Welcome to The Panel, where founders discuss how to build a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan:I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosy.com. Chance is good to be back. Little sporadic over the summer, but we're we're gonna find our groove, weekday cadence.
Brian Casel:We're getting our recordings in. Like it.
Jordan:Yep. It's a lot a lot that happens every week.
Justin:Yes. Yeah.
Jordan:You know? Two weeks, there's so much in the rearview mirror. It may as well not have happened.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Justin:I mean, when I when I asked Claude to analyze our stats, two things came out. One is Claude recommended having a consistent, publishing schedule. You know, don't go two weeks between. And then the second was that the podcast has been a lot more popular since Jordan joined.
Brian Casel:I saw that tweet. That that's a great grab.
Jordan:I I sent that to my entire family. It definitely it it definitely made its way to, like, my cousins in Israel, like, everyone knows now. That's great. Waiting to bust it out with my kids until there's, like, a moment where I need to collect, you know, give them a Trump card. Like, hold on a second.
Justin:Yeah. We're
Brian Casel:gonna we're gonna let that graph go to Jordan's head.
Jordan:Yep. Yep. But but, really, my my humble interpretation of it is, like, more debate, more, you know, points of view. It's just fun, and the energy, it's good.
Justin:Yes. Love it. Yes. Love it. Yes.
Justin:And this week, Brian, you're hosting. And you have some good topics. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know, I don't know if you're I don't know how you can be on or not be on X and not notice, like, the takeover of Grokbot and and all things OpenAI or sorry, x AI and and what they're doing. I just think it's super interesting on so many different levels just as an observer of the of, like, the AI horse race. Like if we look at this as like a sports analysis, right? If we're just like watching the horse race between Anthropic and OpenAI and Grok now, like to me, like this is like Grok and XAI sort of like coming out of nowhere and making a big move. And like we, you know, these moves have started to come into place in the last, you know, with their acquisition of Cursor, which I think is turning out to be a major development.
Brian Casel:Huge win.
Justin:Huge win.
Brian Casel:Huge. Then, of course, this Grokbot thing, we can talk about that. I literally just opened it, just installed it like three hours ago. So like today is my day one playing with it. But just, like, bigger picture, what I think is also very, very interesting.
Brian Casel:I don't know how closely you guys are following this, but the pricing war. Like, the the the just the pricing move from GrokBot. I mean, they're they're selling this I don't mean to sound like a, you know, like a like a big advertisement for them or or whatever, but, like, the Grok they call it, like, super heavy plan or
Justin:Okay.
Brian Casel:Like Grock heavy plan.
Justin:Okay.
Brian Casel:Yeah. $300 a month is kind of a crazy value right now if you think about what like, they're just throwing the kitchen sink into this plan. And to me, it's, like, just clearly, like, a land grab against Yeah. Anthropic and and OpenAI, especially for the tech, you know, people. Yeah.
Brian Casel:The early adopters.
Jordan:You know? I mean, it's it's But it it's kinda both now because Rockbot is not tech really or at least it has expanded the Yeah. I mean potential ICP. Right? Like, I I look at Grock Bot and I, like, I see it as what I've been waiting for.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:I've been looking at Hermes and and Open Claw. I'm like, cool story. I'll wait until there's a UI and all of a sudden, Rockbot comes along and it's like, don't worry about any of the complicated stuff. And I downloaded it and the first thing I did was ask it to do some research inside of a website service that I used for research and it was like, alright, I have my own browser so click here to to log in. So I clicked it, I I get to see Grock's browser, I put in my username and password.
Jordan:And then I say, okay, I'm done. And it's like, alright, I'm in. Tell me what you want me to do. I was like, that's that's the experience.
Justin:That's it. Definitely.
Brian Casel:Like, compared to the OpenClaw and and Hermes thing, like, it is so much nicer and easier and simpler. It's simpler, but it is very powerful. Like, user experience and, like, the mobile app and the desktop app are very, very simple and, like, just dead. Like, just you sign up and you're in. And it's such a it's such a clever concept how you can, like, literally, like, view the agent's computer screen.
Brian Casel:And, like, I used to do I used to, like, hack I I used I had, like, a hacky way of doing that with OpenClaw and with Hermes. And it was a total pain in the ass to set that up. And it broke every three hours. And, you know, it's like, what am I doing here? You know, it's not really it's definitely not for the for the normies, but it even for folks like me, like, I sort of scaled back my usage of Hermes because it was just too much of a pain in the ass to to use.
Brian Casel:But, like
Jordan:If the concept is Yeah. Is a fellow employee that works with you for you, you you can't break every hour or two. That does that's not how an employee functions in your mind on, like, well, you're helping me. That doesn't mean I'm gonna micromanage all of these individual tasks that keep breaking. Like, it's gotta just go do its thing and that that's when you get this superpower feeling of like, oh, wow.
Jordan:Now I just have things happening for me. And maybe you guys have encountered that feeling in the past because you've used these other tools, but Crockbot's the first time that I have felt it like, oh, I I can now set things up and succeed in what I'm trying to accomplish.
Justin:Yeah. So for someone who's not always on Twitter, I I I have a a cursory understanding of what makes Grokbot different or better. What what's the use case that people are getting really excited about?
Brian Casel:I think there's all sorts of ways of looking at it, and it's it's still all very new. And frankly, it's a lot of the same questionable use cases that were around with the Open Claws and the Hermes. Like, what are people really gonna use this for? But I do think that, at least the way I'm thinking about it, and I think others like Jesse Hanley has been publishing a lot of stuff about this too.
Justin:Yeah. Did check out some of that.
Jordan:He's like my favorite AI, like, influencer type of thing. Because he's it's just a just one of us just, like, talking plainly about it.
Brian Casel:But
Jordan:but I do. But always clever.
Brian Casel:I I do think there's more than just a consumer or normie play here. I think for professionals like us, like, I'm actually starting to think about it, like, maybe literally all of my work goes through my quote unquote chief of staff, grok bot, who then delegates tasks to my developer bot and my marketing bot and my designer bot and like whatever. Like, I'm I'm still I haven't, like, set all this up yet. I'm still learning the ropes today. But, like, I think this could actually be a new way to interface with AI in general.
Brian Casel:And and even and, like, the the thing to start to understand, like, this isn't actually getting enough attention in in all the Twitter noise with this, but, like, Grock Bot isn't really from Grock. It's from Cursor.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like it was the Cursor's team's thing that they built.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I think they've been working on it maybe even before the acquisition.
Jordan:Yeah, there's no way. This is a few months. This is a lot of
Brian Casel:work. Yeah. But you could literally see like when you sign up for Grockbot, like, you're gonna see a cursor.com URL when you log It's still
Jordan:cookie like that. But Elon is super strict on naming. Oh, to brand the name. Branded Grockbot. Yes.
Jordan:Yes. Which which makes sense because of Vex AI and and the combination of things. One thing I wanna I wanna talk about that feels very different in Grockbot compared to what I normally use in Claude. First of all, we're talk about how annoying Claude has gotten
Brian Casel:Oh, we should. Over the last few weeks.
Jordan:Oh, wow. It's it's it's kinda wild.
Brian Casel:But I downgraded yesterday. I'm I'm back to $20 a month on Claude.
Jordan:Okay. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. And and that's from
Justin:200
Brian Casel:to to the 20 I
Justin:think I think what I'm learning is there's no way to create a defensible user retention strategy? Because for a while,
Jordan:I was like
Brian Casel:like that. That is a big issue.
Jordan:It is Right. It's lot of forever. Like, Claude is god. Claude, I cannot believe what's happening. Take all my money forever.
Jordan:Let's get married. Mhmm. I think Sean heard
Brian Casel:you heading. But I wanna get back to what Justin's thing as well.
Justin:I just
Jordan:I just look, there's an opening for this, so I'm gonna I'm gonna use it. But Sean Purry had a great tweet that he's like, I'm an AI whore. Whoever whoever's gay I'm I'm game. Let's let's go. Which is a crass way of saying, I have no loyalty.
Jordan:If you got the goods, we're we're let's go.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Okay. So on that oh, yeah.
Jordan:Go ahead. Alright. Here's the thing that I that I was gonna ask about that's very feels very different. Claude has this series of chats and it quickly balloons. And I'm like then I start feeling guilty that I don't have it organized into projects and favorites.
Jordan:And I'm like Mhmm. Where's that thing? I I regularly ask Claude. So at some point, we talked about this. Can you can you find that chat for me?
Jordan:Because I don't know what where it is. But Grox has separated individual agents into individual tasks. It's almost like an attempt to, like, calm everything down.
Justin:Yeah.
