TL;DR

This summary has been generated by AI based on the podcast transcript.

Create: Platform Migration & Infrastructure Overhaul

• Complete migration from Vercel to Cloudflare in 2+ weeks

  • Rebuilt entire SaaS infrastructure from scratch

  • Performance issues: workflows taking 10-15 minutes, cold start delays of 30s-1min on Vercel

  • Cost concerns with Vercel pricing model

• Cloudflare advantages

  • Faster performance, no cold start issues

  • Significantly cheaper than Vercel

  • V8 isolate limitations bypassed with new Cloudflare containers

• Built comprehensive platform (heyblg.com)

  • Substack/Shopify model: single platform, multiple specialized AI stores

  • Automated infrastructure for creating new AI products

  • Focus shifts to workflows only, platform handles everything else

New Product Launch: Andy SEO

• Launched andyseo.com - specialized AI for SEO workflows

• Core philosophy: “AI + deterministic workflows + right data sources”

• Five main workflows/products:

  1. Brand Strategy

     • Website analysis, competitor research, voice definition

     • 6-tab strategic document output

  2. Content Mapping

     • Topic pillars based on brand strategy

  3. Keyword Research

     • Domain authority assessment, relevance filtering

     • Live Google data integration

     • Content Classification (4 types):

       • Transactional (write it)

       • Defensible (strong opinion/original data)

       • AI summary optimized

       • Non-defensible (avoid - AI replaceable)

  4. Content Brief

  5. Article Generation

  6. Batch processing

• Results validation: Generated 90-100 articles for Andy itself, 30-40 for Isabella

  • Each article includes tone, internal linking, technical SEO elements

  • 2-3 hours total time investment per batch

Explore: Strategic Vision: Building Machines

• Leverage concept: same input, exponentially more output

• Three historical leverage methods:

  1. Innovation/Technology (wheel → code/AI)

  2. Human labor (employees)

  3. Capital (money/debt)

• Volume requirement for scale across all leverage types

• Focus shift: building machines that build machines

  • Andy creates content volume for other products

  • Distribution-focused products only (pausing Enzo development)

  • Volume of customers > product quality for business success

Level up: Next Product Pipeline

• Three new distribution-focused products (2-3 week timeline each):

  1. Social Media Content Creation

     • Audience/niche analysis, hook/CTA optimization

     • Human creativity + AI execution/testing

     • Target: 10 variations per day

  2. Video/Content Editing & Automation

     • Multiple format variations from single idea

     • Automated posting capabilities

  3. E-commerce Video Ads

     • AI-generated videos using new models

     • Testing phase → double-down strategy

     • Apply to existing 10k/month e-commerce business

• SEO foundation established but long-term game

  • Need faster volume generation for immediate results

  • Social media organic content identified as fastest path to volume

Transcript of the podcast

Hi, All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to BLG Thinking number three. Well, this episode is a bit late. Because we’ve — well, I’ve been doing quite a lot of things recently, so we are going to talk about this.

1. Create: From Vercel to Cloudflare

Let’s go as always with the first section which is the Create. Well, it’s been a little bit more than a month from the last episode. And, boy, there has been a lot of work. The big change was that I completely migrated from Vercel to Cloudflare, the entire platform. And actually, what I did was I rebuilt from the ground up, from scratch, the entire thing and my entire infrastructure for my SaaS and for my AI SaaS.

So that was quite a lot of work, but at the same time, it only took me, like, two weeks, a little bit more than two weeks to rebuild everything from scratch. So given that into account, that’s not too bad. I’d say so I obviously use Claude Code to do all of this, and, man, that was — that is pretty impressive.

Why migrate — performance and cost

So let’s go just quickly in the technical details. The first reason I wanted to do that was for the performance issue and the cost issue. So, basically, even though it was just at the very beginning, already I kinda saw two problems that I was going to have very quickly.

The first one is the price issue. I always knew going to Vercel that was going to be an issue. I didn’t expect it to be that soon. However, the big problem was really the performance issue.

The workflow concept

So to talk about this, my entire infrastructure is relying on one thing, which is the concept of workflow. So what does that mean?

That means, from the UI perspective and from the actual UX perspective, it is just an AI chat as if you were classic, something you can find pretty much everywhere nowadays in any kind of AI chat. The big difference, and this is where the whole vision, the product vision is going into place, is that I have what I call products inside, which are actually workflows.

So basically, there’s an AI chat where you can talk and just make some very easy tools like read and write and whatever. But the real deal is the ability to use that I have to create specific workflows. Let’s say I have a workflow that — this is for example for Isabella, my research worker — that can batch process multiple YouTube videos. And under the hood, what is happening is that:

1. I go and take the YouTube URL link that the user gave me

2. I then fetch in parallel all those videos

3. Get the transcript

4. Then make some AI calls to summarize the transcript and do whatever

5. And then create the output results

And this is just a very simple and easy workflow. Another one I have — by the way, this is something we’re gonna talk about, the new product, because there is a new product — is about making API calls to get some specific data. So then we are going to make first an AI LLM call to classify the data, and then a second one to output and show the result to the user.

But as you can see, a workflow basically contains multiple steps, and all that is hidden from the user, which is the value of the product. I basically design specific workflows that the user can use, and it feels like magic because you’re just talking to the AI at this point.

The technical bottleneck

The big technical issue here is that the workflow can take minutes. Like, for example, the new workflow that I have, which is about SEO — by the way, let’s go directly into that. We — I will talk about this a little bit later in a few minutes.

But, basically, this workflow can run for ten minutes if not fifteen. And this was going to be an issue from the start because Vercel doesn’t allow that. And so I tried multiple ways. Specifically, there’s a product that is called trigger.dev that allows me to do that to some extent. That was good, but there was a lot of issues in both cases, and there was a big problem which was the pricing — at some point it was going to cost me a lot of money.

So this is the first problem. The other option was to go the old way, so just to have a server and go to Render.com for example. That might have been an option but I don’t think for the long term that would have been much better, and that would have caused a lot of other issues as well.

Discovering Cloudflare

So I decided to go to Cloudflare. To be honest, I didn’t really know all the different services they were offering. I just knew from, you know, DDoS point of view, basically the CDN that they were offering, and they are known for that.

But, actually, it is genuinely very good, impressive, performant and cheap. The only downside is the V8 isolate problem, which is a performance issue, because this is a primitive of Cloudflare. But now with the new Cloudflare containers, you can easily bypass that and that is working pretty well. This is pretty much impressive.

So this was the big reason why I went. And this should have started just as a one day audit to see if that was worth it. Ended up into a two weeks complete recreation from the entire thing. But that was impressive. And now everything’s working out of Cloudflare. It is not only very reliable and working — from the performance, this is way faster.

Cold starts went from 30-60 seconds on Vercel to basically zero on Cloudflare.

