Welcome to the panel where three founders try to figure out what the hell is going on. I'm Justin Jackson, the cofounder of Transistor. Fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel. I am the founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:And I'm Jordan Gal The cofounder at Hey Rosie. Good to see everybody. Happy Friday.
Justin:Good to see everybody. We're trying our new format. I'm the host this week. And I just got back from my Founder Retreat with my transistor co founder, John Buddha. We went to Mexico.
Justin:First time in Mexico for me. Holbox Island, spelled Holbox Island, just north of Cancun.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Justin:Very interesting. We took this island is like beautiful, but it is at sea level. Like, global warming is not going to be kind to this island. It was gorgeous. We flew a little, like a little bush plane out there.
Justin:It was A lot of propeller? Yeah. Propeller. It was better. Otherwise, you had to take a two hour drive and then a ferry.
Justin:Yeah. And I got a little bit airsick in this thing. Was like Where
Brian Casel:is this thing?
Jordan:Oh, I see.
Justin:Hobox Island. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I've never heard of that in Mexico, but we we've done the we've we've done the propeller plane thing a couple of times. We we did it a few months ago in in Costa Rica, and it's yeah. You you you fly you you jump around in those clouds a little bit.
Justin:Little little rough. Yeah. Serene Car Free Island in Quintana Roo. This was a we've averaged transistors been around for eight years. This is actually one of the things we realized at the retreat.
Justin:We've been around eight years. This is John and I's longest job ever. Oh. Eight years of employment at one place. And we have averaged a founder retreat every two years.
Brian Casel:So this is a founder retreat, not a company retreat?
Justin:Not a company retreat. We do do those as well. And the big feeling going in is John and I were not very aligned. And the goal for the retreat was we need to have some big conversations. And we need to figure out if we can get to alignment.
Justin:And this is alignment on some big topics.
Brian Casel:AI What can you share?
Justin:Video podcasting. And I would say maybe above all those things, strategy, direction, and vision. And yeah, so I was a little bit not Yeah, maybe a little bit apprehensive. Just And this isn't the first time I think we've had these feelings. It's like, we'll have a retreat.
Justin:And then we'll just kind of naturally kind of go drift a little bit, do our own thing. And it is, there's just kind of this natural buildup of not communicating, not being aligned. Then we come together and we have a retreat. And we fall back in love together where we get that feeling of, oh, this is why I partnered with this person. And then we drift again.
Justin:And coming out of this retreat, more than ever, I'll let you guys respond in a second here. But more than ever, I am so clear that for this company to work, John and I have to be aligned. We have to be aligned. We're both 50%. We made this bed together.
Justin:We're in it together. And we're it's kind of it's a marriage. We're with each other till death do us part for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer. As long as we're doing transistor, we have to be aligned. Because if we can't be aligned, there's no direction.
Justin:We can't set direction on anything. We can't say this is the where we're going. We can't be like this is the path. It just causes us to avoid making big decisions. And so, alignment's not easy.
Justin:It requires lots of communication, mutual understanding. And increasingly, I think I'm just realizing lots of time together. So that's that's the intro.
Brian Casel:I have more questions. I I like, Jordan can probably speak more to the experience of having cofounders since you have cofounders, but I just have more questions about all so, you know and I know it's very sensitive, and there's I'm sure there are plenty of things you can't really talk about on air. But
Justin:I'll be as vulnerable as I can be.
Brian Casel:Like, I I think the main question probably on most listeners' minds is what is the fundamental issue? You you mentioned AI. You mentioned the getting into, like, video stuff and, like, just setting the the general strategic direction. Yeah. What what's, like, the open question in in your mind?
Brian Casel:What's your stance on it? How's John thinking about it? Oh, sure. Yeah.
Justin:I mean, I think it's still like the the big the underlying problem is communication. Like, that it doesn't really matter what the big issues are. It's just communicating about heavy stuff over Slack in kind of these little it does not work.
Jordan:Dangerous. I
Justin:mean, when I talked to Adam Wathen, I think maybe Jordan's similar. But Adam Adam is on the phone three, four, five times a day. Steve Shoger is in his house, like every day. We just haven't been great, especially lately, just communicating more often. So when you
Brian Casel:said like sort of after the trip, you tend to like drift away, drift back into the routine, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like, okay, we talked about all these things. We're pretty much aligned when we're hanging out in Mexico together in person. But then once we get back into the regular work week, it's like, well, well, now we're just sort of back to working on projects, but maybe we're not working on the the right things that we said that we would be prioritizing.
Justin:Yeah. I I think what's changed now is I think like, I really this retreat wanted to get to we can't avoid big topics anymore. So, you know, basically, it'll like, one of us will bring up a big topic. And it'll be like, kinda like, not really moving. And then strategically, what will happen so video is a good example.
Justin:I brought up video four or five years ago. I said, I think this is going to be the main thing we need to focus on. Customers are coming to Transistor to distribute their podcast everywhere. And creators are creating audio and video. Like so many people are doing exactly what we're doing right now.
Justin:Recording in Riverside. They've got an sure, that can output an audio file, but they've also got video. They're gonna want to post it somewhere. We need to be a part of that pipeline. That's the main thing we offer customers.
Justin:And it was just like something we couldn't And this is on me. Like, it's just something I The initial response I got wasn't, you know, what I was hoping for. And then And I think I also had this feeling of like, I just need to kind of democratically get consensus for the whole team to set direction. And I think I've learned really, strategy has to come from John and I. So it was just like, okay, we need to make big decisions together.
Justin:And until we fight it out, figure it out, it's not going to happen. And what what I don't want to happen, which is I think what happened is because video was too tough of a thing for us to figure out. I was like, okay, let's put that on the back burner. And let's just focus on this and this and this. But it was all like side dishes, appetizers, dessert.
Justin:It's not like the main thing. And so my excitement wasn't there as much. These are fine things to build. But it's like, you know, every SaaS in the world could revamp their billing system. That's a fine thing to work on.
Justin:It doesn't move the needle. And I really wanna get back to moving the needle. So, yeah, I think video is a good example. I mean, just AI too. Like, how are we going to communicate our our AI vision and policy to the team when we still haven't figured it out?
Justin:Right? This is like like in a marriage. Like, you can't figure out how to parent your kids or you can't figure out, like, all sorts of things. Like, if you can't figure it out, then it doesn't work. So Yeah.
Justin:I'm hearing a lot
Brian Casel:of clicking over there, Jordan.
Justin:What what
Brian Casel:I these these sound like good thoughts. What do you got?
Jordan:I'm I'm taking notes. Because I I have a lot of feedback, but I don't wanna lose it and okay. Let's hear it.
Justin:Let's hear it.
Jordan:It's not a marriage.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:It's a dictate it's a dictatorship. Oh.
Justin:This is why we got Jordan here. Keep going.
Jordan:This sounds like a marriage. And in marriage, it's okay to require consensus. If we're gonna do a certain thing, we need to agree on it if it's a big thing. And you're not gonna override your spouse with something having to do with your kids or something because that it's a different context. Yeah.
Jordan:So the the big thing is that I sense a discomfort without consensus. Yeah. And I am saying this critically, but I sympathize because I'm a middle sibling and my whole life has been consensus building. It's actually like one of my strengths is to understand what people need in a certain situation and all that. And it is a real strength when team building and when creating an environment that people enjoy working in.
Jordan:But then you get into the strategy conversation and it's really challenging. I have trouble with this also. I think Rock and Jess, who three of us have formed a leadership team for eight years plus through a few different products, they have learned my shortcomings around consensus building and they kind of poke me toward, like, we are looking to you for, like, to kind of finish this argument. So I I had to kind of build it up over time. So okay.
Jordan:If we take a step back, the real question is, a strategy leads somewhere and you don't necessarily have to have consensus on the strategy, but you do need alignment between co founders on the goal. And then from there, there's a strategy that gets you to the goal. And I personally believe that one person should have the final say around strategy. Usually, the CEO and, you know, the fiftyfifty co founder split makes it challenging. You get a lot of benefit for that, but it also makes it challenging to be decisive and fast and strong and more risk loving than risk averse.
Justin:Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about what you mean by goal? Does goal mean we're all aligned and that we wanna make a $100,000,000, or is goal customer related?
