The Startup Ideas Podcast - Trung Phan on The Hustle, ChatGPT, and TikTok

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Trung Phan. Trung is the co-host of the Not Investment Advice podcast and writes the SatPost newsletter. He was formerly the lead writer for the Hustle. In this episode, Greg and Trung talk about working at The Hustle, owning your distribution, and how to get the most out of ChatGPT.►►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.comTrung Phan:https://bearly.ai/https://twitter.com/TrungTPhanSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro7:45 - Meet Trung Phan14:50 - How Greg sold 5by to StumbleUpon24:17 - Why you need a through line in your work/life28:15 - The story behind Bearly.ai35:30 - Competition vs. opportunity in AI41:58 - How Greg used ChatGPT to get paid $109K49:30 - Should TikTok be banned?

So I knew I recognized you from the hallways of McGill University. Well, I guarantee that there was no, like, photo put up. I was, like, not a good student. I dropped out of pre-med because the classes start at 8 a.m. I'm like, I need to do something that starts from noon. And it was like, it was history and sociology. So that's how I ended up not graduating as a doctor. So you're from B.C.

And you went to school at McGill? Yeah, I grew up in Calgary and my family went to Vancouver when I was like nine years old. It's a funny story. My old man, both my parents are Vietnamese refugees. Actually quite a bit, as you said, you're from Montreal. It's quite a bit of a pretty big Vietnamese community in Montreal because of obviously the French. And my dad just kept him going west. So I was born in Calgary and he's like, I need to go one more city west.

It's like Vancouver. Like let me get back as close as possible to Asia. But like obviously the Pacific Ocean is mad. I don't know what he was trying to accomplish, but he got, so he got there. But yeah, so I ended up going to Miguel. But man, dude, we could talk about, honestly, we could spend the whole hour talking about Miguel, man. It's like, I can't believe he dropped out. I mean, maybe it was the right move, but I had a freaking blast there.

What was like the highlight from your Miguel experience? So I lived, did you live in residence or were you kind of, where did you grow off the island? No, no, no. Do I look like an off island person too? that joke is so niche like no one is going to get that no yeah exactly right you're three listeners from Montreal um yeah I mean you guys are pretty big audience you might have more than you expect um honestly man it was uh I mean it's gonna sound lame it was the party it was insane the reason I went was because I heard how insane my girl was and it just delivered on every front right and I've only

been back twice since I graduated so it's like twice in 10 plus years and now looking back, I think I recognize how insane it is that McGill's campus was literally in downtown Montreal. And like within two blocks in any direction, it was the craziest party street you could have. And yeah, I mean, I did nothing of academic value or like professional value while I was there. So like that, yeah, that's it. To answer your question, it was literally partying. Yeah, I feel like, you know, being social, parting, whatever you want to call it, like that just sets you up. I hope we don't have too many young listeners, but that just sets you up for, like, you know, like in a lot of ways success like if you're able to like go into a party meet people connect with

people whatever like it's it's really underrated in terms of like setting you up for success doing what we do writing on the internet no 100% totally agreed what i would say is this is unless you're a very clear track i mean everybody knows this it's cliche at this one with the the purpose of university it's not the education right like you can get a better education not how cliche is that That is the, like, I thought you were going to go into Twitter is a free university for, you know, for 99.9% of people. Yeah. I mean, that is that that is the true. Well, well, let's let's bring, let's bring in Twitter actually.

The best part of Twitter is in the university part. It's the socializing part. I mean, how many people, I know, I know for a fact that you and a number of other, you know, quote, quote creators or people have built pretty large audiences, you're all in one group chat together, right? It's like, it's a social thing. It's like, it's a very social element. So even though we call Twitter for university, the best part of Twitter is still the social part. Yeah. So that group chat is me, Sahil Bloom, Sean Puri, Sampar, Nick Huber, yeah, Austin Reeve.

Basically what happened was, Julian Shapiro was also in it at one point. He left. Wait, he left the group chat? It's such a small group. Just one day you wake up and you know what the group chat. I don't leave group chats because how awkward it is to see that person leaving the group chat. I just have to mute it. But we can mute the group.

Yeah, anyways, go ahead, man. Also, side note, Cortland Allen was also in the group chat. Also left the group chat. Yeah. So it's all for everyone. But yeah, we created this group chat. We called it initially the 100K club. It was like peak COVID summer, I think, 2020.

Spring and summer 2020. And the idea was how do we build big audiences? We all had 10 to 15,000 Twitter followers at the time. And we're like, how do we get to 100,000? Now, fast forward today. Like Sahel has almost a million. Everyone in the group chat has like 300,000 and around, you know, that number. And it's definitely changed our lives.

Do you think that could still happen today or do you think it was a very COVID-specific thing? I mean, it's happening today. You know, I feel like we're actually. We're actually witnessing it in like the AI world. Like there's a bunch of AI creators that I know that are kind of like banding together. And like I see them like pumping up their stuff on Twitter. So yeah, it's happening. The thing that I always tell people about Twitter is just the idea of like you'll get the top 1% of any field, right?

Like they'll just be there exchanging ideas. And you know, as soon as you have a couple people in that field that are quote unquote the top of their field exchanging ideas, no one else in that field that wants to compete can cede that ground. right. They're like, fuck this person's like, he's got the mind share here. So now I got to jump in here so I can't take it. But what suddenly happens is that when you look at Twitter, it's not about, hey, what is your vertical industry? He's like, can you get yourself into that 1% where everybody's hanging around

in a giant group chat, right? And like if you can just whatever, like I always use a car dealership guy as a great example. You know, his niche is very niche. It's car dealerships. But the information is so good and it's just so engaging that he's elevated now where he has celebrities and athletes and founders and CEOs following him, right? So just got to get in that, got to get in that, that little layer on top. That's all I got to say.

