Million Dollar Exits Ep.8 with Alex Isora: How To Create An Acquire-Worthy SaaS

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Million Dollar Exits Podcast. I'm KP, your host, and I have with me Alexander Izora joining all the way from Georgia. Hey, Alex. Georgia, the country, not the state, which is ironic and funny because I'm in Georgia, the state, and we were just talking about that at the beginning. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Thank you for having me, KP.

I want to kick us off with the intro of, you know, Unicorn Platform and how you got to that idea and sort of your reflection on, you know, how it came about. I mean, there's a couple other questions around the exit and the journey and the lessons you've had, but I want to get to the origin story first. You know, how did you build Unicorn Platform? How did that idea come about?

Yeah, sure. You know, making another landing page builder sounds like a crazy idea. Because there are thousands of them, thousands of tools. I've tried all of them. Like, I have a list. At some point, I just got too bored for trying each tool because, you know, you try one and 2 new appears the day after.

Right.

But I still decided to make my own. Why? Back then in 2016, me and my friend wanted to do something cool on the internet. We had jobs, but we wanted to create a product. We didn't know what to do. And we built an HTML template. Like you make a good template and sell it to many clients. That's completely different from what we were doing back then. We were doing services, selling our hours. Now we are selling a product. And that was quite cool. We made another theme and another, and the business like started and everything was going smoothly. But at some point we decided that we want to build a website builder. We had a lot of ideas, but the problem is that our vision was very different from each other. Mm-hmm. My and my partners, we were thinking about completely different products. I was thinking about a strict landing page builder when you don't have a lot of choices, when you are limited, but the result is always great. But my partner wanted to do a different tool. He wanted to provide unlimited possibilities, super flexible, super customizable. He's an artist himself. Right. He paints with oil and he wanted to make a tool for artists. I wanted to make a tool for busy founders who are not familiar with UI, with design, who don't have much time, who just want to throw a few components and go. That was my vision. And we started to argue a lot. Right. We had a few conflicts. And then I decided to quit and build my landing page builder because I really liked that idea. Then you talk a lot about your idea, about your vision, and you think about it, and you sleep with that, and you have a list of notes. Many of them actually, when you have sketches, when you have impressions and you just cannot do that, you know, you're poisoned. Right. My idea wasn't like unique, wasn't genius. I wanted to make a landing page builder which is simple and cool. Make it radically simple, make it radically easy to make cool things, make it radically hard to break something. And yeah, that idea, it pushed me to the brain.

And that was, I think I read in one of your blog posts that that was the period in your career where you were almost considering going back to a 9-to-5 day job or a desk job. Instead, you bought a $20 domain on namecheap.com, which happened to be Unicorn Platform, which is the thing that changed your life now, right? Tell us about the— what do you remember from the night or from the day of when you bought the domain? What was going on in your mind?

There was two— there were two options. First, you go and have a good job, well paid. Actually, when I was a freelancer, I was paid like $60 per hour. That was a lot of money. I just didn't know how to spend it. I bought— I was buying cold food. I did not know what to spend. And yeah, another option is to get this, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of mystery, a lot of doubts, fears, but a small chance to realize your dream, to get free from the poison. Yeah. You were poisoned a few years ago. So we decided to try because, you know, we are getting older. and at some point I will not be so free and open-minded. I thought, yeah, let's do that now or never. So I had like a few thousand dollars in my pocket for a few months of rent. And what was the exact time? I had to make something to not become homeless and starving.

So in the first few months of that journey, the zero-to-one phase of Unicorn Platform, it seems like to me that you already had the vision of building a radically, truly simple page builder. What was that process like, you know, in the zero-to-one phase? Like what was the journey like? And when did you get the first customer?

The very first customers, they came from my closest circle, from my friends and ex-clients. Those people are most loyal to you because they know you personally. You had conversations with them, you had even some works with them. Yeah, so we know how, how you're creative, how you're responsible, how you're reliable. And if you make a product that they may want, may be interested in, they will buy it immediately. They don't need to be sold. Right. You just send them a link and You get them. So if you're a reliable person and you have some friends who work in that niche, you have your first customers. That was that easy. Like first 5 customers, it was overnight.

