The Startup Ideas Podcast - Screensharing top takes in AI/startups

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

On this week’s SIP Live we dive deep on the X timeline to give each post a sip or a skip, and we answer questions from the chat. This episode covers AI-native operations, a baby food app that earns a million dollars a month, iMessage agents, human customer support as a brand advantage, small teams, reading habits, and sales advice for builders. Listeners get concrete first steps, business ideas they can copy today, and two clear opinions on each take. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 00:59 – Where an AI-Native Company Starts 04:48 – The $1M-a-Month Baby Food App 10:31 – An App Store for iMessage Agents 16:32 – Customer Support Is Eating Engineering 23:38 – RIP to the 2-Pizza Team 26:36 – Paul Graham on Reading as an Advantage 33:31 – The Worst Moves for 2026 37:01 – From Designer to Salesperson Key Points Make the company legible first: keep meeting notes and SOPs in files that an LLM can read. Let the team explore AI tools freely, then ask one department, such as admin, to lead. A million-dollar-a-month app leaves room for niche copies that earn 10K to 30K a month. Build loops that turn daily support transcripts into prototypes and measurable goals. Human support works as a marketing advantage, and premium buyers pay for it. Sales stays part of the owner's job, so learn the frameworks and start cold calling. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL Unscheduled CEO Podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/ X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/

And we are live. Welcome to SIP Live, where we live stream, answer your questions. Look at the timeline. Give you our takes. I'm your host, Greg Eisenberg. And I'm here with my co-host, Jonathan Courtney. He's a shrimp millionaire from Berlin, originally from Ireland. Welcome to the show, sir.

We're going to get right into it. Yesterday, I posted, what's the one? One thing you'd ask me and my fellow shrimp millionaire over here if you had me on the phone. And we got 139 responses. I'm going to go through three or four of them with you, Jonathan, right now. And then at the end of the stream, we're going to go through a few more. And in the middle, we're just going to go and talk timeline takes. This is coming from the X chat.

We got M. Pesci says, when you begin the process of making a company AI native, where do you begin is a department departmental change where department by department you're changing things or is a company wide where do you start and what are first steps uh for me i mean i could spend four hours just talking about this but the number one thing you can do is to make your company legible so what does that mean that means that if you're using an lm you need to have uh the lm be able to talk to your company and that means your meeting notes need to be legible from from the LM that means that you know your SOPs need to be legible so basically going through everything in your company and then putting it so that it could be seen by you know whatever you know if you're using

Claude Code code if you're using you know the Codex and the open AI ecosystem the Google ecosystem whatever it is just make sure that it's being read and then you you start thinking about that's step one and then step two is going roll by role and then basically saying okay this person what are the jobs to be done for for that person so if it's a social media marketer they need to do research around what content they should be creating they need to actually be creating the content they need to be scheduling the content they need to be looking at the analytics and then they need to be taking that feedback from the analytics and then bringing it back to the front so that they could say, we want more of this content or less of that content.

So what you end up doing is you build loops, you build, you know, AI employees essentially that end up doing some of those things. And then some of those things are you're going to obviously remain human. Those are the two biggest things you can do if you want to go AI native. Can I just add one thing to that? What we did. So we, I had already three businesses before all the AI stuff kicked off. So we had to figure out, you know, how do we go from where we are now to adding these AI tools into a system that's already kind of working?

And also, not everybody in the company was excited about integrating AI tools. That's another thing. I mean, if you're asking this question from the perspective of a brand new company, it's a little easier. But I was building on top of water what already existed. And so the first phase, honestly, was just giving everybody, you know, the pro versions of chat GPT and KlaW. letting people mess around with it for a while without any rules because I know that there was like these companies where like you have to use this many tokens or you have to automate all these things. I just let people use this stuff for a while and then they saw me using things

getting excited about things. Then they would show me things getting excited about things. And we just started to see that people individually found little shortcuts and little fun ways to use the tools. And then the only thing that I did sort of mandate was that the ad in part of AJ and Smart was the first phase where, you know, creating proposals, pulling together paperwork for, you know, tax-related things, basically repetitive tasks. That's something where I wanted us to start using these tools so that we could free up time to do other things like optimizing our revenue versus just trying to do all the paperwork. And so for us, it was just a matter of slowly letting people get excited and using this stuff

