Welcome to The Panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods, but I'm working on something new.
Jordan:Oh, we forward to hearing that. I'm Jordan Gal, founder at heyrosie.com. Great to be back together, gents.
Justin:Yes. We're recording on a Monday. Unusual for us, but I kinda like this Monday energy here. I am just fresh back from the Transistor Team Retreat in Toronto. I've got lots of thoughts that will probably leak out in this episode and maybe future episodes.
Justin:But one thing I was thinking about a lot while I was there is I've just started using amp codes orbs. And if you haven't used this yet, it's basically like a meta harness for LLM coding in the cloud. You bring your own model. It spins up a virtual machine with every kind of chat session you start, which gives your Orb, like, actual hardware. There's a computer in the cloud that's running everything.
Justin:The advantage is it gives you lightning fast previews in the cloud. So for example, I've got my Rails app up in it. And I can instantly, on these preview links, see what's happening. And I can share these preview links with the rest of the team. It's really, really fast.
Justin:I can have multiplayer mode, everybody in the same chat thread. So I've been using it more.
Brian Casel:You use the multi... Like like with your team? I know they have, like, team calling features in there. I I use AMP every day as a solo builder, but you're...
Justin:Yeah. I haven't... We haven't started using a transistor yet. This is... That's what I'm maybe thinking about doing next.
Justin:But I found the... This idea of a sandbox and cloud really compelling, even more so than people say, well, why not cloud code cloud and why not Codex cloud? There's some substantial differences and some of them are hard to communicate unless There you've used
Brian Casel:are like like there's little what they call portals, which is like, when they say orb, that's just a computer in the cloud. Instead of doing your work on your local computer, you're doing it up in the cloud. And then they have this feature called portals, which means you can run your app, you would normally run it on your own like local development environment and check it out locally. You're basically running it on your cloud machine. They make this portal so that you can view it.
Brian Casel:And then they do have this cool tiny feature where it's like a little widget in the corner of the of the portal, and you can like select any element and go change this headline, or, you know, change this button, and then that just feeds right into the... It's it's just a quick way to do like like quick front end feedback, so I like that.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But yeah, like orbs and working in the cloud in general, and there's a couple different tools that do it, but AMP, I think has the best implementation of this. It's just the best way to multitask with agents. It's so much easier and better and more efficient to multitask. And also, like, could just start something on your computer, walk away, pick it up on your phone, walk away, pick it up on your laptop.
Justin:Like, that's all just good Sealessness is so great. Just the... These lightning fast previews. And and the other thing now is, you know, there's all these security concerns and there there is something nice again about having a sandbox in the cloud that is somewhat cordoned off from everything else. You know?
Justin:What's more interesting to me about AMP right now is there's always the tool, and then there's the process and the culture. And they're... They are starting to make all these waves. I I really kind of see them as like the new 37signals for this age. So 37signals came on the the scene and kind of redefined what it meant to be an independent or a small software company in this new era.
Justin:And they wrote Getting Real and had all of these kind of think pieces on what is the best way to work, what is the best way to organize a software company. And now I feel like Amp Code is kind of doing that. They've got this podcast called Raising an Agent. And these last two episodes are... I just...
Justin:I finished listening to both of them, The Company of the Future and Culture Stop Slot. And if there's two things that stuck out to me, one is they have 21 people and everybody is completely bought in and aligned around a very simple vision. We're going to build the best possible product. And we want the numbers to go up into the right. Those are the two things.
Justin:So they are all completely bought into that. And then the second thing is reducing friction in the process. Whatever is creating unnecessary friction has to go. So no performance theater, no process theater. And this could mean things like no mandatory PRs, like...
Justin:Or human code review, no quarterly or annual goals, just one short Monday meeting every week. People write their own weekly goals during that meeting. So they say, here's what I'm going to work on. And then that's just what happens. And this idea of do what gives you energy.
Justin:That's what another one of their tenants. But again, under this umbrella of we are the ideal customer of the product. We are users of the products. We understand what customers want. And we are all a 100% committed to the customer.
Justin:So if the customer does want us to build a Jira integration, that's not the most exciting thing. But we're so aligned around this vision that that will give us energy because we all want the same thing.
Brian Casel:I think in that sense, they're they're similar to 37signals. I'm curious what other parallels you have. But like to me, what I really like about AMP as a company culture from what I can see as a customer and a user and I and I follow their podcast and Twitter a bit. Mhmm. Like I always really like these companies who are so clearly actual users of their own product and they get their hands dirty from a design and and like product design development standpoint.
Justin:So Mhmm.
Jordan:You know,
Brian Casel:I would say most of my feature requests that I send into them are answered by their CEO. Mhmm. You know, or or their CTO.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:And it's clear that like, clearly, they they personally are are pushing on those features. It's not like they're relaying them to the team or or and it's not like... I I know that I know that their inboxes must be flooded, I I get that like not every tiny request can be answered. Mhmm. But that's something that I notice as as a user, because same thing with 37signals, you know, Jason and David clearly are deep having their hands dirty and their imprint on the product itself.
Brian Casel:One of the benefits of just being a small team in general, so, you know, I went back and forth between Cloud Desktop and AMP, and you know, there's a lot of pros and cons. Obviously, I came back to AMP. It's much better for a lot of reasons we talked about, but like whenever I sent, I I would I would throw in like some, you know, requests or bugs into the into the Claude support box and, you know, obviously get like no answer ever. So...
Justin:Mhmm. Good luck. It's hard to kind of convey, Jordan, because you were asking how is this different than maybe what your team is doing? I think for me, I'm just realizing, like, these guys think they're building the company of the future. They think this is the way...
Justin:The best way to work for right now. And I'm just realizing, even on the transistor team and other teams I see working and even the pushback that they got to these episodes, I'm realizing how much of a cultural and process change all of this is for teams. It really is. Like, even the idea of what if we didn't do pull requests anymore? What?
Justin:We can't do that. Like, there's no way we can do that. It's like, yeah. But if there's a way for us to work better, for us to remove unnecessary friction, and for us to all be committed to the same thing, moving in the same direction and having this team where everybody is aligned and has very high agency. Like there's nobody on that team, 21 people, that isn't able to work on every part of the product at any given time.
Justin:And that just feels like a radical departure from most software teams.
Jordan:It's just like 21 engineers. That their team?
Justin:But but there's no departments. There's nobody on the team that's like, well, I'm responsible. Like, some of them are good at different things. But for example, they all do marketing. They all do customer service.
Justin:They they all do sales calls. They all visit clients on-site. So they have a big bank as a client. And Thorsten is one of the main guys. He couldn't make it.
Justin:He just sends somebody else on the team. They all have ownership. So it's technically 21 co founders. I think some people have more equity than others. Sure.
Justin:Once you, like, hear them, I... It just in my head, I'm just like, man, this is such... We've been talking about it. This feel inevitable?
Jordan:Is that what... It seems like
Brian Casel:they have really strong convictions that at least on on product and developer experience, I would say. Mhmm. And like, and where where, like, where agentic development is going. I I... Like, Thorsten really has some strong opinions, most of them I tend to agree with, which which are like, this is the world now, and we have to think from sort of like from first principles.
Brian Casel:It's like, yeah, like, if we are in a multi agent world, as we build our products, like do things like pull requests matter? Know, like the interface on these products, about a year ago, maybe a little bit more than a year ago, and before that, I was still on the fence about like, I still wanna have access to my files and my code base, so that I can see the code and I can reason about the code and and prompt and and use agents. But then at some point, and and like even a year or two ago, all these companies were starting to push this agentic interface where on the left column you've got your list of agents or orbs or threads or whatever your product is gonna call them, and in the main window, they were pushing you toward this like agent conversation and away from your files. Right? I still like to see my list of files over on the right side, but the but sometime around a year ago, it started to click probably around the same time that the models started to get really good and that's when it's like, actually I don't need to be even touching my code base anymore.
