Welcome to the panel where three Bootstrapped founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin, the cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian:And I'm Brian Casel. I'm the creator behind Builder Methods.
Justin:And we've got
Jordan:Jordan Gal. Great to be here. I'm I'm the guest for today.
Justin:You're the guest and the founder of Rosie. Yes.
Jordan:That's right.
Brian:That's right. It's always always great to catch up with you, Jordan. As as many of our listeners know, maybe not all of them. I know we've had some new listeners, but, you know, you and I go way back and we had a podcast together for like ten plus years, and and we still we still post over there on Bootstrap Web a couple times a year.
Justin:Yep. I'm gonna be playing the third wheel in this conversation. It's just gonna be Jordan and Brian talking. And but maybe I could help set this conversation up because I wanna get Jordan going here. So, Jordan, you're building a company built with AI.
Justin:Or I should say AI is central to the product. Right?
Jordan:Yes. That's right. Mhmm.
Justin:Yes. And the product is heyrosy.com, an call answering service, which is AI powered. And this is the line I wanna talk about is the I think we've all kind of noticed the last five months, something's happened. Yes. Yeah.
Justin:Like, something in the industry has shifted. And I think it has a lot of us has some of us pumped up, has some of us starting new businesses, has some of us doing pivots, has existing teams kind of reeling. And Jordan, you said, I want to talk about the transformation incurring inside our company, and I assume many others, due to AI tooling for engineers and beyond. What what did you mean by that?
Jordan:Okay. So I'm in danger right now of going on an unhinged rant.
Justin:I that's what we want. That Brian and I wanna just relax this episode. Just
Brian:we're we're just here to, like, provoke you, Jordan. Let's do it.
Jordan:So help help guide me so that so that there's some structure to it.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:This me being on this podcast episode right now was like, I need to talk about this. I I I need to get some of these thoughts out and work through it with with others. And I think it's helpful because I've had similar conversations to this over the last few weeks privately. And I think it's helpful to have it out loud in public. Okay.
Justin:I agree.
Jordan:Okay. So here's here's what happened. Like, we'll we'll go to the middle of the story, then we'll go all the way to the beginning, and then we'll go to where we are today. In December, holiday break, I I stepped away a little bit from the day to day work, but I'm not really stepping away from Twitter and what's happening in the industry and Slack and everything else. And what helped helped me, like, get to some form of a realization, something that made me kind of stop and reassess, was the last few weeks of the year, what it felt like happened was that some of the best engineers in the world had a minute to themselves.
Jordan:They had a little holiday time, a little break, and they went to Twitter and they started to share what they were working on, how they were working. And it it almost felt like a preference cascade.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:You know, a preference cascade is like everyone knows something, but no one's really it's like the the emperor has no clothes. But then once someone raises their hand, once Andre Karpathy comes out and says, I feel behind.
Brian:Okay. I want to pause on that one. Okay. Because you're picking up right where I think Justin and I left off on last week's conversation about this. I think you're absolutely right.
Brian:I think everyone is seeing it. And I do think that this change happened around December, and it's carrying over into January. Yes. And, like, like, what we were talking about and what I think everyone is acknowledging now is that, like, a lot of this is, like, off the back of Opus 4.5 coming out in in November, and and, like, you know, Gemini and GPT five. Like like, the models got really good, but you just pointed something out that I I didn't quite think about, which is at some point around the holidays, everyone has a minute to catch their breath, they have a minute to go play around with the tools.
Brian:And so you're right that all the people, or a lot of the people
Justin:Even DHH.
Brian:DHH is like probably the most high profile one.
Jordan:Yes. It's right. Part of this social friction just like fading. Like you don't have to be embarrassed anymore. I think a key moment was Boris, the creator of Claude Code, saying he hasn't written a line of code himself in thirty days.
Jordan:And 90% of the code he pushes to production he doesn't even look at. So all of these like
Brian:I mean, that's that's pretty similar with me too. And that only happened in the last, like, sixty, ninety days too.
Jordan:Yes. So it is months. It's it's working its way up to the year, but it's really like the past, like, sixty days.
Brian:It's interesting how, like, people had a a minute to catch their breath around the holidays because there there was a lot of people who were still so busy with their normal day to day business or work, whatever it is. That's a lot of the reason why I think some people were a little bit slower than others to start adopting and start accepting like how good things have have gotten just in the last couple months because they didn't have time to play with it. But it's interesting how the holidays, like, kinda opened that door a little bit.
Justin:This line from Aaron Francis, I think, illustrates it perfectly. He just wrote this crazy email newsletter that's just like stream of consciousness. And he said, for a long time, I have thought that AI was moderately helpful when it comes to programming, but not as much as people wanted to claim that it was. Over the holidays, he says, just right around Thanksgiving, I was one shotting things that I would have previously taken me many hours. It wasn't perfect.
Justin:I still had to babysit it quite a bit. But that's when the curve changed for me in terms of how useful it actually is.
Jordan:Okay. Okay. So so practically, right, this is happening like at people's desks. What they're working on, they're like, this is better than I expected. This is better than I thought.
Jordan:My skepticism is fading. But I also put a lot of emphasis on what happened on the holidays in the the, like, social acceptance of not being embarrassed anymore. That's there's no there's no cheese.
Brian:Both together. It's like it's like the the one piece is like it things like, the tooling got so good. The second piece is like people are changing their behavior and changing their trust levels and being openly accepting of using these tools.
Jordan:Yes. I feel like that that flipped. And when that flipped and I was kind of watching it and I'm not technical, so I'm kind of watching it from a distance. But I'm starting to see the posts and I'm seeing the responses to them and I'm seeing the DHH skepticism fade. And I'm starting to see the all the you know, everyone's the, you know, the X algorithm is much more responsive now.
Jordan:So I start liking things. All of sudden, I'm seeing every single thing on Claude Code. I'm seeing everything on Nano Banana. And what it did for me was it started to it helped some things from the last few months make sense to me. Specifically around we have two back end engineers, Rock and Andrew.
Jordan:What I started feeling from Rock and Andrew over the last few months was a sense of impatience. They were like, Why are we going so slow? Why am I waiting for product to get me these specs? Why are we only putting in these three sub features into this feature release when I can just build the fourth and the fifth one right now? Like so so they were pushing, and I kind of didn't understand.
Jordan:My in my what I my instinct was like, okay, relax, but, we gotta follow the process.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:And at some point around the new year, I said, oh, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. This is this is not normal.
Jordan:We need to rethink some assumptions. And now we kind of go back in time a little bit. If I think back to Cardhook version one as an abandoned cart product,
Justin:which was your first startup. For people that don't know, this is your first startup. But when and you started this around what year? '20 or '14, somewhat. 2012.
Jordan:Okay. Yeah. Something I
Brian:remember so many weeks of us talking on the podcast about your evolution across different teams of like your product process. Like that was a big ongoing project for you. Was like, how do we ship and execute product really well as a as a SaaS company? I remember that was like a
Jordan:we started like like a lot of other companies start. It's like one guy doing the development, maybe two people. You don't really need a process. Yeah. You're just kinda talking.
Jordan:So when we when we transitioned right, like you're forced to change. Okay. So we then transitioned to like a checkout product and that required a different process. What we learned was that you can't mess up a checkout. You can't just have a bug.
Jordan:So we had to shift our process to accommodate for the needs of the product. Okay. Then we started Rally and we raised venture money. We built a bigger team and the process looked completely different again. And then we pivoted and we shut down the Rally Checkout product and we pivoted to Rosie with six people and we had to adjust our process again.
Jordan:And to me, like the the most symbolic element of changing a process is the product person. Right in the middle, how do you translate between customer needs and design and which features and how do you prioritize? And that felt to me like the heart of the company sets the pace on what are we doing, how fast are we doing it. And what happening basically right around New Year's is I just felt like, Oh, we have to change our process again. But it's not for a different product.
Jordan:It's not for different requirements. It's because the nature of the process looks differently. Yeah. So I want to identify
Brian:I mean, dude, what you're identifying honestly is has been like the premise of my Builder Methods business since since last year. Honestly, like it's I I work with teams on it now that this is what Builder Methods Pro is all about. It's literally about we're not it's not just about adopting AI and how to use like, yes, I have a course called how to use Cloud Code or build with Cloud Code, but it's not honestly, it's not really about that. It's about That's part of it. The tooling is just the surface level.
Brian:What actually matters is our workflow. And the workflow can be individual, but more often than not, it's an organizational team workflow. What is changing? Like, that is the true transformation that we're we all, as an industry, are going through right now because these tools are here. They're not going away.
Brian:Right. Anybody can do. Anybody can follow the manual on Cloud Code or just use Cloud Code to teach you how to use Cloud Code. Like anyone can do that. Yeah.
Brian:What actually matters is the workflow. And like that, that's what I talk to people and teach every single day since last year. And it's like, that that's the thing that, like, every single company is needing help with right now. And I talk to them at all different levels from I I'm doing a private workshop next week with a team of six. I'm talking to another one with a team of 400.
Brian:It's and and they have the same questions, the same needs.
Jordan:Because the the company is trying to deliver value, not code more efficiently. And so the delivery of the code changes. So I want to explain like the initial insight into how things need to change. And then I want to hear what that looks like in your companies or if I'm on the right track. So here's I mentioned the frustration from engineers and they were like, Well, how come we're not going faster?
Jordan:And in our company, what was happening in the translation layer at product between what do customers want, how do they want it, what should come next and so on. What felt like was happening was that product needed to hand over a ticket in linear that was well thought out and thorough. So I would call it an eight out of 10 on the completeness and thoroughness of the ticket that you needed to hand over. Now, the reason you needed to do that is because the cost of making a mistake on the engineer's desk was very, very high. If you give the wrong set of requirements and you're or if it's not very thorough and you're asking the engineer to make these micro decisions about these interactions and these connections, and then it comes back to product and it's not quite right, it's very, very costly.
