Startup Stories - Mixergy

“We're sitting at about 4.5 million in annual recurring. I started this business with just $400. As a one man band, I was able to take it by myself with all of my AI tools to a million bucks. Let me just tell you exactly how to do this, right? And everyone's looking for, well, what do I do? How do I do it? Here's my process.”

“I eventually found out, okay, companies really need not just some training and education and show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company, that is following up regularly and becoming part of that company. And so I built this fractional Chief AI officer model. And the cool thing about that, and that I knew as an entrepreneur was super valuable, was this recurring revenue element.”

“Like you can literally vibe code a solution. You might have a task that was going to take you six hours, but instead you could take 30 minutes and vibe code a tool that will do that task for you. And you may never use that piece of software again, right? But you wouldn't think like that back in 2020, right? Or before vibe coding was a thing, right? Back when I started my company in 2016, that was not an option for me.”

“Because I had built this image of I am the General AI Proficiency Institute, and not only that, I'm a.org, right? And there's just this added level of trust to a.org and an institute and whatever, and it enabled me to get the big deals with businesses. They said, oh, well you obviously are an institute. Yeah, we'd love to work with you. I mean, I got those kinds of things. I had governments from Australia reach out to me and say, hey, seems like you're the worldwide standard on this.”

“So we've turned the corner of saying, okay, yes, this STE model still is there, but now it is assisted by software. Now we really believe that GenAIPI becomes the AI infrastructure for our clients. And that becomes also much stickier. No one wants to turn that off. It takes time to get it integrated into the systems and to work with NetSuite versus QuickBooks versus this system and HubSpot versus Salesforce, and you have to do some connections and things like that.”

“It was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop in Ukraine for $105,000. They had actually sent over, we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal, but here's how we're going to build the whole thing. And so I was like, I wonder if I could just drop this PDF into Replit. So I just drag it in and said, build this. And 10 minutes later, I had, you know, at least the first version, that preview.”

“It’s strategy, transformation and education. I was already doing that education piece a bunch, right? I had been teaching people and coming in and helping them get up to speed. But I also had been doing strategy as well with a lot of these CEOs before a call or before an education seminar thing I would do with people. I would sit down with the CEO and having, I had the benefit of again, having been a CEO for a decade and so I had experience, I had ideas, I could actually consult at a decently high level.”

“I really just looked at what would they have to pay if they were bringing someone internal, right? You know, I believe that every company, every single company should have somebody in charge of AI. Somebody needs to be in charge of AI and their job is to go around and keep people accountable. In order for me to actually provide ongoing support, and really this is what drove it in the beginning. In order for me to actually provide ongoing support, it's got to be worth my time. So I'm going to charge it at a good employee, 15K a month to start.”

“I just screenshot the app in the app store and throw it in a thing and go code the app, and then it just builds a personalized version of the app that I want. And I was like, that's interesting. I wonder if I can make that so anyone in the world could do it. And so we made it where you can literally just take a photo and I was looking at this app. I have my phone. I pay $29.99 a year for Cal AI. It's so simple. I drop photos. It analyzes the photos. It tells you the calories in it. And I was like, can you build this app into an agent?”

“It usually takes a couple of seconds. It goes and builds everything in the background. So it's provisioning an email address for this, a phone number, a web browsing capabilities, everything. And then it just joins like a member in a chat. All right. I just opened Convos. I hit start a Convo. I can choose whether or not I want to share my name with the agent. So I'll throw it out. I need to swipe up and then it joins.”

“I add Laird. Laird is Laird Hamilton. And I literally just tell Laird at the beginning, like, here's where our boat's at. Here's what we like to do. We got to be out before sunset. Make sure you look at sunset. Make sure you look at the weather. I don't want a boat in the rain. I only have six seats, and we always need people to bring waters and food or whatever. So that's like, it's just simple. And you just talk to it, and it goes and builds that agent for you, just from texting it.”

“I took Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, has a list on his website of his 89 favorite people that has links to all their sites. And I said, build me a reminder, if any of his favorite people write any articles about tech, AI, or the future of technology. And so now it just goes and builds that, and it's now monitoring all of his site. Then it's monitoring my favorite writers. And then I said, every morning, send me a summary, and I want you to tell me if a website's updated.”

“Those agents can protect us, protect our attention while coordinating, and they can negotiate, they can find times together, they can do briefings. It has access to your calendar, mine has access to my calendar, but we don't want to share, I don't want to give you my whole calendar, I don't want to give you my whole workspace. Those agents can protect us, protect our attention while coordinating, and they can negotiate, they can find times together, they can do briefings.”

“I took all my messaging logs of Kai from iMessage, put it, I just dropped it in there. I copied and pasted it in the chat. And then I said the mybodytutor.com blog has all their philosophy. And I love that company for what it's worth. I dropped the link in and said, go read everything about MyBodyTutor. Here's all my chat logs from Kai. And what he did is he's a psychology coach about how you feel about food. So I just built Kai.”