Brian Casel:It really is all about conversations and specs and architectural planning and feedback loops with agents, and it's so much less about refactoring one line of code or reviewing line by line the code, and that's, I think that's the big friction and hurdle that a lot of more traditional software teams need to need to overcome. And it's really, really hard, you know.
Justin:Yeah. I I also think I think that in the old software world, so like when I started in startups, there were factions. The engineers were over here. The product managers were in the middle. The designers are over here.
Justin:The sales and marketing people were over here. The leadership was kind of over everything. And there was always friction between these groups. Developers wanted to do something. Product manager wanted to do something else.
Justin:They have to negotiate it all the time. And there was kind of a built in culture of not resentment, but I think we've all been on teams where it was like you're talking about the other per... You're talking about the sales team, like all those fucking sales guys. Like every every division had their own private gossip chat.
Jordan:Yes. It... In its ideal, it was healthy tension. Mhmm. And as organizations got bigger, it was less likely to remain healthy.
Justin:Yes. And this is one of the core things they talked about in this podcast, the AMP Code team, which is they said, we have just tried to make everyone aligned and the friction happens in public. So there's... They said there's no secret signal or telegram chat here where the, you know, one group talks about another group or on... If if there's something we would need to talk about, it is public.
Justin:We are all aligned on the same thing. We all want the numbers to go up. We all wanna build the best product. And where anything else... If anyone isn't aligned in that same direction, like, if somebody really wants to use pull requests, for example, you're not gonna you're not gonna be on the team.
Justin:Right?
Jordan:Wonder how long Yeah. How long the organization can withstand that commit that commitment to to doing things in that way. Yeah. So it... I I just take a take a second to to go back to 37signals.
Jordan:The thing about them when they first came out, when they when they made a name for themselves is that they were contrarian Mhmm.
Justin:And they
Jordan:were also right. Mhmm. And their rightness was inescapable. Like, just look at look at the success of the company. It's clearly successful.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And they managed to connect their culture and their contrarian approach with their product also. And their product was a different approach to project management and they like married those two beautifully and if you bought into the way they built their company, it was easier for you to buy into the way they built their product and how to use it. Right? It's like Yeah. Like really really synergistic, like one helped the other.
Brian Casel:I think maybe the reason Thirty Seven was... You know, became much louder and and their and their views more widespread is because they they had so many opinions on business. Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. But it was like like you could not separate their views on business from how they did business.
Brian Casel:Yeah. No. Exactly. They like they they led by example and and they they backed up their arguments with how they built their business for sure. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The question is It seems like they're they're a little bit more opinionated on like how products should be built and how to run a software team and maybe... I I don't I don't know that I'm hearing them like comment so much about like, is SaaS dead or like what's... How
Jordan:do... Don't know....
Brian Casel:And stuff like that.
Jordan:That feels like it was right for 37signals and I don't think that's... This moment doesn't require that. Yeah. Maybe some questions come up on like how much revenue can you really grow with a twenty twenty five person team? But like that's not even that interesting of a Mhmm.
Jordan:Really interesting question is like, what if the organization structure that Justin described before was pretty traditional for a company? It happened to be a software company, but the structure was pretty similar to another company where you had a marketing department, a sales department, an engineering department, a QA department, and leadership, and all these different pieces in HR. And it feels like maybe what AMP is best for in this moment is questioning like, well, all the assumptions that go along with how you structure a team and workflow, it it made so much sense. It felt so comfortable to say, it's gonna go from product, and then it's gonna go into a spec, and it's gonna be developed, and it's gonna go to QA, and then it's gonna go back... It's gonna be pushed out.
Jordan:And everything feels controlled and okay, and the bugs aren't gonna kill everybody, and it's... You know, it it felt like a manageable conveyor belt. We could all understand and get through over and over again because code felt very fragile. Everything felt fragile. You release the wrong thing, you screw up the whole product.
Justin:I I just wanna pause there because I... You just said something that I think also implicit in that process was this comfort that a lot of the process gave my job purpose. So some people liked writing pull requests because that part of the process made them feel whatever important, whatever. It filled a space for them professionally.
Jordan:Okay. So it was like defined. I do this. I contribute. My team contributes this part of
Justin:the process. And there's this idea because it was accepted. Like, of course, everybody's gonna do a stand up every day. Of course, you're gonna use Agile. Of course, we're going to assign point systems to each of these stories, and we're gonna pivot...
Justin:Put it into Pivotal Tracker, and we're gonna track it as a iteration and all these other things that were... What's coming down the pipes now are companies like AMP that are saying it's possible that a lot of that stuff was just cruft and just performance theater anyway. It was a process designed to make people feel good and to make people busy.
Jordan:But it may have been necessary. The question is, is it still necessary?
Justin:I think they're both interesting questions. I'm just kind of enjoying this moment of 37signals attacked these sacred cows. And now we're in this new moment where these companies like are kind of attacking some sacred cows.
Jordan:These are like deep sacred cows.
Brian Casel:And I tend to think that like, lot of it is sort of like semantics and structure and tooling and naming for stuff. And a lot of that doesn't matter to me. It's more about what's the substance and what actually matters. So like a PR could be a spec, could be a PRD, could be just a really long prompt, could be a scope, could be a discussion between a designer and a product manager and developer to fit. Like however you can get the best thinking and the best collaboration out of the team that you have and whatever style fits your culture and those personalities, like that's what you wanna do, and that could be Slack async messages, that could be stand up calls in person, all of that is still okay, like there doesn't have to be names for things that people that people adopt because the internet says now now we're all doing PRDs or specs or whatever it might be, it's like...
Jordan:Here's my question. I... Brian, I think you you feel this change more fluidly because it's how did you operate solo two years ago, one year ago, and now there weren't many barriers. You didn't have to fire anyone and change Yeah. Certain process.
Jordan:What I'm curious about, Justin, our company seems to have, like, fallen into this natural state of we got two engineers Mhmm. And they don't want anybody else, and they're real happy just doing whatever they want. Mhmm. And we were worried about Jess, our product manager because she did such a good job at, like, maintaining that process when we needed it for a payments product where you could not mess up. So she had a really rigid hold and that's what made the company work.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And we worried about her transition and we did not need to worry. Mhmm. She transitioned the same way where now she runs product and she's like, give me more tools. Give me more design functionality. Give me more UI.
Jordan:Give me access. Mhmm. So our company seems to have just kind of have like floated into a pretty comfortable spot with all these Mhmm. Less structured processes, more capability. But I don't know where it goes from here.
Jordan:And it... It's odd to not wanna hire anyone and not grow the engineering team because it's like so, like, I don't know, efficient, fun Mhmm. Effective. I don't know what's
Justin:going on in In hiring now, you do have to think about who could fit into this culture. And so I think transistors had a bumpier transition. I think we're getting there. But part of the challenge, I think, is we... You know, we're an older company and a lot of us had kind of entrenched stuff.
Justin:Right? And I mean, here's a good example. One of the big wins from the team retreat was we talked about every software company's favorite topic, project management. Okay. And the the way that it reveals itself is the same in every software company I've been in.
Justin:Somebody says, I don't like this tool. So I don't like Basecamp. I don't like Pivotal Tracker. I don't... We're using shortcut.com.
Justin:I don't like linear. Whatever. So somebody says, I don't like the tool. And so we were all together and it's like, there's just five of us. Let's dig into this.