Jordan:You got to go back to the engineer's desk. You got to go back to this. You got to go back to the QA process. You have to reengineer things. You're wasting time and effort, frustration, energy, momentum.
Jordan:And now because the cost of mistakes by the engineer, that cost has gone to near zero. And so to go faster, the way we're thinking about it is that the ticket from the product manager's desk can just be like a three out of 10 on the thoroughness and completeness. This is what we want to do. This is how we want to do it. But it doesn't need the fidelity of perfection, of do exactly as I tell you, because instead of here's this perfect ticket that I've thought about for three days and documented perfectly and designed and done everything for you, and then you're basically just executing on what I tell you to, the interplay between product and engineering can be much faster and more fluid.
Jordan:You can hand over a ticket that's three out of 10. The engineer gives you back a working prototype and then you can say, Actually, I don't like it like this. Now that I see it, I want it like this. Can we change this thing? Can we choose this hierarchy of this CTA and then this thing and then this option?
Jordan:And because the cost is near zero for the engineer to go, Sure, be right back. You know, an hour or two later, it almost it takes it from like, Here's a blank page, write a blog post, to, Well, here's a decently written out blog post and now you can edit it. It's infinitely easier to edit than it is to go from a blank page. And because the ticket thoroughness at the product level doesn't need to be three out of 10, excuse me, doesn't need to be eight out of 10, could be a three. We're just pushing things faster.
Jordan:And the engineers are having an absolute ball. They're so happy. And so now the entire company runs on the pace of engineering. They're faster than everyone else. They're faster than product.
Jordan:They're faster than go to market. At go to market, Rock is like, My man, I got our iOS app ready. And I'm like, I I need to launch this SMS product. Hold hold on. Hold on.
Jordan:Need to be ready. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian:It's crazy. Right? I I mean, it's it's interesting. There's so many different threads here and different parallel patterns that that I'm seeing here. Right?
Brian:On the one hand, you're you're absolutely right. Like, the the the whole feedback loop of new product from from idea to not only functioning prototype, but this could be usable and just need some some revisions. Like, the the speed is incredible. I mean, they're you know, shipping production SaaS applications to customers, like, that still that still requires a lot of dedicated thought and careful product strategy and UX. And and and and honestly, it's it's I think a lot of this now at at this level of, like, shipping production product features is really more about, like, having more restraint.
Brian:Right? Like because when we can build it all, we can't we can add just one more feature so easily. Mhmm. But at the end of the day, like, product strategy is still product strategy. Customer Customers want a certain job to be done and they and, you know, adding adding too much bloat can can hurt the experience, can hurt the product, can hurt the marketing, can but can also, you know, cause bugs.
Brian:But I wanna there's another there's another parallel track here, and that's this, like, idea of
Jordan:I wanna come back to that because I'm not sure if I agree with that anymore. Okay. Yeah. The the doing too doing too much. I I'm not sure if that advice is right.
Jordan:One thing
Brian:I just think like
Justin:word in before before we get you guys go too far. It feels like inside of organizations, whether there's six people, like Transistor, or 100 people, one thing that is true is that whoever has the come to Jesus moment, they are like, we need to ship faster. I don't know if that's always in engineering. I'd say in transistor, we've been slower in engineering. It's I'm the one that's had to come to Jesus moment, and I want to go faster.
Justin:But I'm seeing in Teams, whoever has the come to Jesus moment and Adam Watham just had this experience. You know, he's like, wait a second. This changes things. This changes how we're gonna work. This changes how much everything.
Justin:Whoever has that moment, they're like, we gotta ship faster. And so I think what you're saying will depend it's gonna land different for different teams.
Brian:I mean, I
Jordan:think I think ultimately, like,
Brian:probably actually agree. But I I I think what I was getting at was, like, the value of the product manager. Right? Like Okay. The I I feel like they still have value, maybe even more value than ever in in the whole process.
Jordan:But they need to adjust also. They cannot Absolutely. They they I think they need to loosen their grip.
Brian:Yes. Yeah. Actually, you're totally right about that because it's like what has frustrated me in recent actually, for many years, but now it's like, I don't need to deal with this anymore, is like the performative aspect of the design phase, the product management phase, honestly, like, the spec or PRD phase. Like, this is all like, for for me as a solo builder, I can sort of wrap all this stuff into into one process for my that that only myself needs to run. But as like, traditionally, there would be, a design phase where a designer would go into Figma and make a high fidelity even just wireframes, there there would still be a lot of performative aspects to this.
Brian:Like, let's mock up a picture of what this theoretical app might look like and then discuss it and then maybe get sign off on it from the stakeholders or show it to customers. All of that that feed the back loop back loop is is gone. It it it has melted away. You don't need to do that
Jordan:whole press.
Justin:You don't
Brian:need to draw pictures of apps we're gonna build anymore. We can just build them. Right? So that whole aspect of it, like, the performative might be the wrong word, but it's like too many Traditional. Too just too many cycles of of creative work that just does not need to happen in the upfront, like, theoretical stage.
Justin:This is why this this this moment feels so crazy. Because as fast as technology moved before, there was these kind of paradigms that emerged that everyone was like, that's the way it is. It's like, here's lean and agile. And here's that don't overbuild.
Jordan:And Don't build too many features.
Justin:And and the traditional kind of product person is the hub and spoke of the the whole organization. Right? Everybody is going to be relating to the the product manager in kind of this way where they're in the middle. They talk marketing and them interact, engineering and them interacts, customer success and them interact, they're researching customers. But the product person was kind of managing the whole thing.
Justin:Right? Like, there's some teams that just said explicitly, nothing gets shipped unless it starts and ends with the product manager. And I think now not necess not that we're ready to throw all all of that out, but there is this, like, like, like Jordan saying, like, there's this feeling of, like, maybe some people need to loosen their grip.
Jordan:Yeah. It's less control.
Brian:I think that's right. But I think the other the other thread here is that product management is more important than ever. And I and I think that that what what I mean by that is that, like, product managers and product management needs to get up to the speed of of engineering now. Absolutely. Yep.
Brian:But engineers need to adopt the skill of product management.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian:Like, the the only way you we are effective practitioners in this new world with AI Like, to to me, the the the highest the highest value skill at this point now is product management. The building what build
Jordan:is to build it for.
Brian:Exactly. Yeah. We we could build anything instantly now.
Jordan:Mhmm.
Brian:Near instant. So so now so now it's still like more important than ever to know what are we building, what are we not building, who are we building it for, why does it matter to them so that we can sell it and make a good business out of this. Right?
Justin:And and that's gonna that's gonna cause some challenges. Because Yeah. If marketers are having to sorry, marketers. If engineers are having to elevate themselves to product people, and now product people have the ability to technically ship things.
Brian:Mhmm.
Justin:There is a lot of stuff that was siloed before. That was like, this is this is my line. Like Yeah. You throw me stories. I do the work.
Justin:I throw it back. You review it. We go but now all of those lines. And it is like talk about managing people. And Jordan, you've you've been one of my favorite people to talk to about managing people.
Justin:This blows everything up. It there's gonna be jealousy. There's gonna be protectionism. There's gonna be people pissed off. There's gonna be people stressed.
Justin:There's gonna be people who feel threatened. Like, this moment is destabilized everything.
Jordan:Yeah. It's chaos. No doubt about it. I mean few weeks of the year, I have felt crazy. I feel like out of breath at the end of the day.
Jordan:Yeah. Because it is genuinely like, it's challenging mentally, intellectually. You have to, like, force yourself to to challenge your assumptions from the past. Things that have worked for you no longer make sense.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:I remember at some point when we first started, Rosie, people would ask me often like, why are you going horizontal versus vertical? And I would say, normally I would not suggest anyone build a horizontal product.
Brian:And
Jordan:still made sense to me to build horizontal because the market's so wide open.
Justin:Yes.
Jordan:So right, there's similar analogy to like, well, we have a roadmap and we shouldn't try to build. I mean, we're building so many things at the same time right now. We are building in six months excuse me, what
Justin:we thought would
Jordan:take us six months. It's thirty days.
Brian:Yeah.
Jordan:And it is almost a matter of sequencing. Like, we can't send an email about this many things all within the span of, like, two weeks. We have to space it out just so people can properly digest and we don't lose their attention.
Brian:Mhmm. Normally, you like That's the other part like, challenging part of this is that, like, the the building speed, and that's the whole stack from design to product to building, that speed still needs to fit the speed of humans. You said, like go to market. There are real world constraints, whether it's announcements or diluting the message or, you know, like product
Jordan:positioning. Know, I think the biggest things, I think it's just comfort. I think it's just psychological. It's just so much chaos. Most people are like, let's not do that this week.
Jordan:And
Brian:No. Mean, from the product building perspective, I think you're right. Like we can and we should be moving as fast as we wanna be, we can be with these new tools. But you're right. At the end of the day, we are making products to sell to customers.
Brian:These are human people who buy our products. Like, we I I can't just come out with, like, a thousand new features of my product and expect all of my customers to understand what the hell we're doing if I announce them all on the same day. Like, we have to have a have a rollout strategy to that. Yep. You know?
Jordan:Which is a a funny thing to for engineering to be ahead of marketing for
Brian:a change. Everything is flipped. But you know what? What I think all three of us have been voicing here is it's been like this is why they call this is why it's called disruption. Like, this whole this entire industry is being disrupted.
Brian:There's just no getting around it. The lines are blurred. And I think that's on the individual level. I think that's at the team level. And just being real, if you are unwilling or unable to expand your own skill set, if you're an engineer, if you cannot start to think like a product manager, or if you're a product manager and you can't get on board with how fast engineering can build now, like, it's going to be difficult for That's
Jordan:right. So, Justin, I wanna ask you, you mentioned something about your team internally. Yeah. So January all hands, it was the first Wednesday of the month is when we do all And and my you know, I I try to have one main theme. So my theme on this one was get ready.
Jordan:Mhmm. Get get busy. It's not optional. That that the the thing I drove home was this is not optional. This is happening.