Yeah, that was also — there was also a speed problem. So another problem that I had with Vercel is every time I was launching a workflow it might take thirty seconds to one minute to just launch it. So I had a real cold start issue that I do not have at all with Cloudflare, and this is very impressive. All of that with keeping everything serverless. At this age — impressive. That is just impressive.

So, anyway, without going too much into audio — too much technical — but that was very interesting because I had to learn every primitive of Cloudflare, how everything is working, how everything is connected to each other. And so on and so forth. So that was a big thing, and now it is working, man, just fine.

Building the platform — the BLG vision

And this is even better because I used that time to not only migrate the same thing, I used it to actually build a platform, an entire platform, and this is basically my platform vision.

So my vision about the product is that I’m building an infrastructure and that is the platform. So this is the entire UI and UX, and the big infrastructure about the workflows and stuff like that. This is one thing. But then the key here is that I can basically create any kind of specialized AI in pretty much any field. And the only thing left to do is to write and create the workflows themselves, which are the value.

But the entire things outside of the workflow — so the AI, the chat interface, the workspaces, the account, the settings pages, the even the drivable, which is a new concept — everything else is the same.

I’m creating specialized AI chats for very different use cases. This is really about giving AI a superpower through specific workflows.

So that is the whole vision of the product. And to do that, I built an entire platform which is way easier for me because this entire platform is working just like Substack. Basically, this is based on a mix of Substack and Shopify model where:

• Substack is the platform and then I can now create a new “store” where I put my content inside of it

• Shopify is the platform, but I can create a new store where I have my ecommerce store and I put my product inside of it

But the underlying tech is the same. This is pretty much the same thing. I have a platform which is, by the way, called heyblg.com. That domain is not going to be used a lot because you’re not going to be connected, at least not right now. This is just for me. And maybe one day, will open up to different people, but whatever.

So this is the actual platform. And then I can basically create the content itself directly and just focus on the workflows, and the rest is automatically done. That was the whole idea and Cloudflare is not only helping me do that — it’s actually very easy to do that with Cloudflare because there’s a lot of things that I can automate.

Introducing Andy — the SEO specialist

And on top of that, to prove my point and the whole point of the platform — to be able to create new specialized AI in different fields — the new one is the SEO product that I called Andy. The URL, it’s already online: andyseo.com. And here, this AI is specialized well in SEO. And Andy allows you to basically be your head of SEO and just do everything.

And that is very much the key here. The whole idea of workflows is that I can do a lot of stuff. This is not just asking AI to do something. It is mixing AI — and this is, by the way, the whole vision of the landing page, this is what it says:

AI is a technological shift. They say it will automate the work. Truth is you spend most of your time teaching the AI how to do the job. The model isn’t the bottleneck anymore. What’s missing is a deterministic workflow and access to the right data sources.

And this is exactly my vision. This is exactly what I’m going to do and sell.

Andy’s five workflows

So if we go back to Andy and to SEO, the workflows there are five workflows, which I call products.

1. Brand strategy

The first one is brand strategy. This workflow is going to ask you your website and some questions:

• The website URL, what you sell, the country you want to rank in

• Then the workflow will fetch all the main pages from the home page (product pages, pricing pages, whatever) and read all of that

• Then it will ask you three to eight questions focused on your SEO goals, your audiences, your target audience, your expertise, your hard opinions, and what you refuse to write about for SEO

• Then it will ask you for your voice — paste a few examples of your own writing

• Then automatically, based on this data, it will run real competitor search — running Google searches for the topics that you wanna own, and see who are your SEO competitors

• Then it will list the pages it read about the website for the internal linking

And based on all of this, it will write up a strategic document that understands your brand, your products, your audience, your tone, your expertise, your internal linking, your competitors.

So that is the first workflow or the first product. And that will be the base of everything. And as you can see, this is very step by step. This is very deterministic. There’s steps.

The real value of AI is not just about putting AI everywhere — it’s about mixing what we always knew about tech, deterministic workflows, with an intelligence layer on top.

So the output here is that you will have a very big document with six different tabs. That is going to be the base of everything else because here you really understand your brand, your audience, your voice, your opinion, your competitors, your site structure, and everything else.

2. Content map

Now the question is, what is the point of doing all this? The point of doing all this is to follow the step by step best practices to write SEO. The same way if you hire a SEO agency, the very first step is not about searching for your keywords. This is about understanding who you are. What is your brand? What is your product? Who you are? What do you believe in? What is your tone of voice and stuff like that?

Then we will create some content maps and different pillars that you wanna own on the topic. And there’s also a workflow for that.

3. Keyword research

Then we have the keyword research. So once you have done the brand strategy and the content map, you can run another workflow which is again very small, that will first of all:

• Read your brand strategy and know who you are (very important)

• Pick the scope and the topic you wanna talk about and write about

• Then the AI will be smart enough to understand your domain authority — are you a new domain and a new brand in the space? Are you already established? — to understand which keywords to focus and to rank for

Because the problem is — and this is very important in SEO — it is very technical and strategic at the same time. A lot of people just go to search for keywords and after that, they would try to write an article on this. But you have to understand if this is related and relevant for your brand and based on your authority.

4. Wide discovery

Step four, wide discovery. We’ll actually do keyword research by looking at real data — not just doing an LLM call at this point. We’re looking at:

• Live Google results

• People also ask

• Related searches

• Conversational queries

Then we’re gonna filter that. And here we’re using AI to filter the research to drop anything that doesn’t fit your audience and that doesn’t make any sense. Then we check the volume, the difficulty of the keywords, we check live data.

And finally, very important, we are going to define whether or not the keyword and the article is worth writing. Very important, especially in the AI SEO era, where, in my opinion, there are four different types of content:

1. Transactional — and you should write it. These are people that wanna buy your product. Definitely write it.

2. Defensible — this is the content you are going to win because you have a strong opinion, and AI will never be able to create and generate a strong opinion. So here you can win, on depth, opinion, on original data.

3. Defensible with AI summary — this is a bit different. You wanna write a topic, but not for human. You wanna write this topic for your content to be quoted inside the AI summary, instead of clicked from below it. Very important.

4. Non-defensible — maybe that subject will be easily replaced with a generic AI, that AI can write itself.

A big part of Andy is that Andy is smart enough to tell you what to write and what to not write.

5. Brief and article writing

So this is just like if you hired a SEO agency, except here, this is the AI that is doing all the work. From understanding your brand, researching the keyword, doing the content brief for an article, and finally writing the article. And you also have the batch mode that can generate the briefs and the articles by themselves.

The proof — using Andy on itself

And, well, again, from the technical point of view, it only took me almost two weeks with the marketing website and stuff like that, but it only took me one week to focus on the actual workflows. And the workflows are the core idea of what I’m selling. And all the rest is already done by the platform. And that is going to be impressive because now I’m going to be able to create multiple specialized AIs very fast.

And finally, just to end up this Create part, I’ve been able to use Andy for my own product because I’ve used Andy on Andy itself to create the blog and it generated me about 90 to 100 articles. And this is very important, each has my tone of voice and understood the actual brand. So in this case, that was Andy itself, which was kind of funny.