and then starting with one department, in our case, admin, bookkeeping paperwork legal, and that's where the AI tools started to come in. And now it's sort of spread throughout the entire company. But yeah, we didn't have like an overall top-down mandate that everyone has to use the tools. So I've got a bunch of takes, but the first take I wanted to give. And by the way, Jonathan has not seen any of this. I saw this tweet. It says, there's a big, baby food app making a million dollars a month. I was searching for baby food apps for my newborn, and I realized the market is absolutely insane. The more expensive the app, the more parents seem to trust it. So you can see here, there's an app. This data is by sensor tower. Solid starts,

baby's first food, making a million dollars a month. Now, Jonathan, I know you're a father. I'm a father too. And a baby. You're a baby and a father, which is one of the most interesting combos. known to man. And my question to you is, what do you think about this idea? You like it, you not like it, do you think there's opportunities to create more baby apps?

What's your reaction? Wait a second. So what does this app do? Is it recipes or something? Can we have a look at what it actually... Is it a recipe app? Or is it for buying baby food? I think so, I don't know about you.

When I had my baby, when my wife had our baby, When I had the baby. So my wife actually bought a course around the first hundred foods that your baby should be eating. And I don't know, it's a few hundred dollars. And so I don't know if you can see on the screen, but this is the app. And it basically says the first hundred foods that you should be buying and making for trusted by pediatric feeding experts, meal ideas, and then you can track food and reaction. So I was just, when I saw this,

I was shocked. Like a million dollars a month for this. Like, you know, it's insane. Well, you know, okay, here's the thing. I have a child. The first couple of months with your first child, it's so kind of scary and confusing. And especially when it comes to health stuff, you just kind of want someone to tell you this is the safe thing, this is the right thing. Food is very confusing. And so for me, if there was a product that's just really clearly saying

these are the things you can feed your baby in the first 100 days and these things will not kill your baby, most likely. I think that, but the fact that it is a, the thing that it says here, the fact that the more expensive versions of the apps actually do better and that parents trust them more.

Yeah, I mean, similar with like, I guess, weddings and stuff like that, there are these things where people want to spend a lot of money because they just, you get one shot. You know what I mean? You don't get like loads of tries over and over again to mess this up. So if I'm looking for things for my child, the price is helping me figure out, okay, does this company actually take this seriously, or is this just an AI generated thing? So I think for me, when I'm looking at something like this, I didn't buy this particular app,

but when I'm looking at baby foods, for example, in the store, I am kind of scanning the shelves and looking at the most expensive one. I'm like, that's probably the safest one, even if that's not necessarily true. Yeah. So I think like the take is, it's a sip. It's a sip. It's a sip. I have two reactions to this little sippy right here. One is if the product works well for babies, chances are it works well for pets. That's just the rule. Yeah. I feel like that. Right? So it's like, okay, you know, what is the equivalent of you get your puppy? What does your first 100 days look like? and I think you can bring this solid starts idea to puppies that I think would work really well. So there's that.

That's number one. Number two is if something is making a million dollars a month, there's always an opportunity to niche this down into a niche. So that could be a geography. It could be solid starts for Canadian babies. It could be, you know, you're feeding them maple syrup. I mean, my daughter can't eat cashier nuts. or pistachio nuts. Right.

So you figure that out the hard way very early. And so if there were, I mean, basically look, if this is making a million a month and someone would niche down and they're okay with not making a million a month and making rather like 10K a month or 30K a month with a product like this that's probably not crazy difficult to maintain, I think that could be a pretty good business, especially if you don't have asset. I do think that this is something where parents do actually care about the quality. And so if you were to niche down, you know, 10, 15, 20K a month for a product that has a built-in market of new babies being born, I think it's worth actually putting a lot of time and effort into making it a really solid, no pun intended product.

I actually like that. I like the idea of niching down into like the little subcategories of general baby food. And yeah, but you wouldn't make a million a month, but not everyone needs. to make that, right? No, definitely not. So this is take number one. Ashley, let's go to our next take. In the chat, I'm just curious.