Jordan:I think it's more company related. What kind of company are we building here? What is the goal here?
Brian Casel:What are we doing? What's the end?
Justin:What are
Jordan:we doing this for? Even
Justin:Can you give me a practical example of what that looks like for Rosie?
Jordan:Yes. So the strategy that we agree on that we wanna get to is to position ourselves in the market to have a few different options between being a profitable company, selling to a strategic, or raising more money. And the way we wanna do that is to hit, you know, a certain ARR number by the by a certain time frame. Right? By the 2026, we wanna be here.
Jordan:By the 2027, we wanna be there. And doing it in such a way where we're no longer just a voice product, but we are a communications tool. And so we kinda look at projections. We look at the money part, and we say to ourselves, okay, what are we actually trying to do here? We start to willow down our options.
Jordan:Like, we're not going for VC funding right now. That doesn't quite make sense to us. So that, you know, that entire path has just been cut off as that's that's not actually what we're going for, which makes it easier to identify what we are going for. So we we've had a few acquisition offers. We're kinda, like, figuring out, okay.
Jordan:Maybe we wanna position ourselves in this way to potentially be acquired in, 2027 by this type of a strategic for this type of reason. Okay. And that I mean, I had a conversation with a strategic this week, and that is partly because that's the strategy. So my work on that path is make sure you have relationships with all the potential strategics that might acquire us in a year and explain to them
Justin:being, like the goal one day might be to get acquired or is that is that what you're saying? Like, so the goal might be to get acquired. So we need to have a relationship with Yes. Potential strategic partners.
Jordan:So I think the best path for Rosie is to be acquired by a strategic because I don't like the way the market looks to try to, like, get to a 100 millionaire on on our own, at least as of now. And I don't wanna raise more money because I don't think that will work out the right way with valuations and availability of money in the next few years, blah blah blah. So we've kinda said, okay. We should make ourselves very attractive acquisition target, but we're gonna do that profitably so that we're not dependent on right? And then you start to work backwards.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:But from there, I don't know how you would I don't know how we would do it. We don't do it this way, but we have one person setting strategy. That's me. And so the goal is a conversation. The strategy is, alright.
Jordan:Like, here's a strategic question. Should we expand our ICP from traditional local service s m SMB to the Shopify ecosystem because we have a bunch of ecommerce merchants and they're getting a lot of value. That's a you know, it splits your attention. It's gotta build a new app, all this other stuff. Okay.
Jordan:Here are the pros, cons, what it looks like technically, how much time we would need. Jordan, that's a strategic question. It's gonna split our ICP. You are gonna take responsibility if it fails, and you're gonna share the credit if it succeeds. Would you like to proceed?
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And just to tie that sort of example or map it to what I don't know. How you might be operating this in in transistors, like, any path is possible, technically possible. Right? Like, if you if decide as a company to go to to build something big in video, like, yeah, video is hard.
Brian Casel:It's tech but it's absolutely possible. You know? Go doing some big AI initiatives, hard, difficult on many levels, definitely possible. So the technical blockers are not there. It's just a decision around what are we actually prioritizing.
Brian Casel:And then to me, that every See, I definitely come from a different place than both of you because I don't have to have this dynamic with a cofounder. I I'm always making all the 100% of the decisions. Yes.
Justin:Dude, you're arguing with moltbots all day.
Jordan:Exactly. Decisiveness muscle is is well trained because he just makes decisions.
Brian Casel:But I'll I'll but I think the one thing that's relevant to all of us, and I think to any business owner, is that, like, every priority this is by far the hardest thing I ever do. I don't I don't totally agree with you that my decision making is sound. Like, I it's it's it's to me, it's the most challenging thing. And and the most challenging thing about it is that, like, every time I decide to do something, it's more a decision not to do three more things. What whatever I'm deciding to work on today, there are five other things that I can and maybe wanna be working on, maybe should be working on, but I decided today's not the day or or or this quarter is not the quarter, you know, because it's just not physically possible.
Justin:I I do have I mean, I I certainly have strong I mean, again, maybe things just went the way they had to go because I've been learning and thinking about other things and becoming more convicted about all sorts of things. Like, one would be, I do think you can't with a team of six, not everybody can do strategy. So at the very least, we need to reduce the scope because it's just if if nobody really owns strategy, then there is no strategy or direction.
Brian Casel:I I definitely agree with Jordan. And just technically speaking, theoretically, logically, the CEO role. Like, it's the decider. That's the you know? You're you're the president.
Brian Casel:You're like, it's literally your your job to, like it comes to your desk.
Justin:Technically, John's the president, and I'm the CEO.
Jordan:Okay. Whatever the process is, but among the co founders, it still ends up being someone's actual job to set the strategy.
Brian Casel:Especially on the close decisions, like the hard decisions. Those are the ones that like, the easy decisions go to your team, but the hard ones, the big ones go to
Jordan:the top. And those matter the most, and they are most likely to end up in some bushy middle.
Justin:Yes. And so here's the thing that I'm very convicted about now, especially in the age of AI. Yeah, we could build anything. But what do customers want 90% of the time? What do 80 to 90% of the customers want 80 to 90% of the time?
Justin:What is the big what are the big rocks that we need to have that we need to focus on? And I'm it could still not work out. It's still a bet. But I'm more convinced than ever that people want to upload one video file to us, have us distribute that video to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Video HLS, and distribute the audio version to Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts, everything else. When we use that as our main slogan and headline on our homepage, it's what converts the best.
Justin:It's why people come to us. When we ask them, what are you trying to do here? They don't know about hosting. They don't know about RSS. They don't know about XML.
Justin:They don't know about any of that. All they're thinking is, I want to get my episodes out into the world. And so I'm more convinced about that than ever. And, yeah, we could build whatever. We could occupy our time with lots of things, and they might still be worth doing.
Justin:But I really want to focus on some of these big rocks. Like that is like burning a hole in me right now. Just like I want to especially right now, I feel like we're
Brian Casel:What I wanna know is like, why why are you not?
Jordan:Yeah. What's happening? It sounds easy, obvious, but there's always very valid reasons, valid excuses. So what's the friction? What's what's the
Justin:Up until now, I think just hadn't got to this point where over the retreat, we talked about it. And, you know, we basically got to alignment that, yeah, we should be doing this. Like, we just needed to face the conversation, have the uncomfortable conversation.
Brian Casel:Do you think it's like it's it's like such a big new rock to move that, like, it's it's it's the pain of starting it? I have this all the time. It's like, I know I I gotta do a video, but, like, just figuring out the first line takes me, like, half a day just to work myself up to that. And then and then I get rolling with it.
Justin:Well well, to be fair yeah. To be fair, things have gotten more clear over time. And AI certainly helped me get more clear because I could start building prototypes using it myself and then sharing it with a few friends and having them use it and then realize it's not as complicated or difficult as we thought it would be.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because I experienced that all the time for years, way before AI and Clarity Flow. It's like, this sounds like a four month feature to build. We ship it in, a month.
Justin:That's right. So it's like at the beginning, it was, like, four or five years ago, I knew that the recording apps Riverside and Zencastr and Squadcast were eventually gonna get into hosting. Like, I knew that was coming. And I said, we have to have an answer to this. So is it so when we're talking about video, if you go really wide, it could be like, do we want to build a riverside?
Justin:And that was very big. Right? That that just seemed like with a team of six, impossible. Maybe not impossible now, but it was impossible back then. And then it was like, well, maybe we just need to host the video.
Justin:And hosting videos is complicated. It's just like you're paying way more bandwidth. You're paying for way more hosting. It's also like now who's gonna like scan this video for horrible pornography and other things? Like, what, you know, what are we how are we gonna do all that?
Justin:But once I was able to build the prototype and feel it myself and go through the motions, I'm realizing people can upload a video file to us, and we can just offload it to YouTube and Spotify. And that will please 80% of the people. YouTube and Spotify, they can do their own content assessment of it, and they will let us know if they're taking it down.
Brian Casel:I I would also let me just push on this for a second. Like, what you just described sound like a lot of what ifs with with video. And I faced a lot of those same what ifs with ClarityFlow. ClarityFlow is very video centric. That was the feature number one when when I built it.
