The Startup Ideas Podcast - The Winning Formula to Building AI-first Products with Dave Rogenmoser

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Dave Rogenmoser. Dave is the co-founder of Jasper, a Y Combinator-backed, generative AI platform for business that helps teams create content 10X faster. In this episode, Greg and Dave talk about why AI isn't enough to be a business on its own. You still have to talk to customers, find a niche, and solve a problem. Find out how in this episode. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comDave Rogenmoser:https://twitter.com/daverogenmoserhttps://www.jasper.aiSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro2:34 - Should founders be paying attention to noise on Product Hunt, Twitter, etc?15:26 - How to get started using AI tools25:49 - Non-obvious niches to apply AI-first products32:55 - Dave takes questions from the community

Dave Rogan Moser. Is that how I pronounce your name? Yeah, you just took the shot. I love that and you nailed it. I mean, I'm a founder. You're a founder. We're confident people. We take shots.

We're not sure we're going to score, but we take shots. Yeah, I love it. You didn't even ask me before we started. You just did it. Just went for it. I just went for it. That's good. Well, first a quick intro about you.

You're a co-founder and Jasper AI, which is really, in my opinion, one of the leading AI companies, a billion dollar plus valuation. Really interesting story because it's come from what I understand some pivots and zig and Zieg and Zag and people might see it as an overnight success, but it's zigged and zagged. And I wanted to start off by asking you how you're feeling because the world of AI has exploded, especially over the last few months, but even more so over the last few weeks. How is Dave doing? I'm feeling good. I think yeah, there's a lot

happening and I would say in December, right now it's March 20th. You know, in December, I was just paying way too much attention to Twitter and way too much attention to all the noise and that got really distracting. And I think, you know, I've always had just a very small team or so me and my two co-founders. And so like if ever like you kind of get the earth to do something or you see this competitor do something, you got to strike back or like whatever the thing is, it's just been very easy to say, well, I'm going to go deep into myself and I'm going to go make this thing happen. And I'm going to work extra if I need to or if I'm going to get more focused or more scrappy or whatever. And now, you know, again, we see kind of this, you know, a lot of stuff happening in the

market. I think it's important to stay away from the noise. I mean, be aware of it, but mostly just execute the strategy. But now I've got a team of 200 people that I'm learning to help get into that zone. And I can't just go make this happen on my own anymore. I've got to be a leader. And I've got to learn to delegate and I've got to learn to empower other people and believe in other people. So it's kind of this brand new skill set that I'm learning as a leader where my old tools that have been effective, you know, are not going to get the job done, you know, right now. But I've got a bunch of really great people that work at Jasper that I really believe in. And I think if I do my job well, then they'll succeed and we'll build a lot of cool stuff.

How much noise should people pay attention to? Because you don't want to be, you know, in a silo coming up with ideas and a strategy. But you also don't want to be like glued to, you know, product hunt 24-7 or whatever it is. So how do you think about that? I think you got to ask like, where's the noise coming from? the first year of Jasper, there was a lot of noise, but it was all inside of our Facebook group and our community. And it was so noisy. And it was crazy. And it was fun. But these are all of our customers. And so like, I'm just talking to them every single day, like all day, every day.

Riffin, laughing, making memes, building cool stuff. Like, and it was, it was wild. But it's like, those are our customers. And so like, that noise matters a great amount. And I would say it's not noise. That's that signal. And you know, you should be paying deeply attention to the things that your customers are saying and engaging with them. And I really didn't care at all about the outside world. I wasn't, I probably didn't tweet it all that year. I didn't like, do anything, but just like, like the customers like was my like social, uh, social network. Um, and that was really good. And yet if I hadn't been on Twitter six months before we launched Jasper, I wouldn't have seen GPT3 come out and I wouldn't have seen some of the cool demos and I wouldn't have thought,

well, I think we could do that for marketing content. That sounds pretty cool. And so I think it's a balance. I think, yeah, you've got to like, you know, be in the know. But I think it's very rare. Like on a day to day basis, it's rare that any, I would miss anything on Twitter. Like if I didn't log in Twitter, whatever you get your news from tomorrow or pro a tonne, like there's probably nothing I'm going to miss.

And if anything is big enough that it's like should really dramatic. changed my life for our strategy. Like it will, it will come to me or it will be there in a week and it will like surface. And like, I think those things are like important to recognize that the minutia is mostly distraction. You should see the bigger things, but it's rare that you'll need to be engaged in the fray day in and day out to see those things. You should see them on like a little bit wider time horizon. I was one of those people who used to be glued to Twitter, glued to all these, you know, websites that are pushing you, what's happening. And, and, And what ended up happening was I was reacting a lot.

