Welcome to the panel where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.
Jordan Gal:And I'm Jordan Goff, founder at heyrosie.com. Great to be back, gents.
Justin Jackson:Happy Friday. By the way, it was really nice to hear from Danny Postma on Twitter. He gave the podcast a shout out. I think this is also just an example of like people, you think you're doing all the marketing, you think everybody knows about what you're doing. And here's Danny. He's like, he says, I can't believe the legends that got me into startups years and years ago have a podcast together. I thought you all quit your pods, Justin, Brian, and Jordan. So years ago.
Justin Jackson:Like, here's the deal. You know, you so much of life is just you gotta keep going. Obviously we want to make this show the best we can. And obviously, you know, it's gotta be good, but the it's just nice to hear from someone who's just hearing about us for the first time.
Brian Casel:So Well, I'll tell you what our biggest marketing problem is on this podcast, and that is Justin not being back on Twitter yet. We need our hype man back.
Justin Jackson:I'm the countdown is on. I think I'm gonna be back late November, folks.
Jordan Gal:So Oh, no way.
Justin Jackson:Okay, November 28th. I think is when I'll return.
Jordan Gal:There we go. So is it gonna coincide with like Elon being indicted?
Justin Jackson:Oh, it did. Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Gal:I've got insider information, you know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah, I turns out I've been sleeping with Elon and I got some inside info. Talking about CEOs. You know, we had there's this whole Jensen thing and NVIDIA, but Jordan, you talked about wartime CEOs, people coming back to run a company. What's going on here?
Jordan Gal:All right, so I just posted a link to the tweet from Brian Halligan, who is right, co-founder and previous CEO at HubSpot, now publicly traded, and he's coming back as CEO and made an announcement. Darmesh and I are completely refounding the company. It's day one. Like, all right, it's a, you know, 5 billion ARR, 10 billion market cap, 15-year-old company that's gone public, whatever, you know, very established. And the way he put it is interesting, refounding the company. This is day one. I here's my Honest reaction to this was negative. This is not a good sign.
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Now it's almost like I'm rooting for them, like hell yeah, like take control. Yeah but he's got, I don't even know, a hundred, two hundred million dollars of HubSpot equity at as the original co-founder, like his wealth is tied up in it, all this other stuff, but he still wants to play ball. He wants to come back and get back to work, which hell yeah. So I think we're gonna root for him. This isn't the first choice, right? This is not the happy path.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:This is like, all right, I did the I did the founding thing, I did the star thing, we scaled up, we went public, you know, cheers all around, and now I'm gonna step aside and let a another CEO come in. To go back in, that to me signals a lot of worry.
Jordan Gal:It's not that no one's gonna get it right, but me, it's I am most likely to get this right because of the DNA and founding the company and understanding the team and all this other stuff. And so how do we give this company the best chance to not just kind of slowly sink into irrelevance?
Jordan Gal:Is I'm going back in. I'm going to take over CEO. We're going to refound the company. Now, Hubspot has access to capital. They have partners. They have name brand recognition. So I do think they can do a lot. With those resources and their mindset, you know, their startup guys to begin with, I am very interested to see how they do, but it worries me to see this.
Brian Casel:I agree. I that was my first takeaway when I saw the tweet too. It was like not only you know, is he making the decision like it has to be me to come back, but it's also like the framing of the announcement is like this is day one, we are reimagining what HubSpot is, all of that. To me, the takeaway is like this is an acknowledgement of like something is wrong and it needs fixing.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:This because like it's just hiring a new CEO is more like things are good, let's see someone take us to a new level. This is coming back to fix what's yeah. So this so what's interesting to me and sort of the open question is like, okay, this is clearly like an open acknowledgement publicly to say like We acknowledge that something is wrong and we need to like what got us here is not going to get us there.
Brian Casel:This needs to be new. I I'm constantly curious about what's happening out there with established SAS, whether you're bootstrapped or larger. We hear all this stuff about like, is SAS dead? Is SAS dead and stuff like that? And like I feel like there must be a lot of things happening under the surface that companies are just not public about.
Brian Casel:Whether they're whether they're not public about how bad things are going with their customer base, or maybe they're not public the other way. Like th things are things are growing and like you just don't want to be so public because it's so easy to replicate and rip stuff off and things like that.
Justin Jackson:I I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, you have Like Ben Ornstein just came back to Tupel. Interesting analogy. Yep. Yeah, in his case, I think it was the excitement that brought him back. So I, you know, th those founders of Tuple, they got bored. They made it, they, they reached the apex of success with the SAS, and then they were all kind of like, eh, like, this is boring. I don't want to speak for Ben too much.
Brian Casel:I think I think definitely some excitement and it is exciting to see the three of them get back together. I think that's awesome for all three of them. But I but also Ben did do a podcast with Derek, which was great to hear them back on the mics. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But he did also acknowledge openly, I give him credit for that, to say like, you know, things are not trending in the right direction, I think were his words, or something along those lines. You can listen to his Yeah, I think he said it was getting a little bit soft for sure.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:What my comment to a friend, and I don't mean any offense by this or anything, I looked at that and I was like, the annuity's in trouble. I mean he kind of
Brian Casel:put it in those terms. He was like, look, they built something spectacular.
Jordan Gal:It grew, it's super efficient, amazingly profitable, just an absolutely beautiful company. Yeah. But to come back is like, mm, if I do it's not that dissimilar. to Halligan, where if I just stay on the sidelines, this is not gonna go well.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And it also sounds interesting to do. And it's a lot of fun developing these days and building a company right now. So hell yeah, go do it. I think in both cases it sounds like more fun to do what Ben's doing than to go back into the CEO role at a public company. That doesn't sound nearly as fun. But they do sound analogous. I don't know if you were done Commenting Justin on it in general.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, I just think this shows the tension that we're in. I you know, I was just having this conversation out in the cowork office here and just, you know, come into the office in the morning and say, hey, how are people doing? And it's simultaneously, I'm burnt out, I'm overwhelmed, I'm I, you know, things are moving faster than ever.
Justin Jackson:And on the other hand, man, this is exciting. Man, this is I'm fired up. Man, you know, look at this moment we're in. And I think there's a little bit of this going on with this wartime CEO thing. You know, you know, when Bob Iger came back to Disney, right? It was a similar thing. Like Disney was in trouble.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, you can write the ship.
Justin Jackson:We gotta, we, we gotta bring somebody in to make this, yeah, write the ship. And I think there's part of it, because, you know, CEOs have ego. There's part of it that CEOs like. It's like, I'm coming back and I'm gonna fix this. This is a challenge. Let me roll up my sleeves, you know?
Jordan Gal:Be the hero. Yep.
Brian Casel:The thing that always interests me the most is the product, the product strategy, where you're going with the product. And I also think that is where the a founder is most valuable is when the founder has their vision and their taste. setting the direction for the product.