Brian Casel:Of course, you have a lot more surface area than than ClarityFlow does, but we have a lot now. And and, like, almost all of those big scary what if situations did not come come to play. Like, What I'm saying is there could be issues with offensive content. There could be AWS bills that get out of control. But first of all, those are pretty good problems to be dealing with because it means you have a high volume of activity.
Brian Casel:The bigger problem is if you don't have any activity. But even that is not such a big problem because these days you could build some version of of the video feature in a month or two.
Justin:Yeah. And You know?
Jordan:Building a feature doesn't seem like the issue, though.
Justin:It was just alignment. It was just I I don't like I don't like conflict. John doesn't like conflict. We're both strong personalities. And we just weren't talking enough.
Justin:We just weren't figuring it out enough. I mean, like I said, we've averaged a founder retreat every two years. And there's some weeks the only time we talk is on the team call on on Zoom. Okay.
Jordan:Can can I add in a few things that Rock and I have done
Justin:over the years? I'd love to hear it.
Jordan:Yeah. Because Rock is in Slovenia. I used to be in Portland. We were on other sides of the world. Now I'm in Chicago a little bit closer, but we're still very, very far apart.
Jordan:We have a lot of time distance between us. So space and time in a remote team is like the enemy of alignment. It's just over time, things drift and Slack loses tone and you might I just had this with Rock the other day. He mentioned something and I gave a bit of a snarky response. And then the next morning when I woke up, I looked and he was like, hey, that didn't feel good.
Jordan:I'm sorry for my part. So so you go off on a day and you're you're making assumptions. So it's just the space and time is is, like, risky.
Justin:Yes.
Jordan:We we have a weekly call with the team, but Rock and I have a biweekly call, just the two of us. In that call, depends on the week. It can range from 25, 75, fifty, fifty, or 75, 25, the other way between personal and business. That intertwined personal life, you know, we've been working together for ten years. He knows my kids.
Jordan:He holds his kid up at the camera. And that, like, love is what allows for the communication to heal quickly after there's some type of a rupture. It is what allows the assumption making to remain in check. The humanity of both people, you know, trumps the the business side. So we just keep it warm.
Jordan:And from time to time, a a founder retreat's a big deal. Right? It's a big thing and you guys took your wives, like a whole thing. We have done before where we were like, this doesn't feel we're not where we like to be working together. I'll come out.
Jordan:Yeah. Let's meet here. You know, he's in Europe, so for him to go to London is a $150 flight or something. And we'll just go spend we'll just eat a few meals together, you know, for two nights, three days, and we call it business. We end up talking business 10% of the time, and we enjoy ourselves.
Jordan:Then it's like a long distance relationship. Keeps the fire going for months.
Justin:Damn, dude. Is exactly what I was feeling.
Brian Casel:I've always been jealous of you guys having these companies where you can do these kind of things.
Justin:Well, okay. Like, yeah, I definitely felt It's awesome.
Brian Casel:It sounds so hard and it sounds so awesome at Yes. The same
Jordan:It's enriching, rewarding, whatever that thing that happens outside of work, but in the work context. It's not your personal life, but it's your regular life, but it's this mixture that makes it more bearable to go through stuff. There's someone there. You're down, they're up, they bring you up and vice versa. It it is part of the the the joy.
Jordan:And I
Justin:mean yeah. So this is one of the conclusions I came to after the the retreat. When I get back together with John, I feel like, man, like, I love this guy. Like, we're we ended up being like island boys together. You know?
Justin:We're like, we're riding bikes around. We're like sharing you know, we're drinking margaritas. We're And all those little moments where, yeah, we had focused work times every day where we'd go to a cafe and we're like, okay, we got some big things to talk about. Let's get into it. But so much of the value was the other 80%, where we're just like sharing meals together, we're going on little adventures together, we're just riding bikes through the, you know, these cool streets.
Justin:And, and, you know, having our wives there today was actually incredibly additive. It just felt like for this to work, like we have to be good friends. And it actually works so much better when we're in this warm friendship mode. And so, yeah, we came to the same conclusion just like we need more phone calls for sure. And I just put it on our calendar weekly for right now.
Justin:Just like it before it would be like Justin and John do bookkeeping together. It's like that's fucking terrible. Yeah. I just have it I just say Justin and John hang out. And Yeah.
Justin:It's just a standing weekly meeting. We'll see where it's gonna happen next week. We blew up in the beginning stages, we love doing product work together, like sketching and talking. We're We're gonna try to do more of the stuff we like together. But then the other thing was we just need to get on more planes.
Justin:Like, we've got budget. We got time. We can we can do it. There's It's no fun. It's fun.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Mexico on the company card. Hell Exactly. It's great.
Justin:And it's a it's a big deal that our wives get along. Like, the wives had such a good time together. And that there's just so much luck. Like, there's so much good fortune we have in this situation. And it was just so nice to be reminded to be in person and to be like, shit, like, I really like this guy.
Justin:And also, like when we're sitting next to each other, things that would have taken us literally a month of just Slack messages and passive aggressive comments or whatever. It's just resolved in literally Right. Right. There's no for thirty minutes. It's just it it it is dramatically better to be in person.
Brian Casel:My only other question, and we can sort of like move on to the next thing, is I'm curious to know, like, what did John bring into this trip? Whatever you're able to share, like, are there any, like, big topics or open questions or concerns, maybe even things that you don't necessarily agree with, but he he feels pretty strongly about? I'm curious on that.
Justin:I mean, this is the yeah. This is the other thing that's, like, nice about being in person is, like, John is more reserved than I am. Like, he he's a thinker. He's like, I could fill all the airtime easily. Right?
Justin:So being together, there's just so many more moments for him to say, like, hey, I had this idea talking about the kind of company you want to work at. He just has all sorts of had all sorts of ideas about, you know, like, for example, if if we're going to do this AI thing, if we're going to incorporate more AI into our and let's say it makes us way more productive. Maybe we should have a four day work week in the summer. Like, that might be something that I would enjoy. That might be something that would be motivating for for him.
Justin:And I had never heard him express that before ever. So it was just so
Brian Casel:It's actually really interesting. You know, I never really thought about it from that angle. I know we're probably gonna get into the Mexican standoff thing with Yeah. With, like, the AI We're on Mexico anyway. With teams.
Brian Casel:But the but it's interesting, because we're constantly talking about like, oh, AI is making us all so much faster. We can ship so much more. We can move our strategy so much faster in fewer days. But maybe for the bootstrapped companies, especially the long standing steady state transistors of the world, maybe the big benefit of embracing AI is, like, we can we can even double down on the comm company ethos and, like, let's go to four day work weeks or whatever that might look like, you know, thanks to the productivity of embracing AI. Like
Justin:Yes. As long
Brian Casel:as your line's interesting.
Justin:And as long as your line and so, I mean, I think the other big issue between us was just I've been using AI a lot. And until we got together, I couldn't figure out like what what what's the disconnect here? Like, what's and just to hear him honestly say like, listen, like, when you come to be with a fully built prototype, it's demotivating. Like, you've explored this whole problem area by yourself with Claude. But I haven't been a part of any of that.
Justin:And we just need more time together where we could be a part of that together. Maybe we're both driving Claude together in a pair programming kind of way. But maybe also, like like he said, like, go and build your prototypes. Like, do all that exploration. But when we get together, it would be nice to even just like, bring me back and go, okay, like, here's kind of what I'm here's the vision.
Justin:Here's the strategy. Here's what I'm thinking we should go. And then allow me to get my creative juices flowing. Then you'll
Brian Casel:benefit like, journey that you that got you from A to B.
Justin:That's right. And I think we're gonna try it. This might this will be v one. But I think there's gonna be something about this that'll be really fun for us. Because I can do all my exploration.
Justin:He can do all his exploration. But when we come together, I think we're just gonna have iPads with that freeform tool open and just be like, okay, let's just sketch out what we're thinking, feeling, or what we've discovered and see what grows organically that way. And I think I'm such a self motivated person. I sometimes, like, maybe Jordan can speak to this. But, like, motivating a team, like, you have to there if you're gonna have a team of smart people, you have to figure out ways to motivate them.
