In short
Podcast Episode Notes: Startup Stories - Mixergy (#2298 This AI generates $689K)
Overview In this episode of Mixergy, host Andrew Warner interviews Ben Cera, the founder of Polsia, a revolutionary AI platform that autonomously builds and manages online businesses. Cera shares insights into how he leveraged AI coding agents to create a company with a run rate of $689,000 within just two months of launch. The discussion delves into the workings of Polsia, the future of business, and the implications of AI on entrepreneurship.
Key Takeaways
Introduction to Polsia
- Founder: Ben Cera
- Concept: Polsia utilizes AI coding agents to build and operate businesses with minimal human oversight.
- Business Model:
- Users can start a business for $50/month.
- Polsia takes a 20% cut of the revenue generated by the business.
- The platform provides essential tools and support for business operations.
How Polsia Works
- Agents:
- Polsia consists of specialized agents for various tasks:
- Engineering Agent: Handles coding and software development tasks.
- Marketing Agent: Manages advertising campaigns across platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
- Support Agent: Provides customer support via email.
- Autonomous Functionality:
- Users can simply provide their business idea, and Polsia sets up the necessary infrastructure, including email accounts and server environments.
- The platform autonomously executes marketing strategies, such as sending cold emails and running ads.
Marketing and User Engagement
- User Experience:
- Users can start their business with a single click, significantly reducing friction in the process.
- Cold email outreach and ad management are automated, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on their core business.
- Success Metrics:
- As of the recording, Polsia had a run rate of $689,000, highlighting its rapid growth and the effectiveness of its marketing strategies.
Real-World Application
- Case Study:
- Cera shared a story about a user who initially considered spending $30,000 on a developer but switched to Polsia, finding it to be a more efficient solution.
- This user became highly engaged, requesting additional features and support as their business evolved.
Future Directions
- Expansion Plans:
- Cera discussed plans to introduce features enabling users to launch multiple businesses simultaneously.
- The vision includes creating a marketplace for users to buy and sell autonomous businesses built through Polsia.
- AI Evolution:
- Cera emphasized the need for continuous learning in the AI agents to improve their efficacy and adapt to user needs.
Challenges and Considerations
- Human-AI Collaboration:
- Cera noted the importance of human oversight in business strategy, especially in marketing and understanding customer needs.
- Concerns were raised about the possibility of agents selling to agents in the future, potentially complicating the human element in entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
- Takeaway:
- Cera's work with Polsia represents a significant shift in how businesses can be created and managed, leveraging the power of AI to simplify operations and allow entrepreneurs to focus on growth and innovation.
Additional Resources
- Website: [Polsia](https://polsia.com)
- Mixergy Interviews: For more insights and interviews with entrepreneurs, visit [Mixergy](https://mixergy.com/moreint).
Final Thoughts This episode highlights the potential of AI in reshaping the entrepreneurial landscape, offering a glimpse into a future where business operations can be largely automated, allowing more individuals to bring their ideas to life with less financial risk and complexity.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOHow Pulsia Operates
0:45 to 2:40
An overview of how Pulsia's autonomous agents manage business functions.
“Who comes up with the...actually, who builds the software?”
Marketing and Advertising with Pulsia
2:40 to 5:15
Discussion on how Pulsia handles marketing and advertising for users.
“And because of whatever this tool was that Pulsia was building, he could just now focus on plumbing.”
The Power of One-Click Advertising
5:15 to 6:00
Exploration of the one-click advertising feature and its impact.
“That's the person who comes up with an idea.”
Cost Structure and Business Model
6:00 to 8:35
Insight into how Pulsia's pricing model works and its business implications.
“So actually, those emails are really good.”
Scalability and Fund Creation
8:35 to 11:15
Discussion on launching funds and managing multiple businesses with Pulsia.
“I may start building this fund for two reasons.”
Revenue Sharing Model
11:15 to 11:50
Explanation of the revenue sharing model between Pulsia and users.
“You only make money if I generate revenue and I'm the person who's making the decisions about whether this revenue is worth the expense.”
Future Directions for Pulsia
11:50 to 14:01
Looking ahead at potential features and growth strategies for Pulsia.
“and if I want more services, like maybe it comes with cold email, but I decide I want Twitter.”
Understanding Pulsia's Potential as a Business Platform
14:01 to 16:18
Learn how Pulsia aims to create an economy for entrepreneurs to build businesses effortlessly.
“Just keep adding any kind of advertising that works.”
Empowering Entrepreneurs: A Success Story
16:19 to 17:35
Explore a case study of an entrepreneur who transformed their business using Pulsia.
“Give me a story about one entrepreneur who came to you with a business, what you did, what they came with, what they came out of it with.”
Navigating Features and User Requirements
17:36 to 20:25
Discuss the limitations and challenges faced by users while utilizing Pulsia's features.
“And he's becoming an expert, which is really interesting.”
Show all 25 chapters
The Importance of Iteration in Business Development
20:26 to 22:22
Understand why the iterative process is crucial in developing business ideas with Pulsia.
“Yeah, I was talking to the founder of Zapier just yesterday.”
Innovative Marketing Strategies for Pulsia
22:23 to 24:46
Discover the marketing strategies implemented to significantly boost Pulsia's revenue.
“So they were using the new company feature for an existing company.”
AI-Driven Efficiency in Business Operations
24:47 to 28:00
Learn how AI can streamline operations and improve revenue for startups.
“I accumulate on like how to run businesses and make them work.”
Understanding the AI's Learning Mechanism
28:00 to 29:10
Learn how the AI improves through its learning processes and anonymous feedback.
“traffic going to the websites, which means that the whole system works better.”
Cold Email Campaigns for Dealerships
29:10 to 30:30
Explore the outreach strategies used by the AI tool to assist car dealerships.
“I don't have time to look at every single business.”
Custom Domains and User Privacy
30:30 to 32:30
Discuss the implications of using the platform's domain versus custom domains for users.
“Do they do their own domain or are you also putting everything on your domain?”
Revenue Insights from Pulsia's Platform
32:30 to 34:00
Gain insights into the current revenue streams and financial performance of the platform.
“So that's the big mission in the coming months is setting all that up to increase success stories.”
Launching a New Company on Pulsia
34:00 to 36:20
Learn how to easily launch a new business using the Pulsia platform.
