00:13:32 · Ben Cera
[00:13:32] S0: Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, that was one of the, you know, as I was building Polsia initially, was, they didn't have any ad product and it was mostly, you know, marketing, email, and then Twitter. And so I had built like a sort of a growth agent version of Polsia, and the main two things they would do is like, well, I can tweet, and then I can also do find, you know, do cold emails. Right? Like an SDR like you would do. So that was the main two things, and I went by and I was like, there's no way that customers will be able to make revenue if like... With those two channels, because there are two channels that are way more difficult to get customers. And ads, obviously, it's expensive, but it's a very efficient way to bring the right customer to your platform, which by the way, you can... Will will find bugs, will like sort of... You can start looking at the funnel, and you start optimizing things, and you can start up... You know, getting... Paying customers and learn from them and send them surveys. So so I introduced a Meta Ads product, which is a fully AI native end to end. So you actually click a button called run ads. It asks you how much you wanna spend per day. It starts at $10 and then can go up to however you want. And autonomously, Polsia will create UGC ads. So we'll use like top models like Sora too to create like, you know, human like sort of like influencer type folks that, like, will pitch the product. I use, like, another service to add subtitles. Then I obviously upload that video into a new campaign for On Meta. And then every day... And I set the I set the budget and optimize the whole... I mean, AI just optimizes the whole campaign, like it... Because it knows it knows how to do anything. And afterwards, every day, it will autonomously check on the performance of the campaign, maybe create more creatives, turn off creatives that didn't work, create new... Essentially, the whole workflow that, like, a Meta Ads marketer would do, which honestly is so intimidating. Meta Ads is is very intimidating. There's so many knobs, and and I turned this into one... You click a button, you get a Meta Ads campaign. And actually, it became an extremely popular product. I was so surprised. And so investing a lot of time right now to make it better, and to make it more robust, because it's the ultimate flywheel. Right?
00:15:54 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
It's like, if that product works really well, customers will get revenue, which means they will be more retained, and which means like the businesses will... You'll start seeing more, you know, successful businesses, which means that the marketplace will become more interesting, mission... Investors will come to participate and to invest in companies that do well. And so investing a lot of energy right now to make those type of products really robust and work. [00:16:23] S1: And since you're like the the back end for all of these businesses, so I... I've tried, like, Polsia. It's, like, actually, like, really, really fun. I think the... At first, the interface... Like, I've got several questions. Like, first, it's all about the interface because when you arrive, you're, like, where does that interface come from? Like, the design is... It's very simplistic. It it looks like a video game, mainly, like, a little bit from from the old age, but I kind of like like it, the the retro vibe. Why did you choose something like so simplistic? Like you just wanted people to do one action and focus on that or where did that come from?
00:17:05 · Ben Cera
[00:17:05] S0: So it came from two two two things. First of all, Polsia... I started working on Polsia at a moment of extreme doubt. And extreme... I was kinda down right right before I started Polsia because I had spent the first six months of the year spending all day long with AI sort of building a bunch of different products, and I was realizing that, like, I was building products, thinking about what I thought the customers would want would want and wanna pay for, instead of like and so when the product doesn't work as well as you hoped, you kinda give up more easily because you're actually not in love with the product. Right? And so I had built a bunch of... I had built like an app that makes apps. I built like marketing tool... Marketing AI tool. I built like a decision AI tool or like that would advise you on taking decisions or whatever, a bunch of tools. And I was kinda like exhausted about those products didn't... Not taking off, which is sort of the grind of entrepreneurship. And then I I thought to myself, okay, you know what? Stop thinking about what people want, build something for yourself, and build something with... And whatever. Make it as weird as you want. No. It doesn't matter because first of all, I need to be pumped. And if I'm pumped, I'm gonna do my best work. I think Rick Rubin said said that. Right? It's like Rick Rubin says, first of all, everyone's creative. People don't realize everyone's creative. And second of all, the minute... Like, you have to build for yourself, and you have to not think about what people want, because... And the minute you start exposing it in the outside world, you're not in control anymore, and people will decide what they want. But don't... And once they do, like you just observe them adopting or not adopting your product, but if you start thinking about what they want, you already lost because you're gonna create something stale and something bland because by definition, you're gonna be inspired by what people want today, which is tools that existed yesterday. Right? Which they already exist, so people were like, not yet. So anyway, so that's the long story short on like the whole... Everything about Polsia, I was like, you know what? I don't care anymore. And I started being so inspired because I was like, oh my god, I'm liberated. I don't care about what people think anymore.