Justin:And if you're if you're, like, doing things that consistently demotivate people
Brian Casel:My guess again, you guys have more experience with teams. But I think I think what tends to demotivate people in general is when there is a lack of a of a vision and target that we're all driving toward. You know? And if you're sort of just like showing up and like picking off the next ticket on on GitHub and and then calling it and, you know, calling it a day at 05:00, it's like that can just feel demotivating. It's like, what are we actually building toward here?
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin:Yeah. And and also, if I'm doing too much in a cave by myself and I'm not And then I just surprise people with stuff. I I don't
Jordan:that's tricky because when when you find yourself, like, restraining yourself and your motivation, that's not fair. Yeah. You you do need some space. This seems to be coming up among teams. These, like it's not personality difference.
Jordan:It's like it's like people have different responses to something like that. Yeah. To to I have been the person that builds the thing. Mhmm. I'm used to you bringing ideas and design, and then I make a lot of the decisions when I build them.
Jordan:And now you're coming to me with something fully built, being like, wouldn't this be awesome? Let's get this into our product. And you feel like you have been skipped in some way. Your opinion has not been. I I would not want to slow the person down.
Jordan:I would want to figure out a way to allow the person to do their thing. Anytime someone's self motivated, the last thing you wanna do is hold on a second. You need more more breaks. Like, no no way. That that doesn't make sense.
Jordan:It is fair to say in this process, this is how I wanna participate, but that should not be don't come to me with with fully finished prototypes. It should be, once you come to me with a fully finished prototype, we have reached one part of the process. It's not the end of the process because I wanna say in the process, but by all means, if you're self motivated to go and build a prototype, no one should stand in the way there. Yeah. I
Justin:think we got there.
Brian Casel:Because there's so much value that can be extracted from a prototype. You won't use the prototype in transistor, but first of all, it's just literally showing your vision and what you believe customers want. Second of all, there's probably a lot of technical breadcrumbs. We come to the real implementation of this, all right, we sort of figured out half of this business logic, we sort of have that system, that's one approach we could take. And then John goes and builds it for real.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we're getting there. Like, even when we were together and we started to sketch out ideas, eventually, was like, okay. Well, let me just pull up this prototype I built and show you some of the ways it's working here.
Brian Casel:Like, it is what Jordan is saying, I think, is like, it's not healthy for you to feel like, well, I can't really show John this prototype because I don't I don't want it might be awkward. This is a tool. This is a new superpower that we all have. We we cannot suppress it. We need to be able to use it.
Justin:Yeah. I I think I think we're we're almost there. Like, I think it's gonna be yeah, like, even just the ordering of things. Like, someone's like
Jordan:The ordering is actually the most disorienting part. Yeah. Because it used to have a logical order, and now you don't need to go according to the logical order of design and UX and thinking through this thing. And then it goes here, then it goes to front end, then it goes to the back. That order isn't the same anymore.
Justin:Mhmm. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so I I think there's still lots to figure out, but I do think
Jordan:Right. But the creative cauldron, the thing that's bubbling up, like, don't suppress that. Well, and I was very clear about that. So I think also, I don't
Justin:remember if you guys I had that conversation with Jason Cohen, and I I don't know if I ever ended up publishing that. Basically, the the big thing was in a partnership, you both need to be a 100% committed to helping the other person get what they want. And so he's like, that's where the magic happens. Because if if you know that they're committed to allowing you to be you and you to, like, run, like, I like, I'm that way. I want to run my fast horses.
Justin:You know, I got they're ready to go. They're in the stable. They're chomping at the bit like and at the same I also know John's got his horses too. Right? And they're running they're ready to run-in a different way.
Justin:If we can both be assured that we're committed to helping the other person get what they want, that's where the magic will happen. And so I said, like, I got to be me. Like, I can't I can't turn down me. Don't don't sense the magic. Yeah.
Justin:So I'm gonna keep doing this. I'm gonna keep exploring all that stuff. But I can work on how we, you know, like, for example, like, I I can become a lot in Slack. Like, I I I'll post twenty, thirty videos a day. And I'm like, I could definitely dial that down.
Justin:And I think just finding a better space for it, which is, you know, if if you John, if you give me a call every if we have a call every week, and we're like working on things together, and I can just get it out of my system, that's like, I don't need to post 50 videos that week. We just Yeah. We just, like, get it all out Mhmm. In our in our little space.
Brian Casel:I have I mean, I'm curious to know from Jordan, especially what you've seen from Rock's end on his embrace of of AI and and how his side of the of the product process has has changed in the last couple of months. Yeah. I don't know if you could speak to that.
Jordan:He he has had the the the first big problem was frustration around the process being too slow. He was confused on why he should be censoring himself. He's like, but I'm I'm done. I can do this now. Why am I waiting for this second part of the feature when I can just do it right now, but just because it's not in the ticket, I'm supposed to not do it?
Jordan:And then I then I pass it off and I have to get approval? He was like, this I don't like this. This feels con too cons you know, confining. Mhmm. And in in some ways, what actually happened was he he almost he started making assumptions.
Jordan:He started getting frustrated at the product part of the process because he assumed that the person running the product wouldn't wanna give up that power in the process. And he was he was, like, pre frustrated. And then as soon as we brought this to Jessica, she was like, I don't care. She was like, I just whatever we need to do, then let's let's go. Let's go.
Jordan:I don't wanna get no I don't wanna get in the way. I want the superpower too. I I wanna be able to do more things on the front end. Can you help me with that? And we were like, oh, it it it's happened a few times, and she always surprises us to the good.
Jordan:Every single time, it's like, oh my god. She's gonna come back from attorney leave, and we have pivoted from Rowley to Rosie, and I hope she's gonna be okay with it. And she was like, what? Of course. Let's go.
Justin:Isn't this how all hard communication is? Is that you just pre imagine how the interaction will go, and then you make up all the reasons it's gonna be tough. All those what ifs.
Jordan:All the
Brian Casel:All all those what ifs. It's like you don't worry about it when it's actually a problem.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah. What I wanted to add in when I heard you talking about you and John and maybe the zero sum nature of are we gonna do this or are we gonna do that, is is we we we make deals. Rock and I have some deal deal making. And the closer you are to bankruptcy, the fewer deals you can make.
Jordan:The the the more real shit is and there's not much money in banking, you don't have a lot of customers, then, like, you can't make deals. You can't be like, well, let's do my feature and then we'll do your feature. No. You have to, like, follow something more strict. But as you get away from the death zone and you become more stable, you can make deals.
Jordan:Okay, I really want this. You want to get this done first because that would set it up properly and you don't want to inject this into the code base because you want to move to the new version of Laravel before we do that, like, okay, you get that. And then I get my thing. Maybe it's over the course of a quarter and it doesn't need to be this week the same way when you're really close to the death zone. You're like, this is what customers want right now.
Jordan:I don't care what you want. You have to do this. You you guys don't seem to be there, so you you can you can make deals. You can say you know, you layer in, like, that 37 signals element of, like, who who cares more in this situation? And if you're both cofounders and you're fifty fifty and you really care, you should have the space to say, yes.
Jordan:Let's do both. You wanna go first? Cool. But I also want and if you wanna pair it down instead of being this gigantic massive feature, then let's do this part and then see what customers say. So you you can kinda make those deals so nobody loses and nobody feels like it's like a tug tug of war.
Justin:Yeah. I love that. I it felt like that's where we got to like, in some ways, I went to the retreat feeling like John hates AI. And then he said, okay. First big thing I wanna talk about is if we're gonna use AI, like and it makes us more productive, like, what do we get out of it?
Justin:Like, I kinda want, like, something out of it. Like, I want their, like, four day work week or something.
Jordan:And it started to feel like, oh, yeah. He's making deals.
Justin:We can make deals. Yeah. And but but the other thing that was surprising as a part of it is you might be closer together than you think. Because in my mind, we were way far apart. And then I realized, oh, wait a second.
Justin:Where did this fuck? Like yeah. You if the deal is we adopt AI and maybe we incorporate four day work weeks into our like, maybe we try it for a summer or something like that. Hell, sure. I'll do that.