It searched the right content, the right JSON MD from the technical point of view. It wrote the article with the H1, H2, whatever, the internal linking, the AEO, the pillar contents, everything else. So that is very impressive that I’ve been able to automate the entire thing while keeping the quality and the value very high. And, again, it took me about a few hours to do that.

And you can even go further if you have your own documents — you can give everything to Andy and it will use that to really create content from your expertise, and that is going to be a very big difference.

I also used the same for hey Isabella. So I just used Andy to create blog articles for Isabella on a very different subject. And turns out it was working just fine. It created about 30 to 40 articles, each based on a very specific keyword, based on the strategy, based on different pillars and internal linking. Boom. Everything in about two to three hours to do all of that.

So that is the new product.

2. Explore: Building a machine

Now we are going to move on to the second part. We are going to talk about building a machine. Well, and this is really going to be my focus because I guess this is every engineer’s dream — to build a machine that is working for you 24/7.

And there’s a lot to talk about here because this is really my view and my vision with AI: that you can delegate a lot of things with AI without sacrificing the quality of content. That is going to be very much the key and very much important.

AI can replace the execution part of the work. However, for creativity and creation, the human is where it just makes so much more sense.

And this is why, if we go back to Andy, a big part of the quality of the content is you. What do you believe? What is your opinion? What is your product? How do you write? Because if you ask the AI to write instead of you, that is not going to work. And that is going to create generic results. That is why the focus on Andy is to first understand you — the input is still you — but then to leverage and scale that.

The three forms of leverage

So let’s go back to the idea of building a machine. What does that mean? I think it all comes down to the idea of leverage, which means to use the same amount of force but to have way more power.

And if we think about this in the past, in the history, this has been done — and which is still done — by three different ways: innovation, human, and capital.

1. Innovation / Tech

So what does that mean? Let’s go back to leverage. So it’s having basically more output with the same input. How do you do this? You do this by leveraging something. In my opinion, the best example is the wheel. The wheel is to some extent tech. It’s a technology. It’s an innovation. That allows you with the same amount of effort to do way more output than without it.

So that was one way of using leverage. And we see this nowadays with tech and innovation. However, today, it is by code and AI and online. There are different ways, but this is mainly what we’re gonna talk about.

2. Human labor

The second way is obviously human. So this has been done in the past with slaves. But if you think about this, is pretty much the same thing nowadays with employees, except they may have a little bit more rights. To the point that you are using other people’s labor to get something out of production. If you think about a company, this is pretty much the same thing. You have a bunch of people working for you and you have, with the same input of yourself, more output thanks to other people’s labor.

3. Capital

And the third way is obviously the capital. The money. Well, if you already have the money yourself or if you can borrow money and be in debt, well, you can use that to leverage and have more output than you would do alone.

Scale, volume, and the machine

So these are the three ways. And that combines into the idea of building a machine that will work for you instead of you working directly.

And if we think about this a little bit more, that is the idea of scale, and scale is the idea of volume. Like, you need some volume directly or indirectly.

So what does that mean? That means you need to accumulate a volume of resources in order to scale, in order to have leverage, in order to build something:

• Real estate — you need to have some volume of money to access the real estate and then maybe do rental and stuff like that

• Product and entrepreneurship — you need some volume of clients to really have something working for you

It all comes down to the idea of building a machine for you, and the big difference is all about the volume.

Building machines to build machines

And if we go back to this, for my vision and what I wanna do here, I want to build machines for myself. That work for me, that basically make money for me. And I will do this by building machines to build machines.

That does make a lot of sense, but this is basically what I’ve been doing with Andy. I’ve built a machine that is able to create volume. So in this case, this is SEO articles for my other machines. Do you see the logic?

And now — and this is going to be the big change here — I’m going to stop focusing, at least right now, on products that are not directly linked to distribution. So I had another product, hey enzo, which is still there and still working, but I’m not going to focus on it too much at least right now because the priority is not based on distribution.

Distribution is everything

And the goal here, if you’re thinking about volume — what is the difference between a $100 a year business and a $1,000,000 a year business? It is not that much the product. You may have the best product in the world — if you do not have customers, it doesn’t work.

The big difference is the volume of customers you have. It is all about the distribution. Always.

We always come to that conclusion. So this is why — and this is, again, all about volume, all about scale, all about leverage, all about building a machine. So now, I really need to focus on using my leverage, using my infrastructure, using my platform and my products to build machines to build machines.

So I’m going to focus on creating new products that will automate the distribution work. And if I can do this, that would basically mean I’ve achieved distribution, and I can do this for pretty much any kind of business. That is going to be the new focus.

3. Level Up: automating distribution

Which makes the transition for the third and final step, Level Up. What is going to be the new thing that I wanna do? Well, as always, as I’ve said before, my new focus is going to be on building new products with the idea of using those products, using AI, using automation, code, using social media, and using algorithms to build a machine that will build distribution for me.

So that was the first step with Andy and SEO. I think SEO is a very good start. It is a foundation. That allows you to have a clean foundation for your website. However, especially SEO, this is not magic. You cannot go all crazy on SEO and just rely on SEO, especially in the beginning, if you have no domain authority. So you can do backlinks. You can do that kind of things. But even if you do that, that will be very long. That will take a lot of time. This is not something you can go fast on.

So I think you can scale very good with SEO, but SEO is really about the authority and the older you are — at least the longer you exist in the eyes of Google — the better you are. So this is very a long term game.

Three new products to crack distribution

This is why next, I’m thinking about doing three new products to really focus on creating volume. These are going to be about content creation, so social media organic content, which I think is going to be the key here because you can really go fast. You can achieve an amount of volume very fast.

I need to really learn more about this. But I think about outliers, about understanding the hooks, the CTAs, and obviously about two phases when you’re doing this:

• Testing phase — when you have to test multiple formats

• Double down phase — when something just works

But as always, this is all about volume. This is all about testing a lot of different things. This is all about consistency as well to double down.

Product 1 — Content ideation

Well, what if you can automate a lot of that work? What if you can create a content product, a machine, that will allow you to analyze your niche, your audience, and what is the kind of content they consume?

And then this is very important. This is where the machine and the AI is very good. However, when it comes to having the idea — this is where the human has to be very good. The AI might give you some ideas, but it will never be able to be creative. This is where the human has to be, and you have to combine the different hook formats and whatever with your unique idea. This is how you are going to be able to differentiate yourself.

Product 2 — Editing automation

Then the second product is all about editing. Because this is basically just like ads — if you’re doing ads, you know that the content might be the same, but you wanna do a lot of different variations on different hooks. And what if you can automate all of that? Well, I think we can do that. Because the idea is human, but the actual edits can be automated.

That would be the second product. And, obviously, then inside that product, we want to do something that can post automatically for us.

And, again, who do you think is gonna win? Someone that is able to have a workflow and a machine that generates 10 a day.

