In this episode, Nicholas Thorne, co-founder of Audos, shares his mission to empower one million entrepreneurs to create AI-enabled million-dollar businesses. From his beginnings on Wall Street to co-founding Audos with Henrik Werdelin, Nicholas delves into how AI is revolutionizing entrepreneurship. He explains the concept of the "Donkey Corn"—a sustainable, AI-powered business model - and offers frameworks like the Five P’s for identifying customer needs and market opportunities. Nicholas discusses the transformative potential of relationship capital, the importance of aligning personal passion with entrepreneurial ventures, and why the AI-driven future makes entrepreneurship a necessity, not just an option. The conversation also touches on practical strategies for starting and scaling a business, the evolving role of AI in shaping customer relationships, and the power of authenticity in the age of generative AI. This episode is packed with actionable insights and inspiration for anyone looking to harness AI to turn their entrepreneurial ideas into reality.
Key Takeaways:
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Audos Website: Audos - Co Pilot for Entrepreneurs
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Audos Mate: Mate.Audos
00:00 Meet Nicholas Thorne: Co-Founder of Audos
01:06 The Mission of Audos: Empowering Entrepreneurs in an AI-Driven World
02:21 The Future of Work: Why AI Is Essential for Entrepreneurs
05:09 Real-Life Success Stories: The Donkey Corns Explained
09:40 The PreHype Journey: Building Entrepreneurial Expertise
22:24 The 5P Framework: Identifying Your Ideal Customer
31:56 Visceral Language and AI: The Power of Words in Business
33:05 AI’s Role in Business: Consolidating and Simplifying Language
34:14 Problem Reframing: How AI Assists in Tackling Big Challenges
36:27 Generative AI in Action: Early Experiments and Insights
40:48 The Inkling Slot Machine: Sparking Innovation with AI
45:12 Authenticity in AI-Driven Businesses: Why It’s Crucial
56:38 Final Reflections and Actionable Insights
📜 Read the transcript for this episode:Transcript of How to build a business with AI? Founder of Audos - Nicholas Thorne on the New Rules for Entrepreneurship |
[00:00:00] Nicholas Thorne: I'm Nicholas Thorne. I'm the co founder of audos. My primary credentials, which you asked me for, is that you too, among a small group of people sometimes call me and trust what I have to say. That started roughly 15 years ago when I started working on Wall Street. I took a very brief, , lap through the investment banking, , world. And I would tell everyone I met that I needed an idea. And Henrik nicely was the first person. To tell me that he had lots of ideas. And so if all I was waiting for was an idea that we could get started immediately and we did, and in the 15 years that have passed, we have, uh, and I have luckily sat kind of shotgun and, or, uh, in the driver's seat of., lots of entrepreneurial, uh, endeavors and, business building initiatives and have learned, , just a ton about probably what, mostly what not to do. Uh, and we've tried to take everything we've learned about what to do. And make it available, , via AI, , for as many people as humanly possible with the kind of objective of serving the life work of helping people find, , fulfillment entrepreneurially.
[00:01:05] Jeremy Utley: Nick. Can we start with a quick introduction to audos?
[00:01:10] Nicholas Thorne: Uh, yes, we can. audos, we were on a mission to help a million entrepreneurs start a million dollar a year business in the next 10 years.
[00:01:18] Jeremy Utley: Stop a million entrepreneurs creating a million dollar business. Is this, this is real. This is the, this is the sticker.
[00:01:24] Nicholas Thorne: We call that business and, probably specifically an AI enabled.
Customer for AI native customer first business. Um, something that we refer to as a donkey corn, which is a, uh, parties like a unicorn, but it grinds like a mule and it's run by one or two or three people, uh, but it is a conception of the type of business that we think, uh, obviously given the million person objective, many, many people, , can and will, and probably. Must be running. In the AI future. Um, and so we make tools and services, , and technology available to those entrepreneurs and we provide capital to them in certain ways. , it is AI all the way down. Um, we help you use AI. We use AI to help you use AI. We help you use AI to. You know, help you help you, , you know, , all the, all the AI everywhere.
[00:02:21] Jeremy Utley: Okay, but before we drown go back to that word must you said that must be why why must
[00:02:28] Nicholas Thorne: yeah, I mean, um, You don't have to look very far to find Stats galore about a future when jobs and work is very different given ai Um that the displacement minimum that's likely to happen over the coming decade is You Enormous.
I think McKinsey estimates it at over 300 million people. It's basically, you know, the United States being out of a job. , and so when you look at that and think about that, um, I think we think, , that there's the likelihood, or at least, you know, a reasonable probability that people will have to maybe return to, but certainly kind of evolved to a place where they are much more aware of their own.
Interests and expertise and experience and how they package that and make that available to other people and other businesses and the economy writ large. Uh, that, you know, we are all very familiar that the, 50 year career working at a given company is, gone. I just think if you carry that trend forward and you put the AI, , multiplier effect on it, you end up in a place where entrepreneurship.
At least in our view is, is probably less of a nice to have, and more of a need to have. Um, and, um, and so we think lots of people will be having to kind of make at least a portion of their livelihood and their fulfillment come from a pursuit that they have designed and conceived and carried forward themselves.
[00:03:58] Henrik Werdelin: I would also say Jeremy, just to add, and obviously in full disclosure, I am Nick's co founder on this. So probably good just to kind of
[00:04:05] Jeremy Utley: flip the curtain back there and just lived
[00:04:08] Henrik Werdelin: in there. Um, but I do think there's another thing and that is. Nicholas and I have spent a lot of the last 15 years building companies and it's been something that we've had the pleasure of doing and have had access to a lot of smart people and capital and other things that kind of have made it easier.
And I think there is definitely this kind of wish of saying there's roughly 60 percent of Americans who would like to start something and only say 10 percent does. Um, And a lot of the resources, you know, the, the knowledge that you could get through a textiles, a Y Combinator, like the mentorships and all those different things is something that now can be taught to a LM model, and then can be, you know, Uh, democratized and given to a lot of people.
And so , there's also like a very distinct kind of, uh, wish of saying there is this thing that has been pretty centered around Silicon Valley. And now that can be, uh, available to most people.
[00:05:08] Jeremy Utley: Okay. So before there's kind of the AI layer, there's the entrepreneurship layer, but before we get there, maybe Nick, would you start with, you said, if people who are aware of their own interests and expertise, just to make it really tangible, For our audience.
What's kind of, what's a canonical example, like a practical, real example of a, one of these million people who are making a million dollar business. Like what's an example of somebody who's taken their interest and expertise and is on the path to being a donkey corn.
[00:05:40] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah. Um, I mean, a very easy example is there's a person who's building a business and an AI business on audos that, uh, is from Northern Texas.