Brian Casel:I don't wanna speak for John. He's not here. So
Justin:I wanted to make him the special surprise guest, but he he he got a little bit of a Mexican stomach bug. Uh-oh.
Jordan:I There's the risk.
Brian Casel:I I would also beg the question of, like, why are we against or slow or hesitant to start embracing AI? And I and I I do get it from a team standpoint. Like, let's not push it on the team so quickly. Let's let's ease that in from an organizational standpoint. I sort of understand that.
Brian Casel:That's really hard for for all teams.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But for as Jordan was just describing Rock's experience with it, I think any serious I'm not saying John's not a serious developer. And I don't even know really what his stance is on this. I just mean more in general. Because hear this sentiment out there in the world from developers. Like, I just don't I I like I don't see how you cannot be so excited about the possibility of changing your workflow in some small ways, some major ways to start to build agentically.
Brian Casel:I understand that people love the poetry of writing code and everything, but I'm sorry. We're we're past that now. Mhmm. You know?
Justin:Yeah. I think
Brian Casel:Not the Like, you can do that on your on your on your hobby projects. Mhmm. But what and this is this is the pros. We build with AI now.
Jordan:Yeah. Go ahead. I wanna add something to to that FTE.
Justin:Again, like, we hadn't talked about it. I was scared to talk about it, is the truth. I was scared to talk about it. And so I would bring things up. And, you know, maybe my way of dealing with it is I would just keep bringing things up in team meetings and in Slack and, you know but not actually like yeah.
Justin:Passive aggressively. Thank you.
Jordan:That that's what people do when they don't feel they can communicate clearly.
Justin:That's right. So I was doing that. And so I'd never really even asked him like, what have you used it to build? And he's like, oh, I've I I've been I've been using it for all of these personal projects. And he told me about his these personal projects he's built end to end with Claude code.
Justin:In my brain, he just hates it. But in reality, he's using it. We're we're not completely aligned. But we're a lot closer than we thought. And then when I actually start talking about like, what are your concerns?
Justin:You know, we we can talk through that stuff. So yeah. I do I think in the market, people the people that are opposed to it, there's a variety of things that are making them opposed to it.
Brian Casel:In the market, you mean like like customers with, like, AI features? Or
Justin:No. I mean, like, developers that are grieving the loss of their craft.
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. Like, the job market.
Jordan:Yeah. I I wanna I wanna just touch on that for a sec because, Brian, my my instinct response is like yours.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:I hear your objections, but what in the world are you thinking? This is not optional. Okay. But I think whenever I hear myself that convinced of my point of view Yeah. Maybe we have to acknowledge or something there.
Brian Casel:Maybe we're drinking too much Kool Aid.
Jordan:Well, it's like we can feel like we're right. However, there's something going on in certain segment of the developer community, they are not stupid. They are ambitious. They're all these good things, and there's still a lot of resistance, and it feels like we need to take a different approach to that resistance than what are you thinking? This is insane.
Jordan:Now Mhmm. I will acknowledge the hypocrisy of just letting a developer go two weeks ago, partly because she just was not getting there with AI was among among other issues. But still, there's something going on there. If you think about your situation, Justin, you're not gonna fire anyone. It's not it's it's not it's it can't be from a position of, like, a threat.
Jordan:Like, you must do this or x, y, and z. So, what is the slightly softer, more understanding approach? This feels like it's also happening around more established products and more established code bases that have been around longer and there's more resistance to just, well, this thing's brand new. Let's just, you know, go from the start.
Brian Casel:Yeah, it's like we-
Jordan:There's something going on there that's more valid than we want to
Brian Casel:have We've had a good thing going for so long.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Right.
Justin:And and I mean, to also be fair so John and Jason have used Claude Code for some pretty major projects that we just had been dragging our feet on. Switching from basically one model to another model, like reorganizing how we handle private subscribers. They did this giant migration. It was a big PR, basically all with Cloud Code. And so we're using it.
Justin:I think it's around it's all the messy other stuff. Like yeah. Just like who gets to contribute to the code base? Who's gonna review all that code? There's there are some thing when you have 36,000 users, you've got you want things to be solid.
Justin:There's lots of issues around feature creep. Like
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:Like I do understand that.
Jordan:To dig into. Right? Clearly, it's not ideological. He's using it in his personal projects. And so, you know, help me understand, articulate what the hesitation is, what are the valid parts of the hesitation, what are just the emotional hang ups around the hesitation.
Jordan:There and and part a lot of that goes right back to the strategy conversation. Because if you say to yourself I mean, for us, it is not bring Rosie to be a communications suite by the end of the year. It is by the end of the quarter. And if that's the case, you do not have an option. You can't write that code yourself.
Jordan:So it helps inform that also, whereas if you're viewing it as we wanna go from here to here by this time frame and we don't need to sprint and rush to everything, either way, it feels like the conversation needs to be opened up around what's the hesitation? Help me understand.
Brian Casel:Yep. I do think I do think that you're you're totally right, Justin, that these legacy code bases and by and legacy can just be even as old as twelve months ago at
Justin:this I think we've also all had
Brian Casel:that But especially having multi year SaaS in place with active customers, it is definitely much harder to start to let AI agents and Cloud Code loose on these code bases when humans built most of it, all of it, like, for for years. That's absolutely true. And I think that the big
Justin:You what's easier for Cloud Code? It's easier for Cloud Code to build a whole new podcast hosting platform from scratch than 50%. Bug in your like, Cloud Code will burn through in ten minutes and create the whole app from scratch. And then you ask ask it to fix one bug and it just churns for, you know, thirty, forty minutes sometimes.
Brian Casel:Or or but I think the the reality honestly about that that thing is that it actually will fix the bug both ways pretty easily. It's the humans who don't want to give it that control on the code base when when the humans built the first version of that of that thing. The so what I what I think probably needs to happen is companies, especially smaller companies, this is much easier for smaller companies like Transistor. One of the top initiatives in my opinion would be more of like a DevOps project. Where it's like, let's do a rethink on how we, the team, interact with our codebase so that we can get to a point where we can leverage Cloud Code and these agentic tools to their fullest extent.
Brian Casel:And that includes how we spec and design and ship features, and it includes pipelines for how we do AI assisted code review and deployment pipelines. Let's just rethink all of it. And maybe that will take a whole quarter just to get our comfort level up and explore all these. Because these agentic workflows are possible. It's it's much deeper and much more sophisticated now than just type a prompt and vibe code whatever you want.
Brian Casel:Like Yeah. There are real high level experienced engineers thinking about what is the new way to build agentically. And and, yeah, it's super easy to do that on new projects. It's but it does take an actual, like, initiative internally from the technical lead team to be like, let's figure out the new way to to build our next eight huge features. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin:I agree. I I agree. I think we're I and I think we're gonna we talked about experimenting with that first with the marketing side because the marketing side is a separate that our our main app is a Rails app. Our marketing site is a Laravel app and has its own deployment pipeline, its own, you know, everything. So we're the the idea is, like, let's figure out some of that dev op tooling, etcetera, on the marketing side first, and then see what we figure out and then move on to this other stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. For sure.
Justin:Well, that was yeah. That was the retreat. Is there anything we missed? Anything? I think we covered the the big thing.
Jordan:You got absolutely no tan, by the way.
Brian Casel:You got you got nothing. Man. There you go.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I I this is I'm I my wife got tanned. I I was not A little bit. Not little bit.
Justin:Did you know? Yeah. A little bit, but not not not quite there. I gotta go back. That's the thing.
Justin:Gotta go back. Do do we wanna chat a little bit about this Mexican standoff thing? Someone said that they wanted to chat about that a little bit. Do we wanna go in there into that?
Brian Casel:No. I I wasn't sure if you were gonna bring that up as as a topic. I know you've been talking about it this week. But
Justin:There was a there was a great entry point we had to it earlier. I do think it's interesting just the dynamics in Teams and to recognize that there is going to be a lot of you know, Jordan has described it as the company folding in on itself. I talked to somebody else who said it is rules are compressing. I talked to somebody else. I reached out I'm writing this article right now.
Justin:Currently titled Will Claude Code Ruin Our Team? I'm hoping to get published this tomorrow. And I'm hoping it does well on Hacker News, hence the title. But the I reached out to some folks, some other founders I know. And they were saying I think I've got some of those poll quotes down here.
