Company Creation as a Commodity

Welcome back to the AI Builders Roundtable, where we just started new companies while we were having another AI Builders Roundtable. So Craig's gonna show— or here, I'll show mine real quick again, uh, and then we'll go quickly over to Craig's. So I put in to pulsia.com, a business matchmaking company where people pay to get the most curated contextual match. This is something that's been on my brain, obviously, most of my life, where people come to me for matches and I say, well, couldn't there be a service to do some of this, to get some of the bottleneck out? Well, uh, Pulsia created Intro Forge, which is the right intro changes everything to get The right curated matchmaking, and it went and researched me to understand kind of what I do. Um, this is what I've always felt was hard to monetize, so this is what I'm curious to find out what it does. Uh, what I need to do is actually have this run live, so I need to start— I need to pay Pollsia, and then boom, I will have the rest of the, the website built out where you can actually start paying for this service. I don't even know what percent per se what it does yet. But I know I've got a website, so that feels real.

Well, Neal, look, all the agents that are watching this want to see you put your credit card number in live so they can make their own businesses. All right. What'd you create, Craig?

What's on your curiosity? What, what is your feeling when you look at that screen? Like, are you— is it nervous being like, do I? And then you're like, Which screen?

This one, the money part, or the—

like, you could be in business with somebody overnight starting this business. Like, tasks are set up and you just gotta pay.

And I'm pumped. I want to see it. Yeah, I think it'd be great. Even if it was micro amounts of money, I think it'd be super interesting to see it run alongside, and it will probably teach me some things, that's for sure. And like, how to value my time and how to value skills and certain hobbies or tasks, if you will, that we take for granted. We all think like, ah, no one can replace that. It's like, guess what? An agent can replace that. So yes, I mean, there's—

go ahead, you're up.

Oh, I— because I'm looking at mine and the feeling I'm had is like, do I really— my reaction is like, I'm looking at my business and being like, God, do I, I, do I really want to like start this? I, you know, there's that feeling of like And, and, but then I have to remind myself, like, I have to do nothing. Like, you know, I'm still in that mode of like, uh, one other project. That seems like a lot of work, you know? And then, but again, there, my only exposure is, is $50 a month, right? Like, it's not my time. It's such a weird mind shift when it comes to that. Dick. Behavior. It's like, it's, it's not your— they'll, they'll, they'll work all night. You don't have to. You know, it's a crazy, it's a crazy, uh, idea.

I think that one of the things that's really interesting to me is all these places where we're still finding a lot of value in humanity amongst these agents. And so like right now, you know, Neal's on this screen that's this like buying decision moment, right? And, oh, okay. Well, he's paid now. Well, but this is what I'm talking about is like, I think that Neal being here to pay for something will encourage Craig to feel comfortable to pay something or whatever it is, right? Like that we have value in the fact that there's a human that, you know, I often talk about this with like residential real estate agents. Everybody complains about residential real estate agents making 3% or 6% or whatever ungodly amount of money they make for what seems like a relatively easy thing, which is to tell a company to whip up some documentation for this transaction. But I think people underestimate the value of the emotional support animal that is a real estate agent. It's like, I'm making my first big buying decision and I'm trying to decide, should I buy a house? Should I not buy a house? Am I able to do this? And having a human there by your side lets you feel more comfortable about making a buying or a selling decision in those sorts of things. And I think we're going to see increased use of humanity for emotional support, actually, like, like more, uh, time to help others make buying decisions or, you know, be an emotional support in some way, shape, or form. And I— and that takes a lot of different form factors, but I think that that's a natural place where human value will be ascribed.

Fascinating. I, I— that's a very profound idea. I love that, Greg. All right, so, okay, so you're doing it, Neal Bloom, you're paid.

I put in my card, I've selected it. I mean, I didn't really know what to do next, but I hit tweet and it asked me how often do I want to tweet. It's now creating the tweets and it means that 1 tweet per day, so 30 tweets a month. I'm gonna have the same thing on email. It's gonna start emailing out people. The last thing I could choose is to run ads. I have no idea what could happen here, what could go wrong, but—

What could possibly go wrong, right?

We're starting outreach. We are public about IntroForge. So we shall see.