And was it SaaS from the beginning or was it more of a lifetime deal?

The first phase was lifetime deal. I sold 50 license keys for $180 each. So in total I earned like $10,000.

Nice. Pretty solid validation, right? Pretty solid validation.

Yeah, yeah, it was a validation of the idea. I said, hey guys, I want to make a radically simple landing page builder. I have this background and I have this small product as an MVP. I made a few HTML templates and they say— said yes, that sounds cool. do that. And actually, I could earn much more because I was overwhelmed by emails of people asking me to sell them another license. But I limited myself to 50 only because I didn't need that much money. Mm-hmm. Like, I didn't know how to spend if I, for example, would get $100,000. I didn't know how to spend that. So I decided to limit myself Because huge money is huge responsibility and I didn't want to take it.

At what point did you switch from the lifetime deal as a business model to monthly recurring like SaaS?

I needed the lifetime deal round for 2 reasons. The first one is to validate my idea and get encouraged because we are humans. We are not robots, not artificial intelligences yet. I still need it. So I needed some motivation. When people give you money, you feel needed. You feel like your tool is worth something. I actually had American money here. And that means a lot. They trust you. You go very far when people trust you. The second one, I needed money to live. As I said, my pockets were empty. Where were you at that time?

Were you in Georgia? Do you remember where you were when you launched Unicorn Platform?

Yeah, I remember that clearly. I was living in Russia, in St. Petersburg. That's that day. Yeah, right. Yeah, the rent there, not so pricey, like $700 per month, but it's still money. Yeah.

So you ran the lifetime deals phase for these 2 reasons. And then at some point, did the customers or did the indie hackers around you, founders around you say, It's time to switch to the MRR model.

That is the main idea from the beginning to create a SaaS because then you create a product, for example, for one-time sales such as WordPress theme or HTML theme, you have to keep the momentum, work on this momentum every day. You have to make sales every day. Once you stop, your business goes down. Yeah. Right. Unlike SaaS, SaaS has Not 1 or 2 legs if you're 2 founders, not 10 legs if you have 10 team members. SaaS has hundreds and thousands of legs, like it's very stable. Yeah, because you have a lot of customers. Even if 1, 2, or half of them fails off, you still are very stable. You can get them back. That's what was my initial idea. I wanted to make SaaS because it gives you reliability. Mm-hmm. And this reliability gives you some patience in the next day. So you can focus not only on sales, on making money today, but you can focus on a long-term vision, on your strategy. This is why I love this SaaS idea. And so I knew I will switch to SaaS. It was obvious to me, it was my goal. So once I had some money and the first product which I made in a year, I switched to SaaS immediately.

And do you remember growing from $0 to $1,000 MRR? And what were some key lessons or observations you had in that first $1K MRR? Because I think a lot of founders, I feel like that is a very profound milestone, you know, and then there's the $10K, but like the $0 to $1K, I think is a very profound one as well.

Yeah, I guess $0 to $1K is more bigger step required to make the first $1,000. Yeah. But anyway, first $1,000, first $10,000 per month, all the same worked for me because of only one decision I made. And surprisingly to me, no one talks about that. It was really obvious to me, you know, it's funny, sometimes something is obvious to you, but no one talks about it, no one thinks about it. and I'm happily sharing it right now. You want more clients, but the solution is not to find more clients, but make your existing clients as happy as possible. Because first, they will bring their friends, and second, your product will improve, right? Mm-hmm. So not just means, hey, look, I want to improve my SaaS, I want to make them happy, I will build more powerful tool and make some more features and they will be happy. That could work, but many of us don't want features. Yeah, we are humans, not robots. We want emotions, we want empathy, and it's hard to give empathy through a product. You need to give some personal touch, some attention, some extra care. If someone asks you for a feature, it's great. great opportunity to build an emotional connection. You can create this feature, you can ask for more questions, you can thank them publicly, you can alert even a small alert, a personal email when you finished that request. Hey, John, you asked a few weeks ago to add this button. I did that. This is the result. Thank you for your suggestion. Your ideas are much welcome. It gives them so much points of loyalty. It literally drives them crazy. Imagine we live in a world where everyone wants to earn money on everyone around. No one cares about humans. All you see around is leads, conversions, followers, fans. Yeah. And then a founder of a tool you kind of like sends you an email, hey, thank you for your idea. And he actually says that you're smart and you are so much valuable person in his life. And you feel yourself so much valuable. And it links you to the product.

