Why Giving Your Product Away for Free Can Skyrocket Your Business From Zero to 2 Millions

Ash Lonare: At 2:17 in the morning, a founder makes a decision that most businesses would never dare to make. He turns off his revenue. No paywall, no trial, no safety net. Just one bold move. Giving the entire product away for free. Sounds reckless, isn't it? But that single decision goes on to generate millions. Today, we are diving into the story behind DAZ 3D with James Thornton. This is not a polished success narrative. It is a sequence of calculated risks, uncomfortable pivots, and a deep understanding of how people actually behave, not how we assume they do. What happens when you remove every barrier between your product and your audience? In this episode, James, unpack how a freebie model did more than increase downloads. It builds a global community, unlocked unexpected revenue streams, and positioned DAZ3D as a leader in its space. If you're building something, scaling something, or questioning whether your current model is holding you back, this conversation will force you to reconsider the rules. Stay with us. Hello, James. How are you doing today?

James Thornton: I'm great, Ash. How are you?

Ash Lonare: I'm good, I'm good. Thank you so much, James. Before we start then, do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires you, motivates you, would like to share with that audience?

James Thornton: You bet. It was hard, Ash, to pick just one, but the one I settled on is, uh, from Steve Jobs, that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do indeed.

Ash Lonare: That's true. Isn't sure is great stuff. So, James, um, you have, have created a million multimillion dollar reality with data, right? You have that kind of expertise. And I'm looking forward to learn and get all these golden nuggets out of your head today for my listeners, right? That's my job, isn't it? So imagine, imagine you are in a room full of founders, right? They're eagerly waiting for you to join. You walk into the room, you got the stage, you got the mic. The spotlight is on you. What would you tell them as your starting part of your, your speech after hearing to that they will stick with us for the rest of the art.

James Thornton: Wow. Again, that's, uh, Ash, that's a tall task. But, uh, I, I thought a little bit about that, that question. And in the podcast and the speaking I do, I often refer to years, uh, ago, I, uh, was interviewed by Inc. Magazine and our business here, and the business I was running at the time was or is located in Utah. And I had been living in Chicago at the time and had been recruited by a private equity firm to come out and run a Business. Start a part of that business by, by scratch that we can refer to later if you want. And I remember sitting there with the author of the article of Eat magazine and she asked me a similar question to what you asked. And the two thoughts that came to mind were as follows. The first is, you know, the, the real key, and this is sort of cliche, but it's been true throughout my entire career. It is, you know, we were talking specifically about recruiting top tier talent to a small market like Utah. How do you do that? And you know, I, I basically said what you do is you recruit people that are smarter than you are and you give them all the credit. And that's the first piece. The second piece is you want to surround yourself with leaders that can and will make decisions that others can't or won't make. Uh, you know, at the end of the day, you can spend an awful lot of time planning and thinking and strategizing, but it really comes down to execution. And to execute properly, you gotta have good people and you gotta be able to make the decisions that other people's can't. Uh, other people can't or won't make.

Ash Lonare: Indeed, indeed. And that capacity to take risk and make decision at the right time actually drives your present and shows you the right direction for your future. At least the direction. I mean, it could go way beyond the direction. But that's what I, you know, I wanted to use the words carefully.

James Thornton: No, absolutely. And in the environment that we're in today, if you think about everything from the economic headwinds that we seem to be facing globally and all the global unrest and uncertainty, and then you throw in perhaps the most transformational time in history, um, for us, I mean, in terms of innovation and progress around AI, you know, it just requires absolutely that you, you focus on making decisions, you fail fast and you win big. Those are all really, really important principles. And you've got to be able to adjust and be nimble and be quick in, in how you're, you're doing things. Especially when you, you talk about being in such an environment of innovation around AI and other technological advances.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Great stuff. So, James, talk to us more about what is DAZ3D? What does it do, who is it for? And what's the main problem you're trying to solve here?

