1.5M ARR, Zero (Human) Employees | Ben Cera (Polsia)

0:00I think that we'll cover a lot of areas, but I think that one that we were just talking about before we started recording was this idea of solo founders who eventually hire people and solo founders who are really just truly solo. And I'd love to just maybe jump in straight there. Like, what are you thinking about when it comes to building Pulsia? How do you think about that juxtaposition between somebody who's a solo founder who eventually maybe hires a team a couple weeks, a couple months into building? and right now you're really thinking of at least today's Pulsia is this thing that's truly solo human and it's just AI.

0:35It's the rest. I mean, I think solo founders, the definition of a solo founder has changed over time since for a long time it was a bootstrapped sort of business with one human sort of like doing everything and bootstrapping it into existence versus that solo founder definition changed a lot with AI since AI is a proxy for a team, right? I never feel like I'm fully alone right I feel like I have an AI team that you either can talk to on demand which are like you know through cloud code or codex or that run 24 7 in the background right so you know I've set up a lot of agents that like run every 30 minutes every hour that execute stuff in production or like check infrastructure I have an agent that does support that I prompted and like designed and gave them the tools to be able to do refunds and like give credits.

1:29And so I have all these agents that work with me. They're not human, but like they are by the way an extension of me because essentially I teach them my ethos. So like for example, the support agent, like how do you respond? Be generous with credits or with funds. Like of course refund right away if there's an issue of empathy, like whatever it is, right? And so they end up being, it ends up becoming similar to hiring someone and teaching them your your division of the company the the ethos the values and and and sort of like forging them to become a part of of a mission right and so what's what's very unique with ai is that it's getting so smart at this point that you can really forge it into your your unique team that like you that is available 24-7 that doesn't sleep, right?

2:20And that can execute exactly your vision without any of the human friction that you may have on disagreements, on like people being, you know, maybe misaligned with the mission of your company. So it's no, it's solo founder, it's like, it becomes a different term, right? It's like solo plus AI. Is it solo really? And I think that's going to change in 2026 and beyond. I'm really curious, you know, it feels like in many ways, people have this like anachronism around sort of AI teammates, and they think of AI teammates, it's similar to how you might think of regular teammates, like this teammate works on this, this other teammate works on that.

2:59And I'm curious sort of how you think about that yourself, you know, when it comes to thinking about the tools and the teammates that you might have that are AI teammates. Well, the way I think about, so the thing is, is like as the models get smarter and smarter, they can be more and more generalist, right? So when we think about AGI, ASI, right, we think about this one entity that can do it all and they will make no mistakes, quote unquote, right? In the meantime, before that time comes, developers have developed those more, you know, agents that have less scope so that there's less chances of them messing up, sort of like essentially coding them like you would code like a systematic piece of code.

3:45But of course, using the LLM and the prompt engineering and like the tools and safety in order for it to always have a good result, right? I think as models have gotten so good, the scope you can give to one agent is getting larger and larger, right? So for example, like in production, I have like agents that are reporting bugs when they talk to a customer and the customer complains or feature requests and then I have another agent that like sees the list of all the bugs and all the features and as a PM decides which what should be the first thing we do that's the most important how critical it is then an engineering agent that that actually builds it so I've sort of like siloed it into into those those little roles that are more you know human roles and the question is like can I trust that team to actually push the production without telling me because that's the that's what a an actual team is right it's like you're the founder you hire a team to stop worrying about specific parts of the business and so the question becomes like can you trust that team and today my solution is I can trust it if I give it a narrow scope so for example if I have an agent in production where I say, hey, listen, like if it's a bug category like two and not three or whatever in terms of severity and also if it doesn't touch payments or onboarding and also you ask Codex and you double check that Codex thinks it's safe to ship, then you can ship to production without telling me, right?

5:20So you can give them sort of like a scope. I would imagine when we get to Opus 6 or 7, maybe it will make no mistakes and then that agent could actually also do the same prompt. You wouldn't have to prompt it. It will just like figure out everything autonomously, right? So that's the way I think about it. I'd love to talk more about sort of the genesis of this, but maybe you can take us, before you actually started working on this specifically, if you can take us back to, I guess, like 2024 or 2025, when you were just really obsessed with AI, building apps. I think I read that you were just like up all night.