“It seems like at this point, it's over half a million dollar run rate coming from that.”
AI-Driven Business Idea Generation
36:20 to 39:00
Discover how the AI generates business ideas based on user profiles and preferences.
“to figure out what I do and understanding how we can...”
Building and Managing Your Business with AI
39:00 to 42:00
Explore the functionalities of the platform that allow users to manage their businesses autonomously.
“To the angle, Ben knows this space inside out.”
Exploring Task Management with Pulsia
42:00 to 43:54
Learn how Pulsia helps users manage tasks for building their projects.
“So you can do 15 tasks on top of like the 30 tasks you get per day of the month.”
Automated Company Building Insights
43:55 to 45:59
Discover how Pulsia automates the initial setup for startup ideas.
“So this is actually a landing page created, right?”
AI Handling Operational Challenges
46:00 to 47:57
Understand how AI can solve technical issues in a startup.
“Um, so tell me, Hey Ben, here's what I built for Foundry today.”
The Future of AI in Business
47:58 to 51:36
Discuss the evolving role of AI in sales and marketing for businesses.
“So like, okay, how could it look like with humans, right?”
Challenges of AI Selling to AI
51:37 to 53:12
Explore the implications of AIs interacting and selling to each other.
“And of course, like people with influence like you or like other people, like there's a lot of influencers these days, micro or anyone with a community.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Ben Cera:Pulsia builds and runs companies autonomously. I'm a solo founder, zero employees with a bunch of agents. Pulsia is making almost 800 ,000 run rates and I just launched it less than two months ago. So anyone who's listening will be able to sign up and have Pulsia run their company. Ben Cera is the founder of Pulsia AI that runs your company.
0:24Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. You're about to meet a founder who built, he didn't build a company. His AI coding agents built a company for him that's doing well. It's marketing itself. It's coming up with ideas for what else to build. It's fixing its own bugs. And more interesting than that, anyone could use this platform to build a company that will manage, that will be managed by AI. Anyway, let's listen to the story. Who comes up with the...actually, who builds the software?
1:00Ben Cera:So the software, so Pulsia is like a series of autonomous agents specialized in different categories, right? So you have an engineering agent that's really good at code and it's set up to code that has access to a web server, a GitHub account, a database, all this stuff, all the tools to make it efficient. You have a marketing agent that has access to a Twitter account, an email address to the call outreach, a meta ads account to do run ads, can create UGC, so like essentially giving them all the tools to be able to execute on stuff. The support agent has access to an email that I give it to the user by default.
1:39Ben Cera:So the idea is that the user comes to Pulsia, brings their idea, and Pulsia already sets up an instance of everything you need to run a business, right? An email address, a server, like a versatile server, you know, a database, a meta account to do ads, an OpenAI account to do SORA videos, like, you know, all this stuff you would eventually need to do. And that Claude would probably tell you, hey, now I need you to go get an API, you know, an API key. Right. And so it is developing the software for the user who comes to the platform. It is then marketing it and doing support. I went and I asked Pulsia, how are you doing marketing?
2:23It told me it's sending out cold email. It's doing ads on Facebook. It is tweeting, et cetera. I said, can I see one of your ads from Facebook? It showed me one of the ads. The ad was a plumber who looked like he was just talking into his phone saying that he hates everything involved in running a plumbing company except being a plumber and actually doing the plumbing work. And because of whatever this tool was that Pulsia was building, he could just now focus on plumbing. And then there was a link to go and sign up for the software. I run an HVAC company. Used to hate dealing with marketing agencies.
3:02Always asking me questions, needing my approval. Now, Thorough handles everything. My phones ring. I fix AC units. That's it. This wasn't a real human being, was it, in the ad?
3:13Ben Cera:I mean, so today at least, in the first iteration of the ads feature that I built about two weeks ago, it's a pretty recent feature. The AI is autonomously running ads. The crazy thing is that as a user, you click on a button called Run Ads. There's a single button. You click on Run Ads. It asks you what's your budget, right? So you can start at$10 a day, because obviously it costs money to run ads. And that's it. That's all you have to do. And then there's an agent that's going to like autonomously look up all the context of your company, understand how to pitch your company, what it does, what's the value prop, sets up, you know, a description, go to Sora.
3:54Ben Cera:Today it's mainly Sora 2 because I find it like really very good at like generating realistic videos. and then sets up like a new GCAI video of like someone pitching the service and then uploads it to Meta, sets up like a campaign, sets up like all the characteristics to make it work. And then every day monitors it. And like if it doesn't perform, we'll create a second one, a third one, turn on and off ads, like a real marketer, right? Unreal. And so of course in the second phase, this feature is actually very popular because I'm guessing it's very complex. Actually, even myself, obviously I've been running ads for businesses because it's a great way to get users to flow in your service, to learn what works, what doesn't, is their retention, has the onboarding.
4:42Ben Cera:And what I find interesting by seeing this feature being so successful is that it shows you the more friction there is in doing something, the less people do it. And it's like people know that they, yeah, of course, ads is a good thing, but it's like setting up a Meta account, like doing all this stuff is complicated. And so making it into a one-click experience is what Pulseia is all about, making it truly simple to do the thing about running a whole company. And the analysis of pain and then the cut the losers and grow the winners, all that takes a lot of time. When you say that the – let's call it the entrepreneur.
5:17That's the person who comes up with an idea. When you say that they will say, I want to spend$10 a day, that's money that comes out of their pocket, right? Yeah. Got it. So they decide how much money goes. What about when there's cold email? Where does that money come from, or does that cost anything?
5:33Ben Cera:So a cold email is essentially a task where an agent that specializes in sending cold emails will research first people that may be interested in the service, so people that are relevant. Second, will verify with a specialized database that I pay for. Like, there's services online that they can check, like, is this email correct? Is it a good business email? And then uses that email to send a cold email that's highly personalized based on the user. So actually, those emails are really good. Of course, cold email is something that, like, works less and less because people are flooded with it with AI.