Brian Casel:They don't necessarily have to be the actual builder or the designer, but like it takes a founder to decide like, we are starting something totally fresh from scratch to or we're going to take this in a in a dramatic new direction. I it's hard for anyone other than a than a founder to do that, in my opinion.
Jordan Gal:I wanna I wanna like double down on what you just said there, because if you look at Brian's tweet, The first tweet in the thread is I'm coming back, we're refounding the company, it's day one. The second tweet is exactly what you said, taking charge of the positioning. The refounded HubSpot is going to skate where the puck is going. Our new tagline, HubSpot, the customer relationship harness. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right? So that's like very deliberate positioning. You gotta give these guys credit. They made inbound. a thing everyone already knew what inbound was but they like defined it and then owned the category and they were inbound so we have to give them some leeway on you know maybe they're right about this i worry about the word harness but he's definitely pointing out a new spot in the market that is not we will hold all of your information for all of your customers as your CRM and you can always depend on us.
Jordan Gal:Like, uh-uh, that that's not where they're gonna stay. I think this leads into the other part of the conversation that I want to have and ask you, Brian. If product is such a, you know, it's a, I guess, a new set of problems decisions to make now, six or 12 months ago, as vibe coding exploded, as the ease of building new software products became evident, People looked at systems of records like CRMs as the safest place to be.
Jordan Gal:As, well, okay, there's the maybe there's gonna be some stuff that goes on top of it that gets replaced because you don't need it, but you're still gonna need the system of record because that needs to live. But you mentioned before we started recording that your experience talking to people directly contradicts that.
Brian Casel:Just look at all these data points, right? You got the HubSpot thing that they're reimagining to be to become whatever a customer. What is it, customer relationship harness?
Brian Casel:So they're trying to redefine CRM. You got you got that. You you've got our friend Tyler King, talked, he's the founder of Less Annoying CRM. I know he gets excited when his when he gets talked about on other podcasts. So how are you doing, Tyler?
Brian Casel:You know, he he's built a great company over there at Less Annoying CRM and he's been very open on his podcast. I think it's called Startup to Last, really good one. So he's same thing. So they're obviously a CRM, they're a bootstrapped profitable, long-term sustainable CRM company, but he's been open about like, I don't know, we're starting to see signals of our customers actually leaving for vibe-coded solutions in the CRM space.
Brian Casel:So you could look at this, I mean, I guess one more data point that I see in builder methods is a lot of the people who come into builder methods, the, you know, the segment of members who are I'll say like non-technical. They're coming from any and all industry across the board.
Brian Casel:The a really common job to be done for them to both to join the community and also to like adopt AI and build with AI in general is, hey, I've got this small business and I want to build my own what they tend to call it a case management system. Depends on the on the industry.
Brian Casel:Like This law firm I know, like he has like a 50-person law firm. He built a custom case management system for his law firm. Somebody owns a dental practice, same thing. I see this across the board. It's a really common internal tool to build either a custom CRM or a custom case management system. You can look at these trends in one of two ways, right?
Brian Casel:Like the way maybe a year ago we would have said like, oh, The system of record, the CRM, is too important to our business to vibecode. So that is safe. That is off-limits. We're not going to vibecode the solution because it's too important to our business. But there's the flip side to that. It's like, it's so important to our business that we need to vibe code it because our business is unique and it has these special nuances that the off-the-shelf CRM tool, A, B, or C, does not address.
Brian Casel:And so I want like 30% of what that CRM or this CRM does, but there's another 60% that's really unique to my particular industry and now I have enough technical chops and clawed code to build my own. And so like I think that's the mistake when people say like, oh, people are not going to vibe code because the economic incentive isn't there. It's not so much about the financial incentive, it's about the customization the customization plate. It's like we want to make it perfect for our business and now we can.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, it's interesting. This last episode on Startup to Last, I was actually listening to it this morning. And there's a few different parts here that I want to highlight. One is Tyler says he had one customer that came back last week that said, I left for Claude like a year ago. But then I realized my data is a mess.
Justin Jackson:So that was that was one piece. And then later on, I think Rick said, I would argue that Salesforce is starting to suck less because there's so flexible and an MCP with Claude makes that super simple. It becomes just a database, which is interesting. And then Tyler responds, it's a database. Now are they going to be able to charge $300 per user per month? for just hosting the database and you know like is that eventually just going to get abstracted away? There is some open questions there.
Brian Casel:I liked this other point from Tyler. He said, I think on that same episode, he made the point that like it doesn't it doesn't take everyone to do this. It only takes 10% of the industry to do this. And that is a massive disruption to equity.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:So like There's always going to be people who just don't have the product shops, even if they could use cloud code, they just don't have the UI and the UX and the product shops to make an actually usable CRM for their business. And so yeah, they're maybe they're limited in that way. But at the same time, somebody who really knows their unique industry really well probably has a better product vision than any random software designer does.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:So You know, there's going to be 10% or 20% or whatever who are going to gain these technical product chops for their particular internal tool that they need. And all of a sudden it's like a better solution than your, than your pipe drive CRMs or your sales forces or whatever it is.
Justin Jackson:The counterpoint to this, I would say, is that this has always existed to a certain extent. So And maybe it's accelerating. Cause Tyler's saying, well, if only 10% of companies do this, then that would be devastating for SaaS companies. Maybe, but you know, there there's always been the possibility that somebody was going to replace your product with Zapier or replace your product with people have been building internal tools forever. But it's a lot more
Brian Casel:expensive and a lot slower and harder to
Jordan Gal:It didn't feel like a threat.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, I don't know. I think it's always been a threat. What what's still an unanswered question for me today, and I realize it's different, but you know, there's been open source versions of almost every type of software you can think of.
Justin Jackson:And a lot of them even had, you know, really easy like deploy to Heroku buttons that allowed you to just like instantly provision it and customize it and all that stuff. And we found out in the long tail of that people, I mean, even so Kevin Rose released his own open source version of Slack. Is that really a long-term threat to Slack and Microsoft Teams? I really think it's a
Brian Casel:case-by-case basis in each individual category. Like something like Slack, I saw that with it's a cool project, but that's not going to unseat Slack because Slack has like the network effects. It has all these people who already are in a bunch of Slacks, so they like to join another Slack or their company already uses it or whatever.
Brian Casel:You know, but I do think that like CRM is one of those unique categories that, in my opinion, is more unsafe than other categories for that reason, because it's like that source of truth of where we manage our client accounts, where we manage our customers, every small business, whether we agree or not, like they think that their small business is a special little flower with these totally unique aspects that really does require some sort of custom, you know, solution.
Brian Casel:And mo and historically most small businesses are just like All right, we can we can get to good enough we to fit this off-the-shelf CRM into my small business. Yeah, it's not it it's not the perfect dream scenario, but it does the job. That's been the story for many years.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But now that it's like, well, now we can take it from 40% to 100% perfect.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You don't have to deal with that trade-off. Where my mind was going as we were talking is, well, what is the solution to this? Because Open source is not the same type of thread. It's never going to take that much of the market because people need simplicity and people aren't technical, people want ease of use and so on. Then I thought about, okay, well, what does it look like to provide the platform for people to take a CRM and customize it to their needs?