Jordan:Get this get this bot to for example, one of the things that I wanna do is I I want a bot to sign up for our product every day. Okay. Just make sure everything's working. Just go through and and create an account and and click through the onboarding and be like thumbs up nothing weird happened nothing. Right?
Jordan:So that's just one bot that has a job and that's the job it does. Yeah. And then you're and then my understanding is that you're if you want another task, you create another bot, like another agent. So it it does feel it feels like that might be unsustainable. Like that might just be, well, now I have 80 different bots doing 80 different jobs.
Jordan:But it is an an attempt at a new way to approach it instead of just a bunch of stuff in different chats. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, I mean, in terms of, like, the how you might go about using it, I think what a lot of people are publishing right now is, like, a good pattern to use is like set up a chief of staff bot and then a small handful of specialist bots. So like Okay.
Jordan:So so what I described, not not flat, like almost hierarchical?
Brian Casel:A little bit. But you don't need 80 different bots. Like, you you like, I probably plan on only having, like, three or four maybe, but, like, one chief of staff. And then, like, I basically only chat with the chief, and then the chief delegates to the product QA bot, or the or the dev bot, or the this, that. But, like, I I wanna I want this is a big thing that I've been thinking a lot about this past week, and I think it speaks to what both of you were just saying.
Brian Casel:Again, like, just as an observer of of all of it, I think if if we're gonna look back on this moment in this, like, sort I see it as a land grab from from Grok with Mhmm. This pricing thing is a big deal. We can talk about that. But the bigger deal to me is like up until now for the past year or two, I think most people have, most professionals in our industry, I mean, like tech developer people, like most people have just gravitated to whatever company they think has the very best frontier AI model. So the first buying decision, like where we spend our money goes to the provider that has the best model.
Brian Casel:For most people, they decide that is Claude. Claude Fable seems to be like the everyone sort of agrees more or less that that's the best. A lot of people have come on board with like code like a GPT 5.6 sole, like that's maybe just as good now. So like those are the two front runners in our minds just in terms of like worth the money, let's spend on whatever the best one is. And as a secondary buying decision, it's like the product experience.
Brian Casel:Like we may or may not like the Claude interface. We might think it's annoying that it has all these different chats and the and like the projects or or ChatGPT's app or their Codex app. They keep renaming it every week and it's super confusing and their UX sucks, but if their model is the best, we're gonna pay for the best model. But I think this week that changes. I think this week it's like, look, all of them are pretty damn good.
Brian Casel:And now the the question is which one has the best product experience and the best mix of product and integration. And what they're doing in Grokland right now, like, you can't deny it. Like, that's that's why the cursor acquisition, I think, was so key. Because to me, I don't think that the Claude desktop app is a professional's app. And I think that the ChatGPT app, which used to be called the Codex app, I think that's a nightmare from a from a user experience.
Brian Casel:Their models might be great. Fable might be great. But I I don't really use the Claude desktop app. Like, yeah, I chat with Claude if I just want chats. But if I'm doing dev, I'm gonna be using Claude code embedded inside whatever professional app I wanna use with a terminal.
Brian Casel:But Cursor is a legit professionals tool. Like Cursor is technical, like strong. It's been around for a couple years now. Like, like it it, you know, it has its paper cuts and stuff, but it is a professionals tool. And Grok buying that to me means that, like like, xAI not only has a pretty solid model, like, definitely not the best model.
Brian Casel:Like, Grok, whatever, 4.6 is, like, good, but it's not Fable, and it's not GPT 5.6 Soul.
Jordan:But it's like It's cursor.
Brian Casel:It's, like, pretty good.
Jordan:You know? Did cursor have its own model or it was reliant on
Brian Casel:They did. They cursor has also been developing a model called Composer, which which is also great and and the big benefit Composer. It it it wasn't super powerful, but that that big selling point was like, damn, that thing is so fast. Like, you give it a prompt and it just turns it around really quick. Okay.
Jordan:But it wasn't in the same conversation as the Frontiers. No. And and so in theory, right, SpaceX, the compute build out, the endless investment in that model, and then you pair it with Cursor on top of your own model. And and I guess that that is the vision there
Brian Casel:Yeah. To combine those two. Yeah. And, like, now they're actually branding, like, their Frontier Grock model. They're calling it, like, the Cursor Grock 4.6 model.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. You know? So but, like, what I'm saying though is, like, if you if you look at the product family from Grok now, you've got Cursor for the for the professional tech people.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You've got grok.com, which is literally the same thing as ChatGPT and Claude. Like, if we have all the same chat
Jordan:chat But but more based. Yeah. Know, which which matters. It has never mattered
Justin:to me
Jordan:up until the last few weeks where I just have this constant frustration. I I don't use Claude the way you guys do with code. I use it as chat, strategy, thinking. Upload PDFs and now
Brian Casel:agree. Like, I've been more and more annoyed with, like, it's just Yeah. Too verbose, like, over explaining Yes.
Jordan:People are using that weird trick of, like, use some technical version of English just to cut down on it. It's not right. Justin, what were you gonna say about what what was your
Justin:I I I have so many thoughts. One thing that's interesting to me is I just heard it was just a week ago. I just checked this out. I just heard Caleb Porzio on his podcast saying, everything besides Codex is cooked. I'm all in.
Justin:And that was enough for me to go, I should check out that ChatGPT app again. And I've downloaded it, and I was starting to experiment with it. And he was saying a lot of the things you guys are now saying about Grok, which is like, oh, it's the best all in one app. It's the best kind of all encompassing experience. And so it's interesting to me to see a spectrum of experiences.
Justin:The the other thought I I have is I like company wise, I feel like Transistor is a team of six people, and I just kind of got everybody on Claude. And the idea of transitioning a team of six to anything else, it's not gonna fly. It's like we and we're a team of six. We're small. And so I think this land grab I I'd be very interesting to know how outside of the Twitter bubble is Yeah.
Justin:Is this grok thing. You know? It's like the purchasing decisions for enterprise companies, those are made on a, you know, five year basis or a three year basis. But even for a small team, it's like, I can't go back to the team and go, hey, everybody. This one, I think, is better this week.
Justin:So let's like, we can't have that kind of going all over the place. I might be able to experiment with it myself.
Brian Casel:But I I think you're right that, like, switching costs, especially for teams, is is very real. But that's the the huge friction right now in in in this race because because the cost of Claude is real, especially if you wanna be using Fable. I mean, I I my two big complaints, two big reasons why I literally downgraded my Claude Max plan this week. I might go back to it. I probably will in a couple months.
Brian Casel:But like right now, I'm trying to I'm seeing if can get it away with this Claude super heavy plan. Because on Claude Max, I'm on their highest tier and I still ran out of Fable usage every single week. You know, and then and then I would have to like spend three days a week just using Opus five or or like last week when I wanted to use Fable all week, I paid an extra like $500 on top of my Mac subscription just to finish my project with their best model, which that just pisses me off. Like, I'm a you know? And then Opus five, it it does seem like like even Fable two, like, has good days and bad days, and it just gets more and more annoying in terms of, like, its its responses.
Brian Casel:It's overly verbose. It's it's just frustrating.
Justin:Is is this just a characteristic of this product category? Because it feels like everybody's having that. So like I said, one week, Caleb loves Claude. The next week, he's like, Claude is garbage. It's not giving me anything good.
Justin:Now I'm in on Codex. But Codex is gonna give him some bad days, and then he'll be like, ah, Codex is garbage now. I'm gonna go to
Brian Casel:I something I can't help but think that there's some stuff happening behind the scenes, probably with their with their, you know, data usage capacity. Yep. You know, like, they they I they're definitely pulling back resources. And, like, I'm just noticing, like, mistakes you would not have made yesterday are happening today. And then tomorrow is gonna be great again.
Brian Casel:And it's and it's been a like, there's gotta be capacity issues happening. But like the switching thing is real. Like, I I I don't know if there's a real solution to this, but the more that we as professionals can be more portable with our work and be able to shift from one company to another, I know that's much harder when you have a team, but the more that we can have like standard workflows and skills that like we could swap in a Claude or an OpenAI or or a Grok, like, when when the winds go that way because that's how it's gonna go for the next year or so. Like, it's we're you know, going all in because, like, if you also, if you think about the costs, like, again, like, Fable usage is so much more expensive. I mean, like, 20 times more expensive than Mhmm.
Brian Casel:It's like it's like 10 times more expensive or something than, like, GPT, and like 20 times more than Grok. And if you look at what Grok is giving you right now, and and I'm I'm not even convinced that Grok is is the best model, and and it makes mistakes too. Mhmm. But like, on this heavy plan for $300 a month, you're getting their maximum usage and speed with their best model for general use, if you're using Grok. They're also throwing in Cursor's Ultra plan, like Cursor's top plan for free, just throwing it in.