Give that a sip or a skip, so we know if you like the takes. So this is just a cool thing I saw. Stanley says, I made an app store for iMessage agents. It's a directory of the best AI agents you can text on iOS. And, you know, what it is is, you know, there's a bunch of different these assistants, caddy, poke, Tomo. And I thought what was interesting about it is you're starting to see just AI agents that are,

you just I message. And which is so cool. So both from a consumer, like, you're European, so I know you live in WhatsApp. What's I message? I'll literally I message you and you just won't respond. But in WhatsApp, I'll just get a voice note, a four minute voice note from you. That's our dynamic. But we love IMessage here in the United States.

And it's a really easy way to just consume a product. So from a consumer, I love it. And then from a business perspective, I think that building I message agents, really interesting, something I'm going to be spending some more time thinking about. What do you think about this? Yeah, I mean, as you said, in Europe, we don't know what I message is. I don't know what an iPhone is.

We don't know about these things. We still use like a stick and like just like, you know, these types of objects. I message agents, honestly, have never used one and never even interacted with something like this. The closest thing I've ever interacted with in terms of messaging is, open claw, you know, building that into like a telegram thing and being able to interact with it. I honestly, I honestly don't know. I think for me, I imagine that that is just going to be something similar to using open claw or having it as like a front end interface to other objects that you have. You know, like let's say it's a smart home. This is now your interface instead of having

to use the interface of the Phillips hue thing or Apple. home. Now you can just text and say, actually, hey, could you just turn on all the lights or, hey, could you just do this? And it just figures it out. And it interfaces with all the other things. But I actually don't know. Do you know many different interesting use cases for these things? Because I imagine they're just like a front end interface to like a more main thing. Yes. Yes. So I mean, like over here you can see poke. If you haven't tried poke. I don't know what that is. It's basically like a personal assistant. app just like it's it does it does you should try it and as like a ux person you're gonna like be

blown away so really i'm yeah like the onboarding experience like anyone who cares about ux just download poke honestly and just see how their onboarding experiences because it is world class and shows you a peek into what agent first onboarding experiences are going to look like um i think it's poke.com, no affiliation. This is the one just to show you, this is the European version of it. So that's what you're talking about, right? Pokemon Go, yeah?

You can't get poke and poke.com. No, it doesn't look like it. Damn. No AC and no poke. You guys are struggling up there. You just got Pokemon over here. I'm just checking on poke.com directly. So what's the difference between poke.com and using like Claude?

Well, I mean, so Claude is wonderful, but you can do a million things with Claude. These assistants that you're seeing like on this I message agent store are pretty verticalized. So they don't do everything. They do a few things and they do a few things well. And that's what's cool about them. once you actually like it's sort of hard to explain but once you actually start messaging with your poke or you start messaging with some of these other ones you um it just feels a little bit different um i invested in lindy lindy dot ai which is like another one more than lindy yeah yeah lindy is

is really focused on like you know you work in a business and you're you want a personal assistant So I actually asked Flo, the founder of Lindy, like what's the difference between Lindy and, say, working with OpenClaw or Claude or whatever. And his response was basically like, what we're trying to build is like the Apple version. Like it just works really well. Yes. And so I think there's, that's what's, that's why I say. some of these iMessage agent apps are really interesting so that's why i wanted to bring it up i thought i thought i thought it could get people's creative juices flowing i thought whoever created this

stanley who created this app store for i message agents was really smart um and uh i'll be i'll be looking at that some more i didn't get what you were talking about till i looked at their sales pitch here and now i know what you mean like whereas most people i know are still just using chat gpte still just using it as a search engine and if you would try to present, if I would try to present co-work or cloud code or any sort of automations to any one I know who's just using it

as some sort of chat engine, they would just be like, no, that's just insane. I'm not going to do that. Whereas poke is like a, yeah, it's essentially a polished front end for doing the complicated things you can do in these AI tools. Yes.

Without you having to know anything about these AI tools. Exactly. Yeah, that's cool. I didn't even know. this existed, to be honest. Customer support is eating engineering.

Do you understand what he means by this? I don't. I don't know what that means. So I understand what it means because, you know. Because you're a genius. Can I try to just guess what I think it means? Yeah, guess what do you think he means by this? Customer support is eating engineering. Okay.