Jordan Gal:At first I thought of Claude, because that's kind of a default or something like it. And then what I realized was maybe what you need is you need a customer relationship harness. And that's what allows you to take the underpinnings of a database and build on top of it with your customizations. And maybe that's kind of what they're pointing toward in a world where the trade-offs that companies need to make that they can't get to 100% of exactly the workflow that they want, but they have to be okay with it. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:If you if you stay there, you're, you're, you're, it's not going to work out for you. Because a large, large portion of your of your customers are going to realize, I don't need to deal with this limitation. I want to shave this corner off so that I can, you know, work according to my workflow. But if HubSpot looks at its customer base and provides them the tools to do that themselves inside of the HubSpot ecosystem, Maybe that's kind of what they're pointing toward and what they mean by a customer relationship harness.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, it will be interesting though because even as I hear this, I'm like, okay, I mean, that's a reasonable bet. Like you become the harness. But there's part of that. As soon as a SaaS tool is now sending me to an MCP or a CLI or their API, and now I'm in Claude. interacting with them.
Justin Jackson:That might be an enduring way to use software, but it also, I think, feels a little thin to me. It feels like a little bit like, ooh, like
Jordan Gal:you've been relegated to an invisible database.
Brian Casel:And also just like using the terminal and using tools like that. It's too technical, too not like the normal person is not going to do that
Justin Jackson:it could be that normal people do that i think what's what is interesting is there is a lot of value in SaaS has been this Chrome of the web app or the mobile app or whatever and as soon as now I'm not interacting with your brand on your app's website but now I'm just interacting with ChatGPT or Claude And then one day ChatGPT says, hey, I noticed you're using the HubSpot plugin, but guess what?
Justin Jackson:Starting today, we've got a new database feature that's perfect for CRM and we've solved all of the technical problems. We know that in the past storing your data in ChatGPT was a mess, but now Every ChatGPT project comes with a database. It's perfect for this kind of stuff. And we've already sucked in all of your customers from HubSpot. Would you like to use that? And would you like me to cancel your HubSpot subscription?
Jordan Gal:Do you want to use your Clawpot to cancel your HubSpot?
Brian Casel:And then like literally like a yes-no button that you can like one click churn from all these stats.
Justin Jackson:That is this is like talk about the Trojan horse that we allowed into the kingdom.
Jordan Gal:So here's I'll tell you how we are accidentally dealing with this at Rosie. We have a subset of users who are starting to ask us for MCP and ask us to allow them to control their settings and, you know, basically their dials from inside Claude. So our first instinct is like, well, that sounds cool. And then We think about it for a second. We say, why don't we just provide that inside Rosie?
Jordan Gal:Why don't we just provide a dialogue box that talks to our MCP and just changes their settings for them from inside? And it's partly to discourage going off into Claude and doing it and also to help adoption around using the UI that way. If we want to use, if a user wants to input like a holiday.
Jordan Gal:Like, oh, I'm going to be closed on Friday for my kids' graduation. Right now, they got to go to that part, that part of the app, they got to click that screen, they got to create a new, a, a unique schedule, they got to identify the date, they got to say not available, and they hit save. Or you could just go into a dialogue box and say, I'm closing on Friday. Make sure Rosie knows I'm closed. Enter.
Brian Casel:And it's like, where does that happen?
Jordan Gal:Does it happen in Claude, Chat GPT, on your phone, Grokbot, or inside the app? Kind of everywhere.
Brian Casel:I think everywhere. Like in so in that case, in Rosie, what I would think about that like, yes, probably helpful to have some sort of chatbot in your app to so that you don't have to click around the interface to make changes. Yes. But I do think there's value in offering an external MCP that anyone can plug into their agent of choice. So if you're a Claud user.
Brian Casel:You want it in there or if you're a Grokbot user or if you're a MetaMuse user, like you want that rosy surface over there for a few reasons. Like one is like you're already using it every day for the 20 other things that you use Claude to do in your business.
Jordan Gal:So dangerous to not be there.
Brian Casel:Yeah, so you want it in there like sort of for the convenience factor, but also like if you're using something to like edit your website. some information on your website and then and then Claude can also say like by the way should we update our call information to
Jordan Gal:Rosie to make the same thing?
Brian Casel:Like you want that in the same action. Yeah it's like just have having it marketing value also. Yeah sure marketing value also like when you have the mcp installed in your Claude or in your Grockbot or in your meta whatever like it'll start to suggest to you like, hey, by the way, like, do you want to set this up in Rosie? So it's like, it almost reminds them that they are Rosie customers rather than saying like, yeah, yeah.
Jordan Gal:Well overall.
Brian Casel:You can go search for an alternative overall
Jordan Gal:I think it's more beneficial. But then Justin, like then we're in that same spot. Like, okay, let's hope Anthropic doesn't get interested in answering phone calls. Yep.
Justin Jackson:What did they release this week?
Jordan Gal:They just released a video?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Right?
Jordan Gal:No take her.
Brian Casel:Well yeah, no taker and whiteboards and
Justin Jackson:yeah Josh Frank in the chat just posted Anthropic just announced open your app inside Claude. Yeah and that yeah that does feel like yikes like Oh is that
Jordan Gal:like a like a like a frame inside of Claude?
Brian Casel:That's how I read it. I didn't play with it, but that's how I read
Justin Jackson:it.
Justin Jackson:So you and Claude can work in the same tool on the same screen without switching tabs.
Jordan Gal:Whoa. That sounds like what Shopify forces people to do and build inside of their frame, inside of their admin, and should and helps them control level. Very interesting.
Brian Casel:I mean, I think it's completely obvious what Anthropic is doing. The they are just spreading the surface area of what they own in your in your work life to keep you in cloud products for sure.
Justin Jackson:I mean, I this is this is Microsoft's playbook on steroids. It's like we are going to land and expand. We are going to when you think software, all of software could theoretically, like all of us are so addicted to building stuff with Cloud right now. We're like, oh, we're building all these cool apps and everything. And Cloud's like, yeah, you guys can go ahead and build all that. Feel the foot.
Justin Jackson:Go ahead. Go ahead. And then eventually it's just gonna be like you open up your Claude OS. and have all of the Claude apps that it's you know, constantly revising and building for you. And all of us are either in a in a in a bath just becoming human batteries or we're sipping pina coladas on the beach.
Brian Casel:It's one of the You know, I'm always I'm always continually like focused on like what does this mean for startups, people who are thinking about new products in our space today. And if I had to bet on the bigger risk or headwind between like, is cloud or openai just going to, you know, like replace whatever startup I might I might start or are people go going to vibecode or are people going to or there's just going to be like hundreds of competitors instantly as soon as I launch because anybody can just copycat anything now.