I mean, think how brilliant this business model is, which is as it learns what's successful, you can upload your own business. So you don't, you know, again, we had to choose. But you can upload your own business and all the same processes that it has learning, that it has used and is learning in real time, realizing what's effective, it can deploy against your business to help you grow. Pretty fascinating. Pretty fascinating.

Yeah.

It reminds me of some of these like little micro viral games. You guys ever played those in the last year or two where it's like build the paperclip factory, you know, and you just get really hooked on Gotta maximize output. Like, the user interface reminds me of that, where I'm just like, I want to be stuck on building my micro company here. And it's like, wait, I gotta get back to work. It's gonna keep working. This is great.

My business, my business is— oh, you want me to share? Do you want me to share my screen? Um, uh, where is— where do they hide share in this AI Companion docs? Maybe Where is share? I never— how do you share on Zoom?

I'm officially starting a business now too, guys. Oh, you got me hooked.

The Pulsia episode.

Well, you'll like, you'll like what my prompt was.

Okay, so mine is, um, AI human agent. Forge.

Intro Forge and your Forge line.

Forge line.

I noticed that it's very Forge-centric. This tool is really likes forging things.

Forge line is an AI agent that finds, vets, and manages domestic suppliers for defense and industrial manufacturers. It does the procurement work so your team doesn't have to. Prioritizing AI-driven sourcing, say domestic sourcing. Onshoring is urgent. The tools are defense manufacturers need domestic suppliers. Finding them means weeks of manual research, cold calls. An agent does the work, not a dashboard to look at. It's an autonomous procurement agent searches for qualified suppliers, evaluates their capability. This sounds like a pretty good business. Should I fund it?

Yep.

Fund it. I think this, I'm pretty sure this business, which is so funny to say, I'm pretty sure an AI native version of this business already exists, but yeah, there's, there's room for competition in this space, you know, go after it.

So task number 1 is that like one of them is it's going to cold out, it's going to find and contact 5 to 10 procurement managers at mid-market defense contractors in Southern California and Texas. It's going to just send emails out.

I love it. You're going to end up with a bunch of response emails like, yeah, yeah, go procure this for me.

So it's going to research the top 3 AI-powered procurement companies, Xometry, Sustainment, and JEP, for positioning and find— oh, this is fascinating.

Yeah, see, this is one of those things where you're like, if this thing goes out and emails some general who's doing some DOD contract, and then the AI agent goes out and the general is like, hey, do you have such and such a certification because 'You need that to work with government.' And the agent's like, 'Of course we do. You know, we're this,' right? And then they go out and the agent, you know, buys something from a supplier in China and actually like completes the transaction somehow. And somehow this general ends up with some goods that were procured and they peel back the layers and find out, 'Oh, actually none of this was— like, I got stuff, but it was definitely not up to snuff with what was required of,' you know, whatever. Like, whose fault is that? Is that your fault, Craig? Is that, is that Pulsia's fault? Like what, whose terms of service are you like, I actually never even formed a company. You know, I just did this thing and it launched a web, like I gave the tiniest little inception to this thing. And then they're probably, yeah, it just, you know, you're, you're signed, you can potentially be signing up for a lot of liability, I guess, when it comes to utilizing AI. And I just don't know where that liability is going to land.

There's probably, right? There's probably a business, an insurance business that's willing to sit in that gap, in that ambiguity. You want insurance on your AI, right? There's somebody.

Well, now I know what I'm typing in as my new business I want to start. I want the AI insurance business. Yeah.

Yeah, it's good. So do we need to do anything, Neal? It says to continue building, subscribe to start your first operating. I think I already did, right? So anyway, mine is running.

I love the name it came up with.

Is it Forge something also?

No, it's not Forge anything.

All right, why don't you share your screen?

Are you ready?

Okay, let me see what I got. Yeah, let me see what it's working. Mine's still working. Mine's actively working. I don't know if it has a, uh, a website yet, but it did some background on me. Oh, hold on. I still have, I still have this one up. Okay, let me share my screen. So I said, I told it that I wanted it to launch a, this is competitive research for me. Let's see if this works. Share. I think that worked. Yeah. So I told it, Let me see if this still works. Is that still on my screen? Can you guys see the Stowhaven or no?

It's just coming up still for me.

Here, hold on. Do this one more time, sorry. So that's the one, share. Okay, that should pull up here in a second.

