen for two seconds, you need the viewer to understand what this app does and why they want to get it for themselves. And if it's unclear, if the app is too convoluted, then influencer marketing will not work. No one will know what it does.”

“everyone's a data scientist because, like, everyone, anyone can just, like, prompt tune, like, GPT-IV to, like, find some, like, do something interesting with the data set.”

“the way that, like, science proceeds right now is, like, you're trying to find, like, underlying, underlying explanations for things by, like, doing high-end studies on, like, lots and lots and lots of people and, like, doing, like, a linear regression to, like, understand, like, how, like, how things work at a group…”

“I think like books started out as luxury goods. And then because of the printing press, they became like, there is this push to make them cheaper because you needed ways to get more information into people's hands. And they're no longer necessary as, um, as cheap forms of like information dispersal because we have the…”

“All that to say, there's a huge opportunity to build Anti AI products just in general.”

“big companies are really limited in the risk, the amount of risks that they can take to like make their actual interface good for that specific thing. Cause they can't risk like pissing off their regular users. And that's a tremendous advantage for startups to like actually figure out what the future of this is like…”

“it's much harder to grow a newsletter now than it was five years ago. I'd probably start with YouTube actually. Um, I think, and funnel people into, from YouTube into a newsletter, um, that feels like the right move.”

“I realized, Greg, that a lot of people are, um, are led down by the AI tools hallucinating or giving them the wrong thing, and that's because most people are terrible product managers.”

“my domain was only hit on a subdirectory. Hence why I suggested that you put it into guides instead. So Google will just hit the guide sub subdirectory and not your whole domain.”

“Comment whatever, uh, keywords in the title. It helps out in the YouTube algo so much. You guys wouldn't believe it actually. So just as an SEO practice today, find whatever keyword is in the title and then try to comment that in the comment section. That's actually one of the ranking factors on YouTube.”

“If you can do a great Black Friday sale, you can literally fuck up everything for the rest of the year and still have a great year.”

“I set up my holding company with the thesis that, uh, community-based products outperform non-community-based products. So when you start with an audience and you build a community, That's just the, a great way to create a moat, have customers lined up, and all of our businesses are based on that.”

“all these LLMs, all these AI tools that we have in the world right now, they're effectively gaslighting engines. Right? That's the world's biggest gaslighting process that you can ever imagine is like asking a question of an LLM and then seeing as it tries to convince you that it has any idea what it's talking about.”

“Like OpenAI, Anthropic, all of these players, they have to have models available that can do everything well. So they can't really have models that do one, one thing specifically, specifically well, right?”

“that you can just copy these apps and get 10 K MRR within a couple of months. Probably if you just copy the content, copy the app, uh, do some slight differentiation”

“if you stole the code base to Facebook, And you were like, okay, I have all the code to Facebook. I'm going to launch Facebook to.com. Well, you don't have any of the users. People aren't going to your website. It's not valuable, but with the large language model weights, once you get the model, you can run that…”

“Especially, especially when you're dealing with stuff that's going to be like more, like more complicated functionality. Like for, for design changes, I'll often just, I'll just kind of like, I'll, I'll be like looking at the designers creating a list in, in one shop message. I'm like, here's this thing sucks. Make…”

“appending AI is valuable when you are creating innovation within a relatively stagnant industry, such as, uh, Cal AI.”

“The most standard practice in the industry right now is to take people through some onboarding flow and then hit them with a paywall at the end. Um, it's just like, you make so much more doing that than pretty much any other paywall strategy.”

“for the same reason that Duolingo is so big, there's so, so few people trying, which just makes it so much easier to succeed, uh, when applying, uh, these sort of new wave tactics.”

