Welcome to the panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co founder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:And I'm Jordan Gal, co founder at heyrosie.com.
Brian Casel:Alright. So, we're back. I hope you guys had a had a good time without me yes, last week. Yeah. Sounded like you guys had a pretty good, episode there.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin:It was nice to talk to Henry. He's like I like a totally different vibe than what you like the bootstrap bootstrap feel, you know? I It was nice to have like a little bit of New York, little bit of venture, little bit of thinking bigger, you know? Enterprise. Mhmm.
Justin:Yeah. I liked that.
Jordan:Yeah. Was good stuff. Were outnumbered. The the two venture backed guys with with the bootstrapper. Yeah.
Jordan:Henry's point of view is different, you know, for a few different reasons. First, his personality. Very thoughtful, very ideas driven. Right? And and a lot of the narrative he and I talk regularly, friends, but a lot of our conversations end up about narrative because narrative really matters for venture.
Jordan:Mhmm. Because you are you're visiting an investor at a point in time. You're talking about the past, but it's almost like that's not nearly as relevant as the story unfolding in front of you and why you're doing certain things because you are predicting the future going in a certain direction And you're trying to see if that person matches up with that narrative. If they believe the same thing you believe, you're you're on the same side and maybe there's work to be done together.
Brian Casel:I feel like that's very true just for me internally. Like, I'm I'm always thinking about, like, narrative of this business. Like when, when I started it, what's the story and where, where's it going strategically and what, you know, like I, I tell myself some story or some narrative about where I think this is going. And then I look back and I'm like, am I achieving that or not? And that's always fun.
Jordan:Justin, does that sound familiar to you around like the video ideas? Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just recorded this this intro for a new podcast. This just gonna be called the video podcast show. And it's just gonna be me talking about how video doesn't have to be super complicated.
Justin:But I have this, moment where I'm looking at this camera, which is like my nice Canon Mark two. And then I switched to this webcam I have here, but I take it off the stand and I show people around my office. And the there's a lot of narrative in that. There's narrative of like, here I am, I'm now showing you kind of this raw, like, yeah, I have this clean background, but now we people increasingly, I think the narrative people are responding to is raw, real, like what okay, here's the nice view of your office, but let's see the messy view of your office. Let's like Yeah.
Justin:Look around your office. Let's experiment in real time. Let's break the third wall a little bit. And yeah.
Brian Casel:I was just listening to, to, Colin and Samir podcast. They they talk about like creators and YouTubers and they're interviewing, I don't know, some some guy has a 10,000,000 subscriber YouTube channel. And he was talking about exactly that, like the the style now, at least with a lot of these documentary style YouTubers is to show the camera guy. Show show like there there's no like invisible crew around the one creator. You're seeing everyone involved in real time.
Brian Casel:That's more of the the vibe that works.
Jordan:Yeah. Authenticity. We we see the same thing in our ads. The more Right. Non ad like, the more authentic, the more effective.
Justin:Yeah. And it's it's you you almost do have to switch this this switch in your brain, which is I have professional Justin mode, this mode that I think looks and sounds good. My kids are always like, bruh, like, what why you sound like that, bruh? Like, that's like they're to to them, it sounds like me pretending to be something I'm not. And my friend Chase Reeves has this technique where he because I'm He's looking
Brian Casel:so good on camera.
Justin:I'm looking at you guys and well, this is his secret, is he says, I he was on Nathan Barry's podcast and he's like, when I'm looking at the camera, I pretend there's a person there that I'm actually looking at and talking to. So you'll see he he'll often like start his videos like this, he'd be like, hello friends, like and he's just like connected with the like very intense connecting with people. And yeah, there's a technique to that that I think is interesting.
Brian Casel:Totally. My my 12 year old daughter, every time she sees anything that's like high production value, even just like graphic design or like, or motion graphics, she's like, oh, that's AI. That's that's definitely AI. That's AI. Interesting.
Brian Casel:Know that there was like graphic design before AI. Like, they're like, they were able to make like pretty polished stuff. It's like everything that and she's probably right. A lot of it is probably AI, but like, it's it's funny how like they they have this like assumption now. Right.
Jordan:It's partly a reaction to that. Right? The the more polished, the more it's like the closer to artificial, literally. And so the the the fuzzier, uglier, raw. Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense.
Brian Casel:So I think it's my turn to host today.
Justin:That's right.
Brian Casel:Yep. And I have a couple of, not many, just a couple bullet points we'll we'll get into. We'll start with some updates. And I thought today, let's let's each do, you know, one business update. Let's also do one personal life update.
Brian Casel:Could be anything. Like, let's I think it might be cool to start a little bit more of a ongoing narrative on what's gonna happen in in our lives, whatever we wanna share that's like not business. And then, there was some news, you know, this week with with Apple. I I like to follow Apple news. We can talk about Tim Kirk, Tim Cook to, to John Turnis.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Maybe open that up to like, how do how do we think about like CEOs that we follow or or are interested in or find interesting? And like, I I like to kind of follow news whether it's in tech or, or not tech, the strategic moves that people are making.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:The bigger question that's on my mind, but I think it's an interesting topic to talk about in general is this idea of ICP, you know, who you, who your ideal customer profile is. And I'm really focused on it right now in my business, but the bigger question I, I'm starting to notice in all of this is that like, I think almost every single business problem or maybe even you can map every business metric from like traffic to churn, to retention, to revenue, to product market fit, like all, all these different levers that we think about. If you, if you just like unpack them layer by layer, eventually you get back to like, well, are we trying to sell to the right person?
Justin:Yeah. Oh, I'm, I'm interested in this because I, I'm not an ICP person. I want to hear what you Okay. Guys have to
Jordan:I'm ICP confused at the moment. So we we I mean, me too.
Brian Casel:Know? Totally. Alright. So what so how about some updates? Jordan, what's what's happening on your end?
Jordan:Okay. So the gigantic partnership with the Fortune 100 company was a complete dud. No. I think I actually don't know. Something something happened.
Jordan:Like, it resulted in effectively zero trash. So something didn't go right. Maybe the email didn't go out. Something But
Brian Casel:it didn't have the intended effect.
Jordan:Kinda. We don't know what happened because we aren't in control of it. And these very large companies, they actually work with an agency. So we are communicating with the agency and the agency is communicating with the client. And so I'm working with agency like, so, you know, what happened?
Jordan:It was supposed to go out on this day. It like we we see nothing on our end. So it's a bit TBD. So sad. But I think it was another lesson in you should work on partnerships.
Jordan:You should pursue partnerships, but you shouldn't get your hopes up on partnerships. You kinda don't know. You just don't know which one's gonna work out. So I I think we should keep doing them. We should be careful on how much time I spend with them.
Jordan:Reality, it's stretched out over a few months. There's not that much time overall. Yeah. So it's just another lesson of like, okay, we we don't know. And I have another one brewing with another, like, really big company.
Jordan:And I feel like I have a healthier approach to it. We're like, yes, we should pursue this. It does make sense. And at the same time, I don't know. We're not gonna get our hopes up and put into our projections and expect, you know, a 100 customers a day or or anything like that.
Brian Casel:It's you know, I've I've always, like, observed your work, Jordan, and that that always seems like a big, like, strength of yours. It's like the networking and the partnerships and developing that into like real, like repeatable channels. And I've always, I tend to lean on the opposite end of that where like every time I try to pursue partnerships or make them happen, just seems like a lot of like spinning wheels and for not a lot of results. But then when they do hit, it's incredible. And like, literally like right now, this year, the story on Clarity Flow, which I don't talk about as much, like we're growing again, thanks to a pretty lucky partnership that that's been evolving over the last few months.
Brian Casel:So like, and like, and I did no work to make it happen. It just finally came through and now that's great, you know? Cool. Yeah.
Jordan:So that's my my mini update. My real update is we had we had a little bit of a slowdown the last two weeks. And, man, that stresses me out. It really no joke. Stresses me out.
Jordan:And then the last seven days are we're we're back to normal. And it was almost like I was playing therapist for Rock because Rock was not handling the slowdown well. And he was like, what should we do? Should we change it? Should we change that?
Jordan:And I've been in that boat before, and he has kind of calmed me down and seen me through the roller coaster. And this time it was my turn. And now now we're back to normal and ended up being like a ten day hiccup. But what it drove me toward is when you run ads, you you get into this habit of just expecting. Well, we spend this much and this is how much we get back.
Jordan:And if it goes off a little bit, you you don't feel that in control because you're spending the same amount of money. You get in the same clicks. The ads are the same, things haven't changed, but but sign ups are down and you want to get, you know, you want you want to do something, but you you can't you can't decide what Meta does in their algorithm. So what it's driven me to is to put work in on the things that I can control. They're also advertising related.
Jordan:But I just have like sit back and well, let me just do this other work because we're just going to expect our same sign ups coming in every day. So it kind of lit a fire under me a little bit. And I can talk about what we're doing on the ads thing and why we're going more top of funnel and looking at partnership ads, which are in the same direction as our previous conversation about authenticity. Right? We run ads and it's from the Rosie account.
Jordan:There are things called partnership ads on Meta and spark ads on TikTok that allow the the business ourselves to run organic content through our ad account. So another creator, someone else with their own account will publish a post. They'll be talking about Rosie. We will pay them for it. And then we can take their post from their account.
Jordan:And Interesting. Yes. And push budget behind it as like a regular campaign. Really interesting kind of like hybrid
Brian Casel:So you can can promote the post that's still coming from the creator's account?
Jordan:Yes.
Brian Casel:Got it. And they're talking about Rosie and they're and they're sending
Jordan:That's right. And maybe it shouldn't feel like an ad format, like a hook and a body in a CTA. You want it to feel more organic. Yeah. But the goal is to go at the top of the funnel in a way that doesn't look like it's coming from your account.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's really interesting. Like, with my YouTube channel, I've I've been selling some sponsorships lately, which is it's been good financially, but it's been kind of a mixed bag for on many levels. Yeah. Some challenges with it.
Brian Casel:But it's it's been really interesting to be to be on the receiving end of brands and marketing agencies reaching out to creators like me on YouTube to And, you know, like some of them are serious and I've had some pretty good deals come through and some of them are just incredibly aggravating to deal with, like the nonsense and the negotiation and the and the low balling and and this and that and and some downright like scams that are hard to notice at first. I I There's It's a whole mess that I never really have been exposed to. But it's Like
Justin:sponsors trying to scam you? Or they're they are promoting
Brian Casel:hard to hard to put my finger on exactly what's going on. But there's a there are a lot of middle play middlemen in in the process in in brand sponsorships, at least with YouTubers, probably with other platforms too. Like, the good the good deal
Justin:that that represent Yeah. Like these brands and they're like, I hey, I've got represent all these brands. Would you like to have them on your channel? They're negotiating. They could be scammers.
Brian Casel:That's like 80% plus of the inquiries that I get. I get them all like every day. Some of them are like direct from the from the brands themselves and though and some of those have been pretty good deals that, that I've done on the channel. Mhmm. One or two have come through.
