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Built This Week is a weekly podcast where real builders share what they're shipping, the AI tools they're trying, and the tech news that actually matters. Hosted by Sam and Jordan from Ryz Labs, the show offers a raw, inside look at building products in the AI era—no fluff, no performative hype, just honest takes and practical insights from the front lines.
Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween.
Sam:Halloween.
Jordan:Once it takes a picture of you, you'll be able to pick a predesigned costume or you can type in your own costume.
Sam:Hey, everyone, and welcome to Built This Week, episode 18, the podcast where we share what we're building, how we're building it, and what it means for the world of AI and startups. I'm Sam Nadler, a cofounder here at Rise Labs, and each week, I'm joined by my friend, business partner, and cohost, Jordan. What's up, Jordan? How are you today?
Jordan:Yo, Sam. How's it going? Episode 18, another crazy week in AI. Massive announcements from the hyperscalers. So, yeah, another exciting week, and we've got some really fun, cool, tools to share with everybody this week.
Sam:Yeah. We have a really fun, I would even argue, seasonal, product to highlight this week. But before I get into the agenda, just remember to like and subscribe. We have new episodes every Friday of Built This Week. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.
Sam:And, yeah, we're we're we're excited about everything that's happening in in AI and start up. So tune in to to hear about the latest. This week, we're gonna talk about, a really fun tool that we built. It's almost a kind of culture building tool, seasonal tool that we're calling the trick or treat rise tool, and it's a a fun combination. You'll jump into it, but uses nano, banana, and Veo 3.1, I believe.
Sam:We're also gonna talk about one of our favorite internal tools to distribute and post content called Publer. And then lastly, we have some latest and greatest AI news, some new products from OpenAI and and just some some funny news stories to talk about. Anything top of mind before we jump into the trick or treat Rise tool?
Jordan:Yeah. Super excited to share this. I know it's a little, early before Halloween, but I thought it was a good time to share. Just wanted to add, you know, you say like and subscribe, and I think every podcast does, but, you know, if we could just ask you to share the podcast with a friend or two, that would be the most helpful for us. So just, you know, telling another friend, entrepreneur, builder, someone who's interested in AI, just, you know, just sending them a link to to our YouTube video channel, whatever, that'd be the most helpful.
Jordan:So really help us build the channel up. I don't know if you know this, Sam, but almost at 14,000 subscribers on YouTube. So channel's been growing a lot, and, we're almost at our twentieth episode. So excited to jump into it today.
Sam:Perfect. Okay. Yeah. Tell me about trick or treat. I know, you know, this is kind of a fun tool we just built, for teams to use.
Sam:Maybe there's some professional applications, but I would say in the past forty eight hours that it has been built. There's been a lot of action among our our wider kind of internal Rise teammates. But what is it? How do we build it? And, yeah, give me the demo.
Jordan:Okay. Cool. So before this starts, I got the idea from someone on Twitter, and her name is Paige Bailey. And her Twitter handle is Dynamic Web Page, that's spelled p a I g e. And she is the DevEx Eng lead at Google DeepMind, previously at GitHub.
Jordan:And I saw Paige essentially post a little product demo that you built with a webcam, and using Nano Banana, Veo three three point one. And I thought, oh, that's like a cool tool. I think that'd be something fun to use. So I built our own version of it. I know, we have our own flavor to it here at Rise Labs.
Jordan:Doesn't have the most creative name as as you mentioned earlier. Trick or treat Rise costume builder or something like that. I don't know. Might maybe we need a better name generator as next week's episode. But I told Paige that I would shout her out to make sure that, you know, this idea was definitely hers.
Jordan:But I took her idea and ran with it and built something for ourselves, and I know internally our teams have had a ton of fun doing this. So I'm going to jump into the app now, and I'll walk you through how it works. What it does is a multi step process. So the first thing it does, it uses your computer's webcam, and this works both on the computer as well as on your phone. And what it'll do is take a picture of you.
Jordan:Once it takes a picture of you, you'll be able to pick a predesigned costume, and you'll see what I mean by that. Or you can type in your own costume. And then once it does that, it'll take that costume as a lead image, use it in Aveo 3.1 generation, and it'll say a happy Halloween message. So it doesn't have your voice, it doesn't really know that much about you, it just has this one kind of image. And, yeah, here you can see my office space here without my background on.