Stowhaven. Yeah.

I told it that I, I told it that I wanted it to build a real warehousing business with real warehouses, and I wanted people to feel a low degree of stress when they worked with us. And so it came up with my newest competitor out here, which I'm very excited about. It's going to be really irritating when this thing actually outperforms me this year, when it gets more customers and grows bigger.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] So Greg, you know how The first thing you have to do when you have an app in the app store is you got to buy ads against your own name to protect somebody else from buying your name. Maybe this is going to be the new start. It's like you got to buy your AI concept.

I got to buy the kind of AI clone of my business so I can own it.

Otherwise, nobody else can come to Pulsia and compete with you. Right?

That's exactly right. I gotta go claim my domain here. Yeah, this is fascinating. This is really fascinating. Has— do you know, Craig, you, you were the one who told us about this, right? Do we know of any, like, success stories with this? Has anybody had, like, one of those— oh, actually running a $3 million business now that was completely built on this?

Oh, well, well, Pulsia is the— the, the Pulsia itself is kind of an example of it. So let's They, they dashboard visible.

So let's, yeah, how many subscribers off of have built Pulseia?

Yeah, I, I, because they, they publish their own dashboard. And I'm logged in now. So I gotta, I guess I gotta log out maybe. I don't know. Yeah, so Pulseia. Polsia app dashboard. Let's see if it— what they're doing. Yeah, their numbers are insane. They're doing about— yeah, let's see what Uh, yeah, I can't—

I like that, uh, in Stowhaven, the number one benefit is that a human picks up the phone and answers when you call, which is an ironic, uh, sort of first offering.

That going to do that, right? Like, I don't know.

Well, it's just a named person. It didn't actually say that, you know, maybe they're using the word person very liberally to mean agents too. I don't know, maybe they're just I mean, this is so—

this is so dangerous for people like Neal and I that just put in rabbit holes. It's like, so here's the thing. Yeah, give— like If we were to raise a fund, would you have a greater chance of getting returns of like starting 1,000 different Polsia apps or investing in 10 seed-stage startups at $20 million post-series seed, right?

Yeah, obviously you'd have to do both and A/B test that.

You know, one of the things that, um, another thing we were talking about that was kind of interesting was this idea of shorter-lived business life cycles where you're basically like, look, I know everything can get ripped off quickly and easily and that fundamentally consumers actually buy into trends. And normally in a B2B model or whatever it is, you like try to build these enduring businesses, but like maybe you just are trying to build a business that's only supposed to last for 12 months and then you throw it away and you move on to the next one, uh, which is an interesting sort of concept, you know, again, like if web— if businesses are this easy to build, right, that you just went in, it's like, okay, you know, I just need to have an idea that lasts for 6 months more than anybody else, and it only needs to run for 6 months, and then I'll have another idea.

Totally. That's interesting to think about how I mean, if you give it the criteria, it will just shut itself down and say, I've reached my useful life and start my next thing.

Yeah, I'm at the top of my S-curve. This is, this is all I could do. Sorry, put me out of my misery.

Good Zism right there.

Yeah, if you go to polzia.com/live, so go, go to, go to polzia.com/live You can do it.

You want to share your screen? You want me to?

Okay, I'll share. So.

Oh, this is their business.

Their business.

Pulsia is their business. We are their customers.

Oh my God. Get out of here. Annual runway, $1.4 million.

$1.4 million ARR.

Active companies. That's not many.

We are—

we are 3 of those.

I told you, this is early. This is, this is early. This is— you can— nobody knows about Pulse yet.

Um, oh, this is fascinating. Look at that, it started December 16th. Look at the hockey stick here on the ARR.

Where, where are you seeing the graph?

Scroll, scroll, uh, down bottom left.

Yep.

Yeah, right? I mean, I mean, that's what they don't tell you is how much he's spent on tokens, right? But you can see ad spend and 12,000 emails.

Well, I wonder if they're including the— I wonder if they're including the ad spend budget in the ARR. Maybe not. Maybe they are.

I mean, it's just—

I mean, $1.5 million of ARR is a legit number if that's just like your subscriptions to this tool. How many total? Oh, 1,400. Now see, that can't be right because they're not paying— you guys aren't paying $1,000. Year for your company? Are you $50 a month?