Brian Casel:And sometimes agencies are serious and they're good. I, I don't want to just get into all the, all the weeds here, but like-
Jordan:Yeah, it's messy.
Brian Casel:You know, from like, like, oh, like we'll only pay you via PayPal or we have to, or we have to renegotiate this. Or like you were talking about like the dedicated, like the usage rights, like, like I charge a lot more for usage rights, right? Like there's, there's the fee for me to do an integration partnership and then there's, and then we're going to multiply that by a lot if you want to actually have access to using it in your ad campaign and stuff like that.
Justin:So because you lose
Jordan:control. You don't know what they can do with it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And like, and, and
Brian Casel:so like, I'm, I'm a
Brian Casel:little bit more, I think like savvy when it comes to those kinds of negotiations than like the 20 year old YouTuber. So a lot of these agencies are used to just throwing around terms at, at these guys on YouTube and, and and so it it just turned into a lot of me saying like, nope, I'm not doing that. Nope. Can't can't do that. And then they just keep coming back and then it and and I'm I'm starting to realize it's more of a distraction even though there is some financial reward on some of these.
Brian Casel:It's a it's a balancing act but
Justin:Interesting. Yep. I'm I'm actually very curious about that. I'd love to discuss that sometime because I'm thinking about resurrecting this idea that John and I had early in Transistor, which was spots.fm, an easy way to sponsor on independent the web. And, we had to shelve it because we were only two people at the time and there was no I
Brian Casel:remember you talking about that a couple years ago. Yeah. I mean, at one point that was a shiny object that I thought I was gonna do. I'm definitely not. But the, I I for transistor, that seems like such an interesting play.
Justin:Yeah. Because it's a two sided market, but we have one side of the market which is creators. We have the creators on our And we actually also have some of the other folks on the other side because some of our customers are also sponsorship buyers. Right? So, we have both sides kind of, but every time I hear somebody talk about it, I'm like, this is kind of why we did get into it because it's like, oh, there's kind of complicated and then there's multiple people and like, but
Brian Casel:Yeah. Podcast ads seem a little bit more, I don't know, serious. And also, like, I just think about in your case, you know, the, like the kit model or the spark loop model, and they, you know, kit acquired spark loop. That's just such an interesting model since you already have the platform, you know?
Justin:Yeah. The, I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to interject here, I think if we did it, it would be for sponsorship of all indie content. So if you have a YouTube channel, if you have a podcast, if you have a TikTok channel, we would make it easy for independent creators. There's competitors in this space, passion fruit or something like that is one of And, yeah, we want to we would go after kind of all of those, specifically kind of video audio content probably, but also maybe newsletter content too, who knows? I know that I've I've had mixed like I tried Sparkloop once, did either of you find that helpful?
Justin:I couldn't figure it out.
Brian Casel:I haven't used it, but, I know Lewis, and, and he's done fantastic with that business. Mhmm. And I know that it's like a huge network that does really well, you know? Yeah. That's why Kit acquired them.
Justin:Yep. Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah. That that's it for me. Justin, how about your, your update? I I I
Justin:kinda already talked. I I've we're working on video podcasting. We're very close to doing the initial beta. It's difficult actually to manage this beta. So many people are hungry.
Justin:And I'm worried that basically everybody's looking for a way to upload to video sorry, upload to Apple Podcast video. That's what everybody wants. Very few people allow it publicly yet, like they're all of our competitors haven't released it publicly. Very few people release pricing and there's just customers fishing around going, who's going to offer this first publicly? And so, have a, we have a, yeah, a beta, we think a limited beta next week, but there's like, I've literally promised like probably 20 people that they can be in the first beta, but we really only wanna have about five five people.
Justin:So like, that we're we're like managing like, there's so many people hungry to get in. The waiting list is almost 600 people. So there's like Okay. 600 people that have said they want video now and
Brian Casel:Are these existing transistor customers or
Justin:A lot of them. Are, lot of but there's also a good number of people who are new, who are just waiting. And a lot of people signed up in anticipation of us releasing videos. So some people have signed up. They respond to my welcome email and they're like, hey, where's video?
Justin:Like, I'm here for video. And I'm like, I'm trying.
Brian Casel:Don't know. Sounded in a
Jordan:product market fitty.
Brian Casel:Coming in on our live chat as well. You got some demand.
Justin:Yeah. Well, that's Chris. That's actually our podcast editor, Chris from London podcasting. He's the and he's I mean, on his side, he's like, now having to because he used to be an audio only editor, and so I'm also doing calls with all these other stakeholders and partners like Chris, let's get on a Zoom call and let's talk about this new paradigm for editing podcasts. And what are you thinking?
Justin:How are editors gonna going to respond to this? Because it's a big jump for a lot of people. So, yeah, I'm it's exciting. We're we're doing going as fast as we can, but yeah.
Brian Casel:It's Very cool.
Justin:Interesting time.
Brian Casel:It's it's cool to be like coming in early on that. Yeah. That's pretty sweet. I wanna hear how that goes.
Justin:Yeah. I wish I I wish we'd started a little bit earlier than we did, but, yeah, it's exciting to see how fast we can move. And a lot of, you know, using Claude way more for this project than we ever have before.
Jordan:Cool. Do you do you have a date in mind?
Justin:Yeah. So, we've said
Jordan:Not to put you on the spot in front of
Justin:the We said basically limited beta next week. This podcast, the panel podcast will actually probably be the first to test Apple video uploads. So that's gonna happen after we edit this episode. Poor Chris is gonna try to figure out how to do it. He's not sure if he'll be able to get it up today on Friday, but we're gonna yeah.
Justin:So upload the video to Apple. So that that limited beta next week, and then my preference would be before we even release pricing is just to get as many of these 600 people in the beta and just say, you could start using it. We haven't figured out pricing yet. You may have to upgrade. But if you want it in right now, we'll let you start using it.
Justin:I want to get as much usage as we can. And then once we've seen the usage, then I'll be able to say, okay, here's here's how we're going to, for example, tier do the pricing tiers. Like, do we base it on storage, which is what Wistia and Vimeo and Flightcast do? Do you base it on uploads, which is what Buzzsprout and, Potigy do? Do you base it on minutes uploaded?
Justin:Do you there's like all these things. And underneath your pricing tiers is of course your own cost structures, like how much is this gonna cost us? And, yeah. So we're we're trying to figure that out too.
Brian Casel:Super interesting.
Jordan:Yeah. I got some problems with that approach.
Brian Casel:Let's hear it.
Jordan:No. I I understand it, but it sounds like what it's leading you into is making your pricing decision based on your costs.
Justin:And that's not
Jordan:it's like an important factor, but maybe shouldn't drive it's tricky because you can get caught. Right? If you if you settle on pricing before understanding the the cost, then the risk is getting caught on like, uh-oh, we don't have enough margin. This is not not a good price point.
Brian Casel:That's like a good problem to to try to have to figure out. Right? Like like we have so much demand, now we have to figure out our cost problem, you know?
Justin:Yeah. Not just cost but the the we actually did a great series on pricing early in Build Your Sass where I interviewed Rob Walling, Nathan Barry, Patrick Campbell, Ben from Ben Orenstein, and a few other people, I think. And just like really got into how do you make these decisions? Oh, Jason Fried as well. And I think the approach that worked for us was at one hand, you have to figure out what your costs are because you don't want to get stuck.
Justin:And almost every value metric is based on costs. So like ConvertKits value metric is number of subscribers. It's not directly related to cost, which is sending email, but it's proportionally it's it's it's, it's it is related to their direct cost. So you keep costs in mind, but then the big one is what is the usage metric that people actually care about? And in ConvertKit's case, they want more subscribers.
Justin:In Transistor's case, our original metric we used was downloads. People want more downloads. But what we found is that almost nobody gets out of the starting tier. And so, we we need a a different mechanism this time around to convey the value of like, what do you want here? What do you want more of?
Justin:Right. And, usage is is a good one. And and that's why like Wistia and a lot of these other people have just, used storage because if you're uploading 10 videos a week, that'll fill up your storage faster, right? So then eventually you gotta you gotta upgrade. So I I'm curious to see the usage more than anything and then keep costs in mind.
Justin:That's that's the goal.
Brian Casel:It's such a tough balance because I when I think about usage, I I feel like Wistia, like they're as much as I'm a fan of the company, like I feel like their pricing model has always prevented me from using them.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But it's like, never liked the idea of penalizing users for using your app a lot. Yeah. You want, you want a lot of usage. Like you, you do want to focus on a value metric, but, that's a tough one. Yeah.
Justin:We we do buckets
Jordan:because of that. So, you know, basically, like, two hundred fifty minutes is the first bucket, then a thousand, then two thousand. Mhmm. And it does keep costs in mind. So there's a maximum.
Jordan:Right? If there's 100% utilization in the plan and everyone uses exactly one thousand minutes, are we still good on margin? And then because it's a bucket and not super metered based on, you know, exact usage, we want to reduce in the customer's mind that they're paying for minutes. Mhmm. It's just you belong in this bucket with these features and this, like, maximum.
Jordan:But I also feel like we're gonna be driven toward more usage based metrics as opposed to feature based, which is what we originally wanted.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I actually think I mean, you're always gonna be anchored to your competitors. So, that's one thing is like, you can you can say, hey, we're inventing a new metric. It's the value metric and everybody's gonna love it.
Justin:And then, you're everyone's like, well, but Mailchimp discharges for a number of email addresses. What are you guys doing? Like, that's what I want and expect. So that's a And big the other thing, I I just think about the whole experience. So there is this experience of like, you're exporting a video file and you're like watching how long it takes to export.
Justin:And then you look at the video file and you're like, wow, that's 15 gigabytes. So you already have file size in your brain. Then you upload it and then you're watching it upload. It takes a while to upload, and then you're watching it process, and it takes a while And
Brian Casel:you're watching the money come out of your account.
Justin:You're watching you're watching it process. And so, file size does kind of equate to storage. And so there is part of me that's like, I wonder if that's the best because it's already a part of the customer's brain. Now, would definitely bucket it, right? We would have a max bucket as well.
Justin:You're in this bucket, you're in this bucket, you're in this bucket. But yeah, it's Go,
Brian Casel:go with the token model that's working for Anthropic and OpenAI,
Justin:Does you anybody like tokens? I
Brian Casel:I don't know, but they're making a lot of money with them. That's that's what I know that.
Jordan:I I
Justin:mean I noticed that Netlify charges us they're our web hosting company and they charge us for credits
Brian Casel:I tend say that that's
Justin:And I'm like, what are these credits? It's like reloaded your account. You have 3,000 new credits. I'm like, what the fuck is a credit? Like, is
Brian Casel:it I mean, the max plan on on Claude is still just feels like a steal to me. Like the people who who keep complaining about about the Claude max plan, it's like, I don't know how much longer we're going to get this, the kind of savings compared to paying for the API tokens directly.
Jordan:Yeah, hopefully for a while. I mean, I have no shame at all admitting I have no idea what a token is.
Brian Casel:I don't think anybody though. It's like, it's like a fraction of a word or something like that. I don't know.