Yes. I was playing a lot of defense instead of offense. And I think while there's benefits to reacting, like you could time things more interesting. There's like some growth hacks that you can do and you understand like the zeitgeist a little bit more. What's been helpful for me is just carving out, you know, once, twice a week where it can just go.

through all the content and write some notes on it and be like, okay, this is what happened this week and this is what it means for me. Totally. I'm not kind of methodical enough to structure it quite like that. But for me, yeah, it's like, you know, I don't have like Twitter on my phone anymore because like it'd be hard for me to actually like react well like on my phone, you know. So it's like, well, if I'm on my computer, I can like take, you know, take some quick notes or like ping the right person on Slack or like whatever. If I'm on my phone, I'm just going to be like distracted. with like my family, distracted, you know, they're probably like overreact to something,

not get it to the right person, like a thoughtful way. And it's just going to like go poorly. So I think I still like synthesize a lot of it, but I really try not to react on anything, you know, too quickly. And I just tell our team like, hey, listen, like our strategy, we've got a great strategy. We've got the things that we know we need to do in the next three months. If we do those things, I think we can all agree that that's going to be really great for us.

And if we don't do those things, it's be really bad. And right now the biggest reason we wouldn't do those things is because we're all caught up and knee jerky and going crazy about the stuff that we're seeing. And so like unless anything you're seeing like pokes a hole in some part of our strategy, like I'd love to talk about that. And like we should reconsider that. Like obviously like the strategy should always be, you know, flexible and available to update. But like if you're not saying that and you're just worried about this thing that somebody else is doing, then the best thing we can do is get back to work and go and execute on our plan. Well, what you're saying is kind of like, it's the Warren Buffett model, which is like, Warren Buffett doesn't check the daily prices of stocks that he owns.

He checks in periodically and he has a thesis for why he buys, you know, sees candies or Coca-Cola. And just because like people decide that they like, you know, Pepsi one day doesn't mean he's not, you know, a disbeliever in Coke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. there's like no price change that would cause him to go back on the reason that he bought

candy and that they've got great distribution, a great brand, and people like chocolate. And they like chocolate on every Christmas, every single year, forever. So it's like, yeah, like no of those things change. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Like, it's just very rare that like on a daily cadence, we need big updates to what we're doing. And like if I see it, like I try to really kind of tone it all down and zoom. in out a little bit before I kind of go to my team about it where I'm not the guy just like firing off tweets to my team being like, what do you think of this? What do you think of this?

You know, like I try to like really synthesize it. And more I'm asking like, hey, how have you made progress on that thing that we talked about? And how is that metric doing? And it's more internal stuff. I hate when investors do this when they'll like send you like a competitor product. And it's like, it's like, first of all, you know, you know that the product exists. Like, you don't need to tell me that it exists. They send you an email and it's just like the link, like end of the message. And it's like 24 hours after they launched it. Exactly.

It's like I have like seen everything about this in an hour. Yeah. Like 24 hours, but like you kind of kept across it and say, see this? See this? Seeing this question mark? Or just question mark in the subject line. Yeah. Is this either bad?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I got this. apply, I got this. Yeah, yeah. That end of message. Yeah. Every now and then I will get something from an investor that I have not seen that actually

is helpful. So I don't kind of, you know, full stop, trying to stop it because every now and then it comes through it. But I'm like, okay, this is mostly just a little bit of noise. But, you know, I get it. They're just trying to be helpful. Do you have any stories around your most helpful investor or least helpful investor that you can share?

I've got a lot of really great investors. So we raised our Series A, like end of last summer. And we had, you know, five or six kind of of the bigger firms come in there. They've all been really helpful. So I really like work with all of them. I mean, one that stands out is working with CO2. I think this was like right before they invested, which took a pretty good time to like get your favors from investors. Like they're going out of their way to like win you over.

And, you know, they sent me an email. They're like, hey, we got this meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. And it was kind of formal. looks like Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook. It's like, dude, I know. Yeah, you could have just called him, you know, Zuck. And obviously I would have known. But yeah, and they're like, you know, got this like a little roundtable, like an AI roundtable

with me and like four other founders that were in AI. And then him, they're just kind of asking questions. And there's just like a really like cool time. And that was like, like those are so nice to just get like meaningful connections. They've also done a really good job of connecting me with other founders that are in my space. I mean, it can just be like lonely going out. it, especially in like an industry like this where it's changing so quickly. And it's like always trying to stay top of mind on what's happening out there. Like I've got now several like close friends

that are AI founders that CO2 has connected me with. So I don't think VCs lean in enough on the community of their founders. And it's like so easy. They don't have to do anything and they don't have to be the smart people or come up with the connection to Mark Zuckerberg, like just introduce us to a few people and help get us into a group. But I think all of them have been really helpful and great to work with. Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you're getting any value.