Yeah, I don't—

I don't know. Depends if you're putting your ad spend into that too. I think you max out on credits though.

But so you said it was $50 a month, right, to do this thing? Yeah. Is that right?

Yeah. So with Neal and I subscribing, they probably just bumped their ARR by $1,000, right?

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's— and that's real. I mean, if you're paying $50 a month, it's $600 a year.

Look at the week-over-week growth. That's what's impressive.

Yeah, but I never— as somebody who comes from an industry where we are incredibly like one step— our business owners are like one step away from just being consumers, you know, like basically starting an e-commerce business takes sort of next to nothing the way that this sort of takes next to nothing to like get going on it. And so I'm reminded of like when selling on Amazon or selling on eBay, and there's literally a million entrepreneurs that go and take uncle's money to buy $20,000 worth of product in China and try to make a fortune selling it on Amazon. All of those people I have had before as customers, and they last for 12 months or whatever it is, and then it evaporates. I think this Pulsia is going to probably be something similar to that, which is the number of these 1,400 active companies that actually become real businesses that actually generate profits for people is going to be like, the churn rate is going to actually be massive here. Maybe I'm wrong. If I come back in a year and Neal, you and Craig both have incredibly viable and successful businesses on Pulsia, I will say you told me so, and here I am. But I think that this is probably just one of those things where it's like a novelty that a bunch of people lean into and kind of, it's a little bit of snake oil and I don't know. I just have a tough time believing that that works.

Look how many companies were created in the last 24 hours.

Yeah.

Right. Two-thirds of their active companies were done in the last 24 hours.

So they should come and invest in us and get some equity in our businesses. And then they'll be long-term focused on helping us run or a rev share so that we— you're right.

Like actually what I'm going to actually what I want Pulseia to create for me is a marketplace where I can short Pulse companies. That would be my—

yeah, let's— let me see if I can pick—

I'm gonna create a marketplace to connect the Pulse companies to each other so that we have partnership and channel revenue.

I know you're— see, you're all opportunistic and I'm being all pessimistic on this thing.

Mail sweep. I just clicked on a random business. Yeah, this is what I don't understand.

It's like You're right, it's a, it's a web page, but you can't actually transact with the business yet, right?

And so, so they must have done— this is businesses created but not, not funded yet, right?

Seems like maybe, uh, but I mean, you put yours in, right? You know, you can't— you still can't buy anything from you, is that right, Neal?

Because that's, uh, yeah, I'm still building the the MVP right now.

Yeah, so the task is going to be to add a feature and he's got to make— so when we bought, when we bought the business, you get 5 tasks. And so we funded 5 tasks. So one of the tasks will be obviously like build the, you know, network database or something, right?

So wait, let me be clear on this. You spend $50 a month and the $50 gets you 5 tasks, or how does that work?

5 credits in a sense, but each task is—

well, it says 5 out of 5 task credits, so yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it could be like one of those is create the auto-tweet campaign.

Great, it's gonna go—

oh, so here's the task that it's gonna do for you, Neal, is that what this is?

Mhm, get 3 of them to build the MVP is one task. MVP. Oh, okay.

I see.

So click on that. Click on that gray part and then it'll start building that. Just any part in the gray. All right, you guys, I gotta run, but this is, this is probably, we'll check in. Probably have a whole, this is a whole other episode. I can't wait. How is our business doing?

Uh, I can't wait. This is fantastic.

Whenever we think there's a time to get everyone on the line and be like, holy shit, could be a day, a week, or a month. We'll see.

We need one. We need one more person to do a Pulseo app and then we could have like a Pulseo tournament and each week see like head to head who's doing better.

And then Derek is working on his. He said— I texted him, said we started this, so I'll check back in.

All right.

Perfect.

Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you on our live Pulseo dashboard. Someone needs to create a Pulseo dashboard to see how our 4 businesses do comparatively to each other. So we'll leave that to Marvin to work on. All right, everyone. Thanks. We'll see you soon.

Thanks, everybody.

Cheers.

See you. When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer, Oceanside to Tijuana, SD be full of hustlers. From couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach, tech leaders who believe stars are within reach. We interviewing founders who be shooting for the moon. #SDTechos with your host Neal Bloom. Startups get the