Jordan:It's like, it's all about tokens and yeah, It's like, oh, You know. You know. Of course, the tokens.
Brian Casel:You know, just just just token max it. Whatever.
Jordan:I'm I know.
Brian Casel:So alright. So, like, yeah, on my end, quick update. Buildermethods.com, hopefully, is loading right now. It's totally new. I just launched like an hour ago.
Brian Casel:Totally new redesign, rebrand. And we can talk more about this later when we talk about ICP, but it is at least the start of a shift, I think for me in ICP. I, you know, sometimes when this happens, when I start thinking about ICP and strategic directions, for whatever reason, this always leads me to a redesign. And that's, that's what happened here. There, there are some other technical reasons I, I rebuilt it to be a little bit more friendly to be able to upload update with Claude and iterate more easily with with Claude code than the original version of builder methods.
Justin:I'd love to hear about that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But anyway, like, this
Brian Casel:is the all new, design of the whole site. I also have a a new course that's mostly launched. I still need to finish it, but it's a it's called Become the Builder. It's a it's like a more of a beginner friendly, like how to build and deploy a real product with AI and Clog code start to finish. And, yeah, that I'm starting to shift a little bit in the ICP who I'm speaking to a little bit less emphasis on like the professional engineer and a little bit more on like the business owner who wants to learn how to build or people working within businesses and be that internal builder, be able to confident.
Brian Casel:And I like that the idea of like promoting the transition from you can vibe code a bit, now learn how the pros learn, learn what you need to know to take it to a more professional level. And that's, that's sort of the direction.
Justin:I can talk about that later. Can just we stay on this for a little bit? Because I'm I it feels like it's it's it's in the zeitgeist right now.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin:Because I we were just talking about before we started recording, I've just done something similar to you, which is I'm like, we need to make the marketing site work better in Claude. And initially, was like, I'm gonna have to build my own CMS to do this. But then I was talking to Josh and I'm like, wait a second, all of our stuff is in Static. It's all these like collections of markdown files already. We can do this right now.
Justin:And so then I just started connecting it to like the hrefs, MCP, Fathom Analytics MCP. I want to connect it to my search Google Search Console MCP and SEO testing MCP. I don't know if you know of that one, but I've started experimenting with this to make it my website more Claude compatible or Claude enabled. What did you do, Brian?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I guess from a technical standpoint, what I did was like, so the new buildermethods.com, which is the public site as well as the membership portal, it's all a Rails app. And it always has been a Rails app. So my approach this time around was let's redesign it and rebuild it from the ground up. So totally fresh code base, new GitHub repo.
Brian Casel:It is still Rails, I transitioned from like, I'm using the stack which I use now, which is Rails, Inertia, React.
Justin:Okay.
Brian Casel:When I, when I started the original builder methods, it was about a year ago. And back then it was more pure Rails and turbo and hot wire and no react. There's that technical note. What I did this time around was even though it was a full from the ground up rebuild, I had Claude Code constantly analyze the code base from from the current and and and I was instructing it. I'm like, okay, I have the new design Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But we are importing or or porting over a lot of the same back end that we've always had. And then today, this morning, we finally did the cut over, which is, which was like the, the, the launch, but we're not like actually migrating databases. It's the exact same database. We're just replacing the code base that talks to it essentially.
Justin:Got it.
Brian Casel:And so, yeah, to, to make it more, updatable, I did develop a design system. And I dabbled with a few different tools. I tried out the new Cloud design. I have a new video about that today, but I didn't, I ended up just doing it mostly in Cloud Code itself. And on the backend, I've always had a backend admin interface, which is essentially a custom CMS that I use for certain parts of the, of the site.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I added a new section in there, which is a design system. And it's a really, really extensive. And I I I showed this in detail in today's YouTube video if anybody Oh, interested I gotta check this in
Jordan:out. Okay.
Brian Casel:So basically, I like every visual element that you currently see on buildermethods.com from the hero sections to the navigations, to the buttons, to the typography, the colors, all of that is defined in detail in this design system that lives in the back end. And, and in addition to showing those components, I also documented some technical notes on like when we implement a hero, there are like three versions of a hero. Mhmm. And these are the configurations that we can have. When we have these like background textures, here's how they work.
Brian Casel:And so, so these are notes, like technical notes on on implementation. And then in the claude.md file in the code base, it instructs Claude. So anytime I'm ever, if I ever say like, right, we need to fire up a new landing page for this new course I'm going to launch or this new product I'm going to launch.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:It, it just knows based on the instruction that like, okay, if we're designing something new, I look at the design system first, I use existing components. Mhmm. And, and if we're tweaking on that, then we can update the, the design system. And it's much more baked in to, to the Claude infrastructure in the code base than, than the previous version was. I just found like the, the previous version, every time I wanted to launch something new, I was constantly, it took like three times longer than, than normal because I would constantly have to tell Claude how to navigate its way around my twenty twenty five development decisions that I made by hand.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin:That exact same thing that you described, having it in the admin, all of these things. I wanna do what you did for design, I want to do for marketing. And I want to have these as kind of orchestrated virtuous cycles, meaning eventually, I want to have some sort of bots or something that go out and just take screenshots of Google AI search overviews, like just go out and search these terms and from different people's different places, different agents, and then bring those screenshots in. And then I want and Claude just has a record of them. Based on what you're seeing there, I want you to make us give us recommendations of what we should do on the marketing site, what we should do other places, like give us today's work, and you just make all the suggestions, and then we do it all and we can build it right there in Claude, right?
Justin:And then I want to set up tests to say, did this work? So remind me in a week to see we'll take a new batch of screenshots from, you know, all the AI overused. Did it work? And I'm I'm getting pretty excited about now just the ability to like we have a collection of customer testimonials, which we add to all the time. But there's no, like, what pages show those testimonials?
Justin:Are they fresh? Are they the best ones? I just said yesterday, I said, Claude, I want you to look at everywhere we have testimonials and put the best testimonials on every page. And if it doesn't have one, just recommend a testimonial for that page. And it just goes through and just embeds them all.
Justin:Fuck. That's awesome. This like this is like you've we have all this marketing stuff that just kind of sitting there, not doing anything. It's all dusty. And it feels like Claude now lets me like dust it off.
Justin:Like hrefs data, how many times do you actually log into hrefs? You're like, oh, I don't know what and now it's like you get to like dust that off and go, okay, Claude, go tell me what's important. Come back, make a recommendation, and then like fire all this stuff up, you know?
Brian Casel:So that's like an agent system that I have not set up yet. Like I I have agent stuff for creative marketing stuff, but I don't do enough with like check my analytics and give me a report and then give me some actionable items on what we should change based on the the performance of certain pages or posts or whatever. Yeah. I need to
Jordan:do think more this of relates directly to your ICP question. Because when I hear what you're saying, Justin, first I say, I want that. Second, I say, I'm not building that. Somebody build it so I can pay you for it. And right.
Jordan:That's like a crossover between, well, okay, the models can do it. Mhmm. But are someone gonna build it themselves? Yeah. Are are they just gonna, like, walk into Claude and just start building?
Jordan:Do they do they need some guidance on how to build? Is that something that we actually should be paying a $100 a month for? Or should we be able to build that? And if I had more knowledge at my fingertips on how to build internally, maybe that's something that shouldn't be paid a $100 a month for.
Brian Casel:I feel like that specifically is a really good example of something that is probably best done internally. Like, I think, I really think that that is the type of specific use case where I think it makes sense to build it custom now instead of look for an off the shelf SaaS. And when I say build a custom, like that could be a marketing focused slash technical focused founder like Justin or or you Jordan or or like a mark, like what I think is like, I think that a marketer these days in 2026 should should have the capability to go use Cloud Code to to build these types of systems.
Jordan:Yeah. We also look at our engineering team and basically demand a portion of their time to be aimed at helping marketing because they're they're the leverage is there. And if we want to build something like this, our engineering team is basically a magic wand for a nontechnical person on the marketing side. But it's so valuable that we should spend marketing excuse me, we should spend engineering resources and time to
Brian Casel:do But but like
Brian Casel:yeah. And like an internal person even in marketing can do technical things now like that they couldn't do before. Now that we have the ability for Cloud Code to get in there or whatever or Codex or whatever like and I I think it's a good internal tool because it's so internal. Like you're accessing your own data, your analytics, your your database, your customer data, like that stuff that's like so hard to integrate with the mix panels and the Google Analytics and the, you know
Jordan:Yeah. There there's something to there's a lot of pressure on the tools. So, Ahrefs is probably feeling a lot of pressure to to expand into that or it's almost like open up more.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:I read a I didn't read. That's that's over overstating it. Listen. I saw the headline in the first paragraph of an article.
Brian Casel:You got the gist.
Jordan:Yes. That that talked about the difference between moats and I think they called it like a canal where where having your own data and your own moat was really valuable. And now maybe opening up to this public canal that allows your customer to access your data and blend it into everything that they want to do is is a different type of emote. I see this a lot in the Shopify ecosystem. People like like yelling at Triple Whale, which is like an analytics and tracking product.
Jordan:And people are just saying, just I don't want to use your A. I. Tools. I want to use Claude. Just, you know, open up.
Jordan:Give me give me the data. And so it does feel like there's a lot of pressure. And maybe right now it's a bit temporary on how difficult it is to go into HREFs and plug it into an MCP and bring it over here and then do the analysis that hopefully it's just easier as time goes on to because whatever HREFs does, it's probably not the full picture that you want. Because you wanna combine their data along with other things.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what's cool though, is I think we're getting there where you can say, okay, first I want you to go pull the Ahrefs data, then I want you to go look at our Fathom Analytics data. And then just to double check, make sure you check Search Console and just, you know, answer this question.
Justin:I was surprised how easy it was to connect to the Ahrefs MCP. This is the first MCP thing I've done. And it was just like, I just asked Claude, how do I connect to Ahrefs MCP? And it's like, oh, here's a ho and then it just linked me there. I offed.
Justin:Came back.
Jordan:Your face in the video. I don't know if you caught yourself, but you looked at the camera like, you're like, oh, I got it worth.
Justin:Oh, yeah. Recorded that. Forgot. Yes. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:What am I getting away with here?
Jordan:Yes. Your face. You're like, I'm gonna do this. And you just kind of looked up like, did I I just do something? And it was like, oh, successful.
Brian Casel:Okay. I love that. Oh, man. That's great. So I think I think we'll skip the middle thing, but I I want before we jump into the ICP conversation, I wanna give a quick, personal story.
Brian Casel:Last week, we took a quick trip down to Florida. We had like a real quick, like spring break vacation on the beach, had a nice place right there. We fly down there. I leave my MacBook Air on the flight. No.
Brian Casel:And I I didn't even realize it until I got a call from from the airline when we arrive at our at our hotel. We are already driven an hour away from the airport and we're at our Airbnb on the beach. Left it on the seat. Left the plane. Wow.
Brian Casel:And I didn't I didn't even realize it wasn't in my back. Like, you know, with with the kids there, we had all this different luggage and I just left it there. Yeah. So
Justin:Brian, as airport dad, you have one job. I know. It's to remember everything. Know, It you're so worried about your
Jordan:kids leaving things and their iPads.