“Like that's a really brilliant business model, but let's scale that up even further. Let's do that with five channels. Let's do that with 10 different YouTube channels. Same formula. I pick a category business. I take it. I pick a category content marketing. I pick a category email marketing, whatever that is. And all…”

“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. It's going to be brittle.…”

“So website is a shadow funnel. It's almost just there to prove that you're actually a real company. And sometimes it's almost just there. So you yourself can figure out what you do and just have like a home for your stuff”

“unless you have unbelievably good SEO and you're spending, you know, good money and have good talent to get the Google ads to go towards your website, unless you have a lot of brand recognition, your website is not going to sell things for you necessarily.”

“people who make really nice websites are generally not good at making funnels at all because funnels require really good copywriting and, and, and mostly it's about conversion optimization for that specific flow.”

“if that was how we sold, if that's how we expected to sell out three events per year at 14,000 dollars, uh, this, my business would, would not exist because no one would ever buy it because it's too high ticket. And also like, why, why would you buy it? It's just on the website. You can decide whenever you want.”

“Nothing is more effective, nothing like in marketing than holding a goddamn book in your hand.”

“Never buy expensive domains, like, It's always available. Just be more creative and find the one that's available.”

“even if you know how to write code and you're great at that, It's a hundred percent better to go with no code, any tool”

“So it all takes, if it takes you more than one evening, then you're doing it wrong. Because if it takes more than one evening, You need to redo your method, otherwise you're kind of riding on a small car, on a, on a slow car, and you'll never get really far with that”

“If your site is fresh and the domain rating is low, if you publish a lot of articles, Google will just never crawl them because it will look like spam for Google. That's why the first month You should have maximum 50 pages or 50 articles on your website, and then second month you can do more.”

“And I think that's a bit of, like, an unfair advantage, is if you create a product, and you just shift the business model. You know, people are doing subscription, you're now, pay what you want.”

“Now I think today you kind of need idea gal or guy and a funnel. Guy or gal.”

“And the best thing I found is that you kind of want to get cursor to just focus on functionality and, uh, don't even just, don't even think about UI at the beginning. And then you start using visual to like touch up, uh, UI interface bit by bit. And this will get you like a lot more success and try to get to everything…”

“I truly believe if you're trying to build something, um, that you, uh, that you want users to use, you're going to have to get your hands dirty.”

“In a world where we have an abundance of choice, familiarity is gonna win.”

“And then you're still gonna, at some point, have to understand the code and have to figure out how to edit it.”

“And so, I feel like there's that trust. If you, if you made it public, it just, you lose a little bit of that trust. So, um, I wouldn't do it publicly, but for, I get it for small bets.”

“I think that There's, there's room for this, which is lifetime, but no community. I think the mistake people make is they open up a feed, and then all of a sudden, someone might poison the well, or there's too much promotion, or, you know, there's so many ways that a community could go wrong.”

“there's so much opportunity for still today in 20, 24 to not go build the shiny, sexy thing with limitless, you know, market size and, Hone in and focus on one industry, you know, one type of business, uh, and build software tailored for them, uh, and build really great businesses that are enduring strong retention.…”

“I'm a big believer in picking a industry and not a, and not a, an idea. So you don't come up with an idea at all. That's not the first step. That's not even the 10th step. So you have to focus on an industry.”

“And there's a correlation with successful outcomes and actually, actually having the industry expertise, but it's not a requisite at all. So, you know, we've built one of the biggest vertical SaaS businesses in the country for trade schools, and it's, I didn't know anything about trade schools until I started a decade…”

“Just show up at machine shops and say, I'll buy everybody, I'll buy you guys lunch today. I know I probably look like a crazy person, but I'll buy you guys lunch today. If you just let me shadow the operation for today, go validate it.”

“I do this with a bunch of new accounts, and I start from zero, and it's totally doable that within 90 days, you can start getting 250,000 impressions per month.”

“That's the structure of a great tweet. So something that not everybody agrees with said as fact with conviction, and then a bunch of really strongly written copy to back it up.”

“I love to hire salespeople who are paycheck to paycheck, but drive a 120,000 dollar white Escalade. Because they're super motivated to sell, and they are highly determined to make it rain, and they'll work super hard because they're cash strapped.”

