Unlocking the Secrets of AI Entrepreneurship with Founder Andrew Amann

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: This is Product by Design, a podcast by Prodity where we explore technology, artificial intelligence, user experience, product management, and the philosophy of building products and companies. Welcome back to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle and, and this week we have another awesome guest with us. Andrew. Amen. Uh, welcome to the show, Andrew.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Kyle. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to have you. I'm excited to talk about some of the things that you have been working on. But before we do that, let me do a very brief introduction for you and then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. But Andrew is the CEO and co founder of 923AI Studio, an AI agency building products for funded startups and established brands like Consumer Reports, SimpliSafe, Experian. And he's also the founder of 14 companies with multiple exits, two, uh, patents, and a kind of a leader in the space. So, Andrew, I'm really excited to talk to you about what you've been doing recently and in the past because obviously there's a lot there. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Speaker A: Sure, yeah. That was a good introduction. Intro. We've been building products for a very long time. I think I've built about 150, 160, where I was either the product engineer or the lead account manager on it. We now have a team of 70 people from all around the world building for enterprise clients. And it's been a great experience to go from building, starting with startups, to building 14 of our own startups, to having all that experience of different business models and different industries. So the team is really the strong point here. We've solved problems together. We've uh, been solving problems together now for 12 years. And it's just a, uh, pleasure when we get a very complicated problem from a very, very good client. And in four to five months we're putting something out to the world that sometimes has hundreds of thousands of users on them. So it's been, been a joy to build different products in different spaces.

Speaker B: Love it. That sounds really exciting and something that makes me excited too, as a product person, you know, building new products, finding these challenges, and then doing it across multiple companies and multiple industries. Uh, so I want to dive into that. But again, before we do, what else do you like to do outside? Outside of the office.

Speaker A: So it's start, it's 28 degrees outside, so it's starting to get into ski season. So I'll Be traveling around the country, west coast mostly, to ski on some of the bigger mountains. But my family and I, we go about 15 times a year to 15 different mountains. So that's, that's the winter activities. But I, if I could, I'd play basketball every single day. But as I'm getting older, my body is not able to handle the stress and the needs of playing basketball. Also 3D print and I hang out with my kids a lot, as much as I can.

Speaker B: Awesome. Do you have a favorite ski resort or place that you like to ski?

Speaker A: Yeah, we love J Peak up here in the east. It's the farthest north mountain here. But, uh, we also have been going to Rangeley, which is as a mountain called Saddleback, uh, which we really enjoy, kind of the quieter mountains without the crowds.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Well, I'm excited too. I was up on the slopes a week or two ago, and I am excited for ski season as well. So, yeah, we have a lot of great ski in Utah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I want to dive into some of the things that you kind of mentioned because you have obviously done a lot, built a lot of products, and I want to talk about that. But as we do that, why don't you kind of tell us about your journey? You know, you've founded multiple companies, working with your agency right now. Where did you start and kind of what led you to this point?

Speaker A: Sure. So I started as an intrapreneur. I didn't know what it was when I was doing what I was doing, but I worked for a nuclear submarine company. And within two to three years, I was a pump engineer. Just, I worked on one component of the submarine called the hovering pump. And as I investigated and saw that an organization has different places that you can work on or try to work on or spend, you know, a portion of your time there, I realized that I could dedicate my time and my energy to extra work or overtime work. And that allowed me to get into designing the aft engine, aft end of a submarine, uh, which led to working on the supply chain part of how submarines get put together. And then just by presenting over and over different ideas or concepts or not being shame, shame. Like, I was not really bashful about putting these ideas out into the world and people at first would reject it. But I did present something about 20 times of how the company can save money through a supply chain operation. And it was the first time that Bluetooth and WI Fi had been used together in a manufacturing plant to track parts. So after my 20th presentation, the CEO of, uh, the company finally realized that this is something that has a very short return on investment. And this guy has been presenting 20 times. Maybe we should just give him a shot. And so I was, uh, able to build a supply chain tracking mechanism that has three United States, two United States patents, one pending. And those patented ideas are now used in Amazon warehouses across the world. And my job for the next four years after I invented that was to travel around the world to install that system into nuclear power plants in France and England and Scotland and the United States. And so that Intrapreneur taught me how to take ideas and put it out into the world. It didn't teach me ownership. And so my journey into entrepreneurship and owning my own company was basically just switching the vocation and not switching my energy, time and what I was doing. And so that was an easy transition to say, I can bet on myself and do the same thing that I'm doing. And we ended up coming up with a, uh, digital business card idea. Originally, it was based on the same chip that I had invented where two people would shake hands and they'd be wearing the bracelet and that information would pass from one person to the other. But my co founder immediately when we started together was like, you're an idiot. We're not doing hardware. Let's do some software. And we came up with QR codes. And so we were the first and largest digital business card using QR codes back in like 2012, 2014, before it was even in the phone operating system.