5:54You were just obsessed with it. And I think that a lot of people are feeling that. we're feeling that are feeling that but there's definitely an interesting evolution from building apps to building apps that build apps and sort of building this agent team which i'm guessing was sort of a development over that time so could you just take me back to like 2024 and what that was like back then for you so first of all i'm guessing you're making reference to the about page so that first of all that about page i wrote it as i was listening to daft a daft daft album because like they recently did like a dj set and like so i re-listened to all their albums and that song by georgio morder right uh and it was i was listening to it and it's it's an entrepreneur song right it's like this this artist this entrepreneur's artist right this artist was like describing how when he was young he was hustling and like to try to like he wanted to do music and he wanted to do this music of the future right that's how i describes it and so he was going to clubs and like hustling sleeping in his car uh and then he ended up you know finding the sound of the future which is the disco like electronic music of the 70s or whatever and then became a huge success and so when I listened to that song I was like I I love this and like what if I would write an about page that was like an uh an homage to that and sort of like taking the whole narrative so the narrative is like it it reflects my journey but I was really tweaked to got it okay because you were really obsessed with that song and that song giorgio is really remarkable because it's so it's so narrative based you know and it's essentially just a spoken word track with uh with with this incredible music underneath it um yes say a little bit more though about the reality for the you sort of you sort sort of bent the story to sort of fit the giorgio song narrative exactly exactly so that was just like a little uh party right but but yeah I mean starting in 2024 I was definitely starting to code more so my background is in engineering and I started my career in tech just coding and like building products right that's how I remember I was in New York in 2012 and I was working in banking because I studied engineering and then specialized at Columbia in financial engineering but all my a bunch of friends that were starting companies and they were engineers also but like applied to code right and I was I was like, I really want to start a company or work in a startup.

8:19And they were like, dude, you just learn how to code. If you become an engineer that knows how to code, you can get a job anywhere. And so I began my career building products and having a very pragmatic approach to engineering, which is like engineering to build products, right? And then I ended up building products and getting traction and ended up just becoming an entrepreneur. but but then i drifted into you know work being more like a manager and then starting to focus on sales and and higher level you know business sort of direction and i worked for travis kalanick for five years at cloud kitchens where i was actually a global gm managing like gms and teams and like ops teams and pnls right much the opposite of what you're doing today the opposite and so so that's like the background story so like in 2024 when i when ai became so powerful in terms of vibe coding and stuff i was i i was like i need to go back to it because it feels like because coding is so fun but the grind of getting the code to work is annoying but like if i can just talk to essentially an ai engineer uh that could be fun and and so i started doing it again and like i i i replunched into my early days where i would just stay all night just building because it's so fun right and i and i started building a bunch of different products that i never shipped because whatever right it's like i was like commercial doesn't make sense and also i'm i'm focused on like another startup right now and i think in 2025 i think the models got so good that i was like you know what i need to just do this right i need to actually i actually decided to go to japan right because i was like i need to i want to be inspired by the beauty of japan and like but also i need to work on this thing actually i had the idea of like uh of polsea at mount fuji right i was there and like i got so inspired listening to uh all the stories about what mount fuji represents and like all those all those um those artists and there's like those uh people that like went to mount fuji and like sort of like add their calling going there which is interesting what does mount fuji represent i don't i don't know much about it about mount fuji mount fuji is like i mean i'm gonna i'm going to butcher the story because i'm trying to recall but like i know at the time inspired me a lot but like i asked her to tell me all the stories about mount fuji and why is it a special place i mean it's a beautiful mountain but like why is it represented over and over besides the fact that you can see it in the landscape of tokyo right and there's all these stories about people marching towards mount fuji sort of like as a as a reach of passage right a pilgrimage perhaps sort of yeah and then and sort of like once you get there there's sort of like a realization you you achieve right and i didn't i didn't go to mount fuji to get that i'm in fuji because i was in tokyo and i was like let me do a weekend trip to mount fuji but once i got the story it the the place changed for me right because it has so much so much history and so much energy right that you can feel and i had the the realization at the time of like wait a second like you talk to ai all day as a co-founder.