Brian Casel:I think the more real thing in the next couple of years is just more and more people are going to be building their own tools. I know people hate to hear this and they don't agree with it, but that's just going to become easier and easier. and more and more reliable to do it internally. Again, we come back to the CRMs.
Brian Casel:Like that's just one example, but like that's the thing that's going to slow, like very slowly make off-the-shelf software almost just a worse option than just building your own. Like, you know, like that, that's the thing that's going to really eat into should I start a SaaS business, in my opinion. You know?
Justin Jackson:H here's another counterpoint. It feels like forever. Startups and software have eaten the low end of the market. So the bar just keeps, the high watermark just keeps raising up. So I pasted to you guys. I wonder how Card is doing right now. Card.co, right?
Justin Jackson:So what was their main advantage for a hobbyist or somebody who didn't really care that much about their website or just needed a quick website or someone like me who gets asked to build people websites all the time? It was a quick way to build somebody a website and not have to worry about everything else. Well, that advantage is clearly gone. So that product, I think, is now below the watermark, right? It is it is now in trouble. And maybe Canva will eventually also fall below this rising tide.
Brian Casel:I mean, I think about video editors, right? Like I'm halfway through building my own. video editor, but so is every other video creator out there. They're all literally building their own video editing tools, either just using cloud code directly or they're building their own like, look at my awesome new video editing tool.
Brian Casel:But like there's like, I literally saw like a hundred of these pop up in the last month because it's like if you have the technical know-how into like what you need in a in a solid video editor, it's at least an equally good option. to go build your own versus com compared to like learning how to use DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere at this point.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, I think my point before was I was just thinking about something Jason Cohen talks about a lot and Ian Lansman talks about a lot, which is a lot of these customers may have not been the best customers. So people on the low end, like very small SMBs and solopreneurs and developers. and hobbyists and prosumers, that market is very DIY. That market is very cost conscious. That it makes sense that that's the market that would get disrupted first.
Justin Jackson:And I think what Jason and Ian would say is, listen, there's a lot of big businesses in the world and they're still spending money and they still want off-the-shelf software. And it just turns out that you guys were in a sweet spot. that for a very little while you could build software for these lower tiers, but that is just always gotten disrupted, right?
Justin Jackson:The web developer got disrupted by Squarespace, and now Squarespace is getting disrupted a little bit by people that can just, you know, get Claude to build them a website and publish it for them. But there's still a higher end and there's a lot of high-end money.
Justin Jackson:because i even if we're talking about a business that is 10 people i don't know i still hear ian in my ear saying does a company that's 10 people really want to build like we're five people at transistor and for a while we were like you know what we're building an alternative to shortcut our project management software like we're gonna do it and then we like start doing it and we're like do we want to do this like no
Brian Casel:it's like it's it it's not for everyone But it is for some people today. And what I'm what I'm always most focused on in this whole whatever debate is like just look at the trend lines. Don't look at like, is are is today everyone gonna switch over to building their own?
Brian Casel:Like, no, of course not. But if you just look at the trend lines, trend line A, like the models keep getting better and better and better at a faster rate, right? Like Opus 5.5, Fable 5.2. compared to what we had like what just three months ago is like so much better. Compared to 12 months ago, like infinitely better.
Brian Casel:So you got models, you got, you got tooling. AMP keeps getting better. Cloud code desktop keeps getting better. All of them, the tooling around using the models g gets better. Okay. Mainstream is now coming into learning about these tools. Like it's not, it's not just about technical people who are using cloud code now. It's everywhere.
Brian Casel:It's not every single person, it's not every single business, but you can't say it's just for the tech people now anymore. It's the mainstream is starting to flood in. Like anthropic is about to go public. Like this is this stuff is in the news everywhere.
Jordan Gal:People know how to use these tools.
Brian Casel:But like, but that's a trend line, right? Like, like if the normal, if the normies are using it in 20% of their day-to-day or work lives today. A year from now, that's probably going to look like 80%. So what does that mean for all the tools they use? You know?
Jordan Gal:My guess, and then we should move on to the next topic after this, is that existing software companies and new ones will adopt adapt toward allowing more customization. And whether or not everything ends up on Anthropic and Chat GPT. I don't know. I hope not. I hope that there are still a lot of opportunity to build effectively harnesses.
Jordan Gal:I'm now 100% in Brian Halligan's camp, by the way. I've changed my mind entirely. I now get it to a lot more because we as we talk through this. And so a company like Hubspot or one of our startups, I think we're more likely to succeed as we open up and as we provide more customization. And but hopefully we can add value that something like Claude can't. I hope. Well, t TBD. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:What else?
Jordan Gal:Wanna talk about Jansen?
Justin Jackson:Yep. We could talk. I mean, if you want to talk about trend lines, there is a number of things that could happen. So I don't know if you guys do you guys think that AI is going to get more expensive because of this whole NVIDIA thing? That's one prediction people are making is like, oh, the age of cheap tokens is over. you know, it's done.
Brian Casel:Do you think would you say that because the labs are going to like compete harder for compute and so they're going to pass that into pricing?
Justin Jackson:I understand why people were saying that because I was like, why? Because Jensen is no longer the leader or because the stock market the stock price went down? Like they already made their money from the stock.
Jordan Gal:Like it's not like I thought that whole that whole debate was predicated on the fact that these token costs are being subsidized. But then we got Anthropics S1 and their margins are amazing. They're not subsidized. They're making a lot of money. Their margins are great. I don't see, I think there's so much competition. I don't see things getting a ton a ton more expensive for us, especially as the models get better and we don't need the absolute latest in compute and capability.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, I mean we're continuously shocked. Like that we're doing all this for 200 bucks per person. It's like yeah, it's great.
Brian Casel:My own my observation of the major lab like the claws of chat GPTs is like I think that they just want more of the mainstream to start using their tools. So like you can't like for that it it's gotta be more of a price to the bottom rather than increase like to get the normies using it, right? Like businesses, yeah, that they'll probably keep charging more and more and more. They already charge like crazy amounts to companies, but like, yeah, to get normies on, you gotta have like free low cost plans.
Justin Jackson:Okay. Anything else on Jensen? It's whatever.
Jordan Gal:It's like yeah, sad situation. Well we'll see. I feel like we don't actually know what the hell's going on. And we gotta wait a little while. And now it's moved into like the political sphere, which means it's gonna be a cloudy mess. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The interesting thing for, you know, for our universe, at least in this conversation, is that the stuff we work on is now center stage on the world at the absolute highest levels, from Congress to international affairs, spy craft, you know, adversarial relationships between nations. Like where we're playing is the thing that the battle between like East and West is meeting. So it's pretty intense and exciting and a little scary. And we're certainly relevant.
Brian Casel:I think on that point, like it's easy for us in our in our tech bubble, in our business startup bubble to forget, like, and you and you see this everywhere now in the main like mainstream media and in politics. Man, people hate AI out there. Like they hate the data centers, they hate AI in general, they hate, they hate the the threat.
