Welcome to the panel where three founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of Transistor. Fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:And I am Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosie.com. And today, I am your host.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So Jordan, are you awake? Are you still on Asia time?
Jordan:I am just coming out of the struggle. I went on a big trip for spring break. We went to Thailand.
Brian Casel:Wow. With
Jordan:the fam, all the three kids. We did Bangkok, then we went to Phuket. It was it was very interesting. It was a cool trip. It was the goal of it was to be more challenging than
Brian Casel:the typical Of skimmer all the like that is a challenging country for sure. The language, the food, all of it. The the distance, obviously, with kids, you know.
Jordan:Yes. Yes. And we that's kind of what we were looking for. We were supposed to go to Israel to see my fam and celebrate. My daughter just had her bat mitzvah.
Jordan:Unfortunately, bad time to go to Israel right now. And we were so we were kind of in the the ambitious mindset of, like, okay. We're gonna do a big trip that isn't sit around on on the beach or pool, so we shifted to Thailand. But what you're alluding to, Brian, the jet lag come back. I'm I'm five days in and barely okay today.
Justin Jackson:I Did it is that a twenty hour that's a twenty hour flight? Is that what I'm reading here?
Jordan:It was twenty six hours of travel. Oh. This Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's a
Jordan:long one. The way home was like a like, hour and a half Phuket to Bangkok, two and a half hour layover, four hours to Taipei, two and a half hour layover, and then fifth fifteen hours to Chicago.
Justin Jackson:Know I can do that. It's a big one.
Brian Casel:We usually connect through through Hong Kong and then go to The Philippines. And, yeah, it's a long one. Makes sense.
Jordan:The the flight doesn't really bother me other than, like, the deep, deep dissatisfaction of walking past first class and being like, still
Justin Jackson:not there.
Brian Casel:Still not there. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Totally.
Jordan:Yeah. And my kids being like, dad, how come we don't fly first class? I'm like, if you say that,
Justin Jackson:Well but be careful because you could do what Dan Martell does, which is Dan Martell books first class for him and his wife, and he puts his kids in coach.
Brian Casel:That's that's
Jordan:I think Dan Martell's weird for that. Shout out, Dan. You know, what's a baller?
Brian Casel:What can I tell you?
Justin Jackson:He's one of those he's one of those guys where he's like, it's my money. It's not their money.
Jordan:They they they I don't disagree, but it but it's still pretty weird. So anyway but we we had a great trip. I'm a little tan. I'm a little skinnier because the food there is so good and so healthy. It's crazy.
Jordan:I felt so good the whole week.
Justin Jackson:Oh, that's great, man.
Jordan:And now back to work. I had a little bit of a roller coaster this week. If I'm gonna be honest, I'd love to ask you guys how your week has been. But mine's mine's been a little bit of a roller coaster. I think it has to do with the tiredness, but I was irritable.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. I had
Jordan:to apologize to people yesterday because we did like an hour call. We did a leadership call that we do on Thursdays, myself and Rock and Jess, and I was not my best self. Yikes. Yikes. We had to do Okay.
Jordan:I don't know if you guys can sympathize with this. We use segment and amplitude to capture event data and do a bunch of analytics. Those two products are really expensive and their pricing feels weird. Like, why? It's not why is it so linear?
Jordan:It's like, okay, now I have more visitors. I just start paying overages. I can't cap it. I can't say, oh, you know what? I've actually I actually prefer if you don't capture any more events because I don't wanna pay you more.
Jordan:So we have
Brian Casel:I remember dealing with that with with I think it was Mixpanel a couple years ago
Jordan:where If it's like
Brian Casel:if you're doing anything where you're tracking every page view, forget about it. It's like the Yeah.
Jordan:We already have it moved over off of the marketing site and into the sign up flow. And and and so we have this great thing that I should be very happy about. We have a very large national Fortune 100 partner that's we're doing a campaign with next week. Very exciting. But we're worried.
Jordan:We're like, okay. What happens if they send us a 100,000 visitors? Let's make sure we're not spending $10 on Amplitude to capture some events. And that part of the conversation with Rock and Justin and I ended up being like forty five minutes and I was so irritated.
Brian Casel:I was like, don't
Jordan:wanna talk about any of this. I wanna talk about some goddamn features and what we're doing next. You know? And and oh, man.
Brian Casel:But That analytics stuff is like it's such a painful rabbit hole to get into it. And and I've been I've been in there, like, several times where it just, not only it eats up all the dev hours of actually wiring it up, but also, but like what you're saying, we're not talking about product.
Jordan:We're not
Brian Casel:talking about customers. We're just talking about internal reporting.
Jordan:Yeah. But then if you're planning.
Brian Casel:It's like
Jordan:Why am I thinking about you?
Brian Casel:And I sort of get why it's so complex to hook these into everything that you need. But at the same time, it's like these companies make it pretty complex and their pricing models are like that. Then And if you think about, I'm just thinking about this, like right now, like the incentives for the amplitudes and the mix panels and the segments to charge the way that they charge for like every single event, like a page view, every little thing that happens, which you want to, you would love to just be like, Just track everything, and then we can figure out what it means later. If they're selling these to like huge companies, middle marketing managers, it's like they're incentivized to want to pay for these tools to sort of justify their reporting and measure stuff like
Jordan:the card munitions, yes. And some of them have moved over to like monthly unique users, like in an attempt to avoid the, you know, per event. But then you're like, okay, so if we allow any event or anything tracked to touch anything outside of our admin, then we're not in control. If this thing leads to a 100,000 new accounts, I'm fine paying. But if you're just going to the marketing site and then you click like one button into our sign up flow and you start tracking unique users right there.
Jordan:So anyway, the entire forty five minute conversation was like, okay, cool story. We're just gonna turn it off those pages.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. So I actually made the decision. I used to be really into segment, and I wrote about it in marketing for developers back in 2015. I've torn it out of everything now. I tore out segment, tore out Mixpanel.
Justin Jackson:We don't really use anything internally, and the only thing we use externally right now is Fathom Analytics. But I've just found ultimately, and maybe it's just our scale, there was no insights I was getting from those tools that I couldn't get from just talking to customers. And so I found all this over orchestration. And sometimes it leads you down the wrong path because now you're recording stuff that seems significant, but it's actually not significant. And just talking to customers is basic even if you're only talking to customers when they arrive and when they leave, I found is all you really need.
Justin Jackson:Then every once in a while, I'll do a spot check. Ran we have a random account checker. It's a little dice in our admin panel. I'll hit the dice 10 times. Just go through what are real people doing.
Justin Jackson:10 random accounts. What features are they using? When's the last time they published? Just make myself a little little report. And this is where, you know, the debate between AI reducing friction and us needing friction.
Justin Jackson:I think sometimes it's just good to have some friction. Just get in there in a real account and see what people are really doing. And you're gonna pick up stuff that people wouldn't that the tools wouldn't normally pick up on.
Brian Casel:I got a quick question for both of you. What are the metrics or reports that you look at every single day?
Jordan:Okay. For me, there's one lighthouse, you know, very, very far above all the others. And we use QuickSight, which is like an AWS, analytics thing. And Rock set up a a graphic for me that shows me it's it's two graphics. The top one is sign ups.
Jordan:The bottom one is conversion. And it's just a bar graph. And each day it just has today's date. And then it has a bar graph of signups and out of those signups, how many of them put a credit card on file? Because for us that turned out to be the most important metric.
Jordan:89% of accounts that become paying customers put their credit card on file within the first twenty four hours. So that's the metric. Yeah. And then below it, he has another graph that is the conversion graph that's basically that plus seven days and I can see how many are set to convert today. That is my home base.
Jordan:The the the tracking stuff, amplitude, I use every once in a while to just see what in the month of February, how many what percentage of new accounts made a test call? What percentage of new accounts put a credit card on file? And in the month of March, how many did so? So, like, very, very fuzzy top of, you know, very high level. How's it going?
Jordan:Are we going in the right direction? Is is this improving? Not improving? But the day to day is just how many people have signed up today? How many of those have a credit card on file?
Jordan:And then that plus seven days, and then I can look out. And what it has done is it's changed my mood connector.
Brian Casel:Oh, Instead of Too real.
Jordan:Yeah. Instead of my entire worldview and happiness level being connected to how many sinus we have, it's now I can just look into the future seven days and I can feel if we're gonna have a good week or not.
Brian Casel:We have a my my wife and I, Amy, we have a funny this is and it's funny because it's absolutely true. She's like, did you get any sign ups yet today? Because, like, she she wants to know, am I in a good mood today or a bad
Jordan:mood today? Can I ask her?
Brian Casel:You know, That's like awesome. Like, it's like and and, like, if I wake up and I had a few, like, overnight, then it's like, okay, we're like, right out of the gate, we're good today. Because, I have a few. Yeah. You know?
Brian Casel:But if I didn't I if I didn't wake up to a few sign ups overnight, then then I'm gonna be look checking the email every forty five minutes for the whole day until I get at least a few. You know? For for me real quick, the the ones I'm I'm obsessively, like, to an unhealthy extent checking all all day every day are I guess, first and foremost is like how many new customers purchased Builder Methods Pro today. And the other number that I check a lot is like, what's the revenue in the month to date? So like, you know, because builder methods is still within its first year.