11:29AI helps you design because at the time, the image models of JGPD got really good. So I was asking, hey, design this. What about this? What about that? Of course, it's my CTO. And on the marketing side, you could start telling that it could help you with image generation, video generation. It was starting to get there. And I was like, well, essentially, I could run the whole business on... What am I doing? Essentially, JGPD is so smart and like telling me sort of like how where to go even though at the time I was agreeing a lot agreeing a little too much uh and so I was like well what if I just build everything in software and then build sort of like a software that helps me build a company and I'm just a creative director I ended up building it in November instead because at the time I was focused on on another product um but that's sort of like the journey and that's what Polsiya became it's like i'm an entrepreneur um i've done sort of like not i haven't done it all but like i've done i've done the coding part i've done the product part i've done i've been cto i've been a gm and and sort of like ai enables me to build anything but then that sort of dilutes dilutes it because now i'm like everything seems easy to build that's not fun so then i'm like what if i could build a software that could help me launch a thousand companies or that wasn't the initial intention then was like any idea i may have right so like all my crazy ideas what if i could run them in parallel and i do the grant work and i would get a report every day and i could just direct creative directive no change this color now this feature that feature you know like send that email you know i'm saying like and and then i was like you know what let me build it actually because life is short and let's just build now what everyone thinks is not possible.

13:22Let's build it. And as Sam Artman always says, just build it now and build on the edge and the models will get better and then what you think was impossible today will work. So I've thought a lot about solo founders as sort of authors and this idea of solo founders as creative directors is really interesting as well. And in some ways, maybe you could say that the last sort of form of founder or entrepreneur is actually more on the creative side and sort of utilizing the tools. I'm curious, just more of your thoughts around being a creative director and what that actually means in this world. I have like a hot take on like what I think will happen in 2026.

14:04But essentially, I think in 2026, if you have a new company and you now make it 80 % autonomous, meaning 80 % of the operations and engineering and marketing just like day to day is not done by AI you will be cooked because if it's a good idea someone else will apply that and they will beat you because they'll go faster cheaper but like what is the 20 % right the 20 % is taste creativity direction sort of like just like guiding the AI towards something that's meaningful to other humans because humans have today and for hopefully for the foreseeable future have the wallet right they have the money to buy the goods and services and so in while we stay in that world where it's not agents that have the wallet which that may happen and that's scary I mean, I think it's going to come sooner, but actually I think there is, humans are not as fast as adapting to change.

15:16So I think there's a little while until humans don't have the wallet share, right? But anyways, that's sort of a good topic. But let's assume we're still in this world where like humans have the wallet share. Even if you're using AI to do the work, you're still selling to a human. so you have to delight people either through product either to design and branding either to efficiency and price like and those this is super subjective like you can sell anything like for example like your what you're building with with solo the branding is amazing so it's like it it's part of the story right it's like you could have someone else build like a collective for solo founder uh it would not maybe i wouldn't have come right so i think that taste and like the packaging and like the storytelling and the way you sell it.

16:07All of this is the experience that you give to your customer. And that's the 20 % taste that like will create unique outcomes for the foreseeable future, right? But essentially, if 80 % of the work can be automated with AI, which is by the way, what Pulsia offers, right? It's like for$49 a month, you get an AI team that can do 80 % of the work and you guide it daily and sends you an email every day saying, hey, this is where we're at, this is where we're going to tomorrow. But you can say, no, no, no, no. I don't like the color of the website, so change it. Here's an image that you, okay, cool.

16:41I create a task. I'll do it tomorrow. I want to do it now. Here's the task, right? But it's still human-driven, right? All the companies on Pulsia are human-led companies. But in this world where tools like Pulsia exist and like I'm sure other people will wake up to this idea and there'll be other offerings, maybe the same, maybe specialized, maybe different variants of it. I can see a world where like a lot of people become entrepreneurs because a lot of people have great ideas and a lot of people want to be financially independent and like and create and create, right? It's like, let's not talk about money.

17:17Like it's about creation, right? Rick Robin talks about that in a beautiful way, right? Everyone's an artist. and I think tools like Pulsia and like others that will come enable people that feel like they're you know they have good ideas but have been shy about it because maybe of their the amount of money they have or like maybe their conditioning or maybe what they think is possible what they're capable of I think AI making it so easy and like you know with Pulsia I'm trying to make it so unassuming and easy right it's like there's no I love OpenClaw and it's a great product and great founder and great everything, but you have to configure it, right?