James Thornton: Great question. So maybe I'll just give you a really brief kind of history of the business. This business is a 25 year old business. Uh, the original business started well before I joined the company and it was a business focused on 3D content creation, digital content creation and creative, creative uh, creating uh, creative digital assets. And so when the company was founded has a software platform, DAZ3D has a software platform called Studio, which is a robust design tool. And we operate under a freemium model. We give that software away for free and then we engage some of the best 3D creators on the planet, hundreds and hundreds of the best 3D artists and they use our technology and our patented protected based technology and content and they create content for a digital marketplace where they bring that content to the marketplace and we rev share it with, with those creators. And it's a great business, it's a healthy, profitable, growing business. But it's also fairly niche around the whole concept of uh, 3D and digital creation. And so a few years ago we founded a new brand called Taffy, uh, which is essentially leveraging all of the wonderful assets we have at daz, the technology, the creator community, the library of content. And we Deploy that in B2B applications and in relationships with some of the top enterprises and corporations in the world. And we've pivoted around different advances in technology. So a few years ago it uh, was all about Web3 and the metaverse and we participated in that, that at great scale around the whole NFTs and we built an eight figure business almost overnight within a couple of months. But just as quickly as that business came it also left. And so we had to pivot again. And so we pivoted to AI. And the good news, as the company has developed and we've developed technology and tools, uh, and very high level content, we've been able to take and adapt that to new technological advances. And so the very procedural tools and AI technology that we started to use around Web3 we now deploy in sort of mainstream AI. And we do have AI tech but we don't build foundation models. Where we come in is we support and train AI models by providing high quality rights owned, semantically labeled, all annotated data that people can use to train models. And we deploy that with awesome companies like Meta and Roblox and Epic and others to help them train around their AI initiatives.

Ash Lonare: Perfect. That's, that's a perfect example of starting smaller with the big vision. Because even though you use the word it's niche but it could be utilized across multiple different verticals. And that's what the beauty of 3D artifacts, right? You can you, could you use it in different uh, industries. Would you be able to give a sense of the size of the business? Where are you from, um, where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team, et cetera?

James Thornton: Sure. We, we literally have uh, you know, millions of people that engage with our technology either through our direct to consumer platform or through our B2B relationships. Um, just our software alone, we've had north of 3 million downloads of our software. It's hundreds of downloads a day and we have a very engaged community. From our UGC community, our direct to consumer community. We have customers, hundreds of thousands of monthly active users that engage in using our platform and they're passionate about what they do. That's what I love so much about Creative Spaces is, you know, our average customer probably spends, I don't know, something like 17 hours, 18 hours a week uh, designing. For most of them, it's not their job, right. It's, it's sort of a side hustle or a passion, something that they really enjoy doing. The business itself does tens of millions of dollars, uh, in, in profitable, profitable revenue. And is, is growing nicely and that is going to continue to grow. We play mostly on the enterprise side, synthetic, on the synthetic data side. And as synthetic data, and particularly 3D synthetic data becomes more and more important, we have a pretty robust outlook for how we expect our business to grow as the demands for our data continue.

Ash Lonare: Awesome. And I don't want to detract our conversation from the creative side of it, but how is AI affecting this whole space in, in. In a holistic way? Because I am guessing the things we used to do in the past when it comes to. I mean you must have seen that Adobe has launched quite a lot of tools, inbuilt, inside Photoshop and whatnot. All the tooling organization, including Microsoft, they are leveraging AI in a big, big, um, uh, in, in their big programs to, to enable enterprises and their employees to utilize it within the tooling itself. How is that affecting DAZ and what's the future plan for it?

James Thornton: Well, uh, again, a wonderful question. I often tell our team and others again when I, when I'm on podcasts like this or speak to others that AI in most spaces, but certainly as it impacts our business in games and tech, as an example, AI is without question the biggest existential threat, but also the biggest opportunity. You know Ash, I think if you were to survey say 500 of the top CEOs, uh, across the technology space, particularly as it relates to AI, those CEOs are going to be sort of split down the middle of will AI create jobs or will they eliminate jobs? I happen to be on the side that it will create jobs. But one thing that I can tell you, if you survey those, those same, that same pool of leadership and you ask them about what they think about AI, they will tell you that employees and companies that position AI in their workflows and do their best to even become AI first or even AI native will be the companies or the employees that win versus those that sort of stick their head in the sand and don't embrace this, this evolution. The one thing in the creative space I can tell you is AI. Well, I think this probably goes across everything, including if you're even using GPT or whatever in your workflows. One thing that, that will, in my opinion, never be eliminated is the need for human touch. AI can certainly make you more efficient. In some cases it can get you to 70 or 80 or maybe even 90% of the output you're looking for. But I think it still requires human intuition and human skill to take and refine that. In fact, if you're working in ChatGPT today, you'll now see a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that says ChatGPT could be wrong. Check the info. And that's where human influence, I think, comes to play. And in our industry where people have amassed this incredible knowledge around, uh, content creation and 3D technology, um, they're you, you still, still can't replace what they can do and their skill set. And so while it is an amazing threat and certainly our business, and I think every business faces headwinds. Again, if you learn how to blend AI with that human skill set and human intuition, I think that's when you get the best output, the best product.