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Enjoy the rest of the show. So we're entering a hype cycle in AI in the sense of there's a lot of attention. It's mainstream. It's everywhere. You know, I was in an Uber yesterday and the guy was talking to me about chat GPT. So to me, that's like the Uber test. Like if you're a taxi driver, Uber starts talking about it, you're like, okay, we're here. We're here. What do you see the biggest problems that we're going to solve using AI? And what makes you excited about it?

Yeah. And I think in regard to the hype cycle, you know, it's not clear to me what would stop. You know, because I've kind of asked myself, is this kind of a bubble? And, you know, with like, Bitcoin, like, what stops it is it crashes. You know, like that's obviously like it could happen at some point. And, you know, kind of all the web three people, Bitcoin people will kind of stop talking for a couple years. And, you know, I think back then like chatbots in like 2017, it was like this big thing and we're all hyped about it.

I was trying to build on it. And it was like all the rage. And then it just kind of never really was helpful. And so it kind of faded off, you know, that. And I think that would be what would kind of cause, you know, the hype cycle to end here if it never really was that helpful. It doesn't appear that that's on the horizon at all. And it seems like we're actually just scratching the surface.

It's going to be far more helpful. Well, that's not the case, right? So I agree with you. I think back in 2017, like we all tried a bunch of those chatbots. And they all kind of sucked. Yep. But like now, like people, like the reason why there's someone with virality with AI-based products is because people are trying it out.

And it's real. It's real. It's magic. No, I totally agree. And so, yeah, I think that we're still very early days and figure out like, what is this going to do? I mean, you see like a bunch of just copyrighting tools pop up. And we're kind of past that stage where it seemed like everyone thought that like gendered AI was only copywriting tools.

And now we're starting to get into like, hey, these can talk to each other and they can connect. And I think you're going to see more tools that do work for. you and not just like generate text, but like, you know, the interface would be more natural language on the front and rear telling an app to do something. And then now, you know, it's going and booking an Airbnb room for you. And then asking you, hey, do you want, you know, two rooms or three rooms that's kind of doing that. Or you're saying, hey, add Greg into my Salesforce contact list and send him a follow up email. And then it's able to go and connect multiple tools together

to go and do that. I think that is going to be insanely powerful just to see kind of tools working for you. Or let's say you're like, hey, create this Chrome extension. And like right now, you know, generate the text and the code and you have to kind of copy it and you've got to go run it and all of that. We're like it might be able to like go spin up the thing for you, the Chrome extension and like, you know, get you like halfway there. So I think like you're just going to see it not only like generating text, but then like going

and doing part of the job for you. And then you kind of come in at a little bit later stage to help edit and curate and make sure it's on track. And I think that's super excited. I was think that there's like right now it's not affected the physical world at all. That's just all on your computer, you know, but I think, I think again, it's kind of what like Alexa or Siri, kind of like trying, you know, the smart home IOT. Like it's like, again, it's kind of like the chat bot thing.

It's like cool, we get it. Like my house is not IOT'd. Like you don't really use that stuff that much. But I think we might be close to where you actually could say like, hey, turn on, you know, the lights for, you know, we got company coming over for a fire pit. And it's like, it kind of goes and like figures out the right music for that and it turns the right lights on and it lights the pilot light. You know, like whatever those things are. Like I think that we could actually be entering a phase where IOT is helpful and not just a Saturday of you setting up a bunch of Bluetooth devices that

you never end up using. So I want to talk about consumer like the consumer experiences. But first, want to talk about like the, you know, business context of AI. You know, today a very small percentage of my workflow is AI enhanced. That's changing, but it's small relative. So maybe it's like 5%. Yeah. 3%. You know, over the next five years, what percentage AI enhance workflows do you see, you know, the modern day white collar worker having? I'd say over 90%, maybe 95%. And in many ways, it'll just be like using tools. It won't be this, oh my gosh, I used AI in my workflow here.

I'll just be, you know, the new generation will be confused at what it means to like not use AI in the workflow. And it doesn't mean that you'll only have like 5% of your job to do. It just means that you'll be able to sit on top of a mountain of AI generated or AI assisted work in context and some and idea generation and filtering and, you know, all of those things. It'll be like having just a really incredible assistant or team assistants working for you that just helps you be more productive and work on the stuff that you want to work on more. But I think it'll be a very large percentage of our time or work will be affected by AI. And for people who want to stay ahead and who,

really want to leverage these tools. Like what kind of advice do you have for people who might not feel super confident in these tools right now to get up to speed? Yeah, I think if you're just curious and willing to play with them, I mean, some people are kind of in the anti-tool phase, which I don't think is going to go well. I mean, that just never goes well to be anti-technology, you know, historically. So I think just like be open to it and curious and willing to play with it. I mean, the best tools are going to come to you and they're going to be delightful to use. And you've got great teams that are thinking about how to overcome the uncertainty that you have around using these tools. And so like, I don't think there's a ton of work to be done for