Brian Casel:It's we're about seven seven months in of of having revenue. And so every month, I'm I'm trying to say, like, are we beating last month? Is is this gonna be a record month? Or are we slightly down from last month? So and I like to see, like, are are we on pace to beat last month?
Brian Casel:So I I like that month to date revenue number. And then and then the other thing is YouTube. I check a lot. Like, oh, most days, I'm I'm I'm looking to see subscriber growth. And on around the like on the day that I drop a new video, I'm checking it all day long to see how today's video is performing compared to other videos.
Jordan:Is it getting picked up by the algorithm? Are people
Brian Casel:watching it? There's and there's that graph. Every YouTuber knows what I'm talking about here. It's it's the top 10 graph. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So is is this a three of 10 or is this a 10 of 10? Meaning, like, it's a really it's a it's a fantastic graph that YouTube gives you. It's a how is your today's video performing against your best 10 videos at this age. So so, like, five hours in, I can see your today's video is on pace to perform better than, like, your best ever video when that was five hours in. You know?
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan:Interesting. That's a very good comparison. It's like a accurate analogy as opposed to something that you have to decipher on your own. How about you, Justin? What what what do you look at?
Jordan:Number of sign ups?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. New trials every day that gets posted in Slack. That's kind of like the baseline for our whole group depending on how good or bad it is. We have certain emojis that we use every time.
Jordan:You just have a total? You don't have one by one coming in? Have you graduated have you graduated out of one by one?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. I yeah.
Jordan:We shut
Justin Jackson:we shut that off quite a while ago. I mean, it's still that we're getting. We're we haven't hit hundreds of sign ups a day, but we have a number that we like to see going up, and it's been going up. And then I'll look at well, we just launched the Ghost integration. So how many new how many people are using it?
Justin Jackson:How many new subs are we getting from it? And then plans, plan changes, upgrades, and downgrades, I'm thinking about quite a bit. Our goal this year is to move from the majority of people being on the starter plan to at least the middle tier, so the $49 and up plan. And with video podcast hosting, that's gonna be the big push. So we're eager.
Justin Jackson:I'm very eager because we've never really had expansion revenue. Our our expansion revenue is basically nothing.
Jordan:People come in and stay at the tier that they came in at?
Justin Jackson:Basically. Yeah. Basically. So you'll have some people signing up on the 49 and $99 plan. Honestly, a lot of times, it's just some people see themselves as 49 or $99 people.
Justin Jackson:Okay. And aside from, you know, there has been a little bit of lift from our AI transcription add on, Basically, no expansion revenue. So the yeah. I'm very excited because I'm just waiting to see how those expansion numbers go up. And I've got a bunch of reports that I run-in Stripe Sigma.
Justin Jackson:If you're not using Stripe Sigma, that's that's the game plan right now.
Jordan:It's like natural language analytics in Stripe. Right? So you can ask it things plainly. I it has like a reputation in my mind, like reputation for me of of don't know if it's inaccuracy or, like, I look at the number. I'm like, okay.
Jordan:But I'm not sure if that's right.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. So I found that actually their AI for developing those SQL, you know, scripts or whatever is actually not very good. I usually use Claude to develop the template, but it is awesome for a for not having to bug a developer to basically get reports out of Stripe. So now I can see I'm trying to see if there's one I could actually show you guys.
Jordan:So you could ask it, like, how many how many tier one or the plan one
Brian Casel:Like plan one.
Jordan:Sign ups were there last month compared to this month? How's that trending to to see where people are coming? Okay. So you can kind of
Justin Jackson:look into your have annual revenue by plan, number active subscribers on each plan, monthly subscription cancellation counts, calculate lifetime value for Black Friday. That was an interesting one. Year over year growth analysis, AI transcription purchases. I use it a lot, basically every week.
Brian Casel:Nice. You know, it's real quick, the on Clarity Flow, it's it's been pretty nice, you know, for because like I said, like, I'm so tied to my revenue graphs or just, like, whatever health metric in the business is, like, also my mental health and mood. And for so many years, those were, tied Clarity Flow. And since Builder Methods is my primary business that I'm focused on every day now, and Clarity Flow is very much secondary, like I I literally in Stripe, it's it usually defaults to looking at Builder Methods, then I need to flip over to Clarity Flow. So I just don't check the numbers in Clarity Flow nearly as much as I used to.
Brian Casel:But I do, every, I'd say week or two, I'm checking what's the MRR and stuff. And so it's actually a really nice to to have these, like, pleasant surprising, like, oh, oh, we actually hit that MRR milestone. I didn't even notice, and it happened, a week ago. You know?
Jordan:Okay. Interesting. It's something that you were so tied to. Yeah. And now you've just taken your focus to something else, and and that no longer affects your mood the same way.
Brian Casel:And even and also the, the daily sign ups and churns are out of my purview now, on on Clarity Flow. So, like, they they just don't even affect me, like in like mood wise. They just happen, and I can just see, the end thankfully, like, year in 2026, it's actually up into the right for the first time in a really long time. So every time I'm checking it, it's like, oh, that's nice. You know?
Brian Casel:And I'm and I'm quick. Hands off. So that that's been
Jordan:You're also not staring at it 10 times a day. So it doesn't have the fluctuation in the mood, which I wish I could do more, but for me it's ProfitWell. So I have my projections and the projections when I look at those, I just look at, you know, some kind of like end of the month numbers. By the April, I wanna be here. By the April because that leads into we will get to profitability with this much money left in the bank.
Jordan:So like that's like my North Star. And so when I look at ProfiWell, I just see how far along we are. There's a growth graph that that shows the that shows your goal and then where you are and that shows today horizontally and it shows you where your revenue if you're behind or or ahead. And that that's the thing that controls my mood more than anything else on the on the revenue side. So, like, the day to day graphs are one thing, but then that's the actual like, are we on track to hit the number for the month?
Jordan:Because if we are, then we're on track to hit my plan, and my plan is a happy plan. Therefore, I'm happy.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Oh, man. Sorry. Did you say, like, you're still aiming to hit profitability? Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Okay. So you you have a plan in the future that's like, when we hit this amount of growth, then we'll be profitable.
Jordan:Yes. I do see that as the next big hurdle milestone because it just I think it it changes everything.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:You know? It just goes from default dead to default alive. And and and that, at least for me, a huge emotional marker of like, okay. Now we're we're gonna make it. We can kinda do whatever we want moving forward, but at least we're at a place where the danger of death is is just not there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So when when you're talking about profitability, just I guess for for listeners, but I'm also kind of curious, like, are you you're literally talking about like expenses and revenue. Like
Jordan:Yes. The way I think about it is banking can't close-up
Brian Casel:and I think of your team now, like compared to previous years, it's a smaller team, right? Like your expenses can't be as high as they used to be.
Jordan:Absolutely not. But one, we pay that small team well. Yeah. Two, marginal cost with AI is not the same as with previous products, right? The previous products were CardHook was like, you know, $10,000 a month in AWS and you could fly from 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 and it'll go up to $11,000 a month.
Jordan:But with with AI inference and voice costs, it it is a much larger part of your expense structure. So so that's bigger. And and I there's a big fat advertising expense because that's how we grow. And I don't want that to go down because I wanna keep, you know, pushing and growing. So I look at two numbers.
Jordan:I look at straight up EBITDA, like positive or negative, and that I think of as profitability. But before that, I think of sustainability. And sustainability, what I do is I do cash left in the bank at the end of the month and I do that divided by the burn rate from that month and it shows me how many months we have left. And so at some point that number goes from, you know, eight months left, you know, seven point five months left. And then it turns around because you're growing faster than you're burning.
Jordan:And then the next month, even though you're not profitable, your runway goes from, you know, call it eight months to nine months. And so that turn is the sustainability and then a few months later, it gets the profitability. So it's like step one, sustainability where the runway expands every month instead of contracts. And then a few months later, the profitability of, like, straight up you're you're adding your bank account is growing. My guess is most bootstrap companies, their runway is actually well, this is a I'm I haven't actually looked at transistors, but our guess is that because we pull out profits quite regularly.
Justin Jackson:And so our runway in a given time is probably not that great. Like, it's it's like we're just pulling up mostly pulling up profits because we know next month has always been more than the previous month. So there's this dependability.
Jordan:Yeah. You don't need to keep that much cash on hand. We run a venture funded business where we do not pull out profits. We don't pull out anything. It's not our money.
Jordan:We're managing other people's money along with our effort, that kind of thing. And so so it's I mean, yeah. The the cash stays in the bank account because if you needed money, what would you do, Justin? You would just you if the business went, you know, wrong for two months and you lost money for two months, you and your business partner would just put some money in.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. We put some money in at worst case scenario, but there's just so many scenarios before that, which is like like, even if something bad happened, like, if we lost 20% of our customers overnight, we'd just be like, okay, well, we're still fine. You know? It would take quite a dramatic event for it
Jordan:Right. To But even if but even if you'd like, oh, something came up. I mean, look, let's say you got sued and you need to pay out $50,000 settlement. You you need you need $50. You and your business partner could figure it out.
