# AI Native Strategy and Human-Centric Differentiation

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-08-25

## Transcript

And we are live.
Welcome to SIP Live, where we live stream, answer your questions, look at the timeline, give you our takes.
I'm your host, Greg Eisenberg, and I'm here with my co-host, Jonathan Courtney.
He's a shrimp millionaire from Berlin, originally from Ireland.
Welcome to the show, sir.
We're going to get right into it.
Yesterday I posted, what's the one thing you'd ask me and my fellow shrimp millionaire over here if you had me on the phone?
And we got 139 responses.
I'm going to go through three or four of them with you, Jonathan, right now.
And then at the end of the stream, we're going to go through a few more.
And in the middle, we're just going to go and talk timeline takes.
This is coming from the X chat.
We got M Pesci says, when you begin the process of making a company AI native, where do you begin?
Is it departmental change?
Where department by department you're changing things?
Or is it company wide?
Where do you start?
And what are first steps?
For me, I mean, I could spend four hours just talking about this.
But the number one thing you can do is to make your company legible.
What does that mean?
That means that if you're using an LLM, you need to have the LLM be able to talk to your company.
And that means your meeting notes need to be legible from the LLM.
That means that your SOPs need to be legible.
So basically going through everything in your company and then putting it so that it could be seen by whatever.
If you're using a cloud code, if you're using the codex and the OpenAI ecosystem, the Google ecosystem, whatever it is, just make sure that it's being read.
And then you start thinking about that step one.
And then step two is going role by role and then basically saying, okay, this person, what are the jobs to be done for that person?
So if it's a social media marketer, they need to do research around what content they should be.
creating.
They need to actually be creating the content.
They need to be scheduling the content.
They need to be looking at the analytics.
And then they need to be taking that feedback from the analytics and then bringing it back to the front so that they could say, we want more of this content or less of that content.
So what you end up doing is you build loops, you build, you know, AI employees, essentially, that end up doing some of those things.
And then some of those things are you're going to obviously remain human.
Those are the two biggest things you can do.
If you want to go AI native.
Can I just add one thing to that?
I had already three businesses before all the AI stuff kicked off.
So we had to figure out how do we go from where we are now to adding these AI tools into a system that's already kind of working.
And also, not everybody in the company was excited about integrating AI tools.
That's another thing.
If you're asking this question from the perspective of a brand new company, it's a little easier.
But I was building on top of what already existed.
And so the first phase, honestly, was just giving everybody the pro versions of ChatGPT and Claude, letting people mess around with it for a while without any rules.
Because I know that there was these companies where you have to use this many tokens or you have to automate all these things.
I just let people use this stuff for a while.
And then they saw me using things, getting excited about things.
Then they would show me things, getting excited about things.
And we just started to see that people individually found little shortcuts and little fun ways to use the tools.
And then the only thing that I did sort of mandate was that the admin part of AJ and Smart was the first phase where creating proposals, pulling together paperwork for tax-related things, basically repetitive tasks.
That's something where I wanted us to start using these tools.
so that we could free up time to do other things like optimizing our revenue versus just trying to do all the paperwork.
And so for us, it was just a matter of slowly letting people get excited and using this stuff.
And then starting with one department, in our case, admin, bookkeeping, paperwork, legal.
And that's where the AI tool started to come in.
And now it's sort of spread throughout the entire company.
But yeah, we didn't have like an overall...
top-down mandate that everyone has to use the tools?
So I've got a bunch of takes, but the first take I wanted to give, and by the way, Jonathan has not seen any of this.
I saw this tweet.
It says, there's a baby food app making a million dollars a month.
I was searching for baby food apps for my newborn and I realized the market is absolutely insane.
The more expensive the app...
the more parents seem to trust it.
So you can see here there's an app.
This data is by Sensor Tower.
Solid starts.
Baby's first food.
Making a million dollars a month.
Now, Jonathan, I know you're a father.
I'm a father too.
And a baby.
You're a baby and a father, which is one of the most interesting combos known to man.
And my question to you is, what do you think about this idea?
You like it?
Do you not like it?
Do you think there's opportunities to create more baby apps?
What's your reaction?
Wait a second.
So what does this app do?
