Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We follow the journey of Faith Forster as she creates an AI native tech startup & product.
Welcome to Building Out Loud, a brand new podcast where me, Brandy Silver, and
Faith Forster:Faith Foster.
Randy Silver:We'll get together every week to map the progress as Faith build a new AI startup. Exciting. So, Faith, I know why I'm here. You asked me to come here. I'm a I'm a coach, a consultant, and a podcaster.
Randy Silver:You asked me to come here and interview you every week for this. Why did you decide to start this? What's the impetus behind this?
Faith Forster:There's so much changing with AI in our world. It's really hard for people to keep up, myself included, as a CPO. I took a step back from my role and focused more on fractional roles, and wanted to experiment, play with AI and learn a lot more about it while I had a little bit of time. I started thinking about what problems we could solve differently now that we have AI technology. There is definitely a lot we could do more efficiently in the product space, particularly for the changes we're seeing in the build phase of the product lifecycle that is shrinking, it's getting a lot quicker to build stuff.
Faith Forster:And so I think that's increasingly going to be a bigger problem as that puts pressure on the other parts of the product lifecycle, particularly the discovery phase, and then the go to market phase. We already ask a lot of product managers to do a huge amount of analysis to inform the choices around what we should be building. And I think that's only going to increase. And AI can do a lot of that work for us in a way that previous technology couldn't really. That's where I'm sort of playing around with this idea of what can we do now that we've got this technology available and how do we make the lives of product managers and product leaders a lot easier to make the right choices around how they deliver value.
Randy Silver:This is interesting because you've done a startup before. You've been in the CPO role. So we're gonna be talking about the lessons you've learned about going through the startup journey and what's different about it today. We're gonna talk about the problem that you're working to solve, the hypothesis that you have and how you validate it and potentially build up a new business. What else are we going to talk about?
Faith Forster:The whole playbook is changing around how we build products. We have to go back to first principles again and really think about what is it we're trying to achieve, why are we doing the things that we're doing, and how do we do that well in today's environment. The entire playbook that we have around how to build and ship and deliver software and value for our customers is going to be different. That's really what this is about. We're building out in the open.
Faith Forster:We're sharing that journey of how do you do this in today's world when you've got access to all these amazing tools.
Randy Silver:Well, let's talk about your previous experience with this, of building out a startup. You started in about 2018 to build your first startup?
Faith Forster:2012, It started as my maternity leave project when my son was born and then turned into a startup.
Randy Silver:What was it like then? What was the approach that you took back then and what's different now?
Faith Forster:In 2012, the whole startup scene in London was at the very infancy. The first co working spaces, the first accelerators were starting. We were still trying to work out how to build software in a cloud first environment. The concept of Agile was just gaining momentum. The idea of product market fit and driving product led growth, those concepts were in their absolute infancy.
Faith Forster:The idea of UX and how you validate the problems you're solving and what the user experience should be, that consumerisation of technology was evolving rapidly at the time. I was a first time founder. I had been a management consultant before that. I was not technical as well. Was my first time doing software.
Faith Forster:I was learning everything the hard way. The way that we learnt was trial and error, making mistakes and reading blogs. There was no playbook at that time. I think we're in a similar situation again in that a lot of the basic principles we now understand of how we do things are changing. We're going to have to rethink that playbook again and really work out what does good look like.
Randy Silver:You came up with the idea when you were sitting in your most recent role and you were experiencing a problem, And then you extrapolate out onto the customer base that you're going after. So tell us a little bit, what is the problem and what is the ideal customer profile at this point?
Faith Forster:Until recently, I was the Chief Product Officer at Legal. We were pushing our team to be using AI tooling to do their work a lot more efficiently. When I sat down to do some research and work out our product strategy for 2026, so where should we be focusing our effort and what are we trying to achieve, I started using AI tooling to help do that. But it wasn't easy. There was a lot of information that we needed to gather and process.
Faith Forster:I had to get the engineers to download all of our customer feedback from a couple of different tools in raw format that I could then upload to ChatDuty and pull out some themes. But then you also need to add to that, you know, what are our competitors doing? What are our win loss reasons? There's a lot of data that we have within the organisation that should be part of that decision making process, but it's scattered in lots of different places. It's really hard to pull together and analyse.