That's like my advice. Yeah, I think, you know, just to comment on that, like the cool part about Twitter is like, you could get into that room. And that's actually like why I initially, me and Sahel. Oh yeah, the name of the podcast. Rumor happens. Literally. Like, that was the idea is like bring people, uh,

the top 1% have conversations. And I think it always reminds me of South by Southwest. I think Gary Vaynerchuk used to have like after parties in his like hotel room, which sounds weird. But I swear, I don't think it was weird. No, it sounds totally normal. Listen, we started it off with McGill party.

Dude, after parties in hotel room, totally get it. Yeah. People are going to hate this episode or love it. One or the other. So I think he would just like, you know, Tim Ferriss would be there. and, you know, Garrett Camp and Travis from Uber would be there. And they'd have these, like, jam sessions, I think they were called. And probably, I mean, I was never invited.

So, by the way, like, you know, I was never in that invited, but I always wanted to go because I was always like, imagine being a fly in that, you know, on the wall and hearing these conversations that these people are having, like, amazing. Yeah. Twitter allows you to make that happen. So I love it. Just want to be clear. I think we're on the same page out here.

One top 1% doesn't mean like financially. We're not saying, you know, you have to be finance. We're saying like whatever your field is or whatever criteria you choose to judge your field, like that 1%. Like let's say you're a medical researcher. You're really good at publishing or whatever, right? You're just passive. That's what we mean here. Yeah, exactly.

And I just want to be clear that whatever happened in Gary's room was probably kosher. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. So trunk fan, internet legend. I'll take that. I'm Canadian. I mean, you are. I can't accept too many compliments. When Elon Musk replies to your Twitter, I consider you notable.

Okay. You are notable. Who are you and what are you doing? So, as mentioned, obviously, partied a lot of Miguel and had no real plans for my professional life. Although you said you told me on the pre-chat, you dropped out of McGill. So you totally get the idea of not really knowing what you're doing. university. That's right. And like I dropped out like, you know, we went to school around the same time.

Like it was like crazy if you dropped out back then. Like yeah. In the in like the late lots in like the 05 to 010. Yeah. Insane right. And it was now obviously it's way more normalized. But yeah, I didn't really have I might as well have dropped out. I didn't make a difference. Right. I could have gone and started earlier. So in whatever my career ended up being. So I went to Vietnam for ended up being there for five years. And I don't remember the time, but 0,708, that's when the Beijing Olympics was 2008. And everybody's like, oh, this is like China's moment, right? So actually, I plan to move to Shanghai.

I had a lot of buddies that are moving there, a lot of Caucasian dudes. And they're just like, we're just going to learn Mandarin and like, we're going to figure it out, right? And then I'm just like, wait a second. Like, I'm Vietnamese. Like, I can speak enough Vietnamese and I have family members. I'm just going to go to Vietnam and try to ride the same, like, East Asia wave. And the running joke about Vietnam is it's always five years away. So any year you get to Vietnam, it's like, oh, we're five years away from being like the next Asian tiger, right?

But it's been that way for two decades. A lot of your listeners probably know me from being an idiot on Twitter. And like being an idiot in terms of shitposting about business, two things happen in Vietnam. That's just completely unplanned, but led kind of that route. So number one was I because I had no real hard skills, I'm like, okay, what course can I take? remotely that I can just do. CFA was the easiest one, right? It's like the one that you can do.

They test in Saigon. I'm like, I'm just going to do this. Put a little discipline around my life and like work in a quote unquote real career. So I took the CFA. And then the other thing I did in Vietnam was actually the thought, the thing I really wanted to do a decade ago was to be a comedy screenwriter. So I wrote and sold a comedy screenplay to Fox.

I co-wrote that. And I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm going to be a comedy screenwriter. But I mean, I know that you know people in the entertainment industry is like you write or option and script,

you're still like at the 10 yard line in your own end zone. You got 90 yards to go and you have no control over the rest of that. So on and off for about three years, I thought I was going to be able to make a movie. I never ended up happening. But TLDR moved back to North America,

got a real job, quote unquote real job in FinTech. Worked for a fintech firm. You might have heard of it. It's called Kencho. It's based in Boston. Sold to SMB Global in 2018. And then from there,

somebody in you at Kencho was an early investor in the hustle or an earlyish investor and then made the introduction to the hustle and then that's how I ended up going down this route of being like a more public facing writer, a business thingy. Okay. And the hustle, like what was that experience like? So the hustle was actually a very good match because it was like everything says like, you know the tone of the hustle, right? You know Sam obviously.

And the way they're right is like it's like an irreverent take on. business. I'm like, okay, perfect. It combines my kind of interest in business with my real interest in comedy. And it was super interesting the time I was there because it happened during COVID. And we had a difficult patch where quite a bit of turnover, probably not surprising anybody during that time. And the writing staff for the actual daily newsletter, because, I mean, you write a weekly newsletter, right? You already know, like, I write a weekly newsletter. It's like, it's already calling through difficult enough just like being on the grind. But like a daily newsletter, like I mean you know Austin you know Sam the daily stuff is truly a seven day a week job if you're in the writer's seat right because at a minimum it's six days because you got to hit all five days during the week but you just never stop thinking about it because you just wake up like oh crap like I got I got to make sure I got the next one and it's honestly a recipe for burnout if you don't have like a team in place it was I had amazing editors a shifting kind of co-writers but I'd say the experience that was great what the hustle was I

never written at that cadence for that long. And I'm like, okay, well, you can do this. I was feeling myself burning out towards the end. But it was nice to know that how much you can actually pump out if you just kind of have to do it. Right. And it was during COVID too. So what else are you going to do during COVID? It feels like there was a group of you that really took off at the hustle, right? Like I feel like, you know, Steph Smith. And there's just a bunch of you. Like what was in the water at the hustle that so many of you became successful? Well, I mean, you'll know this from knowing Sam. He'll bring on board maybe non-traditional people, right?

