EP 216: How to stand out in a world filled with AI startups - Insights from Taplio CTO

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Nowadays, just about anyone can be an AI startup. It doesn't necessarily take what it used to. So maybe you're building a side hustle, or maybe you have your own company that you just started and you're thinking, how can I stand out now in this new world where everyone can create an AI startup? It seems like almost instantly. All right, so I'm extremely excited for today's show because we're going to be answering that question and a lot more on everyday AI. So thank you for joining us. My name is Jordan Wilson and I am the host of Everyday AI and we're a daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people learn and leverage generative AI. So as a reminder, if you're joining us on the podcast, thank you so much for joining us. Make sure to check out your show notes. As always, not only do we have a link to join our free daily newsletter, but we're going to have a lot more information on today's show, so make sure to check that out. And if you're joining us on the live stream, thank you. Like Tara from Nashville who's joining us live, thank you for joining us. Make sure to get your questions in for our guest today. And what do you want to know about how to stand out in a startup when everyone can just sprinkle some AI dust on it? Right? So as a reminder, go to your everydayai.com, sign up for that free daily newsletter that we'll get out after the show. And I tell people our website is like a free generative AI university now with like 210. You can go and watch more than 210 episodes live streams. You can go read all every single newsletter that we've ever put together. It's definitely worth checking out, but let's get this thing started and go over, as we do every single day, the AI news. So Microsoft and Mistral launched a partnership on Azure AI. So Microsoft has announced a new partnership with French AI startup Mistral, which includes Microsoft investing in the company and making its language models available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform. This marks another major AI partnership for Microsoft following its recent investments in OpenAI. So Microsoft has made this new partnership with the French startup Mistral, taking a minority stake in the company. And as part of the partnership, Mistral's language models will be available on Microsoft's Azure AI platform, making Mistral the second company to offer a commercial language model on Azure after OpenAI. According to a very recent TechCrunch report, Microsoft made a small investment of about $16 million US into Mistral, a little different than their, you know, reported $10 billion investment in OpenAI. But some breaking news here. The European Commission just announced that it's analyzing the agreement between the US Software giant and the French AI developer as part of its broader investigation into the booming sector. All right, our next piece of AI news. Some future AI plans from Apple have been unveiled. So Apple's future roadmap for wearables includes AI powered smart glasses and AirPods with cameras, according to a new report from Bloomberg. So these concepts are in the exploratory phase and could serve as a cheaper alternative to the AR Vision Pro glasses currently in development that cost like 10 months salary, something like that. Apple is planning to develop this AI powered smart glasses as the alternative, like we said. But it's also exploring the idea of adding cameras to the AirPods. Interesting. Which would be used with AI to assist users with the routines. So the smart glasses and camera equipped AirPods are still in the exploratory phase and may not end up as final products. Regardless, I want to see what that looks like. AirPods with cameras and AI. Okay, last but not least, are 11 labs in perplexity coming for my job. All right, two tools that I love and use Daily have recently announced a joint partnership to produce a daily podcast. Yeah, that's right. So luckily it's not an entirely AI podcast, but eleven Labs and Perplexity announced this partnership to release a daily podcast called Discover Daily that's featuring obviously 11 lab voices and covering with the help from Perplexity headlines in innovation, tech, tech, science and culture. All right, so much going on in the world of a news AI news. There's always more. So make sure you go to your everyday AI.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. But enough of that. Enough AI news, right? Maybe you joined today. Maybe you're a startup and you want to hear from a successful startup founder, someone that's had multiple acquisitions. If that's you, you tuned into the right show. So please help me. Welcome to the show. Bring him on here. There we go. All right, we have Thibaut Louis Lucas, the CTO of Taplio. Thibaut, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show.

Hey, thank you very much for inviting me.

All right. And hey, if you follow startups closely, you probably know Thibaut, but maybe Thibaut if you could just give us a little bit of a background, maybe what you do at Taplio for maybe those that don't follow.

Well, it's been 10 years that I'm doing startup basically, but like three years ago I've started building Tweethunter and Taplio and I did it in a very, very different way this time. And about 18 months ago we got acquired for a little bit more than 10 million by the team behind Lemlist. So it's been quite a journey and super happy to be here to talk about it.

No, hey, I'm excited to have you on the show and also know some of the, you know, Software that, that TiVo just mentioned that, that he built. It's amazing, right? I'm, I'm a paid Taplio user. I've used Tweet Hunter, even, you know, lemless. I've used Lemless before. So TiVo, you know, as someone that's been in kind of this space for a decade, right, how much are things changing now with AI? Right? Like, like how much different is it for, you know, maybe someone that has an idea, how much quicker is that process now compared to maybe five, six, seven, ten years ago?