Jordan Gal:But like it Can we talk about that for a sec?
Brian Casel:Please. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The I can acknowledge that we're real deep in it and because of that we're very aware of all the details. And this happens in different topics, right? When you know a lot about something and then you hear people who don't know a lot about it talk about it, you're like, Jesus, Hunter, like these people are off in outer space. And okay, I understand that, fine.
Jordan Gal:But it's still it's tough to accept the level of stupidity around it is kind of like jarring, you know, there was that there was a story about this $5 billion data center proposed to be built on an empty parking lot. And this like there's a big story about this like hero activist that like prevented the data center from being built in like this community that really, really needs the money. And it's like this is a building with some machines in it.
Jordan Gal:So, so the disconnect between this is a building that might make like a humming sound, there are like hundreds of them in Virginia and all over the US.
Jordan Gal:And on the other side, like this like $50 million a year in revenue for this little town that needs it is tough to square.
Jordan Gal:Like I know we're on the inside and we see all the details and because of that we kind of we have this curse of knowledge, but whoa, I guess that what that speaks to it's over is is we're also in the AI is also in this like political argument and as soon as you enter that arena, everything, all like the facts are generally added over by people's interests and political interests and monetary.
Brian Casel:This is what depresses me in general about and why I've started to really tune out of politics and like the mainstream media narratives or, you know, whatever they call news out there. It's like Why does everything have to be such a debate? And like why can't why can't we focus on the positive and like constructive like discussion about this stuff?
Brian Casel:If you think about just AI in general, like a like America is the leader in the world. Like the labs are here, the you know, the companies that are driving it, and like of course there's like competition in the world, America and China, and like if you start to think about the bigger picture.
Brian Casel:And the impact that AI is going to have on our economy, like, yes, there's going to be a lot of disruption, but you can also look at it like we are set up to enter a massive phase of growth and productivity and competitiveness if as a society we start to at least have an open mind or learn about it.
Brian Casel:And like you can blame so many different people for this, whether it's Governments or the labs themselves, I think, have been like terrible about like messaging and marketing to the to the mainstream about like the where this is going.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, this thing is gonna take your job and maybe kill you.
Jordan Gal:That like where is that narrative coming from?
Justin Jackson:Is that's coming that's coming right from Anthropic's whole senior leadership team. They keep releasing these press releases saying the where reporters are saying, you know, hey, what's gonna happen? They're like, yeah, it is gonna take your job. Like we predict it's gonna take 75% of jobs by this year. And then they say, okay, and what what's the percentage chance that this goes badly and it kills us all? And they say, well, it's like between 10 and 25 percent.
Brian Casel:It's like and like that's the stuff that like just catches fire in these in these like me media headlines that's just like, what are we even talking about? Like.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, and I think there is more nuance to all of this. There there's a great episode on search engine.
Justin Jackson:the podcast called road trip through the data center debate where they actually go and check out these communities where these things are being proposed and there are some very good reasons to the these stories are often more complicated than the store what you're seeing so some of the anger by the way is not even at the data center or the opportunity for a data center, but at local government who have screwed their citizens before with these kinds of deals where things were promised and things were not delivered, where, you know, it it's gonna provide schools and clean water and all these things.
Jordan Gal:And those things didn't happen in the past. And it doesn't pan out. It costs the city money. Yeah, it's understandable.
Justin Jackson:And again, some of these are also w citizens are in these smaller communities are s are actually voting, you know, they're going through the process and they're saying, no, you we don't actually want this here for whatever reason. And then big companies are taking them to court and suing them and forcing them to install these data centers.
Justin Jackson:So there's obviously a lot more going on here. I think the overall story here is A, mean what you say. So if you're anthropic, if you truly believe that there's a generational risk in the 10 to 25%, then if that's true, then pull the plug. Who would ever take those odds? Like if the Manhattan Project had those odds?
Jordan Gal:Right, it's straightforwardly not. If I was going to get in a Waymo and they said, I said, well, what
Justin Jackson:is the chance this crashes? And they say, well, it's between 10 and 25%.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, let me out.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but like I think I think the stance there is that like look progress is gonna happen AI is here AI is happening pulling the plug is not a realistic option anywhere here like this is not like what are we what are we gonna do just like yeah you could pace the frontier whatever but like we're not gonna roll back where
Jordan Gal:we are right now so how do you how do we deal with that constructively that's the question you know Look, that's the right question. How do we deal with it constructively? And it would feel a lot better if the conversation was centered around how do we do this constructively? Right? It is completely reasonable and understandable for a local politician to say, cool story on your data center, you gotta play ball with the town according to this and this and this. Like, absolutely, have that conversation.
Brian Casel:And they should be, like, like the anthropics and open AI should be going out there and like winning
Jordan Gal:the hearts and minds like. Right.
Brian Casel:Invest in all these small communities. Like, like be awesome over there.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Justin Jackson:Make them love you.
Jordan Gal:And they could be. It's when the conversation goes into like, but you're ruining all the water, like all the stuff that's like blatantly not true. That's when it m it leaves the how do how do we win together to it appears that some people don't want us to win. They want to stop things. They want government to have more control over it than the private markets.
Jordan Gal:And like that's where it's a little dicey on what the different sides are. There's like one side that wants progress and one side that can't say that they don't want progress. And so it gets obfuscated into all this like, but what about the environmental concerns and what about the water concerns and what about the these other things?
Jordan Gal:Instead of having the actual conversation on how do we do this the right way so that everybody wins, so the companies aren't the only ones that win. The American people and the local people that are affected by it should also participate in the winning. Like that's where it should be centered. It's frustrating that it's really tough.
Brian Casel:I do think that like the messaging has been like way too focused on like pie in the sky, you know, what society is gonna be like in a post AI world and like how, you know, you got like Elon Musk on interview saying like, well, money's not gonna be a thing anymore and people can just pursue their hobby. Like That's way too grandiose for average people to like wrap their head around. And what that equates to is fear. Like that's way too much change. Don't like it. I'm against it.
Brian Casel:I think if they just come back to the ground level and focus on like, let's, let's just improve people's lives, improve small businesses, invest in communities, and just like start there and gr and gradually grow. I'm talking about like the big labs. Make those investments, but like you don't need to be talking about like society is gonna change like in these massive ways.
Justin Jackson:Well, and unless that's true, I think that's the you know, it you only need to go to Flint, Michigan to show how people can be skeptical about corporations coming into a town, promising all sorts of things, and then pulling up their roots and moving elsewhere when it's convenient for them.
Justin Jackson:So I can understand why anybody would be looking at a, you know, a mega corporation that wants to do anything in their town, making promises and going, okay, but we've been fucked before. And we need some we need some real assurances here. And then to have examples of these same corporations taking them to court and suing them once they've made a decision or something.