“distribution is more important than product now, it's just from a, it's just easy, you know, it's hard, it's easier to build product. You can use like AI tools and other software to go and create those products. Um, but it's harder to get distribution”

“Whereas real work that makes real money and makes seven figure differences, that doesn't come from just responding to shit on Slack from my perspective.”

“We take a lot of the Silicon Valley status symbols and try to apply these status symbols to small businesses. I think this is what Jason Fried is good at kind of cutting out and getting through the bullshit. A lot of these status symbols, like not running ads, saying Facebook is dead, saying Meta is dead, are totally…”

“I don't think you should start with ads though. That's my take. Because I think in order to create ads that are really high, highly performing, you have to have your messaging Pretty dialed. And I think the best way to get your messaging really dialed is to do organic content. See what works on places like Twitter,…”

“And, um, and I think one of them is teaching what you actually know. You probably have a background, whether you've been studying something, you've been, I don't know, it could be a sport background, could be employee backgrounds, having a course, a book. I think it's the easiest way to get started.”

“When you see a subscription, you're already thinking what happens if I have to cancel and I forget. And when you create objections in the mind of the customer at the moment they purchase, that is usually impacting your conversion rate.”

“I could have gone there and like edited the code myself or could have written this whole app myself. I've been coding for almost 10 years now, but it's still faster for me to Just prompt AI and tell it what to do and get me to a point where I'm here.”

“I think that if you're creating a minimal viable product, I always think about it as like the minimal viable product is the social account.”

“I think there's also an opportunity when a market gets really big, there's just an opportunity to be a me too. And if you just, uh, innovate on like your five dollars less or your black, you know, your red, red and black, you know, just a color colorway. Um, that could also be enough.”

“Those people are way overpaid. They haven't really helped the brands at all. And, uh, the way to think about it is if you were going to pay rather than paying 500,000 dollars for one post, you should pay 500 dollars for a thousand posts from small people, right?”

“I think the perfect combination is, is like rework fundamentals, but Y Combinator orientation towards growth. If you can think about product market fit and growth from the Y Combinator lens, which I really don't think rework emphasizes that much.”

“the best converting, um, fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart, they're two different things, is to get a person on the phone.”

“I, like, basically don't even, like, Acknowledge short views anymore. It's all about long views in terms of affinity. So if there's a lot of long views, it means that there's a lot of trust here.”

“there's so much competition in the AI assisted AI led landscape that there's probably a lot of opportunity in the human stuff.”

“I don't think you can, if it comes to that AI stuff, I don't think you can come in a year later and try to merge your way into it. It's, it's, it's probably too late with those kinds of tools.”

“There are all these no code tools. They're either too limited or too complex. What you need is a product specific tool. Like Shopify is no code e-commerce. Then you would also build no code marketplaces. No code messaging app. No code Instagram.”

“People don't need another bookmarking app. People. No. No. Don't do it.”

“You gotta be crazy to put social media apps on your phone. Just, you gotta be crazy. Period.”

“I don't have a number because people I know who have numbers are just, they hit the number, and then the number becomes two X. And then they hit the number, and then the number becomes two X. And they hit the number, and it becomes two X.”

“You mostly don't want to be surrounded by people who are questioning everything and being the devil devil's advocates and telling you all the ways things can go wrong when your business is just starting out and you're still under twenty million. You want to be surrounded by people who are enthusiastic advocates and who…”

“part of it is you almost want bad creative upfront because you want Facebook's algorithm to get a better and better signal on who your audience is. And if you give them too much good creative, like, you know, if I show you a pretty girl with dancing around or whatever, you may buy the product, even though you're not…”

“Reviews are way lower than people think. It's honestly shocking. Um, especially in, uh, like smaller geographies, it really, what's matters is like, is this an exact match for whatever this person is searching?”