Well, I think when I was building my first products, I quickly hired like 10 people team. That's crazy, like 10 people to build a product. And I think that right now with just, just me alone on a weekend, I'm able to do what this 10 people team were, was doing like in, I didn't like three months. It's, it's just insane how fast you can go.

Maybe could you, could you walk us through some of your earlier products? Whether you want to talk us through, you know, Tap Leo or Tweet Hunter, you know, your products that have been acquired or maybe some of your first. But can you give us kind of what it looked like to build an AI startup? So you said, yeah, you might have hired 10 people, but what did it look like from a, you know, practical standpoint, day to day building it and how much different is it now?

So the thing but AI doesn't change at all is product validation and product market fits. And I think like, it's just the number one priority, that it should be the number one priority for every entrepreneur out there. And when I started my first company, I did, I think I did pretty much all the mistakes that you can do. And the most important ones are I pretty much wanted to impress everyone around me. I wanted to have nice stories to tell at family dinners. So I wanted to hire a big team. I wanted to raise a lot of money. I wanted to say that I was a project manager, I was startup founder. I was managing more than 10 people on a daily basis. That was pretty much the number one KPI for me. And the thing is, you can do all that without having revenue and it doesn't last long. And so our company never succeeded in making a living and we eventually had to move on and do other stuff. And what we did differently with Tweethunter, and that was three years ago, is that instead of trying to force an id, like, instead of, instead of setting this ID to a growing number of people, we did this crazy thing where we tried to ship one new product every week for like four months. And if these products was not making any revenue, we would just kill it and go to the next projects. I think we ship like 10 products like this and, and Tweet Hunter was like the 11th products and took off so rapidly from when we shipped that we just stopped the experiments and went all in on Tweet Hunter.

Wow. So wait, okay, so Tweet Hunter, you said, was the 11th product after shipping one new product every week for four months. I mean, did you get to a point, Thibaut, where you were like, ah, maybe, maybe this experiment isn't going to work? Or did you feel deep down like, hey, maybe, yeah, maybe the 11th product will be the one that takes off and is a multimillion dollar company. Like, like what was that process like for you?

Actually, actually I didn't because like every new product that we shipped was working a little bit better than the previous one.

It's.

It was like two. Two things were happening. First of all, we were getting better at understanding real problems to work on. And at the same time with this process of building, we were at the same time growing an audience of people both on Twitter and on our newsletter. So every new product launch was a little bit easier because we had people listening to us. So we're not doing this randomly. Every single one of the 11 products that we shipped, it was kind of, kind of targeting the same people and trying to solve the same problem. And by, by doing that and by gathering all the early users in a database, we even to be succeeded.

So hey, if you are joining the live stream late, don't worry. Very special guest today we have Thibaut Louis Lucas, the CTO of Taplio, who's built multiple companies that have been acquired for millions of dollars. So. So Thibaut, like, I'm wondering how has your process changed on the latter half, right? So it seems like now AI makes, you know, products much easier, you know, to validate. You were shipping them out, you know, one a week, which is crazy. But what about growing the product? Right? So, yes, AI can make, you know, things easier to help debug code and, you know, come up with new content ideation and marketing ideas. But what about once you start to get those Users. Users. How has AI changed the process of growing once you've validated something?

So my. My realization is that is the huge number of content that is. Is being produced every day. Like AI, AI is basically multiplying the number of blog posts, of tweets, of. Of pretty much everything. So it's really. It really comes down to trust, to, like, to who you trust. What's your number one source of information? And I'm pretty sure, like, for a lot of people, it's you, Jordan. You're a trustable source of information. But when we started out, we were pretty much a nun. So what we did is we did this bold move of partnering up with a Twitter influencer. That was definitely, not definitely plan, but the guy was so enthusiastic about it that we just went all in on that. Like, we. We gave this guy 25% of tweet Hunter in exchange for having him actively promoting Tweet Hunter and setting up marketing campaigns and handling the growth of the products. The thing is, it works so well that when we started working on Taplio, like the. The LinkedIn alternative to tweethunter, when we started working on it, we looked for to replicate this strategy, and we did it with Alex Berman, which is quite big on LinkedIn and coordinating, and again, it worked very well and made us able to kickstart Tapio very fast.