Jordan:We are gonna go faster than we're comfortable. The entire company needs to get up to speed on this. I I I basically held up the two back end engineers on, like, they're leading the way. Like and we are not just gonna watch them. Marketing has to figure out how to write things faster.
Jordan:We need to figure out how to do our own UGC videos internally through these new processes.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:Product needs to learn how to do things differently. All the engineers and I basically said this is not optional. And I know that not everyone on the team is that comfortable with it. And I think it's a real challenge for leadership in any company to get people on board. And then and then there's some decisions to be made on if if someone's not on board and not getting there.
Brian:Mhmm.
Jordan:Like, that's a a very new reason to replace someone.
Brian:Absolutely. I mean, that's just the reality. Know? Like, it's I think what's going to be interesting in 2026 to expand this out into a little bit of, like, prediction for this year is I think that 2026 will be the year that the rest of the company stack starts to catch up to to the engineering speed that that gained, especially in late twenty twenty five. So, like, engineers, product builders, we are now comfortable with Cloud Code for the most part.
Brian:Right? And Cursor, and we can build. And we and we can like, for me personally, in my in my work, the the work of marketing and product marketing and writing and web design and branding, that kind of stuff always was, like, way behind the the speed curve of the engineering stuff. But now only recently, like the recent the recent updates just made on on the Builder Methods site and brand, did in like three or four days. It would have taken me multiple months to to do that kind of stuff.
Brian:All the writing that I do, all the newsletters, all the all the YouTube content, like YouTube is really, really, really hard still. But but, like, writing scripts that I'm really proud of that it like and and getting my best marketing and content ideas out, that this happens 20 times faster because I use Claude in the process. And and so, like, I don't know at a team organizational level, like, that side of the company stack needs to really catch up in terms of speed Yeah. In 2026. You know?
Justin:I oh, man. There's a few things I wanna touch on. One is I think we as as much as I wanna blow past, like, kind of jump into the river in this rapid, you know, this rapid river that's flowing, most teams seem to still acknowledge that having some very senior engineers is going to still be crucial for this moment. You need people that can still understand architecture. You need people that can still understand.
Justin:There's still a lot of back end work, especially a lot of back end refactoring that still needs some attention. The challenge that I'm seeing in our team and I think other teams is that this is like one of those generational shifts where people who loved writing code, people who who who their identity was, I'm really good at this. I've spent literally ten thousand hours investing in this. And that has brought me to the place where I'm now a senior person that you need. But there is you know, I was talking to John about this.
Justin:I forwarded him Aaron's email. And he's like, yeah, man. He's like he he can see it. But it's daunting to think about what does this mean? Especially because in a team with very few engineers, if there's way more code being written, the part that still seems to be quite manual is who's gonna review the code and then make deploy it.
Brian:Just think that, like, every Most
Justin:of your engineers didn't get into engineering to do that part.
Jordan:Yeah. Brian, you go ahead. Then I wanna talk about Rock's experience with with exactly that, like, senior developer.
Brian:Look, this is what This is what I'm getting. I don't know Rock so well, but I get the sense that he's one of these senior engineers who is ahead of the curve on adopting AI.
Jordan:I admire it so much. I'm so impressed because he started he went over the hump. He started to get into a place where he didn't write that much code because he was so senior. We had a team. And now he is a he is a technical god right now.
Jordan:It is insane.
Brian:It is. I I guess this
Jordan:is nuts.
Brian:I I think the mistake that that too many people are still making, that they have the wrong impression that, like, this AI wave is going to wipe out senior engineers, and that is incorrect. The the correct way to think about it is the best senior engineers are going to adapt into this new world. You know? And rock is clearly one
Jordan:of the But that's almost like it's almost like personality and curiosity more so than technical ability because it's like, do you want to make that shift? I I do think there's it's going to be beautiful. There's this huge range because people who don't know how to code can now do amazing things. Middle, you know, engineers can now do incredible things, but it's really just up to them on where they want to learn. The senior engineer thing is specifically interesting.
Jordan:Our two engineers are senior experienced, and there's no way they could be doing what they're doing now in the way that they're doing it without this career that led up to it. Mhmm. But it did require a personality of just like, oh, I'm not gonna fall behind. I'm gonna push so far ahead. And we see it, and now it's almost like a personality trait to hire for is this curiosity around new tools and new ways to do things.
Jordan:Like, you know and and I I I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that the engineers are happy, that they're just energized, that they're like, my god. My my CEO gets it. They're they're they're just gonna let us run. So Andrew, on one hand, is like, this weekend, I'm gonna figure out a way that we have Claude agents running so when I leave on Friday, when I get in on Monday, a feature is built for me. Yeah.
Jordan:And so he's like, no more days off. Now we have junior and it's not juniors. We just have engineers building stuff for us over the weekend. And Rock is like, I'll give you a perfect example that really helped me because it was the last two weeks of the year. So all this was swirling around in my mind.
Jordan:We had an e commerce merchant using Rosie and using a lot of minutes. And when someone uses a lot of minutes, we reach out and like, you know, what do you need? Do need some special stuff? We looked they used a lot of minutes. And we were like, homie, you gotta pay, like, $2, like, now because there's too many minutes.
Jordan:Then we'll talk after the holidays about what your real plan should be. And he was like, charge my card. You guys are amazing. You're saving us an enormous amount of money on our our call center. So Rock looked at that and was like, didn't blink at $2 a month.
Jordan:Maybe that's interesting. And the guy's like, BRB and builds a Shopify integration in like four days. Now, in the traditional software development process, not only is Shopify on our roadmap for, like, Q2 Yeah. But it is unacceptable in a social sense to just ignore product manager, leave her alone on vacation and just build the thing yourself without even asking. But it helped her because she's trying to be like, I know what happens when we lose control.
Jordan:Bugs go crazy, churn goes crazy, everything feels chaotic. But when the engineer comes to you and says, Look at this beautiful thing I built, and it took me four days, you can't argue with it. And so that really helped her come to terms with, Oh, okay, maybe I need to adjust my expectations and process also.
Justin:Yeah. The challenging thing is going to be how much because nobody wants to loosen their grip automatically. People traditionally like the way things are. And so like, it's easy for example, for me to say, well, engineering needs to loosen their grip. But there's lots of stuff that myself as a product person, for example, I'm like, no, I'm not loosening my grip on that.
Justin:That's too important. And there is like still we don't this is my worry about this situation is it as as much as I'm like in it is that here's a perfect example. We've got this new Spotify integration we're just launching. Allows you to add a private podcast to Spotify. We've been working on it for a long time.
Justin:I just want to get it out. And I've been trying to communicate the whole time, like, here's where we are. Takes lots of testing to get this right. Lots of communication with the Spotify team. It's a pain in the ass.
Justin:Their API doesn't work sometimes. We fix everything. We finally it's ready to go. And Helen in customer success says, can we just do a call first to review it before we launch it? Inside, I'm like, fuck, no.
Justin:I want to ship this thing. I want to go fast. I want to move fast. Why? Why do we need to do that?
Justin:Mhmm. Do the call. And at first, was like annoyed. I was like, I don't want to do this. Soon as we get on the call, I realized, woah, wait a second.
Justin:Actually slowing down here.
Brian:Mhmm.
Justin:There's some value here. Okay. Identified, like, three or four things.
Brian:There are still people in the loop here that need Yes. From from the from how are we gonna support customers on this? Like, who care?
Justin:Like And
Brian:how does this matter to our strategy? Yeah.
Justin:And also, the biggest challenge is, in a way, I don't want everybody in the organization writing code and issuing PRs. Because first of all, someone has to review all that stuff. Second of all, there's just a lot of bad ideas. And this was one of Jason Fried's big thing is like, he's like, you don't have to talk about every idea. You don't have to prototype every idea.
Justin:You don't have to but now when you can prototype every idea and every single urge you have, and when an engineer over Thanksgiving can go, you know what, I'm gonna build my three pet projects, and then assume that we're gonna deploy them publicly. It's like, okay, oh, wow. We gotta Yeah. We gotta figure this out. You know?
Jordan:Yeah. Fair enough. I think you're describing like the boundary or like, you know, you should go fast until things start to fall apart and then you back up a little bit. I So so you're just identifying there is a line Yeah. Where you can be too careless and too fast and too sloppy, and that's not good.
Jordan:But but not only does the line feel much further up in terms of speed and chaos Mhmm. It doesn't look like the same line. It doesn't have the same shape of how things get done and built.
Justin:And it's but the the the difficult part is to me, this feels like you're just losing all of the rails that you used to have, which isn't always a bad thing. It's like when I when I left church, and I was no longer a church person, the hardest part was I didn't have all the rails of church anymore. What do we do on Sunday? What what do we do we still, you know, do we still pray before a meal and all this stuff? And I kind of feel like we're having the same moment now.
Justin:It's like, we used to have all these guardrails and these rules and these lessons hard won.
Brian:I think I think the I think the the speed change and and the mixing of of roles in these organizations is extremely jarring to to to most people right now. But Yeah. I I do think that the one constant that really is not gonna be changing, and this is what I wanted to kinda get back to what I was saying at the beginning of this episode, is that, like, product management and product strategy still has a place. It just might look different and it is on an accelerated timeline now. But at the end of the day, the best products and businesses are built on making strategic decisions about what our customers want and why do they want it.
Brian:And like that fundamental truth is not changing no matter what AI tools we have. Like there's still this there's
Justin:still Jordan, do you feel like your engineers have that, though? Do you do you do you feel like your engineers are are operating in that product sense? Or are they just able to take a rough idea and produce like, do they do you feel like they've become more keenly aware of what customers want and like building really fantastic experiences based on what customers want? Or are they just still getting is that insight still coming from elsewhere?