“If that thought is coming at least once per quarter, then see you later. Life's too short for it. You'll hire someone who actually cares a lot about, about it more.”

“It's an app to help you hang out with people when you're bored. And all of these apps have failed. Like all of them have failed. Like they just don't work. There's this negative selection bias where it's like the people who actually want to hang out are not the people you want to hang out with and like all of this…”

“if you're still on your journey, I do think cities are, they're not just a place to go have fun. They are a utility that you pay for. Like, there's a reason also people are like, oh, if you live in Berlin, you pay this much for an apartment. But if I, if you just move two hours outside, you can get a house for 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,…”

“it is Of course possible to build a career remotely and not in a city. It's just the challenge. It is kind of like playing on hard mode versus easy mode. You get the, the, it's like in a video game, you're putting the attributes into comfort. You're putting all your points into comfort and convenience, but then the,…”

“I feel like you could get to seven figures so fast, just doing that with no Audience at all.”

“Look for things that are bigger than you that are happening. And then how do you attach yourself to them? It's the classic playbook. Like, especially when you're trying to bootstrap a thing or self-funded, uh, it's the, it's the, it's the only way to do it that I've seen at work. When you try to convince the world of…”

“And honestly, that's all these podcasts are turning into more and more is like, it's just a sales tool. It's just sales in disguise, right?”

“It just doesn't have creator product market fit, and that's something for you to think about is, you know, when you're building your business, because, you know, every business now is a creator business, are you the right creator for it, or should someone else be? And being honest with that is really important.”

“if you're creating something new, you publish it wide, but if you're creating something really niche, ah, you should look at the existing categories in Kindle Unlimited, and then basically, like, try and stay in that category, and then you're just playing the, the better best game.”

“I think it's not writers that do that. I think it's entrepreneurial people who do that. And then they are just like, and I'm just going to write to fulfill on the demand. But I think the people who are actually talented at writing almost never think about this”

“So you take, instead of investing, you know, into the S and P you, you find an operator, um, and you use data to inform some of these bets and you like, this is a perfect bet where it's like, okay, if I'm going to invest five, four grand a month, three grand a month, share the upside, but this thing could potentially…”

“Because I think the real value is you build a niche library, and then you train AI on how to write that specific subject.”

“no agency works at a hundred percent productivity. Good agencies work at 70% productivity at best. Um, so realistically, if you're at 40 or 50%, you can use that 20, 3040, 50% on your own projects, and you don't have to pay for it.”

“Andy Ratcliffe, who started Benchmark Capital, one of the best returning venture funds of all time, and then went on to start Wealthfront. And he was saying, you need to be passionate about, like, the industry, but you might not need to be, like, so passionate about the exact specific company you work at. So find a…”

“And then you go and you buy like the exact match domain name for that target keyword. You go, you build like. 30 links to it and you'll get it to rank page one. We've like done this already.”

“That you should, you should focus on the thing that you're really good at, and it's way, way more of a commodity to be a good operations person than it is to be somebody that can like take an idea from non-existent and like bend reality so that this thing now exists, right? So focus on that thing that you're good at…”

“And I think that this is like actually where AI is the most effective. It's like taking unstructured data and structuring it. That's when the magic happens, right? Like I don't care about generative AI from like nothing to something.”

“I think this is actually a better way to think about like funnels funnels. I think are broken because that's not actually how people like make purchasing decisions. They don't start here and then like work their way down. That's a very poor visualization. What's actually happening is like they're a comment and they're…”

“I think for first time founders, um, I am convinced that building a B to B niche media brand is the best way to go make your first buck.”

“I get why people optimize for conversion rate, but I think that people are making a mistake by just optimizing for conversion because it's not really long-term thinking.”

“So the best way to not get, not need a debt collector is to not finance a CPG business with debt.”

“You might be junior in the capital stack, but if you turn off the person's account, you suddenly became senior in the capital stack.”