Ash Lonare: Definitely, definitely couldn't agree more with you on being human in the loop when it comes to AI and its final purpose of utilization in any kind of process improvement or productivity improvement, that's for sure. You mentioned something about Daffy, which is, I'm guessing Daz is your top of the funnel where you have this TD modeling software where you acquire a lot of eyeballs by giving this freemium tool for to the end users. But I think the underneath engine is something related to Taffy. Would you be able to share more with our listeners about it?

James Thornton: Sure. So Taffy again, specifically leverages all of those things that the company has built over a couple of decades with Daz3d. Um, and again, what we looked at is if you take for example our creator community who launches hundreds of products a month on our website, and the audience that, that, that we sell to on the DAZ side, Is let's say tens of thousands of annual buyers that buy that content. So when you think about the creators that are creating that content, we looked at AI as an opportunity for them to monetize their product in new ways. So um, and we do that in Taffy does that in sort of two buckets. The first is in the data licensing piece. Uh, you know, one of the things that we've been able to do is create very rights clean structured AI assets, which means we give our artist community or our creator community the opportunity to join our licensing engagements with our enterprise partners. And because of the way we structure the data, we're able to attribute revenue back to those creators. So AI in this case from a data set perspective, has allowed us to be able to create new revenue streams for those users. I would say hundreds of our artists, while they're not our full time employees, make a full time living working with us. And so we're constantly looking through Taffy for new ways to deploy their content and monetize that content in a way that can be attributed back to them. So the data asset licensing for Taffy is the first bucket. The second bucket is to procedurally create content that can actually be sold on other marketplaces or can be deployed in all kinds of different use cases like gaming or training, robotics or whatever. And so just this past week, last week we announced a partnership with Epic and their Fab marketplace to bring content to their marketplace for workflows or streams that are different than what we do at das. So specifically to be able to deploy content in runtime or game ready environments. And we can do that procedurally, we've cracked the code from an AI perspective and a procedural perspective to do that at scale. So where the old way of creating content through our Daz Studio platform may allow us to produce hundreds of products a month, now we literally can scale that and produce hundreds of thousands of products a month that then can be deployed across, like I said, several platforms and several verticals or markets. And in that way it allows not only our company, but allows our UGC community to also monetize their product as well.

Ash Lonare: Interesting, very interesting. You kind of, you already have a marketplace in there, but you kind of also creating um, a platform or product, I don't know what to call it, but it's a medium for people to utilize and create something of their own. For example, I don't know, in my, in simple person's head, I could say I used to create PDF files to sell PDF ebooks right back in 2010. But I used to use Acrobat PDF Reader or Word document or images in those Word documents to, to create it. But you kind of creating this whole environment for the user where they can utilize the whole tool sets technology underneath all the AI functional and everything. And then with the help of that, you're enabling them to become um, I don't know, business, business person or somebody who has a side hustle.

James Thornton: Yeah, you know, you, you've hit the nail on the head. One thing I want to point out is when a uh, creator uses our free tools to create content, they retain ownership of that content. We provide marketing, we provide the support, we provide the business development pipelines, all of those kinds of things. They get the pro, they have the. Just from a practical business perspective, they retain ownership of that content. What you might find interesting is over a five year period, we have over a 95% retention of our creator community. Even though they own those assets and they could take them wherever they want themselves to go, sell that content because they own it, they choose to partner with us and they choose to sell it first on our marketplace and then through these other channels that we've talked about because they know we're going to support them and they know that uh, we're going to treat them fairly and treat them right. And you know, so many businesses today, especially founders in the AI space, they don't have millions and millions of dollars to create their own ecosystem themselves. And so they have to rely on partnerships and have to rely on relationships with others to do that. And as long as you can maintain that strong level of trust and performance, right. You actually are giving results. Then my experience is uh, the fans that we have, the creators that we have stick with us. And so that's, you know, a primary objective. What you talked about, uh, in how you created PDFs and for books and that type of thing, that's exactly analogous to what we do with our creators and the use cases that they use to create with our content is almost endless. I'll give you an example. Some of our customers, some of our partners are very big into AI agents and agentic AI, some of the top digital influencers in the world today and fashion and on social media platforms were creating or were created using our technology and the content created by, by us and by our community. And I love to see that, I love to see the number of businesses at this point. Ash. It has to be in the thousands of people that not only have leveraged their relationship with Daz and Taffy to monetize their Creations, but have gone on to create their own businesses. You might, uh, recall Will Michaela, who is a digital influencer, perhaps the biggest digital influencer in the world today. She was created 100% using Dask, but that's a separate business model for that company who. Those guys built a business with our technology and ended up selling that business to a larger enterprise and made really good money. And nothing makes me feel better than to also be a platform for entrepreneurship and for founders to be able to create businesses using the assets that we provide to them.

