00:26:05 · Ben Cera
[00:26:05] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think profitability in any business is tricky from the get go. I think that like running ads is, there's two ways to run ads, right? There is in the initial phases of product, it's a very good tool because it's getting you beta testers, right? So you can actually test real responses from real humans to real workflows, and that's what Meta is so useful for, and I encourage entrepreneurs to use Meta Ads first, just as a way to get some customers to the funnel, and learn from them, and ask them questions, and, you know, when I started Polsia, I... Before I launched, I had just a landing page, and like a... And dropped your email and a survey, and a typed typed form survey, which was bunch of questions about would you want something autonomous, how autonomous, how much would you spend, and honestly, the response was so good that I was like, okay, think people want this. Right? But I think making a profitable business, it depends what you mean, right? Is it a profitable unit economic? That should be pretty easy once a product actually has a high margin, because there's no overhead, right? So your overhead is so low that as long as whatever you're offering doesn't have high AI cost or whatever, right, it's a high margin product, it should be profitable over time. The challenge is all the upfront cost that comes from it, because Polsia uses top AI models. They're expensive. People spend a lot of time by extra tasks to like get the product running faster. There's API costs that come into play that like pass through one or another through the membership onto the different ways that people spend on the platform, and I think that to recoup all that investment, you need to first get product market fit, meaning start having a product that works, and then start using ads or other ways to find customers and like have a healthy economy. So since most businesses are... It's so early, right, most businesses got created in the past two, three weeks, saying that a business is actually profitable would be like, you know, because it's actually hard to actually even get one customer. Right? Most companies on platform don't have a customer because people are still just building it, and it's hard to get a customer. Like, I don't know. Like, I built a lot of cars that never had customers. Customers. Right?
00:28:26 · Ben Cera
I mean, paying customers because it's easy to get a free customer, but like a paying customer is hard. I think that like... But that that that's the goal of Polsia to get better and better at getting to revenue faster, but like, again, it's not a get rich quick scheme. It's not like, you know, click a button and then it pumps or it dumps, right? It's a real business, and real business, it takes time and it takes investment, and of course AI makes it so much easier and cost efficient, but it's still hard. In terms of like how I also think about ways to make it more profitable, faster for users, is going after folks that already have influence. If you think about quote unquote influencers or creators, right, and there's like people with a thousand followers, 500 followers, to 10,000, to millions. And I'm actually thinking more about the lower hand, people who have like a thousand, 2,000, 5,000. Because those folks, they need to monetize. They have a captive audience that... And actually the smaller the more niche, usually. And so they understand something niche about users, and usually they have a perspective on the world that like is gonna be more unique, and I don't think like you need to reinvent goods and services. Right? It's like everyone sells the same thing more or less, right, in different version. And so I think that those folks, since they already have an audience, if they build something like Polsia that just manages their business and their idea, they can sell it very easily because they can just promote it to their thousand followers, and if they have like 10 people buying something at like $50 a month, that's already meaningful revenue for them, right? And the AI just manages support, manages refunds, manages the bugs, manages, right, building it. And I think... So I'm thinking through ways to maybe, you know, maybe you go to Polsia and you connect your Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever it is, and if you have more than like, I don't know, 5,000 followers, you get the product for free. So you don't even pay for the base subscription because I'm like, you most probably, if you market it, will get customers, which means the product will work, and like, you know, obviously we take a cut of like economic outcomes, so we take a cut of revenue, which I think is fair for the customer.
00:30:45 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
And so those would be ways to make it profitable much faster, because I benefit from having success stories on the platform, and actually success stories will come from, I think, so much more rapidly from people who just have already an audience to sell to. [00:31:02] S1: And have you ever thought of, you know, like, you take your home markets, you want to focus on influencers, so you split them like by category, and you say like, for example, I'm gonna take like all the fitness influencers. I know that whatever they're selling in general, it's like, I don't know, like fitness courses or whatever. And you build a platform that's like a white label for them and you essentially like do the outreach for them and Polsia had in the background already prepared the software. That way they just have to click a link and you do this like a per vertical. So if someone is selling, I don't know, like a a course on something else, you build an app for them and and you you try like segmenting like this. It something you're doing for your customer acquisition or...
