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Founder Reality with George Pu. Real talk from a technical founder building AI-powered businesses in the trenches. No highlight reel, no startup theater – just honest insights from someone who codes, ships, and scales.
Every week, George breaks down the messy, unfiltered decisions behind building a bootstrap software company. From saying yes to projects you don't know how to build, to navigating AI hype vs. reality, to the mental models that actually matter for technical founders.
Whether you're a developer thinking about starting a company, a founder scaling your first product, or a technical leader building AI features, this show gives you the frameworks and hard-won lessons you won't find in the startup content circus.
George Pu is a software engineer turned founder building multiple AI-powered businesses. He's bootstrapped companies, shipped products that matter, and learned the hard way what works and what's just noise.
Follow along as he builds in public and shares what's really happening behind the scenes.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
George Pu (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Founder reality podcast. I'm your host, George pu Today is Tuesday. So yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving, but I was able to curate three very important stories that I think impacted a lot of my decision-making in many things. And I think it will be important and good to share with you those three things. So the three stories are basically telling us that we're entering a phase in which the gap of people, the number of people who get AI,
versus the people who don't get AI yet. It's going to become permanent and even more gapping. So the first story is about, you know, obviously AI is widening the performance gap, no matter if you're a founder, no matter if you're working for someone, you know, you're an employee or, you know, if you're just like self-learning. The second is about distribution is the only moat I talked about this a few episodes back. So now we're getting proof from real founders about how to use distribution to get the edge in 2025.
And lastly, it's about platform listing, right? ChatGPT, obviously I talked about last week, announced deal with shopify So this week, they're actually announcing an app store that's going to create a new app ecosystems that might be beneficial for you if you're a developer. And I personally think those three stories are connected because it basically says, if you're not AI first, distribution first. And if you're not early for new platforms and finding out distributions, you're going to be behind, right? And it's not about falling behind and it's about already behind. So let me explain.
So the first story I'm actually curated from the Wall Street Journal, which, you know, and I think the article was pretty important. It talked about that in a traditional company nowadays, AI has already widened the gaps between superstars and also average employees. So I found this to be pretty interesting because we always think about like AI is going to like, leveling the playing field. you know, like everyone's going to be empowered. Everyone's going to like use AI and it's very hard to see the top performance.
versus the bottom performance with AI because the bottom performance we all assume could use AI to also just get by and assuming that it can work, right? So this article is kind of arguing with that. It's basically saying that the top performance of superstars are going to be even more superstars. They're going to be 10 times a performance or something like that because they extract more value from AI. And it's also because like, first of all, they master tools faster, right? So those superstars, ⁓ AKA,
They're able to use different tools or be able to understand a lot of tools that exist that most of the employees probably don't exist that exist yet. And also they have domain expertise so they can actually ask better questions. So a few years ago, we were talking about prompt engineering, right? And here I think it's still relevant and I think prompt engineering, we'll talk about that in a bit. It's going to also make the top performance perform better. And also the article says the superstars are able to...
use AI systematically. like following a framework, following the system, right? Not just having a question, open chat, GPT, and type the question. think that's majority of us do that. it, you know, it's nothing new, right? So the top performance, they have their own AI frameworks. They have the systematic way of using AI in which the average employee does not still know how to do it. And the average employee, there's article, wait for guidance, you know, sticks to basic features. ⁓ but, know, they get less credit, right? So
The article is pretty important. The article basically says that the stars have domain expertise. So they use that to generate better prompts and use better systems to fundamentally capture more value and they can catch more mistakes from AI systems. That's why they'll be performing better. So quite interesting article. And I think my personal take is like, it's not just about employees, right? It's not just about a company, big company, whereas people are playing office politics. Obviously Wall Street Journal's audiences are that.
However, I think think back, I think this applies to business owners too, right? Founders, business owners, and the gap is going to be way more brutal than what people realize and what this article describes. personal story time. So personally, I've been building, you know, with AI, I think I'm a little bit late to the game, quite frankly, I think I only started around like early 2023, you know, a few months after GPT came out and...
⁓ I see, you know, throughout the years, about three types of builders, right? So the first type of builders, ⁓ it's rare, but there, there are actually a lot, like majority of founders and business owners like that. They're still building the old way, right? They're still having manual processes. They're still hiring for every job function possible. Right. And if you look at like Glassdoor, indeed, LinkedIn, people are still hiring for lot of jobs, right? There are not like, you know, warehouse jobs, actual office jobs. And those business owners are still skeptical about the basic.
You know, about like using AI beyond, like they say, the basic chat GPT usage. So this is the majority. don't know. I don't have exact number about how many of those business owners are, but let's, think at least 80, 85%, 90 % of the business owners are currently still like that, right? They might occasionally ask GPT, you know, tell me more about how I can optimize my business or give me a template for my hiring plan, something like that. But you know, very minimum, very basic, nothing, you know, significant. So.
