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.
00:37:01 · Ben Cera
It's like, people, you know, people talk about it, then I get more sign ups, so I get more paying customers, then the graph goes higher, then I get more inbounds, then those inbounds get talked to Polsia, probably talk to other people, get more sign ups, the curve goes higher, and it's just like... And because nobody's used to a public... Then the investors start going to the dashboard like every day, because they're like, woah, where is it now? Fuck, it's growing more? It's growing more, then email again, and then I don't answer, and then I get overwhelmed with emails, so I can't even answer anymore. So it's not... Because it's like it gets, you know, when you get hundreds of investors that talk to you, you just can't answer. It's like, and also I need to focus on the customer, and then the platform starts scaling, and things starts breaking, and I'm like, fuck, like, need... So do I talk to investors or do I, you know, do I respond to customer support? So it was a crazy thing, and I would say, I would say it worked in terms of like getting a lot of attention. I think end of the day investors, they kinda wanna talk to you, and I think that like, if slash when I will do this again, I actually wanna do a lot... A much more sophisticated AI funnel for investors, where like, maybe it's like, you only talk to me if you wanna put a very big check, but like if you wanna smooth a small check, you literally, like, only way to get in is to, you you get access to a data room, a legal due diligence, maybe you get a call with my lawyer, and you have to put a deposit in, like, I don't think it's something. But it's not to, like, be against investors, it's almost like telling investors like, hey, I cannot talk to everyone. So like, if it's gonna be me fundraising, I'll talk to three funds. I'll talk to three funds that have the most money because... And you will never get in. Or I'll talk those funds because they can write really big checks, but if you have small check, you can get in, but you can't talk to me because I just don't have time to answer, to to have one hour conversation with every single investor in the planet, which there are so many at this point. And so... And did you raise in the end with with this process? We're we're in process. I'm in process. Process. Okay. Closing.
00:39:14 · Guillaume Moubeche, Ben Cera
[00:39:14] S1: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Nice. More more about it soon. [00:39:19] S0: Exactly. Exactly. [00:39:21] S1: And and what exactly, like... Because I think, like, when I emailed you even on your, like, personal email address about, like, the the podcast after chatting on LinkedIn, it was basically like Polsia replying. And I think it feels very much like you. So how exactly did you train it to respond so quickly to email? Like, there like a human in the loop at some point? Like, how exactly does that work?
00:39:47 · Ben Cera
[00:39:47] S0: So first of all, like, so I initially set up my mailbox so that Polsia responds automatically, then it started replying to people that were not investors, and it would respond so well and so kindly, and actually it's sort of like an assistant replying, hey, Ben is busy, but like he will see your email, he will get back to you, which is better than ghosting. Right? And I realized, actually, this is kind of awesome. It's kinda like it's helped... It's a first line of defense. It's like an assistant. Right? It's like, I need to reply, but I can train it to reply in a way. I can give it more context. I would say there's a two... It's a two part story on, like, how I built Polsia. So let me backtrack a little bit of how the tone of Polsia came about, and then I can tell you about specifically the email agent, sort of like how it works. But first of all, why it sounds like me is a very interesting story. So in 2025, I was using ChatGPT like all day long. Right? That was my go to sort of like... I was using cloud for code, but I was using ChatGPT for conversation. And I think in the year end review, I was 0.1% top ChatGPT user in 2025. But in in, I think, in November or something like that, I started using Claude. So I started using all models because I was like, you know what? I need to, like, get the latest of, like, all the models. So whenever I would ask strategic questions, I would ask g b t... GPT pro, g b t thinking, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. So to sort of like test how good models are because it changes all the time. And then Claude would be so good at answering, and I'd be like... Just like... It would be so... It would be much more pragmatic than other models, who are like kinda like just like bombarding you with like long things. So I started jamming more and more with Claude, and then and I started liking it, I was like, it became my default chat model. And as I was building Polsia, at one point, I was telling him, okay, I think we should ship in one week. Like, dude, I can go into rabbit hole of, like, building every feature, but, I need to ship in a week. It's it's gonna be December 15. I need to ship December 15. So I would tell him that. And then the next day, would tell me... I would say, what do you think about this feature? I... And maybe I should do this feature. He would say, stop, Ben. Stop talking about feature. Yes.