Speaker B: Wow. Um, that's a lot of really interesting things there. And I'm always interested in the patent process because there's a lot that goes into that. What did that look like for you, especially as you kind of created this new chip and went through that process and then to have it not just be for the specific use that, that you were kind of looking at within your role, but then to expand it out to so many other places. Like, what did. What was that whole experience like?

Speaker A: Yeah, so the patent itself I came up with, I wrote the patents, uh, with help from the company lawyers, and we had an outside patent attorney that was assisting. But when you go through that, you really have to write almost everything yourself. You have to write the ideas, you have to draw the diagrams. And they're huge, they're hundreds of pages. And so they elaborate a lot more than I would have. Uh, so there was definitely assistance there. But the patents are only good for the people that want to protect the ideas. And so this nuclear company decided that it was Good for the nuclear industry. And that was it. When Amazon started using this technology, it is probably the same exact idea with the same concept and it probably has a little bit of overlap, but it's nothing like there's no one to defend it, there's no one to argue it in court. So while it's out there in the world and it's great that this technology is being used elsewhere, it's something that I'm not seeing any revenue from or income from. And even today, I mean, I advise, I think we saw 100, almost 100 proposals this year. Uh, so we put out 100 ideas. And there are people that ask me all the time, should I patent this idea, especially in the software world? And I say to them, like, probably not needed. You're probably going to have to be able to defend it. And if you don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's. If Amazon is the one that's copying you, are you really going to spend your money and time defending this idea or are you just going to keep building and trying to win the little slice of the pie that can be your marketing or your sales? And so I don't know. In today's world, it's harder to envision software really being defendable by the small companies. But if you're a big conglomerate and you have an idea or a piece of hardware that is differential like we did at the time, I think it is important to get a patent.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great call out. So you, uh, mentioned as well that, you know, you have founded multiple companies. So starting with the, the patent idea that you had and then moving into, uh, the, the first company that you founded. Tell us about your experience founding companies. You know, what was it like in the very beginning as you were just getting started, and then what was it like as you moved on from, you know, the first one and the first ones and really maybe got some sort of process going.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's looking back, I remember at a time I was kind of bragging or very excited about the idea that I was, I was really good at, um, forming a company in Delaware, setting up the registered agent and getting the paperwork all done to start a company because we had started 14 of them. And so I almost thought I was like my, you know, special place in the world was the person that could do that type of stuff. Look, looking back, it's the most nonsensical and easy thing to do in a startup and has nothing to do with if the startup's going to be Successful. So it's just a funny kind of at the time you think you're superman and you think you're doing something unique. But that whole process of starting companies is really about trying to find product market fit. We're a product company and we were really good at building products. And because we had an agency attached to the venture studio, it was really just the kind of wood shipping aspect of the business. When somebody was on the bench, they would work on one of the startups and if they didn't have a startup to work on, I'd come up with another one. And so as the company grew and as the agency grew, the number of startups grew as well. Now I've talked to a lot of venture studios because I thought at the time that was going to be our future. It turns out that of the 700 that are listed on the startup, uh, there's a website that tracks all the venture studios and Startup Studios. About 300 of them had dead phones or were out of business. And then of those 300 that I talked to, the people that were still successful are the ones getting venture backed funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So to bootstrap your own venture studio, it's a very difficult and daunting task. I wouldn't recommend it to the faint heart, but it was so much fun. We learned a lot and by building from zero to one it's given us this, this like insight into industries that we typically wouldn't have had insight into. And now we have clients in those industries. So the payoff has been great for an agency. But if you're not an agency and you have no kind of wood chipping that you can do with the startup studio and kind of flipping it back to the agency, it's really uh, a really long big hill to climb for small return.

Speaker B: Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. Um, I'm interested in what you mentioned about product market fit because that is such an important thing. And you know, how did you, and how do you really determine product market fit in what you were doing in your earlier businesses and now the things that you're working on?