most consumers. You just keep, you just wait for the tools to get better and be excited about adopting them early. I think there's also just a mindset shift. And I find myself struggling with this sometimes too where just thinking about using AI to do tasks is a new idea. And obviously I think about it all day, every day running Jasper. But, you know, when I'm responding to an email, it's still not, it's probably not my first nature to just respond with AI. And you, you know, have that help. And it's when I open up Slack, like, it's not my nature to like use Slack to summer, you know, to summarize the threads and like kind of see the high level stuff. And so there's still just like a mindset shift that's going to take years and years of people like relearning how to do things

that is not easy to overcome that I found. What's been helpful for me is to just set up time like on the weekends and nights to just be like, all right, I'm just going to like play with this. I'm going to play with this tool. Just like get my hands dirty. I think like watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts are sweet because thanks for listening. But there's something about just actually like pressing buttons and like stuff happening stuff happens in your mind like connections are being made that like next time you're writing that email you're like yeah I think differently now yeah I agree yeah finding just time to play and just thinking of it like play like disconnect yourself from the outcome and just think I'm just going to like get a feel for this like this

past weekend I spent probably six hours kind of nights and during nap time we've got three little boys, like trying to make an AI generated children's book or AI says children's book for my boys that has like three boys and I'm using like Jasper art and I'm using mid journey and I'm like playing around with like how to get the imagery right. And I'm using Jasper Chad and Jasper to like write you know the actual like script and I'm like inside Canva like designing like the pages. And you know, it's just it reminded me of just early days building like how fun that can be. And I learned so much just trying to build this thing. What I also learned was it's still very hard to do what I was trying to do.

And so, you know, as magical as all this is and as cool as the demos on Twitter are, like, you get in there and you're like, okay, cool. Like, this is super magical and like we've got a ways to go. I think as a builder, that's exciting to go try to fill more of that gap. Could you discuss some of the problems that Jasper is trying to solve? because it's really like it's a suite of products at this point with a lot of problems that it's trying to solve. So can you just for people not familiar, just run through it and why you're excited about it. Yeah. I mean, so we launched as a Facebook ad generation tool.

And we were generating ad copy for Facebook ads, just the text. And it was like simple. It's like one or two lines. And that quickly pivoted and I guess evolved into like blog posts, emails, social media copy for freelancers. and solopreneurs and small marketing agencies, things like that. And we've sort of been that focus with a long tail of people just playing around with like lots of stuff there. And we kind of knew that like that generalized take would like end someday and it would be

a lot harder to kind of be this generalist tool. But we were just like kind of, you know, exploring that while we had that opportunity. And then I think Chad JPD came out. And I think it's a really great tool. And it's solved a lot of the general. Tinker problems pretty well. And what it did for us was it really focused our company into thinking, well, again, if the generalist tool is going to be this like cheap or free thing that does a pretty good job, then what can we build? What which we focus on that that will not solve? And so it really

got us focused on marketing teams. We looked at our data. We saw people that had two or more seats just were way happy or way more successful with the product. We saw an opportunity to like move up market as well. And like we're going to keep serving the prosumers. And if again, if you love our tools and love the workflows and you need the team collaboration, all of that, then like you're going to be happy there. But like there's a blue ocean for like mid market enterprise marketing teams as well. And so for us, like we're just trying to help marketing teams at, you know, small, medium sized companies do great work. And that often means a lot of texts and a lot of, you know, generation around campaigns and ad copy and blog posts and all of that. But, but,

but it often also means imagery. And you need Facebook ad images and blog post images and all of that. And so now we're just trying to tackle like the image generation and the text generation to generate great campaigns. And that's something that, you know, a more generalist tool is not going to go as deep on for marketing teams. That story, what you just said, you know, I call that the tip of the iceberg product framework, which is you started off with this tip of the iceberg sort of. of small, quote unquote, idea. You had a small idea fixing a problem, but it was just like a very

small sliver of someone's day. And then from there, you just, you know, went deeper and deeper and deeper. You actually expanded a little bit your audience. But it's all, it's always been marketers at the end of the day. The type of marketers has changed, but you've sort of just gone deeper, deeper and deeper. And I guess, you know, the bet, like if I'm a VC and Jasper, the bet is basically that, you know, when I think of doing anything marketing related, you know, Jasper's helping me achieve it. Yeah, totally. And I think that's the only way to start.

And I think people get psyched out about total addressable market and things like this. And so they're like, oh, you know, the Facebook ad copy market is not big enough. Yeah. It's like, well, one, it might be. But two, like, yeah, it doesn't matter. Like, that's all. I'm just like, that's how you get started. And that's how you even just mentally paired out.

the problem enough to like go try and solve it. And you can always expand from there. But you're only going to be able to expand with the insights that you learn from that initial product. And I think you can see yourself pulled by the market. Like for example, you know, we've got all these templates in our product that all of them are like little bets that we make. And we don't know which ones are going to do really well.