And I mean, I think with Steph, he found Steph from her writing as like a solopreneur, like a digital nomad. And it's like, oh, this is just really good writing, right? And it might not be a traditional Ivy League route, a former tech reporter. But interesting, knows what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And that's probably valuable for the entrepreneurs. So I think probably a combination of having kind of a wider net of who would be allowed to work at the hustle. Because ultimately our editor when I was there was Brad Wolverton, he was a former Washington Post guy, right?

Or like very traditional media. But he was able to wrangle in kind of more non-traditional writers. So, you know, I think a lot of credit goes to, I think Brad was a really big hire for that team. He's still there. I believe he's running all of HubSpots editorial stuff now. but non-traditional writing, which is very much consistent with what's happening with Substack now, right?

The best writers I know are not, people that came up as journalists. The best writers are former industry people. Like, I mean, who's going to outright community stuff or what your expertise is, right? You're going to be the best about that. Like, a journalist is not going to outdo you on that. And I think that applies to basically every kind of vertical now.

Although I flip-flopped on how I feel about traditional media, A bit of it is because I'm so in the tech Twitter bubble that I'm just like, oh, you know, screw the time, screw whatever, XYZ. But the reality is that the actual reporting that we all riff on and write on, like that is actually extremely difficult and very like time and financially intensive, right? Even when you look at some of the best solo newsletter writers, I mean, they're just ripping off whatever the financial times or New York Times or Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal has written about, right? because that's still ultimately the brass tack. You got to still have that original reporting. So I think I'm at a middle ground now. I respect old media,

but I do think that there's a lot of questions about their models and kind of their incentives now. I mean, I write a weekly newsletter and I plan to even write more. And I couldn't even define the word reporting to you, like properly. I don't even know like how I should be citing sources and how I should. to be doing like good reporting. You know what I mean? Like I feel like so many people on substack, like me, we, we just have ideas and it's a platform

to get our ideas out there. The way I think about it is, you know, if you're going to touch on the story, you literally have to call five to ten people. Like that to me is kind of what it really comes down to, right? Like the time it takes to set up these calls, chase people down and like get the primary source versus, you know, we're often riffing on these primary sources, right? which is much less time intensive, but you add your own ideas, which obviously is cognitively difficult. Yeah. So I remember like earlier on in my career as an entrepreneur, I would get these

DMs from reporters being like, hey, do you have 10 minutes or five minutes for a quick interview on something? And I get on the phone. And it was just them like citing a source or doing a little extra research. And I remember like thinking to myself like waking up on a Monday morning, let's just say. And you know, the meetings in the afternoon. I'm like, clear my day. I'm talking to someone from the New York Times, you know? Just so excited. And I get on the call. They ask me a few questions.

If I'm lucky, I'm getting a link, you know, back. Right, right. And that's like best case or maybe like, best case is actually link back one sentence or two sentences. Realistically, I'm getting maybe a link. And I didn't realize at the time why they were so excited to speak to me. But now I understand it. Like, they need to speak to me in order to properly get their piece across the finish line.

Like, you're giving them the inner workings, right? The inside baseball that they, like, if they wrote it without your insights, like, that's just a, that's a, that's a wire piece from the AP, right? Like, what's the point? They just go to AP for this. But like, you're giving like literally that one sentence where it's like, oh, here's an insight from entrepreneur. So what did that make you feel about the process, though?

It was like, you're saying kind of even the playing field in your mind of like, who brings value. Yeah, it changed the power dynamics, at least in my head. So initially I was like, okay, there's these gatekeepers. And if I get them to write about me, there's a greater chance that I get customers, users, venture capital, potential people who want to buy my company. Like, might be reading the New York Times. And I'd say, hey, we need to buy this company because we saw them. in the New York Times. Like, that's literally how deals get done a lot of the time.

Like, we feel this is a threat because it's in the New York Times or whatever. Wait, has this happened to you, though, like with your own personal entrepreneurial journey? Yeah, yes. Okay. So somebody's like I saw him in the Times. Oh, that's interesting, man. Yeah. Like, I remember, I was trying to sell my company in 2013.

It was called FiveByte to a social network called Stumble Upon. And I was just trying to get the term sheet from Facebook. at the time, stumble upon, and there was a couple others. And I just needed a little extra juice, like an extra, like, reason for them to, like, move. So I hired Ed Zittron, if you know Ed Zittron. Oh, yeah, I've read Ed stuff. Yeah, and he got us in TechCrunch. And it was like...

Through industry connections? Through industry connections. Okay. I paid him $5,000 to get us into TechCrunch, basically. And... I think got you cross the finish line. Damn, this is some inside baseball, man. Have you ever told this story?

Never told this story. This is amazing, man. Wow. Yeah. That's balder, dude. It was published, let's say, on Monday, Tuesday. By Wednesday, Thursday, all of a sudden, Facebook came around, stumble upon came around.

