Episode 45: Your 100 Discord members don't give a F*** about you, here's why
@jonobacon spent two decades building the communities everyone still points to. Director of community at @github and @Canonical and author of The Art of Community and People Powered.
Silicon Valley just rediscovered community because paid CAC broke and AI ate the SEO. I skipped the cliché engagement-and-Discord advice and went to the dirty grunt work to figure out whats changing with community building.
He told me the default playbook is wrong, forums and @discord only ever capture the loudest 20% of your community, and he now recommends against leading with them.
Then he said the thing no other interview has gotten out of him, about how he watched his own best work lose, and he knows exactly why.
In our conversation, we got into:
✅The 20% trap that makes most community programs measure the wrong people
✅Why does he call it a shithead move to deploy AI agents that pretend to be human
✅The audience in the middle that every founder is walking past
✅FOMO or inertia: which one actually gets people to move
✅The community he built that everyone loves and nobody bought
Listen now 👉 https://t.co/weWMW907hC
most startups are leaving this completely untapped.
@TheTimenator broke down why every founder shouldn't build a personal brand and where, why, and how performance ads should be used for growth
P.s good to see ya'll back on my timeline again!
Full ep👇
your AI Agent ALSO needs an onboarding process.
- yes, just like a human.
@TheTimenator, HoG @Superhuman broke down why most people describe their process to an LLM and let it run, and why that's exactly where agentic AI workflows break down
full ep👉https://t.co/l9YKtW7OeS
Episode 44: 85% of people distrust AI, so why is every company betting billions on it?
@TheTimenator took Grammarly (now @Superhuman ) past half a billion in revenue and has advised @brexHQ@canva , @airtable , @otter_ai and @drink_AG1 .
His read on the AI startup boom is the reality check the tech hype cycle keeps skipping.
We got into why the money pouring into AI features mostly never reaches the top line, and why "smarter product" rarely means "more revenue."
Yuriy argues that most founders are blind to a pricing ceiling their customers already hit, so every new feature is value they can't charge for.
He also makes the case that the product moat isn't dead; it just moved. When every competitor can copy your feature in a week, focus becomes the defensible thing, which is exactly how Grammarly beat Google and Microsoft at grammar checking.
In our conversation:
✅ Why AI is making software more expensive to run and no easier to sell
✅ The pricing ceiling almost every founder is blind to
✅ Where the real moat lives once every feature is copyable in a week
✅ The subsidy is running for half of these companies today, and the exact moment it ends
Listen now 👉
https://t.co/Su2RLauH7c
Episode 43: AI companies are losing billions because of this.
Bobby Moesta (@bmoesta) is a multi-time best-selling author and the co-architect of the Jobs to Be Done framework. He's been building products for 40+ years, and his take on the current AI startup ecosystem is a massive reality check.
We got into why customers calling your product "cool" is actually the kiss of death, and how shipping new AI features every 38 seconds is actively ruining your market.
He argues that the anxiety around larger LLMs killing your startup is misplaced, because the control founders think they have over demand was always an illusion. People aren't buying your product; they are trying to solve a struggling moment.
In our conversation, we got into:
✅Why customers calling your AI "cool" is actually the ultimate kiss of death for your startup
✅How modern CFOs and the obsession with predicting cash flow are actively destroying your sales process
✅Why 90% of SaaS companies are competing with an intern and a spreadsheet, not other startups
✅How shipping new features in 38 seconds is ruining your customers and destroying the market for the next 5 years
✅What separates the founders who obsess over the problem from the ones desperately trying to push a solution
Listen Now 👉 https://t.co/bn8Lm71Smz
Episode 42: The Homepage Was Never a Part of Your Marketing Funnel.
Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) is a best-selling author and the person who coined conversion copywriting, having worked with companies like @Canva, @Intuit, and @awscloud on messaging that actually moves people.
She argues that the anxiety around AI replacing copywriters is misplaced, because the control marketers thought they had over conversions was always an illusion. On a good day, 2% from "a hyper optimized funnel". The rest were brainstorming sessions dressed up as strategy.
ChatGPT can generate a thousand variations of a headline in three seconds, but it can't read the silence between two complaints in a one-star review. That's the moat.
In our conversation, we got into:
✅Why your website was never the funnel you thought it was
✅How LLMs have moved buying decisions offsite, and what you can actually do about it
✅Why fake reviews and the synthetic voice of customers aren't new problems
✅How to validate messaging without the traffic volume for a reliable A/B test
✅What separates the copywriters who thrive from the ones AI will quietly replace
Listen Now 👉 https://t.co/BK6lM3wT5A
The question every founder is sitting with right now is some version of: what happens when Anthropic or OpenAI decides to do what we do?
