Podcast
October 5, 2024

Beyond the Hype: The Reality of AI in SaaS with Max

Yash Shah
Co-founder, Momentum91
Maximilian Gutsche
Co-founder, Unifire
10m read
10m read
10m read

Introduction

In this episode of Building Momentum, Yash speaks with Max from Unifire.ai about the journey of building a SaaS product, the mistakes made in the early stages, and the evolution of technology in the SaaS landscape. They discuss the importance of user feedback, the challenges of scaling, and the rise of bootstrap micro-SaaS businesses. Max shares insights on distribution strategies, leveraging testimonials for growth, innovative pricing strategies, and the future of SaaS in the age of AI. The conversation concludes with a focus on onboarding and activation challenges for new users.

"We spent insane amounts of money just running around."
- Maximilian Gutsche

Key Takeaways

  • Max discusses the classic mistakes made in the early stages of Unifire.
  • The importance of starting with a clear problem to solve.
  • User feedback is crucial for product iteration and improvement.
  • Scaling challenges can arise from trying to cater to too many use cases.
  • AI is becoming an integral part of SaaS products.
  • Bootstrap micro-SaaS businesses are on the rise.
  • Distribution strategies are essential for acquiring early customers.
  • Testimonials can significantly enhance conversion rates.
  • Innovative pricing strategies can attract different customer segments.
  • Onboarding and activation are key to retaining users.

Transcript

Yash From Momentum (00:00)

Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Maximilian from Unifire .ai.

Unifire repurposes audio, text, and video content into anything from tweets, LinkedIn posts, and newsletters to 8 ,000 word blog posts as well. All are trained on your tone and your style. We're excited to hear the story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive in the world of SaaS. Hey, Max, how are you doing today? Awesome. Thank you.

Max (00:49)

Excellent. Thank you for inviting me.

Yash From Momentum (00:52)

Yeah. And thank you for doing this. So let's start with understanding a little bit around Unifire, right? What's the big, bad, hairy problem that you're trying to solve today with Unifire

Max (01:03)

Yeah, so that came very much out of my own problem of being a, know, like LinkedIn creator, you know, like I used to be more like that freelancers or product management, freelancer consulting. We did a lot of online courses and invited people and then this one thing that was about token economics. I had a short exploration of crypto economics. And then we had all these.

these recordings lying around, venture capital, you know it from a podcast. So much value inside. And we saw one guy, so it wasn't the 100 % original idea. We saw this guy that did something, I think it was called EPMY or something. So it was a podcast tool that used, I think, GPT 3 .5 API to extract, you know, like the summaries and whatever.

automatically. And we looked at this and I was like, this is great for podcasters. Do I necessarily care? Not really. But how about we could write blog posts out of this and so on. And then my co -founder, you've seen, we are building stuff for years, tried different ideas. Nothing really worked. Now this time was my own problem, my own thing.

And then then we basically started working on it and the idea is pretty much still the same concept. you, you put in some data, you have all kinds of templates and formats you could want to do. And then, you know, it transcribes in the background and then, you know, we use the AI and build an infrastructure to extract ideas, you know, put that into formats by headlines, outlines, whatever. yeah, I mean, it is at 32 different formats now.

It's going to be 50 soon. So anything from online, you know, online course scripts, lecture scripts, YouTube video scripts, it doesn't really matter.

Yash From Momentum (02:50)

wow.

nice. Interesting. so sort of like scratching your own itch, trying to fix a challenge that you were also facing. Most people would essentially become a prompt engineer themselves or try to become a prompt engineer themselves. so talk to us about the journey from thinking, I can solve this problem for myself. But I think there are a lot of other people out there. And so I should build a solution that can help other people.

with similar problems as well. did you spend time talking to people, doing some amount of early research? What was that journey from fixing it for yourself to fixing it for hundreds of thousands of other

Max (03:37)

So I would say the first two or three months were mainly trying to bring that into a product that's stable and good enough. that was mainly like we obviously talked to some people. We did some soft lounges and posted about on LinkedIn and that got the first people into it interested. They were also willing like we put up a little paywall like one dollar something just to

So that back then it was really expensive, know, to GPT -4 and stuff. and then, you know, first people came in, I think we started in March and then in July, we had a guy first ever paying customer. He paid like 69 bucks a month. that was like, that was the first sign I was like, okay.