Speaker A: Yeah, we're so much better at it now. I mean just maturity is the solution of product market fit. And I used to talk to these founders that I was always in awe of and I would say, how did you find product market fit? And you kind of, a lot of people, it's just shots on goal. You try enough things, eventually you find your audience. But the biggest thing that I've learned is to, to have the um, I don't know what the right word is but like the non ego to say I'm giving up on everything else and I'm going to focus on this little small set of the audience that seems to be working really well for me. So I'm not going to be this product for everyone. I'm going to be a product for this small audience and I'm only interested in a million dollars. And if those are the individuals that then grow to 2, 5, 20, 30. But you have to have that insight and that ability that like brain vod like you really like give up your ego and say I don't need to go for the billions, I don't need venture backed money anymore. I have a product that's working and I have this small audience that's really interested in it. Let me be their biggest fans so that they can be my biggest fan for a long period of time. When we did that, we finally got rid of all the startups, focused on the agency and said we're just for established brands and funded startups. Those are our two clients and they've been our two clients now for four years. And finally Inc. 5,004 times in a row. Right? It really works. And I have friends that you know, run $40 million businesses because they got rid of 10 businesses, focused on one and put all their energy into that one business and now they're rocking and rolling with that one business. Right, with 25 people working for them. So it's, it's this like concept of giving up on your ego or giving up on the venture backed style or being on TechCrunch and just saying look, I want to run a small business. I, I want to be profitable and I want to have this business for a long period of time.

Speaker B: I think that's great advice and a couple things that you mentioned, you know, really focusing on what it is like your goals that you want out of it and then focusing on the specific group that makes the most sense. I've found that that tends to be one of the hardest parts for many products and many organizations is letting go of the idea that you can't necessarily be a product for everyone, for everything but, but you can be very, very good at a specific thing and if you start there, you may eventually become much more. But if you're trying to be everything, if a product or an organization is trying to be everything, you're not going to really have the focus and dedication to make the product or the experience special for the right group of People and grow from there.

Speaker A: Yeah. Seth Gooden was just on, uh, Lenny's podcast and he had that exact advice. He said, you're not really building a product until you know you're your biggest fans. He always talks about your tribe. But the whole concept that you just said is really hard for entrepreneurs to understand. And you can hear it from the greats, you can hear it from people like you and me. You can hear it from all of these people that have experience. And you still hear entrepreneurs putting on their slide deck. The audience is a billion people. Big. If I can get 1% of that audience, I'm going to make $100 million. And you're like, that's cool, that's aspirational. But at the end of the day, I want to see a thousand people that have their credit cards on file waiting for you to release this product with 100,000 people in a community that you have access to so that when this product goes live, you're going to take the shots on goal with the a hundred thousand people that you've already curated in the community. Those are the products that are going to end up winning regardless of what the product market fit is for the product.