Just so happened that they had read the article, and it makes a difference to be in the press. I've been in a couple of conversations with kind of on the sole independent side. and the idea being, hey, how valuable is a traditional press? I think what you're saying here, oh, granted, this was 10 years ago, right? Yeah. But I feel like it probably pulls the same weight, though. Like, I remember when I was, so I took a break from Bloomberg, but when I was writing over the past year,

I still remember the kind of outreach you'd get. And I guess on Twitter, I have a big audience, but there's still some people that I couldn't reach out to or that I know from AB testing, as in like when I reached out to them on my Twitter account, nothing. When I'm like, hey, listen, I'm running something or Bloomberg, totally different ballgame, right? It's like, it still means something to get into the terminal, for example, or in your case, I guess tech crunch is still, I mean, 10 years later. I like your thoughts, actually. TechCrunch now versus 10 years ago, what do you think the influence is?

Oh, I mean, it's gone down significantly. Okay. At the time it was like. What is the tech crunch equivalent today? It's gotten more decentralized. Like, I feel like at the time it was, there was only a few places. that you'd go for for tech news it was like Pando Daily I think but there wasn't that much right like tech felt like more niche and tech crunch was like tech crunch was the holy grail

today I feel like you know Pachy McCormick you have Lenny's substack you have like more Nish Mario Mario Ben's Bites for AI or we just launched one called you probably need a robot dot com for AI like there's these niche gatekeepers um that exist so the attention is way way more spread out that's a great point regarding packy and mario actually because you've obviously seen some of their like quote unquote sponsored deep vibes or even ones that aren't right is they clearly are just hitting the exact market and to your point that where tech hunts used to serve but i mean pack i think pack is up to 200 000 subs and i know lenny's is massive right Lenny might be half a million at this point.

Lenny is the second most subscribed substack period. On the entire platform. Yeah. That is wild, right? That is absolutely wild. He's a new tech crunch. There you go, right? He's a new tech crunch, legitimately.

Yeah. Lenny is the new tech crunch. But he focuses more on like SaaS. But you're right. Lenny in some ways is the closest thing to the new tech crunch that we have. A lot of people ask me, Greg, how do you build products that foster community? Well, I've got good news. That's exactly what Lake Checkout does, my company.

We partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community. We add a couple interesting clients every single year. So if you're interested, and that sounds like you, email front desk at latecheckout. Dot Studio with what you're working on, what you need help with. And don't forget to mention the Where It Happens Pod. Thank you. Going back to your story, you're at The Hustle. What happens?

How long are you there for? About a year and a half, like I said, like a little bit of burnout feeling when the daily, the daily pace for about a year was fast. There's a lot. I wanted to get back to writing a longer kind of stuff. And I mean, you know, the D. The HubSpot acquired hustle in February 2021. Within a year, I think a lot of people ended up leaving, which is pretty typical for these type of things anyways. And I knew that I wanted to get back to kind of writing at a less frequent pace and also just explore the stuff that we thought about, like being more, being more solo

and independent and kind of seeing where you can go. I mean, you'll know this. You've been over a decade. It's just like I prefer taking on random opportunities and not being tied necessarily to one place. Just because a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have built up good distribution, right? It's a little bit different maybe than a year and a half ago. But as you're building up a distribution and you see, okay, well, that's half the battle. In my eyes with the content, it literally is how much ever you put into the writing of the,

the initial thing or creating that piece, you have to put the exact same amount of effort in a distribution, right? And that's what people make the tradeoff. They're willing to work for a large publication because they don't believe that they can do the distribution on their own. But you can actually can, as you can tell, as you know from your group, 100K club, it's possible to happen. So I just want to get off the pace of the writing. I've never really stayed at a place for extended amount of time. And I still have this North Star in my head of being a film, like writer of some nature and what I found with writing independently and kind of using that as the main outlet was you know I do get a lot of interesting DMs I meet a lot of interesting

people just from what I do on Twitter and you know moving the ball towards creatively stuff I want to do like a lot of stuff for me is even though kind of work in the business world I'm like the things that get me excited are the more than creative side particularly humor so what are you working on and it feels like you have some interest in film, writing, AI. How does it all come together? What's your, how do you describe what you're building? Here's the through line. The through line is this is I know what I'm going to be doing every day basically for the next call it, five, ten years.

Like I can already see it, right? It has to do with the age of my kid where he's five years old. So, you know, no matter what, I know that, you know, the commitment obviously got to get a kid, right? So that's the main thing. It's like, that's levering me. And it's like, okay, so how do I build? something I can do for 10 years around the fact that I got to raise my kid

for another 10, 15 years, right? And what that is, and what I've come to realize over the past year and a half was, I know I can just do the content paste that some of your listeners might see or if they're not familiar. I'm on Twitter every day, a couple hours, similar to yourself, I'll write a newsletter,

I do a podcast, and it's just slowly building the audience, as you know, it's like, it just compounds, right? It's just corny, but like, the benefits, especially of audience building, is all going to be towards the end, right? It's like I wrote about it this last week. Jack Butcher, who you had on recently on the show,

he obviously has that amazing visual, right? Of like, it's just a straight line going nowhere. And then it just kind of implodes. And there's a point on that straight line where you're like, oh, this is pointless. But it's just the idea of particularly audience building, the benefits really do accrue towards the end, right? In so many ways, too, is like the you're picking up more people, but then the people you're picking up early on the journey,

they want to see you win. And they're liking you more because of how much time they're spending with you. So when you're asking like, you know, where's the through line? The through line is this. I know I can keep doing the audience stuff like content that I enjoy for the indefinite amount of time. So through that through line then becomes, okay, if you have a big audience, what can you do with that? So the AI stuff was essentially, you know, I'd advertise in my newsletter. I'd advertise in my podcast.