Yash From Momentum (04:06)

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

Max (04:25)

There must be something if it works for him, it might work for 10 ,000 others, right? that's bootstraps us if you have 10 ,000 people that pay you that much and your two person team, you know, except for life. But the approach was basically from March to July, iterating on the prompts on the LinkedIn posts, mainly LinkedIn posts, because LinkedIn is currently winning that marketing game. Yeah, then just, you know, is it like, I'm almost

Yash From Momentum (04:48)

Yeah.

Max (04:54)

always very pragmatic. And my co -founder is like, like, like insanely optimistic. And he was like, honestly, we, we're gonna get there and stuff. And then I saw, and we saw, okay, this is moving in a direction where it gets good enough that people would pay for it. And that was the approach. So yeah, we definitely talked to users, but it's also, I mean, it's kind of like an obvious. So it is an obvious problem to solve.

But it's also really hard because like people, if the blog post isn't really on point, a good marketer just writes it themselves. They're not going to rewrite like a full blog post and stuff. So it was like this approach of figuring out mainly in the beginning, okay, we know that there's a bit of a market need. Can we get to the quality where people pay? So that was literally four or five months.

Yash From Momentum (05:42)

And so that's March of 23, you're saying, March of 23. And then by July of 23, you sort of have a version of the product and you start to realize that, hey, you this is a larger problem to solve as well. so talk to us a little about state of Unifire as of now. So how many users, customers, or how many...

like generations do you do every month just so that we can understand like the people who are watching or listening to this can understand the size and scale of the product today and they'll be able to put everything else in context as well.

Max (06:17)

Yeah, of course we just went through AppSumo Select and it's still going on for two weeks. So that was hundreds of licenses. Also, obviously, since these licenses come with team places and work space, I think at one day there was around 4 ,000 or like 1 ,400 active users or something. Obviously, our shit broke down badly at one point. But overall, I would say

pretty stable now. We are, I think we're having like 20 people trialing every day. 10. Yeah, so that, you know, it's like, so obviously I have analytics of how many cancel and how many trial, but I think it's somewhere between 10 and 20. Sometimes maybe on the weekend, it's five every day that are trialing. So I think it's going into the right direction.

Yash From Momentum (06:52)

wow, that's amazing.

Max (07:11)

now and it's mainly also because we are kind of moved like just you know the last three four weeks we finally moved out of this wrapper stage so like you can build your own prompts now and your own templates so you don't you have like now it gets to the point where you can build anything you want but we we abstract all the difficult things from you so we are like a fully full success now without you know

I mean, it was very sophisticated before, but people were dependent on the stuff I wrote and like the prompts I wrote. And now that's kind of the stage where we go away from. comes with its own difficulties. But yeah, so I'm not really sure if that's product market fit yet, but it looks decent enough.

Yash From Momentum (07:55)

It's going in the right direction. And this is sort of one of those bittersweet moments, right? So before Momentum, I used to run a platform called Clientjoy. And we had this one afternoon when we went down because there was a lot of usage. And the server memory sort of became, the CPU memory for the server on AWS became full. And I was worried and extremely like perspiring because people on support are like, hey, know, why is this happening?

why is the platform down and so on and so forth. And then you start to sort of overanalyze as to what did you do wrong and so on and so forth. But then once that got fixed and towards the evening, one of the things that you as a founder start to realize is that these are great problems to have. So if a lot of people are breaking your platform, it's a great problem to have because that's something that's so much in your control that you'll be able to fix it given some amount of time. And more importantly,

the fact that people are not happy because their platform went away for a bit means that your platform means something as a part of their workflow. And that's incredibly rewarding. that's great problem to have is what I would say. So the other thing that I want to understand about this is that you've been in technology / product space

for about three odd years, you worked in limited capacity on Web3 related stuff, and now you're working on AI full time. Can you talk to us a little bit about a couple of notions that you had when you started early on about technology and about tech products that have changed today? So given your experience, that someone who might be thinking about building a technology product today,

might have a similar notion that you had previously, but that has changed over the last three odd years