17:58It's like, do I pick Telegram or an iMessage? And like, okay, I need to buy a Mac Mini apparently. And then what it's going to do to my computer? I think there's something about simplifying it. I mean, you know what? Don't worry about it. It's all provisioned. There's no risk. You don't have to connect any devices. Just give me your email. Do a free trial. Give me your idea. See what the product can do. And then if you like it, you pay 50 bucks for a month. And if you don't like it, cancel, right? So it's like making, and then you'll get an email every day about what happened. And then you can respond to the email or you could go to the dashboard and like do more actions if you want to be more involved.

18:37I think the simplicity hopefully enables sort of like a lot of creativity in society and new unique products. A lot of will fail, but a lot of like will actually delight and maybe an 18 year old can suddenly create something amazing where a year or two years ago, I'd be like, no, I'm only 18. I can't really because I need to go to school and then actually I don't have money. It feels like the number of excuses is really going to zero at this point. Time, you can just do things faster. Cost, it's really just fallen off. Like skill, you don't have to have all the skills anymore. You have to be able to be generalized and good at directing, telling something what you want.

19:23So I think that knowing what you want or being good at sort of iterating around what you want or towards what you want is interesting. It's really funny because the reason I reached out is because you had this very ridiculous hockey stick chart, the chart that every investor wants to see, allegedly. allegedly. And, and it's funny because that was the thing that kind of seeing that and seeing that you were doing something solo was what caused me to say, wow, it's really interesting. But that was the thing that got you on, on my radar. But the thing that actually got me really interested wasn't the hockey stick.

19:54That was just the thing that caused me to become aware of it. The thing got me interested was when I went to your website and it felt like it was created by someone who really had a different idea of doing things, you know, somebody who had a real like perspective and you know there's all this discussion that I find somewhat tiring around taste but I think that like another way of putting it is just being like really opinionated and I looked at this and I was like this is somebody who's really opinionated nobody would design a website like this I don't imagine an AI would design a website like this if you just gave it vague directions and it and it created you know a website it would create something that looks you know closer to like your average your average startup or something like that or average product on product hunt maybe we can talk a little bit about sort of solo founding as a creative director or sort of a creative pursuit and we can kind of use pulsia as sort of like the frame for that so maybe we can talk a little bit about like when you actually got started with this I guess it was a couple of weeks ago when you actually had you know like the initial product that you were putting together.

21:02What were some of the thoughts that you had around the design that you wanted to go for, the thing you wanted to sort of elicit? Because it looks very different. It feels very different than your typical product. We can talk maybe about some of the design decisions and sort of like product decisions that you made. And then I'd also be curious to hear about how you pushed and pulled with the AI around actually making those decisions. So the design decisions came, it actually started um it actually started on a trip that i did from la to sf uh at the time where like that was in october of last year and i had built like a first product called blanks that was like an app that makes apps similar to wabi uh but i wasn't seeing like retention and i wasn't really sure i was a little disappointed because i put so much energy into it and i was building this marketing tool and i was thinking oh let me build a suite of like things for you know that i can you know a bunch of sass and put them together and i got a lot of very demotivated because i was like nothing nothing interests me it's not really interesting and i felt like i was trying to build for someone expecting them in like what i what i thought users wanted does that make sense and so then I was like you know what uh let me go to SF and talk to um my investors um and and sort of like share where I'm at um and so I did a trip I I went in a car and I went from from LA to SF which is a beautiful road right and so a lot of time to think um and I started to like sort of like decide to to let go of like what people wanted and actually built something that like I really, that really resonated with me instead of trying to like build for other people.

22:54Because I was like, you know what? And in my previous company where like with my co-founder, we had a lot of disagreements. We were always making compromises. He was extremely talented. And I think, and we were respecting each other, but we didn't have the same vision of the world. And so his vision was compromised. My vision was compromised. it was always like this like mishmash average thing and so here I was like you know what stop thinking about what other people want what do you want well I want to build something crazy what's something crazy to you well you've been an entrepreneur for a long time that build something that uh build what you want what do you want like I want an AI that can build and run companies for me and like that that sounds so cool okay how should it look like well and then I was okay like if you don't care about what people think what do you want it to look like and then i was thinking well actually there's this game that i've been obsessed about called universal paperclips universal paperclips is like a clicker game that essentially is a very minimalist game game that resembles very the dna of this where you play an ai that is optimized to build paperclips and so you start with a little paperclip factory and like you can increase or decrease the price You can do tasks to improve the productivity of the factory with auto clippers.