But a lot of those advertisements weren't even products that I used. and the highest value thing for somebody with a big audience is like, you know, you own the product, right? It's like, it's like whatever Jocko does with his health products or Rogan now has a cut in like on it, right? It's like you find a product that you can use your distribution to sell. The AI stuff made sense to me because the app that I launched barely AI. I actually use it quite a bit. I use it a ton to copy edit my own stuff. I don't have a team.

So writing and editing are two such different kind of. of, you know, the cognitive switch is quite large. And it's really annoying to edit your stuff. So I use barely, which is built on top of water. It can be on top of any large language model. Obviously, opening has a big one right now. But we plugged into other ones. And I'm sure Google is going to release one soon. I know Facebook or meta just released theirs. It's like, we're going to be able to route through this app, which essentially, I guess we call it a thin wrapper. But the thin wrapper with two ways I put it is, I think the U.S. and the convenience side, I know you've talked about it previously and used it maybe a little bit,

but I think what we're seeing was the convenience side is if the underlying models are going to be largely commoditized because every browser will have it, like every productivity tool will have it, is people will be like, okay, well, which one will I actually use every day because it's convenient, right? And we're finding, like, we have the Chrome extension, the one keyboard shortcut app, and obviously browser access. People are liking that it's all kind of in one place. And there's definitely enough of a market for those in those. individuals where the lifetime value for this product is higher than I can get and just ads.

So yeah, I was just in a meeting with my team right before this. And I think we're launching like five companies over the next six weeks. Around your distribution. Around my distribution. Exactly. I think it's it's a good point that you have, which is once you're known for something, once you're a one percent, how do you become the advertiser? 100% right with the AI with barely AI like you were relatively early with that how did you get into AI

LLMs and productivity software so but I'm going to have to give a lot of credit to my co-founder parham we worked together at Kencho which was the fintech startup that I mentioned that I worked when I came out of the States but he was head of infrastructure there so I mean he'd spent his entire career like a decade basically plugging at the time it's a lot of data like a lot of nasdaq data sb data into kind of a nice ux and making it very usable and the l l llm stuff was kind of creeping up obviously chat gpti's model underlying model had been around for almost 18 months and just kind of slapped it on top and i'm sure you've read the stuff they didn't even outside of sam oman they didn't even think that it'd be a success they're like they were rushing it out the door because they knew that

that the moment is coming for mindshare, and they just kind of rush it out. So I don't think we're particularly early. I mean, Jasper and Koppi were around probably a year plus before we launched. And now everything was just swept away by Chat GBT BT anyways in terms of a mind share. But what we'll say is it is definitely one of the situations where, like, you know, the tide lifts all boats.

It's just the biggest tide ever. And even Chat GPT and OpenNab acknowledged there's just no way they could service. all the different customers they want. So they did that deal with Bain recently, right, to do generative text and images for Coca-Cola. But in that press release, they're like, we're doing one of the Fortune 500 companies, like a single one of them, right?

And I think the long-term economics for Open AI and Microsoft, which obviously owns about, we'll end up owning 49% of it, is they're going to have to be kind of a cloud provider. And they're going to want as many people the plugin is possible. So I guess their balancing act, which I'd love to, your thoughts on is, you know, how do they have a balancing app between having their own product and trying to incentivize just everybody to build on top of it? So we, I don't think we were particularly early.

I do think that we got in right before that crazy rush. To be honest, it was, it was when chat GPT came out that first week, I'm like, fuck, this might, like, we might be done. And, but then we saw actually that it really helped clarify what our value was, is just some people want the U.S. certain way, right? That's just how some people want it. And that clarified for us is like, okay, let's, this is our market. We're not building the next Google. We need to find 10, 20,000 of these customers and get them to pay. And then you have a mid-seven figure business. Am I trusting that my distribution can do that? So those are kind of the, that was kind of the equation. So what, what do you think when like around kind of thin wrappers and open AI competing against

potential other, other AI plays? So my take on like where we are in the state of AI and building on top of it is it feels very similar to how it was in mobile. So in mobile basically what happened was you bought an iPhone and there were default apps. Like there was no, you know, the first version of the iPhone didn't have an app store. Oh yeah. Steve Jobs hated the idea of an app store because he didn't want an app to drop the call. Because I don't remember, but in his, in the iPhone presentation, he's like the killer app for the iPhone is a phone call. We've created a better phone call.

So he was fucking really didn't want to ruin the phone. But yeah, you're right. There was no App Store. No App Store. And it got preloaded with some default apps based on what they thought people wanted. And Apple knew a few of those apps because from 2000 to 2008,

there was a huge industry around Pocket PCs, which were just mobile windows, and Palm Pilots that we, like often forget about. So they understood that there was notes that you needed, you know, photos, maps. Email like a really shitty browser. Exactly. So they knew that.

That's the phase we're in right now with OpenAI's business. And then you're going to see Google as well. So they've identified, okay, text to image makes sense. Boom, Dolly, you know, jukebox music. They've identified like the, and I hate that. the term, but low-hanging fruit for the space. Today, you know, we're recording this February 27th. Today, I saw that Snap added like AI, OpenAI integration. So now they're moving from like default apps to, okay, partner apps that we can trust. The next step is platform. So the app store for

OpenAI or the App Store for Google Bard. And yeah, what you're building is, like, you're building an app before there's an app store, basically. Right. You're, instead of relying on the distribution for an app store, you're relying on the distribution of your Twitter account and email, et cetera. And I think that there's going to be, like, Open AI and Google isn't going to figure out themselves how to build every niche AI-based product, and they don't want to do that.