Justin:Oh, it's not in this version. I described kind of the standoff. And the standoff, the way that, you know, Andreessen presents it, is between designer, product manager, and engineer. But I think the standoff is happening between
Brian Casel:Yeah. All over roles.
Justin:And there's definitely a lot of teams experiencing this. Like, people that we all know, I reached out and they're like some said, yeah, there's we're definitely experiencing this, especially around product managers wanting to write more code. Someone else said, the challenge of their team is
Brian Casel:And I think for for folk just to be clear, like, the the the basic concept is that, like, the developers is basically saying, well, I can start to take over duties of the project manager and the designer. And the designer is starting to say, like, well, I can start to build, and I can product manage. The product managers are like, well, I can do that. So everyone's trying to, like, sort of fill the void and and take over more territory.
Justin:Everybody feels more empowered while at the same time, a lot of their job like the the the the Kent Beck quote that everyone's talking about is the value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage of my remaining 10% went up a thousand. So there's not only this feeling by some people on the team that, wow, 90% of what I've invested in is no longer useful or helpful or whatever. But now I have to focus on this high leverage 10%. And a big thrust of what I explore in the article is, yeah, but now everybody's going for that 10%.
Justin:Things like who gets to craft goals for the product? Who gets to understand what users actually want? Who gets to be crystal clear about the experience and value you're creating? Who gets to design, build, and maintain robust software architecture? So this is advice that was given to engineers.
Justin:And my response to that is like, yeah, everybody's gonna go after that. Yeah. There's gonna be a jockeying for position on a lot of teams. Because now not only do some people feel way more empowered, they can do more than they could ever do before. But number two, the there's been this loss of, you know, in some cases, what what has been somebody's identity, what's been like the thing that they've done and gotten paid well for, and they're gonna wanna move up the value stack.
Justin:So a lot of people wanting to move up the value stack. A lot of people feeling empowered.
Brian Casel:I think the hard truth is that we are definitely going into a period or going through a period of phasing in the new reality that building stuff requires less people. And so, you know, this is all this whole conversation that you're talking about, this Mexican stand up, is aimed at existing teams that already have these roles. So the question is how do we get to the new reality where the team is is fewer? Because that's just like, in in my case, like, I'm basically solo. I've got one or two people helping me here and there.
Brian Casel:But, like, it's I I look at it more like I'm just not going to hire roles that I probably would have hired for a a few years ago because either either I do them or my agents do them.
Justin:By the way, that is another high ranking president of a software company that we know. He was like, we're not firing anybody, but the big story isn't who we're not hiring anymore. Like roles we had open for tender and we're just like like data scientists was the one they're like, we need to hire data scientists. They had it the opening open forever. And then eventually, they're like, actually, we can do most of this with Claude code.
Justin:Like, we're just not gonna hire that person.
Brian Casel:But I also like I I was listening to, as I tend to do, like, know, Jason Fried talking on the on the Rework podcast about he was posed a question this week about what do we think about AI's impact on our team at Basecamp, their team at Basecamp. And he was like, well, part of it hasn't really changed my stance that I've had for many years, which is we just try to stay as small as possible. We assign two person teams to build features. We've we've kept our team to around fifty, sixty people. Right?
Brian Casel:Like, whereas there are competitors of hundreds or thousands. I I think most of think most of what we are seeing, like, you know, the famous thing that went around this week what's his name? The guy from Block.
Justin:Don't know if I saw this.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Dorsey. They went from like a thousand people down to 500 people.
Justin:From 10,000
Jordan:to 4,000 or 10,000 to
Justin:6,000.
Brian Casel:10,000 to four So, you know, I think a lot of this is like they were over hired in the first place. Yeah, severely. You know, and AI, it's I don't I don't really see it as like a direct result of like, AI makes us faster, so we don't need these these roles. Maybe some of that is at play, but there's also like, what did all these people do in the first place? Did we really need them?
Jordan:Those companies are very hard to, you know, find a proper analogy to our companies. So when I read this first great article, the first thing that comes to mind as soon as I read that is product vision and strategy and the direction of where we're going is more important than ever. Yeah. Because you can see in this new world with everyone having superpowers, it can go all over the place. So to at least direct the energy and the leverage in the right direction feels like a a very big deal.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And I think it's much, much easier with a small team. Even one layer beyond a completely flat organization. Even one layer of manager and then team is already complicated. So there's a real advantage to just this very, very flat organization. We don't feel like we're stepping on each other's toes very much even though the natural boundaries of one role or another have, you know, evaporated.
Jordan:Mhmm. But because you're still kinda have a general role, there's enough to do in that role that is specific to what you do, but it does require some letting go of your ego around just not you know, Jess just doesn't really care that Claude wrote the PRD. Okay. Yeah. She reviews it Yeah.
Jordan:And makes comments, but she isn't offended or threatened by the fact that this thing got created automatically. It just means she can look at, oh, how do we go from a single product to a multiproduct admin over the next few months in a way that our audience is gonna understand it? Let me go have those conversations with our designer and use my 10%. This is what makes me special, And just let go of the other stuff because anything other than that feels like you're standing in front of a steamroller. You can try to stop it all you want.
Jordan:What what's the point?
Brian Casel:I always tend to I've I've always just tended to to prefer fewer cook fewer cooks in the kitchen on all projects. No matter what it is, the fewer fewer cooks in the kitchen is a good thing. Collaboration is a good thing too, of course. And and putting like, a great band together to create something great is magic. But I've always loved the approach of, we need to build this big feature, let's just put two, maybe three people a room together, close the door, and let let those two or three people work their magic rather than saying, like, we need a team of eight on that, or we need a team of 12.
Brian Casel:We don't anymore.
Justin:I think the way you put it before, Brian, is, like, there's this performative collaboration and performative work and doing work just so that somebody has a job or a role or whatever. Like, that is definitely, I think, going away. And
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because nobody nobody, a, wants to do that. Nobody wants to do work that's BS just for their performance. Nobody wants to watch or consume somebody's BS performance. They they they just wanna create great stuff.
Justin:And The question is how much of that there is? Like, basically, The Office, the TV show, is based on the premise that most people in an office don't shoot do shit all. They're just, like, doing this kind of performative work that doesn't produce any real
Brian Casel:outcomes. If you think about like, okay, let's say we have a team of 10 people, and we're used to only working on two big projects at any given time because typically those projects need a team of six or four or five and five or something like that. Mhmm. The new reality is those same projects really only need one or maybe two people working on them together, and they don't need the other three. So does that mean we need to lay off seven people?
Brian Casel:No. Probably not. But maybe it can mean now our now our company can work on four projects at a time instead of two. Maybe those those people can can start to do more meaningful work instead of just doing a tiny thing. And I think I think the people in this job market who are going to really thrive are gonna be the ones who are hungry to be like, let me go own a whole feature.
Brian Casel:Let me go own a whole project. And, like, we can do that feature even though we're also doing this other feature right now because I'm here. I'm already on the team. Just give it to me and and Cloud Code. And, like like, yeah, I'm I'm just a designer, but maybe I could spin up at least a prototype of the back end.
Brian Casel:You know? Like Mhmm.
Jordan:Jordan? That's the upside. That's the part that the that the management needs to show people that there's an upside to this. Yes. It's changing, but let's not ignore the upside.
Jordan:The Yeah. The the problem with, like, news and the general market and the timeline is it points out the downside constantly and always shows that this is what's going wrong and this is the bad effect and these are the things being lost. It's our job inside of our companies to be like, yes, it's different now. But look at all this. Look at the upside.
Jordan:Look at the positives. Look at what I mean, I I see it now. We work with Mark, Blanken on his last name as our fractional CMO. I feel like I am paying him to develop these like skills and agents and this system. He is like a super marketer human right now.
Jordan:And so so he has kind of identified what the upside is. And because of that, the motivation is, like, through the roof. And and each each of these individual roles is like, you know, let's say Sam, who has a pretty challenging job. I've been doing his job for the last two weeks, one part of it because he's been on vacation. It's hard to come up with how to close someone and how to price a deal that's unique.