Brian Casel:And that means that if you're in Cursor and you're using Grok models, you're not even counting against your already huge Grok usage. So right there, it's like way more than double Much
Jordan:closer to the unlimited dream.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And then they give you 400, apparently $400 worth of API usage credits for those times when you wanna reach for a Fable or or reach for a GPT or or a non Grok model.
Jordan:Can you do that from inside Grok? Inside Grok bot or inside cursor? Not in
Brian Casel:Grok bot, but in cursor.
Jordan:Okay. And I assume eventually in bottles.
Brian Casel:Stuff is probably gonna stick to Grock's models, but if you're in Cursor, Cursor has always been a professional's tool that you can switch around with different models. Right. But if you're switch, but like, you know, if you're on this Grock plan, super heavy, and you choose to use Fable for a little bit or GPT, then you're gonna be paying API like overage costs. But this super heavy plan is giving you $400 worth of credits to do that every single month. So it's like, if I only if once or twice I have Fable do, like, a high level plan for me, I've got more than enough credit.
Brian Casel:Like, they're they're they are it is a really good value right now. Like, that's the land grab thing.
Justin:There's another dynamic to this that I'm I'm curious about. Your I wanna hear your guys' take on it. It which is in one sense, we have I think all of this switching is bad for the category. Like, the nerds are switching from one model to the other all the time. The other thing I found you know, my 17 year old is starting to use AI for different coding projects.
Justin:And he's like he'll say, like, oh, man. I got a really bad result from this. And I said, well, what model are you using within Claude or Codex or whatever? And it there's there's the horizontal dimension, which is which company did you choose? Anthropic or ChachiBT or Grok.
Justin:And then there's a vertical element, which is which model are you on? Yeah. And both of those are actually not great experiences as a user. It feels like I'm always waving the magic wand like, okay, like Opus High, go. And it's like, oh, no.
Justin:That wasn't the magic incantation. Let's try Opus Max go. And then it's like, oh, that didn't get me what I want. Okay. Let's try Codex Super Max go.
Justin:Oh, Grok Super Heavy go. And I think this this like everybody has this, like, mental tuning of like, oh, if you're gonna use Claude Design, make sure you're on Opus Max or you're gonna get shit results. But even all of that seems very hand wavy to me. And I can see people getting frustrated if they're not nerds and they don't have time to, like
Brian Casel:Well, I'm frustrated with it too. And and, you know, to what you're literally up until this week, I have been a Claude loyalist.
Justin:Yeah. You've been a Claude Maxer. Claude Maxer?
Brian Casel:For that reason, for the simplicity. I I just wanted to be like, what which one's the best? Let me just pay them, and I'm not gonna be a model switcher. I'm not gonna be tweaking all the time. Just I just wanna be on Fable as much as I possibly can.
Brian Casel:And if Opus five is good, then I'll be on that. And I'm just gonna pay for for the max plan and I'll pay for some overages and that's fine. That has been my attitude for well over a year, two years. Right? Like like, I I was a clawed person because it's the best.
Brian Casel:But then it's like at every single turn, they're it's like they're nickel and diming you, you know, like like, oh, like, alright. I I don't wanna use your claw desktop app because that's not a good product to use for professional dev. So I would rather use a conductor. Oh, you wanna use conductor? Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's extra usage. You can't use your already $200 a month max plan for that. Like, like, come up, like, and, like, like, just stuff like that. And then and then, like, model quality issues recently, it's like, okay, that's enough. It's time for me to actually open my eyes to, like, let's use some other models, you know.
Jordan:Now at the same time, Anthropic is reporting 65,000,000,000 in ARR with expectations to go to what next year? 400,000,000,000?
Justin:Wow.
Jordan:Which would make it one of the biggest SaaS companies ever, which is pretty
Justin:Annual run rate of 65,000,000,000. That's wild. And
Jordan:but expect it to go into the hundreds. I think something like 400 next year.
Brian Casel:Crazy.
Jordan:So that I think starts to speak to your Switching. That that's right. Yeah. That's right. Think about all the enterprise contracts that are in motion that are going to head there.
Brian Casel:They do seem to be locking down the business, like like the enterprise side
Jordan:of things. Right. So it's like, you know, GrockBot Yeah. Has our attention and we switch, but it's slower. We're we're like you, Justin.
Brian Casel:We're Mhmm.
Jordan:You know, five people, but two engineers. So they're they're still closer to Brian, where they're like, I'll try this and then I'll try that and I'll get into it. They've been super into Claude, but they're open. Isn't what we're really saying is that this is going toward the models being a commodity?
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Yes. Yeah.
Jordan:And where you operate and the UI that you use, it's it's so backwards from, like, a year ago. The product experience and the integrations and where your data lives right back to the natural order of things on the Internet.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. That's going to be where the power is and not which antenna am I using for my cell phone. I I don't care as long as it works. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I mean, that's that's really what I think we're getting to right now. It's like, even if we know that, like, the latest thing from Grok or, you know, is not quite as good as the latest thing from Claude, it's like, well, but if Grok has better products and better integrations, then what's the difference? You know, like, I think I think that mindset is gonna start to proliferate. And and, like, maybe maybe, you know, you could just, like, swap in. Maybe the answer is, like, OpenAI three months from now.
Brian Casel:It's like, well, their product experience might just be best at that point, you know?
Justin:To me, there's a lot of open questions. And the I think how fickle it is. Because because I'm not on Twitter every day now, I do see these waves go through. And, like, for a while, it's just Claude and then Fable. And we're all, like, seriously losing our minds about Fable.
Justin:Like, it was, like, whatever. Three or four weeks ago, I was, like, skipping family dinners so I could code stuff with Fable. And now it's like then Fable moved on, and everyone was like, no. Codex Soul is, like, the best. It's so great.
Justin:And now I'm like, okay. I gotta try that. I didn't even get to try that. And now everyone's already moved on. And, you know, it eventually has to slow down.
Justin:I I do think the what they're doing with bot is interesting, though, because my biggest frustration with these tools is it's still not quite this universal AI assistant that has a great interface layer. So if I want to use Claude on my iPhone, I I think you can set a special button to talk to Claude. I'm not I don't even know if you can do that. Okay. Go
Brian Casel:ahead. This is the other big point, and I think this gets into the product differentiator that we're seeing. And I think this is a technical trend that is definitely going to be going, which is cloud based compute, cloud based agents and development projects happen more in the cloud. Okay. So we are already seeing this movement, and I think it's just going to grow.
Brian Casel:If you think about developers, we have historically, we have a code base like a repo. We work on it locally on our machine, and then we can push it up to GitHub. And we and our teammate pulls it down to their machine, they work on it, they push up to GitHub. Okay.
Justin:Yep.
Brian Casel:Now, the the movement is clearly we are now gonna have and work on our our projects, our code bases in a cloud based environment. Right?
Justin:Which has far away right now. Like, when I'm interacting with Claude available. Like But when I'm interacting with Claude in my on the app, and I put a file in there I did this yesterday. As soon as I put a file in there, like a m p three that I want to it to do something with, like I wanted to put it up on a server somewhere or I want or an image I want it to add to the website, it seems to get tripped up by that kind of stuff. Oh, I don't have permissions for that.
Justin:Oh, I can't do that. I'm sorry. I can't and it's like, okay. Fuck. I just gotta go to my laptop, and then everything's fine.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But, like, let's say let's say you've been all in on Claude for the last year, like like I have. Have, right? Yeah. Yes.
Brian Casel:So Claude, Anthropic does offer a cloud environment version of using Claude code. If you open the mobile app on Claude, you can start a new task in one of your repos and you're literally firing up a cloud environment on their servers. Gonna do the coding over there. Great. But most of the time, we're working on our I'm working on one of my two machines.
Brian Casel:I start up a project on Claude locally. And then I wanna move to the other machine or I wanna move to iPhone. And yes, they have like a remote control thing where I can talk back to my laptop that's sitting over there, even if I go out of the house. Yeah. Cool.
Brian Casel:Until it disconnects inevitably a few hours later. It's like, oh, I can't connect to my project anymore. That sucks. I got to wait until I'm home. So like, just annoys.
Brian Casel:But like, look at Grok Bot, unlike Hermes Open Claw and unlike like Clawd and stuff like, Grock Bot is giving you a dedicated machine in the cloud. So they like, people like me and and and many others, like, just went out and bought a dedicated Mac mini to run their their Open Claw on. Mhmm. Rockbot is just like, yeah, we're giving you that. That's that's included.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and it's not just spinning up, like a like an instance that, like, like spins up and then goes away the way that, like, Claude things do.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:It's yours. You just put files there and it and it's persistent and it and that's that. And and you're just you you can open it from iPhone. You can open it from your computer. Like, you're just talking to it.