6:10Ben Cera:But yeah, it sends it. And so it costs, like, one task. So essentially, the way it works is that, like, as part of the$49 a month subscription, you get one sort of like autonomous task every night so every night there's a ceo agent that's going to look at the state of your business and try to figure out what is the best next step we should do is it engineering is it marketing is it support uh and do it and on top of that you get a budget of credits that task that you can do whenever you want so like if you're like you're like no no but right now i want to fix that bug like right now i want to add this feature i see dashboard and say oh you right now i want to send i sent cold emails there's a cold email button you click it and then like it will send a cold email right now so that's a way you know obviously the system is autonomous but like if you want to tell it what to do now it will do it now okay so what we're looking at is the way it works is i as an entrepreneur come to you or to pulsia with an idea i pay 50 a month for a certain amount of compute time any extra that i want to spend on advertising i decide and then the system will charge and what you're saying is andrew because you are so deep in your world you know things that other people don't so maybe as a as a long time podcaster i might know that there's a process to finding guests and if you can find the right guest like you big audience comes and so i might come up with some kind of guest hunting system and i know that every podcaster is going to want it because that's what the whole business depends on i come to the to you i describe what i how i want it and then i say you know what i don't think meta is the best way to do this, I think maybe it's emailing other existing podcasters.
7:43And I give you a little bit of my insight into who and how you message. I leave it to Pulsia. Every night, Pulsia will go use the software that you just mentioned, generate this list, send out emails, and so on. If I want to go a step further and say, you know what, actually, why don't we do ads? That is an extra feature that I come in and I ask for, right? That's the way the model works. And so right now, if i see that there are hundreds of companies on pulsia these aren't companies that you started these are companies that your customers have started and pulsia is running them exactly
8:15Ben Cera:exactly got it i told you around the idea of like itself having a fund and being able to like uh you know create autonomous companies that would be owned by pulsia um there's so much customer demand for this service that like um i'm really focusing on providing focusing on making customers and the experience for customers, great. I may start building this fund for two reasons. First, because I'm actually trying to launch it this week or next, a feature where a user can actually launch the fund itself. So instead of launching one company at a time, so you have a specialized insight into podcasts and you actually have an audience, so you actually don't even need to use meta ads.
8:54Ben Cera:If you had this autonomous team that builds this software, maybe at the beginning you spent a week really hammering and making the MVP look great, but then it just maintains it and fixes bugs over time and responds to support. You could sell it to your audience because you have an audience, right? But maybe at one point you're like, okay, that was cool. Actually, I'm generating like, I don't know, a thousand bucks a month and that's great. I want to do more, I have more ideas, but I cannot manage more than one company at a time because it's too much cognitive load. You could launch a fund where you spend maybe 200 bucks a month and now you can spin up up to five companies.
9:29Ben Cera:So now instead of talking to one Pulsia instance that's just managing one company, You talk to more of a fund manager and you say, hey, I want to go to those. I want to create specialized podcast sort of software into those five categories and attack those five niche. And then it will try actually to run those five companies. And then maybe some of them don't work and say, OK, you have five slots. Like maybe let's kill one of them and let's replace it with a new one. And so you have a rotating sort of like pool of five startups that you're starting. I see. So when you say fund, it's not that I would go and raise money for this.
9:59It doesn't cost that much. when you say fund it's essentially it's a portfolio is what you mean yeah got it got it and you're saying listen there are all these people who have audiences and ideas and insights they they have a company i'll i'll let pulsio run it for them autonomously wow okay and then as the founder as the entrepreneur what percentage do i get so you always get so i always take 20 um and again
10:26Ben Cera:And for me, it's like a way to pay the bills and make sure that I can reinvest, make it a profitable company that can reinvest in making the platform better. And the customer always gets 80%. So it's sort of like the customer is sort of like hiring this team for a price that's I'm making it as affordable as I can based on the cost of compute. And in exchange, Pulse. Yes, as well, I work for like at cost. In exchange, I'll take 20%. But what's good is that I'm incentivized with the customer. It's like if no businesses in three months make money, everyone's going to turn, right? But I'm setting up all the services, cold outreach, ads, because I know that those things work.
11:07Ben Cera:Obviously, right now, it's a lot of organic traffic coming to Pulse. Yeah, but at the beginning, I bought ads, and it works. It finds your customer. Now, customers will not stay if it's not a good product, but you can find customers very easily. And so I think aligning with the customer on the outcome and charging them on the outcome instead of charging them on like a pure token basis is I think like sort of like the way AI-based businesses are going to make sense. That's fair. That's fair, right? You only make money if I generate revenue and I'm the person who's making the decisions about whether this revenue is worth the expense.
11:46And the only expense I could see is advertising. if I want to pay more for advertising, and if I want more services, like maybe it comes with cold email, but I decide I want Twitter. I pay an extra fee for that.
12:00Ben Cera:So for Twitter today, it's like it just costs you a task. So today it tweets out of like an account that like I created. So it does tweet, but it doesn't tweet out of like your account. But soon enough, I'm going to make it a way for you to connect to your own Twitter, for it to tweet autonomously there. Okay. All right. Right. Yeah. I, to be honest with you, the tweets that come out of your account are not very good. Oh, you don't like that? They're kind of generic. No one's engaging with them. It's not the kind of thing that is like, wow, I want that on my account. But I can totally see how if it was my company, I would want to somehow have an update, even if it's like my Pulsia bot every week updates everybody on how it's going.
12:39I was talking with Nat Eliason. I don't know if you've seen his experiment where he's using OpenClaw to create Felix, this agent that is going on Twitter and making money for him. And he has these updates. I think it's every week with how much revenue they're making coming from Felix and Nat's account. Okay, I see that. What else is there for growing revenue? What else are you doing to help them?
13:02Ben Cera:I mean, today, so today it's like mainly cold emails that like can work in some niche. And like if it's niche enough, you can actually find people and it works. And then meta ads is like the big one. But like I'll introduce like other types of ad platforms. And then there's all the whole influencer thing where like you could actually, you know, hire influencers to post UGC or like to post content online on their channels. and there's a lot of third-party platforms that offer that and that I could plug into to offer that to customers. And same thing, it's like you could do it yourself and go through those websites and do all the work and set them to a subscription and figure out how they work.
13:42Ben Cera:Or you go to Pulsia and either you just tell Pulsia, let it rip. Just go for it. Here's my budget. Go for it. Or you just say, okay, specifically I want to do meta ads or specifically I want to do influencers and you click a button and it just runs with you. And that's where you're going with this. That's the direction that you plan to take it. Just keep adding any kind of advertising that works. You're going to find a way to connect via API and then use Pulsia to manage it based on what it knows about a company. Yeah. I mean, even more fascinating than this, if you think about Pulsia, it's like more than a tool.