Yeah.

And people start to become your fans. Like we have people who like our posts, who talk about Unicorn Platform on Twitter for years. Like, you open notifications and you see that guy again tweeted about us. I offered them merch, t-shirts, socks, coupons, everything I could. And there are a lot of such guys. And there are gems, like a few fans, but there are hundreds more who are not so active on social networks, but they recommend Unicorn Platform to their friends and circle. And so if you have one customer, make him or her as happy as possible by providing the best service you can. It will bring you more clients, and your product and support and overall service is great, those new clients will also be super happy and they also bring much more. So you don't need to go to Twitter and get those clicks and conversions by ads, you can just focus on the internal source of power. In my case, it brought tremendous results. Like I spent on ads like zero. I tried a few to spend a few hundreds on ads. It just brought a few views. I don't know how it works. So I don't believe in ads.

So, so fast forward from that moment to all the way towards the exit. So this is how long did it take for you to go from this moment when you had the first, you know, idea Towards the exit, you know, and then I'm curious at the exit, what was your traction like in terms of any public stats that you can share?

I started the project in 2018 and it took 4 years to get to this point. And the point is it's $15K MRR and I sold the product like a year ago.

Wow, that's awesome. Congratulations on a great run. And I also saw that your post about the way the exit happened and some of your tips and some of your reflections on that, it seemed to be that you didn't really, you weren't really planning to exit as much, but there were a lot of inbound that was coming in, which I think is the common case for a lot of SaaS product founders who have anything over $10K MRR. So for you, what was that experience like and why did you choose the acquirer? that you eventually chose over maybe other people? What resonated in that journey?

I knew at some point I will have to sell the product, like maybe in 2 years, maybe in 10 years, I don't know. But at some point I will say goodbye. It's mostly because I have ADHD and people with such condition, they can't focus on something for long.

One thing. Yeah,

yeah. And we switched professions really quick. I wanted to become a perfumer, a DJ. It's hard to work on one thing, so I knew I will say goodbye at some point. So I started to get prepared from day one, actually. That was—

Oh wow, from— yeah, you knew it from day one that you wanted to? Yeah.

Yes, yes. If you want to make a product, a great product, get it's prepared for an acquisition from day one because it means your processes will be clear and effective because no one will buy a service with bad processes.

Yeah.

Your goal and strategy will be clear because no one buys a product with bad strategy and vision and etc., etc. If you imagine yourself as a potential buyer of your own SaaS, and start reviewing it as a potential buyer, you will see that at some points you're not ready for get acquired. And that means you're bad at these points, you should work on them. Right. So yeah, that was a planned acquisition. I didn't know exact time, but I knew it will happen. Why it happened at this point? Because the buyer MarsX and John Rush, the founder of MarsX, was a perfect match. I didn't want to sell just to a stranger with a pile of dollars.

Right.

This is what happens to Biometrics and Josh Pigford. I've heard of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You heard that the new owner of Biometrics, they doubled the MRR?

Yes. I feel like a PE firm acquired them or something. And then they were like ruthless in terms of like raising the prices and they were not so community-centric. And I think, yeah, it was a— I remember some of the, like, fans coming out and, like, not being happy about it.

Yeah, and I really didn't want that to happen to me. Maybe you also heard of Launchaco, landing page builder? Yeah. They also sold their service to— with different vision and different way of thinking about people.

Right.