Jordan:Let's do a quick image capture, and then we can get the side together what we wanna generate. So Perfect. Let's do this. Okay. Cool.
Jordan:Alright. And, you know, should we be a pirate, a superhero, a ninja, or should we create our own?
Sam:Let's try ninja.
Jordan:Okay. Let's go for ninja.
Sam:Haven't haven't seen that one yet.
Jordan:And then I just click here, transform into a ninja. And the nano banana generation is pretty fast. It's usually about like twenty to forty seconds or so, and I should become a ninja. And then it takes about there I am, a ninja. I don't know if those are exactly my eyes, but or even my face, but it's definitely my body movement in my office.
Jordan:So there I am a ninja. And you can download the image here, and so you got like a little ninja. But now what it should do is take this ninja and make a little happy Halloween ninja video with it. And we can try this a few different ways and try some, you know, different different prompts just to see how well it works. But, yeah, once it finishes, I'll show you we have like a little gallery.
Jordan:And, yeah, I think it was just, you know, the culmination of kind of the newest technologies on the edge to make a little fun tool. I know people in the office made all different things from, you know, vampires to wizards to, you know, custom costumes as well. And, yeah, I was just trying to get everyone into the Halloween spirit a little bit, and a fun little tool to build, and yeah, I can just, you know, even when it generates these videos, you can kinda see like what part of it is good and what part is bad. I mean, the image generation, you can see kind of it's the early days and, you know, it's not exactly me, but here we go. Alright.
Jordan:Here we go. Happy Halloween. Well, it's pretty dramatic. So here, you can download the video, you can download the image, you can go to the gallery, you can see some technical details here. And why don't we create another one one more time?
Jordan:This one, I can do. Let's do it with just one hand, let's say.
Sam:What about a rock star in a fist? There we go.
Jordan:Okay, cool. Alright. So how about we do like a eighteen hundreds gunslinger? There we go. Cool?
Jordan:Cowboy. My hand my hand yeah. Cowboy kind of thing. Alright. So I got my hand like that.
Jordan:Trying to look a little more serious in this one. And the Ninja one's pretty funny. It just it just Yeah. It's not a oh, that one, you know, kinda looks like me. Yeah.
Jordan:You can see how fast it is. I mean, it took my whole background out. You know, it kept my hand impression. I mean, the hand is almost, I think, the identical hand. Even though the microphone is, like, cutting off my wrist a little bit.
Jordan:So in that case, like, pretty good. The style is pretty good. I mean, we didn't give it much context. And then we should get another, you know, 18 hundreds happy Halloween video. Let's see how it goes.
Jordan:So we'll put these in kind of full content inside the podcast and post. But, yeah, I'd love to get your feedback on it. I know you've tried it a little bit, but love to hear what you think of the Rise Labs costume creator tool and Wait. Happy Halloween.
Sam:Yeah. Couple thoughts. Number one, it's been really fun for our team to use. A teammate this morning told me, based on one of the videos, she it actually inspired what she was going to be for Halloween. So that's kind of fun.
Sam:But, number two, I think what could be interesting here is just, like, quickly how you built this. I I believe you built it using Replit, but you were telling me, yesterday that there's this, I don't know how new it is, but this planning feature on Replit that makes, you know, builds that much easier and robust before you actually start the building process. Because I'm not sure if you used it on this exact build, but it could be fun to talk about that. And then lastly, you know, professional applications. I mean, even in our own you know, this is more of a fun, like, Halloween themed angle, but we're already using Veo three for b roll and to supplement our actual, original content.
Sam:And I think this is just another theoretical way you could take an image, you can enhance it, and then you can generate a video for it. We are gonna cover a tool that we use to publish, social media content across multiple channels, but the, you know, theoretical acceleration of just a generic webcam video into video content that could later be published, I mean, it's so much faster with these with these tools. So those are those are the high level kind of what I'm immediately thinking.
Jordan:Yeah. So just to kind of run through them real quick, I built this in Replit. The APIs that I'm using are nano banana from Google, as well as Veo 3.1 fast. I'm serving them up actually through replicate.com, as I have an account there, and I have my API keys, like, stored pretty easily already in Replit. And it's not a very complicated application.