The type two, think the second type of founders and business owners, they are a little bit more advanced and think we're getting to the point a little bit. So this might be you, right? So we are like, this person is using AI tool and they're using a lot of AI tools, right? Probably like claude Gemini, chat gpt So tools are a lot, a lot of tools, but they're not fundamentally changing the way of how they build. So they use AI only as like a reference point. They're not using AI say, you know, I have a system.
And I just use it, like, execute a system. It's more about like on demand. I have a question, I ask AI, I have a question, I ask AI, right? And they, maybe they use cursor for some code. They use chat GPT for content. And this type of founders, I think is still the majority, which is probably like 10 % of the remaining, over the remaining 20%. And, you know, they're better than the pipe one, but I think it's, they still think in the old paradigm, right? AI is just a tool for them, right? They're, they're not thinking above and beyond, which is what I think.
majority of founders are still are at this stage because it's difficult to change one's perception about a stage. Even if you're in tech, even if you know AI is a very important tool, right? But the traditional thinking still exists, right? That's why I've been advocating against is basically thinking like, okay, the white comment or advice of Paul Graham essays, those are from 2000s, early 2000s and 2010s, right? So it doesn't mean those are not good resources. I read those resources. I love those resources.
but those resources are not as up to date as it should be in the AI world, right? And I think that is the common denominator is basically those advice, those old school advice, right? They still work. They're still important. And if you follow them, you're probably still gonna build a very successful startup. But the thing is no one has actually built a playbook about how it can be successful post-Chat gpt right? Which is like November 30th, 2022, which is...
quite honestly, less than three years ago. So no one has find extreme success just yet, just like the internet, just like the mobile app, right? So that's problem. So most of our founders are still stuck on type two, right? Which is like not an issue if you're on type two right now. I'll talk about in a bit how you can improve. So I'm sure you can already imagine what I'm gonna talk about type three. So type three founders, right? They tend to be a bit younger, right? They tend to be straight out of college around.
recent years so they actually understand and they can study the tools really well. But it also applies to slightly older founders, older in terms of start-up world, so late 20s, 30s, 40s. So those are the founders who are AI native from the ground up. So they have every workflow, every workflow they have is embedded with AI, not just for the name AI, everyone says the name AI, but their workflow actually benefits significantly from using the AI technologies. ⁓
And every hiring decisions they think in their head is like, okay, can AI do this plus contractors, right? So instead of employees, they're thinking can AI do the majority of the heavy lifting? If not, can we hire some contractors from somewhere else to handle the rest of work? So that's obviously a lot of expense saving, right? So that is basic building products that could have needed 10 engineers, right? They narrowed down with just two engineers, the rest using AI and probably can build the same quality of tools from type two and type one.
you know, business owners. So that's a difference I want you to think about, right? And that's like just in the founder world, in the startup world, right? But it also applies to any business that you run, whether it's a retail, whether it's you're an entrepreneur, whether it's like you're working in a service business, the same thing applies, right? It doesn't have to be in tech, right? Basically, and I personally think the scary part is the gap between founders who are in type three and the gap between founders who are in type two and type one. We're actually not going to see
the big app for a long time because you know, for at least another 12, for 24 months. And the reason is, is because the technology is still new, right? It's still like two years old technology and everyone's revenue at this time still looks the same. However, type three founders are building probably two to five times faster. They're learning probably 10 times faster and you know, and compounding knowledge at a rate where type two and type one founders are going to find very hard to replicate.
But we're not going to see significant changes in revenue, in productivity, anything else, because those are basic compounding asset, right? People don't basically become a lot faster on day one, and you can see the differences in revenue and head counts and different things between companies. But I think in a year's time, or maybe even less, it's going to show up and the gap is going to widen. And by the time, let's say two years from now, it's going to be impossible to catch up because...
where I go in basically type three founders and type two founders are going to be fundamentally different people using fundamental different workflows. And by the time the gap becomes actually visible, it will be too late for the first two type of founders to catch up because while you're figuring out, how do you better use AI tools? They're already building the second and third companies probably with AI first thinking, right? So it's impossible to catch up. And there are many real examples in the world. So I'll show you a little bit.
So even for my personal products, like, you know, I simple direct, we already, as I mentioned, like we are running a very lean team. So I'm personally thinking I'm probably still stuck between like type two and type three founders, probably leaning more about type two because I don't have a systematic way of setting up different tools. So I'm not saying I'm type three founders as well. So we're all in this together and learning about how to be a better founder. So for simple direct, think main thing is like we have two engineers and we basically have like, you know, the main product.