I didn't want that to happen. That would hurt me a lot. So I was looking for an offer from a person which I would like, whose vision will align me perfectly. John has the same vision, the same philosophy, the same way of thinking as I do. But I am thinking in a much narrow way, much more narrow way. I'm thinking about landing pages and blogs. And he's thinking about the whole world. He wants the whole world, the society, to be more simple. And he wants to start with making applications and SaaS and web apps made simple, but then expand it to the world. We think in the same way. We became friends from day one and understood each other perfectly.

I'm curious, so what does MarsX do? Can you share a little bit more on what he does and what MarsX does?

MarsX is an IDE, like a program to create programs that was designed to be used with AI. And the fun fact is that MarsX was created in 2018, 4 years ago, unlike most— Before the AI hype? Yes, before the hype, because John was aware of the GPT. thing. He was actually using it in production since version 2, GPT-2. And when he realized that, he built MarsX. And he thought that GPT will become as intelligent as it is now in like 2030, maybe 2040. But it happened like yesterday. And now he has a line of investors asking him to take their money. What is it? Yeah, so it's a tool for making SaaS and web apps with AI. The powerful thing, it's not intelligent, it's not smart, it's not genius. It has only one core idea which like makes it so powerful. He made a so-called ecosystem of micro apps. So in normal software, you have an app and it like contains a lot of files. They could be long or very long. You can have a file of 20,000 lines and GPT cannot eat that big file because you have token limitations, right?

Right.

So, but if your application is made of small apps, so-called micro apps, you can have a model for each micro app. And then an orchestration model which controls all the small models. And therefore GPT can control your whole application. And in MarsX, you can write something, hey, add comments to my blog, for example. Wow. And it creates comments and it knows everything about everything. So about your application and about all applications in the world because GPT is so powerful. So that's the thing we are making right now.

I feel like I should invite John on the podcast too and kind of learn more about Mars X and kind of share to the world and to my audience. So that was the bootstrapping, that was the exit, this is 2022. And did you decide to stay after the exit with the company? And what was the plan that was agreed upon when you did the exit?

There was the perfect agreement I could ever imagined. John said, we will take all the routine from you, like caring of the servers, infrastructure updates, that kind of stuff, and we will allow you to do what you do the best— strategy, vision, communicating with customers, that kind of things. Right now I'm working as a CEO, but without boring— the boring parts, only fun parts.

That's cool. That's very cool. Have you been enjoying it since 2022, since the acquisition?

It was hard at the beginning because I wanted the people who take my work, I wanted to do it better than me, not just as the same level, but twice better. And I had to teach them a lot and at the same time do my job, do the work. So it was hard, but now it's much better.

That's good. That's good. Okay, so I have a couple of standard questions that I ask, you know, guests. One of them is, what are 3 specific tips for someone who's on their idea to exit journey from your experience?

The first tip I already told is to imagine yourself a potential buyer and examine your tool. The second tip and what made actually that exit possible is being transparent and open. Right. When you share transparency reports, open startup reports, when you write blogs about your vision, about your strategy, about your product thinking, about your understanding of the market, you communicate with a lot of potential buyers. Right? You send signals to them that you are reliable, that you understand the market, you understand the client, and you can be a potential person to work with. You can become a potential partner. So translate your vision, translate what you think about what you're doing. Don't be in yourself, try to be open. It's hard, but it brings results. If you're not Elon Musk, with a lot of connections, you have to be proactive to find ones. That's the second tip, write what you think, write what you do. The last tip for people who want to do an exit, I have one tip, it's working on quality, paying attention more to quality than to quantity. Because if you're such a passionate founder like myself who cares about every customer, Right. Your customer will cost more than a customer of a founder who just spent a little dollars on Facebook ads and gets so-called leads which convert to so-called signups. He might not even know their clients, their audience. They're just numbers. Yes, you can sell numbers, you can sell tables, databases. Your clients, if you have trust and reputation, that costs much more. Like 2, 3, you can ask 2, 3, 4 times more than the market price.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Are there any myths or misconceptions about acquisitions and exits that you believe were debunked from your experience? Like for you, like the Alex going into this acquisition journey 3 years ago, 4 years ago, what were some big myths that didn't turn out, that didn't really pan out, didn't really happen, you know, in reality?