It. It seems like it worked out for both parties, right? So at first, I think, oh, 25%, you know, of a company that was acquired for millions of dollars. So part of it's like, oh, man, you know, Thibaut and team were leaving so much money on the table, but maybe it couldn't have been done or been as successful as fast, Right. If you didn't have that early partner, I guess what clicked, you know, in your mind to take this much different approach than others, because that's something you don't see every day, you know, those kind of partnerships for that amount of equity. So. So what was it in your mind that said, you know what, this is the right way to grow in this new day and age of everything?

AI Well, I think we are in the golden age. Of products and startups like it's AI is making it so easy to build, then the building itself is pretty much worthless. So it really comes down to audience and to acquisition and, and how you grow. And so it was pretty obvious to us that with pretty much no acquisition channel for us, it would definitely be worth it to partnering up with those guys. And what I realized very soon when I was working on Tweet Hunter is that those guys, Twitter creators or LinkedIn creators, they are not making that much money, like definitely not. And so they are listening. When you are talking about sharing equity of your products with potential multi million exits.

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You know it's, and it's interesting to Tebow because someone might think, right, most people have heard of, of you know, some of your tools like Tweet Hunter and, and Taplio and people might think hey, after that kind of success you might just, you know, hang it up, you know, you might just take some time off, you know, and enjoy a nice stroll, you know, through the countryside. But you didn't stop because you actually have another even new product in tight frames. So what is it about maybe the software space right now that still excites you, right? Is it the fact that now you can get and validate and create a great product so much faster? But I guess what's the urge to keep going and keep creating and keep innovating?

I think I'm falling in love with this target audience. Basically working for the creator economy is so fun Doing products for social media, it's, it generates excitements all along the way. Like something like going viral is, is giving you this insane feeling that when it happens once you, you just want to replicate that because it's, I'm, I'm really all for excitement, hiding for that job. And this is what excites me the most. So what I did to grow twicetensor and Tapio, we did this many times and I had no idea we could do that. Which is acquiring traffic oriented small products. I think we did like 10 acquisitions with tweethunter and Taplio of very small products that was generating traffic mostly thanks to SEO and that was fueling our main products. It worked so well that I wanted to do that on my own with my own money. And I did this with TypeFrame. TypeFrame, it's a video editing and video making software that is basically syncing music with beats, like syncing text with the music beats. And it's been like a little bit more than five months that I'm working on that to make it the video making software for creators. I basically think that video is gonna take over the words and I want to be part of that.

Well, hey, a little off topic. Speaking of video taking the wor, taking over the world, I mean, what do you feel now about these gen AI products such as, you know, Sora from OpenAI. But it seems like, you know, when you say the creator economy, you know, all of these AI tools change, right? Like even, even type frames here that I'm showing here on the live stream. I used to spend 10, 15, 20 hours, you know, making a simple kinetic typography animation which now you can do in seconds using type frames. But you know, Thibault, how do you feel about the power of these new tools specifically around video and how is that going to things for people wanting to create a startup?

You know what, when we started working on Twitter, I think it was powered by GPT3 at the time from OpenAI. And we felt like we were so behind when we started working on it. Basically you had like huge software and huge successes or with the other like copy AI. And we were so wrong. We were definitely not so late. We were at the very beginning. And I feel like this is the case right now with video. You might feel like it's done already. Like you have some very big players shipping out their video generation models and the game is set. I'm pretty sure we are at the very, very beginning of this AI video AI gen wave. And it's gonna be crazy and it's, it's super exciting to see it like unveiled in front of your eyes. And I want to just to experience that and I want to, I want to play in this game basically.

Oh, it's. And, and it's, it's a non stop game, right? Like it's, the rules are always changing, the players are always changing. I think, you know, playing the game is a very good analogy for, for the current landscape. So great question here from, from Juan. Juan, thank you for your question. So asking Thibaut, has your thoughts on AI evolved over time from the first time starting to use it for your companies to the way that you use AI today? What are your thoughts on that, Thibaut?

Well, I think the main thing that changed is that I'm getting scared. Like very scared. Like when you, and you, you cannot not be scared. Like when you are using AI all day long you see what it can do and you see how it can hallucinate and you see how it can deepfake. And so it's a very interesting mix feeling to be both shipping AI products and at the same time to be scared by its power. I think like just yesterday I was listening at the Nvidia founder and CEO and this guy was basically saying that we should not teach programming to kids. And it resonated in my head because I'm having a newborn, it's coming on July and it's going to be my second kid. And like how to raise kids in this world is something that seems so scary to me. Like you have no idea how you should prepare them for this world because it has never been done before. So. Yeah. Do you see what I mean?