@apierriPMM 's answer was a fascinating one on our latest episode.
Specialization is the only asymmetric lever a small company has. Not better technology. Not faster iteration. The kind of specialization that makes a vertical so narrow and so deeply served that it becomes genuinely uneconomical for a large model company to follow you into it.
Lovable had a defensible position: build apps. It was specific, it was understood, and it was the thing that distinguished Lovable from general-purpose foundation models. Then the company announced it was adding AI agents and chat, moving toward direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI on their own terrain. His read was immediate: "You guys had a great run. It's over."
His logic is that a startup competing horizontally against a foundation model company is competing on the dimension where the foundation model company has the most resources, the most data, and the clearest scale advantage.
A startup competing in a vertical narrow enough that the foundation model company would need a dedicated team to serve it properly is competing where the big company cannot easily follow.
We covered so many more brilliant insights on Zapier, DocuSign, Apple, the idea of pricing, the viability of category creation, and more.
Episode 40: Most websites were already invisible before AI search became a thing.
The copy was vague, the value propositions were circular, and the only people who made it through were determined enough to ignore the noise. Now those same websites are failing a second time.
@tahneeperry has spent the last several years building agentic AI workflows, advising CMOs on AI adoption, and running training programs on applied AI for marketers.
Tahnee’s take is AI scales whatever foundation you have, and if the person reviewing the output doesn't have deep enough domain experience to spot what's off, the brand degrades before any metric tells you something went wrong.
Chapters
00:00 AI Automation and Workflows
03:26 Reliable AI Systems
05:58 Human Oversight in AI
08:57 Content Creation and AI
11:15 Mapping Customer Journeys with Content
13:30 Startups in AI Integration
16:11 AI in Enterprise Marketing
18:30 Resistance to AI Adoption
21:37 Skills for Junior Marketers in AI
23:59 Outbound Strategies with AI
26:15 Average Outputs in AI Content
31:35 Leveraging Stats and Research in Content
34:14 Optimizing for LLMs in Decision Making
36:39 Personal Workflows and Automation
Full Episode👇
New Episode: Finding PMF in Building Yield for The Unbanked
@torabyou, CEO of @moveindustries, joins @seb3point0 to discuss the radical turnaround of the Movement blockchain.
After a tumultuous leadership change, Torab explains why Movement scrapped its complex L2 architecture to build a sovereign L1 focused exclusively on the Global South.
They dive into the "Move is for Money" thesis, the integration of AI agents for 24/7 security audits, and why crypto must abandon what he calls"decentralization theater" to deliver real product-market fit through stablecoins and yield for unbanked populations.
Topics
00:00 Intro & Context
04:15 The Movement Turnaround
09:30 Why Movement Pivoted
15:00 Overcoming Developer Friction
21:45 AI Agents for 24/7 Security Audits
27:10 The Global South
35:20 Currency Devaluation & The Demand for Stablecoins
42:15 The Move Alliance
49:00 Pragmatism vs. Decentralization
55:30 Bringing Yield to USD, BTC, and Gold
Episode Links👇
"If you use AI to write emotional copy, you are effectively telling your prospects to go away."
Talia Wolf (@TaliaGw) is the author of Emotional Targeting, a conversion optimization framework used for over a decade to help B2B brands understand why their customers actually buy.
She's worked with everyone from project management tools (like @mondaydotcom) to enterprise SaaS, digging into the psychology that feature comparisons and pricing grids will never capture.
In our conversation, we get into:
✅Why AI-generated copy has made every B2B website functionally identical
✅The logo swap test is one that most founders fail
✅How the buying journey has moved almost entirely off your website into Reddit, Slack, and Discord
✅Why your website is now a confirmation tool, not a persuasion tool
✅The difference between social image and self-image in B2B purchasing
✅Why scraping one Reddit thread and asking ChatGPT to analyze it gives you useless insights
✅What zero-click marketing means for how you measure conversions right now
Watch now👇
Episode 38: Why Being an "AI Marketer" is a Massive Red Flag
I sat down with @ollyjjones, a marketing veteran from @myosin_xyz and an advocate for marketers transitioning from generic AI tool users to actual system builders.
He broke down exactly why the standard AI marketing approach, which focuses purely on efficiency, keeps output generic and at the 70th percentile, and what growth teams must do to be the best by linking AI implementation to a sound marketing strategy.
We dive deep into the mechanics of the "Forward Deployed Marketer" and why traditional marketing agencies must evolve beyond billable hours, focusing instead on robust data hygiene and upskilling teams to survive the next two years of rapid industry shifts.