Jordan:I think the insight is still coming from elsewhere. And I think it's coming from product strategy. And it's almost like we, I'm just gonna use our company as an example, but the general we are getting better at pushing forward the product strategy. It's it's more efficient to get to the point where you actually want to get to because you've decided that's what you want to accomplish. It
Brian:used to be a very rigid process. Still happens, but we can deliver it in days, not months.
Jordan:Yes. And it used to require more rails, more control, more speed bumps. It used to require, yeah, more control over the process. We had this experience at Cardhook when we didn't have a good product process, basically, before Jessica showed up. Mhmm.
Jordan:And we used to get feedback from the customer, hand it over to the engineers, and they used to build a feature, and it was, like, five degrees off. But five degrees off is not accomplishing what the customer wants to accomplish. And then we used to send it back to engineering and that caused so much friction and so much disappointment. But all of that was geared toward, well, this is the product that should exist in the market with these features. And in order to deliver that, we had to build out this super rigid process that was right at every step.
Jordan:Now maybe underneath that, it's much more fluid and it elevates product strategy into, a tiny little tip of the spear. Mhmm. Beneath it looks different. It's not this factory line, assembly line. This must be just right before it gets to this step.
Jordan:I wonder if, like, in many ways, elevates product strategy, like you're saying, to the absolute most important thing. Yeah. That's that's so exciting.
Justin:Think what I'm I'm pushing back on is that I'm just not sure. I've just met very few good product people in my life. And I've it also often depends on, like, for example, in the podcasting space, the person who's gonna have the most product insights about the way the product should work is the person who has created multiple podcasts, who's hanging out with podcasters all day long, who really understands what it feels like to go through that process of being like, I have an idea for a show. And I'm gonna pitch Brian on it. And then we're gonna put a thing in the calendar.
Justin:And then we're gonna record our first episode. And then we're gonna throw it away. And then we're gonna release it. And we just hope that, like, there there's specific attributes of great product people that it doesn't I don't know if everybody's gonna have those. I I do think Okay.
Justin:Everybody's gonna have to change. But I'm not sure if if what and I I definitely engineers with product people skills are gonna do much better. Yeah.
Jordan:Crazy.
Brian:So this is what I wanna get at because I it's like, what what actually needs to change? How do we deal with this rapid change that is obviously happening?
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian:How do we adapt as individuals? But maybe, like, since Jordan is is bringing it here is, like, how do organizations, how do teams adapt?
Justin:Yeah. I wanna know.
Brian:I I think the question I I I think I think what I what I wanna get at here is that, like, on the individual level, like I said, engineers need to start to adopt more of a product management aspect. Product managers need to understand the engineering process and and maybe have some experience with it. But at the organization level, maybe it it means more pairing of of, like, the product manager and the engineer literally working together. Mhmm. Like, the the customer feedback loop and the engineering loop and the product management loop are, like, in the same room or remote room, whatever.
Brian:They're in same loop so that the rapid speed still happens. Feedback from the customer, product manager is in the decision making process, engineer is working with Cloud Code to make it happen, goes back to the manager, goes back to the customer. They're all working to get instead of department over there, department over there, we're going to wait two weeks for this next sprint for that feedback to be processed. That's the old world.
Justin:Like now. Yes.
Brian:So it's like, if you're if you're a solo builder, you need to be mixing your skill sets, product manager and engineering. If you're an organization, the product managers literally need to be working with the engineers together. And it's like, no more of, like, stepping on each other's toes or, like, I'm I'm working outside of my lane. No. We're we're all in multiple lanes now, so we need to work together.
Jordan:Yes. So this is what Jessica, our our VP product, identified as the the inevitable next problem. If this stuff just starts flying, then if what it felt like to us was we're gonna have to have constant conversations. We're gonna have to have calls more often than we used to because in the old process, things were buttoned up. It was 99% like, you don't need to be that creative.
Jordan:Like, build what we decided to build. Here's what it looks like. Here's how it functions. In this new world, if you start moving a lot faster, then a lot of the decisions happened in a different place in the process. And it felt like we were gonna have to talk to each other every day and the async would kind of be challenged because of that.
Brian:So on that point, yeah. That point, this is where we come back. There's so many contradictions here because that's what makes this disruption so hard, right? Yes. But the thing with that is like, okay, yes, we all know we can move so much faster.
Brian:We all need we all need to be blending roles and working together. And and yes, that might result in more, like, having having to manage communication. But this is where you bring in the the element of restraint. Right? Like, the the best organizations are going to get really good at deploying restraint because we we can build anything so fast.
Brian:We can cause all this chaos in our Slack channel. But if we if we have the element of restraint, like we know what our customers want, we know what this business needs, let's just keep focused on that, like, rather than building everything. Okay. You know, like and, like, even even, like, intentionally slowing down the the process because it's like, obviously, you don't wanna slow down things like, alright, this this this fix that 5% to get
Jordan:the to get the feature
Brian:to a 100. That can go as fast as we want. But like the next 10 features, like, yeah, we could build them over the weekend, but, like, does our business actually need that or want that? You know?
Jordan:Here's here's my take on restraint. Because, look, in our internal conversations, we we you know, this this is like a it's a semi logical progression in these conversations that people like us are are going to have because there's this big thing, but what does that lead to? And if that what does that mean? And and then, okay, how do you adjust to that? Right?
Jordan:So it's like this sequence. I think my gut on restraint is so attuned to a process that no longer exists that I don't believe myself. I don't believe my assumptions on restraint, and therefore, I don't I don't have any confidence in my measurement of what restraint means. And I think the only way to find that is to just remove restraint entirely until the universe says, hey, you found your limit. Time to add more restraint.
Jordan:Mhmm. And and it might be like an order of magnitude different than what you expect. Yeah. So so and that that is worth challenging. Look.
Jordan:We should do this again in ninety days, and I'll let you know where we found the line of restraint. Because right now, I've taken the the the break, whatever that the governor, the thing that slows people down when you go too fast. I've taken it off. And I was like, no, we will find the line. We will find the line.
Jordan:Right now, let's see how hard we can push and how fast and how messy things can get before we say to ourselves, hold on. Because if we try to anticipate where that restraint is, I'm near certain it'll be way too short of what it should be.
Brian:Yeah. I want to get a little bit out of the theoretical and into like real case studies of what's happened. Like, you know, because we have you here, let's talk about Rosie, right? So, because Rosie is place in now where you're well over a year in, year or two in. Right?
Brian:Like you're
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:It's like fourteen, sixteen months, Mike.
Brian:I mean, mean, you you know, your revenue growth has been incredible. Like, you have product market fit. Right? Like, you have a strong customer base. So what are what is it strategically product wise that that is that needs to be changing so rapidly?
Brian:Like, what's what's happening right now that
Jordan:So the way I look at it, the the kind of, like, top line view of it is that Rosie was uni channel in voice. It answered your phone for you. In 2026, we're going multichannel. And so Rosie is a brain that knows your business and has context around your business and your customer and what you do and how you want to deliver it and where you're located in your hours of operation and your what you're specialized in, what you do and don't want to do. So it knows about your business.
Jordan:It's an employee in your business. Right now, we use that rosy brain to communicate in one channel. But as we know, LLMs are just text IQ, and we happen to take that text and turn it synthesize it into an audible voice. That that's that's it. It's still literally, the person speaks, we transcribe it into text, we throw it into an LLM, the LLM gives us a response, we take that response, and we synthesize it into a voice.
Jordan:It's not that magical. It's magical how fast it is, yes. But it's still just an LLM. And so if there's a rosy brain, it's currently adding value in one channel. So what makes sense to us is, okay, add more channels, SMS, email, outbound, CRM integration, you know, and then and then move into this next phase of, okay, instead of handling inbound, how do you generate new leads?
Jordan:How do you identify in the CRM that this customer you can state as the business, we want people to use our service every ninety days. And there's a customer in your CRM that hasn't done any business with you in sixty five days, and it's time to call them, send to email them, send to text them. And so that lends itself perfectly to over the next year, we're going to build out these 10 big features. And now it's like, if you just did all that in Q1? And because we have an existing customer base of like 1,500, I also look at that as well, when we launch a new product, we launch it into a very willing audience.
Jordan:And so the faster we, you know, SMS is next. I think we'll get 10% to 20% of our customer base adding on an SMS service for between $50 and $200 a month in the first like forty five days. Get the thing out there and get it into beta and learn and price it properly and push it out. And then after that, it's outbound. And after that, it's your CRM integrations.
Jordan:And after that, it's so so the speed is directly connected to revenue growth. And so why restraint is kind of the question.
Brian:Yeah. No. But like that but I I think it's perfectly realistic to ship that kind of to ship that in q one. That you know? Yeah.
Brian:I but I I guess when I when I I said, like, restraint, like and and believe me, you're talking to like the most impatient person in the world here too. Like, I wanna build and ship this.
Jordan:Yeah. It's not like we're taking two sides of the argument. It's just like this
Brian:It's constant sort of like building it all in the same week per se. Or or or, like but also, like, logistically. You know? Like like, decide like, having having the restraint to take a beat to decide, let's actually roll out SMS before we do email because we did a little bit of customer research to realize there's a higher percentage of customers who are ready to get on board with SMS first. Yes, technically, Rock could probably spin up both email and SMS in the same week, but that could also lead to technical crossing of wires
Jordan:and all It's this less technical issues and more strategic issues.
Brian:Yeah. And then, like, really rolling
Jordan:it out. Perfect examples this week is is SMS. So we're going into beta. And I will tell you at some point, like, right around the New Year, I really had this moment where I was like, I don't know if I'm gonna be necessary. You you know, at first, was like, our developers are gonna be necessary.
Jordan:Our designers gonna be necessary. Or and then I had a moment of like, well, what do I do here? And over the last few weeks, what it's shown me is there are decisions that make a massive difference that really set the course of the business that are disconnected from the technical. And so a perfect example this week has been a number of conversations around how to price for SMS. And when you get down to it, there are some tough decisions to make in these software products.
Jordan:Is it an add on? Is it a usage based trial? Does it come with the initial trial? What about the new users? How are they handled differently from the existing users?