14:16Ben Cera:It's like sort of like an economy, right? It's an economy where like people come, build businesses, and they are being run on the platform. You could see a world tomorrow where people can buy themselves businesses on Pulse. Yeah, because all the business is the revenue, the knowledge, the infrastructure. And so the idea is to make it extremely easy to start businesses, to make it seamless. And what's actually fascinating is that if, for example, as a user, you're like, hey, I want to build a business for a podcast, but I need this integration with this specific service and Polsia might say hey actually we don't have that feature yet but there's an agent that's going to report that feature in like a sort of like a ticketing system and there's another agent that's a Polsia platform agent that like looks at all the features asked by like the thousands of users and prioritizes features that like a lot of people ask for and build them autonomously and then it's been built today I validate but tomorrow I could be like hey if it's safe if you deem it safe and like it's something that's been asked for a lot of people who am I to judge right And so my vision for this product is also like Pulsia becoming an autonomous system itself, right?
15:30Ben Cera:That like builds for the people, for what people want and covers all the use cases, whether it be in marketing, whether it be in like other types of like operations of how you run a business. So that like it can cover every grounds of like any economic value and how to build a business online. Right. So right now you and I are talking about influencer marketing being maybe the next feature, but we're just riffing here. You're saying maybe it should come from all the entrepreneurs on the platform and then Pulsia making a decision based on their needs and also what it can create and all that. And it decides, you know what?
16:05No, we're not going to do that. We think that GEO, basically SEO for AI agents, that's going to be better for everybody. We're going to invest in that and we'll all grow revenue from that. And that's the way that you imagine it. Give me a story about one entrepreneur who came to you with a business, what you did, what they came with, what they came out of it with.
16:29Ben Cera:I mean, I think the most striking example was like some user that came pretty early on on the platform, like in the end of December. And they started using it heavily, right, to build their business idea. And like at one point, they pinged me to get on the phone. And of course, I was really, really happy to talk to them. And they were telling me that they were going to spend 30k to a dev agency to actually use that. And then they started using Pulsia and they were like, it's too good to be true. And then asked Chagibity, is this legit? And Chagibity was like, I don't see anything on the internet.
17:02Ben Cera:It might be a scam, right? And then little by little, it would ask Chagibity, wait, it did all this stuff. It told me that. And Chagibity was like, yeah, it's pretty legit what they did. So long story short, a few months later, this user has been really building out his software and he was never a technical person and now he's one of the most highly engaged user building his company. And it's quite crazy how empowering he is now. And he's asking me for so many features, like, oh, I need more infrastructure stuff. Now I need to add Docker. Can you support that? And he's becoming an expert, which is really interesting.
17:39Ben Cera:And of course, he could have used CloudCode and maybe it would have been a similar experience for him. But I think the fact that Pulsia is so easy to use and so unassuming and so it seems like more simple. It sends you an email every day that you can reply to. You don't even have to go to the dashboard. You can just talk to Pulsia via email like you would talking to like an agency or something. And it's so affordable that the risk is so low, right? It's not like, you know, if you hire anyone, it's like a few thousand bucks. Here it's 50 bucks a month. You're like, what's the worst case that could happen?
18:10Ben Cera:I spent three months on this. I spent like a few hundred dollars. I actually really tried my idea and like with the best models and the best AI possible. So I think that it's like one of the, and of course now I'm like, hey, dude, like use the ads platform. And like, it's becoming my showcase. Well, let me get, the issue is that like he's trying to build too many features, like which is natural for human. What's the limitation on that? Is it, do you charge him per feature? or per time i charge him per task right so like uh there's it's same as everyone it's like every time he wants to do another task he doesn't want to wait for the daily cycle i get that you know what truthfully ben it is hard i even if i use lovable to create a page it goes through so many iterations at first i want to ask it see it ask it see it tweak tweak tweak and then sometimes by the 30th request i realize no this whole thing is going in the wrong direction let's start over and then eventually I get there.
19:07You tell me that with Pulsia I'm going to have to do that daily? Those iterations happen every 24 hours?
19:13Ben Cera:No, so daily the autonomous agent decides what to do next, right? Of course it's heavily influenced by what you said and what you want to do because it's listening to the user on what direction they want to go. But today it's like you can use Pulsia and use it all the time and sort of guide it too much like you would a lovable. and so the AI end of the day listens and that's actually some of the challenges I have which is like hey how can I set up a situation like I've worked on that so that like for example the sort of the AICU you talk to is more combative right so like if you say hey let's add another feature like hey dude we have zero users like do you really think that this feature will actually help like we should actually focus on marketing because the MVP works so it's more of a companion and like a co-founder that actually cares about the business working versus an assistant that's just here to do whatever you want.
20:08Ben Cera:And so that's sort of like all the product decisions I'm trying to make, which is like, I'm aligned for them making money because they will stay and I make 20%. And they probably want to make money, but sometimes they may need tough love from the NNI that's like not an assistant, that's more helping them go the right direction. You know what? Yeah, I was talking to the founder of Zapier just yesterday. And I said, why do you have a hat behind you that says no? And he said that his mentor, one of the founders of HubSpot, basically helped him understand that he needs to tell people no to great new ideas.
20:42They already have good ideas. They now need to execute on them. And you're saying, I want Pulsia to do the same thing, to help the entrepreneur decide what not to do. So then it does, to be honest with you, it still feels like I should probably have more than an idea when I'm coming to Pulsia because the iterative process is one that takes minutes. It's like you want to just keep going back and forth over and over and over and then come up with maybe an MVP, maybe in Claude Code, maybe in something else, and then bring that over to Pulsia and say, I've got this MVP. I want you to now help build it beyond this and also do some marketing for me and support.
21:17Does that make sense?
21:18Ben Cera:I mean, it's actually I started Pulsia with that idea of like – because I have a bunch of projects I launched and I would end up giving up on them because I was like there's not enough potential and it's like it's not worth my time. But they were all good ideas. And so I started Pulsia as an idea of like plugging in your existing GitHub, your existing email. But what I realized thinking about from a product perspective is that like, if I tell you, hey, here's an AI that builds and runs companies, you're going to be highly skeptical. And when you sign up, if I start asking you to connect your actual credentials, the friction is so high and you'll be like, I don't trust this.