Brian Casel:Exactly. Whatever else I'm the asshole leaving. So, I mean, luckily, they they they found the thing and they realized I they somehow found it was mine. Maybe they opened it up and saw my name on the screen or something. So they called me up.
Brian Casel:They they held it at at the airport security. And you know, it was only like a three or four day trip. So I didn't get it back until our return flight on Friday. Okay. I mean, turned out to be a pretty great great development.
Brian Casel:Mean No worries I was I was I mean, it it was an interesting test of like, first of all, like like, it's it's great to to have the break on the beach, hang out with the kids, and and break away from the computer. I thought I was gonna do a bit more work than I was able to. But then, you know, it's also a test of like, well, much can I get done from the iPhone? You know? And I I actually did actually push quite a bit of work, like, through Clog Code on the mobile app and everything.
Jordan:So you're gonna say you didn't work all weekend and go I I my I family.
Brian Casel:I mean
Justin:lesson, friends, is that I didn't need my computer.
Jordan:I just stared at my phone.
Justin:The important things were all around me.
Brian Casel:The important thing was that the pull request still got merged, you know. Oops. Yeah. So anyway, that was that was an interesting week. It was it was nice And to break and there was actually like a bunch of work that I left on the machine that I didn't push yet.
Brian Casel:That that was also like a natural barrier for me. Like I need these technical barriers to break me away from from the work, unfortunately. But, but that was nice. So pro tip, just leave it leave it in the in the airport and, and get it back on your way back.
Justin:Here's our productivity hack to get you more connected Just with your leave your laptop on the plane.
Jordan:Yep. Yep. Alright. Video about it.
Justin:Let's talk about ICP?
Brian Casel:We wanna talk personal Let's talk about ICP.
Jordan:Yeah. Cool.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We'll skip the personal unless you guys got anything good.
Jordan:No. That's good. We can we can weave it in.
Justin:Yeah. We'll weave Yeah. It
Brian Casel:So here's the thing. I'm, I'm less about my stuff here. Just in general, if I think about, okay, if in any business, any of our businesses or any business you're thinking about, right? Like, okay, we have a retention problem or we have a top of funnel problem, or we have an activation problem, or we have a revenue optimization problem, right? Growth problem.
Brian Casel:Anytime I think about that, you can look at so many different factors like the conversion rate optimization and the channels and the, this and that, but all of those, at least for me, tend to lead back to at the end of the day, who? Who are we trying to attract into the top of the funnel? If we can get that answer right, then everything else clicks into place. Right? I guess to unpack that more, if you have a churn problem, like, well then like, like maybe the, the, it's just the wrong people to begin with.
Brian Casel:If you have a top of funnel problem, maybe there just aren't enough of the people that you're trying to attract and there's another version of that person where there's a much larger crowd that you can go after. Maybe there's a more of a fit problem where it's like, okay, I could, I could, I could satisfy the need of 20% of this audience, but there's this other audience where I could satisfy the need of 80% in a much stronger way.
Justin:Doesn't like ICP always just feels to me like you're just imagining, it feels like this kind of hand wavy, like, oh yeah, our ideal customer is like somebody who's, you know, mid fifties and they're professional and they make this amount of money and they have brown hair and blue eyes and like, it it it always feels like a little bit hand wavy to me, like here's the person we're going to go after. And then when I actually look at every time I've tried to do it, I've thought I've had a reasonable idea, either a, I've picked niches that were much too small and the customer base ended up being much broader and more general. Or b, once I actually look at who's using the product, it's just so much variety. And I I'm I'm often surprised by, you know, even when I was working at Sprinly, the project management software, it was like, who's our ICP? It's like, software companies.
Justin:It's like, well, actually, I look at it, it's agencies, it's big corpse, it's teams within big corpse. It's like all sorts of people. And that this signal and noise versus for like retention and all that stuff is seems so hard to find. So, I've I've struggled with ICP. I I always find it kind of hand wavy, personally.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, what do you what do think of Jordan?
Jordan:So my take is that it depends on the context. Some things are clearly better to have a very, very defined ICP. If you're going to go productize your service, you're really better off nailing it for one type of customer. Right? Like I come in as reminds me of like Harmozi.
Jordan:Right? What was his thing? He's like, I know how to get memberships for gyms. And that's my thing. And I'm going to crush that.
Jordan:And that's going to be my ICP. So maybe in that context, super important. But I do think it gets overdone. It's almost like you're more likely to succeed if you focus on a very, very specific niche. It's kind of like a decent argument to make, but it rarely plays itself out the way you expect it.
Brian Casel:Think I think the idea of like niching down and focusing on a vertical is one, one angle of this, but I don't think, when I think about ICP, it doesn't necessarily have to be niched down. Okay.
Justin:Okay.
Brian Casel:Or, or I guess what I mean
Brian Casel:is like your ICP could be super huge.
Brian Casel:Like it could be a massive market, but they, but at the end of the day, how are they using your product? Like it's the job to be done of the product is
Justin:what Yeah.
Jordan:It's it's
Justin:like you you you could get
Jordan:it wrong and and then your business just doesn't work. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't go broad. Like, some of the biggest companies in the world have huge ICP. All men, you know, like the NFL is
Brian Casel:so like
Jordan:I feel like there's no
Brian Casel:In those broad contexts, that, that's what I'm thinking about right now is like by shifting ICP, trying trying to go broader to satisfy a broader common need. Right? Like, guess what I mean
Jordan:is Yeah.
Justin:There's some
Jordan:risk there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I mean, like, okay. Like, like, for me, it it usually manifests. I like,
Brian Casel:I I pay such close attention to cancellations.
Justin:Okay.
Brian Casel:Anytime and getting as much data as I could possibly get from well, two things, cancellations and who are the customers who are the raving fans of my product. Those are the two ends of the spectrum. Right? The people who decided this is not for me, I want to cancel. And the people who go out of their way to give me a testimonial.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Right? And, and then I, I, those, those are the two signals that I'm always so tuned into. And I'm, and I'm really focused in on the question of like, how can it be that like, let's say if I look at two different people who canceled in the same month, they both canceled for like, like one, one might cancel Builder Methods for the reason of like, it's just This is way over my head. I'm I'm too beginner and the And this is like way too technical. And then the other would would cancel and be like, it's it's too easy.
Brian Casel:Like, I'm looking for You more advanced know? Yeah. Yeah. And and then I and then I think about the the the happy paying customers who are either quiet and not really given much feedback. They're just there and and and getting value.
Brian Casel:And then the ones who are like, oh my god, this is this this has changed my everything for me. Like, was such a huge unlock. Like, this is is a breakthrough, you know? Mhmm. And, and there's just like a difference in enthusiasm on that end of it.
Brian Casel:And so that just makes me think of like, okay, so if it then then it just again, it just comes back to the question of like, well, who am I going to optimize for?
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:If I if I optimize for, let's say the more advanced person, then I'm gonna have to make certain product decisions, certain marketing decisions, certain positioning, creative decisions. If I optimize for the more beginner level, then that's going to have all sorts of other implications in terms of which product am I using? What types of YouTube videos am I making? How, what copy am I going to use in the headlines? Like, it it all flows back to who is it that I'm going after, you know?
Jordan:It feels like a more pressing question to get right in your business. Whereas Justin, you and
Justin:I are
Jordan:about specifically pretty wide.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:Pretty horizontal. And it doesn't mean going for the entire pie.
Justin:Mhmm. But it's
Jordan:a lot fuzzier. It's like it's basically aimed in this direction. And then from there, all types come in, and all types cancel, and all types love, and all types hate it.
Justin:Yeah. And it feels like with the content business, like Brian needs to be able to say, hi, I'm Brian and I help advanced developers level up their AI knowledge and untangle their career. That's one like, approach. And then it could be like, hey, I'm Brian and I help anyone who wants to build with AI, especially those of you that are non technical, like, figure out how to build real products with AI. Those are two different approaches and it does feel like in content businesses especially, you need to get be known for a thing that's like fairly easy.
Justin:And this has been a this has been a struggle from the day somebody started doing a content business, which is like, do I go over here, which is like a massive beginners, but there's a lot of challenges with that group, or do I really niche down and just go after these smaller group of professionals that maybe can pay more, but the top of funnel is different and it's harder to get that big views and all that?
Brian Casel:I think in my business, there there's some other dynamics that are that are at play that that I'll I'll put aside for a second with with AI and and the technology and the state of the development ecosystem and software developers. But to your point, Justin, what you, what you just described, the, the a and the b where, where, where the b was more like anyone from any industry wants to learn how to build with AI. I think that's an example of, and this is sort of my thinking in in the new direction is that it is much broader and like it can cast a much, much wider net than, than zeroing in on quote unquote professional software engineers or career developers who need to transition and adapt to, to Again, I think that there are other factors at play in that question. But if, if I, if I open up the funnel to, to, to, to the more, like, I think beginner is the wrong word because I think of them more as like people working in businesses who have real internal business tooling needs and they want to use agents to automate things and they want to build custom tools to talk to their agents and, or, or people working in these, in these businesses.
Brian Casel:And, and so like, I get a lot of these people coming into my funnel now and it's interesting to see the, the wide swath of industries that they come from.
Justin:Yeah. You know?
Brian Casel:And all of them, regardless of the industry, regardless of how wide that top of funnel is, the product that I offer can be the same and works and fits all these. Teaches you how to build, how to automate with agents, and it helps you go from zero to one or from one to two. Whereas with, with, with the zeroing in on like the professional developer, it's, it's much more limited in the potential for product market fit because there are developers who, who have no problem adopting AI on their own. You know, they're, they're looking for much more advanced things and things that I'm not even really, you know, really experienced with. But who can I really help?
Brian Casel:I can help someone go from zero to one or one to two. Yeah. And, and I'm, I'm, I'm getting customers from real estate companies. I'm getting customers from device manufacturers. I'm getting customers from like all these different industries that and they, and they turn on CNN or CNBC and they, and they hear some journalists talking about this new thing called Cloud Code and businesses are building internal tools with it and they want to learn.
Brian Casel:Like, you know? So, I don't know. That's Okay.
Justin:Here's
Brian Casel:I I guess that's what I mean by like, it doesn't have to be so niched down. It can still serve a a pretty wide audience. Mhmm.
Jordan:So, here's my take on it. The right ICP. Right? Ideal customer profile. Mhmm.
Jordan:What makes up the profile is is the is the right question to zero in on.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:I just had to look up a word on Google to make sure that it was a word before I use it because I've been using it for years. I really wasn't a 100% sure. So the the word I use is psychographic.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:It is the psychology of the customer that matters more than the other quantitative elements of the profile. How big the company is in terms of people, the revenue size, the industry that they're in. Those are like these quantifiable traditional profile points.
Brian Casel:Right?