Jordan:So, you know, you simply turn on the webcam. It captures an image. We take that image. We send it we send it to the nano by nano API and and get the new corresponding image. And then we use that image as the source image to generate the video with a little prompt about making a Halloween video.
Jordan:So it's been super fun to play with. You know, you can see that it's not a perfect replica of me. It's not a perfect replica of kind of the output. A lot of the videos will say like, happy Halloween, like, blah blah blah, la la la la. And it's not like real words, like you can kinda see the like, you know, mumbled mumble, I guess, you would say, like mumbling of the characters.
Jordan:And it kinda reminds me of, like, how we used to see a lot of the lettering and, like, image generation with AI kind of, like, not be real words, you know, and most of that's kind of gotten solved to this point. So I think we'll see, like, consistent improvements. You know, we've talked about on previous episodes how, you know, NVIDIA is working on a video exclusive chip that should come out in 2026. And so you can just imagine, like, how much more powerful that could be to these types of video generation models. And as you know, you know, Sora two also, you know, could be used to do this as well.
Jordan:I simply went on the Google stack because I saw, you know, the example, and I just thought it was like a fun way to build. So, yeah, I think to your point, you know, it's definitely a cool creative way for people to get costume ideas and even just make some of their own fun social media content. And, you know, we'll definitely try to include some of the the best outcomes here. But
Sam:Okay. Cool. Yeah. You know, as part of our our goal to create and deploy more content, one of kind of our favorite tools to do this that we use internally is Publer. And, basically, the way Publer works, it lets you have a kind of a central dashboard to push, content across multiple platforms in really systematic way.
Sam:You know, you can so for instance, using Built This Week as an example, we have multiple accounts, social accounts for Built This Week. Obviously, we have LinkedIn. We have YouTube. We have YouTube for Shorts and for the podcast. We have x.
Sam:We have TikTok, etcetera. So, you know, if you were to go one by one and upload all the content we're trying to push from just one episode, it would it'd be a hassle. And this way, you can kinda queue everything up in Publer. You can you know, I think there's some AI integrations to help you write the post. You can do hashtags.
Sam:You could schedule it. Obviously, there's analytics. So it allows you to be very systematic and organized and deploy content across multiple channels in a really streamlined way. And we love it here. But, yeah, give me your high level take on Publer.
Jordan:Yeah. So Publer is a social media syndication platform. It is not the only syndication platform that's out there. There's a lot of social media syndication platforms. In fact, Canva has a built in scheduling and syndication platform.
Jordan:And before we were using Publer, we were using another content syndication platform that did something pretty similar to the to the way Publer works. So I don't wanna say that it's kind of the only platform that you can use to do this. There's many that you can you can use to do this. But we find that using Publer to schedule social media content across all of our different channels, not only to be an effective mechanism to get content out there, but it's kind of the only way we'd be able to do it. And if we weren't able to use a tool like Publer, we would probably, you know, have our social team be spending hours and hours a day just to get content live, and that would just make it impossible.
Jordan:So I think, like, if we just show kind of how the the public calendar looks like, I think it might show the gravity of the type of content that we're pushing out, including this podcast. But, you know, on any one given day, you can see 19 posts, eight posts, 18 posts, 14 posts. So across all different brands, all different social media content, we're pushing out content nonstop. And, you know, if you were to push 19 different unique posts across, you know, whatever seven different social media platforms across five different brands, and it might take you the entire day and, you know, you probably wouldn't even finish. So you could just see how a platform like this allows us to scale.
Jordan:Yeah. The way the platform works is you connect your social media platforms. It supports, like, you know, pretty much all the major ones, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. You can create a team so you can allow your team to join in and have permissions to certain accounts. And then you can go on and create your content, you can schedule it, you can make changes to it, and, you know, if I just go to click create here, I can simply pick kind of the social channels I wanna create something with, I can add the content here, I can use an AI assistant, and then I'll get a preview of what this content's gonna look like, and then I can simply go here into my scheduler, and I can select here by scheduling.