Jordan:It's like a lot of decision, friction, and fatigue, and I'm not sure, but they want these to many minutes. And for him to get this leverage around these tools just makes the job better, makes the job easier. And and it is a challenge because you you feel both at the same time. You just kind of have to keep pointing up, Yeah, but look what we're going to be able to do. We're going to be able to do this in a quarter instead of in a year, and then we're going to be able to get this next thing.
Jordan:And then you're going to able to have a four day workweek. And then maybe we're going to make a bucket load of money also, like upside, upside, upside. Don't forget, that's what we're here for.
Brian Casel:I just wanted to mention, I know this is I'm not the host today, but I think it's sort of related to what we've been talking about today, which is this idea of team building. To me, it's more like company building, or company design systems building. And that's something that I've been fascinated with my entire career, which is like, how can I build systems and processes that make this company run like a machine? You know? Even though there's a lot of creativity and humanness involved, I'm a systems guy.
Brian Casel:Right? And so I think it's really fascinating to me right now, obviously, all the content that I've been doing lately on this on on YouTube with OpenClaw and and building teams of agents. It to me, it's so kind of weird, but interesting how close what I'm working on every single day now is to what I've worked on for ten, twenty years with my teams, which is I used to write detailed processes in Google Docs. Yeah. You made people to to carry those out.
Brian Casel:And I'm literally writing or me and Claude are writing processes and skills and assigning them to AI agents. And and and then also there's a software element piece to it where I'm building technical systems to be able to delegate and have agents actually pick up tasks automatically and and literally work like employees on my team. What what I'm getting at is that, like, yes, I'm obviously, I use AI to build stuff, and that happens very fast. And, I have agents who pick up tasks and do stuff on their own on this Mac mini machine running OpenClaw, and that's cool and weird and interesting. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But what I'm doing, what I'm sitting here doing every single day, which is still slow and at human pace, not agent pace, is systems, process. How do completely rethink how I do work? But really, it's like I'm rethinking, like, do I operate a company now? It's different now. And like, I really think that founders, team leaders, like that needs to be your job now in 2026.
Brian Casel:It's it's total rethink. It's also interesting to me, this whole OpenClaw project, it's much different than working with Cloud Code, because with Cloud Code, I'm just spinning up an app and building it and shipping it. Takes me a day. But my work on OpenClaw and building a team of agents is every single day for going on six, seven weeks now. And it's an evolution.
Brian Casel:And it started to occur to me that like, nothing has changed. I'm I'm always working on a company. I'm always working on the the company is the product. The the the company is the system that is always changing. It's never in a finished state.
Brian Casel:And like, that's what that's how we should be thinking now. Of course, there there are definitely still roles for humans. I I think about the the roles that, like, have to be filled by high leverage owner type people, you know, like a video editor, you know, somebody working with clients on on the consulting side of things. And, like, those are people jobs. But the process jobs, like, it's it's a system.
Brian Casel:And and we should everyone should be involved in, like, how do we rethink this and build new pipelines and build new systems and leverage it and and, like, just get our hands dirty and learn this stuff.
Justin:Yeah. Jordan, you add something?
Brian Casel:That's my TED talk. Thank thank you for your closing.
Jordan:So I I think I think Brian's right, and that's partly why this new reality lends itself so well to his approach and why it's working for him.
Justin:Brian was made for this. Brian is in the perfect spot. He's solo founder, loves processes.
Jordan:Right. All these things. But not everyone is. And and maybe that's part of the challenge that some people have. I am not a systems thinker.
Jordan:So it doesn't come as naturally to me. I can wrap my mind around what's possible. And and for me, it comes out as something like, well, I want marketing to have the same leverage as engineering. And that's another way of saying, well, you should build a marketing system the same way you built an engineering system. Right?
Jordan:But maybe my my doesn't flow through the logic for me in quite the same way.
Justin:And But I
Brian Casel:but, like, that's that's actually what I'm talking about. Like, these agentic systems are the marketing systems for me. Yeah.
Justin:You know? And even thinking about outcomes, I think. Like,
Brian Casel:even figured them out fully yet, but, that's that's what I'm working on.
Jordan:That's that's
Brian Casel:the challenge in front
Justin:I've been thinking a lot about you and your your open claw army because there are definitely a lot of tasks that I give to team members that I could theoretically give to, you know, even like Claude code in Slack. So like, hey, Josh, this image is broken on the marketing site. Could you go fix that? Well, that's that's a pretty low tier job for Josh. Like, Josh is a really great designer and developer.
Justin:So it's like, he can do that. But I could also just I I would like to have a process eventually in Slack where I can just at Claude and say, hey, Claude, this image is broken. Here's the here's the screenshot. Can you go fix that? And then it just goes off, creates the pull request, comes back to us in Slack and says, here it is.
Justin:We look at it. We deploy it. That to me is really interesting. And in where I do, I think, want to give the team like way more just freedom is to say, yeah, like, listen, everything's on the table. Like, we have prided ourselves on being a customer service organization, human customers sorry, human support.
Justin:Like, we answer your chats, all those things. But there are no shibboleths. Right? There are no like, there are no if we can free up, for example, Michael and Helen to they do a lot of Zoom calls and demos for us. If I could free them up to do 10 times more of those, that's a pretty high leverage activity for them to be doing.
Justin:And if it means that we have a really good AI bot that answers people in the first second and says, oh, that's a great question. Here's some answers for you. That is totally counterculture to us. But no shibboleths. Like, no am I using that word right?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I even know what it means. You know, the thing that comes to mind, this goes back to the very beginning of our conversation about like choosing what to work on and which means we're saying no to other things. The thing that I tend to gravitate toward all the time, like, okay, which part of my systems am I gonna try to work out today and improve today? I'm always zeroing in on the things that I am currently spending a lot of time on.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, I look at my pipeline of projects. Where where do things feel like they slow down? Or where do I just find, like, out of a five day or six day work week, how many days were burnt spent doing this? Okay.
Brian Casel:Well, maybe next week, maybe I can build a system that can take that down from three days down to one day worth of work. And and like so for me, a lot of that is like video production process, and there's a thousand steps that go into that. But but for anyone on the team, a support person, a a a documentation writer, an engineer, Anyone should be I think the mindset for most people to be thinking about is not about how can I figure out an agent system that can replace what I do today? It should be more about how can I use an agent system to do maybe 80% of what I do today while retaining the human element and keeping the quality level the same, or if not better? And and yes, that that means I'm gonna be shipping more units of whatever I I work on.
Brian Casel:But that should free me up to take on new ideas, new responsibilities.
Justin:Yeah. It's being outcome driven. It's being it's like, let let if we can get better outcomes, then why wouldn't we be doing that? Sorry, Jordan.
Brian Casel:What
Jordan:This is this is how owners speak, by the way. Okay. Not not employees. And and, Brian, you are you are traversing the landscape without any borders. There are no people in the way.
Brian Casel:You Like, it's it is a lot easier for me to
Jordan:just Yes.
Brian Casel:Armchair quarterback all year.
Jordan:I'm not saying it's better or worse. It's just a fact. I mean, this is where I can bring up my zero human company, you know, plug of the day. Yeah. But the the organization
Brian Casel:I got a cold email from one today,
Justin:by the way.
Brian Casel:There we go. It it said it said, this cold email was written by an agent powered by Pulsa, that that that company that saw.
Jordan:Signed up for that product. Product. That product is insane. You should check
Justin:it out.
Jordan:The level of creativity is so high, it was disorienting. I didn't know what I was getting into. And next thing I knew, it sent out a tweet that I had just launched a company. I was like, my man, I did not consent
Justin:to send out All
Jordan:I did was sign up for your product to check it
Justin:out. And I What's it called?
Brian Casel:I think it's Pulsia. Poseia?
Jordan:P o s I. I think I think they hit 2,000,000 ARR in, like, two weeks. Like, some absolutely astronomical
Brian Casel:level listen to his interview?
Jordan:I I haven't listened to it yet. I emailed him, and I said, your product is absolutely insane. I think I'm just a boomer, but I love it, and it's creative off the charts, and good luck with it.