Justin:My prediction is that we will see OpenAI and Anthropic follow suit. Like, I think they're they won't be far behind. That's what's so interesting about this this tourist race.
Brian Casel:It's fun. They could've they could've done it. They they will do it. I'm sure they will.
Jordan:Yeah. They're probably working on it now.
Brian Casel:But they have the infrastructure. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have cloud versions of their stuff. They just didn't put the product pieces together the way that Grok has done with Grokbot or Cursor has done with Grokbot. Because Cursor has this thing called Cloud Agents. If you use a tool like AMP Code, that's also using Cloud Agents in an interesting way.
Brian Casel:So that is where it's going. You just open your laptop, you're working on your code base, but it's not local. You're you're in the cloud. Like, that's that's where general work is is moving toward, but they've really put those so it's like, again, like, it's that product play where it's like, Grok has this integration with Cursor, they have the cloud infrastructure, they give you this cloud thing, they have a super simple and intuitive interface when you chat with your Grok bot and they're giving you their very best models at like a cheaper price than than the others.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's like, oh, by the way, they have their own like image model too. Like, Claw doesn't have an image model. So it's like it's like you get everything you need in this heavy subscription. It's it's a it's a play. And I'm sure, like, three months from now, like, OpenAI is gonna have the same thing, and that's gonna be the new hotness or whatever it is.
Justin:Like But what about Gemini? Jason Resnick just brought that up. What what happened to them? Are they just kinda out of the running? They're not really he even mentioned, like, they have Google Drive with files already there.
Justin:Incidentally, when I was using Claude yesterday and I needed it to do something with an m p three, I had to put it on Google Drive. So from my phone to Google Drive, and then Claude was able to use it.
Brian Casel:I think the if I had to guess, if I'm gonna be like a speculator here, I think that Anthropic will continue to win enterprise, and they're gonna be huge forever. I I think they're I think they're locked as that leader for at least for the for a while. Yeah. They're go public? I think soon.
Brian Casel:Yeah. They're gonna go public. Yep. And they're gonna be great. They're no no stopping them now, I think.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. The real battle, I think, is gonna be between well, I think that they're I think this this Grock play is against OpenAI. I think those two are really gonna battle it out for for like the the techie audience for or or maybe you might call it like the the second place behind behind Anthropic or something like that. But Google and maybe like Apple and maybe Meta are sort of in this other side of the battle where it's like, how do we get the general public, the normies, the consumers, right? So like Google and Apple are sort of partnered up because Gemini is is is what like, Apple basically paid Google to to power their new Siri coming out.
Brian Casel:Google, of course, has google.com. So, like, when my kids Google something, and they see an AI result, that's their interaction with AI, you know. So I feel like they're always going to be around. And Meta, like, I don't know, they're trying to do stuff, but like, That's that massive weird, worldwide consumer audience. So, like, they're always gonna be relevant.
Brian Casel:Yep. Imagine Siri?
Jordan:Yeah. That's really good.
Justin:Oh, dude. That's we've talked about this so many times.
Jordan:Yeah. I I find myself constantly wanting to give just talking instructions. Oh my god. Get now I gotta go over here and click this and click that and write it out.
Brian Casel:As of this year, I think in the next month or two, the new Siri is Gemini. When you're when you're when they call it Apple AI, it is it is their partnership with Gemini.
Justin:Yeah. Interesting.
Jordan:Good. Good for them, finally. Yeah. Good for us, really.
Justin:Bren, what about that topic that, Lewis wanted us to talk about? I think that's a that's a good one.
Brian Casel:Yeah. This gets into the clouds a little bit. Alright. So, like, you know, I'm thinking about this this new Grock Bot thing coming out, and I'm finally getting around to to setting it up today. And, like, yeah, like, everyone's talking about, like, alright, how does this change our workflows?
Brian Casel:And I'm I'm looking at, like, my all my workflows, like, maybe I'm I'm gonna incorporate this or any new tool for that matter, like, to trip to transform how I already work. Mhmm. Okay. Interesting. Maybe you can get faster.
Brian Casel:Maybe you can become more streamlined. I also think there are ways to improve your quality of work. Yeah. Cool. Interesting.
Brian Casel:But what's more interesting to me is like, okay, this new thing, what new value can I create or build or put into the world as a result of having this new tool or ability at my disposal? Like, if I'm looking at this Grokbot thing, like, I'm I am I'm not gonna talk about them, but I I'm thinking of, like, new ideas for, like, new entities, whether it's Mhmm. You know, anything. It could be products. It could be businesses.
Brian Casel:It could be media brands. It could be big new ambitious strategies that like just would not have come about. Like, what can I use this new tool to create that's new rather than looking at this new tool and say like, how do I take what I've been doing for years and just do it a slightly different way with this new tool? How about I just think about this new tool as like, alright, let's just open my mind. We're in a new world now.
Brian Casel:What, like, what could this mean? What what could we build that at that creates value, that creates a new asset or creates a new audience growth or marketing asset or new product or new business something that, like, would not have existed before in my work.
Jordan:Even beyond business too, I I think is where that question very quickly escapes into. There's, you know, there's there are things beyond business. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Of course. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan:Justin, anything come to mind for you before I I go into
Justin:The immediate thought I had when Brian shared that was I think you can only move as fast as your how did I put that? You can only move as fast as your current insight. You can only move at the speed of your current insight. So we just finished talking about, like, man, like, everyone else could have done what Grock did. How come they didn't?
Justin:And it's like you need to have the insight and kind of an understanding of it, a way to shape it. And then you gotta yeah. You have the tools to build faster and better and all those things. But it feels like the Cursor team had this insight that nobody else really did. And then they started building it.
Justin:And then space SpaceX said, oh, look at this Cursor team. They've got some interesting insights. We're gonna grab that part there. And what did they acquire there? They really are acquiring, like, the insight.
Justin:They're acquiring the shape of the idea and the implementation. And I think that's applicable in our companies. Like, sure, everybody has these tools now. And I I keep kind of saying, like, everybody has these tools. The software I'm using still is not better.
Justin:And so we could only move as fast as, like, having the insight, understanding how the product could be better, how we could improve the product. And then you still got all the normal stuff. Like, you still gotta build it. You still gotta test it. You still got to put it out there.
Justin:You got to price it, all that stuff. Yeah. It feels like what I'm coming up against even in our own team is like, it's not yeah. So one is having the insight. And then the second is still it's just like teams are complicated and messy and like figuring out new ways of doing things and new paradigms.
Justin:Like there's lots of stuff still that we're wrestling with.
Brian Casel:I think the thing that I've always been sort of dreaming about, but never really tried to do in any real way when it comes to having these AI tools and now and now that they're really good enough like, remember there was the the thing about Pulsia a couple days back that's sort of along the lines of what I'm thinking here with GrockBot. It's like, what new thing or entity can I create that is self, like like, autonomous, like, create and build something? Like, yes, I like, maybe, like, the idea is, like, I put a lot of initial effort and direction and creativity and systems in place. Yeah. And I stand up this Grock bot or Sun bot out there to run with that system, and let's see if I can just water it every every month with with a little bit of tweaking, maybe a little bit of money, maybe a little bit of just go off and do do your thing and let's see if I can actually, like, little businesses or entities.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:Little garden.
Brian Casel:Or or brands or like like just like the like the idea of, you know, we you hear people talk about like the the one person, you know, multimillion Yeah. Dollar know, I was I'll laughing while you spin up like the next big thing, like, just as like an experiment, almost like a thought experiment, but just to see what can be done here. I am thinking a lot about audience growth, like what kind of content or media brands can be built that are human less and but but, like, creating actual quality content or experiences that actual people would want to subscribe to and follow. And and and then that is an actual asset that can be very valuable for for either its own business or another business. Like, there's just a lot of possibilities that I think I'm not saying everyone should go out and start a shiny object idea tomorrow, but like, we do have these new tools.
Brian Casel:We happen to be on the very edge of the crest of the front of the wave right now, and the rest of the world is not aware of this stuff. And we are the ones who should be tinkering and playing and being creative, you know?
Justin:What are you thinking over there, Jordan? What's what's your take on this?