Yeah, yeah. And even bringing that up here, it's an interesting concept. So yeah, the CEO of Nvidia is saying like, hey, we don't necessarily need programming in the future. It's just your, your natural language, right? Like that is the programming of the future. You know, Thibaut, something you said there that, that caught my ear is, you know, that it's, there is this kind of fear of, of AI, but also, you know, do you think that it's normal, right? So maybe a. Someone who's just launching their first startup and they're scared, right? So I think it's important to hear what, what you said. You know, someone that's been in this industry a decade, that's had multiple successful acquisitions. It's. Is, is it still healthy, right? Is it still healthy to feel, you know, kind of that fear of AI? Is it healthy to, to feel burned out from, from shipping so many products. I mean, what, what is that balance like of, of, you know, having a productive company and leveraging AI versus having, you know, kind of that, that healthy fear of, of what's next.

But we have basically moved from a world where you had one very excited launch every few years and it was easy to keep up with things, and to a world right now where in the same week you can have multiple crazy AI announcements that would basically contradict each other. And having, being in the space and talking about that on my Twitter and LinkedIn every day, I can say that I feel this huge pressure to try to keep up with everything. And I'm pretty sure that at one point I have to give up. And I would Bet that in 2024 a lot of creators that just started talking about AI and that are trying to keep up with AI news are going to burnout because it's, it's getting impossible to be the first to go in depth with those topics. And, and yeah, I think it's going to happen.

Oh, it's, it's so true. You know that that one hit me personally, right? Because I'm spending so much time every single day and I feel I'm ahead of the game. But then sometimes it's like, oh wow, completely missed this, right? But, but Tebow, I want to shift the focus a little bit to people who are right now maybe building their first software company or they're building their first product. You know, with, with everything that you've been through, you know, not many people out there have shipped, shipped as many products as you have. What's your best piece of advice to, to young, you know, startup entre entrepreneurs to young developers right now, specifically as it pertains to leveraging AI to validate an idea and launch a company.

So basically if you want to go to the shiny things like to all the very excited products and ideas that are out there, you need to have a lot of money or you need to have an existing audience. If you don't have those, I would try to go with sometimes very hidden but very abundant needs that are being just helped with AI. So basically you have tons of jobs to automate in companies. You have tons of job where basically the job is to copy information from a form and to put it in different system, something like an ERP or something proprietary, something that just, just to make the company running and to make sure it has all the information. You should work on that. Basically that's, that's the, the less excited, the less interesting opportunities that are there right now and that people should work on and to grow, to grow those products. I would start being active on LinkedIn and Twitter if work very well for me and to start to start talking about very, very specific things like don't go with the generalist approach. Just go with the very, very specific approach and be the best at that.

So, you know, I'm wondering, Thibaut, it has to be hard, I might imagine, to be in your shoes, someone that can build and ship successful products so fast. But I'm even curious whether it's for your own, you know, personal use or, you know, maybe for others. What do you think is is going to be, you know, one of those next big products, you know, AI powered, Maybe that's going to help us all solve this problem of, of maybe, you know, focusing our time and our energy in the right places. Or maybe it's like, hey, what would you want to build next? I'm curious.

I'm betting on Misle for that. Like, Misle have a very interesting approach, I think, and I'm pretty sure they're going to build a lot of very custom model, very specific to some use cases. And yeah, I think they're going to be big in this space.

All right. Hey, so much good information. We've covered a lot here, Thibaut, from how you initially shipped multiple products just so quickly to how you're using AI now. So as we wrap up today's show, I'm wondering what is the one best piece of advice that you have to maybe a young entrepreneur on how to stand up now, stand out now in the world where everyone can build and ship things so quickly with AI.

Well, I would go back to what I shared earlier, which is basically stop trying to impress people, stop trying to boost your ego and stop trying to impress your mother at family dinner and start, go with the hard truth. Start validating stuff and run experiments. And by running a lot of experiments, by shipping a lot of stuff, you will see what sticks. And I think what sticks are going to surprise you.

Hey, the hard truth is this episode today is invaluable to you out there if you're trying to grow your company, grow your business, or start a new, you know, startup with AI. So, Tebow, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show. We very much appreciate your time.

Thank you very much.

And hey, as a reminder, so much good information out there, we're going to share a lot more about TiVo story, some of his new products that he's working on and old ones that we also use and love. So make sure if you haven't already, go to your everydayai.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. Also, tomorrow, join us. I think this is going to be a great episode. The seven steps on how to actually use ChatGPT in 2024. Thank you for joining us. We hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.

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