Justin:Let's talk about it. And my question to each person is like, okay, well, what are you hoping to get out of this? Like, what is the purpose of project management for you? Like, what role is it doing for you? What's the job here?
Justin:And everybody shared. And, you know, so we're thinking, oh, maybe we need to go to Trello and we create a Trello account. And then we're like, no, no, no. We need to vibe code our own. And so somebody starts vibe coding there.
Justin:And then finally, we just end up back on the tool we're already using, Shortcut. And the truth is is that the problem wasn't the tool. The problem is the process. Yes. It's culture.
Justin:It's expectations. It's people holding on to patterns from old jobs or things that they had before. And we're all guilty of this. You know, it's also people just having a personal preference on how they like to work and do projects or whatever. Once we could figure that out, it was like, okay, problem's not the tool.
Justin:The problem is a process. And let's just focus on that. And then let's clean up the tool. That to me feels like just a small little picture of what's happening now because this process question is now everywhere. For...
Justin:I was a product manager
Brian Casel:for Yeah.
Justin:I was a product manager for a long time, and I liked running my product area in a very distinct way. I'm having to reexamine all of those beliefs from two decades of career, you know. I have to reimagine what it looks like now. And I think that's the challenge.
Brian Casel:I do think that there has been... Sort of... Again, it's too much of an emphasis on this tool is very hot right now or this phrase for a thing is very hot right now and everyone's talking about this and tweeting about this, when really it's about the process. And like for me, over the past year and a half, my process has not really changed all that much and even it hasn't changed all that much from the pre AI days. Like I've always been a very very big planner.
Brian Casel:Like I plan and design the thing that I intend to roll out and build, and like the... I separate planning from building. I've always done that even before AI, and then I continued to do that through, let's say, a spec driven development, and you can call it a spec, can you call it a PRD, you can call it a big prompt. So like that's really important to me and I've done in a number of different tools and a number of different formats.
Justin:And
Brian Casel:multitasking is really important to me. You can you can do everything that you can do in AMP. You can technically do it in Cloud Desktop. You can do it in Conductor. You can do it in Devon.
Brian Casel:They're like every tool kind of shares the same interface. I do happen to think that AMP has implemented it in an exceptionally good way. That's my favorite right now, but they are not unique. Conductor does a lot of the same things that AMP does. Like it's just a tool, so the decision really is like, okay, multitasking with agents, we want to increase our velocity and flexibility.
Brian Casel:So what's the best interface for us? What's our preference for that? Pick a tool, like they're pretty much the same.
Justin:Yeah, I think what is especially clear to me, you know, one of the things we've talked about is do junior young developers have a place in this new economy? I'm kind of switching on this. I think that the... Even DHH has this tweet here. I don't often quote DHH, but I'll do it right now.
Justin:The age of agents is going to be amazing for most programmers, but it'll be hard times for the cantankerous ones and replace programmers with anything. Cantankerous designers, cantankerous managers, cantankerous product managers, project managers. Specialized knowledge and rare skills will no longer offer immunity for those who are paying to work with. Best learn some basic people skills. I think that the...
Justin:There's gonna be a real advantage right now for companies that hire young people who are just hungry, who are more AI native, and who are just like, yeah, I get it. I'm moving fast right now. And just looking at the pushback these amp guys got from these these episodes, it's just clear. And a lot of Thorsten and Quinn's responses to those people was like... Like one people...
Justin:Person said, it's not fair. You guys can use more tokens than us. And they're like, yeah. Sorry. Like...
Justin:What? This is That
Brian Casel:to me, I hear that a lot. It's like, come on guys, if you're a professional in this industry, how do you not have a Claude or a Codex account? Like, I don't understand how that happens. I get that like other regions of the world, you know, it could be more expensive, but, know, if again, if you're a professional in this industry, no matter where you're from, you're probably working for some sort of company, like you gotta be... There has to be a token budget somewhere.
Justin:Dude, this is... I think this is the new way opportunities is go to a meetup, go to a conference, ask developers how they're using AI. And any company that's still using Copilot, that's your new acquisition. That's your new competitor. You just go after these guys.
Justin:They're gonna get left behind. I know I've been talking a lot. I just wanna share this comment from Josh in the chat. Part of those frictions and processes were about planning, risk, and communication, in large part because engineering was so expensive. The new pressures friction shift with new found engineering is speed.
Justin:So there has been this change, and it just... I... It just became so clear to me listening to these amp guys and then listening to all the the pushback they got and going, wow, there's something dramatic happening. And we're just at the the tip of it. Yeah.
Justin:Like you think of every bank, every insurance company, every every company ever, every tractor manufacturing company, this is about to hit the whole world, and it's just hitting us first.
Jordan:Yeah. I I can't help but think of the opportunity around that. Right? If if AMP is kinda setting an example of if you wipe the slate clean and got a chance to start fresh without all this residue and leftover, you know, thinking and then then what would it look like? But but that that forces like two questions.
Jordan:Right? Clearly, they are at the forefront. They're building a company in a in a unique way. It's working. The product aligns with how they're doing the whole thing.
Jordan:As an audience of that change in the market, you think first about your existing organization. Like Mhmm. What what should I do? What what should we do? What what should things look like for us?
Jordan:And then the question directly adjacent to that is what about existing companies? Like existing products.
Justin:Mhmm.
Jordan:You know, I I was looking at Fiverr. You know, Fiverr? Public company. Yep. And I was just going through this thought exercise.
Jordan:I think it's about $300,000,000 market cap. $400,000,000 in revenue. $200,000,000 a year in labor expense. $200,000,000 a year in salaries and stock based compensation. A $150,000,000 a year in marketing.
Jordan:I mean, what in the world? People are just enriching themselves. Oh, and $200,000,000 in cash on the balance sheet. Like, what in the world is going on in these big public companies? That means the market is effectively saying it's worth a $116,000,000.
Jordan:Right? Market cap is 316. They have 200,000,000 on the balance sheet in cash or cash equivalents. They're saying the company's worth a $116,000,000. Like, what happens in an organization like that Mhmm.
Jordan:If someone like Ryan Cohen from eBay comes along and says, hey, guys. It's cool that you got fat for a while, but it's time to go. Mhmm. And this is on behalf of shareholders. And and what what do you do to a company like that when you have an AMP type mindset and the tech at your disposal?
Jordan:Do do you just go from 500 employees to, like, 30? Like, is it... Because those opportunities are enormous, enormous.
Justin:Dude, this sounds like a good segue to Brian's thing because it feels like Brian's actually going after, you know, some of this market.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Pretty pretty drastic segue to go from fiber to whatever I'm building over here.
Jordan:That was a great segment on AMP though. That is is so interesting. We're not done talking about it. It'll just continue on, and and there's a ton of advantage in, you know, getting on top of it and figuring out what your company should do, how many people you should have, what they should be doing Mhmm. And what leverage should they have.
Jordan:And I think that's the right segue.
Justin:Yeah. And and and to your point, the companies that were able to get fat or be a little bit more lazy or a little bit more laissez faire, the one that I had during our team retreat, and it's just come up over and over again, is just like, holy shit. This is a business. Like, our customers have lots of choices, and they're gonna have more and more choices every day.
Brian Casel:And and to that end, I I think that the reason why AMP is... Seems to be winning in our circles, in our Twitter feeds
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and the people we know, more more and more of them tend to be using AMP and talking about AMP. I I just think it's their hyper focus on the product and building in public, frankly. They they are out there on Twitter sharing... Not... They're not controversial for the sake of being controversial.