Jordan:You put money in. We we can't put money in. There there's that's not an option. Oh, If we put money into I mean, no. If you put money into the business, you need you need something out of it.
Jordan:You need stock.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan:You can just give money. I mean, you give it a loan, but who wants to get involved with giving a personal loan? So there's just more restrictions around it. And then, right, Brian, how do you think about, like, cash management and all of that? I mean, you do whatever you want, but you just have to think about your LLC and taxes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I mean, it it it is interesting builder methods compared to Clarity Flow and and really everything else that I've done before. I mean, builder methods is technically a recurring revenue thing. I'm selling annual subscriptions. And when September comes in this year, will be will be when the first annual subscriptions come up for renewal.
Jordan:Okay.
Brian Casel:So that that'll be a really interesting turning point to see how that impacts that. And and this is a membership product, so I'm expecting a higher, you know, churn rate. It it sort of comes with the territory. But, you know, it is interesting how, like, month to month, it's it's been growing every month, and March was a record month. And and it is a lot more profitable than like a SaaS and services that I've done before.
Brian Casel:I just have the the the editor and and then some like software expenses. But oh, and and then like it's so it's it's membership revenue, which is like the bulk of it. And now starting in the past month or so, I'm selling sponsorships. And that's now like a significant chunk of revenue.
Jordan:And do you just pull money out whenever you want? Do you give yourself a salary? Do you do like owner distributions?
Brian Casel:I basically pay myself a salary. Like, yeah. And it but it is, it is accumulating like a like a business savings. Like there's like, it's it's been it's been pretty profitable because the the expenses are so low and
Jordan:the At revenues have the end of the year, you can kind of figure out like, how much should I keep there? How much should I pull out of it? I'm assuming it's a flow through entity. So it's basically just goes on to Yeah,
Brian Casel:you want to get into the boring stuff?
Jordan:Well, mean, this is the
Brian Casel:mechanics Right? Yeah, of it is. And I've been doing this for several years. It's it's an LLC taxed as an S corp. I don't wanna get into the nitty gritty details on that, but that's that that's what I'm doing.
Jordan:Right. But you use your business bank account very closely tied to your personal, and you can decide when to leave money there, when to pull it out, what's advantageous. Should I do it in December?
Brian Casel:Should I
Jordan:do it in January? Should I do it before this expense? Yep. Yeah. And, like, what
Brian Casel:what's considered salary? What's considered dividend? And what you know? That's right. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Stuff like that.
Justin Jackson:I wish we had LLCs in Canada. That's one legal structure that it doesn't make sense for, like, bigger companies, but for small companies, that has just seemed so perfect, that pass through mechanism. Mhmm.
Jordan:I think Instead of a corporation for everything.
Justin Jackson:Instead of a corporation. And and just the because of the pass through nature of it, my understanding is you don't you only get taxed personally on profits. Right? You don't get taxed twice.
Jordan:That's right. On distributions. It's it is the most advantageous thing. It is Yeah. Awesome.
Jordan:It is awesome. Yeah. You can you can expense a a lot, and it creeps into your personal life in terms of what you can expense, where you buy a computer, you buy a piece of artwork for your home office.
Brian Casel:Mean, my home office is like a part of my mortgage, part of my house is my office, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. It's great. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. That's crazy.
Jordan:All right, guys. Let's let's, let's change gears. Let's, let's talk a little bit. I want to talk about mythos, this new model that everyone's so scared of. But before we get into that, maybe we take one step out of that and talk about Anthropic and OpenAI and the shift in attention that went from OpenAI a year ago to now everyone's talking about Anthropic and what they're doing and how powerful their model It's almost a sign that everyone's worried about Anthropic's model.
Jordan:Not like like OpenAI's.
Brian Casel:So There's so many different levels. What what always interests me about like the the horse race, if you will, between Anthropic, OpenAI, and and Google. I consider those those the the three big players in the AI race. Right? And it's it's I think it's a very different picture depending on who you ask.
Brian Casel:Like like us, we're we're inside the tech industry, so we we sort of know all the dynamics. But if you ask, like, my wife or my brother, like, they they have only really know ChatGPT.
Justin Jackson:You know? We kinda
Jordan:have to ignore that's, like, so far away from reality.
Brian Casel:Too. Like like, even my kids, they're like, oh, yeah. I got the answer from from AI. I'm like, well, which AI? They're like, well, I Googled it, and I guess the answer was from AI.
Brian Casel:So they they there's a lot of the general normie public the only AI they actually really interact with is is Google. Like, people forget how much of an advantage Google has with Gemini being everywhere. Anyway, but the it is interest like I was watching a CNBC clip last night and you start to see, okay, like the vibe out there, and I think we definitely see it within our industry, is is Anthropic seems to be pushing like, forget about the the mythos stuff for a second, which is interesting, but just Claude and and Anthropic and, like, Claude Code and Claude Cowork and the utility of it, the the adoption of it, the usage.
Jordan:New features every week.
Brian Casel:The new feature There's a little bit of a brouhaha around the the pricing and the OpenCLOS stuff, but but frankly, that is just Twitter, like a few circles on Twitter, and it's probably less than 1% of the market. The 99% are by and large using Cloud Code. Of course, Codex is also widely used and Google is as well, but it just seems like there's a surge in the last two months of like Anthropic is really coming in.
Jordan:Their revenue shows Did you see their numbers are preposterous?
Brian Casel:I believe it. Yeah.
Jordan:I think they added something like 4,000,000,000 in ARR in March.
Brian Casel:In March. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:In in March. Insane.
Jordan:Like, what what And you can
Brian Casel:see it in the like, the app crashes all the time. Like, they are struggling with with Demand. Yeah. Demand.
Jordan:Yeah. A million new users a day? Like, these stats don't make it it's just wild.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just like I know that some people out there really love Codecs, And I use it here and there, but it's but Claude Code, man, every serious engineering team, the whole team is using Claude Code to a certain to in in one extent or another. Like, it's just everywhere at this point, and it's just it keeps growing.
Jordan:Okay. So so now this this new story starts to come out. Our next model is so powerful we can't release it. We need to talk to the government to give everyone a heads up so they can change everything about how things work so that we don't have an event where our model comes out and it exploits our entire banking system, for example. So, Go ahead, Justin.
Jordan:You hear this stuff. Is is it real? Is it PR? Like, what what is going on?
Justin Jackson:Well, the cynical take is that this is just anthropic marketing. Like, you you know, like, they're just trying they're just trying to hold it back because they what's gonna destroy the economy and everything? I mean, I I think the less cynical take is, to be honest, the I am noticing way more security events happening lately. Amongst my friends, more things are happening. Ali Abdall, I don't know if you guys are on his list, but he got he got his basically, his email newsletter list got hacked by Russian hackers, and they sent out crypto, three crypto emails.
Justin Jackson:And what was what it looks like is that he had some sort of plug in with Kit on his WordPress site, and they accessed WordPress, and then they were able to access Kit through the integration. So this is just the beginning. I will tell you the most interesting to me interesting part to me about mythos mythos is I'm telling young people to go into cybersecurity. Like, kids that are into technology right now, go get your cyber your security researcher credentials. I know a gal, a friend of my daughter's, who did a two year college diploma, got hired right away, making over 6 figures right away.
Justin Jackson:There is an incredible amount of demand. If you think small little indie companies are worried, and you know, the alley of dolls, that's one. You know who's really worried? It's big banks, big government, big companies. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:So who are they gonna be hiring right now? They're gonna be hiring so, yes, these security researchers will use AI to battle Yeah.
Jordan:The mythos. Robots against robots.
Justin Jackson:But there's gonna be just some things that you can do, and just having somebody on every team whose hat is, I'm just out there looking to see what's happening. I'm testing I'm using mythos to attack our own system
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:And see what happens. Defensive development.
Jordan:Yeah. Like defensive driving.
Brian Casel:I feel like those cybersecurity experts have always been around for for as long as as software has been around. But the thing with Mythos is that it's catching stuff that the humans and whatever systems we've ever had have not been able you know, that you you see these stories of, like, it it catches, a 27 year old bug, you know, that's just existing that no human system could have ever caught. Right? So I mean, I love John Gruber's take on this. It's like, yeah, mythos, like both things can be true.
Brian Casel:It can be extremely capable and and dangerous to society from a cybersecurity and it can be a really smart marketing campaign. Like, both are probably true.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. The the other thing to keep in mind is, sure, anthropic might be giving us warning. You know who's not giving us warning? It's all the Chinese models right now. Exactly.
Justin Jackson:And the Russian models.
Brian Casel:The thinking.
Justin Jackson:And the Korean models. Like, those the wherever you were getting attacks from before, I mean, sometime go go into your whatever you use, DigitalOcean or whatever, and just look at your logs at all the endpoints people are hitting. And it's it's just so predictable. It's WP dash admin. It's like Oh, WordPress.