Jordan:I work with HVAC companies between 10 and $50,000,000 with 20 to 50 employees. Like that feels to me like an older school definition of a profile. What you're describing is the like psychographic nature of the company. At Cardhook, we could not figure out the right type of a customer. We didn't know how to define it until we landed on, you know, who we are actually for?
Jordan:We're for really ambitious ecommerce companies. Not the ones that just, you know, the employees are just kind of doing their thing and they've been there a while. It's it doesn't matter if you're two people or if you're a 100 people. If you're still in hungry mode, I want more revenue. Let's go, go, go, go, go.
Jordan:That was the right profile for us. And so maybe what you're talking about is it doesn't matter if it's, you know, an old painting company or or software company. It's that type of person that's in this mode of, okay, I have heard about it.
Brian Casel:Like, I'm already
Jordan:heard heard about about it. Leveling up, I'm going to invest my time. I'm going to find people to follow, to admire, to learn from. And then that's the type of person that also goes the next level, invests monetarily in something that is the next level up from watching YouTube video.
Brian Casel:And I and I really like that framing of like, like the ambitious mindset. I I do think about that a lot. And and it's one of the things I I love about this business that I'm in now is that like, the people who get the most out of it, like the best possible customers, the best ICP are the ones who are just eager to grow personally, professionally. Like that's the value. Like, I don't, I don't know if you call this an aspirin or a vitamin type of product, I'm selling, but I just know that it's a positive thing.
Brian Casel:That's like a self motivated need that they, that they feel compelled to, to go learn for free and then, and then pay to, to really dig in and, and grow and accomplish something that they weren't able to do before. Like that's a really exciting value proposition, I think. Rather than just like plugging a hole in a in a process. For for me, that's that's exciting and I I I think it's I I just think it's exciting when when the customers get that type of value from it. Yeah.
Justin:I What what I like about that, we serve ambitious e commerce companies is it gives you the context, like who are they? Well, they're e commerce companies and you know, maybe you could could say, well, we typically serve e commerce companies that are this big or whatever, but that ambitious part, see that connects to jobs to be done, which has always been a stronger way for me to kind of quantify who a customer is. And there's it's called jobs to be done because there's almost every customer has multiple jobs and many customers are doing things differently. But sometimes you can zero in on like one attribute. It's like they're ambitious, they're hungry, and we want that kind of customer.
Justin:That's like the ideal Yeah. Customer, somebody who's just going after it, you know? They want more
Jordan:than the language presents itself.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. I was just gonna say that, like, that's yeah. Go ahead.
Jordan:Yeah. The the the copy, you don't need to then you're not caught in between. Yeah. You can just say, you know, 22% more revenue because that's what you want and what I want we're doing here. And then the feature you can the feature set you can lean into.
Jordan:Okay, here's how to set up. People don't care about that. Here's how we recommend adding these things to your checkout because that will. And then it it just drives you in the right direction and helps you be more honest also in what you're doing and in your feature set. And without worrying about what type of company and how many people are in the company and all like that stuff matters less.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's exactly why I keep coming back to this idea that like once you start connecting the dots, they all lead back to who. Who are we optimizing for? Because once we, once we are clear on that, on the answer to that question, the headlines write themselves, the product roadmap figures itself out. It becomes obvious which features are more important and less important to build.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. The which marketing channels we choose to invest in.
Justin:Mhmm. You
Brian Casel:know, I I So,
Justin:one thought I have here, and this is gonna get a little bit vulnerable in terms of my company, but the the truth about this is actually what Jason Cohen told me. He's like, the truth is in hosting. He said, a lot of like WordPress customers, for example, don't actually care that much about their website. They have a website. They oh, I I have a website.
Justin:I started it. I I have a blog. Yeah. But the truth is that Problem solved. You if you look at their evidence, if you look at their actions, they're not ambitious bloggers.
Justin:They're they're just I'm happy to have a blog. Well, you're paying for it every month? Yeah, I'm happy to just have it. I'm happy to just keep it going. Now, within the WordPress ecosystem, there are some ambitious WordPress folks.
Justin:But in the hosting business, it's always like you're gonna serve a large percentage of people who in Jason's mind is like, they actually don't care that much. Like they care enough that they're starting and they're like, yeah, got this. It's fine. But yeah,
Jordan:is I think that's an example like
Brian Casel:case by case.
Justin:Yeah. I think podcasting is similar. I think I'm my joke is To
Jordan:get a home, a reliable home?
Justin:Yeah. And my joke
Jordan:is my joke is that there's
Brian Casel:And that's the angle there, like reliability. In in one case, you've got like ambition and that's the compelling thing. But in another case, it's like, I just I just need something that works. That's not going to give me a headache.
Jordan:Yeah. Right.
Justin:It does make it a little trickier. Properly. Because then you're you're basically saying, what what generally works in these cases, and it's, it helps that hosting is just very sticky, is the initial promise and emotion around the initial promise. So, publish your podcast everywhere is a simple tagline, but it is just like it embodies like, yeah, I want to start a podcast and I just wanted to go everywhere. That's kind of what I want.
Justin:And now whether or not they bring the ambition, and I'm sure ConvertKit has the same challenge, right? It's like, yeah, I want to have a newsletter list. And it's like, you've had an email list for fifteen years now. And how many people are on it? Oh, like four twenty two.
Justin:And how often do you send? Oh, I send like maybe every six months. It's like, okay. You're but you're paying? Yeah, I keep paying.
Justin:I'm happy to pay. Love having an email list. It there's always gonna be like this level of like, who's really using this? Who's ambitious? Who's so we highlight our best customers.
Justin:Like, here's the ones that are really going after it. These are the people that are hungry. They, they're just, you know, really crafts people, and they're making this sound great. But so many of our customers and just so many podcasters, like I always joke there's there's 5,000,000 podcasts in the world, and most are not that good. Just not.
Justin:If you if you just listen to every new podcast being created, you're like, damn, like, that's not that good.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I guess I wanna and Justin, you've already touched on this a little bit, but I wanna so have you, Jordan, but like, maybe some get some stories out of us, like in the in current businesses, in previous businesses, when you reach some point in the life cycle of the business where you, where you opened up that question, like, are we selling to the right type of people? Are we trying to attract the right type of people into our funnel? Because I think, I think the thing that I'm thinking about a lot right now is that like, I've had success and this has, this has happened with every business that I've had. It always starts out with some level of success with selling to some type of customers from the very beginning.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But at some point, a little bit further down the line from the beginning, I come to a decision point where I, where I I'm, I'm looking at some points of evidence and some data and some, and some feedback that tells me, that sort of worked and it got me to here, but to go to get there, I think I need to come back to the fundamentals on like, who is it at the very top so that I can connect those dots again to the headlines, to the marketing, to the product. I guess what I'm saying is that like, it is, it is always easy to sell to someone. Like you can always find someone to sell to. But the question is like, just because you made some revenue from this one segment, is that enough to say like this is actually gonna what what got us here?
Brian Casel:Is it gonna get us there?
Justin:This I mean Yeah. Yeah. So there's two sides of that. One is looking at what you've got right now. And this is why when looking at LTV can be very instructive.
Justin:If if we look at the customers that have some of the highest LTV with us, they're not all actively publishing. And when we reach out to them and say, hey, they say, yeah. Yeah. We're we wanna keep the podcast online and we wanna keep posting it and maybe we'll publish an episode this year, but it's still a part of our mix. It's like, that's interesting.
Justin:Like, they're not and then you have some customers that like
Jordan:You can't you can't product plan for that.
Justin:No, can't product plan for that. I feel it on that side, but when I explore LTV, it's nuanced enough that I go, wow, there's just jobs to be done is so varied sometimes. It's just like, like there's a lot of CEOs that just want to say, I have had a podcast. I did a 10 episode series, and it was great. The marketing team helped me produce it.
Justin:It's still online. I refer to it every once in a while. Sometimes I'm golfing with my buddies. I'll be like, oh, yeah, I talked to Bill about that. It's on my podcast.
Justin:Go check it out. Like, that's the job to be done for them.
Jordan:Second spend a $100 a month in their business and the $40 a month on the podcast hosting is unnoticed.
Justin:Yeah. And so you could say, well, who are our best customers? Well, the way we slice that is different. Like who are the aspirational customers that we want to promote? Well, it's acquired.
Justin:It's Steven Robles. It's the founder of Stripe doing his podcast. It's TBPN. Like, yeah, those are the big marquee shows that you want people to see and go, man, I could have I could do a show like TBPN where I'm like, it's like Squawk Box, but it's for, you know, whatever. Like, those are great customers to promote.
Justin:Yes. But there's also a lot of customers that are just great customers. We never hear from them. They keep paying. They're happy customers and but their usage, is very different, you know?
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:There this makes me think of look, if we if we go one layer deeper in, like, art professionalism, a lot of what we're talking about is segmentation. Mhmm. Right? It's not like, okay, ICP and then there and then that's it. It once people especially once people get into your product, then it's a matter of segmentation and understanding what each segment needs and why.
Jordan:So you happen to have a segment of incredibly valuable customers because they drive marketing for the rest of the product. Mhmm. That is completely different from the segment of what is the best ratio of revenue to never hear from you ever. I love you. Let's make that segment as big as possible.
Jordan:Mhmm. So so I I
Justin:do think Set
Brian Casel:it and forget it. SaaS. Right?
Jordan:I mean, that's that's a good dream. You know? I I I used to have one of those. It's it's been a while. My abandoned cart product, that was a beautiful set
Brian Casel:and forget thing.
Jordan:Totally. Yep. But now now our churn is higher and our work that, you know, we have cut out for us is more challenging. I think there's more reward in getting it right. But for us, we want to attract a huge range of different businesses.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And then from there, the the challenge is more segmentation than is like a a niche or a type of company. It's this combination. It starts to get into where where you are, Brian. A a lot of our customers don't know anything about AI. We have kind of convinced them that they should give it a try.
Jordan:We've done enough to convince them that they'll succeed with our product. And they came in, they're kind of surprised and very happy that they're succeeding with it. And that's cool. And then there's a growing segment. Maybe this relates to to where you are, Brian.
Jordan:Over the last, I'd say, two months, three months, the number of our customers that are much higher in sophistication and want more access. They say, cool. How do I just tell Rosie to do X, Y, and Z? Like, they're like, give me the prompt box that I'm used to. In these other tools, I have a prompt box and I can just tell it what to do and then see how it goes.
Jordan:And I I want that type of access.
Brian Casel:It's it's really interesting. I alright. I wanna get back to something Justin said about pricing power and like optimum optimization for for LTV. But on what you just said, Jordan, in the AI space specifically, this is something I'm also noticing in about the last two, three months, which is an advancement in sophistication Yeah. Across the board.
Jordan:Yeah. Maturity over time, that segment of people at that it's growing. The norm is changing from a teeny tiny tip of people that really know what they're doing and everyone else trying to figure it out. The middle
Brian Casel:is starting I'm noticing it on all on all ends of the spectrum. Right? So the the professional developers, their, their level of anxiety of adopting AI was much higher late last year. It's, it's, they're, they're largely becoming more comfortable now. It's still, it's still a challenge for, especially for teams and organizations getting that adoption happening, but it's, it's becoming a more widely accepted challenge that pro developers are becoming more AI pilled for, for the lack of a better word.