Brian Casel:They're just passionate about their opinions about their product, and their opinions clearly come through on the product, and the market agrees with those opinions. Mhmm. And and they're... And and so like I... That hyper focus on product in in a space that is so competitive with like hundreds of independent harnesses.
Brian Casel:And then you're also up against Cloud Code and Codex and, you know... Cool.
Justin:Is the advantage of being the customer, by the way, or at least being very aligned with what the customer wants is if you understand this, like, they are their customer. And their customers like them because they see them... Like, we see ourselves in the AMP code team. We're like, oh, fuck. Yeah.
Justin:Like, this is how I wanna build. Like, this is what I want. This is and I mean, the UI could use some work, but we're we're willing to overlook in some ways some parts of the Chrome because they've gotten the main thing so right.
Brian Casel:There are things in the UI that I absolutely love. And then there are like, other corners in the UI that I'm most just like, ugh. I I just don't look look over there very often.
Jordan:Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Justin:Do we wanna shift here to... Well, do we wanna shift to, Brian, your thing, or do we wanna go to Jordan's thing first?
Jordan:No. I I think I think we should go...... Same. Yeah. But but yours is more like concrete and and and and we can we can back out later.
Brian Casel:This is the thing that I... This is this is one of those ideas that I'm I'm about a week in on this concept for what I think is gonna... I think I'm gonna go for this as like my next serious business line here. Mhmm. I'm just gonna...
Brian Casel:Spent this morning getting this site up. It's at homegrown.systems is the domain. The thing is gonna be called Homegrown Systems. The headline here is, know, run marketing in house with agents that you own. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So this is a new service. Think of it like a productized service, and I've I've been running it by some some early, you know, people of of this thing, and this is actually the very first time I'm talking about it publicly. I haven't tweeted it yet or anything like that. Yeah. You mentioned it in newsletter.
Jordan:Right? You just like, surprisingly mentioned it?
Brian Casel:Pat buried at the very bottom of last week's newsletter. It wasn't even about this.
Jordan:You got a By the way,
Brian Casel:I'm I'm starting to noodle on this new idea. It's it's gonna be sort of a service that's gonna help help you build your own team of marketing agents in your company that you own. And that's all I said about like, if if that sounds kinda interesting, hit reply. And I got a bunch of replies over the weekend from that. So I'm talk...
Brian Casel:I'm I'm doing some early customer feedback from them. We can talk about this like what are the very first steps for rolling out a new Mhmm. Product. But but the idea here is, I'm a I'm a really big believer in homegrown systems in general of all types. And obviously, you know, when it comes to AI and agents, the same is true.
Brian Casel:Like, I think it is more valuable and more beneficial long term for me and for other companies to really actually invest the time and effort to not only just adopt AI and adopt the tooling, but to actually develop jobs. I think I literally think of my Grokbot team as team members and each one of them have actual jobs. And they run those jobs on our end. So my mark, like the the offer here is basically a team of marketing agents that do your website's SEO, your AI visibility tasks, you know, content writing, optimization, audits, analytics reports. And what I have with my agents and what I'll be setting up for clients through this is having those agents run that stuff and sending you reports.
Brian Casel:And so this is where we can get into the idea of like a free software platform coupled with a service. I've already built part of this for myself and I'm gonna continue to develop it out, but the idea with homegrown systems and maybe like homegrown the platform is you can give agents these simple tools to send you reports, can customize the way that these reports get sent to you, and so a report can be, here's the audit that we just, here's the weekly audit on your SEO optimization on your site, here are a bunch of competitor comparison articles that we've just written up for you, we need your quick approval to deploy these for you. Here is a new AI visibility page, we need your feedback and approval or you can course correct, so you can reply to an email, you can get these via Slack, you can get these via text, and simple yes, no, approve, course correct, whatever. But the key idea here is that you're not outsourcing it to me, you're not outsourcing the agents and the skills to some agent in a box that you can't control. This service is installing it in your company.
Brian Casel:You own it, you run it on your own systems, your own cloud account, your own Grokbot account, whichever tool you want to use. We use standard protocols for like agent skills, agent systems, just install them into your company, one time fee, not an ongoing service. There there is an ongoing support option if you want us to help you improve and iterate and retrain and and you know, grow your agents in your company, but we give you the slate of like, you get a chief of staff, you get the SEO optimizer, you get the content writer, you... And then you you get this experiment loop. So so a strategist that helps you, look at your business and strategize of of like marketing experiments that you can run.
Justin:Okay. I got a few questions to start. What... So if I pay $2,000 for this, what am I installing in my company? Like, is it is it a skill?
Justin:Is it a collection? Like, what is it practically? For example, if I was gonna run it in Orbs, what would I be installing in in Orbs?
Brian Casel:So you you would use whichever coding, whichever AI platform you use, if you're using Cloud or or OpenAI or or both, for the tokens and whatnot. And then, the the... Like a a a collection of agent skills and also some like documentation, like part of it is a process to establish the transistor brand and company voice and positioning and your competitors and how you and how you message certain things, like all of that training, this is why I think it's so important to have this stuff homegrown and not locked in a box from some other provider because it's about having your own company's training, your own context, your own market positioning, your own market intelligence baked in to what your agents are doing for you. And you know, you're gonna have the skills and the process and the structure that we build. We install that but that stuff is intended to evolve over time within your company.
Brian Casel:So like, you can retrain it, you can add to the training, you can change the process around if your team wants to use it a certain way. We're here to support that with some support plans or you can say like, hey, yeah, the initial investment is great now we're gonna run with that for a while. And then there are like a few other pieces where it's like optional add ons, so if you wanna like convert your site over from like a WordPress site to a Astro agent ready, you know, optimized site, we can do that as a one time project. We've got like a branding startup process, like literally what just ran this morning for Homegrown Systems went through this process. I have a site, you know, spun up for it.
Brian Casel:So this is like a service and a software platform that I'm starting to put together, like I've been building this for myself, I'm starting to wrap it into like what would this look like as a service. I'm starting to talk to people in my inbox, there's gonna be like a limited number at that early price, price going up in the coming weeks. But right now, like the reason why I wanted to talk about it here is primarily is I'm trying to throw it out there to get feedback, questions, what's confusing, what is interesting, what would you expect a service like this to entail? What would be your goal? Like some of the early conversations I've been having with people are, there's a lot of companies with teams, like small, one team of five, one team of 20, and, you know, the CEO or some manager in there is interested in getting their team more agent assisted agent, you know, like supplement their team with agents and having each member of their team manage their agents.
Brian Casel:I'm hearing from software founders, I'm also hearing from, like, the people in my audience are running like law firms and dentist practices and things like that. I'm hearing from some of them. Yeah, that's the main thing is I'm sort of looking for these like early conversations but I, you know, Jordan, like we can get into the idea of, I I think it's really interesting for, if we're thinking about like is SaaS dead or where is SaaS going in the sector that's like the startups, like if you're starting up a new business today, which I am, where do you start?
Justin:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and I think the idea of like maybe the SaaS is not the thing we charge for anymore. I think we gotta go to more of a freemium free tool approach and if if a tool at all, in this case there will be a simple part of it as a tool, that's free. So anyone can even just use this agent reporting tool, even if you're not interested in doing the service, like that's gonna be a tool that'll just be available for free out there, and then the upsell and the business model behind it are... Is the roster of clients who actually wanna build agents using our systems around it, you know.
Jordan:I'll I'll say the the... Where the demand for something like this comes from from from my side, from our company, is we we look around and we see... And the engineering department leading the way is an understatement. They're miles ahead. They are miles and miles ahead, and we're left behind like, can you please help us?
Jordan:Like, be faster at doing x y or z. Rock, right? CTO, his level... It's not confidence. It's like his effectiveness is just astronomical.