Brian Casel:You know out of the gate that like they're going to start from that stance. So you have to meet them where they're at And message from there. Like don't say like, yeah, okay, but the world's gonna change.
Justin Jackson:I think this is why there's everything has more nuance, right? It's easy, you know, on Twitter you see everyone dunking on these activists. And I get it, you know, it's like I obviously activists can be misguided. But I on the other hand, I can see the other side of it where people are like, even us, in our conversations, in our little bubbles in our private chats. All of our little companies are talking about not hiring people or, you know, canceling contractor contracts or canceling retainers. Why?
Justin Jackson:Well because now I can do that with Claude. Now I can do that with AI. It's reducing the need for employment in a lot of our companies. And you can see how folks are like, okay, well, we've been here before. Like you promised us a great life and then five years later you closed down the plant and devastated the community.
Justin Jackson:So I totally understand the backlash. And, you know, this is why I think the leaders of AI companies especially, there is an onus on them to clearly communicate these things without looking like A robots and B like have some practical like you guys are up in the clouds. Come down to the level of somebody in a local community and think about like what matters to them and what are they scared of. And, you know, let's address those things. And there's not a lot of answers even to this stuff, right?
Justin Jackson:If you asked any of us or any of our friends, tuple, whoever, and said, How many people are you gonna hire in the next five years? Yeah. Big question mark.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's a trip. I would say point taken.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's complicated.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, it is complicated. Can I tell you guys a little bit about Amp week at Transistor?
Brian Casel:Yeah, I'm curious how that. Yeah, yeah, tell us, okay,
Jordan Gal:so Brian's an orb head. Yes. Right, the guys who mostly technical are or Orban all over the place.
Justin Jackson:Well, this is the funny part. AMP week is actually not about the product. It's about the culture. Okay. This is about AMP being like 37 signals. And here's the here's the challenge we've been having inside a transistor. One, running a team is hard. Running a remote team is hard. keeping, you know, figuring out how can we as a group of people get things done in a reasonable way.
Justin Jackson:And there was just these handful of things I captured from listening to Quinn and Thorsten talk on their podcast that I was like, it gave me that same 37 signals like feeling, like when they started talking about shape up or they started talking about getting real. And I was like, oh, here's a list of things we can try and they're super simple. One, is we moved our team meeting from Thursday to Monday.
Justin Jackson:So just hearing Thorsten describe, we do team meetings on Monday morning and the advantage is that I send an email Sunday night and in that email it says here's the top things I think we should be focusing on this week. Everybody gets that email. The next morning that email basically gets thrown into their Google Doc. Monday morning You're kicking off the week with what are the most important things we should be focused on?
Justin Jackson:That alone, I was like, I want to try that. I think that would give us a different energy instead of getting to Thursday and then being like, okay, we made a bunch of decisions and then you have Friday and then the weekend and then you come back on Monday and you're like, what am I doing?
Brian Casel:Like, where's Did you do that?
Justin Jackson:We did it. We said we've done it two or three times. Well, once while I was there and then I was traveling and John did the second, led the second meeting. There's a third simple piece to this, and I know these all sound super simple, but I'm just telling you, we're already kind of excited about it. So a Sunday night email puts John and I in the mindset of what do we care about? Get ready for the meeting. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:What is what's important to us? What do we feel like we need to move forward this week?
Brian Casel:Forward looking.
Justin Jackson:Okay, so John and I figure that out. So now John and I do our meeting on Thursday. We swapped. Right? We used to do our meeting on Monday. We moved it. So then we feel like, okay, we know what's important to us. Here's what we think is important for the team. You send the email out. That goes into the Google Doc. We talk about it for 30, 40 minutes. Here's the things. Here's what we got to figure out. What do you guys think? Okay.
Justin Jackson:Then there's a five-minute pause where I say, okay, everybody, I want you to all write in this Google Doc what you're going to work on this week. And it's just, it's like a stand-up kind of bringing back some old agile stuff. And we try to get away from this like agile, like this performative, like, here's what I'm doing. But just to say, hey, we've talked about what's important. We're all in this together. What are you going to pick off the list?
Justin Jackson:You know what's important now. What, what do you feel led to work on? And so people get to say, oh, you know what? That one right there, that's something I can do. So everybody writes in the Google Doc, here's what we're working on. And it just feels like a simple, clear, momentum-giving practice for the week.
Brian Casel:How did you all do that before? Like who, yeah, like how did you all determine who's working on what?
Justin Jackson:We've gotten into the habit of just having this agenda template that we've been using forever, that I'll go in and make a copy of. And, you know, and it was like very division focused. I think that's something else I got from the AMP people. Is there like, why do all these teams have divisions anyway?
Justin Jackson:And like, why do we and on a team of five or six people at Transfer, why do we have a marketing, here's the marketing category and here's the customer success channel and here's the product. It's like, no, no, no, no. What are the top priorities? Who's gonna work on it? Anybody in the whole thing can work on it. So we were just kind of entrenched in some existing templates. I'm just curious about the logistics.
Brian Casel:Like so you were meeting every everyone on Thursdays.
Justin Jackson:Thursday, yep.
Brian Casel:And that was forward looking or that was more backward looking?
Justin Jackson:There was a little this is the challenge. A lot of it was backward looking. A lot of it I would bring up, here's what's most important. But even as I know this is gonna sound silly, but it's just like even having all of these old headings in our agenda that is like, well, we got a product heading, I guess I gotta fill some stuff in there. And we got an engineering heading, I guess I should put some stuff in there. We got a customer success heading.
Justin Jackson:Well, let's let Helen fill all of that stuff in there. And then you just have this meeting where we're just filling spaces where is this just kind of throws all of that out the window.
Brian Casel:I like this, yeah.
Justin Jackson:And just says, what's important? What's important?
Brian Casel:Because any given any given week, it could be very different. Like one could be more of a marketing week, one could be more of a product week, maybe a little bit of both, but like it's like whatever the whatever the priorities are, then people can say like Yeah, that looks like something I should I should contribute on.
Justin Jackson:All that matters is priorities. You know, my wife was just volunteering with this local thing. She was like, man, it's frustrating because some people are just addicted to working on the work or working on the process or working shuffling the papers around or doing all the planning in a spreadsheet. And there's a lot of kind of performance theater in companies where it's just like a lot. It's like, okay, here's your report for your weekly for the weekly meeting. And then we go through it. And it's like, well, is any of this actually moving the needle?
Justin Jackson:And I think what I've really enjoyed about listening to this raising an agent podcast by the AMP guys is they're just challenging all of these norms that maybe I haven't considered for a while or I didn't have the motivation or the push or the nudge to address some of it. But just like w let's keep this simple. What's important?
Justin Jackson:And let's write it in a doc. Let's have the leadership decide that first so that nobody else is determining what is important except for the people leading the company. What is important? Now they can other people can bring up stuff and if something they have is ends up being really important.