Ash Lonare: That is awesome. And I did, did a quick, um, Google search about Lee McKellar, and I can see that it's a 3D generated, um, avatar of Lady. And then they kept posting it. I'm, um, 2.3 million followers. Oh, my God.

James Thornton: Isn't that crazy? And, you know, they. She has contracts with large companies like Ford and Louis Vuitton and others as a, uh, digital spokesperson for. For those brands. And. And that's how they've been able to build that business. That's exactly right.

Ash Lonare: Yeah. This is. This is the. This is the profile I landed on when I searched for Les Miquella.

James Thornton: Yeah.

Ash Lonare: And, uh, you can see that. And the quality is so good. And look at these pictures. Like, she's sitting with, like, the people. I'm guessing one of them is the creator of her, right?

James Thornton: Um, I believe so. I believe that's exactly right. And you're spot on. They partner Loma Kayla with real people as well. And most people don't know that she's not a real human being. Right. Like that. She is a digital personality. Several years. And it's been several years, but several years ago, a Forbes magazine even assigned a net worth of somewhere in the range of like 150 million to 200 million dollars to Lila M. Michaela. So here she is as a digital storyteller and personality who actually has been assigned an actual network.

Ash Lonare: We have CBC icons, and we have museum visits. We have red carpet. Welcome, Dr. We have fest pictures. You know what?

James Thornton: Not like, I won't disclose too much, but the person or the company that created little Michaela, by the way, spent maybe a couple thousand bucks, a few thousand bucks with us, uh, buying content and leveraging our technology to create her. So they went on to spend thousands with us, uh, to hundreds of tens of millions. Hundreds of millions of value created from an investment around thousands of dollars.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Indeed. And that's the beauty of it. Right? That's what I was, uh, talking about. Like, okay, this is what it takes to understand how powerful this technology is. This piece of technology is right. Great stuff. So James, I think one of the biggest challenges we have in founders life is getting the eyeballs, getting the traction, getting people to know about our product. Would you be able to share the story when this platform, Dash 3, the freemium model was started? How did you manage to get your first, let's say ten or a hundred customers and then what is your current strategy in 2026? To get more eyeballs. So I want to compare both of them and I want to communicate it with my listeners that see how different it is for a startup and for a mature business.

James Thornton: Yeah, well, um, you know Ash, this is going to be a plug for you. And for platforms like yours, there is no substitute for taking time like this and being visible. Especially in the age where social media is so powerful today. Uh, you have to be active on that front. And we did a lot of that. I mean once, once your business starts to gain a little momentum. So how we initially grew that, that first piece of business is the company targeted on a very, a very, um, you know, that's what I would suggest to any founder. What I, what I often find is when founders are starting business and, and again when you, when you think about um, around technology like AI, they want to boil the ocean, right? They, they want to go as big and as broad as they can. There is no substitute for building uh, a customer base and building users one step at a time. And to do that you need to focus on, on target audience. In Daz's case, it was originally founded by a couple of guys that had experience creating digital content in the medical industry. And so that was a real primary focus on how they built that user base. What you'll find in communities where there's a lot of loyalty here is your best marketing tool is word of mouth. So you know, we started forums, we started galleries, we gave places for people to engage where we weren't always just asking for a dollar, right? We were, we were building community. And there's no substitute for that. When I joined the company, it wasn't a freemium model. In fact, a big portion of how the company Daz initially monetized was selling the software. And my partner Matt Wilburn, who's the president of our company, and I decided at the time when we took over that we were going to give away the software for free. Boy, that's a big decision. But I find that once you get good product in users hands, then it, then it can scale from there. And so we build our monetization model around the content by giving the software away for free. And so, you know, it went from say, the first 12, almost, uh, the first actually close to 15 years of the history of Daz, where Maybe you had 300, 400,000 downloads at the software. We made the decision to give it away for free. And in the first three months we had a million downloads. So getting exposure to your product in some ways important. And you can do that through podcasts, you will do that through forums and word of mouth. But there, you know, there is sort of a, an organic build. If you don't have the money to spend on SEO and those types of things, you build it by sharing your product as generously as you can and then let word of mouth take over. And then today, once that happens and you build up that database, because we decided to give the software for free, we've created a very vetted, secure active email list of well over a million, probably closer to 2 million active customers that engage and are going to open those emails. And so today, for that business, we primarily market through email and through direct to consumer marketing that way, which is also a much more inexpensive way than to go out and spend a ton of money on buying ads or media or whatever in order to promote your business. So really for founders, the more organic you can spread your word out of the gate, the more success you're going to have and the more you're going to build, uh, an engaged, loyal consumer base.