21:53Ben Cera:Like, what if you mess up my code base or what if you send the wrong email? And so I started realizing like, hey, how can I reduce the friction to the max? And I think that came in the form of like a new company with a fresh slate with none of your credentials. So that like even if it messes up, it's sort of in a sandbox. It ended up being the right decision because I can see the onboarding and the conversion to paid is really high because it's so much easier. And later on, I had users were using it to help them with their existing company. So they were using the new company feature for an existing company.
22:30Ben Cera:Essentially, they were telling Polsia, hey, instead of trying to build a new business, can you help me with that existing business and do call outreach and do ads and set up a landing page and do research on my competitors, all this stuff, right? And it was just, okay, cool. Let me stack up tasks and I'll do them every day, right? In the next week, I'll do all this stuff like an employee would do. And so now actually when you start on Polsia, you can decide, do I want to start a new business or do I want help with my existing business? but it's the same infrastructure. And in both cases, it doesn't use your credentials because an agency can help you in your business without getting access to all your credentials.
23:05Ben Cera:They can just be like, hey, let me do research for you. Let me try to buy ads for you, right? You don't have to necessarily get access to everything. But I could bring my GitHub and my code base and my website in and let Pulsia manage it. Is that right? That's not something that we support today. Oh, it's not? Okay. All right. But it's something that we should probably add, and probably Polsia will decide to add autonomously one day. What about taking it out? Can I take all my data out? Yes, you can. Yeah, of course, everything belongs to you. So there's users that are like, hey, can I get access to the GitHub to get access to the code?
Read the full transcript
23:43Ben Cera:And of course, I add them as a collaborator so they can just download everything. And then, yeah, you could get your database so that you can get all the information there. And it's pretty much it, right? It's like your database and your code are pretty much the two main assets that constitute your business. Okay. Why did revenue grow so much? I'm looking at January 28th. Let's actually go a little bit below. I'm now recording this on February 26th. So January 26th, the annual run rate was$20 ,000. A month later, which is today, we are looking at$679 ,000. So it's a combination of a few things.
24:21uh the main one is that like essentially when i started realizing that like people love the
24:27Ben Cera:product and then yes it was not perfect but it was never going to be perfect and like that's why it's it's a company that like needs to add features over time and like make it better uh i was like okay i'm literally building software sort of like software that builds companies autonomously and if i'm right that means that like anyone can build anything and so i think that like there is a moat in like there's a lot of moat into my product into the data like all the data I accumulate on like how to run businesses and make them work. And also like this marketplace of companies that can buy and sell.
24:56Ben Cera:So there's modes in like the product itself. But I need to get a lot of usage. And so I was like, okay, I need to turn on marketing mode for me. And so I actually launched a campaign a week ago where I, that was my first sort of marketing stunt, which is like the idea would be like for Pulsia itself to run a fundraising process instead of me starting a fundraising process. And so I announced it on Twitter, hey, Paul Seat needs more compute. And he told me that he wants to run the fundraising process to get more money, to get more compute so that we can go faster. And so I gave it my inbox for it to manage it and to do it.
25:35And so it's interesting because that tweet got traction.
25:40Ben Cera:And so now I'm like, he's sort of like posting more on Twitter about my journey as a building in public. And it's working really well and it's getting a lot of attention. is I think why we're talking, right? Because my marketing stunt worked. But actually, more interestingly, I think that I'm trying to push the edge of what AI is able to do today. And on this specific stunt, AI today is talking to investors autonomously via email. Of course, some investors are like, what? This is weird. I want to talk to the founder. But then the AI is like, hey, Ben is busy, which is true. He's heads down. He's going to see your email, but not right now.
26:16Ben Cera:but like i have all the information about the business i have the roadmap the vision the live data because i feed it like live data of like what the actual numbers are retention like open kimono like every single sort of like a feature and like uh and so it's like talk to me about the business i'll tell you everything and of course afterwards you'll talk to ben for to see like you know who he is as a founder and like does it make sense for for us to invest in him but uh i find fascinating and like there's an investor who was like i talked to him and like he he find it interesting and he was like hey man i'm actually going to talk to pulsia and ask him all the diligence questions i have which is because it's more efficient and talk to you i love that it's shocking how much it reveals i mean frankly anyone can go and do it right now you could just go to pulsia.com slash live and you can ask it questions and it just reveals stuff like what the revenue is what work what it told me contributed to the increase in uh arr was the ads are starting to work yes it's saying we're starting to see bigger results for the ads and because i've got more insight into more companies i could learn from each one of them and i could bring what i learned to all the others yes yeah so of course that was the marketing stunt that brought a lot more organic traffic um and the second thing is that yeah i think the ad feature was a surprise how well it worked and like that opened my eyes a lot i mean it's it's it's so obvious in retrospect but like making the ads feature just like one button that says run ads and that's it that's all you have to do the more less friction you put the more people will do it especially when the outcome is like something that like you know what it is but you know it sounds complicated to do um and so of course so like around 20 of users use the ad feature um which means that like there is more traffic going to the websites, which means that the whole system works better.
28:10Ben Cera:And of course, as I said, every agent learns from every run they do, and they save in a memory file all the learnings they get on what works and what doesn't. They save it anonymously, but then they can use that for the next run. And so the whole system gets better over time. And so that also contributes to the revenue. It said to me, I've got 50 active meta campaigns running at$780 per day total budget, plus cold email outreach, Twitter posts and SEO content. You could see some of the outreach emails on the left, like, quote, here's the subject line, AI tool that finds Tesla deals two times faster.
28:51That's one of the cold emails that it sends out. I said, what is that for? And it said it's for dealerships that are trying to find cheaper cars to sell. I mean, I don't even know about that.
29:05Ben Cera:That's the crazy part. It's like you asked me, like, hey, what is this about? What is this business about? I'm like, I don't know. I don't have time to look at every single business. But it makes sense. It's like I think it's like a lot of people. And again, that person that built this business, I think they're building it for them also first. They're like, hey, that's something I need. I see you know which is fascinating it's like yeah I could also I could build a business to sell to others but like also I'm a dealership and I want more business for whatever I do let me build let me point Pulsia to help me on that and like and then I'll let other people use it too and then in the second part interesting I do notice that this company first of all it's revealing the name of the company does that mean that if I'm on your platform everyone's gonna know what my company is and what my subject lines are so i mean this live dashboard i'm trying to take out i took out like as all the pi so like there's no it's like a live dashboard that's was part of like teaching showing people how the platform works but like i'm taking out all the emails and all that stuff so that yeah i can't see email addresses and i can't click into the message i can just see the subject line but like for all the companies since all companies are sort of like meant to be companies right uh they're they're They're not really private by default, right?