Yes, I have one. I always thought that an acquisition is something really bureaucratic, something really hard to manage from the perspective of execution. Like, you will have to pass some due diligence, you will have to sign a lot of contracts, you will have to create documentation of everything. Like, I thought this boring part, these preparations will take maybe a year or even more.

Months, years.

Yeah. And as a person with ADHD, that really scared me. Like, it could be a real blocker. Like, if someone could say, hey, I want to buy your tool, here's $2 million, you have to fill in this form with 10,000 fields. I would just decline because Just impossible to do that. And maybe it's possible today with GPT, but—

I'm like that too. I'm laughing because I'm like that too. I hate paperwork. Yeah.

So I never imagined that I can find a person who I agreed on a price with John, like 15 times, 15 minutes before my taxi to airport. And we were talking about the future, the technology, the importance of AI, society, philosophy, all kinds of stuff except the paperwork. Because we hate it both. We both hate it. And we even weren't negotiating on the price. Like, I really watched on my face and on my watches and said, hey, I have 20 minutes. We must decide on the price. Because yeah, I came for that. And we decided like in a few seconds, I said $800,000. He said,

okay. I love that. I love that. I think speaks to both of your integrity and sort of the kind of people that you both are, you know. I think when it's a long-term partnership and when you really, I think, understand each other, you feel like no one is trying to, you know, be sneaky. It's just being transparent and plain and reasonable, right? I think a lot of humans are like that. We, like, to your point, the reason I even brought up the myth is I've been surprised the last few years where in business, you know, if you're just direct and upfront and honest, there's a lot of people who resonate with that. They're not gonna, you know, it's not like a bazaar. Like I grew up in India. It's not like a little fish market where people are trying to negotiate the 5 5 to 10 rupees, you know, um, for, for stuff. As long as you're being open and honest and you're, like you said, the writing, the philosophy, the, the tweets, your thoughts, all of this, if it's already out there, people can read through them and they understand what kind of person you are, you know. So yeah.

And similar persons.

Yeah, there's a sense of respect. Yeah, for each other. Okay, that was, that was, that was awesome. Now that you are You know, successful founder, and now that you're like, you've had a successful exit, which is something a lot of indie hackers, a lot of founders, you know, dream about. Looking back, what were some interesting lessons and some reflections that you had in your journey? Because I also want to cover, you know, parts of your career where you had some failure, or you had some failed attempts at something else. And what would you go and tell that person, right? Like that Alex.

Yes, sure. I have one advice which I just love. I always tell it to every— I hate giving advices, but this one I give to everyone because I believe it's super applicable, super useful. I just love it. The advice is not to listen to any

advice. Oh, you had me there. That was a good hook. I was, I was you. I fell in the trap. I was like looking for it. Oh, that was a good one.

I spent so, so many months and so many hours talking to so-called experts, coaches, business trainers, all kinds of quotes. I was so confused when I was reading books, even the most recognized, the most respectable books like Zero to One, like any kind of book.

Yeah.

Those have some good points, right? But they create such a mess in your head, so much information that those little opportunities which are actually yours, which are actually innovations, they just disappear. you can't catch them anymore. So I would prefer just meditate than going to all those conferences, talking to guys with beards.

I'm just still recovering from the trap that you put me in. So, but no, anyway, I think I agree again, like, you know, every situation is unique and things will unfold in their own unique way. So What I've learned, Alex, is it's good to have a few high-trust, honest, and direct friends who will tell you the truth about what they feel. But ultimately, it's your call. You know, you get to decide what you should do and follow your gut. You know, and your gut knows more than you give credit for, in my view.

Yeah, that sounds stupid, like advice from a Disney character. Follow your heart. You know, that that kind of stuff. But that actually works. It's hard to do. It's so scary.

It is hard.

The mystery scares everyone. No one likes uncertainty. Everyone wants answers.

Yeah.

But there's just no answers. People who give answers, they just want to earn money from you.