We don't know which ones are going to do poorly. We've got, you know, obviously like paragraph generators. and we've got a review responder that helps businesses respond to reviews. You like paste in the review from Yelp and it kind of writes like a response that you could kind of tweak a little bit and send back out. But then we would have things like a real estate listing generator. And that was a bed. It was like, well, we've got some realtors in here.

We're hearing that they like they really hate writing these things. Like maybe there's a big real estate business that Jasper has the opportunity to go into. So we launched that thing and like never really. saw it pick up a ton of traction or take off. But if it had, like we might have pivoted and said, oh, we're going to go niche down this thing here. But the only way to actually figure any of that out is to get the product out there. Yeah, especially because like, number one, real estate agents might not be asking for a tool like that.

So if you build it, it might take off or they might be asking for it. And then you build it and then they're like, no. this is not at all what I want, but if you actually change X, Y, and Z, that's really what I want. Yep. And there's a good chance, you know, there's probably a great Jasper for real estate, you know, business out there. There's a good chance that we just didn't solve it with that one little template and one little try like in the way that they wanted it to.

But still, like, we're always kind of placing these bets and like trying to get pulled by the market rather than like forcing our way into something. What are some non-obvious spaces in AI that you think products could be built? I think there's a lot of ideas that people have that in AI that are coming out daily that are just like really obvious. But what's something either you've seen recently that you're like, wow, this is really cool or something that it doesn't even exist, that you're like, I wish someone built it. Well, I think the non-obvious thing that generates more non-obvious things is talking to customers.

I was talking to somebody about, you know, how I would maybe like solve to like, like use AI like in like a law firm. Like, oh, would you make like copyrighting for lawyers? I was like, no, like I don't know what I would make. I would, I probably wouldn't make copyrighting for lawyers. Maybe that's a big problem for them. But like, I would probably go talk to 20 lawyers. and ask about their day and ask about their workflows and what's what's painful, what's hard and what's expensive and what's time consuming,

like all those things. And like that would give me some non-obvious idea that like you couldn't get without being a lawyer or talking to a bunch of lawyers that I think a lot of the people build in generative AI are just entirely skipping trying to like find some insight out of thin air. And so I think, you know, again, it's it's not that hard to do. it's a little bit painful, I guess, but it's actually really interesting to talk to people when you can solve their problems

and they're looking to you as, hey, could you solve this thing for me? And you actually can. So it's a pretty powerful thing to go into those kinds of conversations. But those be the things. So yeah, I don't have a specific non-obvious thing. I would just say, go talk to customers.

And you will develop IP of sorts. Like you will have insights that nobody else in the world has from talking to those people that will probably turn into, you know, at least the seeds of some really great product ideas. You've got 75,000 members in your Facebook group. Could you talk about the role of the community, you know, as you've grown, like, walk us through that?

It started with, so I ran like communities and like past businesses and we'd have like a, you know, we used to run all these courses and coaching programs and so you'd kind of pump everyone into a community. And so I like learned like the muscle of community back then. When we started Jasper, all we wanted to do was have fun. And that was sort of our vision. And it sounds lame. But we just had a couple hard years at the previous company.

We'd laid off some of the team. We were just burnt out. And we're like, you know what? We're going to do this and we're just going to have a lot of fun. And we're going to do fun stuff in our community. I'm going to interact with my community in just a really fun way. This was like kind of during like all the Web3 stuff. So he's also like just like very like casual community type relationships forming where

it wasn't all stuffy and B2B and it was memes. There was funny videos and there was like insider jokes and all this stuff. And I just kind of treated our Facebook group like a group text with the boys. And it turns out that's a really great way to relate to people. And I was just me and I would just take pictures of me like, you know, with my son just doing something stupid. And I would, you know, kind of make fun, like get a little chippy with some of the members sometimes. And again, just in a joking way. And they would kind of make fun of me.

something. You know, it was just this like really fun thing. And when people joined, they like felt that. And it felt like this different kind of company. And like that like that fun showed up in our product. I showed up our community showed up everywhere. So I think like early days, people would join and just sit in the community because they really loved the community even if they weren't buying the product yet or whatever. But they were just like, this is fun. And I want to be a part of something that's that's got life in it. And I think over time, I mean, communities grow. And it's kind of been a love. I wouldn't say, hey, But I love stress affair for me in the community because, you know, you get your first thousand people and they all know each other.