And we essentially just have two engineers doing it, right? I'm the one doing the code reviews. So we're a very small team, but I think we're able to actually build two to three different products over the past two years. Right. And that is like in a large way, thanks to get up co-pilot, thanks to like, know, cursor and now thanks to like, claude code. Right. So which I use a lot. So there are a lot of benefits that, you know, businesses can do. And, and remember two years ago, we had about, I think six to eight engineers. Right. And, and that.
progression doesn't mean and and going down from 8 to 2 doesn't actually mean that we're less productive I think we're just as productive right and of course there are of course ways that I could have run the team of eight a lot better engineers right and I haven't right but I think I think fundamentally speaking I'm not seeing as much churn from our team and and also like if someone does churn I don't think the picking up someone new we do recruit it's going to have take a long time to picking it up
And I think a lot of it is thanks to AI because we're able to like actually get new recruits to adapt to our slacks and our workflow a lot faster. and also I think AI also allows us fundamentally to pivot a lot faster. So for example, like with some product financing, I talked about how we're actually pivoting from B2B to B2C just because of broken business model. So I was thinking about sunsetting it, but now we're trying giving ourselves 90 days to see if we can actually make the product.
work for the right demographics. the problem is not a product, it's distribution and it's the customer profile. So figuring that out. And I think right now we're trying to see, you know, can we actually, you know, make the product work? So in 90 days, we're going to use AI to do a sprint. And if it doesn't work, we shut it down. If it does work, we carry it on, right? So that's also possible because of AI, because right now our team is working on a separate project right now. So I'm personally taking on, you know, using an existing product with existing IP, existing distribution channel.
but changing the customer profile and adapting it and using a new distribution strategy. So that is only possible because of AI, right? Because of like using claude to draft like, know, articles that might be relevant to our readers using cluade to draft like social media posts on, you know, X or LinkedIn to target specific customers and also brainstorming the ways that we can work. So it's not possible, you know, before it is possible now. So I'm just sharing an example of like, you know, if you put it like two years, three years ago,
We probably would need 10 people just to do what we do now, if not more, right? But I think now, nowadays, like our productivity is a lot faster and our expenses most importantly are a lot lower. So I think if you put these two things together, right? Anyone right now can be an entrepreneur thanks to AI. And I think a lot of us are not seeing it and the people who are entrepreneurs, I think if you're not using it to become faster, you're going to be undertaken by people who are new, by people who know how to use AI, right? So that's, you know, what I think in the founder's field.
But I also want to mention a little bit about people who still employed because I don't want to just make it about founders. So the Wall Street Journal article always talk about employees. So I also think it's super, super important if you work for someone how you should actually use it to do a lot better. So if you're working on a corporate job, this article should be exciting, not draining because you're like, I'm not a superstar. I'm not good at kissing my bosses.
So there are many things, you know, but you can still do to make yourself a superstar, right? If you don't want to be a superstar, it's okay as well, because now you have an opportunity to build your business, to build a side income on the side. So the first opportunity, I think, is basically you can maintain or exceed your current performance with less time investment. So I have friends, I bet you have too, who are using AI to do the job, right? And now...
they're basically spending time on their job, maybe about 50 to 60%, or you can give it a generous and 60 to 70%. So they spend that much of time on their job, right? And that amount of time is basically, let's say if I spend eight hours before working at five, so now I can probably spend my time working 12 to five, right? So that's a simple example. So what do I do with the rest of the hours, right? Because those people are exceeding their expectations and they're probably even doing better than before using different AI tools.
I think now is a good time to actually spend the extra 30 to 40 % of your time building side projects, side hustles. I actually don't like the word side hustle. I think side projects, right? Working on your audit startups, learning your skills.
because a lot of the misconception is that, I actually need to like quit my job and work on a startup, right? And I always disapprove that, I always disconnect that. And I think, you like if you don't have to actually quit your job to actually do something on the side, right? A lot of people actually do have two to three jobs and I think there's something wrong with that. But I think if you just have one main job and you also work on something on the side, it means that your risk tolerance is still high because if that project doesn't work out.
you can still just fall back to your job. There's no risk per se, right? In the sense. So I'm actually going to write a free ebook probably about this topic, probably in coming weeks. So, you know, stay tuned at funder rather comes when in case I do publish it. And I think also like, you know, the old excuse, which is like, my job is too demanding. I can't work on my own thing because I have to be like nine to five all the time. So I personally do think that excuse doesn't hold it.
because let's say you can actually, it doesn't matter if you're in the office or otherwise, right? If you're working at home, it's even better because now you can just get most of the things done using AI. You can develop your own workflows to free yourself from the job, right? And then can spend the rest of the time building your own thing, learning about how be an entrepreneur or learning about how to do your side business and then even making additional income. So I think that's pretty important and it sounds harsh, but you know, it's indeed very true, right? And that's the first opportunity I think for employee people.