Uh, she herself is a. physical trainer, but as a mom and she specializes in helping mothers regain their form and, achieve their fitness objectives immediately postpartum. Okay. She's very specifically in the postpartum fitness planning business. Um, she has a kind of brand, bod and, she uses AI to, , through audos to find and talk to and engage with her.
Potential customers to introduce them to her various service offerings, which are. Some very low touch, you know, things where you can get a fitness plan and talk to her, the AI representation of mom bod, um, and then ladders up to, you could spend an hour, uh, you know, virtually, or even an hour, you know, in person.
Uh, mom
[00:06:47] Jeremy Utley: bod something that she is or was doing prior to audos and now audos is just kind of amplifying, or it helped her identify something she didn't know she could turn into a business.
[00:06:58] Nicholas Thorne: I think in her case, uh, she had a small version of this operating and, what AI allows her to do is to expand that and make it much more like the million dollar version of it is certainly, I don't think possible without, um, with all the AI wrapper, I think she happens to be someone who was thinking about this.
I mean, I think what you can imagine is we have folks who are everywhere from they've ever sold an hour of their time for something to they've never done that. And they don't have a. They don't even have the foggiest clue where they want to get going. , and so we're probably sitting across that spectrum.
So that's fair, you know, canonically, if you will, we probably pick a lot of people up maybe a little bit prior to where that specific person is, but I think that's a, uh, certainly canonical as it represents and relates to this topic of, , having a group of customers that you feel, you know, have a Very committed to very commited to and energized by serving.
Um, what I think defines one of these businesses is as much or is almost entirely serve, as it is how you serve them. , and what capabilities you have. And I think that's a kind of fundamental repositioning of a lot of, um, how we think about entrepreneurship. You know, I think entrepreneurship has I've often been a lot about, you know, what can I do?
And then it proceeds forward from there. , I think AI lends itself to a, at least a style of entrepreneurship that, , Henrik is probably uniquely well versed to talk about that, that works kind of backward from, if you will, more, uh, who you're serving , and why you're serving them. And so, , I think MomBot is at least a very good example of this very specific, right?
This is not. You know, moms generally, this is not, you know, women generally, this is not people generally, this is not fitness generally. This is, , like a very tight, , definition of a place where you can pick someone up, you can build rapport with them, you can build relationship capital with them and use AI to, , help insulate, uh, the relationship between entrepreneur and customer.
And so we spend, what do you know, lots and lots of time at thinking about what is this kind of three part, the three body problem, three body system Entrepreneur, AI, and customer. And how are they all interrelating and working with each other to achieve the end objective of the customer, whatever that may be in that particular case, you know, obviously getting back in shape postpartum.
[00:09:34] Jeremy Utley: Yeah. Okay. So maybe before we get to AI ifying and Nick, I'll, I'll put you on hold there. Henrik, you mentioned you guys have been doing this for 15 years. Can you talk about what are the various kind of components of your expertise That you're encoding into this, like , what are the key entrepreneurial activities, if you will, that you identified in your previous, call it 15 years working with entrepreneurs that you're leveraging in this system.
[00:10:06] Henrik Werdelin: I, I think. Nick and I have been building this company called PreHype for many years that is seen from the outside as an incubator. But I think from the inside, it was more of a halfway house for entrepreneurs that didn't know what to do next.
And honestly, we build it for ourselves, right? Because , for somebody who decided to have entrepreneurship as a career path, uh, the, your career path is a little bit more janky than, If you're a lawyer, because if you want a new job as a lawyer, you tend to become a lawyer. Uh, if you want a new gig as an entrepreneur, you often don't want to do the things that you just didn't.
And you have this kind of beautiful and vulnerable in between time, um, , where there's often not a place where you can hang out. , and so PreHype was basically set up to do that. And over the 15 years we attracted , hundreds of entrepreneurs and residents who were in that situation.
And what we wanted to solve for them was to figure out how do you create something out of nothing? How do you basically have an inkling that you would like to do something entrepreneurial, but you don't have the faintest idea of what that should be and how do you kind of get going? And over those years, we built our own little school of thought, which was basically, um, in its basic form that you needed to figure out somebody you would like to serve.
Um, you then secondly, I needed to figure out a problem that that person have or that affinity group has. Then you needed to reframe that to see if you can come up with a kind of more novel kind of solution for that problem. And then you need to go out and test that real fast to figure out if that, um, Um, solution that you've invented resonated with that affinity group, and then you would build a business on the back of that.
But I think what was very unique with our style of entrepreneurship was that then you would do that over and over again. And so instead of seeing yourself as being in a business that was defined by what you did as next to did, like, what was your You're kind of like function. Um, , we build a lot of businesses that was defined by who they served.
And so if you take bark, it's, uh, defined by people who love dogs. If you take, um, uh, managed by Q, it was by office managers. Uh, if you, , take, um, row, a Roman, it was men who had slightly embarrassing medical problems. And so they all had this one thing. And so over the last few years. Uh, we were like, Hey, if we can help incubate two or three of these a year and maybe help tens or maybe like over 10 years, hundreds of entrepreneurs, how could we scale that using AI and help, you know, millions and, , build on top of this kind of methodology we've done?
And so that was a slightly long VD version of kinda like how we, we got to where we are now.
[00:12:45] Jeremy Utley: No, it's cool. It's perfect. Maybe Nick, will you talk for a second about this idea that Hendricks just mentioned here of a relationship capital? I think everything makes sense from anybody's kind of probably conception of entrepreneurship.
But I wrote down is, you know, one, who are you serving to? What's their problem? Three, what's a novel solution for test the solution that, that all kind of grocks with, I think everybody's intuition around entrepreneurship, where I think your unique take is, particularly Uh, singular is this idea of do it again, the fifth one.
And Nick, I thought maybe it'd be cool if you just talk about. A practical decision, like say, for example, at BarkBox, which is a company that y'all founded that helps dog parents, you know, with all sorts of dog issues, you know, , an investor might say, Hey, you guys should make cat box. Right? I mean, you've got expertise building boxes, right?
Could you maybe talk about Nick, the, idea of relationship capital and how you evaluate the question of what to do again, when, Hendrick says, do it again, How do you evaluate what to do again?
[00:13:48] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah, I mean, that's probably a question better. I'm more of a student of BarkBox than I am a contributor to anything.
So I can, I give you the academic version of that in my view. Uh, I mean, kind of written shotgun, uh, and then you, Henrik can kind of course correct accordingly. Um, with one quick step back, which is that I, it, that may all be intuitive. Start with a customer, figure out what their problem is, develop some novel solution to it.
Um, test it. , you know, go from there, do it again. While that may grok, that's not what most people do. Um, and it's certainly not the prioritization with which people are willing to kind of ditch one of the incoming assumptions, right? They are sooner going to ditch the, customer there or the problem.