Then you grow out at 10,000. Then all those thousand complain about how it's, oh, it's different than it once was. And it's not the same. And, you know, there's always kind of this maybe bent towards communities turning into support channels. And, you know, if I look at the community right now, I'd probably see a bunch of like help tickets and stuff like that that isn't really what we want the community to be about. But I think, I think it's just been interesting to see how,

powerful a community can be and also how hard it is to scale the leadership of a community. And it's been difficult for me to figure out how to get more daves to go in there and help lead it, either internal like Jaspers employees or just empower other community members to go be a Dave. And maybe the answer is you can't get more daves. Like there's only one Dave and you don't need more daves. But I certainly see the community like thrive when I'm really involved and, you know, start to get a little flat when I step out of it. for a bit. Yeah, I think community, you know, I say that community is like, it's like hosting a

party, right? So if you have like a house party, let's say, you need the right music, you need the right food, you need to start at the right time, you need to curate the right people, there needs to be enough space, but not too much space. You know, I love this, this quote around Studio 54. Studio 54 was a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy. But a democracy. on the dance floor. That's awesome. And that's how I think about building community. And, you know, right before this call, I applied to join your Facebook group.

And I'm still waiting to hear back. You know, it's a dictatorship at the door. And hopefully, my hope as a community member in your community is that, you know, there are leaders like you that could sort of bring me to the food I like, bring me to the music I like, bring me to the people I like. And that's really the role of the leader. And what people really miss is that by doing that and by earning that trust and confidence, like, it's just good business. Yeah. People love it.

I mean, when I'm engaged in there, I mean, people, I cannot believe that, like, you're in there talking to people. And like, honestly, when we raised our series A, that's like a big thing investors always said. Like, maybe like more than our, like, numbers or whatever. it's just like, man, Dave, it's like so engaged in the community. Like, that's really powerful. And, you know, it's a great way to keep a bead on the customers and see what they say and get new product ideas. And so it is, again, it's not easy.

It does like take it out of me when like things get a little too crazy or people get a little grumpy or, you know, the community can kind of turn into a mob, you know, at times. If you get like a really engaged community, like there's some like mob like mentality there that you've got to navigate. But it is such a powerful thing. So we run a community in a business called You Probably Need a Robot.com. And it's like a free community for people who try to boost their productivity using AI.

There's I think about 20 plus thousand, 25,000 members. That's awesome. And right before I just, I came on, I asked them, hey, about to record a podcast with Dave, the founder of Jaspera AI, got any questions for him. So I've got a couple questions. Okay. I got from Karen, is there any AI with Jasper that can help me in transforming data from surveys? I'd have to look at the actual use case, but you could probably, this is fun about communities. It's like, oh, like that's an interesting thing.

Like, again, like maybe there's a whole business there out of that one little question. And so, you know, I'd have to dig in and actually look at it. But I'd probably take the data from surveys. You could probably like copy and just paste it real quick out of a spreadsheet and throw it in Jasper chat or a document and say, hey, summarize this. and give me the insights from it. Or you could take all of that and you could say write Facebook ad copy, you know, about the above. And I think like so much of great marketing is just taking things that users have said and like

turning that into copy and saying it back to them. So I don't know. I look at the use case. But, you know, it's very likely we could take some data and go and get insights from it using Jasper. Dave is secretly like writing this down as a product idea. And after this call, he's going to be like, hey, guys, we got to go build this. This is a big idea. I got a new one.

I got a new one. Hot off the press. Totally. But it's 100% like a big idea. Like voice of customer is what, you know, survey data basically is a really big business. It's actually a multi-billion dollar business. And it's really important. Like, you know, the way I think about voice of customer is if you think about like Google Analytics or amplitude or whatever, that's just data like numbers.

Like you don't really get a full picture. It's like if you had like a Google Analytics for like a Walmart tracking data, let's say, what would it say? If I walked in, let's say I'd go in, I walked around for 45 minutes, I'd check out for $200. Google Analytics for Walmart would be like, great, amazing. Guy walks in, spends $200. That's more than our average size. Our average cart size is $45. That's amazing. What it isn't telling you is that I spent 45 minutes because I couldn't. find what I was looking for. And actually my budget was $500, but I couldn't spend it. So if I could do voice of customer, get survey data and then use AI to basically generate insights to help make

my product better, that's a huge one. Yep. Like what you lose, I think there's power in like the individual customer. And again, if you kind of, if we lose the ability to like do that and all we're doing is synthesizing and aggregating all customer comments and all customer, you know, questions into this one thing. I think you lose something there. But I think it was to take discipline on the people that are building products, you know, or anybody company had to go past the aggregate, summarized AI insight packet and say, I know, I'm going to go talk to that yeah, that just said that. And I'm going to go figure out what she's trying to do. And like, there's a lot of gold in having those conversations. Love that. Next question.

from Merkel, how do you think about moat and jasper.a.ai? Could you give us a little more insight into that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's defensibility everywhere that businesses can pick up. You know, I don't know, both in B2B and in AI, in particular, like if there's anything that's incredibly durable, you know, it's not like the models themselves are these super, super moat, you know, intensive, durable things. They'll probably be more commoditized over time. The app layer, you know, same thing.