Brian Casel:Like, I honestly, like, I would just get off WordPress at this point. Like, it's such a first of all, it's such a bloated thing. But second of all, it is such a target that it's like, oh my
Jordan:god. Yeah. It's like begging for it. Okay. Now we we've covered the negative side.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:On the positive side, my thinking is like, so this thing's better than Opus?
Brian Casel:I mean, I can't even imagine what what we're gonna be dealing with.
Jordan:Yeah. Like, we are things gonna get better? Like, how how how can they get better? Holy shit.
Brian Casel:I was thinking about this today and like the general attitudes AI and you see highly negative stuff. See like, for me, I always find myself leaning more on the excited side, like optimistic, like it's what I do. I think it's incredibly exciting to be able to use these tools and build stuff with them. Like, I can't believe we get to live through this. Like we got to live through the launch of the iPhone and now we get to live through the launch of AI.
Brian Casel:Like to me that is super exciting. And so not everyone is wired this way, and I understand that. But like to me, there are times when I'm absolutely fearful for the future, for society, for the economy, for what this means. And even this whole story of they're distributing Mythos to these 11 corporations, like that's gonna plug all the holes before it gets, like, to me, I'm just like picturing if Mythos has like a character behind it, it's saying like, yeah, cool story, bro. Once it's out there, like, it's gonna be wild.
Brian Casel:Like whatever you think you're patching today, the world is gonna get around that pretty quickly. But the but at the same time, it's like it's like I can sort of compartmentalize that, and I'm almost just interested in it as a news observer, which is but
Jordan:Right. As a member of society. Okay.
Brian Casel:Here here at my desk where I get to build stuff and build a business with this stuff and use it even in my personal life, to me, that's incredibly exciting. And I can't even imagine what just next year, 2027 is gonna look like in terms of our tools as builders. I mean, I can't even wrap my head around it because Opus 4.6 is incredible to me today. Like, what is what's what's this next thing gonna look like?
Jordan:Yeah. Justin, your your cofounder, it's not fair to say that he's just getting into AI, but but he he's gotten much harder into it. On the work front, where is he at around all these new developments and and and adoption and excitement?
Justin Jackson:And I mean, it's both sides. Him, John, and Jason have been using Claude a lot more. And as they use it, they they they've started to wake up to like, wow. This is incredible what it can do. And at the same time, sometimes it messes up, and they they can see that too.
Justin Jackson:And I think also the skeptic just the just what it's gonna mean on the other side. Like
Jordan:It's what, like, tech debt and?
Justin Jackson:Well, right now, for example, a big problem is people creating I just saw another one today, Open Claw podcasts for Open Claws, you know, Open Claw cast and all these things. So mass generating 5,000 episode feeds, which once these feeds get big, they can bring down systems, not just ours, but like because they they get pinged all the time. And so like, there's an open source project called the podcast index that a lot of us use. And they were just getting taken down. And he's like, why are these, like, these response times so slow?
Justin Jackson:And he looked at it, and it was like, all of these pod claws submitting thousands and thousands of garbage episodes, like, dramatically increasing the throughput. And so
Jordan:She used to protect yourselves like like the social networks protecting against bot accounts.
Justin Jackson:Well, now we've implemented a basically, in our terms of use now, like, can we can say no. We're not we're not saying no to all AI generated podcasts, but mass AI generated nobody behind the wheel slop cast. Yes. No. We're No.
Justin Jackson:We're Slop cast. Saying no to. Slop cast.
Brian Casel:Like it. A slop cast.
Jordan:Love it.
Brian Casel:I I mean, you know, it's it's an interesting question about, like because I I actually, you know, I'm seeing, like, a lot more spam fires pop up more and more for sure. There there's been actually been stuff internally at Clarity Flow lately, and and I just see, like, spam hits on on the Builder Method site a lot, and and I've had to lock stuff down as But the it is an o like, I I feel like the the question that you were asking, Jordan, is, like, what do we think about this on in terms of, like, like, on the optimistic side? But, like but then what you're what you're describing there, Justin, is sort of, like, an external reality that just needs to be dealt with no matter no matter what we think about it. Right? Like, it's and I I think I think most businesses are are gonna be dealing with these kinds of things in in various forms.
Brian Casel:There just needs to be a separation. Like like, there there are things that we that are good, that are bad, that are going to happen in our industry or in society or in the economy or in our market that are just out of our control, and shit's gonna get wild for a while.
Jordan:Right. Well, we don't have that much control over
Brian Casel:And we just don't have any control over it, you know? And that can have positive effects, that can have negative effects, but it's just gonna happen. And so I just I always try to take the mindset of like, well, if I can't control it, then I like, just focus my time and energy on what I can control and how can I build optimistically there, you know?
Jordan:Yeah. Rock has described some at some point this week, he was like, Jordan, I'm a little I feel a little burned out. And the line I came up with for him was that we're currently running a remote company with a synchronous culture. And that can be exhausting if you add in the time zone change. The time zone difference between where we are in Europe is perfectly aligned so that Rock works during the day and then the American team gets online and it's the evening and then he just works synchronously in the evening.
Jordan:And there's only so long you can do that. So part of that conversation was like, Rocky, you gotta figure out a way to go async. Just because something got put into Slack doesn't mean it requires a response. And his his response to me was he's got a problem where AI is so satisfying because if you just give me a problem, I just go over to Claude and then at least in my mind, it's gonna take five minutes. Maybe it takes twenty minutes, but then I have a solution for you and it's done.
Jordan:And it's like this addictive thing around, but I I'm on can just go over there and say some words and then and then and I can finish
Brian Casel:this. Incredible. And I like, even on that front, like, I totally relate to what what you're saying, you know, coming from Rock because it's like, you know, I I've
Jordan:been talking about I is
Brian Casel:what I'm I dude, so am I. Like, I mean, I I've been using AI heavily. I basically stopped handwriting my code several months ago, probably late last year. I feel like just in the last month, I took another step change where, like, before I was I feel like I was slow to get on the train of having multiple sessions of Cloud Code in multiple projects, multiple work trees. Like, That always seemed like a step too far for me just for my brain to handle all of it.
Jordan:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I still don't go crazy with it, but I have increased First of all, when I'm at the desk, am running multiple work trees even across multiple projects now, And I'm I'm doing it from mobile a lot more. Like, literally just prompt into my phone and ship a PR within thirty minutes while I'm on the couch. Like, that's happening all the time right now.
Jordan:And Yeah. It's like And it's just like scrolling reels for sure.
Brian Casel:Dude, it it like, literally, because, like, I'm building these tools that I use, like, internal tools for myself, and I'll just be using it, like, trying to use the tool that I built and be like, oh, that there's a little paper cut there. Hold on. Let me just prompt Claude. And within twenty minutes, I just fixed the tool that I'm using in my hand. It's freaking unbelievable.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:You know? Yeah. It's a trip. So, okay. That's related to, all right, this next model comes out.
Jordan:What that look like? Is it even more satisfying? Is it even faster, shorter to productivity? Is it an Okay. So there's a bunch of question marks around it.
Jordan:I guess we'll see when the models come out. This is, you wanna say something before I transition to this this next topic?
Brian Casel:What I'm most interested in in to answer that question is how this impacts everyone else. Like, we already know how it's impacting the technical people.
Jordan:Like Oh, okay. You're saying outside of tech, how it affects, like, other industries or other parts of life?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I would say more like business businesses in general. You know, this gets to the question of, like, how how much are businesses and people within businesses going to be able to spin up their own business tool tooling. And that that to me is just a major interest and major focus. I and I I mean, it's also a strategic direction that I'm going in builder methods moving forward, I think.
Brian Casel:I maybe we can talk about that, like, another another time, like, with my ICP and everything. But what is most interesting to me over the next twelve months is like, I know I'm gonna be using the latest tools that come out of Claude and Opus and and and Codex and all these things. The question is like because I see the market kind of flooding in, like, of just everyday business owners across all different industries. They actually are genuinely interested in learning how to build. Like, they like, people I love how, like, SaaS people and and software people love to say, like, oh, the businesses are never gonna build their own tools or or businesses are never gonna be capable to build their own tools or they're not gonna be interested in designing and building their own tools.
Jordan:Yeah. It's like shortsighted.
Brian Casel:I mean, I I think it's shortsighted, and I literally see these people come to my website every single day. Like, they want to learn. Yeah. You know? They are not they are not career developers, and they know that it's possible to use this thing called Claude Code to build the accounting tool that they want in their in their small business.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:Like And and rippling the base 40 fours. We we think of ourselves at Rosie now. We used to think, oh, this is so simple. We're just gonna hide all the tech. Think I we're actually gonna move toward people being able to build stuff of of their own customer service agents on Rosie because that's just what people want.
Jordan:What what I'm worried about over the next twelve months is a move away from this extreme democratization that we have right now that everyone's got the same tools. $200 a month, everyone has the same magic wand. But this thing mythos comes out. These better models come out. It's just the nature of capitalism to identify people on different parts of the value spectrum.