So I think there's going to be a huge opportunity over the next five years to, like, go and build a seven-figure AI first product. I love that framing the idea of the basically figured out. So the first iPhone came with 60 naps, like kind of everything you mentioned, notes, email, browser, a contact list. The idea of like, and a great parallel here is like the open AI playground, right? Or the text playground is like, that's kind of the, the first tooling you'll see everywhere.

It's probably just gotten a meeting with three people. And there's like, hey, what are the main things we knew with Texas? We just created 20 of them, right? And apart from the use case, different use cases you might have with the LLMs, the other thing we've seen with barely is. So we've been reached out quite a bit by like S&B corporates, not even tiny, like 10,000, employees, they want to integrate some type of LLM into their company, but they don't want to do it through JAPT right now.

And then opening ad just doesn't have the resources to hold their hands. because they're too small, right? So barely is actually very effective in the sense of, you know, we're working on the standard corporate stuff like SSO, single sign on, localize all data so you can upload and just keep it on prem or like not in the cloud because people obviously have a lot of concerns about privacy. And we've seen enough outreach of that where, you know, if anybody listening here, and I'm sure there are quite a bit interested in AI,

is like the one thing I cannot stress enough is the market is so big that even though like the mental gymnastics I went through and like kind of like the anxiety when a chat GPT came out. It just it just came to mind. I'm like, listen, they're just not going to be able to service everybody because it doesn't make sense for them too. And it's like what you said. A, they're not going to be able to figure out every use case. B, they're not going to be able to service everyone. There's going to be enough room for a lot of people. Maybe not generational stuff, right? Like I don't know how many Googles or Uber's Airbnbs will come out of this cycle. But it's great for solepreneurs. There's no question about it. How much anxiety does being built on OpenAI, Google, whatever give you? Because they could just decide, we're no longer giving access to chat GPT or they could just say it's going to cost a million dollars a month. It was a lot more anxiety when chat GPT came out in November. But it seems pretty clear since then that there's going to be enough competition in this I mean, even stability, right?

Like stability, obviously is known for stability AI. Probably known for stability diffusion. But they're working on a large language model. And their whole ethos is to be open source, right? And then you just saw, again, we mentioned meta dropped one last week. Google has to drop. I know meta is more research focused right now, and they haven't opened it widely.

But there's almost no question that Google is probably going to have to within this year. So, yeah, I mean, it is scary. It's scary in the same sense. sense that I believe the way you use a cloud provider is like, yeah, could Amazon, you know, screw you by jacking up prices and like making it really expensive? I think it's called egress fees when you have to leave their cloud. That's basically what they're doing. But the tradeoffs are worth it.

And I mean, otherwise, like, I'm not going to be able to my own LLM either, right? So the reality is that I'm screwed if they really do for that. So although there have been enough discussions where like, like, what are we going to have to just do or like an interesting one enough where you can still do something super niche and kind of exist but yeah definitely anxiety but i think it was much less diminished than in november that was a true shot like when when chat chad chpd came out the information had a great article about jasper so jasper ai was uh you probably know the guys like unicorn uh i i start up that does a lot of copy and marketing uh text but i read that information article and so they're in like

a Slack group, like a multi-cross functional Slack group with Open AI because they're such a big partner. And then when JetG TBG dropped, they're like, hey, what's going on? Like, this is like directly competitive. And you know, the opening guys are like, no, no, no, don't worry about it. It's like, you guys, you still have access to the different models. And it's just like, just a marketing for open AI. But they raised that $1.5 billion. Like, what was the ambition for that company? It's probably a 10 billion plus company, right? Like, is that still possible? I don't know. It seems scary that chatyPDs out there and Microsoft can burn X amount of money.

But I think the market is just so massive that it's worthwhile for them not to screw people. And they'll just make up money on whatever their token model ends up being. Yeah, I think people really underestimate how big the AI market is because what is AI? It lifts productivity. It uplifts productivity. So if you uplift productivity, 7%. like we're talking trillions per year globally. Product productivity, and this is another thing that we found with barely AI is like so

about half of our usage is outside of North America. I don't think people understand the multiplier that Open AI provides for non-native English speakers that are trying to compete and not even necessarily compete. Just even just like, listen, I don't know how much you've dealt with people in Southeast Asia or East Asia. I'm sure you have quite a bit. is like, first of all, English, the English teaching industry is massive,

Nise Jaze. It's just absolutely massive, right? And that's just to teach English, not even to write, not even to read. It's just to teach the pronunciation of English. And if you throw something like chat, GPT, open AI, any large language models, now you have people that have all the other skills, right?

Discipline, understand accounting, understand finance, understand how to use the internet. But the truly large barrier was writing literally just good emails. You can even write a good cold email if you were like a Vietnamese executive because you just don't have intonation. You just don't understand the nomenclature, right? This is a massive change for you. It is truly a massive change.

We're seeing huge usage in Southeast Asia for barely AI. And even though our pricing is Western based for some companies over there, it's a no-brainer for them. It's expensive relative to like how the GDP per capita, but if you're running a business that can do seven figures from Southeast Asia, it's a no-brainer to be able to communicate. properly for $200 a year, $20 a month, right? So I think that's the other part of it. Totally agree with you on the productivity. But I think the massive unlock is going to be, even the playing field in a lot of ways for non-native English speakers.