Max (09:43)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say the biggest one, and it's always the same with these hype cycles. You know, it never like the technology never pans out the same as people imagine. So, so like in crypto, it was extreme. And even I, you know, I had my crypto economics space that kind of worked, you know, in decentralized finance, it's still applications that work. But people also talked about the metaverse a lot.

And even Zuckerberg, you know, he invested 16 billion or something in a technology that didn't work. you know, like we can, we can use ChatGPT but we never really use the Metaverse. So it's, it's very weird that people put so much. and I had the same issue, like in this token economics, my imagination was just running wild. could, I don't know, decentralize clouds, infrastructure and incentivize people to offer this and stuff.

You know, it's certainly going to happen at some point, probably. But I just underestimated how long it would take and how many problems are there to fix. so, and I see the same with AI now. I think GPT -5 is going to be sick, but it's not as crazy as people think. I don't think we're going to make another jump where applications completely change. Like it's going to be more of the same.

better output in text, know, multimodality, whatever. Everything that already works improved. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. And, I don't think it's going to be that breakthrough that, you know, like that brings a whole new generation of, Seth tools. And in the beginning, when this AI stuff came out, people were like, Holy shit, Figma is done. You know, AI is going to create like all the UIs

Yash From Momentum (11:05)

just works a little better. Got

Max (11:23)

You know, I'm working with Figma every day and I'm like, holy shit, that's not gonna happen. in... You know, forget about it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yash From Momentum (11:23)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not in a thousand years. Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. I work with Figma every day as well, and that's sort of what I think as well. So this is one of the popular themes, right? That, OK, now all websites are going to be done with AI. And I saw a couple of fairly decent applications of website development or design through AI as well.

Max (11:36)

No.

Yash From Momentum (11:50)

A couple of my friends also tried their hands at it. And one of the things was that it's good if it's a personal blog or something like that, but any serious as an example, any serious website or any serious UI for a serious product, it's going to take a while. So I think as part of this AI piece, one of the things that I feel is that it's another tool in the RCE. So it's an equivalent to Figma.

it's not going to replace Figma, right? So it's going to make me better at using Figma, as an example, but yeah, so it's another tool in the arsenal. And so let's talk about that piece as well, right? So one of the things that we are seeing is that technology is moving so fast, it's moving so quickly that before large organizations get an opportunity to innovate,

sort of changes or the the new thing sort of comes in and and it feels like the opportunity to innovate lies with with very small bootstrapped sort of outfits which are just couple of people who understand enough of technology who understand enough of the market needs who are able to build solutions very quickly and then go to market together. What are your thoughts on on on the fact

The future of SaaS is bootstrapped microsaas instead of like really large billion dollar SaaS companies coming out. But they are going to be, you know, a million dollars a year in annual run rate run by like two or three people. What are your thoughts around that?

Max (13:16)

I I would say it definitely gets a lot easier to build stuff. I think my co -founder uses Sonnais for pretty much everything. I don't think anybody codes getters and setters anymore or something like this. It's just like text. I mean, the other problem is that distribution gets harder and harder. So you will need some form of audience.

I'd leave LinkedIn YouTube search engine optimization. So the thing is that this is what I'm realizing as well. So I obviously thought, okay, who, holy shit, this is going to be the insane AI boom and people are to catch up with our idea and they're going to come out of everywhere. so I subscribed to 10, 15 AI tools newsletter and I checked for months every day. checked these tools.