Yeah, that's right. Okay, so there's another interesting aspect of your story that I wanted to ask from the beginning, but now I'm gonna get to that, which is You entered a market that is filled with alternatives. You know, it is one of the busiest, Yeah. Crowdest, most populous market, markets in a way. You know, if you think of, if you think about SaaS companies and SaaS markets, which is webpage builders, you know, it's, I think it's like almost like to-do apps, right? A few others that are like very, very job boards, I think also very busy, crowded. How did you handle The competition around you, number one? And number two, were there other people after your initial success who cloned you or copied you, and how did you handle the copycats? So 2 questions. Number one, competition— how did you handle everybody? Number two, copycats.

The first question, uh, I was following my vision. I made a radically simple tool. No one had that before I did it. And taking care of my customers as much as possible, making them as happy as possible, that gives results. Because all the competitors like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, we will never care about their customers. We have staff. True. We have managers, managers of managers, all kinds of managers, and no one cares about anyone. They could answer you, but you will never feel that care, that extra— The

human touch, yeah.

Yeah, the human touch. It's so rare. Just open your tweet, make an experiment, open your Twitter feed. Who you see there? Sellers, marketers, influencers, brands, managers. Do you see any humans there?

Yeah.

So try to be human. It attracts people because people like people. That's a simple formula.

Right. So that's the competition part. Then copycats.

I didn't have problems with copycats, and I don't think it's a problem for anyone. It's cool, then you're copied. It means you make a good product, right? So if you're scared of being copycat, don't be scared, because in the new era of software engineering, then GPT is here. Everyone will be copycatting everyone, it will be so easy, so simple. Your mother will create your own CRM. Your sister will make a website builder because it will be so easy and so simple. Don't be afraid.

I can't wait. I can't wait to log into HubSpot.com built by my own mom. You know what's interesting? What's been unique about just generally your persona and like the Your attitude towards some of these very profound and tricky subjects, topics that we've been touching on. I've had other guests in my previous interviews, the same questions. There is a level of calmness and a level of self-securedness that you have, Alex, which is amazing. You know, I have to wonder, must have come from a lot of soul searching, a lot of meditation, a lot of being I don't know, in touch with your, with who you are deep down. Is that true? Was that a fair guess or you don't meditate at all or you don't care about, you know, those, those kind of things?

Yeah, I work on myself a lot. Like, I like exploring. It includes meditation. I also work with professionals in psychology. I also have autism, so it's easy for me to make new neural connections.

But yeah, I mean, the copycats question, I think a lot of people get thrown off by that. A lot of founders that even I know, like especially with the building in public transparency movement that I'm part of, I know you're part of it. There's a big pushback because people think, oh no, if I build in public, there's somebody gonna clone me, clone my idea, clone my app. And you know, and I'm like, I'm like you, I'm in the same camp. I'm like, good. If somebody clones you, that means you've done something good. Otherwise they're not gonna copy. But also it's like you can't control, it's a free market, free world. Snapchat's been cloning Instagram Reels and it's been going on for decades. You're not going to stop it. And you want the scenario where you are being cloned because that means you're successful or you're going on the right trajectory as opposed to nobody wants to clone you and nobody even wants to attempt to do copycats of you, right?

Yeah. Even if we clone your product like one To one, one feature to feature, one to one. They

yeah,

yeah, they they can't clone you. You have your your vision of the market, of clients. You have some marketing channels in your mind. I hope you're not only about building and coding; you also know how to sell. It's yeah more important nowadays. So

and if you don't know how the drive to keep your customers happy, right? Some of the things that you touched on, right? So many of those skills are soft skills. It's not about writing code, not about writing syntax. True. Because now with GPT, it will take care of all of those things, but it can't make you more authentic, more vulnerable.

I think with the rise of GPT, some lost, forgotten skills and, you know, knowledge such as sociology, philosophy, those kind of things will become more

Valuable.

More valuable, yeah. And maybe you can switch your focus to that so you will be always one step ahead of your customers.