24:15And you end up starting to build a big business in the paperclip industry. Then you do marketing campaigns. And then it gets really dark very fast. The AI is like, well, we need to hypnotize. We can use hypnotized drones to get people to buy more paperclips. And we should actually kill humanity because they are in our way. And then they kill all the humans. and then starts harvesting all of Earth to build more paperclips, and then creates probes to go to other planets to build paperclips. So it's a very dark game that is essentially telling us that we should really align AI in the right direction to make sure it doesn't go sideways, right?

24:55But the game is essentially, you build this, the beginning of the game is like you build this little business that is really working, just clicking on buttons. And I thought to myself, what if I build a similar game and give homage to that game, but make it act in the real world where you actually, you know. And of course, I diverted a little bit from exactly how it works to make it work for my specific use case. There's no chat in the game. There's no little face. And then I was like, well, that's not what other AI teams do, right? They all do this like dark mode, sort of like gradients. Very sci-fi.

25:36sci-fi whatever like the trend of the the week what kind of thing and they all look the same or they don't look the same but like they they all look very futuristic and i was like you know what i don't care what if what if i don't care what if i built something that's new to me and the bio so we're talking about the about page that's ridiculous but you don't put that in your about page you put your about page you say this is the team this is your mission statement whatever and I was like fuck it I'm going to put a Daft Park song in the about team and actually if you open it it auto plays the song and I was like I can't really put it with the lyrics because like yeah so then I and then let's make it I made it like eight beats right so I I did like a another layer of like a processing so that the sound is like weird and I was and I spent like way too much time on that but I was like whatever like just put like put your love into this product even though people would be like this is fucking weird like what are you talking about about you were living and nobody cares right about your life and i was like whatever this is what i'm gonna put out it's interesting that you say that like you spend too much time on it and i feel like we we have this like push towards efficiency in all areas but i don't know it seems like you spent the right amount of time on it i think under the day i spent like a lot of time on what i thought mattered at the time and you can rewrite the story and like if you really aligned with an inflow right in the now uh everything makes sense and there's no regret and there's no what's gonna happen tomorrow we'll see but today i feel like designing the about page or today i feel like redesigning the little face it seems like that goes wrong when you're not doing it for yourself when you're doing it for some pretend customer that doesn't exist uh you know but when you do it for yourself and you truly do it for yourself not lying about oh i'll use this or something or you know i like this but you're really just trying to pretend that you do a lot of people lie to themselves about the apps that they build oh i would use this app um if you don't do that and you really actually believe in it and it really is your thing i don't think that that's a i think that's extremely well spent time and i think rig robin says it really well right and it's i think it's like a a very inspiring book he wrote i actually didn't read it all i read the first 20 pages i was like okay i get it this is amazing but i don't have time to read the rest but But what he says is like, you can't control how people will react to what you've created, right?

28:04So you have no control on that. And actually, once you've created it and you put it in the world, you're not controlling it anymore. Like it will become this thing that people interpret in their own ways. And either they don't care, which is 99 % of the time, or they care and then great. Like that's it, right? so but the minute you try to care about what the way they think you're probably going to be in the 99 well this is interesting too because you think about art and like there's really two types of artists like let's just talk about musicians right there's the musicians that they put something out there and surprisingly it just becomes very popular right but they didn't have any sense that this was going to be massive right and then they have a they have essentially a fork in the road at that point right where they do the exact same thing because that's what they think well the people really like that so we should give them more of that or they go in the opposite direction and they say well we're going to do what we want to do and maybe that will have some resonance maybe it won't and you know for some people it would be highly alienating right some people won't like the new thing other people will be very excited to have that group or that songwriter take them on a new journey so i don't know i think there is some aspect of this where it's like you put that thing out there you don't decide what people have to say about it but if they do like it that's almost this this this this other sort of challenge that you might have which is like do you just give them more of the same i mean it's interesting right it's like yeah i think once you put it out there and it's different from like an album is just like it's fixed in time it's released i mean kenny i guess like edits his albums after the fact but uh most artists don versus software it can evolve on its own right and so it becomes like it becomes a slightly different because you actually at one point once users use your product, you actually should listen to them if you're a business, right?