Justin Jackson:You can add it, but even the framing of here's what's important right now, here's what we've got to be thinking about, here's what moves the needle. And we've got a week right now. It's Monday today, Friday's the end of the week. What are we going to do about it? It's actually not that much time. So let's get on it and then we can go through the process. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see how this all develops.
Jordan Gal:It's cool. We used to have, you know, like 25 people, and now we have five. And so the simplification process has been really enjoyable. We do something very similar. We do it on Tuesday morning. We almost admit Monday is kind of a hot mess. Everyone's got some stuff to catch up on. Everyone redoes their lists, works on the work a little bit, and then and then we do a Tuesday morning instead of what we used to do late later in the week. But similar goal. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Of, all right, everyone's kind of got their general priorities, but on Tuesday, Jessica leads that stand-up. We have linear open and we just look at individual tickets. How's this one? How's that one? Should we do this one? Let's move this one down to next week because it doesn't matter anymore. This one's gonna move up. This customer requested this thing. You got this, you got very, very practical, very, very clarifying for everyone. It's like a huddle, ready. break everyone knows what the play is
Justin Jackson:yeah i also like what
Brian Casel:it means for you guys and for leadership right like it give like you were talking about the sunday night email you know maybe you know team rosy does it on mondays because the thing is on Tuesday but like it's a it's a forcing function for leadership to say like what do we really want to drive forward today we better get those ideas hashed out decided on prepared Because we have this Monday morning meeting coming up.
Justin Jackson:Yeah, it's been, I mean, I think it's also just been good for John and I as co-founders because it was like, yeah, what do we care about? What do we think is important? Let's figure that out. Like, let's talk about that, hash it out.
Justin Jackson:And then it was just so much, it's so much more clarifying to have that kind of at least discussed and then, okay, now let's throw it in doc and stuff that I think is solved in my head. John and I will talk about it and I'll be like, oh yeah, man, like we gotta, we still gotta figure this out.
Justin Jackson:And yeah, I've found it very helpful. I'll keep reporting back. And we do a similar thing. Now we have our project management stuff open while we're in the meeting. And it's just like, hey guys, we're just focusing on this. Like what's in the backlog, what's in progress, what's ready for review, and also we have a separate kind of bucket for what's warming up in the ice box over there that needs our attention next, right? What should be moved from the ice box to the backlog?
Justin Jackson:And again, it's new, it's novel, so it's exciting, but we'll see how it develops, you know, as we keep going.
Jordan Gal:Cool.
Brian Casel:I'm basically doing that by just looking at my sidebar and amp to see which orbits are still open.
Justin Jackson:This is the this is the benefit of you know, of being solo. You just like, it's just like, what do I gotta do? Here it is.
Brian Casel:What's yeah, and I do a lot, I walk every single morning and that's usually my time to either listen to audiobooks or podcasts, but a lot of it I'm just walking and recording my sort of brain dump, like solo voice memo. And a lot of that is like, all right, what's my priority? What's the next thing? What do I need to focus on? Where do I need to? It's managing myself, managing my own. you know, decision making on what I should be spending my time on.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Let's keep going here. Bri Brian, why don't we talk? You had a few topics. What do you want to tackle here?
Brian Casel:So one thing is like so this morning I shipped sort of a refresh on buildermethods.com, touched up the design a little bit, I rewrote a lot of the copy, but the main new thing there, and I'm going to be sort of officially announcing this when I launched the you know, I send out like an email next week, but the I'm introducing coaching.
Brian Casel:And I'm introducing what this is an experiment, but so you can just do a traditional coaching call, which I I've been offering to people on d you know at by request, but now I'm making it official. There's a new thing that I'm launching called project advisory, which is sort of like coaching on steroids.
Brian Casel:So you can do like you can get the one hour coaching call, and if you're a Builder Methods member, you get like a member rate on that. But now this new thing called project advisory, which is almost like It's like one month, like a 30-day span where you and I partner up and we're just gonna work on whatever project you want to work on and you can bring me in on that.
Brian Casel:And what that looks like is instead of just a one-hour call where I can give you my take, you can make a roadmap, sure, but like actually this is like a 30-day span where we can do like up to three live calls. We can have unlimited async messages throughout the month. You're still leading the way, but I can I can give you my thoughts I can contribute in parts. I can we can do so whether you're building an app or building like an agent system.
Justin Jackson:This I think has some serious potential. This is kind of what I've been I mean I think Jordan and I have both been like, man, you should do this. I and I maybe the timing wasn't right before, but I My first thought was like
Brian Casel:yeah, like my first thought was like, how can I like 3x a coaching session? Like maybe I just sell like a pack of three coaching sessions. But then I was like, eh, that's just like that's just more calls. I don't know how much value that is for you or me, but what if we made it like a project partnership or pro what I'm calling project advisory?
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Where you're it's and I have like a little like, is it on that page? There's like a comparison table to scroll down?
Jordan Gal:Adjacent to let's build agents that you keep and you run inside your business. It feels similar to that where that that's still the central goal is for the person hiring you. to build something for themselves that they can keep running after. It's just like helps them get there.
Justin Jackson:I what I just want to break in here because the way I saw this a little bit differently, which I think is still the idea, but I mean Brian, you were saying something the other day and I was just like, I almost posted this.
Justin Jackson:I was just like, I just I would love for Brian to do a call with me or a series of calls where he just watches me use orbs where he watches me build this stuff where I even had this I this thought the other day because I've been updating the transistor website and there's things I want to fix on it and I'm like, dude, I wish I could just have like a Brian that could just like walk through this with me and then we both go into orbs together and we both work on it together, you know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. And like the way that I think about that's exactly what this is aimed at because if I think about it it's like okay if you were just to buy a one hour coaching call with me we can't really do that like 60 minutes is going to go by fast yeah you know and so really a coaching call is more about a discussion we can talk about strategy I can answer your questions but we can't get any real work done in a in a fixed 60 minute window but if I stretch it out to 30 days You know, that is enough freedom for us to, you know, do a couple live calls.
Brian Casel:We can do plenty of async messaging throughout that time. We can talk in the morning and say, like, all right, let's hack on this a little bit and then we can catch up later in the week on this. You know, we can just like I'm in your corner for 30 days. Like that's the idea. And so, yeah, and it's open-ended.
Brian Casel:Like we can get into the agent. system stuff like hiring an agent to do real jobs. That's something that I'm very, very focused on. I've got like products and services around that coming up. But like for right now here, the idea in builder methods is to just, yeah, you can just join builder methods, join the community, get access, get join our live sessions with the community. We do Q ⁇ A, sharing projects and stuff like that.
Brian Casel:But here's like an upsell to you can either do a one hour call on demand, members get a special rate for that. Or you can do this like 30-day project advisory. My strategy with this is number one to like rethink what the business model is behind builder methods, but it's also like I'm alone here and I and I do some chats with members, but I don't have enough surface area with customers, with members.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:or people in my community, people in my audience. So I just want an official way to talk to more customers and actually work with more customers in a, in a setting where it's like, we're working together, but, but I'm getting the exposure to like all new problem areas and all new companies and industries and exact and actually starting to learn and understand like where are people at when it comes to using agents and building with AI.