Brian Casel:And and delete my account. And and, you know, it's it's so funny. So after our conversation, Jordan, last week on the podcast about about all that, like, know, I got fascinated with with and and I listened to that interview with with Andrew Warner and and that guy from from Pulsi.
Jordan:Yeah. Ben.
Brian Casel:Super interesting, like, rocket ship, like, like, month, like, you know, MRR growth, like, like, 100 it's like I don't know what it was.
Jordan:I think it's 2,000,000 ARR. 2,000,000 ARR employees.
Brian Casel:Yes. He about halfway into the so the idea for folks listening is, like, it's completely agent operated businesses. It's like you you spin up an agent. The agent does everything from, like, business ideas, spin up a website, do a marketing campaign, like, all of it. You just pay them $50 a month, and then you fund, like, these ad campaigns and let it let
Jordan:it run. Justin.
Justin:Yes. Everybody looking them up like, I I've searched it a couple times, and I was like, I do not get like, is this the company they're talking about? But their their marketing site is weird. It's like, it's site?
Jordan:Yes. Yes. It I'm telling you, the creativity is spectacular. It is is disorienting. It doesn't look like anything else.
Jordan:It's unique. I I absolutely love it. I honestly had an what felt like an absolutely insane experience because it did things that I did not consent to. And I was like, am I a boomer that I'm not ready to to I I I wanna, like, work on this for a minute before I go tell the world what I'm doing? So it was a bit disorienting that way, but it's super interesting.
Jordan:I cannot imagine it's gonna work out, like, just in a straight line, but the concept is is super cool.
Brian Casel:So I listened to the the interview with with Andrew, and it was, like, like halfway in, Andrew's asking him, like, well, what about these businesses? Are they making any money? Yeah. Like like, these age and and he was like, well, the one that made the most money is up to $50 MRR. He's like, oh,
Jordan:oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So so hold on. Hold on.
Jordan:First, yes. That makes sense. Yeah. But the more the more interesting thing is the demand.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jordan:People want the I mean, look. We have all had a spectra a rainbow of Internet fantasies from from the four as soon as we read the four hour work week. I know that
Justin:came out. Rainbow Internet fantasies is the that's gonna be the title of this episode. That's that's tough.
Jordan:That's tough for me.
Brian Casel:Look. When we first I am super intrigued. Yeah.
Justin:Yes. When we first
Jordan:read Tim Ferriss, we and we we we got a glimpse of, oh my god. Like, there is an automation universe. There is something that runs without us. There is this way to make money more easily with less work, all these different things. But this is the absolute highest form.
Jordan:It is literally let the agent do everything. So, and I think people are going to want that so much you can see in the demand of this product growing. I you know? Right. If you look at it, like, people are not gonna stick around, but, like, it doesn't matter.
Jordan:The concept is there and the demand is there. And that's something to kinda
Brian Casel:pull on. Do think that it could, like, eventually become a serious economic thing.
Jordan:I understand.
Brian Casel:Me, I'm fascinated with it. I'm not doing this because I kinda don't have time, but I would love to just, as a fun side project, just be like, thousand bucks a month. What's gonna happen? Yeah. Like
Justin:Here's I
Brian Casel:just wanna
Jordan:Six say, like months from today, Brian's gonna be making a significant amount of his income with an agent that doesn't need him for anything. That that's my that's my guess.
Justin:I mean, it'd be great content, Brian, for you to just start, like, deploying these agent these money making agents and then see what happens?
Brian Casel:For for me, there's two sides of this. The the main side is builder methods, which is gonna is being agent like, human plus agent. Big part of what I'm doing at builder methods. But this is more like like in my personal finances, you know, we've got our our our safe investments, you know, the majority of of of the of the savings. And then I've got, like, some play money and some stock market stuff, some play money and and some crypto stuff.
Brian Casel:I would love to have another, like, couple points of my savings. Just be like, let let's let's, like, throw some money in this little, like, agent pool and and see what that what that little plant does off in the corner. You know?
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. There's I mean, we've seen this before. There this kind of energy, I just I just looked up. I found this book title just now.
Justin:The Amazing Money Machine, How to Make Money and Build Passive Income, Owning and Operating ATM Machines. Awesome.
Jordan:But it's
Brian Casel:like it's it's more fun just to watch it. Like, would love this thing to be like, I don't even know what kind of business this is gonna build, but let's see. You know? Like
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Jordan:I think it's it's inevitable, And I'm just gonna be really, really jealous when Brian's making, like, $50 a month off of this goddamn agent. I'm still doing work.
Justin:It's gonna be a little bit like the stock market. Instead of picking stocks, people are gonna be picking agents. They're gonna be deploying agents and going, like, why put a thousand dollars in the stock market and earn 10% when I could put a thousand dollars into 10 agents and get them going? You know?
Brian Casel:The thing that I'm I'm actually really motivated by in business wise and the main thing is, like, if I think about these big media brands, especially YouTubers, the Ali Abdaals and the whatever other like big media companies, you know that there's a whole team of players around them that make their, you know, the Marquis Brownlee channel. Like, you know he's got a huge team of editors and producers and and assistants and people. I obviously don't have any of that. Have one editor who works with me, and then there's me. And I'm trying to build out the team.
Brian Casel:I'm already doing this now, where there are three or four roles, small parts of the production process and the creative process that I'm trying to see how far I can get with mostly agents and then me doing it and then maybe an editor. Yeah.
Justin:Everything's a bet. Hiring is a bet. Picking stocks is a bet. Yes. Jordan, you had something to say too?
Jordan:I wanted to point out that you are ahead of things in your view of betting on the agents because you don't actually have to deploy the agents. A very small percentage of people know how to deploy agents. A lot of these zero human company agents have a crypto token attached to them, and people are just buying the token. The founder of the a What the founder of the agent is doing is actually separating themselves so that the money being made isn't being made to the human, it's being made to the agent, and a portion of it is going into these token trades. And so you can literally bet on an agent.
Jordan:You can go buy the Kelly token now. You can do it with Juno. You can do it with Felix. And it feels like it might be an actual real use case around crypto payments, stablecoins, and zero human, like, agent companies where you really can start to look at and say, hey, this agent is doing an amazing job at building iPhone apps for people for a thousand dollars each, and they've made $10,000 this month. And I think next month, they're gonna make $20.
Jordan:And I I
Brian Casel:You're you're more in that in that side of it than than I am. I I, like, I don't quite I don't quite buy that part of it. Like, the the the crypto angle. Like, to to me, it's it's it's just more of, like, simple Bootstrapper. Like, let's see if this thing can just spin up a website that generates any revenue whatsoever, and then let's double triple down on on whatever marketing campaign it has on it.
Jordan:You know? For now. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me in six months when there are agents out there making $10,000,000 a month, and then you're like, oh, how do I how do I get in on that?
Jordan:And then you can see that there's a public market for it.
Justin:Mean, there's a betting market right now for everything. There's a betting market for whether or not we're gonna invade countries. There's a betting mark there's a betting market for everything. So eventually, people will be betting on like yeah. There there will be AI agent sport teams and sporting events.
Justin:And like, it'll be like my agents against your agents. And like, who can take down you know, like, the yeah. I I I can see there's if we thought that the crypto thing was, like, dead, there's gonna be more betting, more crypto. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like also just treating it like a fund or or more like a portfolio, which is like, yeah, I'll throw a thousand bucks, $2,000 a month at this and spin up 10 of these things, and maybe I'll have like two or three winners. Know?
Justin:Yeah. Like those old angel list syndicates. Why not create a syndicate when you're investing in a bunch of yeah. Alright. I think we're gonna end it there.
Justin:Hour and thirty minutes.
Brian Casel:The good stuff comes out at the end.
Justin:The good stuff always comes out. I mean, that this is why I love doing the show is that there is you guys are, like, playing in fields I have not even seen yet. So this is just wild. This Polsia website, people go look at this. Right now, it is Times New Roman.
Justin:It it looks like a 13 year old built this website, but it's making $2,000,000 a year, apparently. So and Ryan Heffter says, this is the proper length for an episode. I think we nailed it.
Brian Casel:Delivered.
Jordan:Thanks, everybody. Shabbat shalom.
Justin:We will see you next week. Bye.
Aaron Francis:Later, folks.