Jordan:Do we want a low entry point at $50 to get people to use it as much as possible? But I thought we said that we want to encourage adoption by giving people a certain number of conversations for free because we need to get the widget on their website. Yeah. And so if you're gonna do that, but then it doesn't make sense to have a time trial. So all of these things are a puzzle that that do require human decision making that you do not want to outsource to an LLM.
Brian:Jordan, how much you know, because I I think you nailed it, obviously, like, as as the CEO. Like, you're the you're the strategic decider on on most things. Right? I am using it I'm I'm finding myself using AI and Claude specifically probably more hours into the day in the decision making process than I am in the building process. Obviously, I use it to build stuff, and I'm not hand coding anymore, and I'm flying when it comes to Claude code.
Jordan:Is it like a thought partner?
Brian:Thought partner. Yeah. Like, 100%, like, probably I I I would say, like, 90% of my chats in Claude these days are strategic thought to help me think through this strategic decision for my business. And and it's been a I've been doing that for over a year now. I I used to be on ChatGPT.
Brian:I moved all that into Claude. And it has been an absolute it's hard to, like, point to, like, observable things on the on the public level, but, like, internally because I'm I'm a solo founder. I don't have partners. I don't have a team, really. So, like, a lot of my strategic planning is basically between me and and Claude.
Jordan:You do need conversation. Yeah. I don't get anywhere good when I'm by myself. I get to a sense and a direction and a gut, and then you start having conversations with people.
Brian:It that's what helps. I do a lot of conversations with with customers and and and I I get a a thousand points of feedback from from the audience and stuff. The but the the hard decisions, both creative and strategic, I don't like like, it's it's a core part of my muscle now and and, like, internal process is
Jordan:to have you gotten it out with I I'm not there on on those things.
Justin:Yeah. I I think I have a and I even have a bit of a different take about marketing. My thesis kind of going forward that I'm developing, and maybe this is wrong, is that you're right. Marketing is going to be slower than everything else. And I think it's gonna remain slow largely because, yeah, you can you can speed up some of the processes.
Brian:But still faster than before.
Justin:Faster than before in that you can you can build a website faster, and you can automate certain things. So marketing has always been about rising above the noise. Getting noticed. How are we going to get people to notice and care? And we've already exposed some of the potential problems here.
Justin:If we build 10 features in a week, and we send an email update to our customers, first of all, we know only 50% will open the email, only 10% will pay attention, and only 2% will try at that time. And that was our announcement. Often, a new feature only gets announced once. Communication is difficult. Getting people to care is difficult.
Justin:And all of the tactics, for example, that work in terms of outbound, they're they're all gonna get harder. Yeah. Anything that comes out of an LLM, like, give me a strategy for Reddit. They're it's all gonna be average. Obliterated.
Justin:Yeah. And and we they I was just listening to I've started listening to more like black hat and white hat SEO podcasts.
Jordan:Okay.
Justin:And they're like the they're just like, the white hat people are having a terrible time right now. The black hat people are having an awesome time right now. And part of the reason is that all of the channels that used to work and all of the tactics that used to work, they've now just gotten flooded. It's all average. LLMs can tell you this.
Justin:The stuff that's going to work is going to be real hand to hand combat. Like, it's gonna be Justin doing an AMA on Reddit Artisanal communication. Artisanal. It's gonna be it's going to be like and there's gonna be companies that are scaling it that are just spray and praying. And that flooding of the zone has never worked long long term.
Justin:There's the startup landscape is littered, like Jason Kallikanis in inside.com. He was like, we're just gonna pound Google with every and it it doesn't work. You can't flood the zone in marketing.
Jordan:And the cycles are
Brian:Let me give you a a snapshot of maybe the flip side
Justin:Okay.
Brian:Of of that literally this week. What you see on buildermethods.com right now, what I what I shipped to the site yesterday, is the culmination of a full week of work, which is also a culmination of like the past year of work. And this is like, this is me plus AI working together to get to this end result. And I this what I'm trying to describe here is, like, how I'm actually using it in my marketing process. Every single word you see on the on the page as well as on the product pages is not a one shot, just like write some copy.
Brian:I spent I mean, workdays, like eight hours a day, three days a week, three three days this week in deep clawed conversations saying like, okay. Now we're gonna go the hero section. Now the section below that. Now we're gonna hash through, like, 10 different options for headlines. I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you what I like about option three, six, and seven.
Brian:Now you're gonna give me another 10 options. We're gonna hash that out 20 more times. Okay? So that is that level of like like just excruciating, like tedious, like like getting every sentence right, giving a lot of creative feedback. But underneath all that is that it's happening in Claude.
Brian:And in Claude, over the past year, I've been having these strategic conversations about my business, about what I'm learning about my target customer, about what their challenges are that I'm observing and my strategic direction. So so Claude itself has all of this underlying memory and knowledge of my strategic direction in my business. So when it comes to the week where where we're rewriting the copy for the homepage Yeah.
Jordan:Not from zero.
Brian:And for when I'm when I'm repositioning the product, it it comes from a place of like, this is I I like honestly, I think it's like so far beyond having a really great copywriter working full time in my company. It's like even better than that level of like Except internal knowledge. It but it it's not just it it what I'm trying to say is that it's not just here's a prompt, generate words for me. It's like Sure. You you know, it's this strategic memory bit baked into it.
Justin:I agree. I think it's still that is quite an artisanal process you just described. It's and Claude's gonna be a a big tool. The for sure. For sure.
Justin:There are dozens of my competitors that are using AI to generate headlines and using it to generate articles and using it to generate ads and using it to generate scripts that are all banal and average and will not get noticed. And the things that in my experience, the things that truly get above the noise floor are the things that are unique, that are really take a like, your top top of funnel is YouTube. And YouTube, as you mentioned, is still takes a lot of time. So Claude is helping with the script.
Jordan:But there
Brian:is just even that, it's like, again, it's like a whole week of, like, batting it around. That's right. And and it and it all starts with a raw idea. Usually, just a voice note of like, alright, here's here's what I wanna say. Here's here's my message that I wanna get send out to the world.
Brian:And that is not publishable because it's it's just me rambling. Yeah. Nonsense.
Justin:And also one more thing, which is I think the both end of this is for sure using Claude the way you've talked about it is going to be valuable, and people are gonna have to do that. But for sure, people that are exceptional, like people that are exceptional at standing out, they are also going to do very well. Those people that are just the the the people that have, for whatever reason, have been good at rising above the noise. Yeah. They've got a process for it that may or may not include Claude.
Justin:They are just gonna become so much more valuable. And they will for example, like, if I get Adam Wathen to review my marketing page, he will come up with stuff that is won't get in an LLM. He's just attuned in a way that the the average answer I'm gonna get from an LLM isn't going to be as attuned as he can be. So it's both and. We can use it for this.
Justin:Mhmm. But there are just some people that are so exceptional, and that will be part of the stack that contributes to success. I think you're gonna need both. And this is why you're gonna want to have great people in your organization to get back to that other point of like more conversations. So more conversations with Claude.
Justin:Yes. But more conversations. Like, we're now doing a weekly product planning meeting. Whereas before we were doing it every month. It's like we're increasing the cadence.
Jordan:Again, we got to the same place in our internal conversations. And so what we are doing because what we talked about at All Hands, the adoption of AI tooling and mindset as not being optional, it's not just for engineering. And if it's not just for engineering, then what we need to do is we need to stop working in AI silos. And so we are adopting a product called Langdoc. And Langdoc and other products like it take the entire company and put it all into one context.
Jordan:So all of Slack, all of GitHub, all of Claude, all of Linear, all of our email conversations. Because like you mentioned, you put work in, Brian. The quality of the output of your LLMs is based on the input over the last year. So what we quickly realized is, oh, this makes no sense that I have a certain amount of context in my instance of Claude, but no one's benefiting from it. And if we don't adopt this, then we're gonna have to have conversations every day about, well, what did this mean?
Jordan:And why did you do this? And is this right for us? So we need to adopt like a company brain and a company process in an async manner where everyone has the context. And that's like the flattening. The product to engineering, to marketing, the fact that it bleeds all over, we need somewhere to be able to see and work across functions so that It's huge.
Jordan:Right. So if I'm marketing or whatever and I want to announce a new feature, I need to be able to scan across to see where the engineers are on that feature, where product, what's finished versus not finished, and pull in the features that I know are going to be in V1 into the marketing announcement blog post without saying, wait, hold on a second. What's built versus what's not built? Wait, hold on. Did we include that?
Jordan:Did we not include that?
Brian:Yeah. Or do we have to have another call, like, for this time today to talk about it?
Jordan:So that that visibility and the buildup of the context at the organization level felt like this next missing piece of, oh, we we can't ever get to where we want to be across all these functions without some shared context was among the
Brian:actually just dealing with the same exact thing on at at my much smaller level too, because I have my a video editor on on my team now. And, like, how do we share this this knowledge? Like, in like, I was like, should I have a a team Claude account? Like like because I'm using Claude to, like, help decide, like, how do we cut shorts out of our long forms? And I need him to be able to do that without without me in the loop.
Brian:Yep. But, you know, I think there's one key takeaway here. I wanted I wanted to talk about it back before when we were talking about, like, the senior engineer, but I think it absolutely applies to marketers as well. And I heard, I heard Dan Shipper from from Every talking about this a couple weeks ago, and I think it's it's spot on, which is there's this third level of player now that I think most people are missing. There there's the the two levels people are have been aware of.
Brian:There are there's, like, the there there's, like, the okay. So if we if we're let's just talk about engineers for a second, and then we can take it to marketing. There's, the vibe coder who's nontechnical, who's using tools like like v zero and Bolt and and Lovable to to whip up MVPs in a in a in a weekend. Nontechnical, you know but then then there's the engineer who's maybe still, like, in denial of AI and not in pretty slow to adopt it and old school, just wants to hand code everything. And those are fewer and fewer now here in 2026.