Speaker B: I think you're exactly right. Went through something like that recently where we continue to just whittle and whittle down the, the target audience. It went from a, uh, lot of people to it's this very, very specific group that we think is going to be ready to use our products. You know, very excited and okay with it being very early because it's, you know, brand new thing that was very hard for most of the organization and executives, like, they didn't want to narrow that much. But we had to push very hard to do that in order to make it the right thing for this group, this very, very small group so that we could actually get the product market fit and the adoption and then grow from there. Like you can always make it bigger and expand, but if you don't have anyone using it, you will never get the traction to do anything.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the other lesson there that's kind of in between the lines is when we first did our first product, There was a $7 business card and so we had 20,000 users. It sounds fantastic, but that is not even, uh, one of our products that we're building now. It's not even like a percentage of the number of users or revenue that it can make. So you shouldn't, you have to pick a market where the ticket price is high enough because exactly like you're saying if you're going to whittle down the audience to a small subset and you're selling a $10 product, you need 100,000 people to break a million dollars of revenue. If you have a hundred dollar product, you only need 10,000 people. If you have a thousand dollar product, well, it's starting to make a lot more sense to get that audience very small but very dedicated to you. So that every time Joey or Jimmy or Julie or Susie calls you, you know them by name, you know their experience, you know why they're buying your product. Because if you have a hundred thousand people, you probably know ten or a thousand right at most. And those people aren't going to help you move the needle. So you, if you whittle down the audience, you also need to make sure the ticket price is high enough.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a perfect call out for how you want to approach product market fit. You know, what is the product you're doing and then the other side of that is what's the market and what's the right thing for not just that group, but what's going to also make sense to build as a business. Because like you said, a $10 product that may have a very, very small group of people who love it just isn't going to be sustainable if it's, you know, a hundred or two hundred people who are just all in, but nobody else. Well, I'm interested. You've mentioned the current studio, uh, that you're working on right now. 923. AI Studio. What is the process that you take M after all of these things you've learned and all of the different businesses and products that you've built, what is your product process? What does that look like as far as understanding and then creating the thing for these companies when they come to you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I wish I kept track of the iteration number because we have to be on iteration 50 of this. We've been selling AI products for eight years and this has been the hardest year to convince people to buy an AI product. And it seems to be kind of paradoxical. It should have been the other way around. But the process of building an AI product that we've discovered now is first you have to convince the company that the AI product is necessary for their return on investment, but it's also necessary for them now. And that is the hardest part of the entire thing is any CEO, you know, 10 million, 100 million, a billion dollar company is coming to us and asking us For a workshop, can you come into my office, can you come into my business and look around and see where we can apply AI? Uh, those are the people that are at the very raw beginning of discovering that AI is something that can help them, but having really no clue where in the business it can, it can help their business the most. And so we've introduced this workshop idea because we have to walk around the shop, watch people working, watching what we call workflows, so we can create a digital transformation around their, their workflows. And what happens there is, we see a lot of paper pushing and we see a lot of data entry. So manufacturing industrial plants like those, those types of industries are ripe for AI because they missed the cloud introduction. They're still using MRP or ERP systems from the 80s or 90s and they really just don't have a solution of how to get the stuff into the cloud to work from home. So they're sitting in their offices and pushing this computer screen to somebody else's computer screen to take action. And so that's the beginning phase of what we call a workshop. A lot of CEOs or startups that are in the $10 million range or have some ideas how AI works or have seen it work in somebody else's business before we go into product strategy and engineering discovery with them. And that's about a four to six week process where we sit down and we get access to all their systems and we roadmap and create user diagrams and user flows of exactly what this product will look like. And then finally we move into a retained team and that retained team will build what came out of the product strategy sessions and either two to four months and we create what's called the first initial launch. We've given up on MVPs because an MVP for AI means you still have a lot of work to do. We go strictly for the first production launch so that we can see a return on investment and then we can guess at the beginning with high accuracy of what the return on investment is going to be. And then by the time we release it, we can see how close we are to that gas and that actuality. As of Today, our last 12, we're seeing return on investments in months instead of years. We're even seeing one that's getting eight figures returns with a six figure investment. So these returns are massive. And if I could just tout any AI, uh, company, I would say you have to start, I mean any company that's interested in AI, like why would you look into These types of services, you just have to start and you'll start seeing the returns very quickly.

Speaker B: I think that's really interesting, especially you know, how you kind of follow that process of, you know, understanding and then creating and then ultimately the return on investment. I'm interested in. You talked about some of the industries where some of these transformations have the biggest impact, manufacturing being one. Where do you see the biggest benefits of some of the products and specifically the AI that you're focusing on. Obviously areas where they don't have nearly as much automation or things like that, like manufacturing are there under other industries as well that you're seeing could or are benefiting significantly from from AI and from incorporating that into their business and their products.

Speaker A: Yeah, we've had a lot of interest from places like legal offices or consultants that do a lot of research. AI is very good at top of the summary, like aggregating data, bringing it together, summarizing it and analyzing it. It's also getting very good at if a person was following a specific process. Step A, step B, step C and then if steps step C has an if or, and that if or brings you down step D or step G. Like that type of like algorithm where worker is going through a systemized process. AI is very good at. So uh, we have a lot of proposals out for, for lawyers and law firms. We have solved a few problems in maintenance where there's reports or maintenance types programs that happen on a general cadence and we have to predict or analyze those maintenance reports and figure out is it truly a maintenance problem, Is it something you can skip? So a lot of places where humans go through that workflow and they have to make that decision, but that decision is based on known information. We can inject that known information into a knowledge base and help that human make the decision or replace the human in making that decision. But what I tout to every single client, and this has been true with every product we released, we have never replaced an employee. We have always increased revenue per the number of employees they had in the company. And every company we've deployed these systems to has been to enhance those employees so that they can do high value things to increase the revenue. And it's been true for the last, I would say 12 to 24 projects we release now.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like that a lot. Uh, especially when it comes to the augmenting of the human capability because I think that that is where many of us are finding the most value rather than the, like you said, the outright replacement of people, the ability to take some of these like very process oriented things and move them to AI or move them to automate some sort of automated, uh, place and then really focus humans where they are the most valuable, which like you said, is the places where the data isn't known a lot of times or we don't have like processes to follow and things like that. Let, let AI do that thing that's very good at and let people do the things that they're very good at.