Jordan:He can just do anything. Yep. And I look at that and I say, I need that for the rest of the company. Every day that we go by that I don't have agents working on my behalf all day feels stupid. That's where the demand comes from.
Brian Casel:That's That is reflected in a lot of these conversations, especially with teams because I I... And I'm trying to think I'm trying to figure out the best way to message this in in like headlines and copy and stuff like that.
Jordan:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You know, I spend a lot of time in these like positioning exercises with with Claude and analyzing what I'm hearing from customers and things, and so one of that, one of those pain points is like that idea of FOMO and it's not just about FOMO of like we we are not getting the benefit of like AI magic that's out there. It's also like my team is just a little bit behind the curve and I want them and even they want to be leapfrogged up ahead in capability to actually leverage the power of using agents. Again, like that's, in my opinion, just as a... Even if I'm just like a client of this homegrown systems, if I'm... Because that's how I try to do these positioning exercises.
Brian Casel:If I were to hire this for my company, what I would want here is like, I don't want to outsource the magic to some I black want me and my in house team to gain the superpowers and then to grow with those and invest in them over time. And like, yeah, we'll start with templates you give us and whatever initial branding training you'll set up, but like the real value and what I've seen is like after months of running these things and iterating on them and saying like on this third and fourth and fifth run, we're gonna improve the way that this works because we learned how it works, that's where the confidence comes from. Like it's not gonna work perfectly out of the gate, but with those iterative cycles, you know. And and like, it's it's like if we give you the starting point out of the gate, that's what you pay for, then your team can start to learn and and adapt and and grow with it.
Justin:And and... But how will it be different than getting something that's already open source? So like Corey Haynes has his his collection on GitHub. I think that's gonna be the big question is like, how is this different than that?
Brian Casel:That's a good question. I think the diff... The way that I would think about it is like, yeah, you could you could totally go over to to get those skills but that's really just the first five percent of the work is getting downloading those skills and putting them into your systems. It's like then what? And you can run them and those skills are gonna run a, there's a lot of good stuff baked into those skills but it is a generalized cookie cutter way to do things.
Brian Casel:They're not trained on your company, on your positioning or on the way that your team likes to receive information and take action on information. Like I personally, I'm a person who wants, like I wanna get emails in my inbox so that I can open them this morning, open them and say, yes, do that, no, do that. Fix that. That's me. I'm an email inbox guy.
Brian Casel:Somebody else might be a Slack person. Somebody else might be, you know, in there in Grock Bot or text messaging,
Justin:like you can... So is there gonna be a service as a part of this, like, we get this go... You get this going, and then you're gonna be running, like, some SMTP, like, sending emails, like, who... Who's sending the emails? Is it your system that's sending the emails or is it...
Brian Casel:I'm still figuring... A lot of that... A lot of those logistics out. I have set it up for myself. I'm using a tool called agent mail to to send...
Brian Casel:To have my agents each have an email address to to Mhmm. Email me. So maybe maybe the services I set that up for you, maybe we have our own emails, emailing service, like, I don't know. But the agents themselves, the agent skills themselves, the documentation, the tokens, it's all yours. You own all of that.
Brian Casel:So you could take everything that we install, And it's not, it's also not a blind install. It's like, it's gonna be a process where like for a week or two, I or my team or my agent systems are going to interview you and get your market positioning and analyze your site and analyze your product and bake it into the skills that we install for you. We're also gonna hook it up to all of your analytics. If you're using Fathom or Plausible or Google Analytics or Stripe or you know, HubSpot, whatever you're using, we're gonna hook up those things so that your agents can read them, report them, send you reports, learn from those reports, send you strategy ideas, tweak your SEO copy based on what it's seeing in your own systems. Like it's all integrated because it's owned in house rather than one box running the same system for anyone who's just blindly, you know, and then of course the idea is like you could pay us the one time thing, you can do the optional ongoing support like, you know, we could help you run and help you improve over time or you can cancel that and keep running it, keep growing it yourself.
Brian Casel:Whereas, you know, you use another service, you turn it off, it's just like, okay, we just lost that capability. Yeah. Now we gotta start over again, you know.
Justin:Have you... What... Who's the ideal customer for this? Like what's the ideal...
Brian Casel:What are the... The early people I've spoken to about it tend to be teams, although some of them are very small. One flavor was like, hey, we're a software team, and from the founder to the other four of us, we're all kind of technical and we basically don't do much marketing at all, we just need to be doing more marketing activity in general, and this seems like they are agent pilled on the product development side, but they're not on the marketing stuff. That's one version of it. Had several conversations with like more non technical, although they are interested in AI and agents in their company.
Brian Casel:So they're doing a lot of sales stuff for various types of products and industries that like some... One is running a big law firm, one is doing like software for some other industry, but they're just very marketing and sales focused, so they just want to empower their team with agents as much as possible
Justin:and
Brian Casel:like, so like one guy told me, he's like, yeah, I've gotten quotes from a lot of these AI agent services, one of them quoted me $30,000 for something like this, and and I told them, like, that's absolutely ridiculous. We're just gonna do it ourselves. Mhmm. But he still responded to what I'm talking about here, you know. So...
Justin:There's there's a big part of me that just wants us to be software, personally. I I either want it to feel like software or I want it to feel like a service. I'm struggling a little bit with the productized service part because I still don't... It's hard to tell and maybe it's not clear yet, but how this is gonna be different than, you know, me setting a bunch of recurring scheduled tasks in Claude code, for example. Like, hey, I want you to notify me every week about this.
Justin:And we're gonna do this. And we're gonna build up this. And I could start a project in orbs right now that that kind of does this stuff. And so that's what I'm trying to figure
Jordan:out is what's the... The fact that you know what an orb is?
Brian Casel:I mean, that's the thing. It's like it's it's for you're you're a bit more advanced than the customers of this type of thing. Would I would... Got it.
Jordan:So... Yeah. I'm I'm starting to see this, like, this spectrum starting to develop where, let's say, on the lowest end, there are skills, like Corey's set of skills. Mhmm. If you know what you're doing, you can grab that as a great starting point.
Jordan:Yeah. Yep. Then then you start moving up the spectrum. Let's call it Josh Pickford somewhere in the middle. Mhmm.
Jordan:It's it's a black box. I'm just gonna pay it. I'm gonna get the results I want, the output that I'm looking for. It's much cheaper than the old version of that type of agency and it's AI powered and I'm I'm happy for that in between to now exist. Something Mhmm.
Jordan:For $2,000 a month not $10,000 a month. Yep. And then what what Brian's doing is saying, yes, that exists and there's a lot of demand for that but there's also a part of the market that doesn't want the black box. They see a lot of value in owning those agents and processes in house, but I'm not gonna start at a skill. And if you can just get me off the ground for $2, it's great great deal.
Jordan:It it goes from... I wouldn't... It's authentic FOMO. You talked about FOMO before. Some FOMO is very artificial and it's surface and it's envy.
Jordan:Other types is authentic FOMO, like you know what's possible
Justin:but you
Jordan:haven't done it yet. You... That is like the a healthy version of FOMO and it's it's worth money to just get off the ground.
Brian Casel:That was a good that was a good breakdown. I I I think I agree with that positioning, Jordan. Justin, to go back to what you were saying about it being more of a software, I think there will very much be the service part, but there will be a software platform in there. I just don't know, I don't have pictures of it yet on here, but the...
Jordan:Yeah. Like
Brian Casel:one sort of similarity, if you remember back to like bench accounting, how they had their own proprietary software coupled with a service.