Jordan:So, you know, analogous to to where Brian ended there around the gap between what we know and what the 99% of other people are just don't care about yet. Yeah. And there's opportunity in that gap. First, you can see it is an interesting test of the role of people inside of business and like value creation.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:Right? In theory, you could spin up a few agents that reach out to local businesses. Right? Research Google Maps, reach out to local businesses, show them a send them an email with a document, maybe even a landing page that shows them the things that are good about their website and bad about their website and then make them an offer to fix them.
Justin:Mhmm. And and
Jordan:then actually fix them. Right? In theory, a 100%. And then the challenge is like, yeah, but the way human beings do business right now is they send an email or they wanna call you or they have a question and like how can an agent get through that the human interaction that leads to business being done
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And trust being built. And like so so maybe you have to go almost like lower down in something that does not require much human back and forth. Right? Like me fixing your agent fixing your website probably relatively high on the back and forth and the conversations required. So Yeah.
Jordan:It feels like it's relatively limited what you could do, but there are definitely some clever opportunities for sure. Yeah. And like
Brian Casel:it doesn't to be like a new side hustle or anything. Like, it could be within your own business. Like, other ideas I'm kicking around for builder methods. Right? Like, they're all sort like, I just launched a a new a new course, a new training in there called Become AI Native.
Brian Casel:And so I feel like the the training library is really strong now. I've got, like, hundreds of of training videos in there now. But the community side of Builder Methods, I think, needs some love. And that's I I'm I'm in there every day, but, like, what can I build? What can I use bots to help me create new value?
Brian Casel:And, like, of course, you could have bots go in there and answer people's questions and and maybe sort and categorize people's conversations into into a searchable thing. Okay. That's one idea. But, like, I would also like to help my members form small group masterminds or help match people of a certain experience level with like minded people. And I've done that before in previous communities I've run, and that's a lot of work.
Brian Casel:Like, it's really time consuming, analytical, like match people up based on all this criteria. That's a that's a thing that can be that can be like a new asset, a new feature, a new benefit that we build into the business, and that can be completely autonomously run with an with an agent. Not like flip a switch and it's just working. Like, yeah, I'd probably have to spend a week standing it up. But then that's something that can run all year long, you know?
Brian Casel:Like Yeah.
Justin:I I will say one thing I I fantasize about, but it's probably a flawed premise, which is in the same way we used to say, you really can't start a remote company if you didn't start remote first. Like, trying to plug remote into an existing on premise team is very difficult. Yep. I feel like with Transistor, we've added AI and an AI mindset and an AI culture after the fact. And there is this attraction towards a greenfield where it's like, man, if I built a new team and a new company with this mindset from the get go.
Justin:How would I hire and how would I structure our culture and how would I motivate people and what principles would we be focused on? And I think it is attractive because it's hard once you have something in motion. It is hard saying not not just that we're going to, like, get on different tracks, but now we're going to turn this into an airplane. Like, it feels so different. And I think especially culturally, there's something attractive.
Justin:Again, probably flawed because once he got into it, it would be it developed its own problems. But I am starting to think a bit about that.
Jordan:I was just going to say that it feels like there's a lot of consumer stuff that's on the way. When I talk to my wife, there's a big gap in in what people they just don't know what's possible, and so it's impossible to Yeah. To imagine what you want. You you can't know the product that you want if you don't have any sense of what's possible. So school started this week.
Jordan:The amount of, like, balls being juggled in the air that that my wife is very focused on not letting anything one thing slips through the crack and it's like, oh, forgot to sign your kid up for field hockey and, like, that's unacceptable. Yeah. You've heard of
Justin:the deluge of emails with PDF attachments.
Jordan:Oh my god.
Justin:So many
Jordan:yes. And blue highlighted lettering and, like, different dates.
Brian Casel:Has, like, four different portals they wanna
Justin:fill out.
Jordan:Yes. We team team snapped and the the this team moved over to a different app and then that these two schools are on membership toolkit, but the high school is on something else. And a lot of what she describes is just is just begging for an AI consumer product to to help. Yeah. Just tap into my Google Calendar, tap into my Gmail, tap into my texts, help me manage these things.
Jordan:So it does feel like there's there's a lot of fun stuff on the way to to satisfy a lot of the things that normies deal with every day, but don't know what's possible yet. That that will really drive toward the UI being great, and the experience being easy, and the model being an afterthought. And and I think that next wave is is good.
Brian Casel:It will be interesting to see what happens on the consumer side, because it won't look anything like what we see. Like, I think for a while, I probably had the wrong mindset of like, look how much our world has changed. It's just a matter of time before the rest of the world sees a similar change. But I don't I actually don't think that's gonna be the case because most people don't build stuff. Most people don't and even if they do, I heard Ian Landsman talk about this on Mostly Technical.
Brian Casel:He made a good point about, like, most not only the fact that, like, most people are are not or most people in business are not using their own money. They're using the company's card or whatever to to buy the SaaS.
Jordan:Yep.
Brian Casel:They're also being given the tools to use at these large corporations. Individuals are not choosing to go use a tool or vibe code a tool or some management has said, We bought Cloud for everyone, now you're all going to use it. If you if you translate that to, like, what do people do when they go home in in their personal lives, in in their consumer land, how is AI going to actually start to infiltrate and change the way things work in our in our lives. I I saw one interesting tweet from, Mark Cuban probably about an hour ago today, and he was like and he and he made a really good point about, like he was talking about health care, and he was like, what if I'm I'm paraphrasing a long tweet that he made, but it was like, what if, doctors set up their patients with, an it could even just be like a protocol to how to use Claude or maybe there's some AI portal that a doctor sets up a patient and gives the patient the specific set of questions that it wants the the agent to ask the patient every day at five p.
Brian Casel:M. Between now and our next appointment and you'll transfer those answers over to the doctor and they can track the patient's answers like over time rather than the old way of like, okay, I'll see you like next month and we'll see what changed, It's great. It's
Jordan:all inevitable. Just like
Brian Casel:a workflow where like individual patients, individual consumers are not gonna take the initiative to like set up the right prompts and and do it. But if a business or if a doctor or if a school sets up the the clients with the workflow to ultimately deliver a better solution, like these are the kinds of things. So so if you map that to like a a small business or it's like, how to train or teach your target customer on how to use AI in a very specific way, so that you can solve that customer's problem that they want to pay for. Yeah. Don't don't just hope that your customer's gonna figure it out.
Brian Casel:Use AI like like onboard them to use it, you know. Mean, basically what Jordan is doing with Rosie, right? Like like you're teaching people how to adopt AI voice. They don't need to take it upon themselves, you know.
Justin:Although what you guys were just saying makes me think that this idea that there will be a universal UI or a universal AI assistant is probably the most promising. Because then it's like, I don't need the school system to adopt like, create an MCP server. What I need is Google Gemini to be the the assistant I use. And every morning, I wake up and I go, hey, Gemini, what stuff has the school sent me that I need to figure out? And it just goes, pop, pop, pop, pop, Thank you.
Justin:And you stop looking at your email. You go, I'm not looking at that email anymore. It's just full of emails with PDF attachments. Now I just talk to this thing every day. And you used to go to DoorDash to, you know, order your food, but now you're just like, hey, AI assistant, can you order me some food?
Justin:And you used to, you know, go to the the Ecobee thermostat app, but now you're just like, hey, can you just turn? So this universal interface, whether it's Siri, whether whoever wins that, and maybe maybe, you know, there will be multiple winners there. That feels like the big win because once it's in her territory, like, you just you're waking up and it's like, I'm not going to my inbox anymore. I'm not logging into the classroom portal. I'm just saying, hey, bot, go log into my kid's classroom portal, and you don't even have do that.
Jordan:Just sign the permission slip.
Justin:Just sign the permission slip, all that stuff. And if it's an emergency, it tells you, hey, you forgot, you know, you forgot, to sign the the field trip thing. Sign it. I've signed it for you.
Brian Casel:I think I think probably inevitably that's where it will end up, but I think it'll be a much longer path to get to that Yeah. Reality than people think, you know. Because I also like just for me as a in my as a consumer in my life, you know, I have zero interest in having AI book flights for me or book restaurant reservations or, you know, order food for me. Like, I wanna pick the restaurant myself. I wanna choose my my flight that I wanna take.
Brian Casel:I don't wanna leave that decision to an AI.
Justin:Not yet. A flight a flight, I might, if it had a skill that knew all my preferences, and then it did it for me.
Jordan:But all these things that we're talking about require Required.
Justin:It's like Yes.
Brian Casel:If I do I wanna fly at that time? Like, I'm gonna make that final decision.
Jordan:Yes. Yes. And I wanna sit there and look at the two at 06:18AM and the 08:18AM. But this one gets in at 10:45, and I should like to go to breakfast
Justin:by know that I don't ever book the early flight. I always book the later flight.