And then there also the second opportunities that if you're ambitious and you want to stay corporate, right? And you can actually become a superstar, this article describes. And look, not everyone should quit their jobs. Like I said, like in fact, I promote people not to quit their jobs. And here are some metrics I think you should take before quote unquote quitting your job to do a startup.
The first is that you actually have six to 12 months of runway saved. I personally prefer 12, at least 12 to 18, if you have. I do prefer that. think that gives you a lot more leeway, especially quitting your job. It's a huge thing, right? And having that runway, aside from the investments, aside from everything else, having that set of runway for yourself or your family is going to be important. And also, I also think if you do have stable consulting income, right? I talk about consulting a lot. I just quickly bring it up again. Basically, my thing is like,
instead of just starting a tech startup, right? Whatever, you should actually start consulting. So solving a B2B problem, because that's the most easier problem to solve, B2B problem. So solve that, but instead of building a product to solve that, find your target customers and sell consulting services to them because they're more perceptive of being sold a service, right? So I write that on my blog, at founderreality.com. So go check it out. The free book is already out, so you can download it for free.
And I recently just got a really good perceptions on Twitter about this. So personally, I believe this, if you build that consulting income or side revenue and that revenue is generating a lot of income for you already. let's say you're getting paid like $10,000 per month and your site consulting income is already doing 6,000 or 8,000 a month. Right. And then I think another important thing
In consulting, think, maybe this is something I haven't covered. In consulting, it's important to build a diversified amount of customers, right? So you don't want to just be tied up with one or two customers because the customers can change their mind anytime. That's the nature of consulting. Their work change, your scope change, everything changes. So in that change, you are actually supposed to quickly pivot to another customer. So ideally you have three to five clients. You're generating as much, 80%, 85%, 90%, or ideally like even a hundred percent or more.
of your current income. So that's a good sign of, you know, maybe I can quit my job and do a startup, right? So that's a, that's an important thing. And then you also have a clear validation for what you're building, right? That's also very important. You don't want to just like haven't validated the solution and you don't have that gut feeling telling you now is the time, right? If you just, just quitting because of ego, that's not a good sign. So I think the consulting model basically talks about it. So build revenue, build revenue before you quit. That's very important.
But, you know, let's talk about why you're so employed. Why you're so employed using AI can make you become indispensable, right? Because you are suddenly the knowledgeable person. You're the person that your bosses and your colleagues turn to when they are stuck with a very simple or basic or complicated problems, right? Be the person who figures out AI workflows and who 10 times our outputs and even share some of easier workflows with your friends, with your colleagues, right? And you will become the go-to AI implementation person in your team. I actually know a few people.
I've just talked to in organizations who are supposed to be forward-looking, who supposed to be tech forwarding, whether or not, right? And they're still figuring out very simple how to use Notion. just, it's mind-boggling to me how they couldn't, like a team, a tech team couldn't figure out how to use Notion. But you know, it actually happens and I think it's important. So if you can be that person, if you can be that go-to person on AI, it can do two things to you, right? The first thing is that you're too valuable to let go. So it provides you additional
job security, right? This is very important. I've seen my friends doing it. It's working. The second thing is like optionality, right? You're building skills and reputations that transfer when you do eventually leave. Or if you don't leave, you can actually have a more broader scope of job responsibility. So maybe it helps you to get up in a chain a lot faster. So those are all possible, right? So the bottom line, I think on the story is that the ad gap is real, right? It's obviously widening and you basically need to decide right now which side you want to be on.
Right? You want to be the adoption side or you want to be the, you know, go as you see side, because in 18 months, the gap will be permanent. No matter if you're a founders, you know, if you're entrepreneurs, business owners, or if you're employees, you have to do it now, because if you don't take action now in 12 months, 18 months, it'll be too late.
So I also have a framework I want to share with you. So, so not just basically bringing your stories, but also sharing the frameworks. So the frameworks, think it's like, you can do an AI positioning audit, right? Asking yourself four questions. And the first is like, am I using AI just as a tool or is AI core to think to how I think about building? Right. And this is goes to software engineers, business owners, or just employee. Right. And the second thing is like, can I reclaim 20% to 30 % of my time minimum?
of my work time using AI, right? Because I think if you're not, that you're not actually trying. So go back, try it again, figure out that workflow and figure out how you can save 20 to 30 % of your work time using AI. And if you're employed, ask yourself like, am I becoming the expert in my organization? And if not, how can I actually make myself do that? Right? And four, fourth question is like, if you're a founder, can my business collapse if AI tools disappear tomorrow? So I think this is a really bold one. So will your business collapse, your business operations collapse?
If AI tools all disappear tomorrow, like chat gpt, claude or anything like that. Right? If yes, you're AI dependent, which I think is a good thing. it's not a bad thing at all. It's a good thing. Right. And I think for me, yes, my business will probably operations will collapse if, you know, we don't have access to AI anymore. So yes, it's a good thing, right? In this context is you have to be yes. If no, if it's just like, ⁓ a bit, a little bit discomfort, you know, it's still fine. You know, my workflow is the same, not destroyed.