So in the age where it's much easier to create, little, if you have a product, if you have a digital product, if you have an app and there needs to be a change made to it, it used to be basically impossible. You'd have to collect all the information, relay that back to the engineering team, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that loop is really complicated. Whereas now, and we see this in our company as well, the people who are directly connected with the customers are actually able to make a lot of the changes that engineers used to have to make. And that's what I would guess it means, but maybe it doesn't. No, you're pretty

much right. So basically, the whole idea is, in general, what you're seeing with AI is, you know, people are going to have their own personal brains, personal second brains, but companies have their own second brains. And you're seeing just companies, small companies, big companies, AI-native companies basically put all their data, meeting notes, customer support, those things in MD files and places where LLMs could read it. So what's happening is, you know, there's been a lot of talk about engineering loops ever since Peter from OpenClaw and who else was talking about. I think Carpath, man. I think Carpathie was also talking about loops. And they were talking about it with respect to just engineering, how you basically are going to do slash goal in codex or whatever.

And you can basically say just like build on the startup, build on the startup, build on the startup. But I think what's actually more interesting about loops is less about just engineering, but doing loops with customer support meeting engineering meets engineering. So what do I mean by that? I mean that if you're getting 50 customer support pieces of data every single day, they're telling you what they like and what they don't like about your product. If you can create a loop that says every day look at those transcripts and every day prototype a feature that solves their problem and give them a goal. The goal could be, you know, DAU over MAU increases, retention increases. virality increases, revenue increases, that I think that that's the beginning of how people are,

like the future of startups is exactly what he's saying. Customer support is eating engineering. That's what he means. And I think that's a huge set. Massive gulp even, a massive, like it's a sip, so much of a sip that it kind of goes back your throat into your lung and then you cough it out and then you gulp it. Can I actually add something to this?

So this is tangentially, tangentially, tangentially, tangentially, I'm Irish, I can't say the word. It's somewhat related. Okay, a lot of products, if I'm looking at a really interesting way to differentiate products that are in a market where everything is kind of similar, one of the things you can really do to stand out is by clarifying that your customer support is not AI and that you're going to be able to access a human 24-7. A company in Berlin here, Trade Republic, actually I don't know if they're German-based or whatever, they did this entire billboard campaign all over Berlin about the fact that they do not use AI tools

and it's a human every time when you call them. By the way, not sure how true that is. I had what we'll see. But if you also look at Basecamp's website is one of my favorite examples of that. They talk about the fact that it's humans, but not only that they actually show the person who's in charge of the team talking on the website.

And for me, I'm like, okay, I want you to be using, these AI tools to improve the product. But when I have a problem, I want to talk to a goddamn human and not to some bots. And so for me, I have my pet peeve, especially if you buy an expensive product. I buy the eight sleep, the mattress.

We love them. Everyone loves them. It's all good. If you have to deal with the support, no. No, it's not. I'd rather they stop developing the product and just leave it as it is

and improve the support. and get more humans in there. I honestly think that companies can use that as a massive, massive marketing customer advantage. Just, hey, by the way, you'll talk to a person when you call here. And then the other thing is cool, too. Yeah, I totally agree. I think people are willing to pay more, like, premium products that say you're going to speak to a human being. I think is a big trend.

And I like, I like that. Dude, sorry, can I say one more thing? Of course. Can I say one more thing? You know, you know the trend of inshittification, right? You know the general idea. Everything gets worse. Like a company, once it kind of owns the market,

they basically kind of make their product worse and worse and worse. And they cut corners because they know you have to use it. The perfect example of that is, back of the day, Amazon used to have the best customer support of all time. You're like instantly talking with someone. It's amazing. And then over time, they're like, we own the market. So now we're going to let a dog be the person on the other side of the screen.

just hitting the thing. So insidification is something people talk about a lot. There was even this big advertising campaign. I think it was in Norway about how this is a thing that they don't want to have, whatever. Everyone talks about it. It's a really big common topic on X. Someone needs to do an advertising campaign around how their product is getting reversed inshitiated and that one of their companies like mottos is that this is not what they're going to do. I think it is one of the things that for me kills brands faster than anything else is when you're a big fan of a product, big fan of a brand, and then they're like, well, we have to grow it at all costs, fair enough.

But can you do it in a way that doesn't insidify it? And then can you use that for your marketing? Big if true. You know what's sad about a lot of tech companies is a lot of tech companies have the worst customer support. Like because they're tech first, they, they, they take it to the extreme. And I think, like, customer support has to have a human element. I agree.