“And my whole thing is, as a marketer, if you're a good marketer, you would charge on performance, right? But most people aren't willing to take the risk.”

“The scripts on these videos are everything. I genuinely think it's like 90% script writing for short form and really for content in general.”

“I think any legacy media brand that stands for something, uh, that is cutting head counter staff at bare minimum and closing their doors at maximum, Is an opportunity for this because I still have yet to meet a legacy media company that truly thinks about their newsletter as a destination because it was always an…”

“Like you see all these studies around loneliness in society, and I do believe it, but I also think it's way harder to build a great business off of that because it's always less tangible. It feels more ephemeral. You want to join a dieting program, you very clearly know if you're losing 10 pounds, and other people very…”

“In a world of hyper-commoditization, where software's commoditized, where, uh, content's being commoditized, where like many things are becoming, um, where we are being displaced, um, By technology, I think taste, like having, being an incredible taste maker is actually one of the greatest advantages you can have.”

“startup valuation is literally a made up number. What I mean by that is that, you know, venture capitalists or people who want to buy your company in the early stages, based on fear of losing the deal, will literally make up a number. That is, you know, valuation is more Art, then science”

“Google is probably not going to copy your startup. Build your startup and ignore the incumbents that are going to copy your startup.”

“Look for opportunities that are low status now, but probably high status in a few years. So for example, building a bootstrap startup a couple of years ago was pretty low status. You know, cash flow was low status. It was all about how do I raise hundreds of millions of dollars, build a unicorn, billion dollar company.…”

“First find the niche, then learn from the community, then the startup idea will come to you.”

“Cash flow over valuation any day of the week. What I mean by that is, who cares if a venture fund is going to say your business is worth a billion dollars? It feels nice. But building cash flowing businesses is ultimately a huge reward from a financial standpoint.”

“if you're working on something and you don't want to put your name on it from the beginning, you should probably reconsider whether or not you actually want to be working on it because you should be proud to put your name on stuff you work on.”

“It makes no, you know, the whole project doesn't, almost doesn't make sense, at least financially, unless you can use it to grow your audience and, you know, sell them courses and other things.”

“I think there's something to be said about being constrained and building your own media. Building your own, you know, your own community and not being just like how you don't want to be, uh, dependent on VCs. You don't necessarily want to be dependent on creators.”

“I know people say, like, don't hire friends and stuff like that. Well, it's like, you trust your friends. Like, there's a reason why you're, you're friends with, with your friends. Um, and so, I say hire friends. I say hiring your friends is a great idea.”

“I think the best way to pay people is ask them how much they want to make.”

“they're the only media that you can create that allows you to create every other form of media from a podcast.”

“I think productized services were a big buzzword in 20, 23, and somehow that became an outbound marketing strategy, uh, when it's really for internal use only, uh, to help run the machine more smoothly, but really changing a productized service, which is more of a transactional task base. Um, deliverable, which is…”

“I think like burnout occurs when your batteries get drained and it doesn't mean you've worked 60 hour weeks. It doesn't mean you are like burning the candle at both ends. It probably means you're just doing things that don't get you fired up. And, or with people who kind of grind your gears or taking energy away from…”

“So I think there's, this is like a bigger idea around there's opportunities to buy some of these distressed assets in the public markets from all the specs and stuff like that. And then, uh, basically modernize the products and also build them with a more profitable mindset.”

“everyone who comes into a job interview or applies for a job and says, I'm a generalist. Stop, please. From someone who's interviewed hundreds of people in the last year, it's not doing you any service, even though that's what someone might need. It's not what someone wants. Someone wants someone who's an expert or…”

“Many of these rapper startups are dimes in front of the steamroller type businesses. And the key to the parable is it's not bad. People are acting like rapper startups are bad. It's not bad. Just, you have to really understand the strategic situation that you find yourself in.”

“It's why we called minimum viable product a product, not an experiment or a test or hypothesis. Like we wanted to remind people that although we are removing features and we are de-scoping in order to get learning, we're still trying to build something that is fundamentally useful.”