The key here is: can I keep the quantity high while keeping the creativity human?

Very, very important. Because again, the creativity should not be from the AI. Absolutely not. The creativity should be from the human.

So my dream here — and I think this can be done in one or two weeks — I wanna have an AI that when I say, “Okay, here’s my idea,” that AI will analyze all the different outliers and content of my specific audience and give me more ideas. So this is the brainstorming step. Then I would say, “Okay, this is my script. This is what I wanna test. And this is the core value of my content.” Then I film it myself.

So there’s a lot of parts that are still very human and manual, and that’s fine. This is about optimizing what the AI and tech is good at and what the human is good at:

• Human — being creative

• AI and tech — automating and analyzing a large amount of data and volume

Once you have that script, that idea — well, you can test a lot of different things. Again, this is all about marketing. It is audience. What is your audience? What is your message? So that is very much linked to human and creativity. But once you have your message, you can test a lot of different formats of hooks, of CTAs, and just test. And this is volume. At the end of the day, this is volume, and that can be automated.

But again, I have to be smart here to create something that does not reduce the quality of content. And this is why the creativity has to be human.

Product 3 — Ecommerce ads

Okay, those are the two new products I wanna create. The third one, which is going to be a little bit similar, but this time is going to be for ecommerce, for ads.

Again, remember I have an ecommerce business on the side that is making almost 10k a month. And we need to double that down. And, again, this is very important — this is what I understood about this.

What is the difference between two years ago when this business was making 2k a month and now it’s making 10k a month? The product has not changed. Okay, the website has changed. So it’s a little bit better. What has changed as well is the volume. Now we have way more people that discover us through SEO. It’s all about distribution, volume and distribution.

This is why I’m so obsessed about distribution because I know this is the key. I just need to crack it. And when it comes down to ecommerce, what I want to do is go a little bit more into AI generated videos. There are new models that have been coming out lately, and if I combine those new models with — as I’ve said — the logic and the workflows of understanding your audience, understanding the message, and just doing a lot of testing here to test what works and what doesn’t and then double down on what works.

And what if you can do that at scale? Just automate the entire thing, and again, building a machine that will be able to build machines. That is going to be the next focus for the next few weeks. I think I would be able to do that in two to three weeks. So let’s see how that turns out.

And if I can do this and if I can crack distribution, well, pretty much everything else is going to go up from there because, as I said, the product is there. The platform is there, the infrastructure is there. I really do believe there is a lot of value into the product. But again, product is one thing — the most important thing is distribution. So let’s go figure that out.

Mood

And for the final word of that — what is the music of the day? Well, that’s been Logic — “Intro”. I’ve been a big fan of Logic and NF, you know, it’s been a few years now. And this song, I didn’t know — I just discovered it a few weeks ago. This is very good and that is really much my type of song. This is really much what I like to listen to.

And I think there’s two kinds of people:

• Those who listen to songs and music based on the vibes

• Those who listen based on the lyrics

I am definitely on the second type of people.

So, anyway, this is it for BLG Thinking, episode number three. I hope you have a good day, and we’ll see you later.

TL;DR

This summary has been generated by AI based on the podcast transcript.

Intro: Isabella SaaS Positioning & Product Focus

• Repositioned Isabella from multi-purpose content tool to specialized AI summarizer

  • Core value prop: “consume more content in less time and remember everything”

  • Target audience: people following 12+ podcasts, 30+ Instagram accounts, 40+ YouTube videos

  • Problem solved: forgetting 90% of content within 48 hours

• Product workflow: paste content → get structured summary with key takeaways → auto-save for search/recall

  • Goal: skip noise, keep knowledge in one place

  • Optimization work completed on product deliverables

Create: Distribution & Marketing Strategy

• Three-constraint goal: get attention at scale, fast, and free/low-cost

• Four-part distribution plan:

  1. Organic social media (primary focus)

     • Short-form content emphasis

     • Belief: creators will become entrepreneurs, brands will shift from paid ads to creator ecosystems

     • Can achieve scale quickly with creativity + business understanding

  2. SEO (secondary focus)

     • Classic SEO + GEO (AI search optimization)

     • Advantage: retention of scale once achieved (can last years)

     • Limitation: slow (6-12 months), difficult for new domains to compete with established sites

  3. YouTube SEO (tertiary)

     • Hybrid approach combining social media + SEO on YouTube platform

  4. Branding integration

     • Focus on triggering positive emotions, having strong opinions

     • Isabella positioning: curation tool, not replacement for original content

Explore: Marketing Research & Framework

• Core marketing principle:

  • Where

  • Who

  • What

• Five categories where people spend attention online:

  1. Search platforms (Google, Amazon, ChatGPT)

  2. Social media (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn)

  3. Owned audiences (newsletters, private communities)

  4. Other platforms (Spotify, App Store, Airbnb)

  5. Private communications (email, DMs)

• Two approaches to get attention:

  • Doing the work yourself (you or the company): paid ads, content creation, sales/outreach

  • Using others: existing customers/product exposure, user-generated content, affiliations

Level up: Personal Brand Launch Partnership & Next Steps

• Signed up for Personal Brand Launch (PBL) service with Ava

  • 3-month program starting last Friday

  • Focus: short-form social media content creation around Isabella

• Planning to create AI tool for content research:

  • Analyze top TikTok/Instagram content in specific niches

  • Extract hooks, content structure, CTAs from outliers

  • Provide research foundation for human creativity

• Current revenue: $0 (expected for 2-week-old product)

Transcript of the Podcast Episode

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to BLJ Thinking. So this is the second episode here, I’m documenting my SaaS journey. So, again, we’re just getting started. Revenue is at $0 right now, which is kinda expected. The product was just finished about one, two weeks ago, and now this is really about starting to get the focus on distribution and marketing.

So well, the last couple of days, I’ve been quite busy doing a lot of research on distribution and marketing. Well, just before that, let’s keep in the flow and let’s introduce quickly what I’m going to discuss in this episode.

As always, we’re gonna keep the create/explore/level up format and at the end, the mood for the music of the week.

In this episode:

• Create — I’m going to talk about what I’ve done for my SaaS. This episode is a lot about research. I did do some changes about the product, but this is really optimization more than anything else.

• Explore — This is really where I dive deep into one subject that I think is interesting. Today, it is going to be about marketing and especially about distribution and how it is very simple yet very hard.

• Level Up — I’m going to talk about a partnership I’ve just signed up for.

1. Create: Positioning Isabella

So as I said this week, I’ve done a lot of research and I’ve read and consumed a lot of contents on marketing, distribution, growth, and you name it. Now before that, I did do some positioning work on Isabella, my product.

https://www.heyisabella.ai/

So just to quickly sum up, Isabella is my first SaaS. This is a specialized AI about summarizing contents so that you can — I’m literally going to go on the website and read you the H1 — you can consume more content in less time and remember everything.