Chapters
00:00 - Forward Deployed Marketer concept
05:25 - Efficiency vs. Quality
12:00 - Building Trust
15:26 - 30-Day Learning Roadmap
20:32 - Overcoming AI Resistance
27:11 - Evolution of Agency Economics
36:10 - Implementing AI in Data
44:48 - Overcoming the Pain Points
51:12 - The Final Playbook for Marketers
Full Episode 👇
Episode 37: Why Everyone's Wrong About AI Killing Product Roles
I sat down with @ttorres (Author of Continuous Discovery Habits), the godmother of product discovery, who has helped 100's of teams across the globe build products to scale.
She broke down how the playbooks she's developed for continuous discovery are evolving, but not fundamentally changing, even in the era of AI.
We also dove into exactly why the standard tech-Twitter prediction of "zero-human" software is "baloney" and what product teams must do to measure non-deterministic AI outputs.
We analysed the mechanics of cognitive bias in user feedback and why, when you're dealing with AI answer engines, the human in the loop is more critical than ever to ensure actual value creation.
Chapters
00:00 - The AI Reality Check
00:36 - The invisible trap in customer interviews
04:04 - AI in sales and customer empathy
08:45 - The "Agentic Buyer" delusion
13:44 - The rise of the Product Builder
16:30 - Solving context rot with AI retrospectives
22:20 - AI evals and non-deterministic product paths 28:42 - Navigating shiny object syndrome in startups
Full Episode 👇
Episode 36: Marketing is Going Old School With AI
I sat down with Beatriz Datangel Rodgers (Head of Product Marketing at Root), former PMM @PayPal, and an advocate for marketers becoming self-sufficient developers (not just vibe coders).
She broke down how the playbooks she uses are evolving, noting that operators engineer their own tools instead of paying for new SaaS subscriptions.
We analysed the mechanics of "AI slop" and why, when you're dealing with AI answer engines and context files acting as ruthless gatekeepers instead of humans on LinkedIn, traditional digital ads are losing to aggressive, experiential guerrilla marketing.
Chapters
00:00 The Self-Sufficient Marketer
01:33 - Build vs. Buy 3.0
08:13 - Engineering your way out of AI slop
16:45 - The Incumbent Moat & Industrial Scale
20:41 - The return of guerrilla marketing
25:47 - Selling to the Agentic Buying Committee
32:35 - The Monday Morning Playbook
Full Episode 👇
Episode 35: The Marketing Funnel is Dead, and AI Won't Save It
I sat down with @ggiiaa (Co-Founder & Author of @forgetthefunnel), Pioneer of Customer-Led Growth, and advises top-tier PLG startups on how to actually build for value.
She broke down how the playbooks she used working with companies like @sparktoro, @Bitly, and @SproutSocial, are evolving but not changing completely, even with AI.
We also dove into exactly why the standard B2B inbound marketing playbook doesn't apply to the era of agentic commerce and what growth teams must do to survive the transition.
We analysed the mechanics of "mercenary subscriptions" and why, when you're dealing with AI answer engines acting as ruthless gatekeepers instead of humans, only traditional SEO and website clicks no longer drive acquisition.
Chapters
01:14 - Adapting marketing strategies
02:04 - Discovery and customer mapping
04:48 - Deep customer understanding
06:14 - AI discovery challenges
08:50 - Limitations of AI in customer interviews
10:21 - Future of customer experience
13:37 - Consistency in customer experience principles
18:34 - Customer knowledge graphs
22:41 - Mercenary subscription economy
25:35 - Solving critical customer problems
32:33 - Positioning and messaging focus
38:13 - Reassessing customer value proposition
44:58 - Combining research with AI
50:29 - Five-move plan for marketers
54:17 - Importance of authentic customer interviews
Full Episode 👇
Episode 34: Product Led Growth is Dead, This is Replacing it
I sat down with @AnujAdhiya, who is an Expert in Residence at @Techstars, wrote the book, and built the growth hacking to what it is today.
We broke down exactly why the standard Product-Led Growth playbook doesn't apply to AI-native products and what growth teams must do to survive the transition.
When you're dealing with AI agents instead of humans, clicks and sessions no longer measure value.
We dive deep into the mechanics of "learning velocity" and why the best growth leaders today are building armies of AI agents.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Growth Hacking and Anuj's Journey
05:13 Hypothesis Testing and Assumption Mapping
10:39 Navigating Founder Ego and Conviction
15:30 Acquisition Strategies in the AI Era
20:41 Redefining Metrics for AI Products
Full Episode👇