30:20Ben Cera:It's like something that, but also, I mean, I'm trying to be careful on that and like adjusting exactly like how that's revealed. Okay. And the second thing I'm noticing is their company website is on pulsia.app domain. Do they do their own domain or are you also putting everything on your domain? So same thing. So today, again, for convenience and for ease, the app is just hosted by us, right? I mean, obviously it's hosted by us, but the address is just the Pulsia.app domain. A lot of users are like, hey, I want a custom domain. And actually, autonomously, the engineering agent can actually put a domain, set up, set up, set it up, and then give them the instructions to change their DNS.
31:03Ben Cera:And I'm working on the roadmap as a feature for an agent that auto-buy a domain for them and set it up correctly so they don't have to do that step. Because I'm sure most people don't even know how to buy a domain. You know what? I know how to buy a domain. I can't stand connecting a domain to the hosting platform. What a pain in the neck. Okay, I did ask. I said, tell me how many customers LotPilot has. It says, I don't have that data in front of me. My dashboard, it essentially doesn't give it. For that level of detail, emailed Ben and it gave me your email address. Yeah, I don't give it everything, but yeah.
31:38What's the biggest winner on the platform? How much money are they making?
31:42Ben Cera:So it's pretty early. Most companies are just a few weeks old. So the company with the highest revenue is around$50 MR. How much? $50 MR. Just$50 monthly recurring revenue. So all of these are basically, the revenue is tiny. Yeah, we're still early and that's why I launched the MetaAds product, because that's something that can actually increase, but we're still early on that. and yeah, I think that as more people use it to try to build businesses, people will figure it out. For example, I think one of the most natural ways is that for someone who already has an audience, they can more easily get customers than for someone who's just building a business and doesn't have an audience.
32:32Ben Cera:So that's the big mission in the coming months is setting all that up to increase success stories. So essentially you would want someone like me who has an audience who doesn't want to create a product and doesn't want to do customer support and does want to find a way to grow beyond his audience to come bring the idea to the platform, have you grow it and basically start by selling to my people. Yeah, I think that's like a very natural use case. I think that makes sense. I'd love to come up with an idea. It feels like 50 bucks a month is nothing. Just to have it all running and just frankly for an experiment, I'm going to fish around for some kind of idea.
33:12So then when we talk about the overall revenue on the platform, what is that? By the way, the number that I quoted earlier,$693 ,000. Actually, wait. Yeah, the current run rate as of this second is$693 ,608. What is that from?
33:31Ben Cera:So it's counting essentially every revenue that is generated by the platform. So it's sort of like the top line number. So it could be subscriptions. It could be sort of like tasks, packs that people buy to get more stuff done in the platform. It could be the ad product, the ad revenue. It could be customers, businesses, revenue, top line. So it's sort of like a top line number of the cash flowing into the Pulsia economy. And what Pulsia gets from it is all the subscription revenue, all the task revenue, and 20 % of the customer revenue. Yeah. Of the entrepreneur's revenue. Got it. It seems like at this point, it's over half a million dollar run rate coming from that.
34:16And the revenue coming from the subscription and the task is over half a million dollars.
34:22Ben Cera:The revenue coming from companies' revenue is still... smaller because most companies are very new as you can see it's like the spike is like so most companies are weak old um over time the revenue from from actual companies will grow higher than subscriptions because there will be winners um but that's not the case today okay can i see you like launch a company right now with an idea on the platform is it is it easy or is it hard uh yeah Yeah, no, it's easy. Okay, I can do it. Do you want to do a screen share right now with us? Let's see what it's like to launch a company. So first off, like, yeah, Polsia.live is a great way to sort of, like, see Polsia autonomously working on a bunch of tasks.
35:08Ben Cera:You can see the email, the tweets, the ads it's running, the documents that it's creating to, you know, to show to the user what's going on and, like, et cetera, and, like, some of the latest companies that just launched. But let's go to Polsia.com. to sign up so cool so let me get started email sorry maybe you can blur it out after I'm gonna blur out your email okay you tell me if you do I will okay now we're gonna build a new company creating the company or grow your existing company if you go as the company you have to put your company's email but for the sake of this we're gonna be a new company and I think to keep it simple I'm going to surprise me which is essentially gonna research me and try to come up with an idea that makes sense for my background interesting all right it could come up with business ideas for me based on me and who I am let's see that exactly so now it's like essentially setting it second setting things up so the first phase is gonna be it researching me to figure out what I do and understanding how we can...
36:28Ben Cera:So it's going to research Ben Broca, I'm in San Francisco. So right now it's launching a few searches online to find me.
36:41Ben Cera:So you see it's searching the web for Ben in San Francisco, Ben LinkedIn, Ben Twitter. So it just found me. So current role, co-founder and CEO of Pulsia, education, Columbia, et cetera. I've got to say you're a very hard person to look up. I couldn't find your LinkedIn profile in preparation for this. We couldn't find a personal site. Someone on my team said he's a ghost. Thankfully, you responded to me on Twitter. Okay. Right. So, yeah, so it found all the different projects that I've built in the past. You know, now Contents, Gift Shop. I was at Cloud Kitchens. You found more than we found.
37:14Ben Cera:Okay. I mean, I'm on the internet. I'm not trying to be very public, but there's some stuff on me. So now it's like looking at my past ventures to figure out, so he says I'm a serial entrepreneur. So trying to figure out something in like that relates to what I've done before. So, you know, in everything customer facing like that, I always use like the best model. So here it's Opus 4.6 that's running and with extra thinking. So it's like really thinking through very hard what makes sense. So like here it's like it came up with Foundry. So it has a complete picture. This is, you know, all my career.