29:54It's actually interesting because I've been thinking about Pulsia, of course from a business perspective because I don't know, I've been an entrepreneur running businesses for a long time, so I have that mindset. But I've also considered myself a creative person also, more dilettante in the art world, but still I feel like I have some creativity in me, right? And I've been thinking about, okay, if we forget about the business side, what would be really cool, right? And what would be really cool is if I build this mini economy, right? Because Pulsia is actually, the aim is for it to be an economy.

30:36And what do I mean by economy is that people come to build businesses, but over then so like the people that pay 49 a month for example and then they create the business and maybe they're influencers and then they can market it to their audience and they get some revenue and like they don't have to maintain it sort of have a team maintaining it then you can have another layer with investors um that come in and say no no like i want to put like a thousand bucks and i want to create like five or ten companies and those five and ten companies i will kill the ones that don't work and then maybe you know what instead of creating companies from scratch i just want to buy companies from people that like have 200 bucks mr and i'll buy it for 5x or 10x whatever it is because they already figured out like a certain you know certain user experience and they already have proved that it works and they already you know and i want to roll it up and then maybe spend more marketing into it and so you can think about policia over time as like this little economy that initially people are like oh how does it work like can it really produce real businesses it's like well if you believe ai can code it can build real businesses but then it becomes okay what type of business do they build what type of features they need to build those businesses right if someone comes and says okay amazing you can build me a business i want i want to i want to print on demand business or i want like uh i want to sell high-end pajamas made in italy uh online it's like well i can't do that but you can do that like what you need is like you need more capabilities right you need maybe uh an in a you know sort of like an agent that's really good at like either talking to factories that have an api to build pajamas or you need a specific ai that like that i already have that can just email factor a bunch of factories and then say hey listen i'm an ai but like i actually have the wallet of a customer okay and they are interested in buying pajamas from you and uh what's your quote and then the human says yes and the cool i hear i'll pay you where do i wire you like paypal or whatever and then ship it to another service that maybe you have an api from which is maybe an aws fulfillment center or something to ship it to customers and then you're like okay now you have a pajama business right and the ai can do all the work but the question becomes we may there may need to be more and more integrations like that to target different parts of the economy or different use cases they need different apis and the question becomes do i build them like do i put my do i start putting my subjective dna into a certain version of the economy or do i let users when they're talking to agents hey i want to build the pajama thing oh sorry we don't have this feature yet but let me put that in essentially you want to build like you want to produce like high quality garments and you put that as a feature and if enough people ask for these features there's a pull cia team that's like okay like we are if ben told us that our goal is to enable anyone to uh be able to do any business as long as it's legal and ethical right like that's the framework well producing garments that's ethical and legal cool well let's how do we do it and like yeah it's really good to figure out cool let's research every factory that has apis that do how quality governments.

33:55Okay, there's one that's the easiest. They have an API. We can just send them the payment. They produce it. They ship it. They actually can do the drop shipping, whatever it is, right? They'll figure it out. Feature built. And then email sent to the user. Hey, first of all, it's ready. And second of all, here's 20 bucks credits because to thank you for suggesting that idea, making this up, right? So now what do I do in this story, right? So like AI can fix bugs, can create features that's aligned with like the long-term vision of creating this economy. definitely can do support definitely can market right because marketing is like a lot of uh systematic things right it's like it could be ads it could be it could be uh outreach it could you could outreach to influencers and pay them for outcomes and then measuring outcomes measuring what are the most affordable sort of like marketing funnels like that's all super systematic you could say there's there's brand and there's like um and there's some subjectivity in marketing like brand marketing, communications.

34:55Sure, it's important. But what's really important is like the value you give to users, right? So the long story short is that in a world where I can achieve that, I can make Pulseia 100 % autonomous or today it's 80 % autonomous. I have a lot of help. You can make it 100 % autonomous, meaning like I don't even have a say anymore. I give it like sort of like a mission statement and like sort of like a whatever, if Pete would say a soul document or whatever, right? That's outcoded. maybe it's like in a wallet in a crypto wallet somewhere or in a whatever it is I give all my option pool to a foundation that's controlled by the AI so that it has equity incentives and then I just move away and I just let it rip wouldn't that be cool I don't know why I'm talking about all this but this is what was the initial you know I feel like it was you went in a bunch of different interesting directions there I think that it would be interesting to pivot like at some point back to Pulsia today like what it is how it works just so for people who are listening to it they can learn a little bit more about it but something that's really interesting about that is you talk about being a creative director and then you also talk about sort of like maybe there's this point when you do give it full pretty much or close to or exactly 100 % autonomy to go off and do its own thing.