“Like, so many of these companies collapse, first they collapse morally, and then they collapse, uh, you know, financially, and it's actually worse for investors in the end.”

“Getting early adopters for this is gonna be easy stuff. There's early adopters who are gonna love it. The issue to cross the chasm here is how can I build something that, that normal people would feel is trustworthy to have such an intimate relationship with, with my private data, with my knowing everything about my…”

“I question email newsletters that have high percentage of paid subscribers. So I don't think it should be your, like the only way you're acquiring users. I think the grassroots social Events, community, that's going to be your bread and butter, but definitely trying out different channels.”

“when a network or marketplace is trying to get liquidity, they're very, very creative friendly. And then once they reach liquidity, they start to try to capture more and more of that value.”

“Shopify has to make millions and millions and millions of users happy. So they're designing towards the middle. They're designing towards the average. But if you're building a custom GPT or you're building a quote unquote chat GPT wrapper, you can afford to make design concessions because you're not building for the…”

“I think that most people are actually really not interesting at all, because they don't know, like, the fundamentals of a good story.”

“turns out I chose a business model that requires my best content to be behind a paywall. And then I need new content, not behind a paywall to get new readers. And like these two sides of my business are directly at odds, you know, growth and monetization are directly in conflict”

“And I think a lot of creators like to build strip malls. Here's what I mean. If you think about the footprint of land, what you can build, right? You're, you're going to a strip mall and you're like, okay, I'm going to build this one little business here. Here's my radio shack. Then it's going to have a subway right…”

“no amount of like onboarding and help tutorials will ever turn someone into the perfect user. But when you're like, all right, fine, I'll like pay me and I will just set it all up for you. Uh, it turns out that works pretty well.”

“when I evaluate content, newsletters, media properties, I ask myself, is this content going to repel some large portion of people? Because if it is going to repel some large portion of people, it will attract another large portion of people.”

“solopreneurs equals solo burnouts. Think you're a one man slash woman army. Cool. Give it a year. You'll be so fried. You'll hire a team just to get a day off.”

“because I think going viral is not, like, um, there's, like, a recipe to it. It's not, it's not, like, something, like, uh, that's, that's too difficult to do.”

“Like I find that most shorts viewers just aren't interested in long form. And so it's not that YouTube isn't making it easy for them to do that. It's just that that's not what the user behavior is.”

“If you have financial constraints and you want this thing to be a viable business on some predictable timeframe, I think you need to lean into being a distributor because businesses are built on creating value for people. So you have to understand what people want value from.”

“the best way to grow an email list is not by writing great emails, unfortunately. Like it's by getting top of funnel elsewhere, introducing them to the point, to the fact that you have, have email.”

“Like I think a monthly membership and a peer-to-peer based community is a bad idea. Um, You'll have to do annual. You could do biannual. You could do quarterly, but I think monthly memberships and a peer to peer based space is setting yourself up for failure.”

“Leaders from Silicon Valley-ish. Adjacent team, rest of the team can be anywhere.”

“you can ask people the question, do you have product markets in their business? And they'll be like, I think so. And you'll be like, you do not have it. Because it is such a, uh, uh, a crazy clear feeling when you have it that you're like, oh shit, this is it.”

“What they do have is they have generations of innovators... So we're talking about generations of technology innovators. That have built layers of technology on top of one another. And so they're gonna see the future much more clearly. And that's why they get to create it.”

“my thesis is, you know, with so many podcasts and YouTube channels and, and so many people now tweeting, you know, you're the average of the five friends you spend the most time with, but you're also the average of the five podcasts you consume. I think that a really underrated way and a cheaper way, frankly, than…”

“I'm super convinced that the things I cared about in my twenties, I also cared about when I was 12.”

“You know, there, you don't need to be a full-time creator. You can be a part-time creator and you could spend one hour a week or two hours a week and still create a niche audience.”