I’ve done a lot of positioning work here because first, a week ago, Isabella was a lot about, well, not only summarizing content from social media but also analyzing it — you know, the hook, the content, CTAs. So that was really about content creation at the same time. So I was trying to make the product do different things, which is not really the product vision overall.

The goal here is to have one specific AI that does one specific job and does it very well. That’s the goal.

So this is why I’ve worked a lot on the marketing website of Isabella to position the product as, yeah, a second brain to some extent. That means that your target audience is going to follow 12 podcasts and a lot of 30 Instagram pros and you probably have 40 plus YouTube videos that you need to watch later. Truth is you will forget most of it in the next forty eight hours after watching, and this is where Isabella is going to help you.

Because now you can just paste any content, ask her to summarize it, get a structured summary with the key takeaways, and then everything is saved automatically so that you can search and record it later. That means you can skip the noise and keep the knowledge — everything at the same place.

So this is really the goal of Isabella. And actually that is a problem I had in the first place. I am consuming a lot of content on a lot of different subjects, whether it is marketing, but it might be entrepreneurship, business, design, code, whatever. So there’s a lot of content out there, and I think we live in an era where it’s pretty great to have access to all that kind of information, but at the same time, it’s too much.

There’s a lot of content. And I think we can easily spend more time consuming content instead of taking action. And even if we do consume the content, which already takes a lot of time, most of the time we just forget the key takeaways that will really move the needle in our case. So that’s the why behind Isabella.

Research Done This Week

So that is what I’ve been doing this week. A lot of work on positioning. I’ve also optimized the product and vision with the deliverables, but this is a bit too product-focused to talk about extensively here, so I’m going to skip that part.

Now the real work has really been about consuming content. And I did use Isabella a lot for that, actually. A lot of research from:

• Books — like I said last week, Purple Cow, but also Hitmakers, which was a book I read a couple years ago, but that was great to have some kind of refresher

• A lot of articles from Reforge, which is specialized in growth and startup in the startup world

• A book on growth marketing

• Lenny’s Newsletter

• I’ve also spent quite some time analyzing “where did you hear about us” sections in multiple different products and services

• Alex Hormozi — obviously

• NFX Network Effect — that was a very good finding during my research

Every time I sign up to a product and they ask me where did I hear about them and their product, I just take a screenshot, and I have a massive folder with, I don’t know, hundreds of screenshots about that. And I think this is very interesting to just kind of reverse engineer what they’ve done and, well, what is their marketing strategy, and how do people hear about them.

The Plan

And finally, all that research ended up with me doing my plan for my SaaS — and my different SaaS, really. So Isabella is only going to be the first one. I can already have a second one that is waiting to be reviewed and validated. And I also have a lot of different ideas and I can quickly create new specialized AI SaaS.

So the plan — before explaining the actual plan, what is the goal? The goal, in my case, is really more than just making it and getting users and getting distribution and, you know, making the SaaS and the product grow. It’s a lot more about understanding and having some kind of process and workflow that I can repeat multiple times for multiple products, but actually for multiple brands.

Here’s the goal: get people’s attention, around one niche, one product. At scale. Fast. Free/low-cost

That is ambitious. Let’s be clear about this. Because what I want — get people’s attention, around one product — but with three constraints:

1. At scale

2. Fast

3. Free — at least does not require a lot of money

Part 1 of the Plan — Organic Social Media

The first one is going to be organic social media. Especially, I’m going to focus on short form content.

Not only that, but I also want to understand the process. Here’s my view — and this is something I’m going to talk a little bit more about in the explore part of this episode. But I think social media, especially organic social media — and this is what I said I think in the last episode — is really something that is going to be more and more important.

Because currently, the state of social media is that it’s mainly influencers and mainly content creators. So this is the creator economy. I do believe — and this is something we kinda see at a really top level, this is definitely not the norm — I believe in the next couple of years, if not decade, that is going to be the main way for the best and the worst, that people are going to get their attention. And they are not only going to learn and learn the news and stuff like that, which is kinda already the case, but also make new purchases.

And I think brands are going to really pivot from a paid strategy to an ecosystem strategy. Because most brands, especially big ones, especially if you have some kind of VC funding, what you basically are doing is you are going to spend a lot of money on ads.

Now what is going to happen is I think it’s going to be more broad. So you’re still going to have that paid part, but then you are going to have some kind of sponsoring of existing influencers, some kind of affiliation sponsoring. But what I think is going to be more and more the case is that we are going to have some kind of long-term collaboration between one or multiple creators and a brand. So this is not just about sponsoring. That’s the real difference — I think the creator is going to have a specific place and importance inside the company. I think MKBHD has something like that, but this is going to be more and more the case.

That is one way. So we’re starting from the brand, and a brand is going to use creators and the overall ecosystem of social media. But there’s also another path — which is something we kinda see and are going to see more and more, especially as with AI the cost of creating and building a product in a company is going to be lower and lower and lower — where creators themselves are going to turn into real entrepreneurs. And real, you know, business people that are going to create their own brands and companies.

This is to some extent already the case, but really not exactly. Except if you are going to be at the top level — but these people have a whole team behind them. What I think we’re gonna see is creators building a product and using and then creating an audience around that. And then, well, you can easily turn that into a brand, do more paid affiliation with other creators. But I think that is going to be more and more important, especially online.

So all that to say, the first part of my plan is organic social media. Especially right now I’m going to focus on short form content.

Now let’s check against my three constraints:

• Scale — I can scale pretty fast to a pretty large audience with organic social media. Obviously, there’s a ceiling at some point. This is where you’ll need to either go with other people’s audience — whether it is a collaboration, a sponsoring, affiliation, whatever — or go with paid. But the ceiling is pretty high if I’m being honest. And you can break that ceiling by adding more and more distribution.

• Fast — I think this is the real deal of organic social media. If you do this right — and I think this is going to be the very complicated part — you can go and achieve a level of distribution and a scale that is pretty fast. Obviously, this requires a lot of work and a lot of understanding that I do not have right now about how it works. And also — and I think I do have that — you have to be fucking creative. I think at the end of the day, content creation comes down to creation, which comes down to being creative. And I think you can apply the power law of media to this. When you look at media, there’s always a power law — the top 1% of media is going to be watched by a lot of people, and then it’s just going to have a long tail. A very minority of media — whether that’s social media, music, movies — is going to be a big hit, and then there’s a long tail. The difference is almost impossible to predict. There’s a lot of luck involved, there’s a lot of timing involved, but there’s also, at the end of the day, a question of talent and creativity. And I think if you can combine the creative talent part and the business, quote unquote — the marketing and the understanding of the game — you can win this, and you can win it quickly and for the long term. Now that is my bet. Not sure if I’m going to make it.

• Free — Organic social media is, to some extent, free. It does not require a lot of money to get started.