And that's where I'm at. I'm skipping fully 100% AI as customer support, but I'm sipping heavily. I'm gulping heavily this idea of human support. Yeah. Rest in peace to the two pizza team. Bezos gave us an all-time great metaphor. Keep the team small enough to feed with two pizzas. It shaped how engineering orgs got built for 20 plus years. He was right about small teams, still is,

but in the AI era, two pizzas is too much pizza. What do you think? Well, first of all, I live in Europe, so two pizzas is probably much smaller than two American pizzas. But I get the point. I get the point. We're talking about American pizzas. Well, obviously, the team size for making something like a piece of software right now can be as little as one. What I will say is, if you do actually want to be able to make money from that product, you probably need to pay, if you're the builder, you probably need to pair yourself with someone who's good at pitching and selling. And so I do think one American pizza is probably enough for the modern AI power team. So I'm going to give it a sip. And I also just think it's a cute

tweet ex post whatever it is so I'm going to sip it to you're double sipping you're double sipping yeah I mean it's hard to disagree with this one right it's like I think when you're building a startup or any company really you have problems you you have problems and we always kind of say like oh if I just hired this one person he or she will solve this problem yeah like what I've started to rewire my brain to do is before hiring someone, I'm like, could I create a loop that can actually get this done? Or I ask myself, what are the jobs to be done for the person that I think is going to save me? And then I start by actually creating agents to actually solve those tasks.

That's what I've been doing. And I agree that like two pizzas, what he's basically saying like the two pizzas team is like probably 12 people. How big are the pizzas? They're big. It's America, you know. They're big pizzas. They're big pizzas. There's pepperoni on the pizzas. There's... They're like this size. Yeah. Like two, two, two, two, two, three slices you're done. Exactly. Now, we're talking about XL pizzas. We're talking giant, giant, giant pizza. So, yeah, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think David, he's the CTO of Cursor. Um, he's right. I like it. And he got me thinking about like a team can't be more than seven people now, six people.

I think, I mean, look, he's right. I just, the pizza size is very different, you know. We're thinking about different sizes here, David. When he's right, he's right. Paul Graham founder, White Combinator says, something I told my 14-year-old. People are going to stop reading books. I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is. The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of those, if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone else. What do you think? I'm really glad the tweet ended there. I thought it was going to, because I can't see the tweet you're talking about. I thought it was going to be like, people are going to stop reading books. So here's a new app idea. And I was just going to roll my eyes. I 100% agree with this. I am, I force myself to read and I read fiction in bed with my Kindle.

And I also am really putting a lot of effort into encouraging my daughter to read. I just bought her a Kindle, Color Soft Kids, and I'm trying to get her to read it as much as possible. Guys, if you have kids, I saw the best tweet ever and it changed the game for me. It said, if you want your kids, if your kids read, it's just amazing for their brains. everyone kind of knows that. But if you want to get them to read a lot, what I've told my daughter, who's seven, is, hey, when you're in bed, as long as you're reading, there is no, you have to go to sleep time. You can read as long as you want. You can read for five hours if you want. Don't, don't bother me. Don't get up and bother me and tell me I have to do stuff. But if you want to read

in bed, you can read as long as you want. And she sees this as like, so I don't have, I can stay up all night, basically. And so she, she reads for like two hours. straight in bed. Whereas before I gave her that rule, she was too lazy and wanted me to always read everything to her because she just want to lay there like while I read. And so reading, I think, is a massive competitive advantage. I think there's a huge difference between consuming the written word and watching or listening to something. For me, I get massively different outcomes when I read a physical book or read on the Kindle reading words. I don't know. It goes indifferent. It's somehow something different happens.

And so, yeah, and I do think it's also an attention span thing where if you're able to actually read a book, it says something about your ability to live within the modern chaotic mess and not being so reactionary. The only thing I would add to it is don't just read nonfiction. Like fiction is a big part of developing your brain and also getting really interesting weird ideas. So I do think adding into that, make sure fiction is a big part of this and not just you're reading the stoic books on repeat or something.