Brian:And people seem to have have thought that, like, that's those are, like, the two camps. And and it's but there's this third camp, which is, like, the senior engineer who absolutely has the full stack background, can hand code, anything, knows how the system is is architected, but is not writing any code anymore, like any code anymore, and and is exclusively doing their work via agents. And even a lot of times, they're not even, like, manually reviewing every line of code that the agent writes because they have these agentic development systems that they they're they're working with context windows. They're doing spec driven development. They're they're using MCP.
Brian:They're they're doing all these these, like, high level advanced techniques development techniques as a as a like, this is like the new 10 x engineer or whatever.
Jordan:That's the that's the god tier stuff I was talking about rock Justin, were you gonna say
Brian:something about that? There's a there's, like, a growing class in our industry of of of these players who who have been adopting AI for the past year, and now they're at this, like, expert level. I think that
Justin:definitely exists in engineering. I'm still skeptical of whether it exists in marketing.
Brian:But I think what we were just getting at in marketing is using AI at a deep level as a thought partner, as a strategic partner to analyze options, to analyze incoming data, help you make smarter strategic decisions, creative decisions.
Justin:I just think the whole go to market, marketing channels, everything is going to be more saturated than ever. There's gonna be more players. There's gonna be more people. There's gonna be more bots posting everywhere. Yeah.
Justin:And the the difference in marketing is going to be who could actually get real customers in the door. And I mean, not to pick on Avery and Dan Chipper, but like, they're doing like 1,200,000.0 in annual recurring revenue. And they are the most AI advanced on the cutting edge. If they had figured out a way to automate and augment their marketing to increase their content business, you'd think they would be doing more revenue. But they're doing about 1.2.
Justin:They've been around for quite a few years now. Mhmm. If you look at even at Adam Watham. So Adam Watham's just had this massive surge in tailwind subscription revenue. Yeah.
Justin:Very interesting What broke through?
Brian:Yeah.
Justin:Was it was it something it what broke through?
Jordan:It was the human.
Justin:Real, vulnerable, above the noise. Nobody had done that. Nobody had put themselves out like that. And I'm not saying that everybody has to do that. But you have to for marketing now, when everybody's using agents, everybody's augmenting their process, everybody's augmenting how much they can produce and how fast they can do it.
Justin:What's going to stand out? If playing field is just rising, rising, rising, and everything's getting more saturated, and everybody wants attention, and there's more companies than ever that want attention, this is gonna be the most challenging time for marketing ever.
Brian:I I just I but I one thing I wanna clarify, though, is that, like, I think there's a huge ocean of a difference between using AIs to auto AI to, like, automate and and spray and pray robotic, like, you know, AI slop as marketing. Like, that is terrible marketing.
Justin:That,
Brian:you know, that that's not what I'm interested in, and I don't think that's what will work because there's so much that's what adds to the noise that we all need to combat and break through. Okay. But using AI to create the the best connection with real people. Using AI to to know your yourself, your company DNA, your your target customer, analyze all the incoming data points. Like, an example that I'm using now, I I built I built an app, in a week, couple weeks ago called Inbox Summaries.
Brian:Right? I use AI to analyze incoming audience research data that I I you know, I get thousands of replies to email newsletters, to YouTube comments, to, like, you know, I do tons of surveys with with my audience. I physically don't have time to read every single one. And I could pick pick, like like, pick out just 10% of them and read them and maybe get some ideas on what's happening. But that could easily send me down the wrong path.
Brian:I could get the wrong impression because I'm only able to read 10% of the responses. Yeah. So but if I have an AI that can analyze all all the responses and give me trends and summaries and patterns and flag the most important ones that are actually worth my attention, and that AI is tuned and trained on real background data and strategy and memory about my about what I'm trying to do here Mhmm. That's actually useful. And that that's like that makes a meaningful difference when it comes to me deciding what to write about, what to make a video about, what product to release.
Brian:And, like, that's that's what what I'm what I'm talking about when it's, like, high level AI powered marketing and strategy. You know?
Justin:One thing I'm distinguishing is I think it will be easier for a certain type of engineer to write more code with AI. Like, the 10 time, 50 time increase is clear to me there. The hard thing about marketing is you're trying to get people's attention. You're trying to get them to care, and then you're trying to get them to act. And that's always been hard.
Justin:It's just even harder now. And I think AI is gonna be helpful in a sense. But the other problem with AI, and this has always been a problem with marketing, is that as soon as someone figures out a tool or a process or a way of doing things sure. Maybe Dan Shipper has a bad better AI marketing brain than I do. I I still think a good marketer is just going to beat those people.
Justin:I because there's there's still a lot of art to coming up with novel ideas, which AI is not good at. Coming up with novel ideas that break through the noise. And they're the ones that come to you and when you're on a ferry traveling from New Jersey to New York, and all of sudden you're like, holy shit. That that's
Brian:See, I completely agree though. Is is that like, I I really think it's about these human ideas.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian:And then and then using AI to to to get it to a form that's, like, that's digestible, that that can that can connect.
Justin:Oh, yeah. I agree with that completely.
Jordan:So I agree, and we're also wrong.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:And and the only difference now is that the time where you have an edge is shorter. Yeah. But that's it. I think some of it, from your point of view, is happening because you sell to people at the cutting edge. You sell to podcasters, you sell to engineers.
Jordan:They are very aware of everything up to the minute. We sell to small businesses in The US. Yeah. Believe me, that shit works. It still works.
Jordan:So Mark Thomas, our fractional CMO. Yeah. He is a machine because he augments his work with these AI tools. So he'll do an interview with me for ninety minutes and it will turn into 30 emails. And then you then we have a good email to send out twice a week for the next fifteen weeks.
Jordan:And that sounds like slop, but it still works. It's good But
Brian:it came from Jordan's source material.
Jordan:To a degree. The leverage is so extreme that it's kind of it's still using the AI tool in a way that you couldn't do it before. Here's another Our advertising is what drives our growth.
Justin:And
Jordan:we just started working with this new agency and they're awesome. What they're not awesome at is the latest in AI tools. And so when we came to them and we said we want video for top of funnel, they said, great. It's gonna be $3 for an AI generated UGC video. And I was like, okay, but we're gonna do that once and then we're gonna take over the process because that makes absolutely no sense.
Jordan:Yeah. And so when I look at Twitter today and I see a split screen of someone talking and then on the other screen, it's swapping between celebrities and it looks absolutely perfect. Perfect. I look at that and I say, I'm gonna steal that idea and I'm gonna be the actor. Yeah.
Jordan:And I'm gonna deliver the rosy message exactly how I want it delivered. And then I'm going to multiply that with 15 different looking creators. And that leverage in AI, that is maybe that slop, but that edge exists. And it might go away because everyone can do it. It's gonna be really easy to do.
Jordan:But I got six months of party with with that with that edge.
Justin:Sure. Yeah. You've you've kind of illustrated my point in that you saw something and then you're emulating it, and there's gonna be more people doing that. Yes. The other thing
Jordan:is part of it, the commoditization, everyone catching up more quickly, 100%, but not in every market and not instantly. So if something comes out and it's new and you can use it, you you you have time. Sure.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian:And I I think still actually I I think, like, in defense of slop.
Justin:Oh, yes. God. Yes. That's the we got there. We got there.
Justin:We got we got the clip. I was like No. But, like You got your title for the episode.
Brian:But I I I do think that, like okay. Like, what you just described, Jordan, is like you are selling a product, Rosie. That is your product. Right? And and if if there is a new delivery mechanism for getting the message out there and getting exposed to to more people, even if it means, like, AI generated videos of of people who who are not real humans saying the same message that you want out there, it's still your message.
Brian:Yes. You know? Yes.
Jordan:It's this combination.
Brian:What what I the the type of slops that I don't like, which is the noise that that especially on YouTube, but you see this in all social media, that we all need to break through are there are all these, like, automated systems out there, just copycat like like, copycat systems, essentially. So, like Yeah. So so any any video that goes viral, there are going to be 50 new videos in the next couple of hours that are just, like, scraping the top performing videos and then regurgitating the same exact content just for the for the clicks and the and the noise. Like, that is
Jordan:Yes.
Brian:Pure noise, not helpful. You know? Yeah. But
Jordan:in many ways, 95% of marketing is just copying each other and doing the same stuff and not standing out. Right?
Brian:And now it's just selling ratings from what you described. Right? Like, that's different from what you described, which is, like, just scaling out the to like exposure.
Jordan:Leverage. Leverage. Just that's right.
Justin:It's Except the the the channel hasn't changed, which is you just said that at paid acquisition is your still your top channel. And so to me, like, all of the power of that channel is in Facebook's I mean, Facebook's gonna have a very good year. This would be a good year to buy stock, I think. There's gonna be so many companies that are looking for distribution channels. And if they used to be content, SEO, paid acquisition, PR, ad sorry, events, there's a bunch of those that are gonna get way more competitive, including ads.
Justin:And ads is always about can you hold their attention? So if if something helps you hold your attention this week, and you can keep automating those ads, that'll that'll work fine. On the other hand, I think things are gonna move slower too, in the sense that we've just Transistors had a real increase in sign ups. It's not like we've accelerated how much we're posting. It's because all of the work that I did, my body of work, engaging on Reddit, engaging in forums, engaging on Quora, all of these things, publishing YouTube videos, publishing AMAs, it all kind of sits there in these systems.
Justin:And it actually stays for a long time. So some of this some of these cycles are gonna get shorter, like in terms of what works. And then some of these things, some companies are just gonna have this bedrock of strength as long as LLMs continue to accumulate new content the way that they have. So some of it's just gonna a lot of the existing players are gonna have a big advantage. Like Buffer.
Justin:The reason I think Buffer is growing right now, they've just cut this bedrock of existing foundational
Jordan:more likely to get discovered. What what I think the challenge is for the established companies I don't know. I wanna say this without saying things that I'm not I'm not supposed to be saying. They have no idea what we're talking about. These larger companies, even a 50 person company, a 100 person company in The US that is a small company, a 100 person company has no idea what we're talking about, is unequipped to make these changes.