Speaker A: That's right. That's right.

Speaker B: Where do you see the. You know, obviously there's a lot of talk of AI right now and you've been working in this space for a long time, but with the introduction of LLMs and other um, you know, ChatGPT and many of these very latest products, we've seen just a tremendous amount of discussion and hype around it. Where, where generally do you see things going over the next few years within this space?

Speaker A: I think the race right now is happening between the tech giants to acquire as much data as possible so they can create that AI agent that is the personalized agent for every human. And that works with three aspects that are very important in the value chain of creating an AI assistant. The first one is that the device has to live next or near the human. So it has to be a laptop or a phone and that operating system or the browser, whatever is logged in, has to be able to take in the human's thoughts and tendencies and ideas to convert that to what the AI can then take action on. So OpenAI is in a tough spot right now because they don't have that hardware, they just have an application that you probably have to skip over Gemini to get to or you're going to have to skip over Siri to get to. Uh, so they have to come out with a hardware solution very soon. And I think for them to survive in the next three years, if they don't have a direct hardware path with that button on the side of the phone, they will become extinct to Gemini and Siri. Uh, because people are buying iPhones and Androids all the time, I don't hear of anyone buying a chatgpt phone. So that's the first value chain that's like inevitable. You have to have that button on the side of a device to get access to the large language model that is your true assistant. But the second one that I speak on stage is a lot about is the search bar. We have a lot of databases that I'm familiar with that you are not like. I call it app stacking. I use bamboo for 3D printing. I have bank of America, I use Uber. When I take a taxi cab, I use Airbnb. But all of these apps know about me because I have logged in information for them and I save my information there. But if it wasn't for me, the human, no one else could be able to kind of pick apart the databases that I use to search for things. Now I might use Etsy instead of Amazon. So if I was to find a toaster, I'd be a lot different than 90% of the humans that are using Amazon. And so that whole concept there is going to then peel back into this one search bar that exists alongside the device I was speaking of. Whether it's Siri or Gemini, that search bar is going to start to have information of every search I do across the Internet. And it's different than Google. Google only searches stuff from my browser. When I go into Amazon, I am using the Amazon search that Google has no idea what I'm searching in Amazon. That's going to change very fast. It's going to be one search bar for every human to search the Internet. And whoever owns that search bar is going to deal with the third part of the value chain, which is security. Is that part of it going to be something that the human owns, the individual owns, or is Google going to own all of the information that gets passed through there and be able to advertise it? So in the next three years, I'm looking very carefully at those three aspects of the value chain because whoever owns that stack is going to win the AI race.

Speaker B: I think that's a fascinating, fascinating way to look at it, and just the importance of the data as part of it, but also the individualized portion of it where it's not just the hardware, it's not just the LLM behind it, but it's pulling all of these things together into what potentially could be a very user centric type of experience where I, I have my own version of all these things that knows me, uh, well enough to know that I want to, you know, rather than just order something, is it, can I go to a store nearby and buy, and buy it? Like, are there places to do that or is it only available online? And like knowing these things about somebody in order to facilitate like what those decisions might be, as opposed to just pulling up a search and saying, here's all the results of everything and now it's up to you to start filtering it.

Speaker A: That's right, that's right. And we got to remember too that the uh, AI Assistant is individualized search. That also means the SEO rankings and the results that you're getting should be individualized as well. Depending on where you live, depending on the number of animals you have in your house, depending on the number of kids and your wife and your demographics, all of that should be catered to that search. And the more the AI assistant knows about me and my tendencies, the more it should be able to predict the blue links. I mean, if you had told me the business model of Google today, I would not invest in that company. And basically, the idea is simple. I'm going to give you a search bar with no other buttons, with no other value chain, with no other way to make money. And every search, I'm going to read 400,000 links, and I'm going to have a special algorithm that's going to tell each user which link they should click on. And I'm going to be so smart that I'm going to make sure that every user clicks on the first three links. That just sounds daunting and ridiculous to the humans now, but that's how we lived for the last 15 years while Google has dominated search. And I think AI is here to change that. AI is going to say, I'm a human that has specific needs that's different than every other human, and when I search, I only want to see results that are catered towards me. I only need three links, four links, five links, because the rest of them are nonsense to me anyways. But I want all five of those links to be values and brand brands that have similar values to me. And if that's true, I'm going to have a great experience. When I stand on the corner of a street and say, I need a taxi to get to the airport. I don't care who picks me up. If it's Uber or Lyft, sounds great to me. It just. I need to get to the airport, and I only have $22 that I'm used to paying. I'm fine with a $23 bill. And if Uber can get me there or Lyft can get me there, fantastic. I don't need to log into their service or download their app. Uh, I just need to shout into my voice messenger, get me to the airport. And so that's the experience I think we're all heading towards, and we need to be aware of all the old systems we've used that are no longer necessary.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a great call out and a, uh, fascinating thing to be watching. I feel like Things have moved so quickly that the potential to get to some of these things that we probably would have thought of are years and years away could potentially be happening much sooner than we anticipated. If you would've asked us like a year or two ago, like, where is this going?

