Rising Tide Startups

The first half delivers genuinely non-obvious operational detail on AI citation strategy - reverse-engineering LLM chain-of-thought and the lookalike-publisher math - but the second half devolves into generic motivational startup advice with little actionable density.

“we can actually run the prompt through the M model and then look through the chain of thought to see the type of content pieces that it's citing and retrieving”

“45% of the citations rotate around um, each month because this model is a home group for new content”

The lookalike-publisher scale multiplication is a tactically fresh idea and the accidental pivot to productized services is an honest, non-sanitised account, but the episode leans on recycled frameworks (leaky bucket, Sequoia quote, 'just start') for its second half.

“for each citation, if your success rate is 1%, you can create 100 lookalike publishers. When you reach out to 100, you get one hit”

“Sequoia released a new article recently and uh, said that the next trillion dollar company is going to be a service or it's going to be a software company masquerading as a services firm”

Rashidi is a genuine operator who took a bootstrapped SaaS from six figures to mid-seven figures ARR with a documented pivot strategy, and his numbers hold up to scrutiny; he is not a celebrity or thought-leader but a practitioner at a relatively modest scale.

“we were in six figures in ARR back then and now we're in mid seven figures ARR. And we had a 5x growth in the past 12”

“That same customer is still with us today. Their spend is $65,000 a month”

The episode is notably concrete for its format - specific client spend trajectories, outreach success-rate math, article production volume, and ARR ranges all appear - though some numbers are rounded and no third-party verification is offered.

“we built over 2,500 articles last month”

“you get less than 1% success rate. So you run all these prompts through and uh, all the top six models like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. And then you get a um, few hundred citations”

The host asks a few genuine follow-ups on the pivot mechanics but explicitly admits he wants to avoid the weeds, lets motivational tangents run long, and closes with a generic 'speak to someone in a cubicle' question that wastes the final segment.

“I almost wanted to avoid getting deep in the weeds because I wanted to talk about the, you know, kind of your pathway and your, your journey”

“Why is the response rate higher with the second company you have”