Ash Lonare: And I couldn't agree more on this one with you, Jen, because the reason is this is what exactly we have tried recently with, uh, one of the product we have built. And this is so funny that you mentioned this strategy, building a community and the content around it. Even though if you don't have money that I cannot resist myself to share this. Yeah, it's, it's true. And it's like it's a real world example. Right. So we've been, we've been having, struggling with, um, publishing our social media content, um, or actually creating our social media content, um, in this, at a scale. Yeah. So what we did is we uh, thought, okay, what's the solution for it? We sat down in a room and we figured out like, what should we do? And what we found out is there are things during your video editing process which you can actually automate and you can do it on the servers. For example, you can actually, uh, add intros to your video, you can add outros, you can add captions, can add background audio to your video. Or you can actually add B rolls with the help of AI generating AI images and then send it to server and create it. And then when we were having this discussion and then when we have hired some UGC influencers, um, there was noises around, oh, it, it will never work because nobody wants this. They can open their editing tool on their machine and use it. And what we did is we launched just one API, which is the Captions API, right? And then we just gave everyone dollars of credits online. We put it on product and Reddit and everything. People started signing up and they all started using this API for no reason. Just one is because it's simple. You send the video to our API, it captions it, burns the caption into it as per your, you know, preferences and then get gives back you the final product and you can actually upload the file on Google Drive also. That's how easy we made it. But then what happened is we started sending emails to these users, okay, what other use cases you would like to build around it? And they say, oh, well, we want to concatenate multiple files into one movie. We want to um, add background audio, we want to add intro and every single email we receive back from that small community, we created another endpoint and now we have almost around 600 plus users on our platform. We don't have any subscription, we don't have any um, charges. What we have is a very simple credit based system. So whatever you want to do with all the APIs we have right now, so you can browse on all the APIs, you just charge your account with some um, uh, credits and then use it for that purpose.

James Thornton: That is so cool by the way. You just gained a customer so we don't have to do it on this podcast. But I uh, certainly want to engage with uh, your Caption API and your other tools, both for Daz and Taffy as well. As I mentioned before we started the podcast, this new business that I've started, the AI Ranch, yeah, this is exactly the kind of tools we were looking for. I was going to ask you if you uh, if and you're doing it with the credit system. I was going to ask you if you tokenize the platform because that's also a common process. But that's exactly sort of what you're doing. You're not calling it tokenization or tokens, but it's the exact same concept. You're giving your customer tokens and allowing them to use the API. And by the way, that's, that's how companies today are Taking that tokenized strategy, that credit strategy that they're using and they're actually. ICOs are back. Right, That's a thing again. Um, and uh, you know, could be a very interesting outcome for your business. So we'll have to offline. I'd love to get more information about engaging with your platform, but this is a hundred percent what I'm talking about and you're, you're doing it. And I'll, uh, I'll tell you what, even businesses like ours that are doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue could benefit from what you are building as well as those companies that are pre revenue and are just starting. So congratulations on um, doing that. I can't wait to learn more and start utilizing, uh, your resources.

Ash Lonare: And I want to echo your point is you need to do the hard work at the start, but you need to solve a pain point and you have to focus on the community. So whosoever list listening to this part, remember what James said before we started this conversation is community is the heart of every business when they start. And I think no matter how big you grow, it will stay as the center of the business. Great stuff. Well, James, thank you so much. Let's jump into our quick fire round. I've got six quick fire questions for you. Okay. Um, at any stage, if you feel that you don't want to answer any of this, just give me a skip and move on to the next one. Okay, Sounds good. All right, what are the top three strategies for generating more eyeballs for founders in 2026 for their startups?