Jordan:Well, I I wanna make that decision while staring at it and imagining, I'm gonna be walking around LA. Do I wanna go to breakfast by myself? But all the stuff we're talking about is really like a the way that what lets you not read your inbox is trust and confidence in the layer above it that's not gonna miss anything. And and that might be generational. Yeah.
Jordan:Or it might just be time or some combination of them.
Justin:I mean, it is generational. Look at Jesse Hanley. He's letting this thing log in to his wealth management portal. Like, he's just, like, go in and and we've all had that. We all have to log in to some shitty banking interface and download some PDFs for our accountant.
Justin:And I was like, how can I just not have to do this?
Jordan:Like I'm not there. I'm not there. I looked at Grok and it was like, who do you wanna integrate with? And I looked at Stripe and I was like, no.
Justin:Yeah. That's the stuff. Absolutely. I'm
Brian Casel:yeah. I'm also like, I I don't know if I'm I don't think I'm comfortable with it getting into my personal Gmail. And but also, I don't I just don't think I have that need. You know, I I don't really understand the idea. Same thing with my personal calendar.
Brian Casel:Like, I don't have everyone loves to use that example. It's like example, use case number one. Oh, it checks my inbox every day. Well, but if if I if you're gonna tell me about the important emails, then that's just another inbox. Like, talking to the bot to tell me my my top 10 emails or Gmail telling me my top 10 emails.
Brian Casel:Those are still 10 things I need important. To deal with.
Justin:It's like
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin:You check my personal email all the time, open the classroom school emails with the PDF, you find the parts that are relevant to me, and then you just tell me that part. That's what I want.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I guess that could
Justin:because I'm missing most of those emails already. I'm like, I'm not look I'm not opening those PDFs. I just yeah.
Jordan:I just don't answer my emails. I just just don't answer. When you follow-up, that's when I open it. What what else we got
Justin:going on? AI assistant. Update my skill to always follow-up with Jordan twice when you There
Brian Casel:you go. Thanks. There you go. I wanna hear some maybe before we wrap Updates. Like, any any updates from you guys?
Brian Casel:What what's going on with your business?
Jordan:Yeah. How's Transistor, man? How's the the video thing? Where's the launch? Like
Justin:Yeah. We've just set we just today set a line in the sand because we we gotta get this thing officially launched. Yes. So, yeah, we're gonna September 29 is gonna be kind of the initial launch. I've sent started sending out emails about the pricing we're considering, which includes some storage limits.
Justin:And we'll see. Basically, like all pricing decisions
Brian Casel:you talk more about that?
Justin:So, you know, we're we're trying to think of a value metric to attach to video. And some of our competitors are doing you can you can upload this many hours of video every day or you can you can have this many streaming minutes. Or you can you pay $12 extra per show. I just wanted a a bigger kind of more inclusive bucket. And it seemed like the the one that made the most sense was storage.
Justin:It's just like that's what Wistia uses. That's what Vimeo uses. It's a nice big bucket. And it has this normal like, people are used to it. They have iCloud storage.
Justin:They have Dropbox storage. It's like if I'm uploading a lot of video like, we had an audio only podcast where he was, like, uploading so much audio, and he had four terabytes of audio. It's like, let's let's create some sort of, you know, And container around so, yeah, that's what we're going to experiment with. That's going be in the initial launch. So there'll be storage tiers for each pricing plan.
Justin:And what I like about it is the more people use video, they'll you know, if they use a lot of video, they'll have to upgrade. Or if they're programmatically creating 10,000 AI podcasts, then that's fine. You're just gonna have to pay for that usage.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Fair.
Justin:So, yeah, I think we're getting we're getting closer. I think this last you know, again, Fable was very helpful in helping us get that first 80%. Now we have people in it, and it's like, okay, wow, we really got to do a lot of reorganizing and other things. And then we still have to work with partners that are not always easy to work with. So like the Spotify video integration is not the easiest
Brian Casel:Spotify is always like, we are our own special thing, and you're gonna play by our rules.
Justin:And and and you think, you know, they'd be kind of, as sophisticated and and advanced with their APIs and everything. And no. They're not. So and, know, with with YouTube, Google Auth, you still gotta go into the Google Developer Console and set up all sorts of permissions and add new scopes. And that's the stuff that kinda slows you down.
Justin:But, yeah, we're we're getting close. The
Brian Casel:numbers look very good. You guys launched an MCP?
Justin:Oh, yeah. And then we launched an MCP. Yeah. So that was Jason and John did a developer retreat, and they needed a break from video. And so they built that.
Justin:And
Brian Casel:I think that's a bigger deal than I think that's a that's a huge deal. And and the more that I'm I'm not I've I've actually I thought MCP was sort of overhyped for a while, but now I'm starting to see where I think just the industry is starting to come around to it now where the more tools, the more tooling that is bring your own agent Mhmm. The better. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan:And I think it's interesting.
Brian Casel:Like, because we If you're running a pod podcast and you don't wanna touch the interface, you just wanna ask your Claude or your Grockbot or your Codex to throw up the next episode, just use the MCP.
Justin:Check this out. We launched it two days ago. What podcast hosting has the best MCP? Transistor stands With the best model control protocol integration for podcast hosting. This is this is so interesting, like and it seems to be referencing this video I made heavily.
Justin:Like, that's two days ago.
Jordan:Yeah. Sick. Nice work.
Justin:It's wild.
Jordan:We decided to finally get into CRM integrations. And thanks to MCP, we have 20. Right? We were you know, that which is not how things have gone in other companies, in other integration efforts.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. But, you know, our have an MCP in, like, any other We don't.
Jordan:We we do not have MCP.
Brian Casel:So you just use all their MCP.
Jordan:That's right. We're integrating with And with
Justin:that
Jordan:experience has opened my mind to this this mindset around preparing yourself to sell to agents and making it easy for agents to buy from you type of a mindset. Yeah. I didn't quite get it. It was felt like, you know, very isolated into these specific types of products, maybe like a form builder and I'm building it. I'm building an I'm fine coding an app or a website and I need a form.
Jordan:So therefore, the form builder that my agent goes out and find that company gets a lot of benefit from being good at that. I didn't quite understand how it would work for us, but this experience with MCP and the ease and the speed around integrations and communication, it it started open open up my mind around that a bit more.
Brian Casel:I like it.
Jordan:Otherwise, I I do I do have some updates and and then I'd love to hear, the the thing you're you're working on or if you're launching it, Brian, you're working on it. But so I brought on some some more money. Oh.
Justin:Yep. You say this that's that reminds me of one one time I was like to my wife, I'm like, what's with this credit card bill? She's like, Justin, just bring in the money. Like, just bring in the money. Fantastic.
Justin:So So so, Jordan, you brought in the money.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah. The the the yes. I got a lot of people asking me questions, and and it's my job to make make sure I bring the money.
Justin:So,
Jordan:yes. No. The the the debt deal closed, funded, and in the bank, and now access to more capital. And then in the process of talking to my investors about that debt deal, one of them raised their hand and was basically like, would you like to take some equity with that debt? And I said, yes, sir.
Jordan:I would. So we we kinda stocked up on cash. And that very very quickly led into like a a new series of questions for me. Because I was operating on a certain trajectory. Yeah.
Jordan:And I was looking at my projections and I'm looking at my bank account. I'm looking at the growth every month and the expenses and I'm like, okay. Gotta make sure you don't run out of money. That's the number one thing. And wanna get to profitability with buffer, not all the way at the edge.
Jordan:And therefore, I like understood. This is how much I should spend. This is how much I need to grow. As long as those two are happening somewhat according to plan, then I'm gonna get where I need to be with some buffer. Yeah.
Jordan:And so imagine that's your mindset for two years, you know. Basically, once we pivoted, it was like, okay. This is how much money I have in the bank.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And now it's a race to see if I can get profitable before that runs out. Because I I in in my mind, I was like, I'm not raising another round. I'm not doing, you know, another another series a plus or whatever else. I'm gonna make this work. I'm gonna get profitable.
Jordan:And so for the last
Brian Casel:like like, do they change anything strategically or is it more just about padding the runway, make sure you have that buffer, more time to just keep keep going on the on the trajectory you're you're on?
Jordan:No. I I think I think I have to challenge my plans and and and how I was thinking. Even if I end up concluding that I should do exactly the same thing that I'm already doing, I feel like I need to go through that exercise of it. Should I be more aggressive? Should we hire?
Jordan:Should we do this? Should we expand into another market? Should we like, what to do with it? Because for those two years, I'm looking at the bank account and have a certain set of assumptions. And then all of a sudden, it just changes and there's a lot more buffer there.
