This Week in Startups
00:02:09 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:02:09] S0: Which is 200 a month? [00:02:11] S1: No. Well, I I signed up for premium, which is only 30 a month, and that's what I was using. But then the team, you know, we started adding other members of our team. Uh-huh. So then it bumped me up so I get the 200 a month plan just for myself, and then every other team member gets their $30. [00:02:28] S0: By doing that as the team manager Yes. They give it to you for free? [00:02:32] S1: I mean, I don't know. It it told me that my premium usage, I was getting an increase because I'm the team manager or whatever. And so [00:02:41] S0: I Awesome. [00:02:42] S1: I don't run out as much or as quickly. I've only used 9% with only four days to go this week, and I have not adjusted my Grok Bot usage. So
00:02:42 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:02:42] S1: I don't run out as much or as quickly. I've only used 9% with only four days to go this week, and I have not adjusted my Grok Bot usage. So [00:02:50] S0: So that that is one issue is... And Perplexity does a great job of this. I've stopped using Perplexity as much because all the stuff I was building with Perplexity Computer, I'm now using a bot interface to do. The bot interface is more pleasing and more efficient. And now that I have a 100 different bots, I'm starting to put bots together. So I have a bot that is good for making videos. I have a bot that's good for doing research. I have a LinkedIn bot. I've got an HTML webpage creating bot. And over this weekend, for the first time had it, I gave it my credit card, had it register a domain name for me, and had it published to the web for me some content. We were gonna do... We're we're gonna buy jackets. Right? So I just wanna give people an example here. We're going to buy jackets. Right? And you can pull up my... A tweet from this weekend.
00:03:45 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:03:45] S1: Right. So that... Yeah. This was this was Jason's response that we sort of quoted before. He's saying, I'm spending about 40 k a year on tokens and subscriptions from Anthropic, Lovable, Grok Bot, ElevenLabs, long tail of other products, and getting about 2,000,000 plus in value for launch and This Week in Startups. We've automated at least seven full time jobs at this point while becoming a 100% faster at the average task that we do. If you haven't used the last ninety days worth of products for at least thirty hours a week, you have no idea how profound the software is. The last ninety days, things have changed more than in the last two years. Many of the things I spent hours on last year not take minutes, and the results are mind blowing. You know, I really agree. I think a lot of people got fixed in time in, like, 2023, 2024. Like, this is what chatbots are, and this is how AI works. And they're still relying on those tropes of, oh, it hallucinates, and you can't trust it. And it's, doesn't have any context, and it forgets things. And it's like, hey. Grok Bot's a new world, man. You gotta you gotta plug in. [00:04:46] S0: Correct.
00:04:46 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:04:46] S0: Correct. [00:04:46] S1: Because, like, I... Teaming them up is where it gets, I think, really powerful as well. Like, I have my sub stack analytics bot that is looking every day at what's happening on sub stack and posting in Slack, but now I have that bot talk to all the other bots that help me research those sub stacks. So now they learn what works and what doesn't and refine their recommendations based on the analytics and the readership we're getting in Substack. And, like, that's how they... It can make smart decisions about what to write about without me because it's already there. The last time we did a post like this with this kind of title that we could do again, it did really well. The open rates were 6% higher. Like, woah, man. That's like a full time analyst looking at our stats that's just working for me now. That's pretty incredible. [00:05:32] S0: Yeah. So what I did was we were gonna make a jacket. Right? We wanted to make a jacket. So Not like this, but [00:05:40] S1: a cool jacket. Like a cool jacket.
00:05:42 · Jason Calacanis
[00:05:42] S0: Yeah. Well, I wanted to make a cool jacket. Right? Everybody wants to have a cool jacket. So what I did was I decided... You know, people were debating what we're going to get for a jacket for founding university in Japan and for Launch Accelerator. And I kept explaining myself to a human being. And the human being did human being things, which is make mistakes, ignore certain key factors, be fallible, just like I am, just like you are, we all are. And the Grok Bot made this for me, posted it to my own URL. Mhmm. And I did this in about under fifteen minutes of instructions, maybe ten, of just talking to it using Wispr Flow to guide it. And then I just kept republishing and republishing and republishing. I got so far here. This is something you would have paid a designer. If you scroll up here, you'll see. And if you just scroll up, I'll tell you when to stop. So here's like... And by the way, this was no prompting. It just made me a table of contents. I said, Give me the best jackets, the most hip jackets, etcetera. Then I said, here's where I want to place the logos. And I gave it the two logos I wanted to place. So I like when you make swag to have it not have a lot of outside branding, right? And I like it to be subtle. So here I said, where to place logos, scroll up. I said, you know, on the inside of a denim jacket, if you put these logos, that's one of our companies and then found a university, or in a leather jacket, scroll up. And it just made this. So now me explaining to somebody what I wanted, a human I'm talking about, would have just been back and forth, back and forth, hours, meetings. And then I said, I wanna put something on the collar or where the tag is, keep scrolling up. And it just made me the perfect mockups of this. Now keep going. It looks beautiful. Only did it do that designed.
00:07:37 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:07:37] S1: It looks like a human spent time and care in [00:07:40] S0: Like a professional designer. Exactly. And so I said, oh, I wanna put do the work kaizen, ikigai on the inside to kinda just reinforce with our founders, like some of the philosophies, maybe make it a little inspiring. Scroll up. Here we go. More examples. Keep scrolling up. [00:07:55] S1: We learned... Interesting cultural thing that we learned because originally when we were designing Founder University Japan stuff, we wanted to have Japanese characters and writing because in America, we all think that's cool. But in Japan, they think it's really nerdy to have Japanese writing on your clothes, but they think it's cool to have English. So that's why I think we're we're now leaning towards writing the words in English. [00:08:17] S0: Correct. And then there's the Ikigai logo where the, you know, the Yeah. Venn diagram keeps scrolling and then I think it gave us, like... Oh, and then I said, go find out what other people have done with these same jackets and find me how they've done the logo branding. [00:08:33] S1: Right.