Is it recipes or something?
Can we have a look at what it actually is?
Is it a recipe app or is it for buying baby food?
I think so.
I don't know about you.
When I had my baby, when my wife had our baby.
When you had the baby.
When I had the baby.
So my wife actually bought a course around the first hundred foods.
that your baby should be eating.
And I don't know, it's a few hundred dollars.
And so I don't know if you can see on the screen, but this is the app.
And it basically says the first hundred foods that you should be buying and making for trusted by pediatric feeding experts, meal ideas, and then you can track food and reaction.
So I was just, when I saw this, I was shocked.
Like a million dollars a month for this.
Like, you know, it's insane.
Well, you know, okay, here's the thing.
I have a child.
The first couple of months with your first child, it's so kind of scary and confusing.
And especially when it comes to health stuff, you just kind of want someone to tell you, this is the safe thing.
This is the right thing.
Food is very confusing.
And so for me, if there was a product that's just really clearly saying, these are the things you can feed your baby in the first 100 days.
And these things will not kill your baby, most likely.
But the fact that it is a...
The thing that it says here, the fact that the more expensive versions of the apps actually do better and the parents trust them more.
Similar with weddings and stuff like that.
There are these things where people want to spend a lot of money because they just...
you get one shot.
You know what I mean?
You don't get loads of tries over and over again to mess this up.
So if I'm looking for things for my child, the price is helping me figure out, okay, does this company actually take this seriously or is this just an AI-generated thing?
So I think for me, when I'm looking at something like this, I didn't buy this particular app, but when I'm looking at baby foods, for example, in the store, I am kind of scanning the shelves and looking at the most expensive one.
I'm like, that's probably the safest one, even if that's not necessarily true.
Yeah.
So I think like the take is, it's a sip.
It's a sip.
It's a sip.
I have two reactions to this little sippy right here.
One is if the product works well for babies, chances are it works well for pets.
That's just the rule.
Right.
So it's like, OK, you know, what is the equivalent of you get your puppy?
What is your first hundred days look like?
And I think you can bring this solid starts idea to puppies that I think would work really well.
So there's that.
That's number one.
Number two is if something is making a million dollars a month, there's always an opportunity to niche this down into, you know.
So that could be a geography.
It could be solid starts for Canadian babies.
It could be, you know, you're feeding them maple syrup.
I mean, my daughter can't eat cashew nuts or pistachio nuts.
So you figure that out the hard way very early.
And so if there were, I mean, basically, look, if this is making a million a month and someone would niche down and they're okay with not making a million a month and making rather like 10K a month or 30K a month.
with a product like this that's probably not crazy difficult to maintain, I think that could be a pretty good business.
Especially if you don't have asset.
I do think that this is something where parents do actually care about the quality.
And so if you were to niche down, you know, 10, 15, 20K a month for a product that has a built-in market of new babies being born, I think it's worth actually putting a lot of time and effort into making it a really solid.
No pun intended.
I actually like that.
I like the idea of niching down into the little subcategories of general baby food.
But you wouldn't make a million a month, but not everyone needs to make that, right?
No, definitely not.
So this is take number one.
Ashley, let's go to our next take in the chat.
I'm just curious.
Give that a sip or a skip so we know if you like.
If you like the takes.
So this is just a cool thing I saw.
Stanley says, I made an app store for iMessage agents.
It's a directory of the best AI agents you can text on iOS.
And, you know, what it is is, you know, there's a bunch of different these assistants, Caddy, Poke, Tomo.
And I thought what was interesting about it is you're starting to see just.
AI agents that are, you just iMessage, which is so cool.
So both from a consumer, like you're European, so I know you live in WhatsApp.
What's iMessage?
I'll literally iMessage you and you just like won't respond.
But in WhatsApp, I'll just get a voice note, a four-minute voice note from you.
That's our dynamic.
But we love iMessage here in the United States.
it's a really easy way to just consume a product.
So from a consumer, I love it.
And then from a business perspective, I think that building iMessage agents is really interesting.
Something I'm going to be spending some more time thinking about.
What do you think about this?
Yeah, I mean, as you said, in Europe, we don't know what iMessage is.
I don't know what an iPhone is.
We don't know about these things.
We still use a stick.
types of objects.
iMessage agents, honestly, I've never used one and never even interacted with something like this.
The closest thing I've ever interacted with in terms of messaging is OpenClaw, building that into a Telegram thing and being able to interact with it.
I honestly don't know.
I think for me, I imagine that that is just going to be something similar to using OpenClaw.
or having it as a front-end interface to other objects that you have.
Let's say it's a smart home.
This is now your interface instead of having to use the interface of the Philips Hue thing or Apple Home.
Now you can just text and say, actually, hey, could you just turn on all the lights or hey, could you just do this?
And it just figures it out and it interfaces with all the other things.
But I actually don't know.
Do you know many different interesting use cases for these things?
Because I imagine they're just like a front-end interface to like a more main thing.
Yes, yes.
So I mean like over here you can see Poke.
If you haven't tried Poke.
I don't know what that is.
It's basically like a personal assistant app.
You should try it and as like a UX person, you're going to like be blown away.
Really?
Yeah, like the onboarding experience.
Anyone who cares about UX, just download Poke, honestly, and just see how their onboarding experience is because it is world-class and shows you a peek into what agent-first onboarding experiences are going to look like.
I think it's poke.com, no affiliation.
This is the one just to show you.
This is the European version of it, so that's what you're talking about, right?
Pokemon Go, yeah?
You can't get poke in poke.com.
No, it doesn't look like it.
No AC and no poke.
You guys are struggling out there.
We just got Pokemon over here.
I'm just checking on poke.com directly.
So what's the difference between poke.com and using like Claude?
Well, I mean, so Claude is wonderful, but you can do a million things with Claude.
these assistants that you're seeing like on this iMessage agent store are pretty verticalized.
So they don't do everything.
They do a few things and they do a few things well.
And that's what's cool about them.
Once you actually like, it's sort of hard to explain, but once you actually start messaging with your poke or you start messaging with some of these other ones, you...
It just feels a little bit different.
I invested in Lindy, Lindy.ai, which is like another one.
Lindy is really focused on like, you know, you work in a business and you want a personal assistant.
So I actually asked Flo, the founder of Lindy, like what's the difference between Lindy and say working with...
open claw or clawed or whatever.
And his response was basically like, what we're trying to build is like the Apple version.
Like it just works really well.
And so I think that's why some of these iMessage agent apps are really interesting.
So that's why I wanted to bring it up.
I thought it could get people's creative juices flowing.
I thought whoever created this, Stanley, who created this app store for iMessage agents was really smart.
And I'll be looking at that some more.
I didn't get what you were talking about until I looked at their sales pitch here.
And now I know what you mean.
Whereas most people I know are still just using ChatGPT, still just using it as a search engine.
And if I would try to present Cowork or Cloud Code or any sort of automations to anyone I know who's just using it as some sort of chat engine.
They would just be like, no, that's just insane.
I'm not going to do that.
Whereas Poke is like a, yeah, it's essentially a polished front end for doing the complicated things you can do in these AI tools without you having to know anything about these AI tools.
Yeah, that's cool.
I didn't even know this existed, to be honest.
Customer support is eating engineering.
Do you understand what he means by this?
I don't know what that means.
So I understand what it means.
Because you're a genius.
Can I try to just guess what I think it means?
Yeah, guess what it means.
What do you think he means by this?
Optimist support is eating engineering.
Okay, so in the age where it's much easier to create little...
If you have a digital product, if you have an app, and there needs to be a change made to it...
It used to be basically impossible.
You'd have to collect all the information, relay that back to the engineering team, etc., etc., etc.
That loop was really complicated.
Whereas now, and we see this in our company as well, the people who are directly connected with the customers are actually able to make a lot of the changes that engineers used to have to make.
And that's what I would guess it means, but maybe it doesn't.
No, you're pretty much right.
So basically, the whole idea is...
In general, what you're seeing with AI is, you know, people are going to have their own personal brains, personal second brains, but companies have their own second brains.
And you're seeing just companies, small companies, big companies, AI native companies basically put all their data, meeting notes, customer support, those things in.
MD files and places where LLMs could read it.
So what's happening is, you know, there's been a lot of talk about engineering loops ever since Peter from OpenClaw and who else was talking about?
I think I think Carpathia was also talking about loops.
And they were talking about it with respect to just engineering, how you basically are going to do slash goal.
in codex or whatever.
And you can basically say just like build on the startup, build on the startup, build on the startup.
But I think what's actually more interesting about loops is less about just engineering, but doing loops with customer support meets engineering.
So what do I mean by that?
I mean that if you're getting 50 customer support pieces of data every single day, they're telling you what they like and what they don't like about your product.
If you can create a loop that says every day look at those transcripts and every day prototype a feature that solves their problem and give them a goal.
The goal could be, you know, DAU over MAU increases, retention increases, virality increases, revenue increases.
That I think that that's the beginning of how.
The future of startups is exactly what he's saying.
Customer support is eating engineering.
That's what he means and I think that's a huge sip.
Massive gulp even.
It's so much of a sip that it kind of goes back your throat into your lung and then you cough it out and then you gulp it.
Can I actually add something to this?
This is tangentially tangentially I'm Irish.
I can't say the word.
It's somewhat related.
A lot of products, if I'm looking at a really interesting way to differentiate products that are in a market where everything is kind of similar, one of the things you can really do to stand out is by clarifying that your customer support is not AI and that you're going to be able to access a human 24-7.
A company in Berlin here, Trade Republic, actually I don't know if they're German-based or whatever, they did this entire billboard campaign all over Berlin about the fact that they do not use AI tools and it's a human every time when you call them.
By the way, not sure how true that is.
We'll see.
But if you also look at Basecamp, Basecamp's website is one of my favorite examples of that.
They talk about the fact that it's humans, but not only that, they actually show the person who's in charge of the team talking on the website.
And for me, I'm like, okay.
I want you to be using these AI tools to improve the product.
But when I have a problem, I want to talk to a goddamn human and not to some bot.
And so for me, I have my pet peeve, especially if you buy an expensive product.
I buy the Eight Sleep, the mattress.
We love them.
Everyone loves them.
It's all good.
If you have to deal with the support, no.
No, it's not.
I'd rather they stop developing the product.
and just leave it as it is and improve the support and get more humans in there.
I honestly think that companies can use that as a massive, massive marketing customer advantage.
Just, hey, by the way, you'll talk to a person when you call here.
And then the other thing is cool too.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think people are willing to pay more premium products that say you're going to speak to a human being, I think is a big trend and I like that.
Sorry, can I say one more thing?
Of course.
You know the trend of in-shitification, right?
You know the general idea.
Everything gets worse.
Like a company, once it kind of owns the market, they basically kind of make their product worse and worse and worse.
And they cut corners because they know you have to use it.
The perfect example of that is, back in the day, Amazon used to have the best customer support of all time.
You're like instantly talking with someone.
It's amazing.
And then over time, they're like, we own the market.
So now we're going to let a dog be the person on the other side of the screen just hitting the thing.
So inshittification is something people talk about a lot.
There was even this big advertising campaign, I think it was in Norway, about how this is a thing that they don't want to have, whatever.
Everyone talks about it.
It's a really big common topic on X.
Someone needs to do an advertising campaign around how their product is getting reversed inshittificated and that one of their companies...
mottos is that this is not what they're going to do.
I think it is one of the things that for me kills brands faster than anything else is when you're a big fan of a product, big fan of a brand, and then they're like, well, we have to grow it at all costs.
Fair enough.
But can you do it in a way that doesn't inshittify it?
And then can you use that for your marketing?
Big if true.
You know what's sad about a lot of tech companies is a lot of tech companies have the worst customer support.
Because they're tech first, they take it to the extreme.
And I think customer support has to have a human element.
I agree.
And that's where I'm at.
I'm skipping fully 100% AI as customer support, but I'm sipping heavily, I'm gulping heavily this idea of human support.
Yeah.
Rest in peace to the two pizza team.
Jeff Bezos gave us an all time great metaphor.
Keep the team small enough to feed with two pizzas.
It shaped how engineering orgs got built for 20 plus years.
He was right about small teams, still is, but in the AI era, two pizzas is too much pizza.
What do you think?
Well, first of all, I live in Europe, so two pizzas is probably...
Much smaller than two American pizzas.
But I get the point.
I get the point.
We're talking about American pizzas.
Well, obviously, the team size for making something like a piece of software right now can be as little as one.
What I will say is, if you do actually want to be able to make money from that product, you probably need to pair, if you're the builder, you probably need to pair yourself with someone who's good at pitching and selling.
And so I do think one American pizza is probably enough.
or the modern AI-powered team.
So I'm going to give it a sip, and I also just think it's a cute tweet, X post, whatever it is.
So I'm going to sip it.
You're double sipping.
You're double sipping.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to disagree with this one, right?
It's like, I think when you're building a startup or any company, really...
You have problems.
You have problems.
And we always kind of say like, oh, if I just hired this one person, he or she will solve this problem.
Like what I've started to rewire my brain to do is before hiring someone, I'm like, could I create a loop that can actually get this done?
Or I ask myself, what are the jobs to be done for the person that I think is going to save me?
And then I start by actually creating agents to actually solve those tasks.
That's what I've been doing.
And I agree that like two pizzas, he's basically saying like the two pizzas team is like probably 12 people.
How big are these pizzas?
They're big.
It's America, you know?
They're big pizzas.
They're big pizzas.
There's pepperoni on the pizzas.
They're like this size.
Yeah.
Like two, three slices, you're done.
Exactly.
No, we're talking about XL pizzas.
We're talking giant, giant, giant pizzas.
So, yeah, I think David, he's the CTO of Cursor.
He's right.
I like it.
And he got me thinking about like a team can't be more than...
Seven people now.
Six people.
I think, I mean, look, he's right.
I just, the pizza size, very different, you know?
We're thinking about different sizes here, David.
When he's right, he's right.
Paul Graham, founder, Y Combinator says, something I told my 14-year-old.
People are going to stop reading books.
I wish this wasn't so, but I fear it is.
The silver lining in this cloud is that if you're one of the few people who still read, you'll have a huge advantage over everyone else.
What do you think?
I'm really glad the tweet ended there.
Because I can't see the tweet you're talking about.
I thought it was going to be like, people are going to stop reading books, so here's a new app idea.
And I was just going to roll my eyes.
I 100% agree with this.
I force myself to read and I read fiction in bed with my Kindle.
And I also am really putting a lot of effort into encouraging my daughter to read.
I just bought her a Kindle Color Soft Kids and I'm trying to get her to read it as much as possible.
Guys, if you have kids, I saw the best tweet ever and it changed the game for me.
It said, if you want your kid, if your kids read, it's just amazing for their brains.
Everyone kind of knows that.
But if you want to get them to read a lot, what I've told my daughter, who's seven, is, hey, when you're in bed, as long as you're reading, there is no, you have to go to sleep time.
You can read as long as you want.
You can read for five hours if you want.
Don't bother me.
Don't get up and bother me and tell me I have to do stuff.
But if you want to read in bed, you can read as long as you want.
And she sees this as like, so I don't have, I can stay up all night, basically.
And so she reads for like two hours straight in bed.
Whereas before I gave her that rule, she was too lazy and wanted me to always read everything to her because she just wanted to lay there while I read.
And so reading, I think, is a massive competitive advantage.
I think there's a huge difference between consuming the written word and watching or listening to something.
For me, I get massively different outcomes when I read a physical book or read on the Kindle reading words.
I don't know, it goes indifferent.
It's somehow something different happens.
And so, yeah, and I do think it's also an attention span thing where if you're able to actually read a book, it says something about your ability to live within the modern chaotic mess and not being so reactionary.
The only thing I would add to it is don't just read nonfiction.
Like fiction is a big part of...
developing your brain and also getting really interesting weird ideas.
So I do think adding into that, make sure fiction is a big part of this and not just you're reading the stoic books on repeat or something.
I had a visual of your daughter just like being in bed at like four in the morning.
Like her eyes are like bleeding just like how tired she is.
She actually, she is reading.
She has taken advantage of it in a way that I didn't expect.
I thought she was going to read for a half an hour and fall asleep, but she's like locked in and it's 11.
And I'm like, oh man, okay, I need to probably need to change the situation here.
But right now it's summer holidays.
Paul Graham says the people who still read won't just be better informed.
They'll be, with a couple of exceptions, the only ones who can think well.
You can't think well without writing well and you can't write well without reading well.
I thought this was the, this was interesting.
So this is the, the rebuttal to Paul.
And he responds.
Yeah.
Who rebutted?
Who rebutted?
So Kieran Richie says, books are a monumental waste of time.
600 pages for every one page of actually valuable content.
I should know I've written three.
Ha ha ha ha.
You want information density?
Blogs, papers, articles, and a well-curated X feed.
And then Paul responds and he says, most books are bad.
Part of reading well is finding the good ones.
And Kieran says, fair.
I stick to textbooks these days for the higher signal-to-noise ratio.
What do you think about this?
I fucking know.
I just don't like that way of thinking about the world.
I think that...
Sometimes I'll read an amazing book and I'll go on Amazon.
I want to leave a review.
I want to say that I like the book.
And then I'll always see someone who says, this could have been an email.
This could have been a blog article.
They don't get the point that a book, what it helps you do is to, it repeats case studies, it repeats things, and it helps it get into your head in a way that's more lasting and more robust.
And so from a nonfiction perspective, I think that almost every nonfiction book that I've ever read, when I look at the Goodreads or when I look at the Amazon reviews or when I tell a friend I've read a book that I really enjoyed, they're like, oh, you could have just listened to the podcast episode where he was on Tim Ferriss.
And I'm like, you just don't, you don't get it.
Like you're not, this is not, it's not about efficiency.
Not everything has to be about efficiency and density.
And I don't know who this Kieran person is.
I'm sure he's a lovely person, but I 100% disagree.
I think the same thing people say about fiction novels.
They're like, you know, it was about 200 pages too long.
Yeah, if you're trying to just absolutely get the most efficiency out of life, I don't think life is all about efficiency.
I don't think knowledge gathering is all about efficiency either.
And I really hate that sentiment personally.
I'm not a fan of it.
Yeah, I think it's a barbell approach.
I feel like...
you can like both could be true like you can read good books and that's an advantage and you can also have like a really curated information diet of like blogs and articles and x and stuff like that you know what i mean so i think like the people that both yeah just do both just do both you know i do both i look at x and i also read but like i just don't get the I've always really been irritated by that sentiment, to be honest.
Yeah.
I think for people who, and I'm guilty for this because sometimes I do this, like for people who spend a lot of time brain rotting, like at the end of the night, at the end of, like before you go to bed, you're kind of like, you got one eye open and you're just like scrolling through Instagram reels.
Yeah.
then it kind of like morphs your brain in a way that like when you go into a book and it's so slow, it just, it feels weird.
So you gotta, if you haven't read a book in a long time, like, and you consume Instagram reels and stuff like that, do yourself a favor and read some books.
It's going to be helpful.
And I agree with Paul Graham.
It's going to be an unfair advantage.
Let's see.
I'm going to look at chat.
See if there's any last few questions, let us know.
I see one question.
Canon Idea says, the worst things to do in 2026 if I wanted to completely screw myself over going forward.
If I wanted to let this golden age of opportunity elude me.
That's a really fun question.
What do you think?
Who asked that?
At Canon Ideas.
Who you would think would have a Canon load of ideas.
I mean, okay, I'll just say, if we're just talking about from a pure financial perspective, I will tell you that the things that I'm seeing people doing, it's a combination of two things.
One, I would assume that if you completely ignore all the AI stuff, it's probably not a good idea.
If you actually decide, hey, you know what, this is all hype, whatever, I think is probably not a great way to approach things.
Just because what I'm going to say next might make it sound like I think you should do that.
I think the biggest mistake people are going to make, and if you would want to absolutely mess yourself up, what I would do is spend all of your time building apps and all of your time building software and all of your time building loads of complicated systems and none of your time actually selling things, getting users and building an audience.
I still think the core of running a business is...
building an audience and getting people interested in what you actually are creating.
And so I think if you want to really mess yourself up, just spend the next couple of years building pointless stuff and not having anyone ever use it.
I would say that that will also make you feel very demotivated.
Yeah, I agree.
I also think it's like a spectrum.
There's like a spectrum of people.
So there's some people who are like, okay, I know AI is a thing, but I'm just barely going to use it.
I think those people are kind of screwed at this point.
Then I think it's like people on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who use every single tool like crazy.
And every new tool comes out, they have to use it.
They have to understand every single piece of it.
I actually think those people are...
are kind of screwing themselves over a little bit.
Overstimulated.
I get this too because I love a new tool.
I love a new thing, a new shiny object.
So whenever I hear something, I'm like, I've got to try it.
I actually think in the middle is the best place to be.
You spend time building and marketing with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok.
like the main players.
And then once a month or twice a month, you see something new that you think has the opportunity to really, that just interests you.
So if like for me right now, it's like AI, what they call like vibe filmmaking.
So I feel like there's a few tools that are now getting really good that you could like actually direct commercials that are really, really good.
And you can't do that today.
With, for example, you know, OpenAI.
So you do need to like try new things.
So I'm not saying don't try new things, but I think like the worst thing you can do is basically try too much or try too little.
Just try the right amount.
And I think this was this is a really good question.
At the RHN or RH Neutrino says, I've been a graphic designer, a web developer, but never a sales guy.
Any advice?
I mean, you have to like this is the age of the generalist.
Period.
So if you're a, it's amazing that you're like thinking, okay, I was a graphic designer.
Now I have to be a web developer.
Now I have to be a salesperson.
And I think salespeople, on the other hand, have to be like, okay, now I need to be a web developer.
Now I need to be a designer, right?
So I think what's happening in general is everything is converging.
And the people who are going to do really well over the next five or ten years.
And by the way, just as how there was an insane amount of opportunity between 2020 and 2022 where people made insane amounts of money, huge opportunities.
I believe that 2026 to 2029, there's going to be that same wave in the sense of if you know how to use a lot of these tools, if you know how to build right now, it's an incredible time.
Good job on you, step one, that you're actually doing this.
How do you, like, I would be like, how do I, if I wanted to be a salesperson, I would go and just like read the biggest sales books, honestly, to get like frameworks around sales.
And then I would actually just start making cold calls and start doing the thing.
The only way to learn anything is by doing the thing, right?
So you can, you know, ask, you know, Google, chat, JPD, whatever.
What are the best sales books that I need to read?
Get the frameworks and just start making cold calls.
Start getting rejected.
Start meeting people.
And over time, you put in your 10,000 hours, you're going to learn.
What do you think?
I think it's a very important question.
I am the person who can do the delivery, but what do I do about the sales part?
It's one of the most common questions entrepreneurs ask me as well.
So to the person who asked, I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name.
I've been running a design agency for 16 years now.
And when I started out, I was just a UX designer.
I didn't really have many sales skills.
But because my company started to grow, I kind of just got put in the position of, oh, okay, that's actually my job.
What I always say to entrepreneurs is, if you're the owner...
If you're the CEO, and even if that's a one-person company, then you are automatically the CEO.
A large proportion of your job, if not 50%, is to be the promoter of your business, to be both the marketer and salesperson for your business.
And just before this call, someone on the call in the background was saying, I wish I had more time to do my YouTube videos, but I'm going to be stuck doing delivery and calls, etc.
And actually, what I wanted to say is...
Actually, your job is to be the promoter and you want to find people to deliver the work, not you permanently delivering forever.
Your job is actually to promote, grow, be coming up with a strategy for your business so that you just don't get trapped in it forever if that's your goal.
If your goal is to be a consultant who does the same thing over time, that's also fine.
learning to sell, learning to market is not really an option.
You do have to do it.
Or, and Greg, I don't know what you think about this.
What I say to entrepreneurs is, if you truly can't stick to that, you actually have to find a co-founder and they have to own 50% of your business.
Because if you find someone who can find you clients, they will either take your clients or own your business very soon.
Totally.
Thank you so much, guys.
Thanks for having me on the show as well, Greg.
I really appreciate it.
I'm having European on here, you know?
Thank you for taking the time out of your day.
I really appreciate it and being generous with your time and everything.
So thank you everyone for tuning in.
I know you're all busy doing whatever it is you're doing, work, family, both.
So I appreciate you and I'll see you on the next one.
Thank you, everyone.
Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much.