Like they often like, Oh, I have this thing. Well, uh, it's not working. Uh, I guess I'll go. Maybe see if, you know, women want it because men clearly don't, I don't, you know, I'm making things up that are easy. And so when you think about what we're holding really dear is that the, North star around which you don't, you know, that it's no longer considered kind of a pivot is if you change who you're serving, because the minute you change that, then you're just fully into it, a new, you know, initiative all together.
Um, and so while that may sound intuitive, I think committing to that and sticking to that and, actually building the architecture of a business around that dynamic, around, I mean, and so now let's talk relationship capital and then talk BarkBox and others.
So, the idea of relationship capital is basically that every business needs an advantage. Uh, without one you tend to, , You know, overtime get competed against and your profits get competed away. So you need to have an advantage. And the funny thing about advantages is that there's a Matthew effect, , which we will all know more familiarly as the rich get richer.
Right. Um, advantages build on themselves. They compound. And so, you know, Be you a student of Charlie Munger or of the Bible, compounding is, everywhere and advantages look like that. And there's lots of forms of advantages. In fact, many businesses have multiple styles of advantage, but you could simplify things that we're all familiar with, , as versions of a, they're, they're all different versions of capital, which is kind of the accumulated form of an advantage.
It's like , if you were to measure how much of an advantage you have, it's kind of, you could think of it as your capital. So you could have. Intellectual capital, , like a Disney might, which has characters and all this, you know, intellectual investment technology companies tend to look a little bit like this.
, you could have physical capital, , Starbucks has very well located. , stores and , they kind of fall forward because they're just on the right corner and the right street. Um, you can have human capital, right? McKinsey has a human capital kind of machine that it, takes advantage of in terms of just recruiting the very, very smartest people and always having that advantage.
And so again, you can have multiple of these advantages. Uh, the advantage that we think about in the form of relationship capital is, , how good is your relationship with your customer. Uh, does it offer you an advantage? , the benefit if it does , and the primary way in which that advantage tends to present itself is that it offers you insight into what to build next.
And in a world where, uh, the speed of, markets and of technologies and of product cycles, , are reducing very quickly, You end up in a place where like the only constant is the change and therefore like, well, how good are you at changing? How good are you at advancing? And do you have proprietary information with which to, uh, inform your product roadmap effectively?
, so Elon Musk, for example, says that the fundamental, determinant of competitiveness at this point is the pace of innovation and relationship capital, at least is a, framing through which to think about, do I have a strong enough feedback loop with my customer that I can have some confidence that the thing I launched next. , will be more likely, you know, well received. Um, so if you take that perspective and you apply it to a business like Bark, um, , it should fairly simply answer the question, why has Bark never launched CatBox? There is nothing functionally that would limit the team from sticking cat treats and toys into a box and shipping it to, , cat parents.
Except for the fact that. It's a completely different customer who laughs at different jokes. As it turns out, cats don't play with toys in the same exact way. And so it probably be, you know, kind of rendered silly from the beginning. And so when you think about, and the reason that Bark has, tended again, for me, as a student of this kind of thought process and style of business has been so, , informative, or at least like has been a fun case study to be able to return to, , many, many times is.
That when you, take this thought process and you, play it forward and you think of yourself then as the CEO or a board of bar considering what to do next, and you're off left, but let's just oversimplify that your choices are. We can launch cat box, uh, which leverages our capability, right?
Our base capability is we stick stuff in a box and we send it people every month so we can, leverage the capability or, , we can launch an airline for dog owners, , and dog parents. And in fact, like I think if you apply the thought process, it would just be completely self evident. You'd be like, Oh, we're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, um, an airline, not this thing because the shipping stuff, the cat parents just opens up this brand new, uh, you know, kind of surface area to our business that is, is actually a significantly more fundamental change in what we're doing than all of a sudden leasing aircraft.
[00:19:15] Jeremy Utley: Right. And so the core premise there being the trust and understanding you have of your customer , is the most defensible advantage, far more defensible than perhaps whatever capability you've built. Like shipping capability is not barks advantage. It's their knowledge of dog parents. , I was just thinking going to audos, how does An individual, you know, again, a potential donkey corn. Yeah. How does an individual begin to think about who their dog parents are? Yeah. And how does audos help with that?
[00:19:48] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah. , I think it's a perfect segue and I just want to add one comment to it because you said it's, it's the most defensible.
I don't think it's the most defensible. I think it is, in the realm of things that could be defensible. And most importantly, it is a, is a path to defensible. Relative defensibility that is actually available to almost everyone. And so if you think about our objective, a million people, a million dollars a year, you know, you were talking about a scale of entrepreneurship that effectively doesn't exist, , today. Right. Um, if you think about some of the great, , technologies, let's call it that have stimulated entrepreneurship. , we think a lot about entrepreneurial technologies, , These are very basic things. They're not always things that look like, you know, digits. Uh, the, formation of a, uh, joint stock company low and behold , was it was a big innovation for entrepreneurship, , in the form of being able to aggregate capital anyway. Uh, franchises, for example, are epic entrepreneurial technologies because they, they make, uh, being entrepreneurial an option to more people. So, if we're thinking that way, we have to approach the problem, uh, with a design criteria that says this school of thought, this way of building a business, this advantage that you might be able to pursue and acquire over time has to be something that is at least potentially available.
To a lot of people. Um, and so the benefit of relationship capital from that perspective is, it fits that criteria? I don't know that I don't think you'd want to, I certainly wouldn't want to engage in an academic debate with, uh, someone around whether this is the best. Um, advantage. I think it is a viable advantage and I think it is available to lots of people.
So therefore, uh, audos, when it sets out to try to help people, , conceive of and make progress on a business in this likeness, , It obviously therefore starts with, , you know, asking you and trying to help you think about who your sole customer is. Um, , who do you have , at least the possibility that you could form a really deep connection with.
Um, there's a lot of like dimensions on this when you start to think about it. But like there's some simple, , heuristics, if you will, that you can start to apply and , that one part of the audos platform, which is the kind of onboarding assistant, if you will, uh, will certainly help you work through, uh, which is to, , ask you, first of all, like, what's the name of a person that you think you could kind of serve or sell something to tomorrow, , or at least talk to, and so one of the things that we would observe is that it's very hard to start a business.
If you can't like, imagine the first couple of people, , , by name that you might like help, uh, out of the game.
[00:22:23] Henrik Werdelin: Hey, Nick, do you want to introduce the 5P kind of like concept? Because that's sometimes is a good way of thinking about who could I actually serve.
[00:22:33] Nicholas Thorne: . For sure. So the one, part, very practical, like you probably got to be able to give this person a name.
So like that, that's a very practical thing where we try to help people do and really force them to do. And so we can come back to how you make an AI actually stick to the instruction manual and not deviate when you say, actually, , I don't know the person, but I'd like to do X. Like, how does it help you return to that?