Faith Forster:It's still a lot of manual work, even with our agents. And so that was kind of where I started. As we get quicker at building things, those choices around what should we be building will become incredibly important. The ability to process that information and make those decisions quickly will be increasingly critical in how businesses navigate when you've got you know, we're seeing AI native tools releasing major features every week. How do you make those choices so quickly?
Faith Forster:I think there's a real opportunity to pull that information together in a way that's more accessible, linked to commercial and customer goals of the business, and puts product leaders and product managers in a much better position to make more confident choices and demonstrate the value they're delivering the ROI.
Randy Silver:And it's going to be a really interesting journey. So we're committed to keeping these episodes short. So we're not going to go into huge depth today, but things like putting together a first prototype, finding out what is your market size and who is your initial ICP? How are you going to go through validation? All of these things are things we're going to be talking about in coming weeks.
Randy Silver:How is it going so far? What's the stage that you're at right now?
Faith Forster:I've definitely made some mistakes already because with AI tooling, the default is you jump onto a coding or prototyping tool and you create something, right? But that's not where you should be starting when you're creating a whole new value proposition. There's already been so many learnings here how you use AI to do this. There's so many tools available. Which are the best tools?
Faith Forster:How do you use them? How do you not chew through a lot of credits and therefore a lot of money? There's so much to learn. I think this will be really interesting to do it out loud, to share those learnings, explore how this is done, and make that something that other people can engage in and learn from as well.
Randy Silver:Looking forward to challenging you on things like that, but I don't actually agree that it's wrong to start by building because in this case, the risk, the amount of effort to build, it's the same way I would often start by sketching. And now build almost sketching. It's how do I validate the idea in my head? How do I make sure I'm able to articulate that it looks the same? You know, that I'm able to do some of the things?
Randy Silver:How do I take do some of the riskiest assumptions and do it quickly? If I can do that in a day or two, yeah, there is also still the problem of falling in love with my idea. But if you're treating as a prototype and lowering the risk and lowering the effort, maybe it's not such a bad thing to do it that way.
Faith Forster:That's where I started. And I did get some really useful feedback, which I will share in the next episode. But I have I have also revisited a lot of that. And what's been really interesting is the partnership I've formed with a colleague of mine, Chad, who we will talk to as well as part of this, to really think about what we're trying to do in terms of the audience and the value proposition. It's so quick and easy to build something now, but making sure that you're building the most valuable things for the right person and being really clear on that is even more important and needs to be done a lot earlier in the process.
Faith Forster:So I've really valued his input because we've been able to do it over a day or two of conversations of trying to refine exactly what is that problem we're solving. I was then able to change what the product did, which is difficult.
Randy Silver:Fascinating to learn more. You're building this on top of customer feedback. There are platforms that already collect this. So is this a feature of those kinds of platforms, or is it a product in its own right? You're building for an audience that is often stretched on their tools, budgets.
Randy Silver:How are you gonna sell a new thing? It's there's there's a ton of really interesting ideas. I know you've thought about a lot of these things, and I'm really curious as we go from week to week to see how your thinking evolves, how you're dealing with these things, and what changes over time.
Faith Forster:Yeah. I'm looking forward to your challenge too, Randy. I absolutely don't have all the answers. No doubt the conversation will also change what I then go and explore and do.
Randy Silver:Well, if you came in with all the answers, it wouldn't be a very interesting story, would it? So I think the building out loud, the learning along with you is the fascinating part of this.
Faith Forster:I'm looking forward to learning. To me, this is a big exercise in discovery.
Randy Silver:Okay. So one last question. What's next for you? What should we expect? What are you working on this week before we talk again next week?
Faith Forster:So I've got a prototype. I've had some feedback. I'll share how that went next time and what I did with the various different prototyping tools and what worked and what didn't. I'm not far off having a working version of the product, I think, but there's definitely a lot to work through to get to that point, and I'm not at all confident we're in the right place.
Randy Silver:Not at all confident. Give us a percentage. How confident are you right now?
Faith Forster:I'd say 20 to 30%.
Randy Silver:Okay. So we'll be doing this every week. We'll be talking every Monday morning, checking in with Faith, seeing how it's going, and then we'll put these episodes out, and we'll catch up with you next week.