And it's funny, I do a non-investment advice podcast with Bilal and Jack. And we randomly had a sailor on last year, Michael Sailor, and he had a great line. He's just like, whatever you do, you can sell for more in English, like if that's, you know, the language you're interacting. Obviously, he's a lingua franco. And he's like, and whatever you buy, you can buy it for cheaper in English. And I think that matters a lot. Like, forget about just the productivity, which I totally agree on, like 7% boosts,

like you said, we're trillion to dollars or whatever hypothetical number, right? But the unlocking of literally two to three billion people to compete in the lingua francoa of the internet, which is English, I think it's a huge and we can't really compute what the opportunity is for that. Obviously, I speak English, but growing up in Quebec, like, you know, you speak English and French and you're in North America. So you kind of like see, you understand U.S., you understand selling into the U.S., but you also understand that you might speak French as your native, you know, 93% of Quebecers speak French as their first language. So for me, like, I've always thought about, like, how do you, how do you localize different products? and niche different products, like barely AI for, you know, Vietnam, for example, could be a huge product.

And I just find that Americans don't think often like that. They don't think like, oh, hey, let's, like, they just think about like, you know, if you make it in New York, you make it everywhere, right? Like, that's like the mentality. But I don't think that's necessarily true. I believe in speaking to different audiences and the way they want to be spoken to. So I think there's a ton of opportunity in just creating proven products that are AI first and just focusing it on non-Western countries. Well, let me use an example from, I mean, you had a viral thread a couple days ago around, I think a vendor owed you $109,000. $1,000.

Fuck, how do I get this? $1,500, but who's counting? Yeah. So a vendor owed you six figures. It's called 100K. Yeah. And actually, while I was reading it, I mean, the solution ended up. being very simple. It was like you prompted chat GDPT to give you an email to send hypothetically

to a vendor that owed you X amount of money hadn't paid in a Y amount of time, right? Like simple enough. But I think there's an insight in there. I think it's why it kind of went viral, right? Last I saw it was like 12,000 likes or something, which is millions of impressions. But like, I think the insight there was something and you touched on it. It was like the idea that it's good call it back off, right? Yeah, I could have written that email. I could have written it. But there's mental. blockers for you to write that email. I think that so for the listeners that haven't seen it, the text of the email is something along the lines of, you know, hey, vendor X, like we've given you five months

to pay this bill. We're much appreciated if you pay. If not, here's some recourse, right? Like, you literally could have written that. But the mental blocker to be like, fuck, do I want to be the bad guy? Like, you know what I mean? It's like, do I really want to do it? No, but I want you to apply that.

Think about that mental blocker that you as a successful Western entrepreneur had, right? to write that English email. Now apply it to the 700,000, the 700 million Southeast Asians, right? Yeah. Imagine trying to write an angry email from like you're a Malaysia manufacturer. You're trying to get a New York-based company

to pay you six figures. Where do you even start to communicate that properly? But like you, I think that's what the beauty about that. Like it was such a simple solution, but I don't think people understand the implications of it. So literally now you can have angry, great emails that are effective, written and sound like a lawyer. Hell, this might be a bad thing, but not anybody can do it. But I think it's a great equalizer. I mean, a lot of our team is based

in Canada. So obviously they're super nice. And they're just like, they're just like, they're just like, I can't write his email. Well, they were basically like, you know, responding to that, you know, that vendor and just being like, hey, just following up would be awesome to get paid, you know. It needed like a bit more oomph, exactly. It was missing some booms. And they asked for my advice and I was just like chat GPT. Like, you know, initially they're like, we're going to give it to the lawyer and let the lawyer just like handle it. And at the time, we were like, we were over budget that month on legal fees.

On legal fees. Yeah. I was just like, let's do a fun experiment. And we did it. And I just, I got that notification. like 95 seconds after I sent the email from the executive of that company. And he's like, yeah, sure, no problem. We'll pay you.

I was like. You knew it was good content too, right? Because I know you're a content guy. You're like, oh, this is good content. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was telling someone of my team, I was like, it's worth the money just on the content alone. I'm just, forget the hundred and nine.

I mean, dude, I was looking now because I don't know, this is specific for the users that aren't super Twitter heavy, but kind of the way you plug your products on Twitter is after like a long multi-tweet thread. And kind of conversion is typically, whatever. If you can convert 10% of likes from the first tweet to the bottom, like you've done a great job. I was looking at some of the likes towards the internet there. I'm like, damn, dude, this is like, this converted really well. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll share some of that inside info. Like, you know, one of the things I launched in that thread or put in that thread is a design service called dispatch. to a 5K a month.

Yeah, 5K a month. I put it like in the tweet, I was like, hey, listen, like this inspired us to to launch this product that like we actually get paid on. You pay us 5K a month and it's unlimited designs for your company. And it's like landing pages and websites and apps unlimited for only 5K a month. And from that tweet alone, you know, that'll generate six figures in ARR just from that tweet. just from that same, did you actually launch it because of that thread? Yeah. So did you already have that in the works?

We had it as an idea. We're just kind of like, hey, like a lot of companies, we just have a request. Like a lot of companies just need, you know, our short staff, but they want like small design tasks. And they weren't right for our like traditional design agency. We've just been referring it to other agencies because we're just like, hey, it's not a fit. They were like, hey, wouldn't it be cool to have like a monthly subscription? And it was on the back burner. And then when that happened, I was like, hey, great forcing function to bring that back.