I don't think we could just stop building on Jasper and it would be this great company, you know, over time just because we have this like durable mobe. I think there's obviously a lot of product that you can build, that just building great product that solves user needs, you know, is defensible. We've got a lot of great data that we collect and that we can use to go fine tune and train and perhaps even build like our own large language models someday that can like make our output different and better for our users than any other product would be. And so we get value out of that.

I think distribution partnerships, brand, community, just talent, internal organizational rigor. Like all of these things matter and are hard to do. And I think all of them, you know, add up to, you know, something that's really hard for someone to compete with. But I don't think we've got some silver bullet, even the data stuff, which is probably the most like compelling or at least the most moat like thing. People are going to hear that. They go, yeah, yeah, there's a moat there. Even that, I think, is dubious long term.

If there's a ton of value there as the models get smarter and smarter, you might not get a lot of value of fine-tuning. But that's probably a long ways out. But anyway, I think all of these combined creates a pretty durable business, but a lot of it just comes down to execution. I also think design in UX plays a role in it. Like if you can create the experience that's easiest to use, most fun to use, like there's value in that.

Yeah. And like all these are really hard things. And I think about my day and my week and like, you know, it's Monday. Like my week ahead is filled with me doing a bunch of really hard things that I'm not particularly good at and many of them. It's a grind. It's like it's hard to hire great people and learn how to do that. It's hard to retain great talent.

It's hard to do great UX and UI. And so all these are hard things. And then there's hard things. There's somewhat of a moat. Now whether it's like structurally durable over a decade is a whole different thing. But yeah, I think a lot of people sit around and talk about moats and they matter. But I think in like B to B or like most tech companies don't really have these systemic moats that they're built in on top of. Two more questions.

and I think you're going to like these. If you were Sam Altman, what would you do differently? I haven't thought about that. I think they're doing a really good job. I think he's a very thoughtful person and I think really means what he says. I don't think he's got like ulterior motives. I think at least the kind of PR and comms around them being open,

but increasingly more closed, definitely causes a rift. the developer communities and the AI communities. And I think there's a world where opening I could be kind of this bad guy that's aligned with Microsoft. And, you know, it's kind of an Apple 1982 commercial, you know, again, where, you know, somebody needs to break us free from all of that. I don't think that's their intention. I don't think that's them now.

But I think maybe like getting a little bit ahead of that of just building great brand equity around the openness as well would go a long way, I think. what would you do if you were Mark Zuckerberg and you wanted to leverage the power of AI into their suite of products? How would you be doing it differently? Yeah, I mean, I think they are doing this. I mean, I would do a hard pivot away from the metaverse and that's painful. And not that I don't think that that'll even be a thing. I just think it's early and you've got this thing in front of you that's so clearly here that I think they could still be the first by a long shot to the metaverse by waiting five more years.

Yeah, the metaverse is basically chatbots in 2017. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was like a false start. Again, you're not going to be last if you like it's not it's not happening anytime in the next you know, a couple of years at least. So yeah. And obviously I think the generative AI actually like plays a big role there. And so I think you're still like building tools that can, help you get there if that's kind of his end goal. But yeah, I think I would pivot big parts of the company to figure out from first principles what they could do with this. And that's what's hard. I think for everyone, but I think for incumbents too, to like step back to first principles and think, well, like what would Facebook be if these existed back when we first started and not just

trying to build on the existing infrastructure of the company, but really step back and think broadly. Obviously, there's ways they can like integrate it into their platform. to help write posts and, you know, all of that stuff. But there's probably some like big business ideas they could come out with it as well that would really be powerful if they just thought from first principles. If Instagram becomes 99% AI generated, do we lose the magic of that platform? You know, I don't know how much. Yeah.

Is too much magic, AI magic, a bad thing? I know. I do wonder how much we care about like knowing that something is. from a real person. Like, I don't find my, someone's like, hey, this Twitter thread was AI generated. And they kind of call it out up front. And they're like, I just copy and pasted it. Like, I don't really like want to read it as a person because I'm like, you know, whatever.

Maybe there's some golden there, maybe there's not. Now, if they're kind of curating it and thinking it through and I know that, hey, they kind of used AI, but also like we're very thoughtful about it. Then like it kind of goes back to I really want to know this person's thoughts. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know if just pumping out a bunch of like super cool images. is a replacement for Instagram and knowing what your friends are doing and knowing what that, and knowing what Beyonce is doing. And like, you know, I think you're getting something out of that. That's not just, oh, that's a cool image. Like you're, you're getting clues about societal, uh,

draws and what people value and all of that. I don't think AI replaces. I think what people care about is content that they connect with. So if AI enhanced content helps them, connect less with it, then that's a problem. I think if I'm a PM at Instagram, I'm kind of like, okay, I want to go and create tools that allow creators to really connect with their audiences. Yeah, and I think there's some, you know, there's some Instagram profiles that, you know, they're just showing like cool nature photos and things like that. And I think like that could be like, again, that might be able to be more AI, but still like