00:31:50 · Ben Cera
[00:31:50] S0: I think that's like something that's very smart to make money, but I'm sort of like... Since I'm doing... It come... Doesn't come from like a how do I profit right now. Right? It comes from a... To this tool is just like, I don't care. It's... I think it's cool, and I wanna make it fucking... I wanna make it like crazy. I wanna be to be an economy. I want to have investors, and, like, I want to, you know, and I want to build anything, and I want to be a humble hireman. That's what I'm focused on, and I want to preach it. That's why, you know, I'm I'm... I accepted this talk because I'm, like, I want to be able to tell my story, not for me, but to wake people up on how capable AI is. And I think what you're describing is a very smart way to get to revenue faster, but I sort of wanna build a more agnostic and general platform where it's like, you can tell it anything and it will build it. Because if I like, quote unquote, not fake it, but I fake it and I'm being like, oh, it's a premade template for fitness influencers and it works, but then it looks the same for everyone, but it just works, then they, you know, just market it. I'm sure it would make money, but then it it... The market would be flooded with the same product or whatever. Right? Versus if I say, just describe what you want, describe what your intent is, your perspective on the world, and the... And I give the AI a summarized version of what that person is, and then AI acts as sort of a twin of that person, and starts building with perspective. Right? I think... And then, yes, it may take more time because it's not a template, but really, AI can build anything very quick. And and there... You know, we're making a lot of integrations that have... If you wanna build an e commerce, maybe we should just use Shopify. Maybe you don't have to, like, rebuild the whole custom thing. And so that would make the engineer more capable to build things faster, but I like the idea of just making it raw and open ended, so that every product that emanates from Polsia is very unique, and it creates creativity and abundance versus a templated sort of like spam machine, which by the way, because LLNs are so... Are are are very... You know, they have opinions on design, and so if you don't guide them too much, they will create slop. Polsia is like the opposite. Right?
00:34:15 · Ben Cera, Guillaume Moubeche
It's trying to be the opposite of slop. That's why it's AI slop in reverse. [00:34:20] S1: Yeah. [00:34:22] S0: It's trying to enable human creativity in a positive way. [00:34:28] S1: And right now, I think I read that you were like, you gave Polsia, like, the the entire, like, your mailbox to essentially, like, fundraise. And I think I was seeing, the amount of VC, three, etcetera, etcetera. Can you give, like, more details about it and how it's going so far or how it went?
00:34:51 · Ben Cera
[00:34:51] S0: So, yes, it was... That was actually when I realized that I had product market fit or like I I really thought so, I wanted to put fuel on the fire, and so I I thought to myself, I need to do marketing stunts. I need to like create like those fun edgy stories of how I use AI in an extreme way to get attention. And so I wrote this tweet where I guess, I was like, okay, what I can do is I can send an email to hundreds of investors, and it's like a rage bait, right? And tell them, hey, like, I'm an AI, and I'm raising money on behalf of Polsia, and here's a live dashboard with like the graph, right, which by the way, initially it wasn't like this, right, it was like, it was the beginning, it was growing a little bit, right, and I was like, I feel like investors will be like, what the... Either love it or hate it. It would be polarizing, because a founder refusing to talk to an investor, and I think in AI, have full context of the vision, of the roadmap, of the data. Like, there's a data room which is Polsia. Live. It's like, what else do you want? Like, if you... And then actually, like, the AI would share, like, when they say, no, but I wanna talk to the founder, it's like, oh, here's a podcast of him. You can just... If you really wanna see his face talking, like, here here's him talking for an hour. And it's almost like, you know, the AI would say, like, you could talk to Ben, but, like, it would not tell you anything different than, like, what I can tell you right now in an endless conversation, or what you've seen in the podcast, and what you could see in the live dashboard. So you don't need Ben. You need, you know. And so... And then... And also, we... I I told Polsia that, like, we should should tell that we're raising 10,000,000 at a billion valuation, and that was when I was like, at like, I don't know, five hundred hundred k run rate or something. What's it again? And I was like... Because I was rage bait. Because I'm like... It was like, if people take it first degree, it's like, what the... Who the fuck does he think he is? Right? But then it's rich bait. It's like, people might react. And by the way, that worked so well. And I mean, that was the genesis of me getting attention, is because it's a flywheel.