I had a visual of your daughter just like being in bed at like four in the morning. Like her eyes are like bleeding just of like how tired she is. She actually, she is reading. She has taken advantage of it in a way that I didn't expect. I thought she was going to read for a half an hour and fall asleep. But she's like locked in and it's a letter. And I'm like, oh, man, okay, I need to, probably need to change the situation here. But right now, it's summer holidays.

Paul Graham says the people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be, with a couple of exceptions, the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well and you can't write well without reading well. And I thought this was the, this was interesting. So this is the rebuttal to Paul. And he responds. Oh, oh. Yeah.

Who rebutted? So Kieran, Ritchie says, Books are a monumental waste of time. 600 pages for every one page of actually valuable content. I should know I've written three. Ha, ha, ha. You want information density? Blogs, papers, articles, and a well-created X-Feed.

And then Paul responds and he says, most books are bad. Part of reading well is finding the good ones. And Kieran says, fair. I stick to textbooks these days. for the higher signal to noise ratio. What do you think about this? I fucking, no.

I just don't like that way of thinking about the world. I think that sometimes I'll read an amazing book and I'll go on Amazon. I want to leave a review. I want to say that I like the book. And then I'll always see someone who says, this could have been an email. This could have been a blog article.

They don't get the point that a book, what it helps you do is to, it repeats case studies, it repeats things. and it helps it get into your head in a way that's more lasting and more robust. And so from a nonfiction perspective, I think that almost every nonfiction book that I've ever read when I look at the Goodreads or when I look at the Amazon reviews or when I tell a friend I've read a book that I really enjoyed, they're like, you could have just listened to the podcast episode where he was on Tim Ferriss and I'm like, you just don't,

you don't get it. Like you're not, this is not, it's not about efficiency. And not everything has to be about efficiency and density. And I don't know who this Kieran person is. I'm sure he's a lovely person, but I 100% disagree. I think the same thing people say about fiction novels. They're like, you know, it was about 200 pages too long. Yeah, if you have, if you're trying to like just absolutely get the most efficiency out of life,

I don't think life is all about efficiency. I don't think knowledge gathering is all about efficiency either. and I really hate that sentiment personally. I'm not a fan of it. Yeah, I think it's a barbell approach. I feel like you can, like both could be true. Like you can read good books and that's an advantage. And you can also have like a really curated information diet of like blogs and articles and X and stuff like that.

You know what I mean? So I think like the people that both. Yeah, just do both. Just do both, you know? I do both. I look at X and I also read both. Like, I just don't get the, I've always really been irritated by that sentiment, to be honest. Yeah.

I think for people who, and I, you know, I'm guilty for this because sometimes I do this, like for people who spend a lot of time brain rotting, like at the end of the night, at the end of, like, before you go to bed, you're kind of like, you got one eye open and you're just like scrolling through Instagram reels. Yeah. Then it kind of like morphs your brain in a way that like when you go into a book and it's so slow, it just it feels weird. So yes, you got to if you haven't read a book in a long time like and you you consume Instagram reels and stuff like that, do yourself a favor and read some books. It's going to be helpful.

And I agree with Paul Graham. It's going to be an unfair advantage. Let's see. I'm going to look at chat. See if there's any, if there's any last few questions, let us know. I see one question. Canon idea says the worst things to do in 2026 if I wanted to completely screw myself over going forward. If I wanted to let this golden age of opportunity elude me. That's a really fun question.

What do you think? Who said that? Who asked that question? At canon ideas. Who you would think would have a canon load of ideas? Hannon, yeah. I mean, okay, I'll just say, if we're just talking about from a pure financial perspective, I will tell you that the things that I'm seeing people doing, it's a combination of two things. One, I would assume that if you ignore all the, completely ignore all the AI stuff, it's probably not a good idea. Like if you actually decide, hey, you know what, this is all hype, whatever, I think is probably not a great way to approach things. Just because what I'm going to say next might make it sound like I think you should do that. I think the biggest mistake people are going to make. And if you would want to absolutely mess yourself up,

what I would do is spend all of your time building apps and all of your time building software and all of your time building loads of complicated systems and none of your time actually selling things, getting users, and building an audience. I still think the core of running a business is building an audience and getting people interested in what you actually are creating.