Speaker A: Yeah, AI is moving fast, but it's also moving very slow. And I know this is like the thing you shouldn't say as an AI leader because then all these companies seem like, well, I can wait 10 years. But I just saw the Sora release on OpenAI with the video and it's not replacing video. Real humans, the legs don't even walk without the legs shifting the side of the body. And I know this is the worst it's ever going to be from here on out. Like, this is the worst and it's always going to get better. But my point I'm making is that there's a lot of promises that large language models make. There's a lot of hallucination that large language models have, and there are a lot of things that we need to solve as a human race of how we're going to deal with these systems. So auto driving was promised to us in 2020. And back in there's a chart that I have in 2016, there was a chart of how every road is going to have autonomous driving vehicles in 2020. And I don't think there's a single autonomous vehicle on the road that can go from my house to California without a human interaction. And so there's a long path of government regulations, of power supply of power demand that we're going to have to deal with to get these large language models into the use of every human and every device. And those, the bottlenecks are no longer AI. The bottlenecks are no longer the path to AGI. The bottlenecks are the government and the power supplies and the energy that's required to run these systems. And until we solve that, which could be a 10 to 15 year plan, we're going to have to limit how much people can use the AI models on their phones because it's not fair if human A can use it more than human B. And so there's different factors of this now. And because large language models are out of the bag, there's a lot to be done with privacy and security because even today you can still hack these systems to do very nefarious and bad things every time they're released. So I just think AI is moving fast from the release standpoint and the technology standpoint. And Nvidia stock has taken off, but it's moving very slow from the government, the policies and the regulations, and we need to catch up.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it'll be, again, it'll be another fascinating thing to see how we continue to evolve both as a society and then what governments are going to do and what kind of path we're looking at around the world. Because every government seems to be taking kind of a different approach to how to address some of these things as they're coming up, whether it's in Europe or here in the United States. What is going to be some of the driving forces behind that? And like you said, the investment that goes into it to make this a, uh, sustainable thing. Because it's only going to need more focus and more energy and all of these things that aren't quick fixes that we could just solve immediately. That's right.