And of course, in the beginning, they were just rappers and shit, really bad. And it continued like this to this day. So it's like the product are not improving. So it's like, I would say the big issue is like, of course we can build easier. But it also, you know, it's just like 90 % is still really bad. So I would say back to your question. I mean, absolutely. I would say

You know, the people that have some form of distribution audience. wouldn't like, I mean, it was insanely painful to bootstrap. never done anything that was so mentally taxing, but I'm also someone who hates authority in any way. Doesn't matter if it's the police, the state, you know, my teachers. So I can't have someone sitting on my board or owning a piece of my company and telling

Yash From Momentum (14:48)

Okay? Okay?

Max (14:54)

you should grow by 50 % more. But back to the venture thing, I have a couple of friends, for example, in Berlin, and they raised venture capital and I would say sometimes for ideas that are not venture ready. One of them always says he needed the money, otherwise he would have bootstrapped. But that's kind of the problem, right?

Yash From Momentum (15:12)

I got it.

Max (15:20)

Like you cannot put a bootstrapped business model into a venture outcome, I would

Yash From Momentum (15:25)

Yeah, yeah, you cannot, you cannot, it's, it's, it's extremely, it just leads to, it just leads to, to sort of loss of value, loss of opportunity. And then also, it's very taxing for the founder as well, right, because then they have to stand up to the standards of venture capital in order to generate those sort of returns and, and then so on and so forth. And

The other interesting thing that you mentioned while we were talking about this is about distribution, and it's going to get difficult. It is already very, very difficult. And so from that standpoint, could you talk a little about how

Unifire has gone around with distribution. So like first five customers, first 10 customers, did you have those as your friends, your connections or people who you discovered in communities? How did you go about that?

Max (16:15)

So I have around 12 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'm not as active at the moment, but you know, I invested a lot of time to build a community there and that helped a lot with spreading the word for like 100 people or so. So first few months, always someone came from there and know, conference hosts had a lot of recordings and so it came from this. Also a bit of like just coupled outreach.

bringing a friend in who knew a lot of creators and so on. So I would actually, I mean, not to discourage people, I would say

You can do a lot of things with a bit of cold outreach and you're near network. If the product's good enough, it's going to spread in these areas. So I think the first step is relatively easy. If you're not a complete jerk and you have three connections on LinkedIn and you message people, hey, use my product. Obviously that's never going to happen and people are going to be just pissed off.

I think that's pretty much it. And now we are mainly doing search engine optimization.

Yash From Momentum (17:17)

Correct. And the other thing that made me really curious while I was going through Unifire's website was that like half, more than half actually of your homepage is testimonials. It's like people just raving about the product and when I looked at it for the first time, I was like, we've got to have this person on our show. And so who is doing this, right?

So we've done testimonials, we've got about a couple of hundreds of reviews, but the way that you've done on the homepage and a couple of other pages as well is that it's person after person, company after company just talking about their experience with the platform. And can you take us through your journey of collecting those testimonials? How did you do that? Like it's been less than a year.

says, or just about a year, says the product's been out and available to general public. How did you go about

Max (18:12)

So basically, we've been in an AppSumo select and obviously you can make a bit of money, but mainly the main point of AppSumo is like a go -to -market strategy, right? So that's like a go -to -market motion. So what we did was basically, okay, first of all, we need AppSumo reviews because if you get more reviews, get more sales. Perfect. And then we figured the smartSumo link came and said

Yash From Momentum (18:18)

Yeah.

Max (18:37)

Don't give people the ebooks. Give them more of your credits. So we have like a usage -based credit system. And then we were like, okay, you get 30 extra credits for an AppSumo review That worked like wonders. Two weeks, we had 100 reviewers or something. And then we were like, okay, we need testimonials for the website. So we incentivize testimonials. At the moment, we are incentivizing G2 crowd. So it's just, you and that's all of the magic.

all the testimonials and everything you see is basically six weeks old. Not even, yeah. Yeah, yeah, six weeks.