Jordan:I can pick the times in which I want this to be scheduled, if I want it to recur, etcetera. And so what this does is just really allow you to scale up your social media content across channels. And, you know, honestly, I mean, I'm I'm posting consistently across my channels, and if I had to manage that myself, I know it'd be almost unmanageable. So there are some small nuances. I know for, like, things like Instagram, you need to have a business account versus a personal account, and I think that's true for some of the other platforms as well.
Jordan:But, yeah, we're just big believers in in social media syndication platforms like like Publer, and it's been a huge huge huge advantage for for Rise Labs and all of our sub businesses as well. Yeah. What do you think about it?
Sam:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I know it would be really hard for our team to do what they do with as much content as we're pushing across our brands without a tool like Bubbler. And there's a couple others out there. I I know we've used another one previously.
Sam:And for, you know, the price point and the tooling, Bubbler is the one we've stuck with. But, yeah, I think it's a great tool and, you know, essentially allows us to do more with less. So, yeah, I do have some news I'm ready to transition to. Is there is there anything else on Publer you'd like to cover? Yeah.
Sam:No. I mean, I
Jordan:think in general, we covered it from for the most part. I think Buffer was the one we were using before Publer, if we wanted to mention that. But, yeah, like I said, Canva has a scheduling tool. And, yeah, they're pretty inexpensive, and they become a a great way for for startups and tech companies and almost any company to to really scale up their social media postings across channels. Okay.
Jordan:Let's move on. Yeah. Let's do it.
Sam:Also, one last thing on public that was really helpful. You know, our our we have a small social team. One of our teammates took, you know, an extended European vacation for a couple weeks, and having all the content preloaded, pre it was almost, you know, like, we never missed a beat for those that short period of time she was away. Obviously, you know, she's back and able to do more, but just having that as a stop gap and having it all scheduled just made that period a lot easier.
Jordan:Yeah. The brands never stop posting, and they don't know who's on vacation and who's not on vacation because you're just being very consistent in in getting your content out there.
Sam:Okay. Moving on, our first article is a bit of a stinker. We both think this is a a pretty funny new device, but Kohler, the toilet brand, has unveiled a new camera, for your toilet. Yes. That is true.
Sam:And, yeah, something that, I guess, truly analyzes your output. Obviously, I know that, there is a lot of potential health benefits from analyzing a person's waste, and I know there's a couple other companies that do this. But maybe maybe every element of our health doesn't need to be optimized, but, we both thought that this was a a little funny device, to analyze your your poop.
Jordan:Yeah. Well, I don't wanna poo poo on your news, sections, but, I did think this was a a great story that we could both shit on together. What is interesting here that, you know, Cole or putting a camera inside your toilet sounds really weird. I know it's not the first device that's done that. But the reality is is that by imaging bowel movements and urine, you can actually learn a lot.
Jordan:And I think this is the beginning of AI entering the bathroom. You know, we haven't really seen even something like a smart toothbrush in Sonicare. I think Sonicare is like, I don't know, was twenty, thirty years old as far as technology goes. I think this is interesting. I don't know if I want a camera inside my toilet yet, but I could definitely see a future in which, like, you know, you have a smart toilet.
Jordan:It's got a camera in. It's got a sensor. It knows, like, who's on the toilet. And it's recording all this data, and, you know, you go to see your doctor, and your doctor's got, you know, pretty much, like, every every piece of information about, you know, everything that happened in the bathroom with analysis. And I think that that could be incredibly helpful, and especially for patients that have certain types of illnesses, especially for people who have IBS or other types of diseases like that.
Jordan:This could be actually fundamental for their health and be a huge improvement, and almost like a glucose monitor type of style. But it's certainly a stinky story, and I thought it'd be fun to share with everybody here.
Sam:Great. Great. Yeah. It's a fun story. I think I'll pass personally, but, you know, it'll be it'll be interesting to see what what sales adoption is like.
Sam:The next news that we're gonna cover today is OpenAI launched Atlas yesterday. I downloaded today, poked around a little bit. Haven't really had too much time using the Atlas Atlas browser. I think what's more interesting is kind of the the overarching strategy. I think Google took a couple percent hit yesterday just on the news alone.