It will be a little bit hazy because I rely on using it for asking questions now. Okay, that's not collapsing, right? That's just discomfort. So you have to differentiate discomfort and collapsing. So collapsing is the right way to go. Discomfort is not. So if the answer is no, so you're not being AI native enough, right? So that's basically the first story, which I think is very important.
And also we have a second story, which is also basically building the product distribution and product, right? Which is, I think a few episodes ago, I talked to you guys about while distribution, why distribution is the only moat left in 2025. So remember I talked about that a few episodes ago. So I got the validation about like a new breed of founders on Twitter. actually analyzed their tweets, analyze what people are talking about and analyze their startups. So they're all talking about distribution first and product second.
Right. And they are validating those founders on Twitter are validating about channels. So actually building via Tik TOK audiences, newsletter lists and communities before they actually build a product. Right. And I think.
I think the logic is very interesting because it basically says that, copying product is trivial now because of AI. However, we think the audience's moats aren't right. So for example, one of the founders are building an audience first validating and product second, and building a product third for that audience. So that is new workflow. So it's not building, validating, you know, and then ship it. Right. That's, that's the old way. So I think it's also important because
It tells us more about the in a world cheap replication because, you know, AI does make replicating software code a lot faster, a lot easier, right? Even though you can say, George, but they can, they can copy my customers. can copy my workflows. can copy the hardened brand of my brand, right? Which is true. I think partially. However, if your brand is entirely dependent on solving a specific problem, right? And your customers do see there's a cheaper alternative that's built by like a one person team or like five person team.
It is, it might make them think twice about, should I actually go to this product? Right. That's entirely possible. And that's why I said distribution is the only moat left because that is the moat that we all of us should be building from the ground up right now.
And I think my take is like, you know, I obviously talked about this a few episodes ago about building it because I think the trend is accelerating, right? And I think you have to take it very seriously. If you're seriously thinking about building a tech company in 2025, doing a tech startup in 2025 as well, you have to think about building distribution is the only moat left. And here are the things that you can actually do, right? My biggest regret personal story again.
My personal regret is that I thought about I'm building in a blue collar space and I think building distribution moat is not that important because those customers I served before are blue collar customers. So what they do is they use their phones, they call all the time and you know, they, use traditional old ways, old school ways, like a pen and paper Excel. So obviously I was thinking like, okay, building a moat in this space doesn't work. However, I'm still wrong because there are companies, there are companies have actually built a successful audience using Facebook groups with those.
group of audiences and they're still very successful at that. Right. They just post memes and memes got those blue collar customers really happy. So I obviously cannot use that as excuse, because I didn't work for me. However, I could have done it a lot sooner. I could have done it even before I started my own startup. And I always think about just like making calls, you know, to customers like B2B calls, finding distribution partners, doing business developments, and also a few other things. Right. So I never thought about building out the distribution first.
Right. Which is like personally, I always so afraid of, so I, I'm not a blue collar type. I'm obviously a white collar person. So how will they see me? How they look at me. But after digging through marketing in the past couple of months, I realized it's just an excuse because yes, I'm not, I'm not blue collar, but I'm good at is talking about tools and resources. So just to give an example, I could open a TikTok account. I can talk about how home improvement contractors, blue collar people.
Right? Roofers and HVACers and people who go to the garages. How they can actually use technology to make their lives a lot better, to make their workflows better, to help them make more money. And guess what? That's going to take off. Right? But I found the excuse in me for the past couple of years saying, Oh, you know, nobody's going to actually do it. Right? Nobody's actually going to find it helpful. And that is a lie. And I realized that. So that is my regret. If I had done what I just said a few years ago, I get it. TikTok was not out, but you know, if I did on Instagram.
if I did on YouTube, et cetera, I would have built myself a very loyal, blue collar audience. And I would have found it lot better for myself to actually sell to them, right? Instead of like going cold calls and trying to go outbound, right? If your mentor hasn't talked to you about like inbound and outbound marketing, right? Always think about getting something inbound, especially in B2B marketing. It's very important to get inbound and I don't think it's the way of like you have to do like a very good outbound because first of all, outbound does cost you a lot of money.
Second of all, I don't personally think outbound is that helpful nowadays because we all get a lot of increase every day on LinkedIn, on Twitter, whatever. I get people cold calling me like three to five times every day from different places about selling me IT products or whatever. So those are not going to work. So I think as a founder, especially if you're AI minded, especially if you're like inbound minded, you're budget minded, right? It always makes more sense to do marketing first. And once you have a really good moat, once you have enough money, maybe it's time to consider selling to enterprise customers.
And in which you're still the best sales person, right, initially. I have tried hiring sales people before. I've done it many times. And I just personally don't think it's worth it to do it sorority. So that's my personal take. Right. So, and basically I just showed you what I could have done. Right. But that's more for blue color. So I think for white color or in general, think, you know, leveraging social media channels is very important. Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and building in public, documenting my learnings. Right. I said it.
previously about like, just be afraid of building public hashtag, right? Use the hashtag, learning public and actively posting what you have learned. People appreciate that. Right. And it's like humidity and it's authenticity. It's about admitting that you don't know something, right? It's very important. So I, I'm doing that. I'm going to start doing that. I hope you're doing that as well. There's no shame of saying, Oh, I don't know this. I don't know that. don't know that. And the stigma of like not knowing the stigma of basically having to pretend that we all know everything is a lie. We don't know everything.
Right? And I think starting something, you know, building an audience and starting on day minus 100, not even day one. think day one, you're figuring out your distribution channel on day one, you're late, you're late. You have to start a hundred days before you even have the idea. You know, it's weird. know, but starting a hundred days before you even have an idea or you have a brief idea, you don't exactly target audience that you're targeting, but you haven't got a product. So do that a hundred days before you launch.
I'm sorry, before you even have the idea. Try that, try that. I know it's hard. Try that, right? You must have an idea right now. So try do it now, right? Do negative 100. By the time you actually have a product to launch, which is like day one, day 100, day 50, you would have had 5,000 or even 10,000 loyal people who know about you, who trust you, right? And they're waiting to see what you're building, right? No matter if it's service business, no matter if it's like online business, no matter if it's like tech business, whatever, doesn't matter, right?
But instead I told you I have not done that. in case I have to spend many, many months, especially the past couple of months learning about marketing and building. So that's like a very deep learning experience. you know, obviously how it works now is of course you're seeing I'm building and making a podcast. So yes, it is one of the ways that I'm building my audiences. And obviously I'm trying to build up my audience. People who know me authentically, Not just like, you know, not just marketing myself.
who know me and who are curious about the product I'm going to be building. And also I'm giving back to the community as well. Everything, every framework I learned, it's all going to be free. I'm going to open source it on my website, fundrailreality.com, and I'm going to share that with you guys. So that is the trade off, and I hope it's worth it for all of you audiences. basically that's what I'm doing, and I think it's important for you to do that as well. That's what you should be doing as well, because you should be caring. People should care about your problem, the problem that you're trying to solve.
And by going distribution first, you are going to save a lot more time on that, right?
And just a last word about like social media. So I have to say personally, I'm not like a big social media person. I don't spend that much time on socials. And that's just that and that's because of cutting. That's not because I'm just naturally, you know, not not saying, no, on social media. And I think those are all the things that are no longer nice to haves. I think many years ago, we think about social media below. Those are nice to haves for like our audiences. Those are the nice to haves to build awarenesses. Right. But they're no longer just that. Now they're your distribution infrastructure.
Now they're your business pipeline and they are your product validation engine. So those are all the things that you could do.
So for myself, I've tweeted something about like 40 likes very constantly about the frameworks I care a lot about and for my audiences. So I just tweeted questions and problems out loud and also to like engage in also commenting on other builders and audiences and my target audience about what they're looking for. Right. So I got, I got a lot of like valuable feedback in social media. the good thing about social media is like unlike 10 years ago, everybody's using it now. Right. Like even people who say, you know, they're not using it.
They're using it quite a lot. So I think it's important to actually, you know, build the moat and I think build your presence and don't feel like it's work, right? Don't feel like it's something that have to do aside from your work. I think that's a mistake I made as well. Don't try to think, ⁓ I'm marketing or like putting myself on social media. It should be additional time from my nine to five or from my like builder time. actually it's not, it's part of your strategy now. So actually don't feel guilty about spending time during your day and spending that on social media and building your presence.
That's obviously going to be extremely valuable, extremely valuable. So that's the second story. I think the framework I have is I basically, also have a framework for the story as well. And I think if you don't have a social media presence, try the platform that you really think you're going to do well. So some people, for some people, it's going to be Instagram and TikTok and YouTube shorts.
For some people, it's going to be Twitter, it's going to be like, you know, even threads, going to be something more written languages, right? Like newsletters. So pick what works for you and works for your audience first. Obviously, if you're an e-commerce person, will say, will argue Instagram route is better. If you're tech person, if you're a tech product, I will argue that the tech route, like the Twitter route is better because it's just text, right? You can also attach images. But pick something, you can do it consistently and post three times a week for 90 days minimum.