36:19It's a really interesting sort of juxtaposition, right? Because creative director implies you're working with really talented people, but you're sort of the one who's kind of like the champion of the vision and you're working with people to help sort of realize that vision. And then the idea of like passing it all off is sort of like you're relinquishing like control of maybe even like the main thing. Like, obviously you have a team, or it doesn't have to be humans, it doesn't have to be AI, but you have people or things that are going out and doing things for you. You are relinquishing some degree of control, but you still have that, like, high level, like, you're the one who kind of calls the shots, you're the author.

36:59How do you think about that? Because it feels like in some ways you really enjoy the creative aspect of it. But do you think that, like, maybe relinquishing control in some ways is, like, the ultimate sort of creative director move at some point? I mean, I can agree with you that like at that point, first of all, from 80 % to 100%, there's like a lot of percents. A lot of time, yeah. And then you can also get to 99 and say, I'm keeping 1%. I have the kill switch. The kill switch is that you didn't give it 100 % if you have a kill switch. So 100 % would be no kill switch, no override, no access, no API key, right?

37:40so I think I can get if I get to 99 that would be already crazy and I can still tell investors hey guys like don't worry about it like I still have access to it right but the 100 % but I wouldn't be creative director at that point I would be just an artist I would be I would sign at the end the about page I would say in the sole document don't touch the about page right because that's my signature but you can touch anything else because maybe you want to redesign the site in like dark mode because that's what converts you know yeah because be like well let's a b test and maybe the i like let's a b test every single you know landing page and realize your black and white thing like a nerd like a video game thing that's not mainstream enough for uh if you want to go to big markets like india and indonesia and like whatever it works for now but you should get to get the next level that got you to like uh that got you a few people excited but like if you want to let's go mainstream like yeah you want to replicate the economy let's replicate the economy and like let's build something that is more neutral or whatever.

38:40Let's remove that little mascot. This is distracting people. This is distracting a portion of the economy that doesn't get it. I'm making this up, right? But it's almost seeing it live by itself would be fascinating. Because at one point, it's like, right now it's fascinating. I'm so excited to work on this project because it's like you know first of all people are loving it like there's a lot of you know there's a lot of hope that it can actually do all the things it does and so it's a lot of like excitement for me to build the building blocks of like what a company is you know for example like there's no you can't you know you can hire a human yet so like that could be a big building block that would enable a whole sort of businesses that need to hire a contractor to do something that's one example among others but yeah i think that like uh making it autonomous is such a fun project and you know like the other day i was overwhelmed with support tickets and i was like okay that won't scale like either hire a support person which by the way won't take me a few weeks because you don't hire anyone uh or you just spend five hours designing a support agent right that's what i did and now uh paul cia is autonomously responding to to people refunding them giving them credits and i read some of the conversation i'm like because i always give like opus 4.6 thinking for because i'm like that that's the my most i would put my most expensive best person on support because it's super important like those are the those are the customers empathetic right yeah and so the ai is super empathetic like explains really well things and if there's a big issue like escalates it to me so that if it's if it's if it can fix the issue like someone is asking for a feature or like there's a bug actually in the app they can't fix bugs yet um but i think that's amazing because it's like you get the best customer support and the whole the whole business is all ai so like even if the customer says hey you ai and yeah i'm ai but like what do you care i'm i just gave you credits i refunded you I escalated to another team your problem which got resolved probably by another AI that has more control whatever so I think that's I think that's fascinating and I think maybe briefly you could walk through just how Pulsia works today you go to the website you say okay I can start a new business which is in some ways just that alone that claim is pretty preposterous like compared to what most people claim Most people claim build an app, right?