Yash From Momentum (19:12)

got it. At this pace, don't think like in the next six, in six more weeks, you will not have space to say what Unifire does. It's just going to be all of it is going to be testimonials this is great. I thought it would have been an activity that happened over a year, but six weeks. So I think, would you say that like a carefully thought through

well implemented incentivization scheme for collecting honest testimonials is something that and I'm sure it improves your conversion rates for sure. And would you recommend that to like early stage founders, like very, very actively collect testimonials as much as possible?

Max (19:51)

Absolutely. I have so the thing is, I mean, I'm massively into data, but I track a lot more user behavior than what I track on my website. But from from what we have now, the general conversions and trials just went up because like these toasts, the monos, you can put them everywhere. So we have them on a pricing page on a signup page on the trial page on the landing page everywhere. And then you can obviously so as a judge,

Yash From Momentum (20:09)

Yeah.

Max (20:16)

very cool little tool. Also buy a bootstrap founder. Yeah, and you know, like you can just it has little widgets and so you can you can put like this wall of love on your main website and then you can put that widget on on your pricing page. So I'm always trying to find like ways where to include it in a natural way where it just looks good. And it makes you feel like hey, all these people love the tool.

Yeah, and then, you know, we have a bunch of video testimonials. Also, it's a different language. So we have some Portuguese, some Spanish, some German testimonials. It just feels very international. you know, it kind of changed the feeling from, okay, we are like early stage to, okay, seems like we have a bunch of customers.

Yash From Momentum (20:55)

Yeah, no, that is extremely helpful and meaningful as well. And then another thing that I also noticed on the website was the pricing. And so more often than not, the conventional wisdom for SaaS is that every price that you have is like 100 %

higher than your previous plan. So you typically have three or four plans. You start at let's say $9. So then it's nine, 19, 39 and like 79, something like that. Like almost about 100 % jump in pricing and then certain features, like difference of certain features between those prices and so on and so forth. What I noticed was that you have a thousand percent difference between the two pricing plans that you have.

So you started at 36 euros and so like 14 day free trial followed by 36 euros and then it's a 360 euro per month. So talk to us about that. Like isn't that like a too big of a jump for someone who's paying today who's paying 36 euros to go to 360 euros.

Max (21:56)

Yeah, so I mean, we have the tiered pricing anyway. So the first one is 36. Then you can select the next one, you know, and that doubles always. But this is usage based pricing. And then the one on the right, the really big one is unlimited basically. Because like one thing, and this is more like an experiment we have with a bunch of business customers. So what you have one account, unlimited team members, you

Yash From Momentum (22:11)

are limited.

Max (22:22)

unlimited. It's also the best transcription services, the highest AI models and everything. And that's an experiment of us looking for a way where we can see what kind of because it's so the strategy behind it. I just listened to the pricing roadmap, which is an excellent book on SaaS pricing. Gotta recommend it. It just came out this year, think. And it talks about fencing. So basically finding buckets for your customers

We have more like these creators, YouTubers, marketing teams that are the usage based people. And then it seems we have some businesses that are like 60, 70, 80 plus. And that was the first thing we are trying to, where we just saying, you have, and sometimes they have very special needs of like very long recordings, 10 hours, 12 hours. And I'm like, no, we're trying this out. We see how this goes because obviously as, and this is like in the

bootstrapped founders mentality is like, I don't know, know, for with these 300 bucks, you just need 50 of them and you make, whatever you like. You get it.

Yash From Momentum (23:23)

Yeah, Yeah, 15 ,000 euros a month, right? So that's good. So the average order value is significantly higher, lifetime value is significantly higher. And since you're doing SEO, whether you acquire a customer who's paying you 36 euros or 360 euros, your cost of acquiring is the same.

Max (23:30)

No.

Yash From Momentum (23:41)

So you typically want to move them and push them up the ladder as much as possible.

Yash From Momentum (23:45)

And so the other thing, Max, that I would love to understand from you is in terms of what were some of the biggest challenges or biggest mistakes that you made early on. So very, very early on, you're either starting to build a product, or you have your first few customers, like a couple of people who are using the platform. What were some of the biggest mistakes that you think you made?