You don't have to do it every day, but post three times a week for 90 days. And about the problem space, don't talk too much, just talk about yourself. Talk about the important problem that your product is going to solve. And talk about the space, talking about like engage people, engage people in that specific space.
no matter how small you think the problem that you're solving is, a lot of people do have the problems, right? If you don't believe that, go to YouTube and search the most random problems that you have during your day. Like, you know, my standing chair is broken or my headphone's broken or my water cup is broken, whatever, right? And you'll see exactly how many views those videos get, how many likes those videos get. And you'll be surprised, even like a small nuance, like a small thing that I don't like is going to be able to have this.
So don't feel like your problem is too small. And identify 3 to 5 distribution partners who could have your audience and who could give you those audiences before. Remember we talked about ConvertKit?
ConvertKit became successful because they leveraged a very huge affiliate marketer who has the audiences of creators, which is what they were looking for. And they're able to pay them affiliate marketer percentages of every sale to go through. And the affiliate marketer was able to in turn send them a lot of customers. So that was their initial moat. So it's going to be important. It's not just going to be social media traffic, right? So obviously figure out distribution partners, how we can find those partners. And I personally have done that.
I might, you earlier mistakes. I have done this republishing partner power and it's very helpful and it gave us many customers that we still have today. And, you know, obviously the, the last part is like test your demand with a landing page. It's no longer hard. think when I first started and there was no web flow, there was no lovable, you cannot use those tools to easily build your landing page without coding. So five years ago, I built my landing page with just HTML code, CSS and JavaScript, right? I coded it from scratch. So that's why I did. And if I can do that.
back in the days, you can do that now with no code. You don't have to write a single line of code. Go to Webflow or Lovable and you can spend probably a day or two and to have really, really good landing pages that you can use to validate.
And also how do use landing Pages? You just give landing Page and you give that, you email that, or you send that unlooking message to your customers and ask them if they have a problem, if they resonate with the problem that you're identifying, do they want you to solve their problem? So I think it's very important. I tried that five years ago. I got really good feedback for one of our products. So I think you should do that as well.
So the last story, I'm going to go a little bit brief on this story because just because we're a little bit at running out of time, but I think chat GPT obviously just announced their app store. I think in the past past few days and personally, I think it's important because it gives you a new distribution channel of what you can now think. Right. And it's not just for me, that's true, but it's not just distribution channel, right? It's a new way to build inside chat GPT and they claim they have 800 million weekly active users, which is like an asset, right? And they have.
work with companies like Booking.com, Expedia, Figma, Coursera, Zillow, Canva. And I think new apps are coming soon like Uber and Lyft and a few other brands. And also they have launched the App SDK Preview for developers. And Sam said basically a new generation of apps that's going to be available for all the LGBT users that's going to be interactive, adaptive, and also personalized for usage. So I have personally tried with Spotify, I'll plug in on chat gpt It's not perfect, but it did work. So I think
You know, for something I just launched, like on day one, I tried it. think it's okay. It did build me a playlist. I did like the playlist, but it did get stuck a few times when I was making that. So I think it's obviously new, but it's, it's raw. Right. And this is where basically opportunities are here. And I think it might be a huge thing in a, in distribution moat. So let's look back at a few other distribution things that have just happened. I think personally, it's very important in 2008.
Apple introduced the App Store, right?
And obviously Instagram, Uber, Airbnb, those are the early developers. got early distribution. And I think a lot of their success is early successes due to the app store becoming available. And in 2016, TikTok become available in the U S and also other markets and early creators became instant million followers, right? With followers. so they, they have millions of followers because they were early creating tech content and everyone who's using TikTok is hungry for new content, new creators. They follow them. So they instantly
became, you know, million followers, right? Without much effort. And on country, if you had to do that on Instagram, it's very, very difficult. You do that on YouTube. It's very, difficult. so those people are lucky, right? So that if I were to start tik tok today, it will be, it would take a significantly amount more time for me to get to a million followers. And in 2018, I think shopify also released apps and I think, it also got early builders, a lot of like categories of, of advantages, right? And they were able to capture those advantages and becoming the top sellers and still today about those shopify categories for the merchants.
And I think now it's important to think about chat GPT apps, right? What are chat GPT apps? They are basically AI native OS. And I think they are able to get your app distributed to a hundred million active users. So it could be a huge thing because a hundred million active user is essentially a continent, right? It's like the population of a continent that's using the app. And I think even if you can get a drip, like a funnel analysis, you even get a drip of those audiences are definitely going to be specifically helpful. Right.
I think there are two sides of this. think the first side is obviously being early of course helps, right? So if you have some bandwidth if you can figure out yourself if you have some development bandwidth You can actually check it out their STPs SDKs
I have actually personally checked out the chat gpt SDKs about my app, simpledirect Financing, and I'm actively analyzing if I'm going to be building on that as well. So I think, definitely think about if you want to build on their platform, I think obviously it's not going to be for everyone. And yes, I know like being early, it doesn't always mean being right. You could be wasting your time on something that's not going to come right yet. But I do think the traffic is there. So it's worth a little bit of like thinking about, is this worth it? Is it worth my time?