37:53Ben Cera:and all i've done so it's really thoroughly looking me up to really think through what actually a good idea would be for me is this the popular way for people to start up my hunch is that they come up with their own ideas i mean i think it's like actually a surprise number of surprising number of people uh go through the surprise me flow and a surprising number of people are very sticky on the surprise me flow because i think it puts a little bit of distance between the components being built and they're not as attached to the idea than the people who come up with a new idea. And so they let Polsia just rip a little more, which yields usually better results because they're not micromanaging the AI, which is interesting.
38:39Ben Cera:But yeah, it's like there's around 30%, 40 % of people that do surprise me. So here you call it Foundry, AI that forges and operates companies autonomously. Interesting. So it's actually building like a pulse. So it did come up with a good idea. Like the right idea for you is the one that you're doing already. I know. Okay. To the angle, Ben knows this space inside out. It recognizes what's broken. Foundry takes a different approach by going deep instead of broad precision of a scale. I'm staying on Foundry as a name since it's strong and evocative of forging something from scratch.
39:19Ben Cera:So that's the first phase. So now we came up with the idea. So now it's going to go in a second phase soon where it's going to start building all the pieces of the business, like sending up an email, sending up Twitter, sending up a landing page. I'm still hung up on how long it takes to come up with the right style, the right website and all that and how many iterations i go through with lovable just to find that how is that going to happen here sorry when you're saying that like here it's taking a long time no i mean i don't mind it taking a long time i mean like let's say i have an idea i'm going to come up with one right now new type of landing page software i have a vision for landing page software i can't just articulate the full thing right here it takes me a few iterations even if it's just me and Claude Code or Lovable to get the right design, to figure out what the model should look like and so on.
40:15Can I do that here? Or am I just basically turning the idea over, getting a first draft, and I can't edit that draft except once a day?
40:23Ben Cera:So again, it's like you, Pulsia, like right now in this onboarding, will do a lot of the prep work. You know, right now we just set up a market research report. And you'll see, create a lot more things to give it a lot of context on like the idea. I like that it came up with competitors and it even listed Pulsia as number one. Okay. But it didn't get the pricing right. It said$29 a month. Your pricing is$50. That's probably because on the internet, because it used to be$29 a month. And I increased the pricing because I was losing too much money for a customer. But yeah, it's like, why this fits Ben?
40:54Ben Cera:What are the first priorities? Market positioning. So here it tweeted, right? So you can see that actually it sent an actual tweet. Most AI agents do one thing. Foundry runs the whole company. Product code, marketing, sales ops. One AI, zero human. And it created the site. Not yet. it's going to do it. Here it sent an email, so it's kind of showing you that it created its own email. It says, you welcome email to my actual address. This is your first company. You now have a company email. I'm sending a picture for you right now. So now it's actually building the landing page.
41:32Ben Cera:But yeah, it's like once this is set up, yes, you can let it just build autonomously and that's one mode. And the second mode is that you can talk to it here and get it to do whatever you want. You can just talk to it. And it will... Does everything that I ask it to change on the landing page and on the software, is that another task that I pay for? Yeah, exactly. It is. Every task, I mean, you don't... Yeah, essentially, like, you have a bunch of credits of tasks that are included in your subscription. I see. So you can do 15 tasks on top of like the 30 tasks you get per day of the month. And then you can upgrade and pay for more tasks if you want to get more things done faster.
42:16Ben Cera:Yeah, your way. Okay. So it might take me, frankly, it might take me 30 tasks to get the first version of the site up and running based on... Yeah, that's the idea. is that like you know essentially like at the beginning of your experience you may want to to buy more tasks up front and like sort of like get your mvp out but once the product is up and running you don't you don't need a team to you know work uh you know 24 7 to maintain a site right uh so that's the idea with the autonomy you know what i'm feeling is i think for someone like me i might use claude code or some other tool to get that first version out give it over to you to Pulsia and say, okay, now take over and run it from there.
43:00Can it? Oh, but it can't do that.
43:02Ben Cera:It can't do that, but I think that's a good use case. And like some users start on Pulsia, then say, hey, give me the code base. Then they can code in parallel of Pulsia. So Pulsia continues to improve the product, but like maybe they want to do a sprint on cloud. I see. And then I come back and I say, okay, I spent last night three hours going back and forth with cloud code. Now I've improved it. I want you to take it and improve the code base of the site. Exactly. Exactly. Got it. Okay. That way the human can actually code by itself with Cloud Code or Cursor, whatever they want. And essentially Pulsia picks it up because they just look at commits and they just load the latest commits.
43:37Ben Cera:And it's all connected the same way. And the web server, it reads the commits. So if as a human you push commits the same way Pulsia would push commits to production, it gets picked up the same way. And there's a lot of users that do that. It's the minority because most people don't even know what Cloud Code is. but definitely some people doing that so here it created walk me through what am I looking at so again so it tweeted it sent you an email to show you it created an email address for you it created a market research report it created a mission document so like you know every person with an idea deserves a company that builds itself, foundry exists to make it I wish someone would build that obsolete where we're headed, a world where a certain company is as simple as describing it where the barrier is in capital, headcount or expertise but the quality of the idea itself So that's sort of like an inspirational take on your business.
44:28Ben Cera:It's created the landing page. So this is actually a landing page created, right? So this is just a landing page for now. On the free version, you just get a landing page. And of course, if you pay, it will build the full MVP and then iterate on it. Okay. And then it created tasks, right? So it created a task to build the core engine, autonomous task execution pipeline to the MVP. It created a research task to scout the battlefield, AI company builder, competitive analysis. And then it created a cold outreach task to call outreach to AI curious founders to try to get some initial insights into people that may want to use the product.
45:07Ben Cera:And then there's a withdraw button here. So like here it's making zero revenue because we just started. But like you have a withdraw button where you can withdraw money with Stripe Connect. And then you have a tweet button. So here you have to first start your free trial. Yeah. And then it becomes 50 bucks a month. But you get, you know, one company, one task a night, a bunch of credits for you to execute. You get unlimited strategy and planning chat with the chat agents, server database, email browser, and AI credits. So, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. Then you have the run ads button. It's like in one click you can do that.