Imagine if we can get, you know, six figures a month or even seven figures every single month being charged. And it's, you know, not, you know, we work with a lot of Fortune 500. It's, you know, net 30, net 60, et cetera. Well, there you go. You need 20. You need 20. And I looked at, it's not shocking at all that you got at least 20 because I looked at, man, again, this inside baseball for people don't use Twitter. You can kind of do like a rough hand conversion of like likes to like clicks.

I'm like, this thread was like, that's hilarious, man. So like this thread you put a little hit on every single level. There's like five layers of winning here. And it generated thousands of subscriptions to you probably need a robot.com. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? So I'm curious then. So for you, because I mean, you obviously jump quickly on different ideas that you think are, you know, quite large potential.

And outside of the ones you kind of mentioned, kind of the community, the newsletter, are you looking at doing a lot more AI stuff around products that you, because you say you launched five to 10 a year? Or you used to get five companies in the works. Yeah, yeah. So, well, I've been in some form into AI for a long time. So like my co-founder and I have late checkout, you know, I mentioned StumbleUpon. Like, stumble upon was like the OG, you know, personalization.

an AI company. Yeah. So that's how I got into AI. And also I studied computer science at McGill. Shout out Miguel again. I learned a little from that. And yeah, for those you don't know, to stumble upon,

it was basically like a, you know, you put your interest in and you press a button and it would serve you interesting web pages based on some AI and ML. Kind of similar to how like the TikTok for you page really works. But for web pages.

So I've been interested in a while, you know, for a while. But, you know, with all this buzz over the last 12 to 18 months and a lot of our clients asking us for AI product designs, I just wanted to build like a free community because my belief is like if you attract the smartest people into a community and you have like, you know, workshops with them and masterminds with them, you get to know them. Like you, even if you're not an expert, you can become an expert. So the fastest way to learn is to start a community, in my opinion. And I wanted that for my team as well. So from that, I think we're going to build a lot of AI stuff. A lot of the difficulties in AI is not necessarily specific to AI.

Like, again, you're not going to build probably a large language model. The challenges is distribution, packaging. And I mean, this is your area of expertise, right? Like this is distribution packaging is literally like what you do. But you worked at TikTok, right? Yeah, I was an advisor to TikTok. Okay, because of the stumble. Oh, because it would recommend yourself with it.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, actually, the reason why is because I had built like this app five by that got acquired. It was this video discovery app similar to how TikTok worked. And TikTok hired when TikTok, after it was rebranded to TikTok from musically, they hired a bunch of YouTube execs basically. And I knew a lot of those YouTube execs for my Five Buy days.

so they brought me in to help them YouTubeify and grow TikTok. Because at the time it was an app for like 12 year old girls. So we need to ask them. There's a big elephant in this room. Should the United States ban TikTok? Give me your honest opinion. Should the United States ban TikTok? Or force a sale.

What do you think? You too close to this one? What do you think? Oh yeah. I think there's no question. I've never been written about this. I think they should ban and then force the sale. My logic is a little cold wars, but the analogy I always uses this.

If this was the 20th century, it'd be like if the Soviet Union own ABC, CBS, or NBC, right? Like one of the three big television stations that had access to hundreds of millions of Americans. And this is what TikTok is. I'm not saying that there's every single day someone within the CCP is like going into TikTok saying like do XYZ. but we've seen with Chinese tech and Chinese industry, sometimes you don't even have to say. It's understood what you need to do, right? And I mean, Yizaming, the former, I guess he stepped down as a CEO of Bight Dance,

are still chairman, very involved, was he had to apologize for the, I don't know, pronounce the Tutau, the newspaper app. He's like, yeah, CCP is like, we're not liking the content here, so we had to make a huge public apology. So they need the force of sale. I'll tell you what's funny. Obviously, there's only like five or six companies in America that can buy TikTok. But I think it's going to end up being owned by Microsoft, which will just,

Satya is already the biggest animal ever. And he's going to own TikTok, right? And he's going probably buy it for like $30 billion. I think that will be the outcome. So I don't know what you feel about that. But yeah, I don't think it should be owned by a Chinese company with the CCP on the board. I mean, I agree. I have to agree with you. I think Google or Microsoft, but it can't happen to meta because anti-competition, anti-trust, right? Yeah. it could happen to Disney Disney could buy it oh that's interesting

yeah because Disney actually looked at buying Twitter in 2016 I think they had a term sheet everything was ready and then Iger like woke up one day is like I don't want to deal with this fucking I don't want to deal with the moderation bullshit that's going on there Google is interesting because then they own like short form TikTok and yeah longer form YouTube Netflix of course actually let's game this out I'm making a prediction

YouTube is going to buy TikTok, they're going to spin out YouTube. It's going to go public, $500 billion company, done. Clip this. Editor, clip this for what happens in the next 12 months. No, I think that makes sense. I also think Satya buying TikTok, integrating OpenAI, and then turning it into a super app. It's undefeated.

That's it, right? Just go off in the sunset. What other purpose do you have to exist? Like Santosh, go retire after that, man. Yeah, totally. Dude, this has been fun. I got to run, but this is, this is. Greg, I do appreciate the time, man.

That was awesome, dude. Come back anytime. Where could folks follow you on Twitter and plug the podcast also? Yeah. Yeah, we keep super simple. Everything's on my Twitter bio, I was Chongti fan on Twitter. Non-investment advice with Jack Butcher,

who was previously, on Greg's show and then Bilalzati. And yeah, barely A-I is B-E-A-R-L-Y.A-I. It's free to use to try. And if it's in your U-X wheelhouse, I get a lot of dopamine with new sign-ups. So think about that. I love it.

Go follow him. Thanks, Tray. Yeah, absolutely, man. Thanks, Greg. Later.