And so I think if you want to really mess yourself up, just spend the next couple of years building pointless stuff and not having anyone ever use it. I would say that that will also make you feel very demotivated. Yeah, I agree. I also think it's like a spectrum. There's like a spectrum of people. So there's some people who are like, okay, I know AI is a thing, but I'm just barely going to use it. I think those people are kind of screwed. honestly at this point um then i think it's like people on the other end of the spectrum you have people

who use every single tool like crazy um and every new tool comes out they have to use it they have to understand every single piece about it i actually think those people are are are uh kind of screwing themselves over a little bit and i think overstimulated and they get you know and i get this too because i i love a new tool i love a new thing a new shining any object. So whenever I hear something, I need like, got to try it. I actually think in the middle is the best place to be. You spend time building and marketing with, you know, Google Anthropic, OpenAI, GROC, like the main players. And then once a month or twice a month, you see something new that you think has an opportunity to really, that just interest you. So if like for me right now,

it's like AI, what they call like vibe filmmaking. So I feel like there's a few tools that are now getting really good that you could like actually direct commercials that are really, really good. And you can't do that today with, for example, you know, open AI. So you do need to like try new things. So I'm not saying don't try new things. But I think like the worst thing you can do is basically try too much or try too little. Just try the right amount.

and I think this is a really good question. At the RHN or RH neutrino says, I've been a graphic designer, a web developer, but never a sales guy. Any advice? I mean, you have to, like, this is the age of the generalist, period. So if you're a,

it's amazing that you're like thinking, okay, I was a graphic designer, now I have to be a web developer, now I have to be a salesperson. And I think salespeople, on the other hand, have to be like, okay, now I need to be a web developer. Now I need to be a designer, right? So I think what's happening in general is everything is converging. And the people who are going to do really well over the next five or ten years. And by the way,

just as how there was an insane amount of opportunity between, you know, 2020 and 2022, where people made insane amounts of money, huge opportunities. I believe that 2026 to 2029, there's going to be that same wave in the sense of if you know how to use a lot of these tools, if you know how to build right now, it's an incredible time. So, good job on you step one that you're actually doing this. How do you, like, I would be like, how do I, if I want to be a salesperson, I would go and just like read the biggest sales books, honestly, to get like frameworks around sales. And then I would actually just start making cold calls and start doing the thing. The only way to learn anything is by doing the thing, right? So you can,

you know, ask, you know, Google, chat, TPT, whatever, what are the best sales books that I need to read? Get the frameworks and just start making cold calls, start getting rejected, start meeting people. And over time, you put in your 10,000 hours, you're going to learn. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's a, like, very important question. You know, how, you know, I am the person who can do the delivery, but what do I do about the sales part? It's one of the most common questions entrepreneurs ask me as well. So to the person who asked, I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name. I've been running a design agency for 16 years now.

And when I started out, I was just a UX designer. I didn't really have many sales skills. But because my company started to grow, I kind of just got put in the position of, oh, okay, I am that. That's actually my job. What I always say to entrepreneurs is if you're the owner, if you're the CEO, and even if that's a one-person company, then you kind of are automatically the CEO. A large proportion of your job, if not 50%, is to be the promoter of your business, to be both

the marketer and salesperson for your business. And just before this call, someone on the call in the background was saying, I wish I had more time to do my YouTube videos, but I'm going to be stuck doing delivery and calls, etc. And actually what I wanted to say is actually your job is to be the promoter and you want to find people to deliver the work, not to, not you permanently delivering forever. Your job is actually to promote, grow, be coming up with a strategy for your business so that you just don't get trapped in it forever if that's your goal. If your goal is to be a consultant who does the same thing over time, that's also fine.

but learning to sell, learning to market is not really an option. You do have to do it. Or, and Greg, I don't know what you think about this. What I say to entrepreneurs is if you truly can't stick to that, you actually have to find a co-founder and they have to own 50% of your business. Because if you find someone who can find you clients, they will either take your clients or own your business very soon. Totally.

Thank you so much, guys. Thanks for having me on the show as well, Greg. I really appreciate it. I'm having a European on here, you know? Thank you for taking the time out of your day. I really appreciate it and being generous with your time and everything. So thank you, everyone, for tuning in. I know you're all busy doing your whatever it is you're doing, you know, work, family, both.

So I appreciate you and I'll see you on the next one. Thank you, everyone. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you.