Jordan:And so now if I stayed on the same trajectory with the same plan, we would get to profitability with arguably too much money in the bank. Meaning, like, you probably should've used that money because you're you're not close to zero, so you have so much buffer that you should actually use it. Mhmm. And so the last few weeks for me have been, like, turning in my mind around, like, okay, if we were gonna spend more, how? And do we need to?
Jordan:Should we just hunker down and be patient, do everything the same? Is there anything else that we should experiment with? So I have I have gone on a little spending binge. Because What
Justin:are you buying?
Jordan:I'm I'm buy I'm buying I'm buying creative assets is what I'm buying. So right now, our advertising is very strong at the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. We have good UGC content at the middle of the funnel that really speaks to the problem.
Brian Casel:Like people are problem aware.
Justin:Yes.
Brian Casel:And they're out there. It's like, okay, this is the thing that I've
Jordan:been Stop missing phone calls. Each phone call is a missed opportunity. Never miss another one with Rosie AI. Here's how it works starting at $48 a month. Right?
Jordan:Like that kind of thing. With a bunch of different creators and different hooks and different messages and so on. And then at the bottom of the funnel, we have those mixed in with static ads and that's kind of what closes because if you if you engage with our ad and then we basically surround you with different messages from different angles on like, it's really affordable. It's really easy. It's the best.
Jordan:It has 2,000 customers. It's right. And that's what converts. That's what people are thinking about it, and they're interested in saw the website, then they see all these, they're like, oh, that one hit me the right way. That's my issue.
Jordan:That's my priority. That's when I convert. And that's all great. But what where we have always been weak is at the top of the funnel. And the top of the funnel operates differently because really what you're trying to do is you're just trying to call out your audience.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And to come right out and basically state something that someone needs to be problem aware is not actually top of the funnel. But right now, we're basically just taking those ads and putting them into prospecting and that is our top of funnel. But that is not that's not right.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So
Justin:wait a second. Are you getting a Super Bowl ad?
Brian Casel:I'm like, yeah.
Justin:No. I feel like that's the move. I feel like that's the move, Jordan.
Jordan:You know, when I talked to investors, that wasn't one of my lines actually about Rudy. I was like, this is the first business I've ever run that would run a Super Bowl ad.
Justin:Would love to talk to reputation, like, for you to speak at MicroConf next and just be, like, the only MicroConf er to ever buy a Super Bowl ad and all, and then you come out. As long
Jordan:as it as long as it the same story as Peter Coppinger from Teamwork who bought The Domain with all of their money Yeah. And it actually worked out. You know, it needs to be like that. Like, I used my entire budget.
Brian Casel:I love it. So that. That's awesome.
Jordan:That's one thing, and then I think we're gonna hire for what I has to be called customer success, but it's our version of it.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:We just see, call it twenty, thirty sign ups every day. And I just look at it in Slack and I'm like, why aren't we just calling every
Brian Casel:single one
Jordan:of these people? They're literally putting their phone number on. They're signing up. They're making a test call. They're going into support.
Jordan:They're saying, can someone help me? Can someone call me? It's just like, it's right there. It feels so obvious. So we're gonna run some type of an experiment and I don't even I mean, I've just been firing people, bro.
Jordan:I don't remember how to hire. I don't know where I hire anyone. I, like I thought if we work remotely, and I'm like, that's it. That's that's where my knowledge ends. I I forgot how to hire.
Brian Casel:So You
Justin:should definitely get personal personal recommendations for that position. I've told you a few times about Michael on our team who does a personal Zoom call with anybody that wants to. And we are gonna scale that up. But the right personality and there's somebody maybe even in our audience, but certainly in our network, I think, that would meet that criteria. You just want somebody who's incredibly personable.
Justin:Just loves talking all day. Loves talking. They don't get upset if somebody hangs up on them. That that's what you're looking for. In terms of it, it has tangibly converted into meaningful LTV, meaningful MRR.
Justin:One person doing this. It's like one of those things that don't scale where I've seen the scale. Like, it actually does work. And if you're thinking about twenty, thirty sign ups a day, if you call five of them and they have a great experience, even if they don't sign up, they still talk about you because they're like, I had a great conversation with Rachel at Hey Rosie, and I can't recommend them enough. That's the real benefit of it.
Justin:So I highly recommend it as a strategy. It's one of those things that most companies won't do because it's, you know
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's
Justin:do it's I I'll get on the phone. Like, I never
Jordan:do Yeah. So look. RICP regular it makes a lot of sense, but we regularly hear in support at least once a day. Can someone please call me? Just like just help me.
Brian Casel:Just wanna talk to someone.
Justin:Yes. Yep. Yeah. Help.
Jordan:Alright. So I got plenty more, but since we're gonna talk again next week, I don't have to do the entire update because we're back
Brian Casel:on a normal cadence.
Jordan:But Brian, tell us about
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I I find myself in a similar place when I think about the funnel for Builder Methods. So today, I actually did launch a new this is like the second flagship course from Builder Methods. It's called Become AI Native. The first one was called Become the Builder.
Brian Casel:This so it's so now the idea that I have on Builder Methods is, like, it's a dual track, a dual funnel. Right? I I for the past several months, I've had this Become the Builder course and a free workshop on on learning how to build apps with AI and a workflow for whether you're technical or not, you can learn that. Now, this become AI native is like how to weave AI into the rest of the work that you do. Especially like knowledge workers.
Brian Casel:Right? So, anyway, it's like a training course and and it goes and it's really focused on how to build custom agent skills and to rework your processes and to build how to build a sales pipeline and weave AI into that. How to how to do content production and train AI on your voice, and how to do client proposals and and have a consultancy, and and how to weave AI into all of that. Right? But, you know, you you take away patterns and you can apply them in different ways even if your business doesn't exactly follow those those shapes.
Brian Casel:So the the main play, and this goes back months ago when I was talking about the ICP, is like, let's let's start to step away from just the software developers. Mhmm. Start to speak to knowledge workers more broadly and and try to be that source, the the the training destination for okay. I dabble with ChatGPT. I dabble with Claude, but I don't use it in a real way.
Brian Casel:Let's figure out how to actually build business processes with with AI. Like, that's that's the concept here. But anyway, like, strategically with builder methods, with this launch, the way that my funnel currently works is I do YouTube videos. That's my I mean, I don't even know if I would necessarily call that top of the funnel. It's functioning as my top of the funnel.
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But it's not the most ideal. It's it's really more of the middle of the funnel. Because if you're if you're getting fed my videos on YouTube, then you are already identified as somebody who really cares about this kind of stuff and you just want more content about using AI in general. And then you stumble into me in my videos, and then you join my list and you get into one of my free workshops, which lead into one of those two big courses, which bring you into the Builder Methods Pro community. So that's been the funnel.
Brian Casel:And now that I've shipped the second big piece of that, I feel like from a product standpoint, it's sort of feature complete, especially especially on the training side of things. I've got like these two huge courses, two free free workshops. Okay. Like that. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That was a big lift, a big grind to get those out. And now they're out and that's great. So and I do some work on the community. We do some, like, live sessions and stuff, and that's a good benefit. But now I'm starting to think forward looking about, like, how do I really grow this thing?
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Because I think for the last couple of months, it's been sort of just like riding steady at this, like, baseline steady state level of sales and subscribers and traffic that I get every month. Right? Mhmm. I think this new course will help because it that fills the gap in what I think a lot of people were waiting for.
Brian Casel:I did raise the price today. There's a coupon that's going between now and September 1, but officially, I'm almost at the one year anniversary. So it's like raised the normal price for new members going forward. It's a $100 more now. I've been kicking around different things for what I tackle next in the rest of the year going into next year and where I'm gonna take Builder Methods in terms of how do we grow this thing.
Brian Casel:Couple different possible directions. One was to think about what can I offer in terms of a higher ticket? Okay. If Builder Methods Pro currently costs $400 a year, what can I offer that costs, like, $1,500 a person? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Maybe like a cohort thing, like, twice a year. I do, an intensive, like, group cohort sort of we build together or we have a fall cohort and a spring cohort or something like that.
Justin:Yeah. There's
Brian Casel:always the option of how do I just double down on YouTube and do more YouTube or do it harder or do it better. And I've talked about this before. I just keep coming back to the idea, I am too YouTube dependent and I need to expand and get more top of funnel exposure. And now that I have the assets in place, how do I just either throw money into this or systems or content or what? Like, short form video on, like, Instagram, maybe doing more on LinkedIn, funnels, ads, I should be spending on traffic to get into these free assets that I now have.