Max (24:05)

I it's such classic mistake. I mean, I even advised as a consultant against it. And then of course I did it myself. obviously, Unifire now has a lot of different formats and templates and you can build LinkedIn posts and newsletters and whatever. But in the beginning, there was a huge problem that we, I don't know, we added Twitter threads and then they didn't work or they would break and then they had bad quality. And so we spent insane amounts of money just running around ourselves.

So, you know, we improved one thing, moved to the next thing, improved that by 30%, went back to the other thing. And then we never really had critical quality or mass in any of them. So, right. So it's like too many use cases, like loading the product, but also maintaining it. Like that was at least three months of time we could have saved just by saying, okay, we have these users, they need these, you know, these, these use cases.

And if I would start over again, I would just start with the transcripts because people just some of the first people just use this for transcription. So I would just say I would launch Unifire as the transcription service for creators. There's not really anything out there like this, you know, with like the new transcription APIs. then then I would probably build on top the podcasting stuff until I have this

and then move into, I don't know, blocks and stuff. know, one thing by one, instead of like trying to boil the ocean with everything and then, you know, features breaking and you're just like, that's something that's gonna kill you at the bootstrap,

Yash From Momentum (25:41)

So Elon Musk has a brilliant quote, where he said that large amount of time is wasted by engineers in optimizing something that shouldn't exist. yeah, so one of the challenges I've also seen very early stage SaaS founders is thinking that more features means more customers, which probably at some scale, it could be true. I don't know.

at early stages, that's not the case. If one user story, if one use case is solved end to end, that's good enough for you to get a good set of customers. think that's helpful.

Max (26:16)

No, absolutely. And I mean, it is true. So in the beginning, you have people that have that come to you with different use cases and different problems. They will talk to you and they will request different stuff and you can get them all as customers if you build their stuff and you work through them. But then you end up with three different features for three different audiences and you're two people and you are massively underwater and you're just constantly distracted.

Yash From Momentum (26:29)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Max (26:42)

And that's really, I think, first big death trap you should avoid.

Yash From Momentum (26:46)

Yeah, got it.

Yash From Momentum (26:48)

So I think, and so this Max brings us to the last piece of the conversation, which is where I ask you a question that our previous guest has asked you. And so our previous guest is Christophe from Doc Analyzer. Doc Analyzer is also an AI, is a next -gen AI -based platform, which

basically analyzes documents and then enables you to have conversations with the outside gate for lawyers and accountants and bookkeepers and so on and so forth who have really lengthy documents that they have to go through and read and search through and find information. So one of the questions that he has is, what according to you, Max, is the future of SaaS in the age of AI? So in the sense that

Is all SaaS going to be AI SaaS? What's your thoughts? So how long do we have is primarily the question.

Max (27:38)

Okay. I would say, I would say every SaaS on not, not every, not a hundred percent, but I'm almost every SaaS is going to have an AI component because it's like, you know, we have, we are knowledge workers, we work with information and this is perfect at summarizing information, filtering out stuff for us, instructing things, you know, so for example, I don't know in FigJam, FigJam does that really well. I don't know. Give me a meeting.

you know, meeting, meeting agenda, whatever. And it just gives me this, right? It's, it's this thing. I stare on a blank artboard, I would need to take a template, I would need to customize, personalize it, or I would just go inside, give it an instruction, it personalizes it for me, and it works. So I, you know, in the in these processes, it could be, it could be embedded everywhere. But obviously, you think I don't I don't think it's the main feature, because

Unifire started with AI as the main feature and now our main feature is, I don't know, prompt management, workflows, transcription services, I don't know, like, you know, converting into documents and stuff. So AI is certainly at the core, but you know, then there's editor and everything. So there's like a full suite of workflows and other UX elements and products around it. So I assume every SaaS is

gonna have it because like now I also have other SaaS ideas, of course, and I would immediately see how I can use it. But what I wouldn't say, for example, is there's also a huge opportunity to build more like micro SaaS that's native to AI. Because I, for example, I use Notion every day, but I never use the AI. Because I'm like, I don't see the reason really. So I think this add -on

Yeah, I'm not really convinced that this is gonna

Yash From Momentum (29:22)

Good. So good way, what you're saying is that just how you can bold your text in Microsoft Word, essentially have like it's one of the features. AI is also one of the features. Obviously more important than that, but it is one of the features that a SaaS product has that helps you get it done faster. So it's get there as quickly as possible, more efficiently, more productively.

and then so on and so forth at that point. And what's, yeah, sure.