But that's a different problem. Um, the second thing, if we get a little bit more abstracted, that we spend time on to, , Henrik's point is working through with someone. Um, a mapping, if you will, of their own, , and now I'm going to have to, it was really going to push my knowledge of our own frameworks, , their own passions, positions, possessions, powers, and potentials.
And so imagine these things as a passions is obviously, you know, what do you like to do effectively? Like, how do you like to spend your time? How would you spend your time, uh, in absence of some other, um, you know, in input, what are you caught doing? Uh, that could be that you like to play fantasy football.
, that could be that you love your dog, by the way. , and , a couple of these, , frameworks can lead you to the same place. That's also pretty good. Um, so passion is, is kind of the easy one. , this next one is positions. Like how do you define yourself? The easy way to think about this is if you were to fill in a sentence that says as a fill in the blank.
Uh, it sucks that such and such is the problem statement of the business. Uh, what goes in the as a category? So as a dog parent, it sucks that, you know, I don't feel like I'm doing a good enough job making my dog feel like a part of my family. Um, so dog parent is kind of a position parent, , and then maybe a more traditional version of that, that everyone will be familiar with. It's like, what roles have you had professionally or otherwise that might offer you a perspective on. You know, as a product manager, it sucks that as a software developer, it sucks that as a financial analyst, it sucks that, um, so positions is another thing that you can kind of think about what roles have you played previously.
And then you could think about who else plays that role. And can I can I help serve that function?
[00:24:30] Jeremy Utley: The smallest side on position, not to derail the five piece, but is, have you just anecdotally, have you observed a better kind of mining of opportunity in professional positions or personal positions?
Meaning like mom bod to me, it's like, I am a mother who's recovering from you know, childbirth. That's a personal position. Versus, you know, you said product manager. I just, when I think of donkey corn, where I think million dollar a year business, , my own instincts, maybe my own bias is to think more in terms of personal positions and professional professional tend to at least start to define some outlines of much bigger businesses, which might sound more attractive, but actually may be less kind of well suited. I don't know if you have any observations.
[00:25:15] Nicholas Thorne: No, I mean, I, I think we've always, um, If you take this framework, one, question we've often been asked and, , we can go down this, uh, on a, separate podcast with you, Jeremy is like, how does this whole thought process apply, for example, to the enterprise?
Um, can, companies build new companies in a kind of relationship capital, uh, likeness? Um, and, , that's a whole different topic. , but I certainly think that when you are an individual and , if you, if the way you answer the position question is with a role that you have, like I was a investment banking analyst, , in a former life.
You know, I think that starts to look like how you build this B2B SaaS company is that you have picked a certain, , buyer profile at a certain type of company and you focus on them. And so that could be, um, chief innovation officers, or it could be chief financial officers. And so, yes, agreed that it's the type of thing where if, if done wrong, you can start to get a little bit too broad.
[00:26:11] Nicholas Thorne: And so it probably has to either be combined with other inputs and, or you really have to ask yourself, am I defining. The, category narrow, you know, like if you say chief financial officer, do you really mean chief financial officers? Or do you mean chief financial officers of SMBs in, you know, the Northeast of America?
So for some set of reasons, and so we spent a lot of time in our, our tooling and our platform, both, , explicitly and kind of iteratively and therefore implicitly, uh, ends up driving people to be quite focused, at least in how they start and where they start. And maybe that's back to this question of, you gotta be able to name the person probably, um, you gotta be able to give them a name and imagine them.
And
[00:26:48] Henrik Werdelin: it's useful if it's yourself
[00:26:50] Nicholas Thorne: and it's often useful if it's yourself or some former version of yourself, uh, or someone, you know, you know, and love so closely that so as to kind of obviate the difference. Possessions is kind of what it sounds like. Uh, it's, it's your dog is what defines your interest in being a dog parent. , so that could be kind of repetitive, but it could be that you have a boat and you love sailing and so that's, you know, it kind of combines with your passion. It could be that you have a home and you want to take good care of it and you don't really love necessarily doing that, but it's important to you and you've invested in, or you like watches and you collect them and you know, so it's just another lens through which to think about.
Like what have I kind of invested in and curated as a kind of portion of myself, , and collected is, uh, is, is just another, you know, manifestation of, uh, this thought process, you know, I have a guitar. Well, that's a possession of mine and it may be something around which I can think about, uh, where I might find an affinity group.
Um, and then powers and potentials. You know, these are basically similar things like, where am I really good at something , , , so in that case, maybe I was a investment banking analyst, , but I, maybe I'm really good at financial modeling or making presentations as the case may be.
Well, maybe that's a place where I feel like I could, , it could offer the starting point for something new and then potentials is, is kind of the opposite, which is like, maybe I'm not good at it yet, but I want to learn about it and I'm intrinsically motivated to learn about it.
Uh, well, like, you know, taking other people along a journey with you as you learn about something and, building a business around your learning objective is also, I think, a perfectly valid place to kind of start to look for these styles of finding groups. So I want to learn how to sail, uh, even if I don't have a boat yet or don't know how to do that yet, et cetera, that could easily be another place where you can find, because a lot of what you're trying to do is.
Uh, is twofold really, one is you're going to get kicked in the mouth, , a lot, you're going to get told, no, you're going to get, it's not going to work immediately. You're going to have to mess around. And so you better kind of find that this gives you energy, um, that, that even in, absence of a lot of positive validating signals to the contrary, although audos will try to kind of help you with that in a couple of ways, um, that , this is like something that you can actually just.
Intrinsically pursue for a period of time because it's, interesting and energizing to you. And then the second thing is, uh, and this is something Jeremy, actually, I was reading some emails coincidentally between you and me from years ago, uh, that we had a chat about at some point from your work at launchpad was, you know, can you speak the, language of the customer?
Um, and, uh, and so the reason that mapping across some of these things and picking one that you feel is relevant is, um, You're going to try to be yourself in how you write copy, by the way, AI makes this like even more important because it just takes the way you write, for example, and if you. Tell it to behave in a certain way.
Not only is it going to do what you tell it to do, but it's also going to kind of like, uh, start to embrace some of your words. Like if you use fancy words in your instructions to the AI, lo and behold, it, it kind of mirrors that way of talking. If you use very basic words, then it'll mirror that. So, um, you know, you want to be able to speak the same language as your customer.
That's both because you want to use words that they understand as being kind of things that they're like, Oh yeah, yeah. Um, that this person is speaking my language. They get me. Uh, they, use words that are the ones that I would expect to hear. It doesn't feel like someone writing marketing copy, for example, that is, uh, not what, you know, I would have said or wanted to click on.
Um, and then vice versa, when the person says something back to you, you need to be able to hear them. Um, you need to be able to understand their words. Uh, so it's, like any language, um, you need to kind of be on the same page in order to, back to the whole relationship capital thing, be able to turn their, feedback into your next product enhancement or development.