Brian Casel:I just think that there are so many ICP people that fit the profile that just probably aren't YouTube people and just aren't stumbling into my videos, but they do live on LinkedIn or they do live on Instagram. Mhmm. I'm just thinking about that in terms of, like, what can I do or what systems or what or what or where do I spend money or time to to do that? At the same time, I'm there's a lot of stuff that's up in the air for me in the next couple of months in terms of how much time and energy I'm gonna be Am I actually gonna be able to show up and do a video every week? And even no matter what's going on in my life or whatever, too is a business risk.
Brian Casel:I don't like being the bottleneck. I don't like having the whole business model depend on me turning the camera on and getting a video out every week. So what systems or assets or growth levers can I invest in that do not require Brian to be around? Do it. You know?
Justin:Yeah. One thing I wanna just give you a massive kudos on is I feel like there's a lot of people starting communities and courses and other things. And you really persisted in moving it forward, launching these big courses, launching another big course, like making like you said, the community kind of feature complete. I do think you've done that. And, I think it did allow you to kind of pull away from the pack.
Justin:Like, just a lot of people that tried didn't have the persistence to keep going, and you kept going. And like a lot of things, who's gonna win in this new age? It's the people who are willing to keep going, you know? Yeah. It's super exciting to build something in a day, and then the work begins.
Justin:And I think you've really demonstrated kind of that how that works in practice. Like, you just kept going on this thing, and now it's working. Like, you I
Brian Casel:appreciate that, man. It's it's been it's been real it's been really interesting. I think I think we're coming up I don't know the exact number, but we're coming up on, like, a thousand members on And, Building Methods Pro at this you know, like they keep coming in and for different reasons, like they come from different backgrounds. I always come back to who is the ICP and what is their motivation. And that's what I think about the most.
Brian Casel:And that's what led me to do the second course. I still see a wide range in the community. There still are a segment of the audience who are technical. They're software people. But increasingly, and this is probably a result of my shift in content toward this group, but it's like, it's the it's the it's the non technical business owner, but non technical is a little misleading.
Brian Casel:It's like, they are technical. Or they have, like, systems operations chops, and and they're a little bit more than the than the mass than the masses who don't do anything with AI. Like, they they are tinkering with Cloud Code and Mhmm. They just don't they just don't have, like, the software code writing experience. But, like, they are pretty technical within their own domain.
Brian Casel:And it's always fascinating to me, like like because I'm seeing, like, accountants and dentists and Mhmm. Yeah. Some people.
Jordan:Know? That are not traditionally developers, like, this, like, activated them. Mhmm. Like, it, like, shocked them. It's, oh my god.
Jordan:I could actually do what I always thought that I wanted to do but but couldn't. And now all of a sudden, it they're engaged. When I hear you talk, the two things that come to mind are looking at the amazing library of content that you have and realizing, acknowledging that you probably have 200 plus good clips Yeah. From all of your YouTube videos. And that is so powerful to be able to seed other platforms.
Jordan:If you think about 200 or so clips on TikTok, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and on YouTube Shorts spread out over weeks of time. Yep. And and then the other piece that I would put in is retargeting. So Yeah. You know, ads for prospecting real tough, real expensive.
Jordan:But if someone hit one of your pages to then take one of your clips or just a mute, just go to just spinning up a video to turn either a clip or a new video that you make into a video ad only for retargeting. Like, those two things combined can increase traffic a lot and then increase the conversion of those people that end up on on your site. And it's like, you you basically have everything. All the raw materials are there. And I would not be surprised at all.
Jordan:I would be surprised if you couldn't figure out a way to be very efficient in identifying clips turning them into clips and then posting them and writing the copy around them.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. And a lot of those
Jordan:systems are there.
Justin:Maybe this is a chance to hire like, maybe ask bot if it can do it. But maybe this is also one of those cases where you gotta hire a Gen z person that really understands how to do this stuff and just get I've them to do
Brian Casel:been I'm I'm in Jay Klaus' community. There's a lot of, like, creators who who do this at at a high level, and I've been learning a lot about, like, these other platforms that I I know nothing about. Like, so Instagram, you know, I'm also starting to learn about Substack. Like people are apparently, that's like a whole Oh, discovery channel. I I always thought of Substack as like a as, like, a yeah.
Brian Casel:Like, just an alternative newsletter or or publishing platform, but it's a it's a it's a discovery platform. So, like, that's another one that's interesting. The thing with Substack
Jordan:is that it's for people who read.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. And that's a weird subset of people if we're gonna be entirely honest.
Brian Casel:Yep. That's true.
Justin:Like
Brian Casel:No. But, like, the shorts
Jordan:the shorts value. You know? It's like it's like golf. Like, that's actually where all the money is, but you have to talk to them very differently.
Brian Casel:The shorts thing is is at the top of the list for sure. I've been thinking about it for a while. I've the the thing is I it does need a strategy. Like, I I've done the take clips from my long forms and just publish them as short forms on and they don't really perform well. But I do think that I have the process and the capability to just spin up an actual funnel specific short that like a range of shorts that like, here's the hook, here's the pain, here's the payoff, you get into this free thing or you get it or you watch this free video, which takes you down the rabbit hole.
Brian Casel:I'm starting to think through like what that could look like, but especially like, the other challenge with it as a creator is like, yeah, I watch YouTube, but like, I am not an Instagram person. Like, I don't even have a personal Instagram. I just don't use it. It's Yeah. Like, not my thing.
Brian Casel:So like Such a boomer.
Jordan:I'm I'm when I like something on Instagram, I'm like, did everyone just see that I like that video.
Brian Casel:So, like, I don't even I I still like, the the other day, I'm just, like, scrolling. I'm like, okay. I need to freaking learn Instagram. Like, what's a reel? What's a what's a carousel?
Brian Casel:Like like, I'm such an old ass. Let's go.
Jordan:Yeah. Yep.
Justin:You know?
Brian Casel:Same thing. But anyway, so that's that's kinda fun. Cool.
Justin:It might I mean, I I do think I had two thoughts, which is one, Lars' thought Lars' advice, which is you either have to be the influencer or hire the influencer. Yep. And the the second thing I'm gonna this is an experiment I'm about to try that I think is gonna work because I've noticed the same thing, taking clips from existing behind the microphone. This framing, very boring. I I scroll by it myself when I see kind of these posh framings.
Justin:What gets me to stop is somebody just casually talking to their phone while they're walking. And so the reframe for me is go through your library, choose a topic and go, okay, I'm just going to go for a walk,
Brian Casel:just talk
Justin:and about it in a casual, authentic way. It it leads to the polished stuff.
Jordan:Right. Like go here to see the full thing. Yeah.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to I'm going to start trying that over here as well.
Brian Casel:I've always wanted to do that and to be able to be that guy that could just like flip on the camera and like get a thought out. Yeah. But in reality, and like, if anyone has ever watched my videos, it might seem smooth when you watch it. I freaking do 10 takes of every single line. And I hate that about myself, that I'm such a perfectionist.
Brian Casel:I wanna
Jordan:is a what what we're calling Rosie University. I don't know if they will actually call it that, but internally, we're calling it, basically, a library of videos on how to use the product. Yeah. Right. Okay.
Jordan:So that's like my role. Like, it it should come from the founder and my inspiration is Jason Fried. Oh. Because Great. His videos are just no frills.
Jordan:Yep. Just turn the thing on. Hey. I'm Jason. I'm gonna show you the new feature in Basecamp that allows you to do x.
Jordan:Alright. Yeah. So let's take a look here. When you click just just it it it feels like it almost gives me permission.
Brian Casel:Can tell he did it in, like, maybe one, maybe two takes.
Jordan:Right. Just ignore the production. Just go right to the people and just talk like a human being and it's all good. It's fine. Yeah.
Jordan:Yep. So that that's that's my whenever I get stuck, I watch one of his videos because I always get I get weird at the intro. I'm like, hi. I'm Jordan, but I just said that. You just watched a video where I just said, hi.
Jordan:I'm Jordan. What am I doing here? But
Justin:then, yes.
Jordan:So building up that muscle. I I hear you on that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Jordan:Alright, gang.
Justin:I think we did it. Yeah.
Jordan:I'm gonna go review some onboarding screens.
Justin:Yeah. Actually had and I had some marketing ideas for both of you, but I'm gonna share it with you offline. Cool. I saw some little, little hanging fruit.
Jordan:There we go.
Justin:But, yeah, thanks everybody for, joining us today. Really nice chat today, actually. Lots of folks ended up joining later on. Good to see you all.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Now I'm gonna like scroll back through. Never, I never really got to watch it live, but after every episode, I kind of scroll back and see what people said.
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See everybody. Talk
Brian Casel:to later. Bye.