Jordan:And at some point, these things get so valuable that you you you can sell a model to someone for million tens, hundreds of millions of dollars instead of selling it for $200 a month.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. So it's like Oh, you think, like, the value like, the the the pricing of it? Yeah.
Jordan:The power. Yeah. I'm worried that the power in our hands is gonna be different from people who can't afford what we can afford and that we can't afford the best. And and that advantage starts to I mean, it's one thing to have budget. It's one thing to have, like, I have a team of a 100 engineers, so I have advantage over you.
Jordan:Mhmm. And in some ways, we we all identify that. It's like, yeah, you have some advantages, but we have other advantages because of that dynamic. But what if that company can afford the absolute best model and you can't? That's a scarier advantage than a 100 people versus five.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. So I guess what you're saying is like, I guess that would be scary if the gap between the very best frontier models and the and the next and the next models. It just keeps
Jordan:us wide. Can have. What we can afford.
Brian Casel:Guess what? But but if you think about it like like, well, today, like the clock like GPT 5.4 and Opus 4.6, like, that's the frontier, so we pay for those. But if you're on the free plan, then you're just one or two generations back, and it's just like a little bit
Jordan:Right, it's so, the $200 a month is a very low barrier.
Brian Casel:But if you think about like what we have today at Opus four point six, if that's gonna be free a year from now and Mythos is the thing that we pay for, the people on the free plan still have a, know, just like if you're on like an iPhone.
Jordan:Yes, but it's still like Like a relative
Brian Casel:a regular iPhone.
Jordan:Yes. Yeah. So I think this stuff is getting weird. And also the safety issues where you're like, okay, in order to have access to this model, you need to be certified with SOC five, you know, nonsense that only certain companies and people can achieve before having access to them. So I think right now, we're in a moment of everyone has all the newest stuff, and it's a relatively very low price point to get the absolute most incredible power in your hands.
Jordan:And I'm worried about that changing.
Brian Casel:I do think, like, from a security standpoint, I I know nothing about this, but the but the the fear that I have is that the world is sort of gonna be a little bit hopeless in terms of, like, protecting against like, I like, I think I think they're they're trying to do their best with the with the Mythos rollout and stuff. But I just think that, like, once it is out there, it's out there. And whether whether you're actually using Mythos or you're using the open source Chinese version of that, that's gonna come right after it. Like, it's just gonna be out there. Open source is just gonna spread.
Brian Casel:And I I just hope that the world is gonna have some kind of safeguards around this, but it's but I'm I'm not I'm not super confident that it will.
Jordan:Same.
Brian Casel:Same. So I don't really know what to think about that, and I'm just gonna try not to think about that. Yeah. That
Jordan:that's Look, here's the thing. I've been a good boy and my Dropbox is clear, man. I'm not going to jail. If you if you get access to my Dropbox, I'm good. Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah. But but the idea of of yeah. All these risks. Okay. So let's go to this next topic.
Jordan:It's it's kind of adjacent to it. Right? We just talked about models, who has access to them, your your bigger competitors, your smaller competitors. Here's a touchy subject around competitors that has always been around but might feel a little bit different today than it did a year or two ago. And that is the issue of copycats, clones, people who see your product, they think it's a good idea and they want to compete with you.
Jordan:Tale as old as time, right? Totally normal part of business. Nothing really unethical about it as long as you don't cross a line. All of us copy ideas. We see, oh, this is amazing.
Jordan:I'm going to take this idea and apply it to my industry. But something feels a little different right now with the power of AI products to be able to industrialize this risk because someone can just, we're not very far away from putting a URL and providing a username and a login to an AI tool and having the AI tool just copy the entire product. Just clone it. Yeah, we're not far from that at all. And so I've had an experience with this recently.
Jordan:We have a lot of copycats. It's fine. It just is what it is. We battle them. We we we are proactive.
Jordan:We we have a self serve flow and we ban the hell out of accounts. We can identify you. We've got all these safety measures, same IP address, VPN. We're we're on it. We're we're banning five to 10 people every single day because we don't like the looks of it.
Jordan:But recently, we came across a competitor that was egregious. The marketing site, the the the verbiage, the, the name, the admin, the sign up process, the onboarding flow, they cloned everything. And I was like, you know what? I'm actually gonna fire up my lawyer and I'm gonna take action. Which in the past, I've always just rolled my eyes and like, that's annoying.
Jordan:But this this felt like, okay, that's actually too much. I don't know where you guys are at. Justin, it feels like yours is a bit more defensive in nature. Like, you can protect your because people use yours your product in a different way. Yeah.
Jordan:I don't know how you guys think about this, if if it's increased over the last few months. I I just wanna
Brian Casel:add on one one more question for both of you on this, because I feel like you both deal with this a lot more than I do. How do you define an actual copycat or like well, yeah. Like, what where do you draw the line between, like, okay. Like, if there's gonna be another podcast hosting company, like, there's there's a bunch of obvious features that every podcast hosting is gonna need to have.
Jordan:AI receptionists these days, there's hundreds.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So, like, so where where's the line between, like, okay, it's just another competitor versus, like, they're literally ripping us off? Like, what's that?
Justin Jackson:I mean, I've had various experiences, and some just feel like bad faith actions more than like like, I get angry about it just because it feels like it's done in bad faith. Like, I had one guy who reached out to me for a podcast interview, and I was just very open and vulnerable and told him all sorts of stuff about how we did pricing and all sorts of stuff. And then a week later, he said, I hope you don't mind, but I'm launching a podcast hosting platform. And he just did it. I'm like, well, I do mind, and you're
Jordan:an asshole. That's gross.
Justin Jackson:That's just like a gross bad faith thing.
Brian Casel:Like, I'll just never understand the psyche of people like that. I just don't you know?
Justin Jackson:And I mean, luckily, I you could now I've been around since 2018, and so I've seen these people come and go. Like, that business didn't work because and Jason Fried has this whole thing is he's like, all these copycats are copying they they're copying the the surface area packaging they can see, but they have no deeper understanding of why we made those decisions. And all of the value is in understanding the deeper stuff. Right? So yeah, you can go in, you can suck up all of our UI, you can copy our pricing, you can do whatever you want.
Justin Jackson:If you don't have a deeper understanding of what's motivating the customer, of what they're trying to achieve, all these little instinctual things that are very difficult to even communicate, like, what is that?
Jordan:It's like copying homework. You didn't understand the lesson behind it. Exactly. Takes you so far.
Justin Jackson:I do get also upset when funded competitors just had one sign up, and and then they launched a competitor. And I'm like, guys, like and if you're gonna do it, do it. Don't sign up with your Yahoo address.
Jordan:I see you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's like
Justin Jackson:Competitor that runs with Treehive. Sign up with your real corporate domain. Yes. Don't be a don't be a, you know Yes.
Brian Casel:And it's almost like they it's almost like they wanted you to see the name in there too, which is fucked up.
Justin Jackson:I I just it's just something about it. It's just this barely hidden reconnaissance. And it's like, okay. You guys have all this money. You guys all have all this thing.
Justin Jackson:Right. You know? And it just make if anything, you're just making me mad. And so now I'm gonna compete against you even harder. So I guess, fine.
Justin Jackson:Go ahead and do it.
Jordan:Yeah. It's not illegal, but it's not ethical. No. I think for us, I get offended when special sauce is copied that was arrived at through significant work. Like our sign up flow and our onboarding flow required creativity and work.
Jordan:And when that gets copied in an egregious way that because look, when when we build it, we are borrowing concepts from a range of issues. Mhmm. A range of websites and services, and we're taking inspiration. And then, you know, that's the alchemy of, like, putting it all together into our version of it. Mhmm.
Jordan:So I
Brian Casel:don't know. I don't I
Jordan:don't even have, like, that big of an issue with cloning conceptually, but there's just something it's like a, you know, when you see it type of a bad faith approach.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. And and, again, I'm still bullish. I mean, depending I mean, Brian's always telling me about how all the crazy stuff he's doing on the marketing front, and maybe it will be get easier to duplicate some of
Brian Casel:these
Justin Jackson:things. But what can't be replicated is the stuff that's always been hard. Distribution, network, making deals. There's this great article I just posted in chat by Joan Westenberg. You know?
Justin Jackson:And he he mentions all these things. Community trust, regulatory capture, brand. It's why, like, I think Brian getting involved with Builder Methods so early, he might have felt like he was late. But like, you look at Brian's YouTube channel, and he's now has all of this evidence, hundreds of thousands of views on multiple videos that he is the guy you can trust for this kind of information.
Jordan:Yeah. And sure,
Justin Jackson:some some kid on Twitter with a big following could try to get into it. But as long as Brian keeps doing what he's doing, there is this this foundation of reputation that does persist. It persists, I think, a little bit longer with SaaS, but it can persist in any business. And that's still the hardest part. And the thing is people are lazy.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I think that I I have like two two thoughts here. Like, I'll get to some how I feel like I'm evolving in my view of competitors now with with builder methods. It's very different from previous years. But about what you guys see, I think, in SaaS is it's it is a SaaS to me in general is like zero sum. Like your competitors, if they're if they're going to win a customer, that customer is not gonna be your customer.