[00:30:23] Henrik Werdelin: It's a specific concept we refer to as customer founder fit, which is a nice way to think about it rather than product market fit, uh, which obviously is a little bit more utilitarian where this one plays a little bit more into the relationship capital concept. Can I ask you, Nicholas, just as you are kind of like riffing off kind of like, uh, these frameworks, uh, you mentioned it sucks that a few time and obviously being a big fan of it.
I'm not sure that we've ever documented it anywhere. So do you mind just explaining a little bit what that means?
[00:30:57] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah. Um, if you take the, as a given that, you know, let's go customer problem solution as opposed to solution idea problem that, that happens to solve customer or Market trend, you know, contort yourself into like what the near term version of it is, et cetera.
Um, you need to have a framework for helping people articulate problem statements in a clear and impactful way. And the issue with helping, asking people to articulate the problem that they're observing a customer has is that they tend to use very like watered down , boring vocabulary that starts to make it not sound like a problem at all.
Uh, they say like, , well, the problem I'm solving is, uh, that dog parents, , tend not to be able to, , receive a box of monthly treats and toys to their door every month. And you're kind of like, that's not the problem. That's just the solution reframed as like, as a problem. And so, um, I think it sucks that is, um, meant to be a set of words that you can require someone to use and what comes after it is very, very difficult.
I mean, it'll sound painfully obvious if you're really overly retrofitting, like a solution into a problem, or at least it gives you a chance that your language is more visceral. , I mean, so much of what we're doing as we're talking about it, you realize is like, these were all like nice to have.
Things pre AI and pre the, world that I think we think is coming. And now they just become increasingly like need to have the reason that you really want to write pretty visceral language now is that like your language, the kernel of language that you consolidate your elevator pitch in kind of written form for your business has gone from a thing that like you can avoid having probably like, you know, Oh, what's your elevator pitch?
Well, you know, if you're not very good at getting in and like doing a one minute thing, like it's probably not like. Going to stop you from building maybe a perfectly good product. Like you could probably still build a good product. You might just not be a great front man for it. Um, in the world of building like an AI product, if you can't consolidate the language around your business into a, seed, um, that you're happy to have lots of copies made of, um, you're, you're at very least just, you know, disallowing yourself an amazing advantage, which is that if you do do that, if you can consolidate it down to something you like and use words that are powerful and impactful, then everything else becomes significantly easier because the AI is so good at taking what it's given and, making these copies of it, but
it's average beyond at making copies. So, you just need to make sure that , the average copy of your seed is, really excellent.
[00:33:47] Jeremy Utley: , it's another example of compounding advantage.
[00:33:49] Nicholas Thorne: For sure.
[00:33:50] Jeremy Utley: Advantage of having a well articulated. position is now you can train an AI on really high quality seed material.
Um, whereas if you don't, then that you're training the AI on garbage or kind of
[00:34:03] Nicholas Thorne: garbage and, and, or on average stuff. And I guess maybe that's also true. It's like, it's so definitionally average. And so that was the problem with basically every other problem statement, a mad lib that one could have come up with.
Uh, and so actually we have things where, you know, our audos. Uh, co pilot, if you will, assistant agent is, uh, lives in a couple of different places, but one of the places that lives is in an Instagram handle. So if you go to audos. ai on Instagram, you can chat with, , this, , AI assistant that will attempt to kind of go through a lot of this process with you.
But, uh, one of the things it'll do is it, it'll do the problem reframing. It'll say, okay, based on what you've described to me are the kind of, uh, things that the, this customer needs and wants, but can't get, um, I, I might play the problem back to you as. You know, for Jeremy, who lives in California, it sucks that his electricity comes in and out a lot, um, due to whatever.
Um, we have people who are like, I would never write that problem statement that way, like, that sounds kind of yucky. Like, please don't use that word. Let's rewrite it to be whatever. , and that's an interesting thing. It's a place where we basically, I'm not going to say disagree with the customer, but where , we try to hold a line.
We try to have the AI hold the line and say, totally understand and respect Europe. The fact that that's, that is, it's, I mean, if you think about why the word is visceral, um, it has a certain, you know, negative connotation to it. , but just creating that little bit of discomfort that we're really trying to come up with a thing that someone might say, yeah, that does really suck, you know, um, is something that, , is important because it's also an important part of how you, uh, at least make sure you're talking to the right people.
So, uh, one of the ways in which you can use this secondly, is basically, , Doing the online equivalent of shouting out to a crowd. You know, raise your hand. If you agree that it sucks that, , it's hard to get an erection. Um, uh, as it turns out, like, that's not a thing that most people shout out to crowds, uh, but, but
[00:35:55] Henrik Werdelin: that was a reference to the company row is just to make sure that it wasn't just a random thing that Nick just threw out there.
Here's a reference to one of the companies that we held incubate. It's actually quite well, you're saying they're
[00:36:07] Jeremy Utley: actually doing well. And, and the yucky statement is part of what qualifies or disqualifies the person they want to serve. Uh, Backing away from audos for a moment, Nick, I'd love to hear, because I know you're such a prodigious tinkerer and explorer. What did you see in the early days of generative AI that made you start to wonder, wait, could it do some of the stuff that we, because you and Henrik have kind of high value, high margin expertise and some people might say, I never want AI to touch that.
Right. I think you saw something and experienced something that you're like, Oh, wow. This can unleash this expertise. What was it you saw and , can you tell us about some of your early experiments as a user of generative AI?
[00:36:55] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah, um, Henrik nicely, I mean, Henrik. Is very good at, um, signing up for every new thing.
I like, I, for example, I got a text message from my dad yesterday saying, have I bought the new Nvidia, uh, little computer? And my answer was like, of course I haven't. Cause I'm quite confident Henrik has taken care of that. Um, and I, so I get to the benefit of, um, you know, the logins to the new systems or, or like, uh, you know, I picked up his vision pro for him.
So I got to at least do the demo before he arrived from Europe to get it. Um, so Henrik nicely, you know, uh, beg bartered and stole our way to , some GPT three API keys back in summer, late summer, 2020. And it's, um, coincidentally or conveniently, or maybe not surprisingly, the first time that we, um, gave it the old, you know, for, , dog owners, it sucks that and hit enter and waited to see what filled in. And. You know, GPT 3 , was imperfect on a lot of dimensions but it was , certainly the first experience with loading, , a large language model with a lot of requests to kind of fill in the blanks of these different Mad Lib style sentence structures that we had been developing as, , frameworks for helping someone get an idea out on paper.
And so I think maybe that's like. Among other things that really, what was very obvious, which is, um, if you sat down as we did often and had a conversation with someone where they said, I'd like to start a business. And I think I maybe even have like an idea of what it is, or maybe even have multiple ideas of what, what could be right.