So that is good, but on the other hand, if you don't really want to be spending that time right now, if you already have profitable product, you have distribution channel, you have moats right? And you're not really afraid of missing out for the early people, right? Because I personally do think chat, GPT is going, this is going to take more usage. Yes, people do use chat, GPT now, but they're not using it for the apps, right? The people who are using apps are probably significantly lower in terms of people, even though it is quote unquote free traffic. So I think there are both sides of this. See if you want to build something there.
But you know, don't commit time of taking away time from your development team or from your own roadmap just to feed it into building for chat. So I think that's a nuance. And I think there are many things that you could be thinking about because like discovery is free. are discovering for free and probably like in six months. You don't know if you're building in six months, you might be one of the 10,000 apps fighting for featuring and fighting for attention. However, if you're doing early user tolerance or high, right? Because like spotify didn't work for me last week when I tried so obviously users are forgiving in the early days in later days They might be a lot less forgiving and this is not just for chat GPT'S app store It's just in general right for any any tools for a tik tok creator obviously in the early days You can create like very scrappy videos with a lot of mistakes and people still forgive it even today But still early days I think he earliest this is more significant and being a first mover like the shopify stories the shopify movers they they basically move Move ahead and they've created that
those shopify apps and they're still number one today, know, or the category leading partners of those categories. So they must be making a lot of revenue now. So if you choose to be early, I think advantages is that basically you might be able to dominate the category for that category, even though of course it's going to be way more competitive than shopify now because every, every builder, every developer is thinking about how to build it there. So, you know, it just got announced, I think a few days ago, so it's very early, but if you happen with.
definitely check it out. So for us, I'm personally checking it out. I'm going to be analyzing this with my team to see if it's worth our time, but definitely there's potential. So I'll be sharing with you in future episodes if we do decide to do it, right? So.
And I think also chat gpt doesn't traffic a lot. And I think even if you just don't build it for the chat gpt for apps, think about how you can optimize your website, your blog to be captured more by those AI agents. Right? So I, I personally, my website has been captured like 60 to a hundred times last week by some AI agents in China. So I have no idea. Like because their session lens are just three seconds. So obviously there are bots and I'm not sure why they're captured for. so that's something interesting, but you know, my website obviously haven't been captured by chat gpt yet, which is basically facing more of the audiences that you want. Right. So I'm still pressing, you figure out how to do that. And I think if you don't build an app, try to see if you can build a distribution just by asking, having chat gpt send more traffic your way. That's also a very like a low maintenance, you know, you don't have to put an app and you know, it can significantly create more value for your apps and services. Right. So just don't chase it. Just don't chase it. Just, just because everyone else doing it, right. That's the fear of missing out. Try not.
to have that mindset instead find a mindset of like how can I benefit my business using those tools right so that's a new framework I think the framework is like if you have existing users who could be using chat gpt right if you could get benefited from customers discovering your product right in the early days of you launching this product on chat gpt platform and if you also can launch it very fast so you have to launch it in two to four weeks from now
because if you do it later, the moat might already be left, right? And if there's no category leaders in this space right now in that platform, it might be a good time to consider a launch.
So if three of them are yes, I think do it, it's worth a sprint. But if not, definitely stay focused. yeah, today we talked about lot of stories, three stories. The first story was obviously AI's widening the performance gap. Second story is about distribution becoming the only moat left. And the third story is about new platform.
new platforms, creating new opportunities that have good timing. So how they connect, right? It's about basically we're in a moment where AI obviously made building a lot easier. So products are commoditized, right? However, distribution is still hard.
Right. And audiences and channels are now the new moat and also new platforms are now resetting distribution and creating new opportunities for founders and builders. If you're AI native and your distribution first and your platform early, you're going to be beating the people who are building the old way by a long shot. And you're going to create a significant gap that your competitors are going to take a lot of time to close. So what you can do this week is basically, I said, audit your AI use
to to the chat gpt App Store, which is like one of the latest platforms that just came available to see if it's worth your time, right? If you're employed, obviously, you know, try to see if you can use AI to reclaim 20 to 30 % of your time. You can start building side projects if you could, and then you can start building that side projects distribution first. Remember, right? Not just building it, but building the distribution. So remember to post three times per week on your socials and also see if you can become the AI experts who are team rely on if you're employed, right?
So most importantly, thank you so much for today's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. often, like I said, I open source a lot of my thoughts about different resources on my website. So if you're interested, check out funderreality.com for the free eBooks, free widgets, free frameworks, and also like weekly updates. I think we post like a few times there now per week about some of the thoughts I have that's not available here on the podcast. So be sure to check that out. And of course I'm also the George pu on Twitter and X so you can find me there and DM me about the podcast. So thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you next time.