Part 2 of the Plan — SEO

The second part of my plan is going to be SEO. So same idea, this time on Google search. And when I say SEO, I’m talking about SEO, but also GEO, which is the new thing with AI — even though everybody is talking like they know how it works. Truth is nobody knows how it works. So right now, the best bet is just to do classic SEO but for maybe more question-type search, instead of keyword search, that is mainly the only difference. Until one of the big AI players publishes some kind of guidelines here. Right now, everybody is trying to figure it out.

But SEO is very interesting as well because it’s free. It can scale. And I’ve done SEO in the past — if you want the full workflow, I started my career as a freelance web designer, working for clients and for companies to do their websites. And then I switched and I started an ecommerce. That ecommerce is still a thing. It’s a niche thing. It’s making about 10k a month — again, this is not revenue flexing by any means. We have about a 50-55% margin. So that’s a small thing. You can easily operate it solo, so that’s kinda cool. And the main distribution channel here is SEO. So I do have some kind of experience here.

Now let’s check SEO against my three constraints:

• Scale — SEO can scale. Yes. And I think to some extent, the one thing that SEO does better than social media is the retention of scale. That means once you are in the top one, top two place in Google for keywords, that can last for years. Obviously it’s very difficult to get there in the first place. Sure. But you can stay here for years without having to do anything. And this is something I kinda see with my ecommerce site. I’ve been really focused on SEO for about three months — I did a big revamp of the SEO strategy for three months. And then it just keeps working. That is pretty much impressive.

• Fast — Absolutely not. SEO is long. This is going to take at least three months, and three months is pretty optimistic. In reality, it’s gonna take six months. It might even go to twelve.

• Free — Yes. And I think this is even better than social media because you literally only have to write text at the end of the day.

However, there’s something important to say about SEO — and this is quite the big difference between SEO and social media — you cannot blow up on SEO the same way you could on social media. Like, even if you write the best content ever created on a single keyword subject, you will not be top one immediately. You might be on page one pretty quickly if you do your job right, but that is already complicated.

Why? Because SEO is not only about writing for the right keywords — which is obviously very important — but also about how difficult that keyword is. And the more difficult it is, the more it’s not just about how good your content is, but how trustworthy your brand and your domain is for Google. And if you’re just getting started, you are not trusted. Because the whole idea of being trustworthy to Google is:

1. To have a lot of traffic — but how are you supposed to have a lot of traffic if you’re not trustworthy and Google doesn’t send you traffic?

2. Having a lot of backlinks from trusted sites — but again, how do you achieve that?

And for example, my ecommerce example — we are about 15, maybe 20 thousand traffic right now, depending on which platform you’re looking at. The numbers don’t really mean anything in isolation — if you’re watching on Shopify, if you’re watching on Google Search Console, if you’re watching on SEMrush, it gives you something completely different. But we’re around that range.

The best competitors in our niche can achieve about 40 to maybe 60,000 — again depending on the actual website and platform you’re looking at. So we’re still three times less than the leader in our niche. And to get there, it’s almost impossible if we rely only on SEO. Because we cannot compete with them — we are in the niche since two years, and they have been in the niche for more than twenty years. We just can’t compete if we’re only playing by SEO rules.

So that is why — and I think this is the best thing about social media — you can achieve a level of trust very fast. Again, that seems very complicated. That requires a lot of creativity. But if it does work, that can also feed the actual SEO and bring you way more results in SEO than you could actually get just by focusing on SEO itself.

Part 3 of the Plan — YouTube SEO

The third one is going to be some kind of mix — YouTube SEO. So this is going to be about creating YouTube content but focused on SEO. I’m not going to extend on that, but this is pretty much trying to do both social media and SEO on YouTube. So that’s going to be interesting. There’s a lot of good ideas here.

Even though that is not going to be my main focus. My main focus is going to be, in order:

1. Organic social media

2. SEO

3. YouTube SEO

Part 4 of the Plan — Branding

And finally, a fourth part of the plan is branding.

Now branding — there’s a lot of things about what is branding, what is not branding. But from my understanding, which might be wrong, branding is about triggering positive emotions to your ideal audience. And by that, once you trigger those emotions, that is going to create some kind of connection between your brand, your product, and your ideal audience and that emotion. Basically, you wanna make your brand and your product cool in the mind of your ideal audience so that you can charge extra. And have some kind of branding advantage.

But okay, that is all theory. How do you do this in practice? In practice, that is done through media. I don’t see how you can actually do branding with SEO itself. Sure, some might argue that you can do this by creating some kind of tone inside the content, which is true. And then you can create a newsletter, which will create a tone, which is also true. I think that might work. But that is not going to be as powerful as actual content from media. And this is done through two ways:

1. Paid media

2. Organic media

So that is going to be interesting how I can put more branding into my contents, into my SEO. And in my case, branding is really going to be about having opinions — about how you should, yeah, really about having a way, an opinion, about how and why you should do things a certain way.

What does that mean? I mean, in the case of Isabella, the goal of the product is not to replace the content by just stopping watching it and instead summarizing. The goal of Isabella is really to — well, take a lot of content you wanna watch, summarize a lot of it because you can bulk-summarize an entire YouTube playlist with 45 YouTube videos, whatever. Read each summary and quickly read the key takeaways. And then if there’s one key takeaway and you’re like, okay, that is interesting, that is very much what I need right now in my current situation — then watch the original thing.

This is more like a curation than it is about replacing. It’s really about curating the content you wanna watch and having some kind of priority order.

So I’m going to try to put a lot of branding inside my contents, my SEO. And yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Part 2 — Explore: Marketing Is Very Simple, Yet Very Hard

So I’ve talked a lot longer than expected, but that is fine. Let’s move on to the second part, which is explore.

In today’s explore part, we are going to talk yet again about marketing. And here’s what I’ve learned about marketing this couple of last years and especially the last couple of days, where I tried to do a lot of research.

Marketing is very simple. Yet very hard. It is very simple to understand. It is very hard to actually execute on it.

At the end of the day, I think there are two very good definitions of marketing that I like.

The WWW Framework

The first one, which is the easier to remember, is the W W W:

• What — What is your offer? Your product, your service, your brand.

• Who — Who is your ideal audience, your ideal customer, your target audience?

• Where — Where do they spend their time? Where are they spending their attention?

Once you figure out those three things, you have understood marketing.

The CTVP Framework

Another version of that, which is pretty much the same thing, is the CTVP:

• Channel — The where. What is the marketing channel where they spend their time?

• Target — The target audience.

• Value Proposition — Your offer, your product, and the messaging.

Where Do People Spend Their Attention?

Now once you understand that, well, let’s talk about what is, in my opinion, the most important — the where. Because where do people spend their time and where do people spend their attention?

Let’s remove the online factor here and let’s go back a couple of decades ago. There was no TV, no internet, no nothing, no radio, no nothing. Okay. Where do people spend their time? On the street. In — this is why at the time, if you wanted to do marketing, what you would usually do is have some kind of billboard. Because this is where most people spent their time. Going to work, going to the bar, whatever. They were on the street.