And you engage with them in a conversation to try to kind of get to the bottom of, what is that idea that they have? It's actually pretty like nuanced, like the, average person, the fingerprint of that idea. Would take you quite a while to like, to sketch out because in their brain, without necessarily having ever put it on a piece of paper is lots of thoughts.
They have thoughts about why it might be a good time to do this. They have thoughts about why they might be the right person to do this. They have thoughts even about like, you know, what colors should it use? Or, , what marketing slogan it might have or. You know, they, they, for whatever reason, know something about some supply chain trick, then, , how they're going to do it.
So, , inside anyone's brain, , when they say they've had this like idea for a business, which we tend to refer to at that stage as an inkling of an idea, um, , there's a lot to it. And so the, hard part about that is a, like, how do you methodically, if you're trying to be a good thought partner and conversation partner to someone, which As we've all kind of come to know AI can be, um, you got to kind of know what questions to ask and in what order to ask them in order to like move through that thought process methodically.
Because if you're kind of coming at it for the first time, you can take in a lot of directions. , and then the second thing that is hard about it is it's very hard to get people to kind of commit to a certain form factor of, um, how to present it. , because like they writing it down into a simple. Um, like for like a simple form factor is, is a hard, it feels constraining to people. And then secondly, , if you ask them to write down, if they had multiple ideas, there are two different ideas, they would write them down in two totally different ways. Cause one might be motivated by a insight into a given market.
Another might be motivated by a, uh, another kind of insight. And so what we had done a lot of is try to create these kind of, , fill in the blank style templates for, at least if you were to try for yourself to line up your own ideas on the same like for like basis so that you could read the same five sentences, , for, you know, idea one, two, three, and four, what would the template be? Um, it was very obvious when you got your hands on GPT 3 that like, if you could, , hand it the template A and, or then break the template into little pieces so that , you could kind of almost play. One of the first things we did was, uh, we called it inkling slot machine. And so , imagine that you were looking at, um, you know, like a little slot machine, but the first thing to fill in was like the position of the, of the customer you want to serve.
So as a dog parent or. Man with erectile dysfunction or anyone, you know, like, and you can either fill in the blank. You can type it in or you can just ask it to generate something and it'll generate something and then so as a something it sucks that again, you can either type it in yourself or it'll fill itself in, you know.
So that was to create problem statements and then we go all the way to, you know, Introducing fill in the name for a company. And so we took this approach of like, basically , like this little template for an elevator pitch effectively for a business, which we called an inkling, uh, getting filled in. , almost like slot machines, but where you had the option, you could either, you know, type it in yourself or you could hit, you know, the kind of equivalent of, I'm feeling lucky and it's something would generate. And you could then like create lots of different versions of and permutations of your own idea and study them and think about them , and study what was different.
And we were doing that mostly just so that we could give that to entrepreneurs who we were having this conversation with as a way to just consolidate. You're
[00:41:58] Jeremy Utley: scaling yourself. Yeah.
[00:41:59] Nicholas Thorne: Just make it easier for them to kind of interact, like instead of shooting them. A notion doc, which we did all the time. We duplicate the notion doc, send them the page, say, fill in this little table.
And at least then we can have like a much more enriching conversation around.
[00:42:14] Jeremy Utley: Now it's, now it's responsive. It's dynamic. It's happening automatically.
[00:42:17] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah, exactly. and everything that follows from that is fascinating.
[00:42:20] Henrik Werdelin: One thing that was quite fascinating, we tried then to say, let's just , make a system that comes up with ideas, test them in market, and then see if they work without any human intervention. And so basically you have the machine do this, it runs ads against some of these problems. And then when basically you had people who had signed up, uh, you would be like, Hey, this might be an interesting business. And it was some crazy stuff it came up with. I mean, one I remember was Uh, Nick, you will remember this better than me, but like, it was, um, people who wanted to buy fecal transplant from Olympian athletes to get a better microbiome.
And so basically I want a better microbiome, let me get poo pills. Now, it turns out that It's not really safe. Uh, it's illegal. There's a bunch of other issues, but there's a bunch of people on the internet that would like to buy it. So there's that
[00:43:15] Jeremy Utley: well, so, so that actually you kind of you hit on something, Henrik, that I was curious about, which is. Nick, the way you've kind of characterized the slot machine, there's, almost like an a priori evaluation. It's like founder, which one do you like best? I think what we all know is innovation is somewhat a numbers game and we don't really need to be making a priori decisions necessarily so much as running more experiments.
Does it matter which one they like best? Is there a mechanism for actually On your behalf, we've actually tried these five things and here's what the market likes. But like, how do you, balance the founder decisions versus by pushing them towards experiments to inform decisions? That sort of thing.
[00:43:55] Henrik Werdelin: You know, one thing that I might add, um, give Nick a second to think about it is often when you start something new, you actually don't have that much confidence in it. You have like these areas that you're kind of curious about. Um, there is this, I feel, illusion that as founders, we come out with this thing that we always wanted to build and we knew exactly what it was. , But most of the people who are in the in between time are like, yeah, I'm thinking about a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of blah, blah. And so one of the things that I find the experimentations being incredibly useful at is to give yourself confidence that other people actually think that this is interesting too. Uh, and that is obviously to start with other customers that think it's interesting. But then once you can get a few feedback from customers, then you can also start to talk to peers and investor type. So, you know, your partner, whoever you kind of see advice from, and then you slowly build up the momentum to actually yourself plunge into a specific concept. And so I know it's a little bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but I do think the experimentation is often needed because very few people Some people probably do. A lot of people I've met in my history just didn't know exactly what they wanted to do. They just knew that they wanted to do something.
[00:45:12] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah, but I think that there's also something, Jeremy, in there of um, you could academically or experimentally arrive at the view that there's some great business to be built around fecal matter transplantation. Let's assume for a moment that at some point we thought that was a good idea. And that maybe we even thought that there are people out there who would buy it and da, da, da, da. And, let's actually assume for a moment that it was feasible and scientifically non stupid and non illegal Like, are we the right people to build that business? I don't know. Maybe, but I'm not an Olympian. I don't have a good microbiome. I don't even have the problem. Um, . The place where I think, um, it becomes really important that the person at least like, you know, involve themselves is maybe not at that initial stage. If all you're trying to do is figure out like, , are there some customers out there who might like this given thing but if what you're trying to do is actually find a business that you could build and invest yourself in, then that analysis, that work has to somewhere intersect with Your five P's or whatever it is, you know, somewhere, some mapping of yourself and where you might have fit over time. Because, um, I think that this is probably true generally, and definitely going to become increasingly true in the AI era is if you aren't an authentic kind of leader of representative of participant in a given community of customers, , you're going to be competed away by. The very low cost, a version of like kind of average knowledge and expertise that is available via the chat GPTs of the world.