Jordan:The difference between, you know, a scrappy company being able to move faster is turbocharged. That difference is gigantic, gigantic. And so there's a lot of advantage accumulated to new organizations that don't have this like residue of how you've always done things.
Justin:Oh,
Jordan:yeah. I think that's part of the responsibility of leadership to demand your organization make these adjustments if you're a small company and look at the individual players and say, How do I help you get there? Because if you don't get there, you can't come along for the ride. I don't think it's optional.
Brian:There's no doubt about that. That's a really good point. That's a really good pattern because I'm seeing it on every single level. Right? I see it literally at the code base level to the individual level to the team level.
Brian:Right? If you're dealing with the transition factor of before AI to post AI
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian:That is slow and hard. Right? So I have code bases that I started building twelve months ago before I was full on AI in how I build. And those code bases are harder for me to work on today than the ones that I started thirty days ago in in the new AI. Like, that's at the code base level.
Brian:Right? Then you have, like, the the individual people in in our industry. And I just noticed this, I observed this over the past year, the solo builder founders have been much faster and earlier to adopt the Cloud codes and the cursors and the process because it's just them, and and they're they're able to adapt. And then once you even get to a few people to a to 10 to 20 people teams and up, they're they're much slower, having a much harder time. Yeah.
Brian:And and then to different degrees of, like, interest and motivation. Some of them are motivated and and moving through this transition, and others, maybe the leadership wants to move, but the ranks don't. And it's Yep. It's it's really hard
Jordan:to imagine. Being in leadership in that situation and looking down at your 40 person engineering team, your 10 person product team, your four person design team, and you're like, am I going to accept things as they are? Or am I about to wreck shop and change my entire business? Or that feels too risky and these little competitors are going to start to bite. I think it's a very, very challenging time.
Jordan:You know, we always end up in this bootstrap versus VC type of conversation. What we're really talking about there is just finance strategy. You know, how do you finance a product? And I think that is in crazy territory right now. Crazy territory.
Brian:I'm glad you just brought that up because that was one of the last questions that we had on last week's episode that I was that we were thinking about, like predictions for 2026. I just threw it out there. It was sort of a spur of the moment thought, an open question. I'm really curious, Jordan, your thoughts on this. What happens to funding in 2026 and 2027?
Brian:Right? I I just can't help but think like, I just can't make the logical connection to, like, the role of I I guess there are a few cases. But, like, my my contention last week was that, like, funding in general is just going to decline as a general need for for startups. And and there's gonna be a resurgence of bootstrapping. Bootstrapping never really went away, but it's gonna become more of the default now.
Brian:Whereas before, it was like there was always the the funded route is a is a default, and some people also like bootstrapping. Mhmm. Now it's gonna be much more rare that somebody's gonna seek a funded route when when they would first default to bootstrapping. Like, I'm I'm just Right.
Jordan:You can grow revenue faster. So I don't think venture's going anywhere. It's just that the nature of it is it's always been a game of outliers. That's the only way VC math makes sense. Raise a $300,000,000 fund and then make a bunch of bets, you need gigantic winners, and everything other than the gigantic winners are incidental.
Jordan:They they really don't They don't matter. They don't impact your actual business math. Yeah. I think
Brian:And I guess like Yeah.
Jordan:Sorry It doesn't change very much. There are still unbelievable exceptional winners, more so than ever. You know, 0 to 100,000,000 in ARR in eighteen months type of thing is insane and great for the VC industry.
Brian:And I think And I guess that is where where VC
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian:Works. Right? It's like if if your if your goal is to take down a a, like, a a huge player, you you need
Jordan:Yes. And the VC incentives are weird and markups are weird and raising your next fund is weird. So you get these very strange dynamics around products that get anointed as winners. Like, Harvey is a great example. Harvey is like a a legal AI for law firms, and it kinda got anointed by its VCs, and it kept raising money.
Jordan:And then the more money raised, the more inevitable the product seems. And so the more law firms think, hey, we gotta go with the leader. And it's almost like this manufactured process. And I don't know if that stuff really matters to us. That's just gonna go on forever.
Jordan:These because there are weird incentives in VC land and good and bad and who who cares? It's it's great. You know, make money, bet money.
Brian:I'm more interested in, like, the bootstrapper who needs a couple $100,000 to get their thing off the ground.
Jordan:Yes. Like That's the part that I think is problematic right now. I I don't really know how to think about it because it's still tough to do things from zero. If if you if you're bringing 25 k of your own money into into the bank account, into the business, it's still that's a slog, man. It's real hard.
Jordan:It's just hard no matter what.
Brian:I I I still see the case now for for, like, this fund the founder or founders. But funding a team, we have agents now. If you're if you're starting from zero, if you're starting if you are starting a new idea today
Justin:Yeah.
Brian:You and or a technical cofounder are gonna build your thing, and you you need funding to, like, get out of your job or But you need
Jordan:some money. But you need some money, though. Yeah. It's it's and you need more than you think you need.
Brian:And and, yeah, yeah, you need to do some some marketing and stuff, but, like, the the numb like, the the number of dollars required and the amount of time. And also, if funding our time, the amount of time. We've been talking about it all night here. We don't need a whole year anymore. We need a month to build it.
Jordan:Yeah. But you still need to grow revenue. Right? And that takes time so you can build faster. The the real challenge is where's the money come from?
Jordan:And where the money comes from is directly connected to the business model of the money. So TinySeed is interesting because they don't require gigantic exits. And that to me feels like a much healthier approach to financing small software companies right now. You almost need like a private equity mindset where 3x your money is great as opposed to a 100 x or or zero. It doesn't matter.
Brian:Mhmm.
Jordan:Because taking you still I mean, if I started something brand new, man, I wouldn't wanna go from zero. You still wanna raise a million, $2,000,000, hire a small team and get rolling. Then And you can make a big push and you can make a lot of progress. But if you raise $2,000,000 in a seed round, you're either screwing your VCs or you're lying to them because that $2,000,000 should get you to profitability, should get you to fast growth if you hit product market fit. But if you don't raise the next round, it doesn't fit into the model.
Jordan:It doesn't make sense.
Brian:But I do think, and I'm sort of projecting out a little bit into the future of the next, I think the next twelve months, twelve, twenty four months is that we are going to see an ocean of more builders, more people with building skill that you don't need to hire a team
Jordan:for. Yes. Isn't that right. But isn't that just an enormous amount of competitive pressure? And and more competitive pressure means less likely for a gigantic outlier outcome.
Jordan:So why should I give you my $2,000,000 as the seed round when if you're onto something, you're gonna have 100 competitors six months from today?
Brian:See, I think this is another I think you're right about that, but there's there's there's there's this layer that people are missing about the yes. There's gonna be so much more slop AI built apps that do nothing. They get zero customers. They're not gonna go anywhere. And there's gonna be thousands upon thousands of those, obviously.
Brian:There already is. But now the it it's it's still a fundamental truth that if you have a distribution advantage, you're going to win, but at least some part of your market or all of it. Like, you're if you have that insight, if you have that inroad, if you have the channel, you are going to do well. So now all the people who who have the distribution channel, who have the, random niche industry insight that nobody in the world knows about except for this person who works as a, elevator repair operation industry that nobody would know. Like but there's, like, a huge, you know, industry there that needs to be served with with software that only this this person knows, and they and they happen to know everybody in that industry.
Brian:Before now, they would have to hire a developer, they would have to hire an agency, they would have to partner with a technical person to get that done.
Jordan:Yes.
Brian:And they would have to seek funding probably to do all that. Also that person, even if they had funding, even if they knew that they needed to build an app, they didn't have the know how, like, what kind of stack do I need? Do I need to hire? Who should
Jordan:How I talk do they finance it? I had this literally the exact scenario you're describing. Someone introduced me to someone from an industry. I don't want to give anything away because they were private about it. But exactly what they've been working in this industry for ten years.
Jordan:They have an idea based on a very, very painful problem that they have themselves every day. They know a bunch of people in the industry. They talk to people they work in the industry. If you solve that, I will pay you. Right?
Jordan:All like the classic elements of, right, the raw material to build a product that makes sense. So he's coming to me and is like, All right, what should I do? How do I go hire developers? How do I start building stuff myself? And then the real question is, How do I finance this thing?
Jordan:Because it still costs a lot of money to stop what you're doing and work on this thing and then get it off the ground and market it. And it's still at least six months of effort without making your income. And then you probably have to hire some people. So you you need money. You need somewhere between a 100,000 million bucks depending on kind of your approach.
Jordan:And that used to be in my conversation with him. What I told him was do not raise a seed round. Because if you raise a seed round, you will have the money, but then you will be in the wrong environment to be successful because I don't think what you're talking about is gonna be a billion dollar company. But if you can sell for $20,000,000, my man, you did it. You should be you should be beyond happy.
Jordan:Yeah. But what did
Justin:you recommend company. What did you recommend in terms of in terms of funding then? How how what did you recommend in that situation?
Jordan:I told him it's real tough right now. I told them to look for money that wants a normal return. Not a VC return. Look for look. This this is kind of the tiny seed.
Jordan:It's kind of the closest thing. It's almost like PE. It's almost like you need someone to to look for a reasonable return. Yeah. If I give you $250,000 or let's just say a million bucks and I'll own 20% of the company and you build it for the next eighteen to twenty four months and you sell it for $10,000,000, we should both be really happy.
Brian:Mhmm.
Jordan:But under most circumstances, given either Bootstrap or VC, if you bootstrap, it's really tough to have the money to build it. And if you if you go VC, then it makes no sense to sell your company for $10,000,000.
Justin:Yeah. I could see investing in something like that, especially for acquisition. Like like I said, I think Facebook's gonna have a very good year. So why do you need the money? Right?