Justin:Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's sort of what I'm thinking here. There's gonna be this homegrown platform, which is a software that anyone can use and you don't even need our service to use it. It's a reporting system that you can have your agents plug into. So you can customize the reports. And because I do this for myself already.
Brian Casel:I receive them as emails. They're not just plain text emails. They... There's like interfaces in the emails that so... Actually, like, item number one, what do you wanna do?
Brian Casel:Yes? No? Correct. Item number two, like approve or unapproved. Yeah.
Brian Casel:And so like you can custom or like I get like a KPI reports, like I got one this morning and it gives me all the numbers that I want to see in the format that I want to see them. But, like, that's... You you can plug your agents into that same thing and have them report the way that you want them to report. Of course, we would set that up for you as part of this service.
Justin:Yeah. Like, in some ways, the... Like, actionable reports that you can respond quickly to is... Seems like a a a compelling thing. Like, I have in my head, I wanna set that up.
Justin:I have in my head, I need to get notified every Monday morning about these things and stay on top of it, you know?
Brian Casel:I think the thing is that there is a huge jump and huge gray cloud of like, okay, I kind of want this reality where me and my small team were receiving these reports, we've got these agents, they're doing these marketing jobs, we know that our site is passing all these audits, we we just want all that stuff to be happening, and also like I gotta make sure that the whatever they're doing on our site is actually aligned to what we wanna be saying about us in the market and
Jordan:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Want and and and it's gotta be on brand and all that. So I just want that to be a reality, but there's a huge gap to go from download a random skill off the internet or like hear somebody on a podcast talk about something like you're supposed to be doing to making that a reality. There's training, there's wiring things up, there's figuring out the new workflow of how we're going to communicate with our own agents. There's like...
Justin:Yeah. I think it also feels similar to Pivotal Tracker, honestly. Like, Agile was this big thing, and Pivotal Tracker had software that you could use to manage the Agile process. And then they had a Agile consulting side that would come in and get you set up and teach you how to do it and all that.
Brian Casel:There's also, like, a land and expand strategy that I'm thinking here too. Like... So what will start at two ks, it'll go up, but like the core marketing team, that's like the flagship product that every customer would start with. There's the ongoing support retainer optional, if you want us to help continue run them with you. But the upsells would be like, okay, we've started with the SEO and the AEO and the content writing, now the growth experiment strategist is suggesting we try cold email outreach or we try some ads campaigns or try an affiliate program.
Brian Casel:Okay, cool. We have a library of other agents that you can add into the mix for a fee. Okay, and then maybe another company has like, okay, we've got this like special sales process and we need to have some agents sort of custom built to work in our very unique situation, unique industry with some unique requirements. Okay, that's a custom job. Like let's add it to your agent roster and really dial it in for you.
Brian Casel:Starting with the core thing and then options to to expand out and and probably some other options for like larger teams implementing agents, you know.
Jordan:Yeah. Like it's like a recruiting... Speaking of Fiverr, it's it's like a recruiting agency or marketplace to hire.
Brian Casel:It's funny. I... My early iterations on this was exactly that. And like just a few days ago, I had a version of this, I was tentatively calling it roster, but the word roster is used for too many similar things. But yeah, I was gonna position it like it's a recruiting agency for agents and and we're gonna have a catalog of agents that you can just hire.
Brian Casel:I I had some versions of that, but then it was like too confusing of a buying experience. I was like, me just give you like one plan and
Justin:let's go, you know.
Jordan:Agree. Big challenge is just like getting as close to the bull's eye as possible on the messaging. I I posted a a tweet there from from Omar. He might be listening to the podcast, hopefully. We we follow each other on on Twitter.
Jordan:He the three d sent was agencies were hated because they weren't scalable. But now if you do it right, they can scale at software speed. And like that's kind of it. This mixture of software and service where can you find the thing that requires a little bit of service, but it's mostly done by by by the software.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. And
Jordan:and you you could charge a lot more than $50 a month, you know, and and that all of a sudden turns it into this very unique thing that if Brian can get the system working Mhmm. And and then you could take, you know, 30 customers a month. Whereas normally, you you... There's no way you could do that Yeah. Unless you start to hire like an agency hires and that's where the pain comes in.
Jordan:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And none of this is fully built in terms of like how the delivery will happen, but I I have some ideas on how that might shape up. But yeah, totally. Like, this compared to the days when I did audience ops, like, the the processes and the people involved and the scalability of it is... Here's...
Brian Casel:It's not easy, but it's it's it's attractive.
Jordan:Yeah. I I would keep that as the north star of sorts because one of the things you can say about Josh Pigford service is it's almost like you're buying a product. Yeah. Like here's the price and here's what you get. And if there are 50 people every month that want that, he he can he can get to that level of 50 people joining every month because it is productized.
Jordan:It is it is the same thing for everyone with very few customizations. And I I would try to hold that in mind especially for the entry. Right? Like what you have right now on the site is kinda moving in that direction. It's like, no, here are the five core things and here's the price.
Jordan:That's the right place to start.
Brian Casel:That's where I landed yesterday and today. It got to this much simpler model. Still totally... So where I'm at, so let's step back, go higher level, what does this mean in terms of like for anyone who's starting out a new product, like here's how I'm thinking about like what are my very, very first steps with something like this, right? And my first step was last week where I mean it was buried.
Brian Casel:I did a newsletter about something completely different and in like the final paragraph I was like, oh by the way, I'm I'm noodling on this idea, it didn't even have a name at that point. Mhmm. Like, so if you happen to open my newsletter, if you happen to read all the way to the bottom, hit reply and if this sounds interesting, let me know what you think. So I've got multiple replies in my inbox, I've been going back and forth. This podcast is the second reveal of like let's put a signal out and see what kind of signal I can get back in terms of people interested, asking questions, giving feedback.
Brian Casel:What can I learn from those? There's an email submit form there. I've got a survey on the back end. Obviously, wanna see if I can fill up this roster of like ten first clients. So that's sort of like the next experiment.
Brian Casel:At some point in the near future, I'll send out like a dedicated email. I can see, actually, I think what maybe before I do that, I'll send it to limited groups, so I'll probably send it to like Builder Methods Pro members, I'll probably just send it to like friends and contacts in the industry that that might be a good fit. And just like concentric circles out of like, share it, get feedback, ask questions.
Jordan:How are
Brian Casel:you thinking about this? What would you expect from a service like this? Have you purchased or considered services like this before? And then and then we're off to the races, you know.
Justin:Yeah. It does feel like the thing that would put people in motion is this this... I mean, we talked about this at the beginning, Jordan shared this tweet earlier from Joel Gascoigne from Buffer.
Brian Casel:Oh, I shared that one.
Justin:Oh, you shared... So the pace we hit with AI is directly dependent on our pace of making good decisions. Previously, things that would take a while anyway, and we'd make decisions along the way. Once we've made a decision, we can ship very quickly. So hesitation has become a clear cost.
Justin:And so one of the more... Most important things we can do is develop our ability to have conviction. I feel like people are feeling this FOMO, especially with marketing. It's just like, we can't hesitate anymore. This can't go through...
Justin:Like, you need some sort of automated system keeping you on track every week and enabling you, which it sounds like what Homegrown does, is enable you to make decisions quickly. Like, reduce the friction for making decisions. I think that is gonna be a key kind of thing that's pushing people. Is that people are just like, holy fuck. Like, it's gotten so much more competitive.