[00:46:50] Jeremy Utley: You know, you're, you're kind of getting at it. Some, I was talking about with a, woman who runs an entrepreneurship program on the East coast, who's got some, you know, major funding to basically drive entrepreneurship in an academic context, we can talk about whether we like that or not separately, but one of the things that she and I were talking about is Ideas don't exist in the ether.
They don't exist independent of founders. And I kind of told her the way I think of it, it's almost like the core molecular structure is founder and idea, and it's inseparable, right? There's no such thing as an idea that goes without a founder. And what you're speaking to, which I love is you're reemphasizing. And if the founder doesn't care, then , it doesn't matter if the founder can't credibly claim or resonate with the problem in some way. And you might have some people who are maybe hypercapitalists who say, I can get behind any idea that works, but
[00:47:40] Nicholas Thorne: and there, by the way, there are enough of those out there. They're probably what's traditional, like what you might, um, pejoratively kind of referred to as like an MBA idea. You know, it's like someone who spends a bunch of time and derives academically. That some idea is a good idea. Uh, maybe the less pejorative version of it is that like, I'm sure that Jeff Bezos, you know, cares about the average American. Like, I think he's a deeply kind of customer obsessed, but in like a very abstracted intellectual way. And I think from like some very high level studying of how he got into the business of founding Amazon, that he actually really just was, he was like a hedge fund analyst. And understood how state tax, among other things, was working. And so moved to Washington so that he could ship goods to other places in the country, , in a sales tax, advantage manner, right? That's like a, that's an academic understanding of basically a market opportunity, which again, he obviously like, you know, like would that I could be Jeff Bezos in terms, even just in terms of his customer centricity. So this is not a person that doesn't necessarily run counter to his customer centricity, but it does suggest that maybe the part of the founding. insight into that business was not because he was so deeply passionate about helping his grandma find the book that she couldn't find at her local bookstore, right?
I think , we can intuit that there's a certain level of a kind of You know, mastermind chess player that was, at work there. There are definitely businesses that do this. Um, and there are definitely businesses that get started in different way, but, certainly, you know, we would, argue that again, if you're trying to create a set of design principles that are available to lots of people, , and that, , might give you a marginally better of success in the world that we're headed into, that having a really, you know, You know, tight relationship with who the customer is you're serving.
Um, and, reason to articulate to them while you're like, we see this actually on audos is a decent amount. Uh, someone will have an idea where the sale will, um, you know, be really nice. If my family's meal plan, , would be kind of like automatically created, every week. And maybe even that to have the shopping done for me and audos on audos, you could build an AI agent as, kind of MVP product offering that will definitely take a customer through quite nicely and quickly, the creation of a family meal plan that takes into account, you know, how many kids you have and how old they are and what their dietary preferences are, what equipment you have around your kitchen, what ingredients maybe you have in the fridge from last week that you could reuse, um, and, and maybe even in fact, like we can do a bunch of things to.
Plug in kind of a third party API so that you could even use the Instacart API to have it automatically purchased for you. And, I think certainly integrating that step, that API step would differentiate it from what someone might get from just chatting with ChatGPT. But the thing that would really make it different is if I, as the entrepreneur had like a really specific point of view about how you make a good family meal plan and not just rely on the average imprint that ChatGPT has taken of the blog posts that are all out there that answer the question of how do you make a.
Meal plan? And so the personality in the world that we're headed to really starts to kind of become important because it's so obvious, especially anyone who's used chat GPT, if you're just kind of like doing the equivalent of, uh, providing what, I could get if I just went to chat GPT and said, can you make me a meal plan?
[00:50:48] Jeremy Utley: You know, you're getting at something that I think Jenny Nicholson, I don't know if you listened to that conversation, but what Jenny talks about is you have to bring your humanity to the model. Cause it's kind of the only thing that makes you unique. And in a way, what you all have done with audos is enabling folks with an inkling to bring their humanity to the task of entrepreneurship or to the opportunity of entrepreneurship.
And you're demanding that people you're, you're actually disqualifying. If someone can't bring their humanity, then they're not. Going to be a donkey cord.
[00:51:17] Nicholas Thorne: Yeah. And I think that we, it remains to be seen if that's right, by the way, uh, it remains to be seen, but that's your point of view, but that's our point of view.
And that's what we are deeply hopeful about. We think it's a deeply hopeful message, but that we are on a mission to make possible and make a prolific, , because I think the alternative is horribly soul sucking is like that. You just do go to chat, GPT or wherever, and it provides you with whatever it's providing.
Effectively, everyone else wrapped up in a, , some sort of kind of personalization rapper. And, , I think that's a really sad version of it. I mean, we, we talk a lot about, we have some businesses that are getting built on audos that are in and around kind of sommeliers and how they, build an audience and then, and, uh, and a kind of private client business for themselves.
Um, If you go to chat GPT and you ask it to help you figure out like what type of wine you like and what bottle of wine you should buy next and all these different things, it'll do it. It'll do a perfectly average job.
[00:52:13] Jeremy Utley: You want to find something where the person vehemently disagrees with chat GPT is like off the shelf recommendation.
[00:52:19] Nicholas Thorne: Exactly. Well said
[00:52:20] Henrik Werdelin: one thing before we leave, as we're trying to make sure that people who listen to have something very concrete that they can, um, If you, we obviously have tried a lot of things, if somebody sitting out there and saying, Hey, I'd like to build something on top of AI, what is the thing that most people who just begin try to do that we've already tried that they just shouldn't?
[00:52:46] Nicholas Thorne: Uh, the thing I see, , mostly cause I've now seen it on Twitter a bunch is like is the classic chat GPT or like the new version of what's a quick way to make money with AI is that you go to, chat GPT, you say, Hey, Um, write me a video script for promoting fill in the blank generic, you know, , the air fryer that I found on Amazon, and then you make a video and you put it on YouTube and you get your affiliate link and you publish the video.
And even if you don't have much audience, like it eventually could pick up audience. And then if you do that a hundred times, because it's not that hard to have chat, TPT write a script, make a video, get the affiliate link, stick it in there. You, you run your own little like affiliate play. Um, I can tell you a bunch of reasons why I don't think that, you know, will work for many people.
I think they're probably quite obvious, uh, especially once like you imagine a world where everyone goes in and tries to do that. , but that's like one that you'll see getting tweeted about and people like posting their, an image of their, their Stripe page where their revenues are going up because they're making affiliate fees.
And I don't have any problem with affiliate fees. I just, among other things, don't think that's the way that you're going to, like, find a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment, uh, doing something over time. So that, that is a way that people are doing things. Um, I obviously think that what we offer is, , a better way.