Max (29:45)

But then if I can add one thing, I think there's a huge potential to design new experiences natively. Because for example, I have this problem with Semrush and other tools. They are huge and they're really good. But if you do keyword research, you will need to come up with these keywords.

look for them and if they're semantically a bit different, you will need to find another keyword and hit this. And this is for example, something that LLM is perfect for. It says like, I'm going to give you this keyword, you're going to find me anything related, anything that has the same functionality. And this would be totally different functionality than Semrush, but much better. you know, I think, I think there's a huge opportunity for us to think

Where can we design native little products that do this better? Because I have three different keyword research tools, all for different aspects. And they all work the same. And sometimes I think like, I know, yes, I have to do it this way, but just let the LLM search for it. yeah, it will save me so much time.

Yash From Momentum (30:53)

So, correct me if I'm wrong. So, I think what you're trying to say is that there is an opportunity where AI native applications can be built for alternatives that are, that have currently retrofit AI into their platforms, right. So, like Semrush as an example or ClickUp or Notion as an example was never built.

for AI to get where AI got in today. And so they had no option but to retrofit it. And that's why there are certain experiences that you just won't be able to experience over there. However, if someone thinks about it from grounds up, knowing the power that AI has today, that can build different experiences that can make it very different from what it exists today. Would that be a fair way to say what you're saying?

Max (31:36)

Yeah, it's I would say it just it just opens a new design space for like a lot of micro sass because like, I don't know if you heard about key search. It's a very small and cheap research tool. Yeah, and it's, it's, you know, it is very cheap. It's very easy to use. And I could imagine that someone just comes up and says like, okay, Max said that, you know, could be an interesting thing. And you could build in a few days a little key. So research tool where

Yash From Momentum (31:38)

Got it. Yeah. Yeah.

Max (32:02)

put in some keywords and you say, you know, just find me a huge, I don't know, cluster of everything, you know, find me different options for, I don't know, tools, templates, whatever you could build. And that's definitely possible. Like, that's super easy to build with an LLM. So I would say you don't have to disrupt them, but us as bootstrappers, give me a thousand customers and we're gonna chill in Goa or something or in Bali.

Yash From Momentum (32:06)

phone.

Yeah, absolutely. Goa, highly recommend. But Bali is a good place to be. And what's the question that you have? What is it that you are currently trying to solve for ad

Max (32:41)

Yeah, I think activation is something that is always very interesting to solve. There's so many moving parts of the onboarding to activation. What kind of, you know, how do you track it? What do you do? You know, there's a lot of different options, product tours. Some people build an onboarding hub where you have like a checklist and it tells you everything you have to do. Yeah, this is, this is currently

Yash From Momentum (33:03)

How do you accelerate your time to value like for a person who trying out?

Max (33:07)

Yeah, pretty much without annoying the users and also constantly, right? So people, it's not a one -time event, right? You need to make it a habit. at the right points, I know there's Dobt that was just bought by Airtable and there's some other thing that actually uses an AI chat interface to guide you through. So there's a lot of different ways and I'm currently trying to figure out what to do there.

Yash From Momentum (33:31)

Interesting interesting. This is a great question. I'll be asking my my next guest about about this as well And with that we come to the end of of the episode Thank you everyone who joined in whether you were listening or watching this episode Whether it was on on Amazon music or it was on It was on Spotify or YouTube you will be able to find the link to Unifire .ai in the description I strongly recommend you go ahead and check it

It will help you build better, more consistent content pipelines. Thank you, Max, for joining us for this conversation.

Max (34:03)

My pleasure.

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