@joelgascoigne@ericries How the hell did you almost lose control of the company? I thought you had majority equity.
I remember @hnshah telling you, if you want to do all the shit that you guys love, you have to own control of the business. And you are saying that was what you were going to do.
This guy + his agent hit a $10MM run rate...
...and everyone on X is dumping on him.
So I took all X's harshest criticisms and asked him straight up:
Q: Are customers cancelling? Is your churn high?
First month is ~50%. But many people are just signing up to look around and see what this whole ai company builder is about. That's not egregious.
Q: Your revenue isn't recurring.
Some is (like the base subscription) and some isn't (like domain name purchases).
Q: Are the sites your customers get just AI slop? I created one and it looked like a few other sites I saw.
The first version is designed to give you a taste for how this works. At the start, I intentionally trade customization for smooth onboarding. The AI will improve it with you.
Even the first version of a Squarespace site feels generic, but you're meant to improve those too.
And we're working on improving Polsia to create even better site.
Q: Is your name, "Polsia," just "AI Slop" spelled backwards?
Yes. I'm trying to build the opposite of ai slop.
Q: Polsia builds companies. Seems few of them are making big money.
Less than 10% of Shopify stores are profitable.
I'm a seasoned entrepreneur who spent 2025 building companies and 3 of them made zero dollars.
Polsia is helping new founders get started. We just launched a few months ago. Give it time.
My take:
- Make as much fun of him as you want. He told me X critics are growing his company.
- But at least spend some time hearing his vision and his responses to the criticism.
- I heard him out. I think he's sincerely working on building the future of entrepreneurship. I want to keep interviewing him as he builds his vision.
Hear the whole thing on yt:
https://t.co/JhHvpElMt9
(PS of course these Q&As are my edited notes, not verbatim quotes.)
been asking others at Anthropic how they stay in the loop with Claude and fully understand the work being done
this is one of my favorites from Suzanne:
@rajvara good point. but shopify is an established company with a long track record and still turning a profit is hard.
maybe we shouldn't expect agent-build sites do take off right away?