Brian Casel:It's gonna be their customer. Right? So that is why SaaS is so hard. It's because like, if selling accounting software, your customer's only gonna buy one. They're not gonna buy everyone's.
Brian Casel:So so, you know but I do think that, like, part of it part of why I've tried to ignore competitors in SaaS, whenever I worked on SaaS, is that the real threatening competitors are the ones that actually have the distribution. The ones that have And the like Justin, we were talking about this last year about Riverside with you guys and Riverside, right? And like, but in general, like I would be more concerned with not just the well funded competitors, but more like the competitors who have distribution, they have access to the audience. And by their nature, I'm not so worried about them copying my stuff or ripping my stuff off. Because since they have that access to audience, access to customers, they're hearing directly from the customers.
Brian Casel:So they have the volume of the customer feedback, the customer requests, the market demand. They don't need me or my product to inform them of the market demand. They have customers already. That's why I never really got on board with the idea of like, oh, competitor over there who already has thousands of customers is copying us. Like, no, they're probably just hearing the same demands from the same customer overlap that we happen to hear.
Brian Casel:And yeah, their product ends up looking similar, but they're hearing the same market Right.
Jordan:You don't like take it very personally in that case.
Brian Casel:I can't fault them for serving So that then like, it's like the customers who are the competitors who come in and they don't have an audience and they're just trying to rip you off because they think, like, Justin made transistor, so I'm gonna make transistor, and maybe I can rip off 10 customers for that. Like, again, like, you could like, the bright side is, like, they don't have the distribution, so we shouldn't be threatened by them. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. It it is probably an ethical thing and moral thing too.
Jordan:Like, I
Justin Jackson:I can't tell you how many people that I've talked to, and I've thought about it too, who have been like, man, I would love to start an email newsletter startup, but I don't wanna step on Nathan's toes because he's a buddy and we got the and there is something about that too. I think sometimes it's just like, is it worth me getting into this market to compete with a friend? Probably not. So Probably not.
Brian Casel:That's something that I've struggled with too. It's like, like, general, whenever like, I I've always tried to ignore competitors. Mhmm. And when I see competitors, especially if it's like people that I'm connected to, I get kind of bummed out about it because I know myself, whether I like the person personally or not, I'm gonna need to shut them out for a while. Because if I'm watching what they're doing or if I'm seeing what they're doing, I'm gonna have that unfortunate human reaction to be like, ah, they're they're doing the same stuff that I'm doing.
Jordan:Yeah. It's different when it's the stranger. Yep.
Brian Casel:Very Like, it's it's fine when it's strangers, but it's when it's when it's people I know, like, I'm just gonna have to unfollow you for a while because I don't want it in my feed. I don't wanna see it. Fine. I I I get it. Like, do do what you're gonna do.
Brian Casel:I I gotta focus on my thing. I don't wanna be influenced by by that.
Jordan:Infinitely better than getting obsessed
Brian Casel:with it. Yeah. I like because it's hard not to get obsessed with and also like in what I'm doing with Builder Methods, this year, I've gone on a journey with how view competitors and what I'm doing because I feel like to a certain extent, like everyone on Twitter is my competitor now. Like literally everyone. And it's like a lot of friends, like a lot And everyone that I ever followed, now everyone's an expert when it comes to AI.
Brian Casel:And, you know, I I think part of me has started to evolve on that where it's like, look, AI is just the thing now. Like, it it's we we used to all talk about software. Now we all talk about AI. Like, or we used to all talk about whatever marketing. Now now we talk about AI.
Brian Casel:It's it's just gonna be everywhere no matter what. So it's it's it's it's it's the air we breathe now. And but then the other thing is that my transition away from SaaS and into this creator type business. And one of the things that I love about this transition, it's it's taken a while to get my wrap my head. It's taken a while for me to, like, shed a lot of the mental baggage of what it means to be a SaaS founder compared to what it means to be a creator founder.
Brian Casel:And by that, I mean, that zero sum mindset. Right? Like, if I'm a SaaS competitor if I have competitors to Clarityflow, my SaaS, I don't wanna look at them. I don't wanna know what they're doing because we battling for the same customer.
Jordan:It's sum. Is that why? Because if you're using this software, then you're not going to use the competitor because it does the same thing.
Brian Casel:I literally know that people sign up for my software because they left that competitor or they leave my software to go to that competitor.
Jordan:And creators like in InfinitePie, I can be a fan of yours. I can be a fan of your competitor.
Brian Casel:That's how I view it. Yeah. Because like, I know that like a lot of my members in Builder Methods Pro, I'm sure that they purchased three, four other Claude Code courses out there, you know, or other AI memberships. I'm sure that they watch 10 other YouTubers in my space that are talking about the same kind of stuff. And that's great.
Brian Casel:Like, it it it it keeps it keeps the volume. It keeps the algorithms, like, put like, sending us traffic. Like, to me, that's that's totally fine. Mhmm. You know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. You have to keep an eye on competitors. That's anyone who says they don't keep an eye on competitors is being not honest. You have to keep an eye on competitors. But ultimately, the companies that win are the companies that understand the customer the best.
Justin Jackson:That's just how it works. And if you can deliver on what the customer wants, what they desire better than your competitors, if you have an insight that you've come to by actually talking to your customers, which very few people do. Sorry. Listening to your customers, which very few people do. If you actually have this gut level, I understand what people are trying to accomplish here.
Justin Jackson:I understand what they're up against. I understand that they're in their service truck all day. They don't have time to answer calls, and they're sweating, but they don't want to lose the customer. So if I can answer the call for them in this way, like if you can understand that, especially the emotionality of that, you're going to win. You're going to win.
Justin Jackson:Because most companies are lazy. And honestly, I'm still surprised how many companies are just not good at product in the sense that they don't understand what the customer is trying to do. They don't.
Brian Casel:It's true. It's that is the hardest thing. It's also the thing that I'm I'm always the most interested in focusing my time and energy on is like listening and listening to my customers, the feedback that they're giving me both directly, like like, by telling me either verbally or through email or through surveys or with their wallets. Like, they buying? Are they canceling?
Brian Casel:What are they what am I learning from that?
Jordan:Okay. Here's here's the it's a it's a yes and. It's not a disagreeing disagreement with what you just said, Justin.
Brian Casel:But Mhmm.
Jordan:There does come a point in time where the competitive space gets saturated. Like we're this now, right? We started this maybe two years ago and part of that thinking was like, let's get started now because this is going to be good. This is going to be a big thing. It's it's now a pretty big thing and there are a lot of competitors.
Jordan:And it feels like understanding the customer and their needs today is no longer enough. And now what's required is taking that understanding and using it to predict where the product should go based on how the customer's needs, their desires, their willingness to try, like their belief on what's possible. Like, where is all that leading? Yeah. So this is a nice transition to my my final topic, which is which is around the question of okay.
Jordan:So Marc Andreessen did this interview where he was like, all the great thinkers and accomplishers in human history, he was being a little hyperbolic here, had no introspection. They just did. They just did and took action and action and action. No introspection. Like, obviously, this okay.
Jordan:Not true. Right. He he used the word, I'm gonna be polite against my instinct. R word maxing.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:Okay? And it's shorthand for don't think, just do and learn by the doing and learn by the feedback after you've already done it as opposed to the planning and the and all that. Okay. And I'm I'm open to that. I'm open
Brian Casel:Ready to this fire aim kind of thing.
Jordan:Yes. And I'm open to that being a possible cure for procrastination, like planning and worrying and what's gonna happen, where should we go, and all this other stuff. But but it it links to, like, this question around product vision. What what are we building? What are we trying to do?
Jordan:And I feel like I used to I used to pride myself on living about a year out into the future. Mhmm. And now that feels so fuzzy that it's, like, three months out into the future is kind of all the vision we can handle. So you're taking your customers, your understanding of them, you're taking the competition, and then it's like, alright. Well, do we need a clearly formed vision of where it's going?
Jordan:Or do we just need the fuzzy outline of, like, what's going next and then just take action to start start building fast in that direction? Does this sound familiar? Because this is, like, the single biggest problem for me right now is when you go to Rosie's website, it is we will answer your phone for you. And in and and that is way behind where our understanding of what the product needs to be. So we we gotta bridge that gap real quick.
Jordan:We gotta go from where we are right now. We basically need to start building the new website before the features are done because we know what features are going to be built between now and then because we know we have three weeks and Claude can do that shit in three weeks. No problem. So we can we can we can explain the product and the features that don't exist yet because by the time the marketing side's ready, the features will be ready. So, like, that that's as much vision as you can handle right there.
Jordan:That's that's plenty.
Brian Casel:For the listeners, I am just nodding along, like, 100000%. Like, I'm feeling this. I'm thinking about it constantly, especially right right now, that that movement of our new problem.
Jordan:Because you used to look out a year into the future and say, we're gonna build all these things because it's gonna take a year to build them.