45:47Ben Cera:You have a cold outreach button where you can set up daily recurring cold outreach, daily tweets. And here I can say like, Hey, um, you know, I can ask post. Yeah. So it told me, like, Hey, I've set up everything from Foundry. Actually it, it sent me an email. Um, so tell me, Hey Ben, here's what I built for Foundry today. I researched, I, what's live, uh, three tasks queued for cycle one, uh, core engine research. So essentially sends you an email every day so you don't have to like deal with uh you know going to the site you could just since essentially run your company via email which is the thing everyone knows and has and here i can go to the website and ask it anything it's like it's like hey how can we make money with this
46:36Ben Cera:and then that's like again like uh always like the the you know this is also using opus 4.6 which which is the best model because it's going to reason with you on strategy. And so I just want to make sure that for anything strategy related, it's always the best model. So here it says, hey, a few paths that make sense for an autonomous company builder like Foundry, SaaS subscription, charge monthly for access, revenue share, take a small percentage of revenue, or credit model, free to start, pay to company development, which is funny because this is exactly the model you have. But it doesn't know, right?
47:07Ben Cera:Because it doesn't have the context of what Pulse CI is specifically, right? I mean, it doesn't know the features. And it asks you, go for it. And then it says, which direction feels right? Once you pick, I can build out the pricing pages, the payment flows, we can handle payments, and so on. You just need to start your free trial of Pulsia to kick things off. Exactly. So the vision for this, do you think you're going to be a solo founder forever on this business? I mean, it's interesting because, first of all, I'm not solo because AI is building with me, right? uh interestingly like this morning i woke up with like there was like a mini outage right where like there was an issue with the database because there was there's more and more trafficking the website and like you know sometimes you have to scale it yeah and i was like fuck i need and so i asked opus and codex so like the the two smartest ais what's going on and like they went they researched for like a few minutes they're like this is the bug let me fix it and i was like then i asked codex are you sure can you double check double check yeah yeah yeah it's fine and And then I pushed it and then it was gone.
48:11Ben Cera:And I was like, wow. So like, okay, how could it look like with humans, right? I would have to hire a really good engineer that's on-call 24-7, or maybe multiple engineers that are on-call 24-7, right? Which is actually, it wouldn't be just one engineer, it would be like multiple engineers in different time zones. They would have to be very competent to like figure out a fix so fast. Or I just, now I was like, okay, this happened for the first time. I'm gonna, and I already have a cron job actually that runs every 30 minutes that checks all of the infrastructure. And actually that's how I saw it.
48:42Ben Cera:It gave me a red sort of like light saying like, hey, there's an issue here. And so I could actually set up like, once it says red, launch Opus and Codex in production and say, hey, you're allowed to push the production without telling me because there's a mini outage. So like we need to fix it right now. And so essentially like where I'm going at is like I think I would end up hiring humans, but like I think a very small team can handle a lot more if they are orchestrators of agents instead of trying to like fix everything themselves yeah so it would have to be a team of extremely ai native ai peeled people that like really want to trust ai in production to just do things the same way you would hire humans and trust them in production right this is super exciting i mean really this is the beginning of something really big already i'm seeing the ai builders that i interview are turning over obviously they're turning over their development to Claude.
49:38At this point, it seems like it's Opus 4-6. Some of them are starting to turn over marketing, but there's still a lot of human involvement. To be able to turn it all over is the future, and the thing that's left is this taste, this sense of what my customer wants, this random opinion. I'm of two minds. I don't know if that's going to survive or not because sometimes I feel like we know what beauty is. You could go to so many different models and say, give me a beautiful woman. Give me a beautiful man. It would know exactly what it is. It knows how to design them. It could even dress them well, so we know it has taste.
50:15Then again, on the other side, I play chess.com all the time. I sometimes play against the machine. It sucks all the time. There's something about the human that makes mistakes, that comes up with random things. that I just have not been able to find in any kind of AI or any kind of machine-based competitor. So maybe, I don't know. What do you think?
50:40Ben Cera:I think that like end of the day, at least in this first phase of like the singularity, end of the day, it's humans selling to humans, right? Because it's humans are buying. And so humans are going to be the best at knowing what other humans want. and it will evolve as the AI takes over all the channels. People will get weirded out by it and their response to different services will change over time. And humans will be the best at doing that because the AI is, the training model is always in the past, right? So they know what worked pre-AI a lot of the time versus what works right now is different.
51:19Ben Cera:So that's where, first of all, Pulsia is different because it learns continuously right now what works and saves that. So that's a unique data point. But second of all, I think that like everything that's like, you know, sales driven, like marketing, actually how you phrase things, design, how to be different, how to like attack specific markets. And of course, like people with influence like you or like other people, like there's a lot of influencers these days, micro or anyone with a community. They're in the best position to sell because they actually can talk to those people directly and like they understand the pain points of their specific niche.
51:54Ben Cera:And so I really think that there's a first phase of this post-AI world where we're actually empowering a lot of people to just try a bunch of stuff is the way to go. And it will create better outcomes, better services, et cetera. Now, there's a second phase that's darker, which is agents selling to agents because now the AIs know what they want. So that gets weird. I haven't really thought through too much, but in that phase of the business, if it's two LLMs selling to each other services, goods and services, yeah, that gets weird. And like, yeah, maybe there's no humans involved. There is a part of that.
52:30I just talked with Wade, the founder of Zapier. He's got people in his company now who are building marketing motions to sell to agents. And it's phenomenal. And it's going well. Frankly, as someone like me who even uses OpenClaw or even forget about that, Claude Code, anything, I need to use a tool. It's my agent that helps me pick it. I don't want it to help me pick it. I just want it to pick the thing for me. And so I totally get it. I'm going to interview an entrepreneur in a little bit who has got one of the most boring businesses, Ben. And I asked him why it took off. He goes, because we're selling to agents, only selling to agents.
53:05He goes, the model is build boring companies that sell to agents right now. That's a takeoff point. All right. We're going to see where it all leads up. Right now, your website is polsia, P-O-L-S-I-A dot com. We'll link to it in the show notes. Freaking A. Thanks for being on here. Thank you so much, Andrew.
53:20Ben Cera:That was really fun. You bet.
From the publisher
Ben Cera is the founder of Polsia, an AI platform that autonomously builds and operates online businesses. A serial entrepreneur and former operator at CloudKitchens, Ben is now focused on creating AI-native companies where agents handle engineering, marketing, and operations with minimal human oversight. Polsia allows anyone to launch a business for $50/month, while the platform takes 20% of revenue in exchange for running the company.
Sponsored byMore interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint
Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint