Bootstrapped Giants

Andrew Warner: [00:00:00] Jesse, there are people now who are creating a Jesse writing bot. Essentially, it's taking all of your internal calls and taking your [00:00:09] voice memos and stuff like that and turning it into social content. I don't understand that. And let me, let me explain why. Wait,

Jesse Pujji: sorry. Who's doing that? You mean we're doing it internally?

Andrew Warner: [00:00:18] We're doing, yeah. Internally, you're spending money creating internal software. And here's the part that I don't understand. There are all these other people who are working [00:00:27] on this software. There are tons of apps already. Why not wait till they figure it out? Why spend your own money creating this thing?

And if you are, why not turn it into a SaaS? I, I don't know why [00:00:36] you're doing this internally for yourself, this AI writer

Jesse Pujji: who, who's doing it. That's

Andrew Warner: why I asked you on Slack

Adam Brakhane: Lee. That's what, that's literally what we're paying lead.

Jesse Pujji: No, no, no, [00:00:45] no, no. I know we are doing it. Who is, you mentioned these, these mystery companies that are doing it and I don't know who they are.

Ah.

Andrew Warner: Ooh. Okay. Uh, you know what one of the [00:00:54] problems is? They suck so badly that they're easy to forget. Okay. That I don't even like get involved in them.

Jesse Pujji: I rest your, I rest, I rest my case, your Honor.

Adam Brakhane: [00:01:03] Yeah.

Andrew Warner: But do you really believe that all these people are spending money on it? That you're going to figure it out with one person internally, just for yourself?

Well,

Jesse Pujji: I

Andrew Warner: think and if you can [00:01:12] beat them, why not make it a bigger thing?

Jesse Pujji: Maybe. I, I, I think the, the. I, I have a couple thoughts on this and I'm curious what Adam [00:01:21] would say. One is like is I have a dream and my dream is that I can have conversations like this, or [00:01:30] yesterday I was at a conference and I had all these really interesting conversations and I'm a unique human and I have unique worldviews and all these other things, and I want all of [00:01:39] that, and I don't wanna ever write a social post.

And I want, I want, you know, the set of agents. And by the way, I showed this to a bunch of people yesterday and everybody felt blown away. I showed them Lauren's output of just [00:01:48] like the categories that came from the q and a, we did, and then the actual posts that were written, and then how I rewrote them a little bit.

And everyone was like, oh, wow. And it was the idea [00:01:57] that like there was somebody pulling out a piece of it, pulling out the themes, and there was a different bot, you know, different agent that was like writing them and then someone else could edit them. And like, it takes pieces to do this well. [00:02:06] But I, I think that the, the notion of the specific idea I had of like, I am a busy person doing, meeting interesting people, giving advice to entrepreneurs all the time, and I want, I never wanna [00:02:15] write a piece of social content ever again in my life.

I think Adam and team have run with that to, to try to solve that very specific problem. And I think that, I don't know that there's a [00:02:24] software that's doing it, or you just said they're all shitty at doing it. So, so, so that, that's one piece of it. The second piece of it is, I believe, and, and. [00:02:33] I think, Andrew, this is a big shift in your worldview, and I think you've been a little slow on the AI thing, if, if I may say that, um, to, to like fully appreciate it, right?

I [00:02:42] mean, you, you were, you were not allowed, and you weren't yourself using AI because, because the softwares are shitty. A few months ago,

Andrew Warner: I, I was addicted to it as a consumer of [00:02:51] certain things for sure,

Jesse Pujji: but you've been very resistant to, to leaning in and adopting it and.

Andrew Warner: Okay.

Jesse Pujji: I think

Andrew Warner: I, [00:03:00] I would like to hear more about that later, but let's keep going with this.

Jesse Pujji: But I think one of the worldview, you still think, like, you think in the old paradigm, which in the old paradigm is software. [00:03:09] Software is the thing, the new paradigm with ai, I think one of my, one of my opinions is because AI is [00:03:18] fundamentally bespoke to an an individual person's situation. 'cause that's the promise it holds to basically automate a thing that's very specific to Jesse Gie.

And [00:03:27] his, his orientation as ceo, then it's, it's, I think there's gonna be, we've talked about like a trillion dollar services industry buildup around it because you actually have to [00:03:36] get in and understand my very specific situation. You actually have to understand, you know, things about me that are unique and then you're gonna build me a piece of software effectively called an agent [00:03:45] that only works for Jesse Fuji and only should work for Jesse Bougie.

'cause it's so powerful for me because the challenge. Old SaaS software was just too generic. It, it didn't, [00:03:54] you know, and then it had to be customized or you had needed a person to operate it. So the other, the other reason, Andrew, is I think this is actually the way that a lot of AI software, whatever you [00:04:03] wanna call it, tools, will be built in the next paradigm here, and it won't be through software.

Andrew Warner: Custom created for individuals. So [00:04:12] you hate your email software. There will be an email software created for you, the front end. You hate your, when there's

Jesse Pujji: a business case for it. I don't, I don't think your consumers are gonna go, no, [00:04:21] my wife's not gonna get an email app built for her, but I think Dollar Shave Clubs email app will be different than Hulu's email app will be different than, [00:04:30] uh, bootstrap.

You know, they're all different and they're all agents that are specific. Will there be a software that you customize to this? Maybe, but I actually think it, it, like, in many ways the [00:04:39] platforms like OpenAI and others, they eat up a lot of the, like, you know, people like Adam CTOs and my old engineerings, they always use the word, [00:04:48] use the word plumbing.

Everything's plumbing, plumbing, plumbing, plumbing, plumbing. I need data, I gotta pull data. And then it's plumbing. The interface, Jesse, is very straightforward, well chat, GPT and, and even the ability to [00:04:57] create plumbing through writing code. But just the, the platforms themselves have, I think, obscured a lot of the plumbing and will continue to obscure it.

So that it's gonna be much easier to, [00:05:06] to create things that are custom on the surface of one of those platforms.

Andrew Warner: Okay. This is, this is one of those things really that's been hard for me to accept. And Adam, I wanna bring you in [00:05:15] on this too, but. I still see a world where SaaS exists and what you're saying is it will exist, but for a lot of business [00:05:24] needs, we will have our own custom software.

And the example that that comes up a lot that does make sense to me is CRM. Everybody hates their CRM because it never does what they want it to [00:05:33] do. Have custom CRM and it's such a vital part of the business and it produces money. And so it's worth spending some developer time on that. Let's

Jesse Pujji: use that actually a [00:05:42] real, another real life example though that is the most common.

What is the, what is the most common bespoke software [00:05:51] tool in America right now, Andrew,

Andrew Warner: but bespoke meaning it's made just for me.

Jesse Pujji: No, no, no. We, we all have bespoke tools we've built inside of [00:06:00] it and everyone knows how to use it, and billions of dollars in transactions is my hint. Billions of dollars in transactions take place in this [00:06:09] because of this software every day.

Andrew Warner: I can't think of a single thing that is actually bespoke that I'm using. Adam

Jesse Pujji: [00:06:18] Excel, Microsoft.

Adam Brakhane: I was gonna say Excel. Yep.

Jesse Pujji: You have an app called the Bootstrap Giants p and l. You have an app called, uh, personal [00:06:27] Finance of of the, of the Warner Household. You have an app called, uh, calculating Metrics for my business.

That is, it's just bespoke to you. [00:06:36] It's, it's a very completely bespoke thing that's been,

Andrew Warner: I see. I've used Excel to create a bespoke experience that's unique to me. I get it. I do remember that even in college when

Adam Brakhane: you open Excel, [00:06:45] Andrew Uhhuh, what, what does Excel want to create? Is Excel saying, great, we're here to make a p and l or we're here to model [00:06:54] this.

Just says, hi Andrew, what do you wanna do today?

Jesse Pujji: And, and then

Adam Brakhane: here's cell A one. What would you like to put in it? And, and you know, now you take these [00:07:03] like SaaS platforms, it's the exact opposite. Has Gmail ever asked you how you want it to show up? Has, you know, how much can you change? Oh, there's like, [00:07:12] there's a settings page with 15 different toggles that you can, you know, turn on and off.

You could change the background, but it's a big crusty hard [00:07:21] platform, not designed to change. There are tools like this that are designed to say, Hey, what would you like to do today? Go to, you know, lovable rept, base 44. [00:07:30] These like site builders, they can rebuild any website that you've ever seen or touched.

They could build CRMs, they can build landing pages, they could build [00:07:39] marketing pages, they could build anything. They don't, when you open it up, they don't want to do anything. They're just ready to do whatever you want to do

Jesse Pujji: and, and the, the future. But I [00:07:48] think the future, like when you, if you think about Excel's, if you percentage of tool or software automation, you've got these.

Again, you've got these first party [00:07:57] softwares depending on how techie your company is. Right? I'm on the board of Schnucks and like, I think 10% of their software, they've actually written themselves for their own business, which is kind of cool for a [00:08:06] grocery store. DoorDash is probably like 50 per, I mean, you know, there's techie companies that have written, then there's third party software, which has been the big wave of the last 20 years.

[00:08:15] There's horizontal SaaS. There's vertical SaaS. Right. Um. But then there's Excel and like I would argue Excel today is probably 10 to 50% [00:08:24] of the software inside of every company. And you know the hint I gave you guys, people joke about this on Wall Street and I worked on Wall Street, is like, dude, billions of dollars [00:08:33] transact on Excel software.

What

do

Andrew Warner: you mean by that?

Jesse Pujji: At the heart of every single Major M and a deal is a custom piece of software. That is the [00:08:42] model that was built for that deal. And probably there's three of them. There's like the buyer's model, the seller's model, and it's, it's software. Like someone goes in and says, well, tell me what [00:08:51] happens if, if we cut this cost and someone goes, oh, here's what it is.

Right? Like, so I think we, this, that's software that is automation, that is tooling. When [00:09:00] I, when I worked at McKinsey, we got hired by a hedge fund to look at Verisign for them. And I personally built a model. I probably, I don't know if [00:09:09] I, I have it, but like it was trying to predict domain name growth in the next five years.

And I had this insight while I was building it, that because [00:09:18] of my own domain buying, which is once people buy a domain, they very rarely let it expire. And so then we took business growth in the us We took small business growth, and by the way, [00:09:27] small businesses grow a ton, but they, they churn a lot. But we had this killer insight, and it was my insight, I'll take credit for it.

And this hedge fund made, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars for it [00:09:36] that they're never gonna let go of their domain. So, so at first, because we ran the numbers backwards and we're like, wait, but all these companies get started and they go out of business. Right. [00:09:45] And, and, and we're like, but the domain growth historically doesn't show that it's as if these guys are still around.

I'm like, well, that's because once I buy a domain for 10 bucks at [00:09:54] Jesse's coffee shop, I'm never, I'm never gonna let that thing expire. That's, I'm gonna hold up my heart's gonna hold onto it forever. Even if

Andrew Warner: the business goes away, I hold onto the domain,

Jesse Pujji: haven't you? Do y'all, have we all done that? Don't we all have like [00:10:03]

Andrew Warner: I hate that I do it, but I do.

I hoard him.

Adam Brakhane: It's

Andrew Warner: shameful. But

yes.

Jesse Pujji: And so dude, using that, we basically were able to take automation of small business growth in America. [00:10:12] Layer it onto domain name growth. And we were a hundred percent right. And Verisign had a.com.net monopoly on the business. And this hedge fund who paid McKinsey million [00:10:21] dollars probably made several hundred million off that insight because the market didn't realize that.

The market just didn't realize how much domains would grow. But in any case, that's a fun side story. But the [00:10:30] point was I built a unique piece of software that could take inputs and then could spit out outputs and had all this cool logic built into it. And I was 22-year-old Jesse sitting [00:10:39] there, you know, building.

But, but Excel is such a huge part of, of, of custom software inside business. Now. Adam was talking about REP and all these other guys, whatever the tool [00:10:48] is, I think that that is gonna, you know, five years from now and 10 years from now, there's gonna be so much of that software, tools, whatever we wanna call it, [00:10:57] inside of everywhere.

In fact, I think it'll be the biggest part of every organization. And by the way, I think it's a massive services opportunity, but it's just a massive opportunity. It's just gonna change everything. [00:11:06]

Adam Brakhane: What doesn't Excel do that made the space for those big platforms to come around? Why, why am I [00:11:15] not using Excel as my CRM if it can build everything?

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, um, you may know better than [00:11:24] me, Adam, in terms of the actual technical answers of like how much memory they can store in terms of like, you know, everyone has the Excel model that crashes their computer every time they open it, right? Mm-hmm. [00:11:33] Mm-hmm. Um. I mean, I would tell most founders start with Excel as your CRM right name.

When did you last talk to them? Like just keep order Google Doc or whatever. Right? [00:11:42] And that's where it starts. And then at some point it's like, I want automations. I want something to ping me, to tell me to, I want a drip campaign. I want enough data stored in here. I want a place where sent [00:11:51] multiple people can use, can update the record.

So I think there's all these, these other things that come up to run A CRM, well, feature-wise that Excel just [00:12:00] basically can't. Allow for, although I bet you, dude, if we went out and we, we should tweet this, show me the best version of an Excel CRM you've built, it would kind of [00:12:09] blow our minds how deep, far someone got building it.

I, I like it would be better functionality than some of the, some of the like SaaS ones.

Andrew Warner: Yeah. Adam, I feel like you're getting at something with that [00:12:18] question and some, some kind of depth that I want to get to.

Adam Brakhane: Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I wonder what's, what's gonna happen next, right? Like what, like [00:12:27] if, if Excel can do everything.

Yeah. I think LLMs can do everything. They do a lot of stuff then really poorly. And I, I think there's a problem with a [00:12:36] tool that that says, Hey Andrew, what do you want to do today? Well, I don't wanna have to figure out the whole problem, like do some of the work for me [00:12:45] tool. And so what is it that Excel couldn't deliver that made the space for these platforms to come around?

And then what are these platforms not delivering that's [00:12:54] gonna make the space for these LLMs? Like is this just like a cycle or is this the next step? Like,

Jesse Pujji: well, I mean one, one simple one would be like, what is the future gonna look like? Where we started this whole story, which [00:13:03] was. I don't think, I guess Excel could do some content creation, but not that well, you know, you could concatenate a bunch of phrases that Jesse uses and then [00:13:12] make a formula that would spit out, but it, it can't, it can't generate generative ai.

It can actually generate. Words and sentences that are quite amazing, relatively [00:13:21] speaking.

Adam Brakhane: Well, with Google Sheets, you, you've got the ai, you can, you can run Gemini on any cell, right. That can reference all the other cells. So maybe,

Jesse Pujji: I mean, I mean pre ai like [00:13:30] pre, yeah, pre AI though. Yeah, like that. That would be a limitation of Excel and you can do some stuff.

But I think that the generative nature is a unique thing. And then I think, I think stuff like you mentioned [00:13:39] lovable, like. The fact that you can use words to then generate like website objects and, and colors and the fact that it can speak to something that can then generate [00:13:48] those things feels like another level of, I mean, there's a, Adam, maybe you can try to explain the thing you and I talked about in my office the other day, the funnel thing that [00:13:57]

Adam Brakhane: Yeah, there's, there's a, a word people use to describe LLMs and LLM tools.

That I think we should all be putting in our vernacular, which is [00:14:06] amplify the LLMs, amplify whatever you put into it and the system around it. Maybe, you know, multiplies that [00:14:15] amplification in one direction. Maybe it's a little more specific. But what happens is you take the LLM, let's say we're all just like talking to the base open AI [00:14:24] models.

Well, there's no tools connected. It can't see the internet. It's just the knowledge it had on, you know, in May 20, 25 or whenever it was trained. And [00:14:33] there's amplification there. That thing can type at 12,000 words a minute. I can type at 70 words a minute or whatever and cool, I can do more with that, but I can't [00:14:42] do all that much more.

So then you take a a platform like Chachi pt and what is Chachi pt like? Andrew, do you know why [00:14:51] you are addicted to it as a consumer?

Andrew Warner: I have a a, there are a few things. It answers my questions quickly. Uhhuh, [00:15:00] um. It lets me talk to it and it draws me out. There are a few thoughts like that. [00:15:09]

Adam Brakhane: Yeah. Um, why is it quick?

Do you know why it's quick? Do you want me to tell you why it's quick?

Andrew Warner: No, tell me

Adam Brakhane: Often Chachi PT is [00:15:18] really great for consumers because of its memory tool. It knows you. It knows your style, it knows your preferences. It remembers kind of who [00:15:27] you are and the way you want things to show up. If you go and talk to just the LLM, like we're using the API version of these LLMs No tools.

Every [00:15:36] time you talk to one of those, you're starting from scratch. Mm-hmm. You know, big Bang, new World, everything starts from scratch. You, you have to give it all the information that you want it to do. [00:15:45] So, all right. What's one level above the LLMs that's a little bit more amplified, but also a little more specific is these like.

Chat platforms, chat gpt [00:15:54] claude.com. You know you're actually going and talking to an agent, not the LLM. It's got all these extra tools. Now it can do more, but it can also do less. Right now, you can't do [00:16:03] some of the things that I could do. You can't run 50 requests in parallel and kick 'em off and all this.

All right? Then you take, let's say lovable like Andrew. You could build a a website [00:16:12] on chat GPT. You could ask it to write HTML and CSS and make it pretty and use your design reference, but. It's gonna take a [00:16:21] lot of chatting. It's not really designed for that thing, so it's gonna be hard to do. Plus at the end, you've still gotta like copy and paste all that code out into something else.

What are you gonna [00:16:30] do with that code? I dunno what you're gonna do with that code. Now you go into lovable. It's still just lovable is built on top of the anthropic models. I believe it. [00:16:39] Only wants to build websites. Still a chat. You could still say anything you want, but it only wants to build websites.

Well, now you don't have to tell it to make the [00:16:48] boxes pretty. You don't have to tell it to use nice colors. You don't have to tell it how to host a website. You're not copying and pasting the code. One more layer on top of the chat. GBT type agent [00:16:57] is a purpose built agent for like building websites. But like Jesse's saying, cool, now it's way more possible.

You could build a website and host it [00:17:06] in 10 minutes. You, Andrew, like, we could do it right now before the end of this call where you've got a brand new website for yourself. And Jesse did this once while we were sitting together. [00:17:15] Uh, and that thing searched about him. It posted it up. That's great. That's like really, that increases the capabilities.

But now that you have those [00:17:24] capabilities and you say, awesome. Take access to my email. Here's all my customer data. Here's access to our internal file systems. Alright? Host that website. Make this CRM [00:17:33] for me and give me a sign up. Oh, oh. Is all that stuff available to the public internet? Do you know? Do you have any control over that?

Do you, how could you check that? [00:17:42] And often what we see happening there is, is people hosting private data, customer data, and there's all these scrapers. People are like, oh, I'm gonna go and find every [00:17:51] lovable site because I know 50% of 'em have some proprietary data that like the person using the tool had no idea when they uploaded it in there that it was gonna be public.[00:18:00]

Now, Chachi, bt, you're uploading. Custom data all the time. Right? But you're generally not sharing those publicly, so it doesn't really matter. You know, OpenAI has it and we could [00:18:09] debate that's good or bad. Lovable. There's a big publish button. It's so easy to click that publish button, oop. Now all that's on the internet and you didn't know.

It's not obvious to you and the [00:18:18] agent might even lie to you and say it's not accessible. It's like as you grow the amplification, any of these LLM Amplifications, they don't just make the thing [00:18:27] better and easier, they increase the risk, but they're also more specific. Like you couldn't easily process huge amounts of data in lovable or [00:18:36] do deep research.

I don't, I don't have a deep research feature.

Jesse Pujji: Adam, where, where does this end up? I mean, it, it makes sense, right? You, you,

Adam Brakhane: yeah. [00:18:45]

Jesse Pujji: It's a, it's almost like any supply chain, right? It's, it's like I buy, I can go plant corn in a corn field and then somebody else farms the corn. Yeah. And then they sell the [00:18:54] corn to someone and then someone beats it into corn meal and then they sell it to the bread guy and then the bread guy sells it to.

You know, the grocery store, then somebody, a restaurant buys it from the grocery store and then [00:19:03] cooks it. And I, I get a san I mean, we forget how much of a supply chain in the world exists today. So it kind of reminds me, I mean, that's kind of an analog in my head, but where [00:19:12] does, like, when you were talking, one thought I had was like, you know, there, there's like what there, back to SaaS versus services or how it's all gonna play out.

Like [00:19:21] do you think, let, let's make up a dumb example, like municipal governments, it's like a really niche category. Is someone, is someone gonna, is lovable gonna solve the problem of [00:19:30] them, them making and managing their websites? Or is someone gonna build, like, you know, should we go build municipal government hosting [00:19:39] website.com, right?

Muni sites.com and it's all powered by ai, so it's like a way better version of Squarespace or whatever. And then that's gonna be the tool that everybody uses, or our services [00:19:48] business is gonna come in and it's gonna be a mix of everything, of course, but like. Is that, I guess, is the municipal government website idea a good idea or is it a bad idea?[00:19:57]

Adam Brakhane: Do you remember, Jesse, do you remember when you tried to build your lovable personal website? Do you remember how that

Jesse Pujji: went? Yeah, it was, it was like blah. It was meh. It would've taken me [00:20:06] really like an hour to make it probably what I wanted. Maybe more

Adam Brakhane: uhhuh. Um, I think I agree and. [00:20:15] Why, like, why, why, why was that?

Why would it take a whole hour? Like if this tool can do anything, like why would it take an hour? What was it wrong at, what did it, what did it miss? What did you,

Jesse Pujji: I don't remember. [00:20:24] But it was, it was like, it, you know, the color scheme wasn't quite what it was. The way it had it, it was missing. Remember? I think it was missing a couple categories of tabs I would've wanted on the site.

Adam Brakhane: Yeah.

Jesse Pujji: [00:20:33] It

Adam Brakhane: like, I, I remember you were trying to also get it to look, go look up all the podcasts I've ever been on. Yeah. Yeah. And list those out on the page and it just.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, when I think of [00:20:42] the spec versus, yeah, yeah.

Adam Brakhane: Yeah. So, so I, I think the, you know, if you look at lovable as an Excel replacement, [00:20:51] uh, is there an Excel for municipal governments?

Jesse Pujji: No,

Adam Brakhane: not that I'm aware of. Is there an Excel for anything [00:21:00] that's not just Excel?

Jesse Pujji: Well, I mean, there, there's interest. It's a good question actually. There are, there are several plugins. I mean, there's actually a nice little, uh, plugin industry. [00:21:09] And I think the most famous example, oh, I forget the name of it, but it's an insane business.

It's like a 60% EBITDA margin business doing like [00:21:18] 50 million EBITDA a year. Um, Excel

Andrew Warner: plugin business, all they do is Excel plugins.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah. What is it? It's,

Adam Brakhane: is it one specific plugin for one

Jesse Pujji: industry? Yeah. It's [00:21:27] like a PowerPoint plugin for consultants. I mean, I'm sure there's other versions of this. This is just what I'm familiar with.

Yeah. Uh, what the hell was it called? I used it all. Think cell. [00:21:36] Think Excel. And it's actually, you know, what it specifically does is it connects Excel into PowerPoint and it's like a famous, it's like a bootstrap [00:21:45] giant, and it, it makes tons of money. Um,

Adam Brakhane: how, is this something a regular person would use or only a McKinsey

Jesse Pujji: consultant?

Only? Yeah. People in consulting or [00:21:54] whatever. It's expensive. Oh, dude. It's way bigger than I just said.

Andrew Warner: How much

Jesse Pujji: revenue is 200 million in a RRR EBITDA? One 50. And the [00:22:03] first article says Syn ven considers 3 billion euro sale of think cell in test of software.

Adam Brakhane: Wow. [00:22:12] Boom.

Andrew Warner: It helps build datadriven charts, automates slide layouts, and improve presentation

Jesse Pujji: product.

And I lived in it when I, when I and I, it was wasn't, I didn't even [00:22:21] live in it. I was in PowerPoint in Excel, and it was the one I like. There was a menu in my Excel that I'd pull down and go think, sell.

Adam Brakhane: Yeah. Yeah. I think this is probably a pretty good [00:22:30] analog to answer this question of. Well, you could have this plugin.

You were a, you were a person at a place that had resources. You had this plugin, [00:22:39] or there was probably someone you could have written that would've worked on the, on the deck for you, or there's a consultant somewhere else that'll work on it for you. There's an agency, there's a [00:22:48] software. The question in a little bit is like, where do you want control?

Where do you wanna own kind of the workflow? And Andrew, this, this is a little bit of a tieback [00:22:57] to why would we build our own custom. Uh, workflow and tools around content creation. Like we wanna own it like that at the, [00:23:06] at the core of the whole thing, you could just say, we're interested in owning that.

'cause it's so important to us in our business that we would like to have all of the [00:23:15] control and all of the upside. And I bet the reason Jesse didn't farm out this work to someone else like, well, no, you wanted to push the buttons, right? Like you didn't. You could have [00:23:24] asked for help, but you wanted to be in charge.

You just wanted a tool, sort of,

Jesse Pujji: I just don't think anything exists. Or Andrew, you sort of said it all sucks. So I

Andrew Warner: if there, we also sat in on meetings with [00:23:33] consultants who said that they do this really well and when I look at the results, I just don't even have a heart to tell 'em how bad it is. Yeah. So I talk about it internally.

Okay. Well I

Jesse Pujji: think there's that, [00:23:42] sorry, can I pull on one more thread on this Uhhuh, because my brain is just going now, like

Andrew Warner: I can see.

Jesse Pujji: There's this thing, [00:23:51] Andrew, where a Adam, you know, or there was a post, uh, by Reid Hoffman where he talked about becoming voice pilled. Do you know what that is, Andrew?

Andrew Warner: No.

Jesse Pujji: It's this [00:24:00] idea of, of like, because prompting is becoming so normalized in, uh, in ai, like, and voice is just a way easier way to write a [00:24:09] prompt.

Adam Brakhane: Mm-hmm.

Jesse Pujji: Right? And like Adam showed me this, he's like, we're all gonna be talking to our computers in five years or three years. And I, I agree with him. Yes. And even like, I've gotten d my wife.

[00:24:18] Like she's, she's a consumer of chat, GBT, and I was like, well just, just talk to it, like tell it what you want specifically, and you'll get way better answers. And now if she does it and she gets better answers, [00:24:27] I just, this is like a weird thought, like the municipal government, I don't know why I am, like, I had this visual of like, okay, there's some app from municipal governments [00:24:36] and every day the guy, the guy or gall or whoever, if you, if they had to write a prompt and do work, that would be annoying.

But if they could just walk in and say, Hey, today on the site, [00:24:45] I would like you to feature the. The farmer's market that's gonna be there. Can you go ahead and do that? And the computer's like, yep, it's on the site. Or like, Hey, we need to add a [00:24:54] calendar for trash pickup. And the, I dunno why the hell I'm talking about Municipal city, but like, there's something really interesting about thinking about the world voice [00:25:03] first and how much it changes the way we interact with software that just, it feels like another vector in all of this.

Andrew Warner: You know, Jesse, it's amazing how many people still do, even in our [00:25:12] space, even people who are addicted to AI still do not do voice. You talk to Alex Lieberman and me, he and his team Armand is uh, the guy who runs his dev shop. [00:25:21] They don't use audio and it's because a lot of them are in rooms with other people.

And I think it was, uh, Sergey Brynn who had said in an interview with all [00:25:30] in that he had never tried it. And because he was being asked about it, he said, you know what, I'll go back. But he said, I don't try it because there's a room full of other developers around me. I don't wanna interrupt what they're doing, but it really does change [00:25:39] things.

Alright, coming back to, um, the, where this is all going. Adam and I were talking about how you all have a thesis on ai. [00:25:48] Is is you trying it internally, part of that part of you saying, Hey, you know what? We think every company's gonna have bespoke software. We think they're gonna be these [00:25:57] massive companies that build bespoke software for enterprise.

Let's try it on ourselves and then build the next one in a collection of it. Is it that you wanna create SaaS [00:26:06] that's built with it? I'm trying to figure out what it is. What is it, Jesse? What is it? Adam,

Jesse Pujji: you go first, Adam.[00:26:15]

Adam Brakhane: Yeah, at minimum it's a, it's a flywheel, you know, the, these tools are, are hard to learn. A lot of them suck. Some of them are really [00:26:24] good. And

Andrew Warner: we're talking specifically about AI writing tools that will write in your voice. They

also

Adam Brakhane: No. All of the tools, you mean All AI tools suck. You know, I've tried video editing tools.

I've done writing [00:26:33] tools. I'm, I, I demo a bunch of tools every week. I've got a special credit card just for my AI so you can cancel, uh, you know, r and d [00:26:42] testing stuff so that I, you know, I don't accidentally spend all our money and most of them are not good. What, [00:26:51] what I'm trying to find is usually some combination of, there's a tool that's actually good.

There are a handful of them out there that are like, [00:27:00] oh, this is a phenomenal tool. The tool on its own though. If you just, if you tried to use it tomorrow, you probably wouldn't get that great of results because most of the best [00:27:09] tools, they're not just great at doing the whole thing all our own, all on their own.

That tool is combined with a workflow. That may or may not [00:27:18] work with you and your business and how you want to do it. You also might not know it. And these tools are bad at educating what the workflow should be. So you've gotta figure out the right way to work with the [00:27:27] tool. And then you have to figure out how to communicate with the tool.

Usually that's prompting, sometimes clicking buttons, whatever. And when those three things come [00:27:36] together, boom, there's a tool. So we wanna be trying as many of the tools as possible. We also need to be building it because in a lot of these cases, like the workflow is actually more [00:27:45] interesting than the tool and the tools are gonna keep changing.

I guarantee we're not gonna remember the name of hardly any of the tools we're using today, two or three years [00:27:54] from now, but Adam, so I'm not too worried about which tool is there and how good or not they are. I want us to learn the best workflows that get the most [00:28:03] juice out of whatever the state of the art is in the tool for video editing or.

Content creation or coding or whatever,

Andrew Warner: because you're saying, look, no matter [00:28:12] what the tool is, even if it's video editing, there's gonna be an iterative process between the user and the software that someone's gonna need to know. Intuitively, we wanna develop that. I get [00:28:21] that part. The part that blew my mind was you're saying, I don't think any of the software is ever gonna be great.

You don't think that we're going to get software that [00:28:30] takes this video and creates clips.

Adam Brakhane: Well, I, I think lovable is like pretty cool right now. Like does lovable stick around for five years? I don't know. [00:28:39] I, I probably wouldn't, probably wouldn't bet that much on it because two years from now it'll be a pretty big platform and they've got a lot going on and they're focusing on integration and enterprise [00:28:48] partnerships.

And as the LLMs are better, there's better research, better methods. Someone else is gonna really quickly create another version of lovable just [00:28:57] as quickly as lovable was created. And I wanna be on that tool when that tool comes out. I don't wanna be stuck on, you know, this lovable tool.

Jesse Pujji: Do you, but Adam, do you [00:29:06] think Andrews Andrea asked a question, uh, uh, outta the side of his mouth just now as like, like video editing, for example?

Mm-hmm. Do you think there will be tools in the next five years that will be [00:29:15] as good as Michael, like as a video editor? Right?

Adam Brakhane: Yeah. I'm actually, I, I need to go and find, there's this tool, I think it's called Eddie ai, that even today. [00:29:24] Is, oh man, I want to try it. 'cause I signed up a couple weeks ago for DS script.

Uh, I wanted it to work. I really wanted it to work. I've already canceled my subscription [00:29:33] because in the first hour or so, I spent all of my credits and really didn't get anywhere. It didn't, didn't really work. I wanted to like, edit a video by editing the transcript and [00:29:42] combine a couple of 'em together, spent all my credits.

I was like, all right, fine. I'll, I'll keep trying. I upgraded to the next tier, spent all of those credits, and now I was on the like $200 a month plan. [00:29:51] Okay, this still sucks. This isn't worth $200 a month. But I've been watching like some YouTube videos and some other people talking about this. Eddie AI seems to be an [00:30:00] interesting tool.

It doesn't promise everything. DS script. Anyone off the street could walk in and edit videos, cap cut, anyone off the street could come in and and edit videos. [00:30:09] You kind of get crummy results. And if you want something special, I think you're gonna spend all your credits and not get it. Eddie Ai, like plugs into Premier and Resolve.

It's your, it's your [00:30:18] Excel plugin. Uh, it doesn't, it does some stuff on its own. It's like it can ingest content, it'll process it all, it'll help set up your timelines and it kinda hands [00:30:27] off a lot of that work to the non-linear editors that already exist. And this, I think is like one of those workflow things if you want the tool to own the whole workflow.[00:30:36]

Like it's not good today and maybe it'll never be that great because my workflow is my workflow. I want my artistic process. There's tools like dy ai. Again, I need to [00:30:45] test it, but tools like that, that might enable me to scale my workflow dramatically. And I think we're gonna see that like in a lot more places.

This plugin [00:30:54] idea, like I'm pretty bullish on like, heck yes, I want a lot more plugins that exist in the tools I'm already using that enable my custom workflows. [00:31:03] To like amplify me. 'cause the tool doesn't amplify me. The tool amplifies itself, but the workflow, and if it can do a bunch of the work for me, now I'm [00:31:12] amplifying, right?

And in theory, I'm in this room because I'm smart and special and experienced and, you know, capable of figuring stuff out. So I want, I want the workflow to [00:31:21] amplify, like, from there, not from what the tool thinks I should do.

Jesse Pujji: Yeah, it makes sense. I, I don't, I mean, you know, the, my version of, of the answer, [00:31:30] Andrew, is like.

I tell my kids when I talk to my kids about CDs, they like don't [00:31:39] understand why CDs ever existed. Right? Because, because they go, well, what, what was, how did you listen to music? I was like, well, there was these things called tapes and they were this [00:31:48] big, and you put 'em in a Walkman and you listen to them and you rewind it and you forward and, and, and then they're like, wait, why was this whole other form factor?

Well, you could [00:31:57] skip tracks fast. It didn't. You know, there was these other, like, it was thin and, and like, but from their vantage point they're like, well, everything just streams straight to like a, like a, [00:32:06] you know, they're like, that whole intermediate phase of technological innovation feels dumb when you look at it from their lens backwards.

Now we all [00:32:15] lived through it, so we're like, well, yeah, it was incrementally like much better than a tape. It didn't get all, whatever. I mean, we could come up with our reasons for it, and the CD industry was a massive [00:32:24] industry for a long time. Right. So I do think my version of it, uh, what Adam's saying is like, I think human beings take a long time to adopt technology longer [00:32:33] than the technology moves faster than human's ability to adopt it.

I think there's gonna be a lot of interim fact form factors and tools. And [00:32:42] before we get to the ultimate version of this, um, but I will also say like, I, this, I, I has, I, I don't wanna say this time it feels [00:32:51] different, but because that's, you know. But like it, this stuff does feel like it's moving faster.

What we can say is that it's moving faster. It feels like a significantly more [00:33:00] powerful technology than anything we've ever seen. Um, and obviously again, just like the, you know, this thing of like, you can have this stuff write code. I dunno, there's versions of, [00:33:09] there's things about this that make it very, very distinct.

Andrew Warner: We can definitely say this time is different and it is different. Alright. But coming back then to your thesis, you guys are apparently [00:33:18] raising money, and I only say this because nac, the COO has asked me for some things that seem like it's going into a, into a deck. Um, are you [00:33:27] raising money?

Jesse Pujji: Maybe.

Andrew Warner: Okay. So then let's suppose you are raising money.[00:33:36]

I'm looking at your faces. I like that. I've made you guys uncomfortable. Don't this, I want to be such a happy clappy. Let's all get together. Let's get to the discomfort. Alright. Let's suppose you were raising money [00:33:45] and you needed to build something. What would you build? What's the thesis that you would, b, that you would use this money with?

Jesse Pujji: I [00:33:54] think, well, I think the, there's a couple things that get me fired up. I think personally and professionally, I think one is. [00:34:03] I, you know, I love being around lots of entrepreneurial people, and entrepreneurial people are usually really smart. They're very [00:34:12] self-motivated, they're coachable, they're, there's like a real feeling, you know, when you're around someone who's an entrepreneur and, and like, I think of my life dream and goals, like [00:34:21] I just wanna be around lots of those people and hopefully help their trajectory and shift them in some meaningful way.

And I think, like I live in St. Louis and I love St. Louis, and I think like having [00:34:30] something here would be very, very interesting and compelling. Um, and I think there's a lot of people from the Midwest. I think there's, I think there's tons of talent. Did you know there, there's that some quote that [00:34:39] talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.

And I think there's not enough opportunity for talented people here in the Midwest. Like, [00:34:48] you know, my, one of my, some of my favorite quotes, like Andreessen went to the same college that Adam went to, UIUC. University of Illinois or Bon of Champagne that's like this, it's the MIT [00:34:57] of the Midwest, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, so did Max Lein. So, I mean, you know, Larry Page is from Michigan. Uh, there's a, there's a really well-worn path actually, and [00:35:06] I think there's a big opportunity for more of that happening here. And then, you know, I think obviously if we were to build something, I think AI is important. You know, the, one of the observations as [00:35:15] a marketer I've had is you go category by category.

Well, AI's gonna shift healthcare. It's gonna shift legal. And when you say how is it gonna shift it, it's gonna shift the way [00:35:24] they do work. They're gonna, you know, a lo a lawyer to create the first doc document. It's easier now. Whatever. I think that shift is gonna happen for marketers too. It's gonna shift the way marketers [00:35:33] work.

How to add creative, get made, how to emails get made, how to content get made on social. But marketers have a double shift because in five years, if you're a marketer, [00:35:42] not only is you're aware of your work different, but the way that people discover businesses and brands is gonna be very different because of open ai.

And the other LLMs are becoming [00:35:51] another channel. They're becoming what Facebook became 15 years ago, or Google became 25 years ago, which is the place where consumers start to try to get information about [00:36:00] something. Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, we wrote this post recently about OpenAI is gonna be a $300 billion marketing business because it's got the search aspects of Google where [00:36:09] someone tells you what they want and it's got the social aspects of understanding you extremely well.

And as a marketer, that means very high CPMs effectively. For me, I think you put all that [00:36:18] together and you go, Hey, Jesse wants to have a bunch of smart entrepreneurial people where he lives and focus on the things he knows with his marketing with this new AI shift. [00:36:27] And that's, that's like where my excitement and energy is right now.

Andrew Warner: So would it be a company that buys a bunch of [00:36:36] marketing companies or a company that builds marketing companies, that all help companies buy ads on, on chat, GPT, or what are we talking about more [00:36:45] specifically?

Jesse Pujji: Well, I think, yeah, I mean, this is a fun topic that Adam and I were jamming on a bunch. I mean, I think it, it, it's some, it's a [00:36:54] studio accelerator.

It's starting companies. That's, that's my joy is in the mo the, you know, the, the, is this, could this be an idea? Is this gonna work? Oh, I see it. I think it should work. You

Andrew Warner: still wanna start [00:37:03] companies? It's not a pain in the ass dealing with people like me, the chaos, the frenetic, everything Adam is.

Jesse Pujji: No, I, I, I,

Adam Brakhane: you're saying I'm a pain in the ass.

Andrew Warner: I don't, I'm tired of, I [00:37:12] You're sick of dealing with me being a pain in the ass.

Jesse Pujji: Well, I think I enjoy starting the companies. I think we need to do it in a way that does, like, is probably a little more scalable and does, it takes less of [00:37:21] our, our bodies and more of our brains.

Andrew Warner: But it's starting companies at the intersection of AI and marketing and they've gotta love St.

[00:37:30] Louis.

Jesse Pujji: They've gotta come spend some time here, be from the mid, you know, they don't have to be from the Midwest, but we want. I want people here that's like more of like a, that's just, you know, [00:37:39] if you're gonna go do something, you will really, really want, do the thing you really, really want. And that's how I feel about it.

But, but, but Andrew, you started going in this like creating ads things for, you gotta [00:37:48] really start to peel the onion on how distribution is gonna work on these platforms, right? So there's like the, and I watched this happen with Facebook and I watch this happen with Google. [00:37:57] There's level one and level one is pretty straightforward.

It's like. These a EO companies, Hey, you're a brand. You wanna show up on the thing, I'm gonna help you do that. I'm gonna make [00:38:06] content. Those are good businesses. I think they're gonna be compelling. There's like a level two, which is like, well, what happened in Facebook? There was this category of mobile measurement partners.[00:38:15]

Mm-hmm. Coach Chava apps, flyers, all like multiple billion dollar businesses, which were smaller than Ampu at one point and all became bigger. That's gonna be an industry in, [00:38:24] in AI analytics built around cross LLM analytics. Zero click analytics, there's gonna be a whole analytics infrastructure get built around it.

But let's keep [00:38:33] peeling the onion and kind of go, what happens when people don't really need websites anymore? Right? So, so let's pick a, pick a random [00:38:42] vertical travel. Okay. Well, easy. Well, if I, if I can book right through OpenAI or Google's new whatever, Google will do something. [00:38:51] Okay. The website, whether it's from Expedia or Kayak or American Airlines or the four seasons.com, like that shit doesn't matter to me anymore.

What matters to me is I've come up with the perfect [00:39:00] vacation itinerary, and then I wanna pick through a few options and I wanna select them. Well, what's that gonna create? Well, that's gonna create an opportunity for data tooling for all those [00:39:09] companies to be able to feed into the, into the CPS correctly.

Someone's gonna be optimizing to go, well, how do you make sure that Chad, GBT thinks to pull from your, you know, your feed versus somebody [00:39:18] else's feed? Well, that's gonna be a whole nother another business. There's gonna be an inventory management system. So you have to start to think of the world many, many layers [00:39:27] deeper.

And if these things become distribution platforms, the, a whole new set of businesses that we can't even fully imagine right now will come to be. And so part of [00:39:36] the reason I love this trend is because I, again, I watch this with Facebook and like it went on and on and I mean, there was this things like, you know, there's this whole set of companies, Andrew, you might [00:39:45] remember them.

Adam was probably not even in college. Like Buddy Media, wildfire, social, uh, they were all like hearsay, social, all really good [00:39:54] businesses and good outcomes that were trying to help you manage your Facebook page and help you manage like, you know, how you commented and liked and whatever. And that was a [00:40:03] whole industry.

I mean, there's still like Sprout Social and there's some companies that are still actually big businesses that help you do that. But, but like that was really the version one of social, I [00:40:12] mean, it was a whole long, long time ago. I think part of the reason I love it is 'cause I think there, there's like just gonna be so much runway and so much iteration in how these [00:40:21] ideas take place that we, we think.

So it's not just like a, can I do ads on, on chat? That might be an idea by the way. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, but it's just a very, [00:40:30] you have to go down to the basics of, of, or like very first principles, thinking around it.