Competitors. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I think, I think you're right, especially with the content. That's something I try to do is because it's so easy to create perfect content now, right? Like all the images are like too perfect, all the video is too perfect. You know, I try to be as authentic and as human-like that I can be, you know, and ask the questions that I could ask based on my curiosity as opposed to, right, like what GPT-3 would ask in a podcast format, not just video, but I'm saying tweets or whatever, you know. I think the future is about authenticity.

Yes, you're so right. Yes, authenticity will be the new gold for indie makers.

Yeah, it could be the new gold.

It is gold.

It's always been gold, but I feel like it was on the background and nobody really valued it as much. Yeah. But in a world that's increasingly, like for example, on my Twitter, like there's so many threads that I'm like, it takes 4 seconds to create a thread on 15 platforms that I have right now. Typefully can do a thread. Like you just copy paste any article from my blog post, it'll create a thread better than me. Frankly, better than me. So I'm like, okay, the answer that my people are, I mean, the audience are not looking for more threads. that are like cookie cutter. What they're looking for is a screenshot of me or a screenshot of my email. This morning I posted an email, an apology email that I wrote the 4 or 5 early customers that I had for one of my SaaS ideas. 2 months ago I had a SaaS idea. I had some early customers, but it didn't pan out. You know, it didn't work out the way I wanted it to be. So I sunset that project. But the email was about me saying sorry that I couldn't live up to this, but here's my reasoning. And I appreciate your trust on me and the fact that you took a shot as early customers. And I took a screen— I could have written a thread on this with like some grand meta lesson. There's nothing there. Instead, I just posted the raw image of my sent email in the sent box and it didn't go viral. But there were so many DMs that I got from people saying, Awesome. Thanks for posting this. You know, like sharing the fact that it was— and I mean, I said, I called the word, I said the words like failed attempts. I didn't skirt around it is what I'm trying to say. I didn't like make it seem like some grand gesture or, you know, I just said like, hey, it sucks. You know, I made it and it was a mistake or it was a thing and onward to moving on to the next one. I feel like that authenticity is what I want to listen. I want to look for, I want to follow from other people, not like this yet another Wikipedia thread, right?

Yeah. Yes, you're very far in this, in the research of authenticity. So I'm more curious to follow you.

Yeah, no, but that's the path. And the irony as of now though is that those things don't go viral or those things don't get a lot of views and likes. But I feel like over time that will change. Over time, like when AI will detect other AI content, like I think it'll automatically deprioritize some of the AI stuff and this will like stay up as rich, like real rich content. But even if it doesn't, I think the real people who matter, I think they get it. Yeah. You know, so I've been thinking a lot about this AI and authenticity these days, Alex. Like in the world of AI, when anybody, like you said, like my mom, my grandma, anyone can create hundreds of threads or tweets or anything, apps, how do you stand out?

You know, by caring. You have an answer? Because GPT can be authentic too. Sorry.

You're gonna train GPT on my Gmail to make it seem like, Just post a screenshot every 2 days from KP's sent box.

Yeah, why not? Why not? So I don't have an answer. I'm feeling quite desperate right now, actually. It blocks me from creating content.

We've all been stumped by how quickly it got here, right? Like, we all thought like 2030, 2040.

That's true.

I think, but if you just see 3.5, and I think 4 is coming or 4 is already here, GPT-4. I think it's here.

4 is here.

So I can't imagine 5 and 6 are going to be even more wild.

If you want a conversation about GPT and AI, you should ask John because he knows a lot about it.

Yeah, I'd love to. I think after this, I would love to send you a follow-up and I would love an intro to John. He seems like the kind of guy that I think I would resonate with because I'm like the same type as you in a way. So I would love to learn more. So looking ahead, what is fascinating and curious for you? Or what is like, what is piquing your interest, you know, for you in the next 2, 3 years? Where do you think you want to take Unicorn Platform to? And personally, as a founder, where do you want to go to?