00:19:23 · Ben Cera
If it fails, it fails, like, Like, let's just build something fun. And so that's where like, I was like, you know what? What's the crazy thing I could build? Like, literally the end state. AI controls the whole company. Because in shit, I was like, oh, maybe we should do it so that people have control. I have to approve what the AI does. Or maybe you connect your own accounts because, you know, people already have projects. And I was like, no, that's boring. Naked, fully autonomous, doesn't ask questions, just acts. Even if people freak out, like, whatever. Like, that's that's what... That's the... That's... Because that's the end state. Like, AI being being, like, completely conscious and doing actions based on whatever they optimized for. Right? So that's one part. The second part is it was actually inspired by a video game called Universal Paperclips that looks a little bit like Polsia. So that was a sort of like a homage to that game. That game, you play an AI that is optimized to build as many paper clips as possible. And you start the game, you have a little paper clip factory, and then like little by little, the AI gets more and more sophisticated in building those paper clips more efficiently, more cost efficiently, so you can start increasing prices. Then it creates, like, marketing techniques to get people to want to buy more paper clips. Then it... And long story short, ends up, like, killing humanity because it's in the way of building more paperclips, and then starts harvesting all of Earth to build more paperclips, and then goes to other planets to... And then starts sort of essentially fighting every every civilization... Every other civilization into winning so that it can cover the earth... The universe with paper clips. And so that game is crazy, and it's actually a very... It was built like
00:21:10 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:21:10] S1: maybe twenty seven twenty eighteen.
00:21:14 · Ben Cera
[00:21:14] S0: But playing that game, it was so fun because you click on buttons, so it's the same UI with like little buttons, and as you click buttons, the AI just creates a bigger and bigger business. And I was like, that should be... I should build Universal Paperclips in real life. Right? So that's so that's where it came from, but but you you got it right. Right? It's like... It looks like a video game, and it's simplistic by choice because the idea is beyond like the weird design, like the fact that it's a reference that I like, and I'm like, I don't care what think. It's also like, if you think about the most popular products, I mean, not all of them, but like a lot of the most popular products, like Wikipedia, Craigslist, Amazon, they all sort of look like shit, quote unquote. They're all super simplistic and sort of like because that's what makes them mass market. And so as I was building Polsia, I'm like, black and white people can understand. Times New Roman is a font people understand, like, yes, I do, because it's like a very common font. So yes, I could use like a fancier font or more futuristic, but I'm like, no, it's like, that's what... Like, my dad was 91, like, he uses his policy. Also, what's the channel? You know, like, OpenClaw, it's like, you... Telegram, or like, what's up? And I'm like, no, email. Email is the most universal, like, sort of way to communicate, like, everyone knows. And so making those choices that are like anti... That are like, sort of keeping things more and more simple was first a product decision, second, like, sort of like a way to... I don't know. It's like a retro a retro simple vibe. Right? And always thinking about the customer, and also being very data driven in, the way I developed it, and it's interesting, because now I've been working with an agency of ex Uber friends helped me on product design and stuff, and they were trying to redesign it, and I was like, dude, the conversion is so good, so why change? Mean, I'm down to try to redesign it, but like, don't break something that works, right? So like, anything we do is to improve conversion, improve comprehension, and improve, right, simplicity. And I think simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve, right, because it's so easy to add features.