Brian Casel:Right? So you
Jordan:feel like there's less value that you can add there? Yes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's less value because they are more self motivated now to just go figure it out and they're more capable of figuring Yeah, it out on totally. Their own Okay. More tooling, more technical experience to be able to so that side of the market is shifting. And like you're saying, the I don't I gotta think of a better word than beginner because I don't think of these people as beginners.
Jordan:It's like early stage
Brian Casel:AI They actually tend to, to name themselves like I'm a non developer or I, I've never known how to code, but I'm really interested in learning how to build. I hear, I get emails like that all the time. So, those people are also graduating from the lovables and the toy artifacts from chat GBT bubble Bubble. And And and and yeah, they they they probably are pretty good with like no code Zapier kind of stuff. They're operational people.
Brian Casel:They're systems minded people. They just have never coded before. So they are, so they they have outgrown the basic vibe coding and now they're But they don't they don't have experience with like wiring up a database and and like, you know, and like MVC architecture with a Rails app and stuff like that. So
Justin:That is a big market. Like that, that, that's the market that Zapier really that's the category that Zapier created, which is this, this kind of sophisticated no code professional who might be a marketer, a CEO, whoever. But they're using Zapier to build stuff.
Brian Casel:And I think that's the shift that I've started to see. Like, like my my content tends to attract people who are like, I kinda wanna see what the pros are doing even though I'm not a pro myself.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You know? So, it's there there is that shift. I wanna get back to something you said, Justin, about the the LTV. Like, you you were talking about it like, alright, you have these customers who've been who've been around for for a long period of time. They're just happy to pay.
Brian Casel:They're happy even if they're not actively using it, they're happy to to keep the LTV going. I think that's that can certainly be true. But I think on the other end of the spectrum, getting back to what Jordan was saying about the types of ICPs that are more ambition driven. Mhmm. This is one of the factors I'm weighing right now is that like, I think that going in this direction gives me more pricing power.
Brian Casel:Right. And being, being less dependent on like courses like these in this market tend to price at this relatively low level. So I'm unable to, to price much higher than this. But if I focus more on the, on the, on the people who get this like super compelling value, oh, I, I get to gain a superpower that I never had before. And it means the difference between building systems in my business or having to hire all these people instead of doing that, like that is a huge, huge value.
Brian Casel:And so there, and so like the willingness to pay, goes like, you know, I could, I could increase the price of Builder Methods Pro. I can come out with like higher tier, like cohort programs. Can do all, all these different things that, that wouldn't necessarily be available to the run of the mill. Yeah. You know, grumpy developer who who just wants to who who who, you know, their their boss told them they have to learn how to use Cloud Code.
Justin:You know what this makes me think of is well, I I used to first startup I worked for was an email newsletter company who primarily served government and business. We answered the phone, we would build you a custom email template, and it was a great business. They actually taught me a lot about what I what I know and do today. My bosses were amazing. But I remember when Mailchimp came along, and they offered they had a freemium plan.
Justin:And I remember us thinking, what are these guys doing? Like we were a $100 a month as to start. We were very like, you do a phone call with us first, we screen you, all of that stuff. And our product was better. Like we were just like, these these Mailchimp guys are gonna they're gonna be gone in, you know, six months.
Justin:And I think what we failed to see is that they were saying Mailchimp is for everybody. You want to start an email list? Come on in. And what we didn't realize is that their use case actually swallowed our use case. It in their circle, they were drawing a big circle in their big circle.
Justin:Turns out the governments are happy to use that product. Turns out big business are happy to use that product. We thought, oh, we've got this niche nailed down. And it was like, actually, no, they just drew a bigger circle around us. They said, this is our this is our continent now.
Justin:And we just got annexed.
Brian Casel:Well, all
Justin:of a sudden, all of our customers were like in their in their, their country, you know? So, yeah, I think Your about
Jordan:ICP is just one of our segments.
Justin:Yeah. And
Brian Casel:and It's one of our landing pages. Yeah.
Jordan:That think that's my my Emma by chance?
Justin:No, we we also get ours was my mail out. So, had a different different different company. But yeah, you know, it's interesting to see where sometimes the b2c or the b2 prosumer or just the b2 bigger market can swallow up some of these folks that thought, oh, we're totally insulated from this. We're, you know, we're b2b, we're b2 industry, we're b2 enterprise. And it's like, well, actually, that was the whole that's the whole thing that SaaS disrupted was now, my little team inside this giant corporation, we can we can sign up for SaaS.
Justin:Like, we can do it.
Jordan:Yeah. I I like it. I mean, what you just described is exactly what we're trying to do at Rosie. And I remember when we first started and we had to kinda choose if we're gonna go for a vertical or more horizontal Mhmm. The analogy I used was Mailchimp.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:And and what I told our, like, investors and our team and myself was that if something new comes along, and the analogy I used was, if email gets invented, I'm not building Klaviyo. I'm building Mailchimp. Mhmm. Because everyone needs an on ramp. And just being that on ramp, Yes, you absolutely need to run fast on the treadmill so that people don't leave for more custom vertical solutions.
Jordan:Mhmm. But you can still win such a big portion of the beginner beginning market as it forms that that's fine. Everyone can everyone can go take the vertical. So it's almost like I saw late stage software thinking being applied to a newly invented market. So people were like, we are going to do voice agents for the dental industry.
Jordan:Mhmm. And we're going to do it for the car dealerships. Mhmm. And I think in some ways those companies grew faster and they're easier to grow faster because you really, really zeroed in. But I I wanted to go with the more horizontal approach and it's TBD on if it's if it was the right thing to do.
Jordan:But what I'm seeing now is, let's say a lot of people went after home services and now all the home services CRMs are launching all their own agents. And then you're you're kind of stuck. And one of your you made one giant bet as opposed to, I guess home services for us, which is like a, you know, a relatively small portion. I guess we'll we'll probably lose that because the CRMs are gonna do a great job for them.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:I mean, I I really like that line of thinking, Jordan, because it's like, again, like, it's it seems to me you you obviously, you're much closer to it than I am, but the the job to be done is the same. That, that's what I'm talking about is like the ICP doesn't necessarily have to be an industry vertical. If, if the ICP is so wide that everyone in it across all these different sub niches, they all have the challenge of we have a phone answering problem.
Jordan:Right. We have a communication issue. Customer communication. Yes.
Brian Casel:You know, we, you know, we have all this inbound that we can't serve, and we want to be able to serve. We are ambitious enough that we want to get all the business that's out there. We just don't have the people and the time and the response time. Like your So you don't have to make product decisions like, well, if we're gonna serve HVAC, then we have to make different product decisions if we're gonna serve real estate agents. No, it's the same product.
Brian Casel:It works just as just as well. Right? Right.
Jordan:Some some thinking is like, well, the models should be smart enough, and then you kind of tailor the context that the model receives, and therefore, now you're specialized in that business.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:It sounds similar to I have a tool building problem. I need to build tools for my business. It it might be a very different business from the other person that's watching this YouTube video. Yeah. But we kinda we're trying to get the same thing done and we need to know how to do it.
Jordan:Right. So similar kind of like I I that's the relation to the job to be done around
Brian Casel:It's been an interesting thing. Just I just created this new course. I'm just about finished called called Become the Builder. And it's basically teaching my personal preferred stack. Like Rails, React.
Brian Casel:And, and you would think that like, how am I going to teach like a non technical person how to build a Rails app? That'd my worry. But, but the, the interesting thing, like my goal with this course is like, I'm just teaching you the big high level building blocks. Not teaching you anything about how to write code. Not teaching you anything like you don't need to learn how to write code.
Jordan:Think is the big unlock now. Base 44 is so popular.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I've seen, I see ads for that everywhere. I, it, and I, I think it's like, I mean, I, I don't, I'm not that familiar with it other than the ads, but the, like, I, I think that there's like a, like, to be able to build at a more professional level without needing to learn how to code. Mhmm.
Justin:You
Brian Casel:know? And just put the pieces together. It's it's pretty powerful.
Justin:Like Mhmm.
Brian Casel:The interesting thing is that like teaching this type of course compared to the other kind of content that I've done, like I'm making the decisions for you. Like, like I've decided like for if you want to learn how to build like the way that I build, like here's my stack. I'm giving away my starter template. You know, and here's why I chose each thing. Here when, when, when you, when the LLM is telling is, is throwing around this terminology, here's what that means at a high level.
Brian Casel:You know, compared to like a developer who's like already set in their in their preferred tech stack or or their code base. However, that's, you know, I I can't teach every everyone's different code base. You know, so
Justin:I I had a I had another thought while you're you were talking, Brian. Which is because ultimately, the reason you're making these changes is because you wanna get more customers and earn more revenue. Right? Like that's the goal. So how can I get more people top of funnel, keep them longer?
Brian Casel:Yes. But it's also based on some feedback that I've had over the last couple of weeks and months.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Some good and bad, you know.
Justin:I think there's also this other interesting variable on top, which just came to me as we're talking, as we're talking about Mailchimp and everything else. Because I'm like, like what is Mailchimp's positioning? In some ways, it's all brand. Like they had a good product, but you can use the product whether you're somebody writing your blog, whether you're somebody running a 30,000 person company, like it's funny that the same Mailchimp editor just can get reused in so many it's so flexible and agnostic, it can be used by so many people. And then you think like, if you guys were gonna guess what Mailchimp's like positioning is on their homepage right now, like, could be anything.
Justin:And I know they were trying to like broaden it out and like we're we serve everyone, we do everything.
Jordan:Right. I mean, they got acquired by Intuit. So they're now in there. We literally do everything. We do everything.
Jordan:They do websites. They do everything.
Justin:The thought that came to me is what's interesting is there's when you go broad, it's almost the the positioning almost matters less than the brand and the vibe. So it was like, just people kind of liked Mailchimp's vibe. It had a it was like, so, you know, what am I gonna use for email newsletter? And it could be like a construction worker asking his uncle who owns a fortune 300 and they could both recommend Mailchimp. It's like, I love Mailchimp.
Justin:It's the best. What is it? It's product. Product is part of it. But the product's pretty agnostic.
Justin:It's pretty it's basically the same product that was in campaign monitor and My Emma and MyMailout and Kit and everything. And even Kit, like what did Kit provide that was different than Mailchimp? It was more brand and vibe than anything else. And then that just made me think about Apple and iPhone, which is this mass consumer product. What was the job to be done?
Justin:And part of me is like, it was just like, give me affordable luxury. Like give me a beautiful product that it's a great product, but like people want
Brian Casel:I think it became the luxury thing. Once it once it got so popular, it became the luxury at first it was the innovation of like, I have a computer in my hand, you know.
Justin:Yeah. But we already had that with Blackberry. Like what what was it about iPhone that made it like there was just a mystique around it, it seemed like
Brian Casel:The the screen like was a was a a step change from BlackBerry. Like the the full screen experience, like this is like an actual web browser in my in my hand.