Speaker A: The other aspect too, that I think we all forget about is it works really well for the personal assistant side of things. It doesn't work so well when a company is trying to trust it to do something perfect. And that's where the agencies come in. That's where people like us can control it and manage it and be responsible for making sure it has the correct output. But if you're using these off the shelves, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Gemini, whatever you're using, it's not foolproof yet. It's just a game, it's just a feature. And what's going to happen very soon is we're going to switch to having AI like electricity. It's going to be part of every system, it's going to be part of every computer. It's going to be baked into the keyboard, as you saw Microsoft's doing. Every device you pick up is going to have this large language model attached to it. And now it becomes electricity. And the tokens are going to matter and how much usage is going to matter. That means every company is going to aggregate their devices and their usage for the large language model. So that whole infrastructure, think of electricity from when it was invented till, I don't know, the 1950s, there was an entire infrastructure that needed to be built to support humans having electricity in their homes and their houses and in their cars and everything. We have to build that infrastructure to support these large language models.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that will be a massive, massive project over the next little while. And I'm sure, and, um, be interesting how, how we go about it and what comes of it. I'm interested in, as you kind of look back on all the things that you've done and created. What would be something that you would say is kind of the main thing that you've learned over the years or even recently that maybe you had wish you had known earlier?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think that the biggest like older person realization is that enough's enough and being on the COVID of TechCrunch and being venture backed is not all that. Uh, it sounds like it doesn't sound as appealing as, as being bootstrapped and profitable and running a business. Giving up ownership is a very tough thing. It sounds great at the beginning because you actually can build a larger project and I know plenty of people that have given up ownership and made it billion time over more successful than we will. Uh, but that's a long road and it's a long payout and it also requires scaling a company past the thousand people and past a billion dollars of revenue to achieve that. And there are stomachs and peoples that can do that. But not everyone's cut out to go from that zero to one mentality. There's a whole world that is not talked about as much, that is not touted in TechCrunch, that people don't promote as much. And that's the bootstrapped consultancy world. The apprenticeship, the ability to be really good at something and have a vocation in that and be really talented at something that the world is seeking, whether it's design or computer engineering or design, I mean ui, UX or architecture of systems, whatever it happens to be. If you can be an expert in that area and sell your time for money and make sure that you truly love what you do, there is a path that you can make a million dollars and be completely better off than 99% of Americans. And it doesn't take like you can be rich. The downside of that conversation is it's going to take you a really long time. So it's just the path that you decide you want to go on. Do you want to go three years and look like you're doing really well on the COVID of TechCrunch with a venture capitalist, you know, in your back pocket? Or do you want to take the 15 year road, build very slowly and have success at the end of 15 years? And I wish for me personally, somebody told me that we're now 12 years into this, that your 12th year is going to be awesome, but it's going to be awful from year one to 11 because from year like two to 10, it sounds like you're never going to make it and you're always wondering, should I quit? Should I give up? Is this not worth it? But by year 11, 12, 13, it's fantastic and it's well worth the effort. And you just have to get through all of those down years to get to that point.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that and I love the focus on, you know, it doesn't have to be the splashiest billion, $2 billion startup that is making all the news in order for you personally for any of us to find the right value there and for it to be like a very successful business as well. You know, that's when we think about how many billion dollar startups are there. There just aren't that many. But how many smaller companies and agencies that have been built by passionate individuals solving problems. There are a lot. And that can be a path that is for a lot of people, a much happier path rather than trying to manage and scale up to a billion dollars. And then, you know, maybe it works out and maybe it doesn't. And then that whole kind of experience building something sustainable for a long time is a very, very, I think, appealing path for a lot of us.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like to, I like to say it's holistic entrepreneurship because the local car wash owner, the lawyers in town, the dentist office, nobody comes knocking on their doors and saying, you know, you want $100 million and I'll give you $1 million to take this thing to $100 million. Doctor's office, that's not like a thing that happens outside of tech entrepreneurship, but yet these agencies, these small SaaS, products, and these technology founders that are building something that has legitimate clients that stay for a long period of time. Just like a doctor's office has clients that stay a long period of time, it's okay to keep those thousand clients and to just make sure you're compounding year over year with a little bit of growth and a little bit of profitability, but also sustainability and holistic. So if you can have a life and golf and go out and hang out with your kids and have dinner every day at 5 o', clock, that seems like a pretty good balance that we witness these lawyers and doctors have that tech entrepreneurs should be able to have as well if they build the right business.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that comparison and I love that call out as well, that there's differences in what path you may want to take. But just because something isn't on the magazine cover does not mean that that is a bad path. In fact, for, for most of us, and I say, myself included, it tends to be a much happier path, to be able to have, like you said, the holistic either entrepreneur or the holistic experience where it's not just all about scaling and moving as as quickly as possible to get to the valuation in order to get either more funding or to go public or whatever it is that you're trying to do.

Speaker A: That's exactly right. Exactly right.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Andrew, this has been, uh, an amazing conversation. Um, I've covered a number of topics and I think it's been absolutely exc. And I have a couple of follow up or a couple of questions to end with that we like to ask our guests. But before we do, where can people find out more about you, about the things that you're working on, about the agency, about anything else?

Speaker A: Sure. So I'm very active on LinkedIn. So Andrew, amen. A M A N N. And then our company is 923 all spelled out with the letters. You can find us on LinkedIn as well or just go, uh, to923.com great.

Speaker B: And we'll put those links in the show notes as well. Well, Andrew, we'd like to end with a couple of questions just about, um, a few things. And these don't have to be business or technology or product related, but have you read or watched or listened to anything recently that you found particularly interesting and would like to share?