James Thornton: Top three strategies. So the, the first is build a compelling product. And as part of building that compelling product, again, I, I would encourage founders to not try to build oil the ocean, but to be very focused. Start small, start something that's executionable and that you can bootstrap. That's, that's number one. Number two, again, it's all about who you surround yourself with. So if you don't have the dollars to hire employees, find yourself good advisors, network with, with other professionals, put yourself out there so people can get to know you and you can get to know people. It's exactly like what you and I just did. Ash, I have a feeling you and I are going to be friends for a long time and are going to be able to leverage and use each other for ideas and brainstorming and things like that. That's really important. And then the third is, and you've already said this, absolutely focus on the community first. Building a great product is an important Part of this process, as I just mentioned. But at the end of the day, you've got to solve a problem and to do that, you've got to engage your community and allow your community the opportunity to give you candid woe so that you can make consistent improvements and go from milestone to milestone. If you do that based on voice of the customer, you're much more sure to succeed than if you're sitting in a room, uh, or in an office by yourself, just trying to do it alone or with a few people. The more people, the more voices, the more voice of the customer, the more successful you'll be.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Indeed. What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

James Thornton: So, you know, I'm kind of old school. You could probably tell from the little bit of gray hair. Good to Great is a, uh, book that I refer to back consistently if you, if you want to cut to the chase. Uh, I won't, I won't spoil this for any readers that haven't read it. But the hedgehog concept, the hedgehog principle, which is still consistent with what we've already talked about. So read Good to Great. It's. It's awesome for every business.

Ash Lonare: I'm going to add that into my reading list right now. I'm, uh, reading through, uh, never split the difference from. That's really cool. I think once I finish that, then I'll jump onto this one. Great stuff. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful farm?

James Thornton: I. You gotta have thick skin. Oh my gosh. I mean, on a daily basis I, uh, deal with failure. Usually on a daily basis I deal with success. And you have to be willing to not let the failure get you down or derail your enthusiasm. Have thick skin.

Ash Lonare: Indeed. Indeed. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

James Thornton: Great question. So because I'm so focused on AI, large language models, uh, are, are an important part of my personal and professional workflow. I use it every day. And so, you know, again, I encourage people no matter what your job, your work of life is, find a way to start small in engaging this new technology and you'll find that it, it makes you more efficient, uh, every day. So certainly use those tools. So shout out. I'll shout out to my friends at OpenAI. Use ChatGPT.

Ash Lonare: Definitely. What's a new or a crazy business idea you would love to pursue if you had time?

James Thornton: So, uh, I mentioned this again off the hop. Our family has a ranch in southern Utah and I'm starting a business called the AI Ranch, which is Bringing AI to rural communities and blue collar work environments. And again, those are traditionally areas where the demographics are fearful of AI. So there's going to be a lot of education and a lot of patience and a lot of energy around that. But so I'll call it AI for the average person, the everyday person, and particularly those in job works, uh, in jobs or in communities where AI is yet to reach that.

Ash Lonare: Yeah, I like the name AI Ranch. So you can actually use that.

James Thornton: Yeah, I mean it's so fun. You'll see a lot on social media really soon about blending our family ranch and ranch life, which I still work on the ranch. We raise, uh, cattle and uh, again learning how to blend something that is that, you know, roll up your sleeves hard everyday work with technology. So sometime you and I can, can talk even more about the AI Ranch if you'd like.

Ash Lonare: Definitely, definitely. And last but not least, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

James Thornton: I love fly fishing. There. There is something serene and special about standing in a river with only the noise of the river. I don't get to do it as, as much as I like to, but I'm, I'm passionate about spending that time.

Ash Lonare: Awesome. Great. Well James, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story. Unpacking the years of building this business and some of the ups and downs. If people want to check out, people want to get in touch with you. They have any questions, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

James Thornton: So our website is daz3d.com so you can certainly reach us through that website there. You can learn more about that UGC community that I talked about. If you go to the product tab and want to scroll down to AI to AI products, you can learn more about AI there and then. I am always available and open to people as best I can and I'm learning to use AI agents to manage all my inbounds. But don't hesitate to reach out to me at jamesake. Com. Uh, and I would love to hear from you.

Ash Lonare: Great stuff. Well James, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your inspiring journey and the impactful work you're doing in the creator's world. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on founders podcast.

James Thornton: Pleasure for me too, Ash and I learned a lot. Congratulations on your business success again. I look forward to speaking with you again in the future and leveraging what you're building.

Ash Lonare: Great stuff. Thank you so much.

James Thornton: Thank you, Ash.

Ash Lonare: We did.