Justin:Yeah. Right. But that was the
Jordan:vibe of that was an aspirational thing that more luxury, more beauty, more modern, more elite. And that Yeah. Everybody wanted.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like I think it definitely got there by by the iPhone four or five like it became
Justin:Well, even Okay. Even think about the Tesla Model three. The the Model three is basically Tesla's Pontiac Sunfire. Yeah. Right?
Justin:Like you see them everywhere. But why did it have the feeling of this is a luxury car when it came out? Like, it was like, oh, you've got a Tesla. It was like, wow, a Tesla. Now they're everywhere.
Justin:But there's something about this, like, it it feels like mass the more mass market you go, the more the vibe and the brand is more important. And then I was thinking about you, Brian, and I was thinking like, there's probably some vibe stuff that you might not be getting in customer surveys, which is just like, I I whether you're a construction worker or a software developer or a marketer who wants to learn how to build with AI, I just like Brian's vibe. He's more grounded. He's not as hype He's not so I wonder if that's part of it too, you know?
Brian Casel:I think it definitely I I mean, my whole funnel is is through the YouTube channel. So it's definitely people vibe with me for whatever reason. They Mhmm. The the the gray hairs doesn't scare them off. So, you know, I I like, that's that's definitely part of it.
Jordan:Yeah. People have been talking
Brian Casel:about I'm also seeing shifts in YouTube too. Like, again, in the last two, three months. In audience? Audience, view counts, topic selection, interest, like it's shifting so fast. I mean, literally, four, five months ago, I could do a video about any new Claude feature and expect tens of thousands of views.
Brian Casel:And, and now I can do the same new Claude feature videos and it's much different. It's, it's not that there's a lack of interest now. It's just that it's, it's it's first of all, the the competition has flooded in on YouTube for the same type of of topics. And I think the search volume or the or the interest level in general is like, it was so new in 2025, like everybody learning how to use Cloud Code for the very first time. Now it's sort of been around.
Brian Casel:So the hunger and the instant, like give me any possible video on the internet about this thing. I have to watch it. Like that's not there like it was a few months ago.
Jordan:You have to find where the attention's going and fragmenting into more specific.
Brian Casel:And, and that's why I'm also thinking about as a creator and as, and, and in YouTube, I'm right now, I'm really, I feel a little challenged with this, but I'm like the, the, we tend to like default to like, what's the most like niche keywordy title or hot topic that I can focus on. Like, I think people are gonna Like today I dropped a new video about Claude design. That's the new thing from Claude. I did a video about it. And I think it's a pretty good one, but it's not performing very well.
Brian Casel:And I I think I need to move more, just more broad. Like, and and I, and this is like a muscle that I, that I need to improve as a creator, as a YouTuber. It's like, how do I tap into these like desires, ambitions to advance, to grow as professional, to, to build? How do I because, because that's the type of stuff that like the YouTube algorithm can deliver my content to people who don't, who, who might not even know that what I'm talking about is available or someone like me with my vibe is available to explain to them how to build like this, you know? You know, so it like, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to learn from these much larger channels who are able to just say like, like have these like really broad topics that can, that can still, you know, provide a lot of substance.
Brian Casel:And I haven't really cracked that code yet, but that's, that's where my head is at. If I go in this direction for that ICP, that opens up a lot more possibilities creatively for the type of content and titles and topics that I can start to publish on, you know?
Justin:Well, nice thing for you is you have, you do have a feedback loop, which is you publish content for a particular kind of person, and then you can see if the algorithm gods bring you the the views, and then if those views bring in subscribers. So, you'll be able to test this once you publish two or three videos.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it's I think also part of it is back in March, I had an insane video on Open Claw.
Justin:Mhmm. And I was just looking at 684,000 views.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And which was fantastic. It made March like a just incredible month on on every single metric. Mhmm. April is definitely a correction from that, for me Mhmm.
Brian Casel:On on every metric, you know? And I don't know what that did to my algorithm or or or what YouTube is. And, and, and, it, but that also brought in a whole wave of customers that are a slightly different ICP from my typical ICP. And like, so there's a lot of mixed signal that I'm getting in the last four or six weeks, you know, since that, since that video. So, you know,
Jordan:we'll see
Justin:what happens.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's, you know, it's as, as zeroed in on YouTube as am, I'll continue to be, I'm still investing in it. It still also makes me think that like, I need to unlock other channels. I need to, because I think that this ICP is everywhere. And, and I think there's an ocean of the same ICP that resonates with, with me and with this content and with the, with the problems that I solve.
Brian Casel:They're just not YouTube people. They would never come across my videos because they don't watch YouTube, but they're on LinkedIn or they're on Facebook or they're on wherever. Like I need to have funnels that reach those people. Right now I don't, you know?
Jordan:Yes. It feels like you are missing one layer further up the funnel in in the form of clips. Yep. So you you have great content to work from. And when what people do is they hire clippers.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:So like there's a company called Content Rewards.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:Very interesting. And you can just
Brian Casel:hire I I gotta, like, learn, like, these mechanics, like, how to how Yeah. Like because because I'm I'm good on the creative side. I can I can do the assets? I could do the messaging. But Which Yeah.
Brian Casel:I gotta figure out
Jordan:That's the hard part. You know? Yeah. What what what you do is the really hard part. The the easier thing yeah.
Jordan:Convert rewards. Very interesting. You basically pay by CPM. So if you click on that at the top instead of yeah. Where it says tap from creator, it'll switch to no.
Jordan:All the way in the all the way in hero. See that little orange? Yep. Click on that and you'll see basically the view from the brand point.
Justin:Okay.
Jordan:And what you can do is then jump into this as a marketplace and you can run campaigns. So you can say, will pay a dollar per CPM. I have a $3,000 campaign. And then and then you can upload your long form content and then people will clip it and post it onto their channels to get views.
Brian Casel:What do you mean by clip?
Jordan:Like, So you have a forty five minute YouTube video on how to use Claw Design, for example. What people here will do is they will either you bring you provide the clips that are like thirty, sixty seconds, or they will clip it themselves, and then they'll take your clip and they'll put it on their channel. So maybe they'll do something like one of the formats is like hook and then clip. So the hook would be like
Brian Casel:Like they will like react to it or
Jordan:or Yes.
Brian Casel:They'll be
Jordan:like, get a load of what this guy's talking about and clogged. This changes everything. You know, that kind of thing. Then and then they'll put your thirty second clip on it. And they'll they'll do it for money because but and and they'll based on CPM.
Jordan:So that's the type of place that's like a marketplace for views. Yeah. And it just goes one layer further up in the funnel because the clips are what people scroll through. And then when someone watching your clip leans in and says, oh, that's what I want to learn. Mhmm.
Jordan:What do I need to do? Oh, this guy's a YouTube channel. And then it goes one step further down into your YouTube channel, which is where you currently live and expect the YouTube algorithm to play that part of the top of funnel for you.
Justin:Yeah. This is basically how, My First Million built their YouTube channel as they they released their videos so anybody could download them and clip them and they said, you guys just go and steal our content, like you have a TikTok, you want it and we will reward the top TikTok channel every month with something if they've they have the top views of, you know, whatever, like, you know, Sam Takes. And so the TikTok channel is called Sam Takes. It's not Sam, It's just people clipping Sam and competing to get the most views.
Jordan:Yeah. This is how that douchebag Andrew Tate made so much money. Mhmm. He would have these really controversial, disgusting, you know, podcasts. And then because they were so controversial, people would clip them and make a lot of money by by having people view and go viral with the clips because they were so infuriating.
Jordan:And that was that was the top of his funnel.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:Yeah. Like the best marketers right now are like the twenty to twenty six year old iOS app people. They are the best marketers on the web right now. They are dialed into how the funnel works and how to use emotion.
Brian Casel:So market like apps like games and stuff?
Jordan:Yes. You know, connection apps with your with your boyfriend girlfriend, calorie tracking. All all of it is basically just an excuse to sit at the bottom of the funnel. It's just how do I monetize the bottom of a funnel because the because the funnel leading down there is like a science.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Like, hi, I'm Fred. I've got no motivation. Check out this one thing that helped me change my life and then it's just like an iOS app.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yes. So, it's just
Jordan:conversion rate and that's it.
Justin:I mean, this is what this is the reason that TBPN sold for 200,000,000. If you look at TBPN's like views per episode, it's like 3,000 views, 5,000 views. It's like why did this They
Jordan:were everywhere.
Justin:Why what the they were everywhere which helped and they had the right audience which helped, but they also are big on clips. So their clips get millions of views and the people clipping their stuff gets millions of views, not just on YouTube but especially on Twitter is where they really kind of Right.
Brian Casel:Were perfectly interesting. Like like the short form stuff I feel like is the weak like I have I have, my editor just cutting out my long forms and just posting them as shorts. And and those do okay, but I don't know how much they how much value they add, to the channel. But I I've never really explored the idea of like other people clipping. You don't My step.
Jordan:It's actually, that's a step or two past where you should start. And where you should start is your own clips. I mean,
Brian Casel:I just think like a basic funnel, like, like, I don't know, like a video of me that leads to a free thing that leads to an email that leads to the thing. Maybe that's maybe that's too old school. No, no.
Jordan:But you still you still need fresh, regular content for the actual top of the funnel.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:And and that you don't you don't need to hire. That's like later. Riverside the reason Riverside does automated AI clipping is because people want this. So anything that you do, you should load up into a tool that automatically clips, which which which exists. And then you can load it up into something like Post Bridge, which is like a buffer, but a little more modern, like indie indie solo guy that that runs that.
Jordan:And it has an MCP, And and that's what we're doing now. So we have slideshows that we're creating with AI, thanks to Mark. And we now are posting automated either two or three times a day. We're we're just posting from our post bridge. So we actually got like a like an Android device
Brian Casel:because you're going to dig into this.
Jordan:Yeah. You have so much good content.
Brian Casel:I think I think that the what I'm curious about, I want I wanna like actually see this stuff is like what does it end up like what's the value in in each individual clip that would you're going to
Justin:be if somebody's into AI and they open up their YouTube homepage at the end of a day, what AI people do they see there? What clips do they see there? So, you know, if I go home and I open up my computer, I'm like, I'm gonna watch some content and I've been really into AI content, do I see a Brian Casel in my shorts? Or do I see Theo? Or do I see, you know, else there?
Justin:It's the clips, even if they're just seeing your face and the title, it's it's building awareness for like, oh, this is a dude I should follow about AI.
Brian Casel:Like I I think my YouTube channel does that now. You see me there on the screens on the right. Like, that's that's just a clip from one of my YouTube videos that my editor threw up there. So those are coming out every every few days.
Jordan:Yeah. You should do the same thing on Instagram and on Facebook and on TikTok and make sure you're publishing two or three times every single day. And in your profile for each one has a link back to your actual where you want them to go to YouTube and your email list. And the first time someone sees you, people who don't care will scroll. People who do will just hit a like button.