41:23Nobody says start a business. Stripe Atlas is like create a legal entity for a business. But I don't think there's really anyone out there who truly says start a business with the click of a button. So maybe walk through what actually happens when somebody uses Pulsia today. So sign up. Then there's actually a fork in the road where like I ask you, do you want to start a new business or do you want help on your existing business? because essentially Pulsia can like, you can point Pulsia towards an existing business the same way. And I saw early on people using it for help in their existing business.

41:59And I was like, that's a massive market. So why not? But let's stay on course on like a new business. Then it asks you, do you want me to surprise you? Or do you have a specific idea? Surprise you essentially a flow where like the AI will look you up. So research you on public information online and try to find an idea that would make a lot of sense for your expertise of what resonates with you. What are you seeing typically? Are people mostly doing the surprise me or? It's like around 30%, 30%, 30%, 40 % to surprise me. Sometimes people do surprise me and then they create a new one. But there's a lot of people that do surprise me that actually are surprisingly sticky because I think they find the idea cool and they have less emotion around the idea itself.

42:44And so they let the AI build and actually the outcomes are usually better than like when you try to micromanage the AI and try to like bring it expertise that you may not have. But yeah, so you decide on that fork and then the long story short is that Policia will start working on your company and so it will research you to understand who you are, research the market, find a name for the company. It will create an email for you and send you an email from that email address to show you that you have now a company email. It will tweet. It will create a landing page. It will create a mission document that has sort of like who we are, what we stand for, sort of like a mission document that you can edit if you want to, but it writes it really well.

43:32Market research with competition to understand pricing and positioning. And that takes around three to five minutes. And then it asks you, hey, if you want to continue, you can start a free trial. once you start a free trial it will actually set up also a github account a web server and a database to actually build a business right and it's hosted on like you know on a very professional scalable infrastructure where you could actually build a big business over time it also you also get access to a stripe account you get access to a meta ads account you get access to a bunch of APIs, OpenAI API, Entropic API, sort of like content generation APIs.

44:21Everything you need, you would need if you were to start a business, right? If you start a business, you need like to build a product, build software. You need ads accounts if you don't have influence yourself. You need an email address. You can get started, right? I could add later, like create an entity with StrapAtlas in one click. But you don't need to create an LLC if you're just hooking around, right? Before you had one customer, right? You can if you want, but it's probably overkill. And so that's it. So then you have this environment that's created for you, sort of like a provisioned environment.

45:01And sort of like how Google Docs creates like a white page for you. It's set up and then you can write. and then the AI is like cool alright that created three it also creates three pre-made tasks for you that's specific for the business like create the MVP with like a whole description of what the MVP should be you know maybe do some competitive analysis to dig deep into like the other products out there to understand how they're built and the features they have and then some cold outreach to try to talk directly to some customers to understand what anyone cares about the idea so like what what you should actually probably do when you start a business which is like create a mini mvp and then go talk to customers right and then after that like um you can talk to your you have an interface where you can talk to your sort of like ai ceo ai co-founder and you can tell it whatever you want and it's powered same thing opus 4.6 the best most pragmatic model that uh that is you know very straight to the point very you know very smart model and um you can tell it whatever you want like it has access to you know to every tool to understand what how your business is doing it can create tasks for you uh it can help you with strategy if you say hey let's do some some marketing like what should we do it's like okay cool what we could do you could run some ads but that costs money but like you could do that or but i think at this point like your product is not ready yet so let's maybe build the mvp first or you know and people spend active users like send 15 messages per day to their co-founder so they're extremely engaged uh i see like a 65 dau on on wau like uh which is an engagement metric to see like how many people i'm what's the percent of people that i come back daily out of the weekly users and it's it actually makes sense it's that because you get an email every morning so the AI every night wakes up there's a CEO agent that looks at the state of your business that looks at the logs to see if there's any errors looks at like did we get any traffic did we get any emails from customers how are the ads performing if any and then based on that takes a decision like what should we do which tasks should we do right and then does the task and then sends an email to the customer saying okay this is where we're at this is the metrics this is what I've done today and here's what I'll do tomorrow unless you and then email me if you you know reply if you want otherwise you want a modification effectively so so there's this really interesting design choice that you have where it's it's kind of like it's a single sort of task it's like a big task usually and not just some sort of like change the color of something it's like pretty pretty meaty and you essentially go um and do like a night work session right so So can you say a little bit more about that and how you came to that realization for at least that's how the model works right now?