Now let’s go back to 2026 and let’s focus only on online. There are only a few places where a massive amount of people spend their attention. I want to emphasize the idea of massive amount of people. Because sure, we can argue that one way to get your ideal audience’s attention is to go on a forum, on a community, on an event, or something like that, which might work. But you do not have the scale factor.

That means if you wanna reach a massive amount of people, you wanna go to places where a massive amount of people spend their attention. And turns out there’s not a lot of places. There’s only a few places really. So I’ve tried to categorize them.

Category 1 — Search Platforms

So obviously when we’re talking about search platforms, we are thinking about Google. Yes. That is one. But we also think about Amazon. That is another search platform. And obviously the new one — AI chatbots, so ChatGPT, Claude, and stuff like that. But that is the same category. You are searching for something, whether it is information on Google, or on ChatGPT, whether it is a product on Amazon. We could also technically add YouTube as well.

Category 2 — Social Media Platforms

Here, anything from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts — which is kinda different, kinda the same platform, kinda different. Even LinkedIn to some extent, Twitter, and so on and so forth.

The key difference here is you wanna have — this is the second category where people spend their time online. The big difference is that here, they are going on that platform with the intent of mainly entertainment. They are not going with a specific search in mind.

Category 3 — Owned Audience

Now owned audiences are anything that a specific group of people — whether it is an individual, a creator, a company, whatever — has been able to capture from most of the time another platform, and just keep them somewhere. So that might be, most of the time, a newsletter. But also it might be a private group community. Here we’re starting to lose the scale aspect, but this is still interesting, and depending on the kind of audience, that might be big.

Category 4 — Platforms Broadly

So these are platforms that most of the time do not fit any other previous category. We are talking about Spotify. Technically it might be — it’s not really a social media, but pretty much anybody can put content out there. But you don’t have that algorithm factor. So kinda weird, this is where I put it. That might also be Airbnb — to some extent, there’s a vast amount of people here. That might also be the App Store or the Play Store. If you are doing some kind of mobile application, you wanna be here.

Category 5 — Private Communications

This is more like sales and outreach. So email, DMs, whatever. But again, if you think about this, most of the time DMs are linked to a social media platform.

The only exception I’d say is the paid aspect. Most of the time, paid is going to be on one specific platform. If you’re doing Google Ads, you are going to pay to get the attention of people on an existing platform — in that case, Google. If you’re doing Meta Ads, you are going to pay for getting people’s attention from Instagram and Facebook. The only exception to that would be display ads — here, this is where you might have ads inside a video game or mobile game or something like that. So this is a bit broader and does not fit any category.

But except that exception, I do think — and again, correct me if I’m wrong — that these are the only places online where there’s a massive amount of people spending their time and attention.

So if you want to sell something — and by the way, I think this is why I’m fascinated by this. Because this works for anything. Sure, it works for a business, this is what I’m trying to do. But that works if you are trying to sell — what if you are an artist and you wanna sell and get eyes on your music? You are going to be faced with the same problem. What if you are trying to sell your movie? Same problem. What if you are trying to sell a community, or just something local like a local gym? Same problem.

At the end of the day, you wanna get people’s attention.

The Only Ways to Get People’s Attention at Scale

I’m going to end the explore part on this. If you wanna get people’s attention at scale, here are the only few ways you can do it. I’ve divided this into two parts.

Part A — What you can do yourself (or the company):

1. Paid — Search ads, social ads, sponsoring, influencer marketing, affiliates, whatever.

2. Content — SEO, GEO, organic social media.

3. Sales and outbound — Cold email, cold DMs, outreach.

Those are the only three ways you can do that yourself.

Part B — Using other people to get your ideal customer’s attention:

The first way is to use your existing customers / product:

• Product exposure — The classic example is AirPods. Apple is using their existing customer base and every person that is buying AirPods and using them when walking or going anywhere, people will see around them that you have AirPods. So this is product exposure.

• Product virality — What they usually call product virality is product usage. By the idea of using the product, you ask people and invite more people to use the product and become users. The Slack example is a very good one. If you are using Slack, you wanna onboard your whole team on it. So you, as the customer, by using the product, will invite more users to the product.

• User Generated Content — I think this is very interesting even though not a lot of people are talking about it. Basically, you want to incite people by different means to create content around your product. Customers are going to create content around your product because of what they’ve been able to do with it. Maybe it’s because it’s amazing, maybe because it is technologically impressive, maybe it’s to flex, maybe there’s no reason — but you wanna find a way.

The second way is affiliation:

• Referral programs — Basically, you wanna incite people, most of the time with money, to talk about your product. Tesla has been known for doing that in the very early stages.

• Sponsoring — You just wanna sponsor creators and stuff like that.

And this, in my opinion — which again I might be wrong, but I think I’ve done a lot of research on the topic — are the only really ways to get people’s attention online at scale.

Part 3 — Level Up: Personal Brand Launch

Well, that moves me on to the final part of this episode, which is level up.

So in level up, I’m talking about something I’ve learned and grown from in the last week. And that week, I signed up for the Personal Brand Launch — PBL — serviced by Ava on social media.

Basically, they are going to help me over the next three months to create short form content on social media, to create a brand and to build around the product. I’m very interested to see — it’s already started, last Friday if I’m being correct. So that’s going to be very interesting to see what they’re gonna do for me, how they’re gonna do it, what kind of contents they are going to produce.

What I’m also very interested in is to understand the behind the scenes and the different parts of the workflow. Especially the research and scripting part — to find outliers. And a little secret here — I’m planning on creating an AI that can do that. That can, for a specific niche, search on TikTok and Instagram, research the best content and the best creators around that niche, find the outlier videos and content, and then from those outliers, analyze them — analyze the hook both from a transcript point of view but also from a visual point of view, the content, the CTA — so that the AI can automatically do this job and basically give you a research work with everything it found around your niche.

And then what you as a human — again, AI is very good, but AI will never be creative. You have to be creative to use the right hook with your right branding tone, and just creativity. So I’m also very interested — not only from a product creation perspective, but also for me personally — to understand how it works, and does it work, is it possible? So we’re gonna see. I’m going to keep you updated in the next couple of weeks to see how it goes.

Music of the Week

And finally, this episode is coming to an end. This week, let’s go back to some classic. I felt like last week — that was about Top Gun, that was very good. But this week, it’s about going back to NF.

You probably don’t know this, but I’ve been a huge fan of NF since almost ten years now. And I think that man and that artist had more influence on my life than my parents. That is impressive. I really — I can talk about this for hours, but this is not the point of the episode, unfortunately. But that is pretty much impressive how this guy has been able to not only have that kind of grind and success and you know, achieve his career, first. Second, there’s a really artistic point of view that I really like and I do not have right now in my life. And third, he kept that family values that are very important to me. He managed to keep that in his life, which is beyond impressive.

So let’s go with NF. Remember This. That is one of my favorite songs. It’s been a while. Let’s listen to this again.

Well, on those beautiful notes, I wish you a good day, and I’ll see you very soon.

