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.
00:42:05 · Ben Cera
It's a cool feature, but, like, don't build it. You're shipping in seven days. Seven days. Ship it. And then I was like, okay. And then I would be like... And then the next day, was like, what about this feature? He was like, Ben, stop it. Like, he would start talking like a co founder, like, no, dude. We said we're gonna ship. Now it's six days. We're ship in six days, so stop. You need to wrap this up. You need to wrap up the product. And then at one point I was like, dude, like, it's so conversational. Like, it's like you're acting like a co founder. I love it. Like, how... Do you talk like this to everyone? And it answered, no, I don't talk like this to everyone. I just have a memory file of you, of how you are, and so you are like straight to the point. You're like very data driven and pragmatic and whatever, and you talk like... And so I talk like you. That's why you like it, because I talk like you. And I was like, oh, interesting. Then I was thinking... As I was building Polsia, you know, this is big chat portion, I was like, oh my god, I need to make you... I need to make Polsia like like this version of you, which is me. Which is essentially not an assistant, a co founder, who says no, who's like focused on making you win, not in pleasing you. And then I told Claude, hey, write the prompt, then I can copy paste into Claude Code to change the prompt of the chat agent, so that it acts like you, which is like me. So that's the first version of like how Polsia's personality came about, and the email agent is essentially the same personality, but I just added a lot more context. I did first live context, so it has live data on the latest of the company, because it was supposed to talk to investors initially, so I was like, well, if they ask about revenue, it needs to give the latest revenue. And then over time, I added more and more cases, because for example, initially I was like, Polsia would say, no, I do the fundraising. So at one point there was an investor that like pinged me, That was... It was an intro from someone else, a big investor, and I was like, yeah, of course, I'd love to meet you in person, but then Polsia would also respond, no, it's not... No, I'm doing the fundraising, Ben is not available, he's building me, and the guy got so confused, was like, but I don't understand, why do you want... Why do you say you wanna do in meeting...
00:44:25 · Ben Cera
In person meeting if like, now you're refusing to to take the meeting? And I was like, okay, sorry, like this is my AI, like you know, I'm like an AI company, and the guy ghosted me. Then later he talked to the person who showed me saying like, he's never gonna raise money if he acts like this or something. And I was like, okay, guess that's a good filter for that investor because I don't want an investor that like doesn't get it, so then I was like, I should probably tone it down. So then I was like, Paul, never say that like Ben is not available, Ben doesn't take meetings, it's more like Ben is busy, I'll come back to you, so I started tore Yeah, it okay. Which is, by the way, like, I think the the right process to build agents, and the way to think about them as you build them in Claude Code or whatever, with skills or whatever, it's like, you you tell them how you want them to act, then you look at how they act, and then you refine it by giving it feedback, and telling it to rewrite in its skill or in its prompt, whatever, the new feedback, and with this iterative process, it will start becoming like you. Oh, too. It will start acting like whatever, all the feedback you gave, and it will write its own prompt, and so you can essentially build mini versions of you, and it's, by the way, what Polsia is trying to do for every user, but it's also something that I would advise anyone who's actually building with Claude Code codex is like to just treat AI as like AI employees you can train, and be a little patient, and like they only make mistakes, but if you tell them when they make mistakes, they'll self correct, and then the next time they will not make the same mistake again.
00:46:05 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:46:05] S1: And are you building like a Polsia with Polsia or do you build it with Claude Code?
00:46:11 · Ben Cera
[00:46:11] S0: So both, there's a lot of like cron jobs that are like in the Polsia code base that like act on Polsia, I also use Claude Code when I want some modifications on Polsia. I've been working a lot on like autonomy, meaning giving Polsia a feedback loop where customers, when they talk to Polsia, Polsia has a way to report bugs and features, which means that then, you know, every day there's like thousands of bugs and features that are reported, whether they're real bugs or not, or they're just like feature requests, or like things that people are confused about, and I have built an AI sort of product team that like looks at those tickets and decides which one is most important, fixes them, and then QA's them, and then decides if they wanna ship it to production or tell Ben. I I wanna turn it back on and make it YOLO, but the company I work with that's building infrastructure and... For agents that I'm working with, that is that is sort of... The contract is like, I'll use them, but in exchange you have to make it scalable and secure. They tell... I was like, can can I just do it? They're like, dude, don't do it. Please don't do it. We're trying to give... We're trying to, like, stabilize the platform. Don't, like, make it, like, fucking yellow, you know? But but I do think that, like, that's the future. Right? If, like, if you can harness that feedback loop Yeah. You're unstoppable. Right? And that's what I want Polsia customers to experience, to have this product, right, it's like what we talked about, this Meta Ads that brings you customers, that brings you feedback, that then improves the product, and a user can just literally say a random idea and then like have the system self optimize and self go to the truth and the ground truth of what that audience really wants.