Justin:What are we doing? We gotta... We can't hesitate anymore. You know? Like, this is this is a I clear do
Brian Casel:feel that speed. It's almost like a blessing and a curse type of thing. That's why I shared it with you guys. I feel it right now too. Like sometimes like the moving so fast makes it harder.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Because I want time for these things to breathe, I want time to get feedback, but at the same time, like I also have another video editing product that I'm in the middle of creating, that's gonna come online in the next week or two also. You know, I think that's more niche and more for my own use frankly, to do video content, but like, being able to ship stuff so quickly, it's like how do I manage shipping stuff and like publicizing it and getting feedback
Justin:Mhmm. In
Brian Casel:a in a coherent way. Yeah.
Justin:The the the other thing that's interesting about the idea, is that it it feels like now everybody needs a top of funnel to feed their agents. And the FOMO part is I'm sitting here. My agents aren't doing anything right now. Like, we're talking... We've been talking for almost an hour and a half.
Justin:My agents are just sitting there. But there's... The... This idea that there would be these inputs going into your agents and automatically notifying you that stuff... You need to make decisions on stuff is kind
Brian Casel:of That's interesting because like the thing that I've been trying to teach in my recent YouTube videos about agents, and the thing that I just don't think that many people approach it this way, which to me, it's kind of crazy. Like the growth of these assistants, like GrokBot, Muse, Dots. Claude has a new one now. Everyone's using them as like their text messaging assistant, like hey, like quick, just do this, like go do that project, go do this, like Yeah. Like that's sort of how I use AMP, right?
Brian Casel:Like I use AMP directly when I personally wanna build stuff or have things built. When I have one task, one request, go do this, I'm gonna do that directly. I happen to be using AMP, you can be using whatever. But the agent, like the bots, the agents, I don't go into Grock Bot and open it and chat with them. Not sending them requests, I'm not having them use my personal inbox.
Brian Casel:What I want is those bots doing jobs. Like most people are not thinking about these agents as doing actual jobs.
Jordan:I'm I'm happy to hear you acknowledging that most people aren't because you can get too far ahead of the market in your assumptions because you're doing it, and I'm telling you, effectively nobody's doing that. And effectively everybody wants to. Like Mhmm. That's the opportunity in the messaging. Yeah.
Jordan:Because I I don't have... Look. I use chat GPT. Excuse me. I use Claude as a strategic friend.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Me too.
Jordan:Okay. So so when I do research on Fiverr as a public company last night, I'm in Claude. I use it for design a little bit, but like I'm I'm stuck on where to go from here. And I imagine
Brian Casel:But like it's like really not actually different from hiring marketing people. Like it's when you need to be doing SEO on your site, you're gonna have a person or a service who's going to take care of that. Taking care of that is a little bit of setup up front, and then it's like weekly jobs. Every week we gotta be auditing, every week we gotta be publishing a new competitor analysis page, every week we gotta be doing another, you know, question like answer that would show up in chat GPT page. Like those are jobs that happen on recurring basis, so they need a process, they need an execution, a way to create them and deploy them, and you can train agents on that now.
Brian Casel:And yeah, you might have a marketing team and you might have a marketing person, but that person should should be in charge of managing agents to do this. Mhmm. Like, we shouldn't be doing that stuff by hand anymore,
Justin:you know.
Jordan:Yeah. It's it's weird because, Justin, I don't know about you, hiring people is unattractive right now. Mhmm. We we wanna hire someone and even even hiring. We we want...
Jordan:It's so strange. It's not even we wanna hire for a role. It's like an experiment we wanna run. Mhmm. We wanna take a look when we get 50 sign ups in a day, and 15 to 20 of those sign ups put a credit card on file, and we know with a very high degree of certainty that, you know, call 98090% of those are gonna convert.
Jordan:That means we've got 30 sign ups every day that we do nothing with. Mhmm. And I I want someone on the team to call them. These are SMB, Main Street SMBs. And they're very open to phone calls and they very often come into support and say, can someone help me?
Jordan:Mhmm. Normally, I would look at that and say, okay, we we gotta try customer success. The idea of of asking someone to quit their job, going through the interview process. Right? Asking someone to quit their job, hiring them, and then three months later figuring out, experiment didn't really work.
Jordan:Let's fire them is an unacceptable choice. You you can't do that. I'm not okay doing that, but I I I don't wanna do it myself, But an agent can't do it. It's such a strange thing that we're we're hire like a contractor and and try to experiment for again, $2.03 k a month because that feels like this very acceptable risk level. And and there's a lot of that that I don't even realize I'm doing, but I'm dismissing the idea of hiring another marketer.
Jordan:I'm not hiring a marketer. Mhmm. There's no there's no way I'm hiring for a 100 k role. No. But if you offer me the ability to hire a marketing job, a marketing experiment, a marketing like like siloed off tactics, strategy, whatever that thing is, I'm in.
Brian Casel:The thing that I wanna be like careful about the messaging and on that point is that like, this is not a set it and forget it type of thing. This is like, we're gonna do a lot like maybe 80, 90% of the work of setting it up and empowering you and your team to have these agents running. You could set it and forget it and you'll get mediocre results, but to really be effective is to have the experts on your team who know the market really well, know your customer really well, continuously training and improving your own agent loops. And yes, we can do that for you or do it with you as part of our service, but the real benefit is that you do own your own agents. So as your marketing person is receiving the reports back from your agent and as the marketing person is evaluating the agent's work, they're gonna look at that and say like, okay, this is like 75% there, but it got some facts wrong and we need to fix our training on that.
Brian Casel:Like that's Yeah, so it's really connected It's connected with the Sure, theoretically you could just set it in and forget it and let it run, but like, if you really wanna actually invest in this stuff and make it good, like it, you get what you get out of it what you put in, you know. And and we're here to help and make that easy so that it's not like how do... What what do we put in? How do we get the right information out of us, the experts in our in our industry? Like, how do we get that into the systems?
Brian Casel:Like, that's that's what we do, You know?
Justin:Part of me listening here, I I I kind of like that metaphor you you were playing with before of a roster. I also like the idea of it being gamified a little bit. It's it feels for me personally, like it's a lot easier to imagine getting into this if you were saying, we're gonna help you hire your next agent and we're gonna help train them and we're gonna... So the metaphor just seems so perfect.
Brian Casel:I know. When I was looking for... I loved the name roster and then, like, 10 competitors who, like, do this were called roster.
Jordan:That was, like, AI agents for, like, womanizing.
Brian Casel:And then, like, you know, like, there were no domains for it. And, like... And and I was just, this isn't...
Justin:But but I think the metaphor is still helpful in that. Yeah. Like, I can just imagine a... You know, I I just drew this up really quick. But, you know, you you...
Justin:It's like, well, you could hire this person. And it's like, okay, start the onboarding. You click the button and start the onboarding.
Brian Casel:I had an earlier version that was like that. It was like pick and choose your agents. And and I had ideas around, like, we charge per agent. But like, that got a little murky and
Jordan:a little confusing. I
Justin:kind of love that metaphor, though. It just feels like... Because when you... As soon as you put it into my head, like, honestly, like, your positioning right now is a little bit muddy for me. But as soon as you put it into my head, it's like...
Justin:This is like hiring and onboarding an agent that's gonna be like an employee. Instantly, I'm like, yeah. Like, what would I want a good marketing manager to do? I want them reporting to me a Monday morning. Hey.
Justin:That's what my first we gotta make....
Brian Casel:For it. I... Yeah. My my earlier iterations were like, this is a recruiting service for agents.
Jordan:Yeah. Yeah. Not quite right.
Justin:I still kinda love that.
Jordan:I I kinda agree, but you gotta you gotta, like, play with it.
Justin:Yeah. A recruiting service for agents is such a... That's a shareable headline.
Jordan:Yes. Is is a marketplace more than recruiter? No. Was was sort of like Recruiter like because it's subversive.