Justin:Like, Transistor was started. John and I each put 5,000 in and then just sweated it out. And it was hard, but we did it. But now, if you're looking to get customers, you and a big channel available to you is paid acquisition, you do need some money for that. And in the old days, VC would say, well, we're gonna give you a bunch of money.
Justin:You're gonna just destroy. You're gonna be first on the block. You're gonna get you're gonna gain all the market share. And that's gonna be and we're gonna get our exit. But you're suggesting now that maybe VC won't be the route.
Justin:You're gonna have to find that money from somewhere else.
Brian:I mean, at the end of the day, there is still the option of get your money from your customers. Get get to revenue 50 times faster than than people could have done it a year or two ago. Because because we're because we live in now. Because this is 2026. And people can spin up rough vibe coded MVPs.
Brian:I know our industry hates to hear this, and most people still disagree with it. And and look, and I'm someone who highly values a full stack background and systems mindset and and building quality products. But look, the the reality is if you have a access to a distribution channel and a unique insight to deliver value to a customer base, you are fully capable of learning how to build a basic app that can get you to ten, twenty, fifty k MRR in a matter of weeks or months. And, like and you may maybe it means maybe it means you're gonna rebuild it in a couple months. But, like
Justin:Although the the both the both and here is that's true, Brian. But now I'm starting to think because I in my head, I was like, oh.
Brian:And I'm not And I'm saying, like, 99% of the Vibe coders will never come close to that. But there's the 1% who have the distribution.
Justin:Well, here's here's I was kind of feeling like angel investing is gonna be dead because I was like, who's gonna again, I was thinking along your line of, like, who's gonna wanna fund something like that? You got an idea, why don't I just go build it? Like, if the cost of building and time is just that small, and you're coming to me with the idea stage, and you don't have a good distribution channel, you know, maybe I'll just build it. But I could see if somebody came to me, there's very few ideas, good ideas that come to me anyway. But if someone came to me and said, Listen, I got this great idea.
Justin:I built the prototype. We just need customer acquisition. I think if we, if I get, you know, $500,000 in Facebook ads, I think this thing could really fire. Then as an angel investor, that's an interesting opportunity because your window to getting your money back just got a lot shorter. And then it's like, well, I can I can help you spend $500 right now?
Justin:See if you can make a big splash in the market.
Brian:But if that if that person built a prototype. Right, so they they vibe coded a prototype. Right? It it works. It could be it could be used to solve the problem.
Brian:How hard is it to talk to 20 target customers and get your first $5,000? And then take that $5,000 and plow it into your next Facebook ads that gets you to a 100 customers.
Justin:I just think it's gonna be hard to get. Yeah. You're you're
Jordan:forgetting the amount of courage required to do that because you've done it so many times. The that is that is a
Brian:That's rare why I'm saying the 99% will will never do that.
Jordan:That that's right. I mean
Justin:Like
Brian:Yeah. That's that's the scheme. We we've always known that. Right? Yes.
Brian:But, like
Jordan:Yes. But it but it's still a challenge if you have a good idea and you have you have industry experience and you know what to do and now the tooling is available to you to solve the problem more directly and faster. It is still a a strange problem on what to do and how to go about it if you wanna build a company that makes revenue and gets profitable and is a nice business. For us, that's success. If you go out and raise money from VCs, that is not success.
Jordan:So I think that, you know, the probability of a VC funded company succeeding was already small, and now it is, like, minuscule. It is even harder to win in that It's easier to raise money. It's easier to grow. It's easier to build and much, much harder to win.
Brian:Like, I think like the no code tools, Zappiers, the bubbles and stuff, which was like, you know, that's been around for years. And like a year ago when I was offering that MVP, you know, build you a Rails app in a month service, A lot of the clients that that came my way were people who who no coded as a Zapier solution and got a got got some early customers and wanted to then hire me to to build it for real. Right? But those those people were, like, in the super minority of, like, semi technical enough to be able to use Zapier to to rig you know? But the the transition from Zapier to build you you can build a decent, like, React app, Next.
Brian:Js app or whatever. Like, you know, not for everyone, obviously, but, like, more people who have access to customers are going to look at that as as like, at least they're gonna explore it before they go raise. You know?
Justin:The the only other variable you might not be considering is that this is still so new. We have not fully grappled with what happens when the floor cut comes down here. So how many new people are coming online right now as competitors all at the same time, all competing for the same customer? I think that's gonna be the interesting thing That's a real thing. Where this shakes out is it's gonna be and that's where you might want some money because then it might be like, hey, listen.
Justin:Like, I know that this influencer is building this, this influencer is building this, and I'm the influencer building this. Who's going to win? Well, first to market, and whoever makes the biggest splash and grabs the market share the fastest will win. So there might be scenarios now where it's just everything's moving faster.
Brian:That's true. I think that's I think that that part of it is absolutely true. It's so much harder. It's just literally the same prediction we had a year ago, which is like SaaS is going to get harder because it's so much more competitive. It is every year.
Brian:And I do think about that a lot now where it's like if you're starting any sort of, like, small app, like a, I don't know, like a productivity app, a to do list app, or even even stuff like accounting apps and stuff like that.
Justin:Like Mhmm.
Brian:I mean, all the time now, like, when I have a need for for an app, I'm I'm constantly thinking like, should I just code this or should I go try try like, trial three or four different project management tools today?
Jordan:What I really like is I like selling to nontechnical people in this environment. And I and I think the most obvious thing to do right now if you're an entrepreneur is just build a services business that helps people bring AI into their companies. There's so much demand for it. And the the gap it's like the gap between what you know and they know is so big. And at the same time, what you would deliver to them is so valuable that you're not really taking advantage of that gap.
Jordan:You're just I mean, you're just delivering what people people want. I I think that is like you could build a big agency quickly in this environment going to small businesses, mid market, and just being like, I take let me take a look in your business and I guarantee you Dude I can help.
Justin:Retail. Like, why can't I get my point of sale to do this in a retail company? Well, previously, it didn't make sense for you to hire anyone to build that because it would cost too much. But now you could have a little business where you're just like, hey, I know your point of sale is a pain in the ass. Let me help you.
Justin:Let me let me help you do that.
Brian:This is this is how individuals are valuable in this new economy. It's like builders, honestly. Like, I really think I've I've thought this for a long time. I think it's gonna start to really be a reality in in the coming year and years is like every business, every small business is going to have builders inside it who and they and they did not have builders before. And they're like, yes, they're still gonna buy SaaS tools.
Brian:They're still gonna hire solutions. They're gonna hire a outsource things and services. Mhmm. But, like, to to be competitive in no matter what size or industry you're in, internally, people are going to have to have, like, technical AI skills to to build internal tools all the time. It's just gonna be more and more prevalent and more more surface area.
Brian:You know?
Justin:Yeah. Alright. I think we should wrap it. That was that was good. I mean, that hopefully, Jordan, that was helpful.
Justin:You got some some did you get to process some of what you wanted to process there?
Jordan:I I think for me, the the the most impactful thing is that our conversation flowed in a very similar, like, logical sequence
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:As we felt internally because when you open one door, it's like inevitable that you've reached this next door. Well, okay, then how do you handle this? And how do
Justin:you handle this? And Another good opportunity right now is to be a coach or a team leadership transition professional that can just because I think what you've kind of opened up is that teams everywhere are feeling some version of this. And we're seeing it in the chat. Like, some people are like, listen, my team, we're way over here. No one's adopted AI because enterprise privacy, da da da da.
Justin:And we don't know what to do. And over here, it's like, yeah, the engineers are skeptical, and they're worried about the quality. And then over here, somebody you could have a counseling business that just goes around and just says, okay, we're gonna figure out we're gonna we're gonna figure out brand new paradigms for this Yeah. Era. And then you can do that every month because it'll change every month.
Brian:I I talk to people from Teams all the time through through Builder Methods, and it is and, you know, having Jordan here on the call, it just really shows how much harder it is in in the team situation than the individual. Like, obviously, like, there's like, individuals are making their own transition, their own adoption of of of different tools no matter which job or role you're in. But it is so much harder and more complicated when you need your team to be working together and adopting and transitioning at the same time. Like, that's that's literally like, I'm working with a team this month on on exactly that. Like, it happens all the time now.
Jordan:But that that feels like that's the biggest unlock. The first unlock happen happens at your desk as an individual. And then when you when you can make that click in an organization and everyone has leverage, Like when I look at my projections and I look at like, you know, what do I want to do next three years? We want to get to 10,000,000 ARR. I'm like, I don't think I need that many more people.
Jordan:It's just how do you amplify everyone's role and everyone's unique abilities and how do you 10x each person's leverage in all these different directions.
Brian:Mhmm.
Jordan:But doing it individually will get you one place, kind of figuring out how to do that together feels like that's like the giant opportunity.
Justin:I think we gotta have you back. I mean, people in the chat are already asking for you to come back. But I think like three, four weeks even just like to follow-up because it will already be a completely different year if we wait
Jordan:for Maybe the panel can actually be a panel. In thirty days or so, I'll be able to talk about these big projects that we accelerated over the next thirty days. Yeah. And we can talk about how the release and launch went. Did we go too fast?
Jordan:Did we find that restraint line? Is it working out? Do we get more benefit? Is it more painful? So I I mean, we're we're waiting to find out internally, and I'm happy to share as I it
Brian:wanna hear about it.
Justin:Thirty days.
Jordan:We'll have
Justin:you back. Thanks, Jordan. This is really great. This is awesome.
Brian:Thanks, buddy. Thank I
Justin:love your energy. Love that you kind of uncap what's going on in your own brain. It's always been really inspiring to me. Thanks, everyone in the chat that showed up. We got Bo, we got Zach, we got Emmett.
Justin:Moving Pangea. I don't know who that is, but they've been showing up. Ryan Hefner, of course. Rob Henley. Rob, we'll get to your question next episode with Jordan.
Justin:And we'll see you guys all next time. Yeah. Bye.
Jordan:Thank you, folks.