THE BOOTSTRAPPED FOUNDERHOSTED BYARVID KAHL
Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses, how to build an audience, and how to build in public.
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But, but, yeah, but then because, there are a lot of marketers who are like, If I, like, you know, do a boot camp or, like, I learned a little bit of JavaScript, I can, like, say I'm a growth hacker, and then I can get paid like a developer. And, and then what they really end up doing was, like, spamming everyone's contact address books. You know? And and so the growth hacking ended up being associated with a lot of spam and, like, bad behavior, trying to get something for nothing. Like, the word hacking obviously didn't help there. But, it's it's a similar problem in prompt engineering where, you know, you get mixed reactions from people when you say, oh, I'm a prompt engineer. Because, what I mean by prompt engineering is, someone who works with AI to build a system, to get useful and reliable outputs. Right? So it's just like, if you're engineering a bridge, you want the bridge to be reliable. Like, you don't want it to suddenly turn to jelly. Right? So so so, you know, you need to kind of understand a little bit about how bridges work, how physics works, you know, in order to, make sure that the process of building those bridges is reliable and will get the same results every time. And and, you know, people don't get in trouble. So, prompt engineering is is like that to me. Like, if you're building a production system like you have with your app, you know, you just need to make sure it's reliable. You can't have it refuse to do a request every now and again. Right? Or you can't have it, like, hallucinate and make make something up, that, like, with your tool, like, it might say that something was said in the podcast that wasn't, and that could actually cause a big trouble. Yeah. A lot of trouble for, for some guests. Right? So I that's how I see prompt engineering, but, how a lot of people see it is, like, these spammy, like, here are, like, 800 of the best prompts, for for this. And I'm like, okay. You look through it, and it's it it looks like someone casting a spell. You know? It's like it's like an incantation. That's that's how you know it's a lot of scrap. Yeah. Honestly, that's that's exactly how I feel
The Bootstrapped Founder
307: Addressing my Weaknesses
Fri Mar 29 2024
Built in query generator AI that I use to quickly just ask it, like, you know, give me the count of all these these items in that particular table that have this and that and that, and it just creates a perfect SQL query that I just run and get the result from. I talked about this a few weeks ago. AI in tools, that's just an expected part of any piece of software now. Right? AI is a side dish, but it's kind of an expected side dish. Like bread at a restaurant, where you go to a place and you kinda expect them to give you some bread and butter before, you know, they even come and ask you what you wanna eat. That is the expectation. And I know this is a kind of North America centric view, but you know what I mean, That you have these certain expectations, and if you don't see them in products, you think, what's wrong with them? Why are they not adopting this kind of technology? So you kinda have to have it. And I've been leaning into this particular use of that technology a lot. Unfortunately, AI is at a point where you need to be an expert in the field that you wanna use it in to be able to use it effectively. Of course, it will speed up my coding. Right? I know what good code looks like, and I've been writing production ready code for years, so I can quickly tell if the AI created something that is good or bad. But the moment I look into my skill gaps outside of coding, AI assistants turn from these glorious saviors into quite a gamble to use. Because how am I supposed to know if that Chatcpt marketing email headline is going to be a good one when I never truly learned how to write a good marketing email? Like that's a problem. Like I could trust Chat gpt, but I'm not sure if I can take my knowledge of coding and how good ChatGPT is at that and just extrapolate it into everything else. So AI assistants are at best a helper tool on the sidelines. I still need to either learn more or hire. And let me tell you something. Struggling with hiring has been a long time self and post limiting belief for me. That I only
Not just you always have to find a technical and a nontechnical founder. There are also groups of people with just 2 technical people, and they figure it out along the way. So it's it's just interesting to see that you went for the complimentary approach. Now let's talk about Leadsie. What does Leadsie do? Or maybe what did Leadsie do in the beginning in your little prototype, and what did it grow into? Perfect. So, so in the beginning, my idea was more around helping, companies startups, because I was working with startups, but generally companies, of any size to to to be to be better at Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. So what I've noticed also through my mentoring was people are just doing so many silly mistakes, just burning money, you know, and the only one who's happy about it is Facebook, but not even them because they they're not gonna see more money coming, right, if they're not successful. So, so what we built was a essentially, like, an audit tool. So a tool that would allow you to say, hey. You know, you get temporary access to my Facebook ad account, and then the tool would tell you recommendations, and also give you a bit more visibility of, like, what are your best creators, what's performing well at which audiences. And then so kind of going through best practices, like, kind of like a checklist of what are you doing well and where where could you maybe make some improvements. That was the first product. And then relatively quickly, we wanted to sell this to agencies as a way to generate leads. So many agencies usually, as part of their lead generation, they offer, a free audit anyway to their potential clients. And we wanted to help them generate this audit at scale, basically, with the with the tool that we have. There are many similar tools that exist for that, by the way. So for SEO, it's very common thing, but nothing existed. Still nothing really exists for for paid, specifically Facebook, Instagram ads.
The Bootstrapped Founder
305: AI Hype — The Straight Line Bias and the Fear of not Keeping Up
Fri Mar 22 2024
Think online payments is a good example here as a technology. In the beginning, there were so many experimental providers for online credit card payments or billing invoicing these kind of things, but over time, this has consolidated into something that is much more stable and reliable. There are standards and there are expectations. Payments now rely on the bigger players and the connection between them and developments in this field are much less frequent. If you were one of Stripe's first customers when they were still called slash dev slash payments back in the day, you might have had a harder time integrating certain services, or the even the APIs because they changed a lot. Now that has changed over the last couple of years. Stripe's APIs are to in in my perception probably the best most well documented and well structured well versioned APIs you could possibly use, but things have changed. It's becoming a much more mature system. And I believe that in the world of AI, we're not there yet. We're at a point where everything is still super new, constantly changing, everything is in flux. So let's discuss some things related to AI, and how they might keep accelerating or slowing down, because I think most people would like to know, well is this going somewhere? Can I invest in this now or is this gonna change a lot or is it at a stable point? One big aspect of AI that I've been working with and experiencing lately is the capacity to own the technology. We will likely continue to see big language models like gped5 coming up, right, or whatever new thing anthropic comes up with in the future being deployed on massive clusters of machines. It is really massive, like the both the technology behind it and the price is quite bizarre. Nvidia recently announced their b200 graphics card, which costs between 30,000 and what $40,000 per GPU. That's one single GPU there. That's such a high price that is kind of comparable with a v
Like manual process and would would come to your home to give you a quote to, you know, just to say, like, oh, this is gonna cost, like, 5 times more than you think and, like, waste your time. So I built some software to let you get a kind of instant quote for solar and was gonna build a business on top of this. And at the time, this was, like, 2010,011, and starting a business was just way less capital efficient back then. You know what I mean? Just even incorporation, like, was go to a lawyer and pay, like, 5 to $10,000 to start your business. Right? It was just, like, not like, you know, go to Stripe Atlas or Firstbase and pay $300 and you're done. And so we we were like, okay. We need some money to get this business off the ground. I didn't have any money. I I couldn't raise a friends and family round or anything like that. And so my cofounder and I basically spent 2 years discovering that there were no investors out there who would invest in these kinds of software companies unless you were trying to build this, like, unicorn, this multibillion dollar company. And it was a really hard lesson for me. I basically wasted, like, 2 years of my life. I spent, you know, all of my savings and then, like, ran up about $60,000 in credit card debt. And finally, I, like, gave up, you know, and I had to, like, leave New York and fly to Thailand to live on, like, $500 a month to sort of rebuild my life. And that was a really hard lesson. And then I boot strapped a b to b SaaS business and, you know, ran it for about 5 years and sold it. And I was like, well, I still could have used some early capital to get that thing off the ground. And if someone had invested in me, they would have done well. You know, it would have been like, all in all, win win. Why doesn't this exist? And so that was the question. And then, you know, the magic of Twitter and writing on the Internet, as I was building that business, I met a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs like you, like, you know, dozens of other folks, a lot of whom eventually became successful and sold their companies and had money to invest. And they all had the same idea. Like, why can't we invest in these kinds of companies? They're