Justin:It's it's not. It's But
Jordan:you can't charge what you wanna charge. I... What I like is the idea of sell something that is easily scalable, but that gives more value than software. So you can sell it for $2,000, but you can sell a 100 of them every month. That that is like And
Brian Casel:the and the expansion piece is more like the recruiting agent. So like the idea is like, look, if you... I don't know if you scroll down the page, right, you get to the section that says meet your agent team. Yeah. So out of the box with the core offering, you get these five agents.
Brian Casel:You got your chief of staff, your reporter, which is like looking at your analytics and sending you reports, your optimizer which is doing all the SEO and AEO optimization on an ongoing basis, writer anytime you need to write a new page, which is like every week, and then the strategist which is analyzing all the work that's being done, all the progress that's being made, and giving you new ideas for experiments that you can run, and those experiments can be run with new agents, and when you want to add a new agent, you send us a message and we set it up for you for an additional fee. We will have a growing additional library of like, hey, we wanna do ad campaigns or we wanna do email outreach, those are additional agents that you can, you know, call in from our marketplace.
Jordan:It off the shelf, it, and it is a lot of value and not that much additional marginal work for the next customer.
Brian Casel:Exactly. And the core five there is like basically every company, this everyone everyone needs to optimize their their site. That's the foundation. So so that's the core simple offer one price. You start there and then you could stay there or you can expand that whenever you're ready.
Justin:I still think the gamifying of this would be really awesome for onboarding. Like, if if I sign up, even if it's not that practical, though I think you could make it practical, this idea of personifying these people. Like, who do you want to hire? Henry as your chief of staff or Janet? And Janet is a little bit more like this, and Henry's a bit more like this.
Justin:And then there's something...
Brian Casel:I definitely will do a little bit more of that. Like, this is a quick like whip up with some icons, but like, there will be more illustrations, more personification. I don't want it to necessarily be too far in the realm of like a Dotz or a Grock Bot. Like we would suggest, I would suggest using Grock Bot for some of this, but like, again, the idea of like throwing any random tasks or asks at your agents, you can do that, but what we will be giving them are the jobs that they will always do so that you are not burdened with thinking up the next prompt, thinking up the next job to give them, we give them the jobs to do so that they run on a schedule, you know?
Justin:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just telling you that the part that's, like, kind of, like, piquing my interest right now... And again, you should you should definitely put this out, and then people should also get a get a hold of you too.
Justin:But there's something... As soon as you said it's a recruiting company for agents or it's like we help you hire and onboard agents, I instantly got it. It's like somebody else is gonna do the work.
Brian Casel:I'll tell you... It's interesting because I'm with you because that was my first Notion as well. It's a recruiting service and I like that idea. Yeah. Once I started to put together the page and the pricing, a bunch of questions made it murky.
Brian Casel:Like number one, it was like, okay, now I'm seeing all these different agents that I could buy, which one do I need? Which one should I start with? Which ones do I need? Okay. That's question number one.
Brian Casel:And then it was a question of like, what goes into an agent? Okay, I got the SEO agent and that includes some optimization, but we also wanna write this deep guide. Can it also do that? And can't we also use it to write this other stuff? It's like, oh no, now you got to That buy another line is kind of murky, you know?
Brian Casel:So it's like, it just adds all this stuff.
Justin:I think you can still keep these categories, but it's like, As a part of the onboarding, it's like, okay, it's time to hire your chief of staff. Let's do that first. Is it gonna be Henry, Janet, or Frank? And then each of them has a little per... Different personality.
Justin:Each of them is a little bit better or worse for your situation. And then you just keep doing that with everybody. Reporter, writer, strategist. But by the end of it, I feel like I've personally had some choice in it, the same way that I would wanna hire somebody. There's just something about that that just feels juicy to me.
Brian Casel:It's kinda fun. Yeah. The the part where... And and this is not even coming through at all in the in the in the page, but I think the value of what you're getting at is like really, like the first week is about learning your company. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Learning your market, your positioning, your voice, like your your brand voice. That's the... That's like the intangible stuff that you can't get from a black box or from a skill off the Internet that like... And and we're gonna have a deep process with you and your team to get that out of you and then baked into your training for your agents, you know.
Justin:Yeah. There's... I think there's definitely something here that's that's interesting.
Jordan:I'm so excited that instead of talking hypothetically about, like, Josh's thing, we get to, like, really look at something you......
Brian Casel:My thing apart instead. That... That's that's better.
Jordan:Well well, look, you know, from the outside like... You can't learn anything. It... These... It's unlikely that what you put out right now resembles exactly what it looks like three months from now.
Jordan:It's it's unlikely. Like, okay. You never... Yeah. Right.
Jordan:Shift, adjust, get right, you know, get wrong. So so that process is very interesting.
Brian Casel:What I think is interesting like high level is that like, this to me seems like an opportunity. I mean, remains to be seen if how how the upcoming experiments and conversations and sales go, but services done for you, done with you, helping companies become more agent native, companies cross that chasm from the old way to the new way, getting over the, you know, like like helping you leapfrog that through that through that FOMO.
Jordan:Yeah. Most people are not, you know, So, as
Brian Casel:like, you know, like for the last... For the past year, I've been doing product after product after like tool idea after tool idea. Most of them scratching my own itch, but like really for the most part I don't see strong business opportunities in them. I get some customers on some of my products, but like they're, it's not, the question of like is SaaS dead, I don't think it is, but it's definitely changing from a startup standpoint. Like, thinking about new startup opportunities, this is the first one in a while where I'm like, I could see a path where this becomes a real business.
Jordan:Yes. Years into the future. Like, the one off $30,000 will build you AI stuff, like, that's definitely a cool opportunity in the consulting world. But what what you're tackling is like this this new thing that's forming. If you get the positioning right to match with with the demand inside companies, then it's it's a great opportunity.
Jordan:Very cool.
Justin:Well, that sounds good. I got I gotta run pretty soon. Jordan, do you got anything else you wanna end us with? Or how are you feeling here?
Jordan:No. Vote for Mike Rogers in Michigan. No.
Brian Casel:It's great
Jordan:to see everyone. You know what? I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna hold off on on on on that bit.
Brian Casel:I wanna hear the political stuff.
Jordan:Oh, jeez.
Justin:Oh, man. Here we go.
Jordan:My dad my dad, MVP, he went to Israel and voted and now is flying back here today
Brian Casel:Oh, wow.
Jordan:To to get here to vote tomorrow. Hell yeah.
Justin:Oh, I love it.
Jordan:Dual citizenship.
Brian Casel:That's great.
Jordan:No. It's good to see everyone. Yeah.
Justin:Good to
Jordan:get caught up. I'm out. Oh, well, I'm I'm out on Friday, but I think next week I'm back. I'm in Austin, Texas this week. I hope you guys got some good plans.
Justin:Little Yeah.
Jordan:Fun mixed in to all the work.
Justin:Yeah. I'm I'm gonna be at my daughter's university graduation, and then I'll be back on Friday. So next Friday Cool.
Jordan:We'll be
Justin:back at our regular time.
Jordan:Yep. I'll be back.
Justin:Wanna thank everyone who showed up. We got a few people here that... We had Matt from New Zealand able to show us for this time. Riverside Life. Yeah.
Justin:We got Ryan in here. He said he was listening... He had to listen at two times speed to catch up because he had to call, and now we all
Jordan:sound drunk.
Justin:The the secret, Ryan, is that we're always drunk on this call.
Jordan:On on Fridays, at least. Monday, not so much. We're doing the Monday drunk thing.
Justin:But, yeah, we'll see you folks next week. Thanks, everybody.
Jordan:Bye. Later, folks.