It's certainly a better way to, you know, Doing something more sustaining, but if, if you don't want to do it with us and you just want to take the very practical step, I would, , simply say to, , a, what do you know, start with a person you could help tomorrow, probably yourself or like your family or your friends or your colleague, but pick one person and, try to conceive of a chat GPT style enabled automation , or kind of workflow. , change that you could start using yourself, um, and, , talk to chat GPT about how you would do that. So say to chat, I would like to, for example, change the way I do meal planning, I'd like to have my groceries ordered automatically and check you. And I want to use , the Instacart API to do the automatic shopping, and it will take you through like line by line, how you could start to do that.
And you'll have to do trial and error. It won't, know perfectly. And you'll try something. Um, That it's told you with utter confidence is going to work and it doesn't work. And instead of having it gaslight you, by the way, don't fall for that. Just go back and say, it's not working. Why is it not working?
Are you sure that we're doing right? But if you say, I want to change this part of how I act. Um, and then you ask to help you change that thing and integrate technology into it, you then have the kernel of something you can make available to other people. Um, which is extremely powerful at, at a baseline, you've at least learned more about how to use chat GPT. And secondly, and probably automated some workflow in your life that was otherwise kind of pernicious and painful.
[00:55:29] Jeremy Utley: Where for folks who listen to this and go, I've got an inkling is the best place to go, uh, Instagram and just start.
[00:55:37] Nicholas Thorne: I mean, if you go to audos. com, it'll, it'll redirect you to Instagram. Yeah, it, probably is for the moment where we have a number of different channels.
Um, I will, we'll give you an email address, that. That also that people who are listening to the show, you can put in the show notes, , could just send an email to and then it can have a conversation with, , the audos copilot, , the onboarding copilot via email. , and so there's a number of channel.
I mean, one of the things we're obsessed with is that, um, you know, businesses and entrepreneurs in the future will. communicate in a, make their service available kind of quote unquote headlessly. You know, if, if email is the most comfortable place for you, then you should just be able to email with it.
If DMing on Instagram makes sense because you saw an ad and you don't want to even leave your, , the comfort of your DMs, um, then we should do that. If you want to talk voice, we'll do that. But so bare minimum here, well, you can of course always DM us on, uh, on Instagram and the co pilot will help you there.
Uh, but it will also give the show a custom email that people can, uh, Send a note to, if they just want to strike up conversation in that form factor,
[00:56:36] Jeremy Utley: I love it. . .
[00:56:37] Henrik Werdelin: That's awesome.
.
[00:56:37] Henrik Werdelin: Jeremy, as this is a little bit. Of something that I have obviously thought a lot about, uh, why don't we start with you on what's your reflection after having heard Nick talk about how to use AI to be entrepreneurial?
[00:56:51] Jeremy Utley: I mean, I love it. As Nick mentioned at the top of the episode, I mean, he is one of the, he's on the short list of people I call to bounce ideas off of, to get a second opinion as a sounding board, as a, thought partner.
So I'm a huge fan of his thought process of y'all's thought process of what y'all have built. And it's super fun to get to showcase some of that. Um, and I hope that how insightful and compelling he is, is clear to our audience. I mean, just what an incredible human, what an incredible person, what incredible product that y'all have built.
Um, I hope that this episode can be a little bit of a catalyst to get more people to start to build, start, check it out. Um, in terms of some of the stuff that I took away, I, I really resonated with this idea of personality and the, you know, if you want to be a donkey corn, You actually have to care about the customer in a way that is far from kind of the cold calculus of a typical, you know, TAM oriented entrepreneur.
This is not about a top down kind of economic analysis, but rather a deep seated sense of passion and purpose around solving a real humans problem. Who's probably very close to you, if not you yourself. And I couldn't help. Of course, but be reminded of our conversation with Jenny Nicholson, where she talked about the importance of humanity, um, in interacting with AIs. And I think it's just, it's a beautiful kind of postscript to think about bringing humanity back to entrepreneurship. I thought it was, I think
[00:58:21] Henrik Werdelin: that's, I think that's very true. And I do think, um, that in a world where AI can do most things. Who do you want to buy stuff from? And so the authenticity and the authority of the person that you are willing to give your money or your data is very likely going to matter.
And so you need to feel passionate about serving somebody, , so that you can have that omnidirectional relationship that is relationship capital that allow them to trust you and want to buy more stuff from you.
[00:58:54] Jeremy Utley: , the other thing I, loved was just the, the idea of, the relationship capital, the idea of it being a defensible source of new product ideas moving forward. And we didn't get to this, but I kind of. Can help, but think about these audos power, donkey corns future. What else will they be doing in the future as they start to build and harvest for lack of a better word, some of that relationship capital, I can imagine all of these businesses morphing and evolving and really interesting and unexpected ways. It'd be fun to do, you know, an episode five years from now on, you know, , Do some kind of a spotlight of five donkey corns entrepreneurial journeys, because my hunch based on that conversation and based on the importance of relationship capital to you all in particular is their current point five years from now is going to be radically different than their starting point today.
[00:59:49] Henrik Werdelin: When I was listening to Nick and obviously when, Talking to Nicholas for many years, it did dawned on me that something as easy as I'd like to start a business is actually potentially pretty complicated because there's a lot of different aspects to it. And so as we've been trying to build this operating system for building companies from scratch, we've had to try to figure out how to simplify it and how do you take the best available approach and make that available.
And it is still kind of like that. Complicated when we talk about it now, like it is not just, you know, here's the five things you should do to make a good company. Like there are different elements and I think all of them comes back to their, uh, and I think you mentioned that they are like an electron.
They are hugely intertwined with who you are as a human. What is the type of person you'd like to serve? What is the type of business that you'd like to do? What is the business logic that, , works with your kind of, uh, values? All those different things, and those are not necessarily something that you can just put into a, here's a top list of how to do it.
That's something that you need to ask yourself, like, what is it that I want to spend the next many years doing?
[01:01:06] Jeremy Utley: You know, I think it's a cool kind of simple action item. A lot of times our action items are more call it chat, GPT oriented or AI oriented. I would suggest every listener of this episode.
Go to Instagram and find audos or, , you know, hit the email link that we'll drop in the show notes and just play through a conversation with the audos kind of onboarding conversation bot, because I think every single person owes it to themselves to ask the question, what would I start if I could start something?
And if I had the, expertise of a couple. , world class entrepreneurial thinkers like Henrik and Nicholas at my fingertips and literally ready to respond instantaneously. What kind of guidance might they give me and how might they help me get started? I think everybody owes that to themselves.
And I can't imagine the kinds of epiphanies and realizations that can occur in literally in the next 30 minutes. If somebody either hit the. Email link or go to Instagram. I, by the way, I've done it myself. It's super fun. And I wish that for each of our listeners that you would give it a try.
And then of course, if you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone, hit, like hit subscribe as always. Thanks for listening.
[01:02:19] Henrik Werdelin: Thank you so much.