Jordan:That'll make the algorithm
Brian Casel:more likely. Run up into the thing of like, man, I just don't want any of my friends or family to watch my
Justin:YouTube This is this is the thing, dude. Why? This is is that yeah. I just I I
Brian Casel:don't like it. I I just I just like to be in this like tech bubble. And and then when I hang out with with the normies, just Yeah. I don't know. I do internet stuff.
Justin:Is gonna be tricky. I did this test the other day. So this little video here, I went to visit this place called Caselo BC, and I sit at the bed and breakfast. I know them. I was like, I'm gonna make them a video promoting this town and their bed and breakfast.
Justin:It has 86 views on YouTube. Guess how many it has on TikTok and Instagram? 60,050 respectively. So and that that's just like all my other stuff I've posted to either of those places is like in the hundreds or the thousands. This is like way more views.
Justin:But you know what's happening is people, people who I've just my normie friends in town are like, hey man, I saw that that TikTok you made, like it just showed up on my feed. Like, the taco guy at the taco stand said, I saw your TikTok the other day. Awesome. So it is a thing and that's part of the game is you gotta be kind of willing to if you're gonna be if you want that kind of top of funnel, you kinda gotta be willing to play. And the other thing I think I think people are doing wrong is it's actually very difficult to make your own clips because there has to be something kind of subversive and like Jordan said, like hook, duh duh, and Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I think Yeah. Like the reaction is more like if I think like I I do scroll TikTok sometimes just just to rot my brain a little bit and like, there is something more compelling about somebody with some sort of opinion or reaction to a clip, even if whether it's someone else or they edited the whole thing themselves, like, that's just like, like, yeah, there's something compelling about that. That's really interesting. What was I gonna say?
Justin:We're at an hour forty five. Do we wanna like
Brian Casel:I think we should wrap it.
Jordan:Now you wanna talk about what's his name? Tim Cook?
Justin:We we can have some quick Tim Cook.
Brian Casel:We can. Mean, I'm
Jordan:what I wanna inject one thing before we jump into into this. It's related. I heard a great little tidbit. I think it was a Marc Andreessen interview. I think he's talking about Elon.
Jordan:And what he said was the best marketing in the world shouldn't. Either he said it it shouldn't actually need marketing or it doesn't need anything beyond the product. If you see the product, it should be dead obvious what it is. If you need to explain it, then you haven't The the best products in the world don't need marketing is basically what what he was saying. When you see a robotaxi, there's no question about what it is.
Jordan:Mhmm. It's straightforward. Right? Similar like with an iPhone when it first came out. Yeah.
Jordan:And I wonder where Apple is right now in their life cycle. Like, these the amount of innovation. And now it feels like extraction phase. Like, okay, we're we're the best. We're gonna make an ungodly amount of money.
Jordan:But is is there a next breakthrough product? Is I think
Brian Casel:think that the Tim Cook era, the last fifteen years, was the extraction phase.
Jordan:Ridiculously good performance at extraction phase.
Brian Casel:Jobs brought the iPhone. The iPhone came, and then and then and then Tim Cook brought it to China and the rest of the world, and Apple became what Apple is now. The And I think I think his run was fantastic on the growth and of the iPhone. It's most widely sold product in the world. Right?
Brian Casel:But you could say during the Tim Cook era, yeah, there were a few new products that came out, Apple watch, the AirPods and stuff, but like they, they, they didn't come out with this, it doesn't seem like they they're really known for like that breakthrough new technology, the way that they were under Steve Jobs when the iPhone came out and then the iPad. Right. And I think the move to John Turnis, and I don't know too much about this guy other than that, comes out of Mac hardware and he is more of a product guy. Whereas Tim Cook was the operations guy. Like he was the logistics, you know, genius who brought the supply chain into what it like.
Brian Casel:That's people don't really know, maybe give him enough credit for like the supply chain that he developed is best in the world, like best ever. Right? Like, Right.
Jordan:The amount of demand they had was beyond overwhelming. We can't even wrap our heads around that.
Brian Casel:The only reason they are able to grow to the level they are is not because of the how great the iPhone was. It was because he was able to unlock the the manufacturing logistics.
Jordan:And capture the demand instead of having it spill over into fine. I can't have that. I'll have this other product because that's too expensive because you can't make enough. Yeah.
Brian Casel:And I and I read a thing like there were zero recalls of the iPhone during Tim Cook's run of like, which is unprecedented. Like there there have been like eight Samsung reef, you know, recalls during this time. Like, you know, it it just like, that's the level of like like proficiency. But the thing with John Turnis, which I, I don't know too much about him other than that he comes out of like the product side, the hardware side of Mac, which is like, it does seem like they are, they need to get, get back into that direction. Like they clearly had some sort of like missed opportunity or dropped the ball with, with AI.
Brian Casel:And they're gonna need to innovate at some point in the next couple of years. And I, you know, I don't think a duplicate of a Tim Cook is the right move. I think I think it was the smart move to go with
Justin:Yeah. Someone Well, here's here's why I'm excited about him. Because we we we you you breezed over this, but you guys are both wearing these AirPods, AirPods Pro. This product does more revenue than Spotify and Adobe combined, I think. So we talk about product companies.
Justin:Oh, Adobe's a product company. Spotify is a product company. They don't Daniel Ek, what a great CEO. This one little thing does 26,000,000,000 Yeah. In revenue.
Justin:And and Tim should get some of that, some of that, the creds for that,
Brian Casel:right?
Justin:It was under his his Yeah.
Brian Casel:And you could also make the argument that I agree, like I'm wearing them. They're they're fantastic and everybody loves the AirPods, but they are the obvious extension of the wired AirPods. Alright, let's just make them wireless. Right? Like,
Justin:yeah, it's exactly the Apple thing, which is like, they took a thing that anybody could have else could have done and other people had done wireless headphones before. I didn't get a pair of wireless headphones until Apple did it. The vast majority of people didn't get these a pair of things are so ubiquitous. Like you you go for a walk around town, almost 80% of the people wearing headphones are wearing these. This is like this is this has blocked parents from talking to their teenagers for the last like ten years.
Justin:So they're so ubiquitous. And but John Turnus was the one who oversaw the original development of the AirPods. So he's a hardware guy. Yeah. So maybe we're gonna get we we might never get something else that's iPhone level.
Justin:But I like, if Apple gave us another something like the AirPods, which is just so perfectly designed, like, they when p I was always like, are they a big deal? Like, should I try them? And everyone I knew was like, listen, you don't Yeah. As soon as you put them on, it's just like, instantly better than anything else you've tried.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin:And it was true.
Brian Casel:I do think that, like, with the Vision Pro, that was pretty much a flop out of the gate, but It was the the right test. Was think I thought it was a good swing. But the if you think about it, then, like, next five years, if they can get to a point where you can just wear regular glasses and you're getting that type of quality Mhmm. Experience. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, if that can come into market, like, like, you know, like, socially acceptable glasses.
Justin:Yeah. Here's another anecdote about John Turnis versus Tim Cook that I heard. I heard this from Steven Robles on, the Primary Technology podcast. He says that Tim Cook was known for talking about CEO styles. He was known for deferring.
Justin:So you have a meeting with all of his his lieutenants, and a big decision would come up. He was known for saying, do you guys think? I want you guys to kinda argue it out, and and we'll make a decision based on that. So very, more of a kind of deferral style leadership. John Turnis, at least in the internal reports inside of Apple, say he is much more action oriented.
Justin:Big decision comes up, this is what we're going to do. So he's much, way less, you know, Democratic, way more, you know, I know the vision, I know where I wanna go, this is what we're gonna do, which is great for product development people. That's That's a
Brian Casel:Steve Jobs thing.
Justin:Like a Steve Jobs thing. So Yeah. It'll be interesting to see
Jordan:I I I also read that he's more likable and has a lot of loyalty as opposed to the Steve Jobs, like giant asshole, but everyone has to respect something.
Justin:Wouldn't it be great friend?
Brian Casel:It'll be really interesting to to see what they end up doing with AI. I I think that it is probably smart that they're just going with like, we're just gonna buy Google's AI and power Siri with that rather than Well, or or maybe it's more of a long term play that they'll develop their own. But I, I think, I think the deal with Google is more about like, let's just deliver a good experience and we're just not going to be the LLM provider.
Justin:Yeah. Although, if I was John Turnis, I'd be like, by first day in office, I'd be like, guys, we are fixing Siri. Siri can do nothing useful. It can't do anything Hey Siri, can you turn this on? Hey Siri, like, but it breaks constantly.
Justin:It's like so much there's so
Brian Casel:much It's like such a like the the whole brand, like it is such a tarnish on the Apple brand. Like like I don't know about you guys. Like I never touch Siri. Like anytime it comes up, I want get out
Jordan:of I it off on my phone.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fix that. John Turner
Jordan:Alexa more. Alexa's bad, but it's useful.
Justin:Yeah. And and I do think that
Brian Casel:they should lean they should lean more into hardware. Like like, I think that their role in in AI should be like, deliver the best Mac devices that can run AI on them. Mhmm. You know, like you don't have to be the the model provider, but you can be the hardware provider. I don't know
Justin:about that because the whole thing about Apple that originally made it great was integrated software and hardware that works seamlessly together. They're designed to work as a package and it felt like with Siri, Apple really let that just like flounder. And if you had had somebody like Steve Jobs, he would have in he would have been in the office every day going, what the fuck?
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin:Like, this is embarrassing. How come it doesn't do anything useful? How come it the nine times out of 10 it says, I can't do that for you, you know? It's like
Brian Casel:think part of their stumble with AI though was that they tried to like paper over it with like, in the last two years, their their WWDC stuff, where it's like, oh, we've this new Apple intelligence. It's gonna be great. Like, actually, no, it sucks, you know, or or they're not even delivering it. Yeah. Like they they should have just like committed to like, either we, we are going hard at it or we're just not.
Brian Casel:We're, we're staying in our lane. We're, we're hard, we're a hardware products company. Like they tried to just like quickly say, like they they rushed into this like direction over the last like like from like 2023, '24 Mhmm. With this Apple intelligence. I I just think that they either have to commit to it or or not.
Justin:Yeah. That said, I actually do have a sauna appointment today. So I got got to go soon.
Brian Casel:Yeah, we're going go going out to dinner celebrating my my younger daughter's 10 year old birthday today. Very nice. Hey. Happy birthday.
Justin:We are going to some Double digits. Yeah.
Jordan:That's right. Yeah. We are going to some charity thing. One of my wife's friends runs a charity and tonight's the dinner. That's fun.
Brian Casel:Put a shirt
Jordan:on, you know, put some pants Very
Brian Casel:exciting. Presentable. Very nice.
Justin:Thanks everybody.
Brian Casel:All right.
Justin:We'll see you next week. Thanks everyone in the chat that came here. It was nice to see Chris Enns, the editor in here, Dave Jones. And we had Bo was here with us. Who else?
Justin:We had, Jason Resnick. We had, oh, I'm missing somebody that was in there early. Now you're now you're gone. I can't see you. But, everybody that was in the chat, we appreciate it.
Justin:You can see us live every Friday, 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern.
Brian Casel:Alright. Later, folks. Bye.