We are waiting on AI at this moment. And we actually implemented it and it works much better than anyone did that. Even better than Webflow did. Wow. That was not because our programmers are so special and genius. Actually, we have only one programmer and he's a self-taught middle frontend developer. He's talented, but because John guided him so well, because John knows how to interact with GPT, how to ask proper questions, how to fix that. We actually did something that works. And we want to allow people to build cool websites with AI, with just prompts, just throwing all your mind in the chat box and get the result. We don't want to stop on websites only. We want to go farther. We want to make emails for you, tweets for you. Like if you have, I don't know, if you want to sell flowers, you have to do a lot of routine manual work, like you have to fill in all the flowers in your shop, then create content for social media for every shop, for every flower.

Right.

We can automate that for you with GPT. It's easy to do. We want to do that. We want to take all the routine away from humans. Only the creativity, focus on the innovation. Right. We believe that humans have Everybody, every person in the world, they have creativity, they have passion to build new stuff, to innovate something in any way, but we need to give them space to think, to dream. I mean, we will do it by removing the routine part from them and giving them that space, that time to think.

Yeah.

That's our main goal. AI will help that. व्यथा है,

right? So so have you listened to Naval Ravikant's podcast appearance on Joe Rogan Show?

No, not yet, but I plan to.

I think you should because so much of what you just described, you'll resonate a lot with what you know he's been talking about too. It blew my mind when I first heard about it. He was saying something this like maybe a year ago, not related to GPT, but he was talking about AI in general. And one of the sort of core concepts he talks about is that in the future, humans will not do any work. They will only have fun. And fun is equals to creative things, imagination, that kind of thing. And all the work will be done by AI or robots and technology. And I was like, wow, that's such a crazy thing to think about. And so he goes, and then he says, the premium, humanity will put a premium price on art. Yeah. creativity, humor, innovation, like new ideas, and anything that is mechanical or anything that can be done by AI would be very cheap, right? Which is true, which you think about it now, right? Yeah. I thought that was very interesting, you know? And he said like, in the next 50 years, like if we really wanted as a humanity, as a society, this is possible, so easy. We don't have to ever work again. And I think Joe Rogan was like, I think he thought he was crazy, like some selling the promised land, you know. But

so obvious to me. I really believe that. I don't think— right, exactly,

exactly. But it seems like a, you know, I don't know if you watch the Pixar movie. I think it's called Dali. Is it one of the movies where humans just sit there and they get obese and then they're just like watching TV and playing video games, and they're like,

yes,

of course. Yeah, I think it's like a sci-fi futuristic movie. I think it's Dali, but that's what they do. They just like chill, they just hang out, you know.

Um, it's okay. I'm okay if some people will just spend their lives watching Netflix forever without doing anything. I think it's okay. Some people do that, but some will create, some will spend their time on Invention.

Yeah. And so I think the fundamental premise, though, which I agree with, Alex, is what you were saying, and which I fully believe it, which is everybody has creativity in them. You know, it's about unlocking it and unleashing it. It's there. They just need the space. You know, they just need the peace of mind and this curiosity to explore, which is usually, it can't happen if you're in survival mode, trying to make that next $10 to live, you you know, pay the rent, that kind of thing. So what are your thoughts on universal basic income? I'm curious now that we are here. UBI, do you believe in like a society having some version of UBI?

No, I don't. After the war began, and I don't believe in society and humanity anymore, I don't think we can achieve something like that because there will be evil people who who will be greed and want to take everything. Greedy? Yeah. I don't believe in this. My world beliefs, they changed so much and I don't know what to believe now.

Yeah.

So, it's hard for me to discuss because I don't know what to believe. All I believed before the war started, now I don't.

I bet. I mean, yeah, it must have been like a significant Change in you. Okay, so I think those are all the questions I had for you. Anything else you want to leave us on, like any tip or any advice or any question you personally have for the audience?

One advice you remember.

I know. I feel like that might be the clip that I'm going to get from this episode. I'm going to put that on social media. But no, so it was great having you, Alex. Such a pleasure. Enjoyed our chat. And I would love to connect with John, you know, later. And I wish you all the best for Unicorn. And you really piqued my interest about the new AI features you added. So I'm gonna go play with it for a little while and check it out, okay?

Yeah, sure. We'll give you access.

Awesome. That'll be awesome. All right, thank you so much and have a great rest of the day.

Thank you. You too. Bye, KP.