when I see like a really cool waterfall in California, if I just, if it's just AI generated, that means so much less to me. Because otherwise, if I'm looking at it, it's like, hey, we could go there someday. Oh, I can't believe that that exists. Oh, like what a weird phenomenon that, you know, the water sprays up in a rainbow. You know, whatever those things are, if it's just AI generated, it's like, okay, cool. It's like a cool image, but like means nothing to like me in the world that I'm in. So you're saying, you know, going back to your earlier point, really that sometimes it's

helpful to think about building product AI first in this like newer world versus like I've got this product and like how can I slap on AI? If I'm like, you know, a PM at a big company, like I'm still probably doing the slap, you know, early because like, you know, it's probably worth it. And sometimes. But I think the bigger thing is yes, like over the next five years, you've got to go back to first principles and think, you know, is this. really the best way to do this at all given the new technology and and I think sometimes it will be and like slapping it on will work. But I think many times it's going to be no, this is never how we would have done it in the first place knowing this technology existed. We've got to go and

it's at the innovator's dilemma. You know, we've got to go and do the hard work to redo it from scratch. Otherwise, some startup will come along and do it. You know what's an idea I just had and I'm curious your feedback on it. So you're hearing it fresh. AI for onboarding. So the hardest part is getting people to sign up for your product or service. Even it's a free product, but getting them through it. And if you can use AI that really enhances that and makes it quicker and faster and easier, you know, generate more signups, generate more leads, generate more customers. What do you think of something like that?

Yeah. No, certainly. I mean, just even thinking, you know, you could have it, you could feed in kind of some just demographic information about the person.

So you can have some context of like who this person is. And it's, you know, it's a 65 year old woman, uh, in Kansas or is it somebody else? And, and then you could also feed in like where are they at in the stage and what

buttons have they clicked and kind of given all that like, what do they need to? And it could probably do a pretty good job of contextualizing all of that. I think particularly if you fine-tuned it off of like all your past successful customers, you know, like here's what clicks matter next. And, you know, given all that, you could probably have something really cool there. All right. So if someone's listening and wants to do this, you got to cut in jasper.

com. And like, check out. Yep. You know, we're interested. Yes, totally. What's something that the vast majority of people misunderstand about the world? of AI. What's something that you wish that people really understood? I see people looking for, like they've got a hammer and they're just looking to like, we're looking for nails.

And they're trying to fit this onto everything else and they're not doing the hard work. Like you're still building a business. Businesses have always been when you find a group of customers that have a need and you can solve that need and ideally solve it for a fair exchange of value that everyone's happy with. And you can do that repeatedly. And there's more of those people than like you can grow a business. Like that is still true today. And I think people think that for some reason that has changed and that AI is just something you can just jam anywhere in the world and kind of create some business. And there's just a lot of kind of copycats just, you know, it's like on Twitter just copies of copies of copies. When like again, I could probably go walk down downtown Austin and

just start talking to people and come up with like five ideas that nobody on Twitter has ever thought, of there's no businesses there and like some of those could be really great businesses and so um i just think it's really cool technology but it's not a business in and of itself it's just enhances and like i think accelerates you know business building but um i still think like there's so much value in just talking to users right now that's why i'm such a big believer in like you want to build a product start with a community you know just like build the community right like we had an audience we had a community like we've been we've been working in that audience for you know seven years leading up to it. And so again, I didn't I just, it was kind of intuitive for me at that point, you know,

because I just had been living in it. But yeah, like if you have a community first, I'm with you, man. Like that is the easiest way to go and develop a product and get tons of product ideas that would be unique to you or at least much more unique than kind of what you're going to see looking at product top 10 and then being like, oh, I could do that too. All right. Well, I think that's a great place to end, you know, because I think it's actionable.

I think like anyone could go and create a free community. Like I created, you probably need a robot, you know, under a month ago. And like I said, like 20,000, people are just like spreading like wildfire. And now I know that, you know, 20 products I want to go build for it. Right. So, you know, if you want to learn, you know, one of the great things to do is just like build a free community, get people in there. But don't just build like an AI community.

Like go do like AI copywriters or, you know, AI lawyers, like be, be a bit more niche. Yeah. Get people that are like have a job to do. There's value in them outside of AI, like being connected to each other, you know, but, you know, they're early adopters. They're at least open to like, you know, trying new things here. But yeah, if any industry has like 10 AI products coming for them, that are going to be really delightful and easy to use and amazing

and great businesses if people will just go and engage with them. Dave, thanks for hopping on. If folks want to follow you and Jasper, where do they go? All my hot tweets are on Twitter at Dave Rogan Moser and jasper.com. Cool, man. Well, thanks for the time. All right. Thanks so much, Greg.

Thanks for having me, man.