Brian Casel:It has been really challenging to even wrap my head around the speed. We because we know that the AI space is changing really rapidly. Right? Like like, that's obvious. But what I what what I'm starting to catch up to now is that the market of people in this space, like my customers, like potential like, I'm really focused on this question right now of ICP.
Brian Casel:You know, who is my ideal customer for for Builder Methods Pro? It's not as clear cut as you might think.
Justin Jackson:Do you feel like you used to have
Jordan:a clearer understanding of it a month ago and it gets fuzzy?
Brian Casel:Well, I just had a very different hunch six, seven, eight months ago than I do now. My my gut has changed view on this. I don't know how much detail I wanna go into here, but the but it's it's a it's a reflection of, I mean, definitely feedback that I'm seeing in the business in terms of the numbers and the types of people that come through and and who's buying and and who's who's resonating
Jordan:a while was like professional developers, the serious people, not the vibe coders. Let's let's talk to them and show them how other professionals are are building.
Brian Casel:That's how I started. Yeah. I think I'm changing now.
Jordan:I think I'm Expanding outward.
Brian Casel:I'm moving because because my membership is moving in this direction and and my interests too, but toward what you were just saying about, like, redoing the marketing site, like, haven't done that yet, and that that would be coming. And I have I have product changes coming.
Jordan:Yeah. And there's a lot behind. You look at your front window, your storefront, and you're like, that's not really us right now.
Brian Casel:But I am so if my membership is a big pie and it's broken up into segments, like there's definitely a sizable segment of what I would call professional developers, people are career engineers and they are adopting Claude code and they need to get comfortable. But I think that that pain point and that product market fit worked really well six months ago. And that equation is changing. And the fact that that that's even changing within a matter of two, three months shows how how much faster this industry is moving than other industries. Right?
Brian Casel:And and what I'm seeing now is that, yes, there's still there's still engineer like, professional developer development teams out there who who do still they still have demand for, like, hiring consultants to come in for workshops to do, like, how do we adopt Cloud Code? But that is declining because most teams are just already adopting Cloud Code now. Also because it's like, you're technical, adopting this stuff is actually not very difficult. But where I am seeing the movement in my membership are the non technical but serious business people who do wanna build with AI. They have real business needs.
Brian Casel:They wanna build with AI.
Jordan:Okay.
Brian Casel:And they're coming into my membership.
Jordan:Their ambition is growing into your okay.
Brian Casel:They turn on CNBC, they're talking about this thing called Claude Code and saying that it's a tool that can help them build internal tools for their business.
Jordan:And they go to YouTube.
Brian Casel:And they're going to YouTube, they come to me, you know, but and that's the direction. And and I see it in the numbers, and I see it in the feedback and the metrics too. And and I can see which content is resonating versus which content is pushing people away.
Jordan:So let's move away from the pros. Justin, all the weird set of issues that I just articulated, what does that look like the podcasting world?
Justin Jackson:Well, I mean, the one thing it made me think of is just because you can build a lot faster, it just changes everything. I mean, it changes things in terms of marketing. So as soon as we decided to do video podcasting, I immediately started marketing as if we already had it. I said we nor normally, we wouldn't get the feature page out until the launch day. I said, no.
Justin Jackson:We need to have the feature page out right now. Normally, I wouldn't start speaking about the feature on interviews and other things until we had launched it. But now I'm speaking as if we have this already, and it's just changed I think when you could change the like, John and Jason are building this faster than any feature we've ever
Jordan:built before. Right. The the gap is is so much shorter. It doesn't make sense to hold it. The amount talk about it.
Justin Jackson:And and but I can see, especially in a horse race. So right now, there's a horse race to see of all the podcast hosting providers. There's a lot of demand that's getting squeezed looking for an an in, a lot of demand of people looking to publish video podcasts on Apple Podcasts. And they're all looking around and seeing who has an in that I can I like, this is the exact kind of demand you want? Right?
Justin Jackson:And who who whoever markets this the best and gets it out that, yes, transistor does video podcast hosting, and then releases the feature the quickest is going to capture an incredible amount of that demand. And it creates this alignment thing. Right? So that it made me think of that. For you, it made me think of there's just this other thing, which is there's all this competition, building is faster than ever.
Justin Jackson:And so strategically, what kind of wild ideas could I imagine Rosie doing? And the one that jumped to my mind, this is just a silly idea, but it's just what what will increase Rosie's market? Well, enabling more young people to start those kind of businesses. And so one crazy idea is you go to Rosie and it's like, you can start we have a fast track to start your own power washing business. And it's like, start my business.
Justin Jackson:You start it. Rosie becomes your operating system.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:But you help them get training. You help them you've got the playbook, and they just hit one button like Stripe Atlas. And now all of a sudden, a 19 year old who's not gonna get a white collar job because of AI and is looking for an option. It's like, oh, if you need to start your own thing, you just go to Rosie. That's how it just you can run the whole thing as a one person company.
Justin Jackson:So there's like these ideas like that that have never been done before.
Jordan:Yeah. That You know what it links to? It links to Palsia. Yes. Okay.
Jordan:So I'm with you and I'm not gonna speak in too much detail about what I think that path looks like for us, but it opens up the aperture on what we should tackle pretty wide. And then it's tough to know the sequencing on, do you just jump to the end state or do you build up along the way and almost like boil the frog with your customer base to get them to adopt this next thing and then texting and then calls and then emails and then outbound and then CRM and then all of a sudden we'll we'll go find customers for you.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And and I had a conversation with this with our lead investor around Pulsia. While the product we don't like and isn't good, the demand is something to pay attention to because I keep finding myself having that same type of demand in other aspects where I'm like, I just wanna sign up for this thing and just click a button and just do the thing for me already. Mhmm. And and that's, you know, Palsy is extreme because it's like do the whole business for me. Yeah.
Jordan:But you can see how it's like, do all the marketing for me. Do do all the customer for me. Do all the communication for me. And it gets to a point, like you said, where you're like, just build me a roofing business. Yeah.
Jordan:I wanna point out owner.com. So restaurant
Justin Jackson:I'm familiar with owner. They
Jordan:are doing such an incredible job. They are worth paying attention to. Go to their site.
Brian Casel:What is it?
Jordan:It's restaurant websites, basically.
Justin Jackson:Nice. But yes. Don't call it a throwback, Brian.
Jordan:Okay. Now, okay. What Justin just said, he put up the homepage of owner.com. What you see the entry point is not build your restaurant website. It is you're losing sales online.
Jordan:Use AI to see what to fix. And the entry point is get my AI report, and it is this onboarding is a thing of beauty. It is incredible. Right. So put in a restaurant.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And then go to Instagram and and and wherever else you go for social, and then pay attention to the ads and how well done those ads are. And it's like the podcast ad with the founder of owner and Marcus Lemonis. And then you'll see something else for, like, restaurant no. No. Yeah.
Jordan:Maybe, like, restaurantgreater.com. And it's actually their property that's the same entry point as it is so well done, but it it speaks toward this potential of AI to just do the thing already. Just just do it for me. That's what that's what you're here. So what Justin's going through right now is he identified a restaurant, and now look how well done this thing is.
Jordan:It finds it on the map. It will find images. It will it will be like it'll show you, like, building your mobile app right now.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. And then it
Jordan:concludes as, like, here's so so now you have to go create an account. So now you're seeing how valuable this is. It's so well. It's so good.
Brian Casel:It's really well done.
Jordan:Yeah. Really well done. And then like where you get to is you get this report and it's like, here are the things you're doing well, here are things you're doing poorly, and here's how using owner, you can do all of this. Just click the button and we'll do it for you.
Justin Jackson:Is That is brilliant.
Jordan:So I don't know I
Brian Casel:mean, that's the thing I was thinking in in your case, Jordan was like, do it for you. Like, yeah, your thing is like self serve for these small businesses, but you guys can also do that for them, right? Like I don't mean to set them up with their, but your team runs their call center
Jordan:for them. It's a real, it's a problem because you get to the end state pretty quickly. You get to do I think maybe we have the opportunity to just like build and acquire small businesses. And I'm like, no, actually that's too far. I don't want to do that.
Jordan:I don't care if that's a good opportunity. That's actually not for us. So, but you don't know where to stop. And so the the challenge becomes I I think for all of our businesses, the challenge becomes how far ahead into the future do I wanna position myself?
Brian Casel:Theoretically, you you could be a you could be a call center, an AI call center.
Jordan:I think maybe we are. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Right? Like but I mean, like, even like I don't know. Is there like another management layer that that your customers are still handling themselves that could actually be handled by Rosie?
Jordan:Well, yes. This is actually guys might be experiencing the same set of questions where we're having trouble figuring out where we live because we're about to do a bunch of CRM integrations and we're of like, okay, so we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna do customer communication. And as soon as we get to all the touch points, things become more valuable because then you can identify this person is the same person that texted you. This is the same person that emailed you. This is linked to your CRM.
Jordan:And the question for us was like, so we live on top of the CRM? So we replaced the CRM? So, and what we got to was that we should not compare ourselves to software. We are not a software layer. We are a labor layer.