Sam:I know you've downloaded it and started using it. But, really, you know, it makes sense that OpenAI is going to have its own web browser, but does it you know, how significantly does it threaten Google's business? And, yeah, what's your take? And and how much time have you had using it? I've only used it for about twenty minutes, so I don't have too much of a usability opinion yet.
Jordan:Five to seven years of experience. Yeah. I downloaded it yesterday. After it came out, there was kinda like a pop up in ChatGPT to download it, so I downloaded it. I've used it a little bit kind of side by side with Chrome.
Jordan:I have used only a few of the AI features. I think there's a few kind of key points that make the browser interesting and and competitive. The first thing is that it's very fast, And, you know, Chrome has historically taken up a lot of resources. It is the best browser on the market. You kind of everybody uses Chrome.
Jordan:However, it's incredibly heavy and taking up, like, system resources. So one thing I'd first noticed is that it's very lightweight, is in it feels very fast to run. So that that was like kind of a cool thing. The next is, know, when you're searching or you type in kind of a search or a website or something like that, you're immediately brought into like a chat GPT conversation. And obviously, that's like kind of the first major threat to kinda Google because like, you know, rather than like searching on Google to find a website and then linking to that website, you're brought into like a chat GPT conversation if they can't figure out the domain you're typing in.
Jordan:So, you know, if you type in something like Gmail and hit enter, you're gonna go to gmail.com directly. You know, but if you type in something like, you know, built this week podcast, you know, you're actually instead of getting like a Google search result, you're getting a ChatGPT search result, which, you know, as we mentioned, is obviously a, you know, pretty big threat to Google. And, you know, as we mentioned in previous episode, I think it was last week we talked about shopping, you can start to see how shopping starts to get into this. Right? So, you know, you're on your new browser, you're searching for iPhone cases.
Jordan:Right? They have shopping integrated. You check out, and you never even leave leave, like, the chat experience. And then the last piece is just the integration of ChatGPT as like a side side panel, and you can kinda see it here in the video as it runs through. It does a good job of doing like page summaries.
Jordan:It looks here like they showed, you know, what's the best thing here on the page. Also, it looks like they show some examples of of it doing some analysis of the page. I found it to be like pretty like rudimentary right now, but you know, I do believe it'll just get better and better with like feature versions to the point that almost like you never really touch the page, you just talk to the bot and say like, okay, I need this, this, and this, like, just go check it out, and like, maybe even use your voice to do it. And the bot says like, okay, like, I'll do that and let you know when I'm done. But, yeah, it's definitely an exciting day.
Jordan:And, you know, I do wanna talk about Atlas before we talk about the final story, but I I do think they're tied hand in hand. And I think that, you know, OpenAI's decision to launch Atlas, you know, yesterday was purposeful, especially for the impact of Google's announcement as well. So, yeah, curious, you know, any other last comments on Atlas, I guess, before we move on?
Sam:Yeah. I used it in the twenty minutes. I used it before the filming of this podcast was to kind of recommend a purchase. I'm looking for a family passport holder to store kind of passports and travel documents for a group of four. Pulled up Amazon, chatted, kind of put my parameters into the chat.
Sam:It asked a couple questions. I answered those questions, and it surfaced two or three options, and gave me kind of its recommendation. I didn't move forward with the purchase. I've just had other things to do, but I thought that feature was was interesting. I I basically didn't have to search.
Sam:It gave me, like, do you want affordable? Do you want high end? Do you want, you know, functionality? You know? Yeah.
Sam:Okay. Based on what you're looking for, we think this one's the best, but here are other two options. And it just kinda makes it easy.
Jordan:Yeah. You know, this is I I you know, one of the things the browser asks you is to enable memory. And I think this is kind of like the key unlock feature here, is how well AI can really learn about us. And I think this will hit when you think about websites where you spend expense extensive amount of time finding what you want. And and an example of that might be, Sam, like, you know, an Airbnb search.
Jordan:You know, let's say you're taking your family on vacation for, you know, a few days and you're you're going to, you know, maybe my favorite place, Destin, Florida. And, you know, you're looking for a spot for your family, and maybe you've been to Destin, Florida, like, you know, multiple times in a row. So you kinda know what you like. Right? You kinda know you want a house.