Brian Casel:Everyone's very different on that spectrum, but like I need more direct exposure and more customer research so that I can inform where I go next, whether it's products, services, videos, like whatever it is. Like I need more direct exposure to customers because right now I'm all I have is like what I see on my Twitter feed, what I see in the in the members chat, and that's not enough. So You know, there's a way to like get more exposure to that.
Justin Jackson:Did you want to say anything before you got a run here?
Jordan Gal:It would be really interesting to see what you encounter and what you learn about what people are trying to accomplish that they want some help on. What it makes me think of is this general growing problem. In the podcast topics, one of the things you mentioned was, you know, smaller teams. that need fewer people and like what this is leading to.
Jordan Gal:And over the last six months, we have cut multiple productized services. We work with a great designer and it just kind of got slowly inhaled internally. And our product manager is do is doing design. And we still need help. And what we need help on has changed. We don't need the design output. We need the intelligence and the experience of the designer and that input into our thinking and how do we solve this problem? And this is a dashboard, but this is these are our customers. How do we think about that?
Jordan Gal:So it's like, what's going on with these services and what you're talking about, you know, that didn't really exist. A year ago, you couldn't be like, it makes sense for you to hire me to watch you develop is like, what makes no sense. But now, now it does.
Brian Casel:Okay, so what I just described was builder methods, but let me, since you just brought this up, here's the next thing that I I'm obsessed with. And this is the this is the general theme of where I'm going. Bigger picture.
Brian Casel:The other thing that I sort of shipped, but I haven't really like launched it yet, but I'll talk about it here. It's a you can go to agentreports.io. So the headline on this for those listening, it's agents work everywhere, they report here.
Brian Casel:This is going to be Sort of like a SaaS platform plus services, but the general gist is it's a reporting it's a way for you to take your agents and plug them into a system where they can report their work to you and your team. These are not just like analytics reports, although they can be.
Brian Casel:It's more like, think about it more like these people on my team report to me. This is how they report to me. This is how they send their work, the list of things that they've done, or the list of things that need me to unblock them. Okay, so. That's something that I'm working on, but the general the higher level thing that you're speaking to, Jordan, is like hiring agents to take on jobs, agent jobs, right?
Jordan Gal:It feels very in between. You it's not quite right for the human to do it right now, but it feels like a difficulty. It doesn't make us just hire someone or outsource it.
Brian Casel:It what you want is to have what I'm actually seeing with people, and I have a few, you know, first clients in my consulting stuff. who they are small businesses. They might have a team of like five to 10 people and they are looking to empower their team with more agents.
Brian Casel:And so that means like each like one guy said, like I just want everyone on my team to have an agent and to do stuff. Okay, so what I want to draw a distinction here and what I want to really focus on in all of my content and everything going forward and products is We're always going to have our direct projects with our Cloud Code or our AMP or whatever it is that we personally are using to accomplish things all day, right?
Brian Casel:But we also need to like outsource or hand off jobs. Agent jobs to me are like what I've been building with my marketing agents, where they literally have jobs that run on a schedule and they're doing things in the business.
Brian Casel:So like they're doing SEO tasks, they're doing content writing tasks, they're doing optimization, they're doing audits and fixing those audits. They're, they're You know, they're doing things. Giving an agent a job is a way to like make it just work predictably, but also have a way to like for them to report in to say, like, all right, here's what got done this week.
Brian Casel:A couple items need your approval, and then it's just going to continue to roll. You know, like you don't want to be tethered to a chat for every single agent doing work. Like, like, I'm going to have my orbs, I'm going to have my threads for the projects that I have my hands in. But I also want these other jobs to be done in my business.
Brian Casel:And I don't want to have to have open chats where I directly like dictate every single task for them to do one by one and monitor it and watch it. I just want them doing the job in the background.
Brian Casel:So this is where I'm going. Like I want to really focus on like how do we actually build our teams to be people and agents where agents actually have jobs in the company. And how do we give them the infrastructure to like, yeah, you can give them agent skills, but they actually need like a reporting system, a messaging system to like send the right people the reports.
Brian Casel:The way that I see this playing out from like a funnel perspective is like I'm building this platform, but there's going to be this, you can see there's a thing called like agent jobs on there. There's gonna be like a directory where you can browse agent jobs, you can like hire an agent for a job in your in your business.
Brian Casel:All that's free, but if you want like the reporting piece to work with your team, that that'll be the business. There's also the option to like just build custom agent jobs for your business for those like special, unique processes that you need to like build a custom job for. That's where you can either hire me or build it yourself and use this platform to do it.
Brian Casel:It's all like bring your own agent, plug your own agents into this reporting platform. It's sort of in concept. I'm starting to build this out right now, but like that is. A big, a really big focus area for me, I think, is like I think most people are still using AI directly and we always will.
Brian Casel:We're always going to have our own projects where we're using, where we're building stuff. But I think more and more companies are going to be growing and investing in agents doing jobs in the company. Like that, and I think it needs some like infrastructure for that.
Jordan Gal:This feels like you're like three months ahead of where the market is and the market might swim right. toward that. You see like a few pieces kind of like missing like I want to hire agents. I don't really know how. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You know, I want agents working all the time for me. So I'm like one step away from realizing, oh, I need to understand what these agents are doing and where to manage them. Right. So I'm like that need for that product you're describing is like one step beyond, well, okay, now I want to hire agents. Where do I hire agents now?
Brian Casel:And like from a product's perspective i'm thinking about this like because we were talking about earlier like how do you build a pr a new product today that is not gonna just get swallowed up by claude or whatever right so yes so i actually like so this past week i've been like prototyping that i did like four different prototypes of this to figure out the right shape like i have a version of this running in my business now right like i have grockbots they each have email addresses they send me their reports via email I read those emails and then I can reply to the emails and say like, yeah, approve, approve, approve.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, effectively no one know no one knows how to do that. I have no idea how to do
Brian Casel:that.
Brian Casel:Yeah, like I mean it took me
Jordan Gal:no idea how to do it.
Brian Casel:Right, like so that system took me weeks just to design and set up the way that I want it to work. So this is going to be that more productized, easier. And but the key, I think, to making this at least theoretically somewhat safe is this is not a agent that you can just get and it competes with the other agents.
Brian Casel:The idea is you bring your own agent. You can plug any agent platform you're using into this and just give them that ability to send you reports or send your team reports, you know, and you can customize the reports exactly how you want to receive them.
Jordan Gal:Jess, I got a run to a school thing.
Justin Jackson:Sounds good, man.
Jordan Gal:That's a good place to end it.
Brian Casel:All right, dude.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Let's do it.
Justin Jackson:Say thanks everybody. We'll see you later. Bye.
Jordan Gal:See you.