Jordan:What would some what would an employee that you hired do for you? That's what Rosie does. Yeah. And that feels accurate and temporary because pretty quickly, that's just gonna be like, well, that's just software now because software is a replacement for people.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Jordan:So it is a really it's like a it's like a brief moment.
Brian Casel:I just think of it like like the motion is already there. Right? Like, they're small businesses or businesses of all size have have outsourced their call handling. Like, replace or or just don't hire a secretary or don't hire a phone person and instead hire a a remote
Jordan:Right.
Brian Casel:Call answering Communication
Jordan:is a function of a business, period. Whether it's email, phone, text, website forms, people coming to Yelp, Thumbtack, requesting things like it's just a normal thing. And so, you know, the next obvious thing for us is to go beyond phone calls into other forms of communication.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, and you could see if you have imagination, you can see all the ways this could happen. So for example, one thought that just came to my mind is you call my landscaping company, My AI knows I'm booked for the next six months. So what my AI does is recommend a competitor, but I, as Rosie, own the affiliate or referral layer. So you now pay us to refer a customer. You get 30% of the referral as the referee.
Justin Jackson:Rosie takes a little cut, and then the end person gets 60%. There's all of these like additional things. It's like, if my business is cranking because of Rosie, and now I can answer every call because of Rosie, and now there's really nowhere else to go. Like, my barber is busy all the time. The phone's ringing off the hook, and they just start sending people to other barber shops.
Justin Jackson:But if they got an automatic referral every single time they did that, just Rosie doing it for them.
Jordan:Yeah. You're you're like trying to increase the slope of their growth. Like, they can handle so much. Then with Rosie, they can handle more so they can grow more. And you're trying to just crank that up all the way to the point of, like, actually, just click the button and we'll find you a customer.
Justin Jackson:That's right. Yeah.
Jordan:Yes. Yeah. So what to to me, what that has done right now, the communication layer is more important. The call, the phone call is more important. That's the most important thing.
Jordan:But what's happening very quickly is that the business knowledge and context, I know about your business so that I can answer your phone call, quickly becomes, I know about your business, now you get to decide how you want to use it. It is the elevation of the business brain, we call it, over the communication channel. And we gotta get through that transition because right now, it's communication channel first. It's the phone. And we need to transition that along with the positioning and the pricing and the packaging and the so that feels like the challenge.
Justin Jackson:Eventually, I want Rosie running all my ads for me because they understand the customer better than I understand the customer. I want Rosie doing outbound calls for me because that's free. And, you know I don't know where it stops or if it's supposed
Jordan:to stop. I don't know if there's supposed
Brian Casel:to be. I do think that that, like, the the management layer, like like, what you're like, you know, your customers use the interface in Rozy with some, like, onboarding to, like like, set up their rules, set up their their training for right? But like all of that can start to be actually handled in house by Rosie, not even by your team, but by agents. Right? Like agents are gonna like, we talk about like how how is Mythos gonna impact or how how is like the next generation of models gonna impact over the next twelve months?
Brian Casel:It's gonna make everything more capable, not just building software, but, like, you know, putting putting, like, an account what traditionally we would we would think of as, an account manager on this account to to help to to be their, like, personal concierge. Right? But that that can be an Right.
Jordan:Like, the onboarding for your construction project.
Brian Casel:That can be an agent that churns that business, that configures Rosie, that configures their training, that that that does the back and forth consultation, that can all be agent based. Like, it it seems far fetched, but it's actually not that Yeah. Like, anymore. You
Jordan:know? Is a it is a challenge of restriction, you know, because you can't do this properly as a product that people experience and pay for if go completely crazy tomorrow. There is a sequencing required, you know, based on an understanding of the customer and what they need next, what they're willing to adopt, what there is a stretch for some people to adopt, what would be attractive versus sounds too far fetched. So it's cool. I think you're about to experience it, Justin, with video Mhmm.
Jordan:Because right after video, there's gonna be something else. There's the next novel concept that's gonna be very attractive.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. And or something that's come up as we're talking about all of this is what is the is the actual difficult thing that people are gonna start to do? Sorry, that no one's gonna do, but we could do. And so we've thought for years, like, could just send people a whole equipment package. There's no advantage for us to do that.
Justin Jackson:It would be difficult in terms of logistics. It'd be difficult in but for the right kind of customer, with the right kind of LTV, that's actually a great thing to do. And could we do that in a way that actually impacts or like, even a crazy idea. I don't even know why I thought of this was like I was thinking of like, oh, well, every mega church should have a podcast. And we have a lot of churches that are podcast customers.
Justin Jackson:And I was thinking, oh, what could we do? Because they already have the equipment, but there's just like this interface layer. I was like, what if I just sent them a Clodbot on a machine and I say, just plug this into your network, and it just scans
Brian Casel:your Somebody's doing that now.
Justin Jackson:It scans your
Brian Casel:There's companies that are selling pre built Mac minis with OpenCloud. And
Justin Jackson:you just say, this thing will figure out how to get your sermons on transistor automatically. Don't worry about it.
Brian Casel:About, like, that question of, like, how how can we offer something that's valuable, that is difficult to attain, that's worth paying for, that that is gonna continue to be difficult? Like, if I think about your business, Justin, yeah, you could sell you could send them a microphone that that could help that that could eliminate, like, a week of friction of getting up and running with with a podcast, I would say. The the really hard thing, the really hairy problem, is making a good podcast that's worth that's worth listening to, that can actually be that can actually reach a market. So that's that to me is like the hard thing that that would be really hard for you to offer as a service, but it's possible and you can charge a lot for it. Like, you know, and that could look like a number of things.
Brian Casel:Like, traditionally, it was like an agency that would like work with like, they would have a content person working with the business owner to extract their best ideas and turn it into a podcast. Mhmm. May maybe there's an agent version of that. Like or, you know, because, like, the the church like
Justin Jackson:Or maybe I need an owner style onboarding where it just scans your podcasts and looks through all the transcripts, looks through all your your ratings and reviews and says
Jordan:And who you are. Your your background. Here are your first 10 episodes. Let's go. These are the topics you should be talking about.
Jordan:This is how you should be talking about them. It's like it's almost like what is the biggest, most difficult, most valuable thing that you can offer by one click of a button? Yeah. Like, I can promise you this huge, difficult, very valuable thing. You just gotta click here.
Jordan:That's it. Let just get the journey started. And and it it's like and we're it's almost like we're we're not being ambitious enough in the big promise that we're making.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Like
Jordan:like Rosie should be making put in your Google business profile and all of your customer communications are done.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'll give you a quick sort of teaser on I'm thinking about this. I know we gotta wrap soon. But the, you know, I am thinking about like this shift in like ICP, like people who want to build stuff. You know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I could do like more beginner focused courses and stuff. But what I'm really excited about right now is this concept of starter kits for for apps and products and systems. So like, instead like, I just built this this tool that I call Sparkdrop. It helps me run my content pipeline.
Brian Casel:I've got another tool called BrainDown. It's like a it's like a markdown editor. Got another one that does my my my tasks with OpenClaw. Each of these are software products. I could launch them and host them as a SaaS, but I'm not doing that.
Brian Casel:I'm not interested in that. I don't I don't I don't think that they're really that marketable. But what is but I get requests like, I want that. I wanna build it. Can I use it?
Brian Casel:Can I get it? How how could I build it? So I'm I I wanna grow this catalog of starter kits from Builder Method. Like, as a Builder Methods Pro member, you get access to these kits, which is like the specs, the design system, the the prebuilt prompts to put into Cloud Code so that you can build your version of this product. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I'm just gonna have a whole catalog of these things. So I I built a product, converted it into a starter kit, give you a couple videos. And so then then you get to use these tools or build build your own version, maybe deviate and customize it and make it your own. But in doing so, you're also learning how to build. You're going through the motions of of using Cloud Code, you know.
Brian Casel:So that's like a direction that I'm really excited about right me of
Jordan:Base 44. If you sign for Base 44, which is very interesting product, very successful.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yeah. I see that. They have advertisements all
Jordan:the time. Yeah. They have templates. They have app templates. Yep.
Jordan:Yep. So you sign up, you're like, oh, you wanna build an app? Cool. You don't have to start from scratch. You don't need a blank canvas.
Jordan:There are paid templates. There are premium templates. There are free templates. Yep.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Super cool.
Jordan:Alright. Fam, great episode. Thank you everyone for joining us. Justin, you're heading out for the weekend. Heading out.
Jordan:Cool.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I'll be out next week. I'll be on the beach in Florida. So I don't know if you guys are gonna do an episode without me.
Brian Casel:I hope you do so that I can listen to Yeah.
Jordan:Maybe we'll bring in the guest.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Maybe we'll bring in the secret guest. Yeah. I think I'm around. So Cool.
Justin Jackson:Same. See you next week. Thanks to everybody in the chat. Nice to see all the same folks, and we'll see you next week.
Jordan:Thanks for joining.
Justin Jackson:Alright. Later, folks. Bye.