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is the fourth year in a row I've read the Alchemist. And every year there's a part of the Alchemist that I just pick up as part of my life or the journey that I'm currently on that I hone in on that part of the book. Uh, so it's a, it's a, it's one of those books that is just timeless. And it's one of those books I think every entrepreneur should read more often because it shows how to be a holistic entrepreneur, but also that the journey is worth more than the destination. Because if you know the book, the entire time he's trying to find the gold in the beginning of the pyramids or the bottom of the pyramids, and he never ends up finding it because the gold was actually at his house where he left. But he doesn't regret anything because of the journey and the people he met throughout the path. And so I think that that is a true entrepreneurship book of how to be happy while still never achieving the ultimate prize.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great one. I'm a big fan of it as well. I actually have, um, I think I have the Portuguese version Back here on my shelf somewhere.

Speaker A: Nice.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, awesome. And are there any products that you're using right now that you're enjoying, would like to just call out? Whether it's a digital product or it could be a physical product.

Speaker A: Yeah. I've gone deep on the GPTs inside of ChatGPT, building my own for different parts of my life. And actually people have been asking me repeated questions, so I built the GPT to answer those questions for them based on my previous responses. That's been kind of life changing for me as. And then on top of that, I've used Zapier to some of these crazy zaps of use. Uh, I guess I'll go through one of them so people can kind of follow along because every time I'm on a sales call or podcast or anything, half an hour before the call, I will have a GPT crawl my email and the web about the person I'm on the call with and it'll be triggered from my calendar. So my calendar is the trigger and it says, hey, this is happening in 30 minutes. It crawls all my emails and finds any email that's associated to that person, then crawls the Internet, goes to LinkedIn, sucks in their LinkedIn data, and then gives me a summary of exactly what to expect, whether it's a podcast or a sales call, who they are, what their Last posts on LinkedIn were. My email conversations summarized with action items with a summarization at the very bottom of the whole thing. And then also on top of all of this, it gives me my HubSpot connection and links to are they a sales qualified lead? Are they marketing qualified lead? How many proposals have we sent to them in the past? Who else knows them on LinkedIn? And then it looks up their LinkedIn. So these like spider webs of things that of information that I can get now prior to a phone call is all from GPT and summarizing and aggregation and pulling that all in at the right time so that I don't have to waste my time, you know, researching this stuff.

Speaker B: Wow, that, ah, I like the sound of that. That sounds pretty incredible. I have to take a look at putting something like that together. But I absolutely love the idea and like, like you were saying, the potential to automate and augment a lot of the things that are very time consuming as a person, like you said, like prepping for calls, which could take a significant amount of time to be able to automate that and have all of the information at your fingertips. I love that. That's a Great idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I'll give you a really quick one too. For podcasts. Um, we just created it this week where to validate which podcasts are valuable to be on. We created a GPT that you type in the URL of the podcast and it crawls all the previous guests and it gives a list of the top five guests based on celebrity status. And so then, you know, is this the type of podcast that I should be on or not? And this one of course showed up, so we're on it. Uh, but there's a lot of them that don't. And it gives me the validation without me having to do it because I also put all of my criterias into the prompt and I say this is what I want out of the podcast and if it's not there, we skip over it and go to the next one.

Speaker B: Love it. That is again, another fascinating and great use. I'm sure that it sounds like you've got a number of them and this, uh, I feel like that's an entire topic to dive into, but I love the ones that you've shared and the time saving ability to do that and put some of these, these automations together for, not just for business, but for life. Like, how can we take some of these things and get more time back to do the important things which are kind of like we talked about, like being able to not just work, but also spend time in hobbies and with family and other things like that.

Speaker A: Exactly. Right, yeah. The holistic entrepreneurship.

Speaker B: Yep. Great. I love that phrase. Well, Andrew, this has been again, like I said, a uh, great conversation. Appreciate all of your insight and everything that you shared. So I think this, we, we touched on a lot of topics and I think all of them probably could be individual episodes, but appreciate all of your insight that you were, that you shared with us today.

Speaker A: Well, thanks for having me on. It was a great conversation and uh, yeah, pleasure to listen to your previous shows as well. It's a great podcast for everyone listening.

Speaker B: Well, thank you and thank you everyone listening. We will talk again next. Thanks again for listening. If you like the show, be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app. You can follow the show on TikTok at Prodity Co and on Twitter Roddity Company. You can also follow me on both of those platforms, kylereevans. If you want more product conversation, check out my newsletter, Proddity at Proddity Co. You can also follow me on Medium at kylerievans or check out my Medium publication, Proddity. Of course you can check out all these links in the show notes.