Jordan:You kinda know, you know, you want a pool. You want a view. You wanna be near the beach. You know, maybe you want something for the kids, like a playroom or something. Right?
Jordan:And so every time you go to Airbnb, you kinda start with the same search, like, I'm looking for Allison and Dustin, like, you know, then you put all these filters on, and gotta have WiFi, and the hot tub, and whatnot, you know. I think, you know, this is where it starts to get interesting, where you can start to say to the to the chat, hey, I'm going to Dustin again, you know, get me the best house. And it already knows, like, kind of like your price and like your willingness to pay and all these things and, you know, kind of maybe whittles it down to like the top three choices. But it's already gone through and kind of done all of those searches for you, looked at the images. And so you can start to see how, like, agent can kinda work in the background, save you a ton of time.
Jordan:You know, an ex example here, it's talking about Instacart and, you know, United flights. But, yeah, I think it's a super exciting kind of just the abilities to start to use agents to browse the web for us. And I think, you know, when they start to work really well, I think they'll become superpowers for people.
Sam:Cool. And moving on to the last story, Google AI Studio has rolled out, launched a new vibe coding tool. Both of us are, you know, pretty familiar with the portfolio of different vibe coding tools out there. I would say you are an expert, and I believe you like this one a lot.
Jordan:Amazing. Amazing. So Google announced this yesterday. They call it AI Studio Build, I guess they call it. You can, you know, basically build applications in the same way that Lovable and Bolt and vo.dev and even like Codex and and Cloud Code work, but you can do it all in the browser.
Jordan:It's built by Google. They say it's powered by Gemini two and a half Pro, and it feels just really, really good. They have some premade templates here, so I mean, you're looking at 16 premade templates already. You know, animate images with Veo, use an AI powered chatbot to do customer support, use Google Maps data, control images, transcribe audio. So I mean, just the prebuilt templates alone are are pretty awesome and pretty intensive.
Jordan:I asked it to build a little chatbot for me based on the Built This Week podcast, and so I I can jump into that. I think first, I should probably have it start to build something just so we can you and I can kinda show what that interface looks like. But, you know, let's just say we wanna build, like, I don't know, maybe something like a weather clock app for LA and Nashville. Does that sound okay? Is that like too easy?
Jordan:Weather and time app for Los Angeles and Nashville. And let's say make it pretty. And let's go built. And here you go. It's just gonna see kind of the same type of UI you've seen in in other apps.
Jordan:What's cool here is they show you some ideas. Like here, add weather alerts, start from a from a gallery, add hourly forecast. So while the app is actually, like, building its feature set, it's actually thinking of new ideas and recommending them to you that you can actually add into your build so you can actually continue to build and make it better and better. Right? And that's just, you know, one way to kill time.
Jordan:Right? Like, obviously, these things are building. And I know we are running out of time, but I think we'll have enough time that this should get built, and we'll have a little demo of it. And I think that'll show you, like, this is all Google. It's I mean, I do have a Google Gemini paid account, so I'm not sure what permissions you need, but woah.
Jordan:Look how fast that was. Look how fast that was, Sam. I mean, definitely the fastest fastest thing we've built so far. You know, here it is. Yeah.
Sam:It definitely does not feel like 82 degrees here in Nashville today, but I wonder wonder if that's accurate. But can you deploy to the web? Just, you know, in Bolt, you can essentially take your build and pretty much deploy it immediately.
Jordan:Here we go, baby. Deploy the app. We can push it to GitHub. We can download the app. We can save it.
Jordan:We can share it with, a virtual link. You can add some private, switch to API keys. So guess you can, like, API your own app. You can test different devices. So I guess we could test what it looks like on mobile, even if we rotate it.
Jordan:So, yeah. Pretty cool. And then here's the code. Yeah. So honestly, I think this is a huge day for Google.
Jordan:Really, really awesome product. And you could see all of these products are converging more and more, and just the ability to be able to say kind of anything you want, and then get it built so quickly. So, anyway, yeah, that's Google AI Studio. I think it goes hand in hand with the Atlas announcement as well. And overall, just, yeah, really fun episode, Sam.
Jordan:Really great to catch up with you.
Sam:Great episode, Jordan. Everyone like and subscribe, and we'll see you next week.
Jordan:Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Bye.