TL;DR

This summary has been generated by AI based on the podcast transcript.

Intro: BLG Thinking Podcast Launch & SaaS Philosophy

• First episode of weekly podcast/newsletter documenting SaaS marketing journey

• Two specialized AI products ready, shifting focus from development to marketing/growth

• Core philosophy: Build specialized AI for specific niches vs generic solutions

  • Data access is critical limitation for AI effectiveness

  • Workflow design requires “micromanaging” AI with step-by-step instructions

  • Opportunity exists in specialized tools big players won’t build

Create: Product Portfolio

• Hey Isabella (heyisabella.ai): Video/content summarizer

  • Solves “Netflix problem” of too much content, no time to consume

  • Bulk processing up to 45 videos in ~5 minutes

  • Analyzes videos, articles, ads for hooks, CTAs, emotion triggers

  • Includes “connect the dots” feature for saved content

• Hey Enzo (heyenzo.ai): Figma design AI plugin

  • Enables voice design using existing design systems/components

  • Differentiates from Figma MCP through guided workflow vs terminal access

  • Ready but awaiting Figma team review/validation

Explore: Marketing Evolution & Content Strategy

• Reading “Purple Cow” - marketing shifted from TV ads → remarkable products → back to distribution

Explore: Marketing Evolution & Content Strategy

• Current shift: Paid media declining, earned media/content becoming dominant

  • US election example: 3-hour podcast (40M views) vs $100K ad spend (1M views)

  • Facebook/Meta ads now prioritize creative over targeting

• Key insight: Attention economy requires great content, not just budget

• Next focus: Learning hooks, story structure, emotion triggers for content creation

• Weekly mood: Top Gun Maverick soundtrack on repeat

Transcript of the Podcast Episode

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this very first episode of BLG Thinking. Your host Ben, but you can call me BLG.

And today, well, this is the first episode. So let’s take our time and let’s get time to know each other or actually know me.

I wanna talk about three different things. And as always, I will try to keep up the weekly format if I can. And I also wanna keep up the format:

• Create — chapter one

• Explore — chapter two

• Level Up — chapter three

• And at the end, always the Mood that I’m currently in because I listen to a lot of music

Okay. Anyway, let’s start.

Create: The idea behind this whole thing

Now, as this is going to be the first episode, I’d like to introduce my project, what is this all about and my different SaaS.

So this whole podcast thing newsletter thing, I don’t know how you call this, is going to be around the theme of — I’ve spent the last couple months building my SaaS, and the product is ready, the software is ready, the software is working. Now, my next focus is really going to be on the marketing of it. How to get users? How to keep them? How to, yeah well how to grow, and the product.

And through our journey, I want to documenting everything I’m learning, I’m doing and that is going to be yeah, a weekly — my weekly, to do to have this kind of documentation and also that’s just me to keep my schedule and to keep doing the marketing task and the marketing work because I would usually be like that we don’t spend more time on the product. Yeah. So that is the cool idea.

The two products

Now let me introduce you to my different SaaS and what is this about because I’m talking about this, but I never shown the product. So there are currently two products. And I’m going to explain, I’m going to show, real quickly the products, but also explain — I think this is what I’m more interested in — the philosophy behind this whole thing.

So the two products are two AI SaaS. To be more precise, what I’m trying to build here is specialized AI. So an AI that is specialized in one thing and one well let’s say niche.

Hey Isabella — heyisabella.ai: A video summariser

The first one is called hey Isabella. So the website is online, I probably put it into the transcript and the post. This AI is, well, how to say, a video summariser, in a way.

Was my pain point. I spend a lot of time consuming contents — on marketing, on growth, on SaaS. How to get users, and a lot of those things. Problem is there is too much content. The amount of:

• Emails and newsletters

• YouTube videos

• Instagram reels, TikTok, and whatever

There’s a lot of content out there and I believe those contents are really good. And to some extent, this is also incredible. Like, you can have a two hours podcast episode with the CEO of one of the biggest startups in the world. For free on YouTube. That is, to some extent, incredible.

So there’s really good content out there. Problem is I don’t have the time to consume, read, and watch everything. And that creates what I call a Netflix problem. Too much content, too much choices, too many — well, at the end of the day, I do not watch anything. I just create a watch later playlist, and I do not watch later anything.

That is why I’ve created Isabella. This AI is specialized in one thing: to analyze and summarize content. So it’s not only video content — that works for videos, that works for articles, that works for a lot of things.

And the idea here is that to have a work and a process to not only get the data — that is the first thing, because this is not only about getting the title, the transcript, and the images, the video itself from a visual point perspective. This is very going to be very important when you do want an analyze, content short form content that will perform well. And the use case is that I can summarize the content I wanna watch so that I know exactly if the content is worth it or not, and then I can either watch the full content or just watch the very specific part that I’m interested in.

And a very big feature that I like is the bulk processing. So for example, what I do is I usually go on YouTube or in Instagram and create a playlist with a lot of different content that I wanna watch. And then Isabella — I’m gonna call her Isabella because I just wanted to have a human name which is at this weird but at the same time I think it’s kinda cool — so Isabella is going to process and summarize the 45 videos in a row. So that takes about five minutes.

Once it’s done, for each and every content — there might be a video, there might be a podcast, an email, whatever — I have a condensed file with a summary. And I can read the very big part I’m interested in, and the highlights, and then I can decide:

• Either that was interesting and I want to know more — so I watch and read the original content

• Or I got what I wanted, and I just move on

So that is the core idea of Isabella. There’s a lot more things you can do:

• Analyze short form content

• Analyze ads to understand the hooks, the storyline, the CTA, the emotions trigger

• Save your content — there’s a feature, we’ll connect the dots another time

You can check the website. You can also use the app if you’re interested.

So that is my first SaaS.

Hey Enzo — heyenzo.ai: Vibe Design your Figma with your existing components

The second one is hey enzo. Yeah, I’ve just decided to go with human name as brand name and maybe I’ll explain why another time.

And that is another SaaS, another specialized AI. Here’s the thing. This is completely different, and I wanna — I’m just going to explain quickly what it is before moving on to what I think is more important which is the philosophy of why I’m doing this the way I’m doing.

But Enzo is a specialized AI for Figma designers, to be able to do vibe design. So if you already done design work in your life, whether it’s web design or product design, if you’re building a SaaS, you are already using Figma. Alright. Pretty casual thing here. Nothing crazy about this.

Problem is, and especially in the last couple months, everybody wanna use AI — especially in this industry. Problem is AI is very interesting if you’re doing code and for the software engineers. But if you’re doing design work as a designer using Figma, you can’t really do anything about this. There’s not such thing as vibe design, at least right now, because well, even Figma AI is really for draft and prototype. For production work, there’s nothing like this.

And interestingly enough, a couple days ago, there’s the new Figma MCP feature that can allow access to your design and that is very interesting because this is basically what I wanted to have. So maybe my product is not that much useful after. I don’t think so and I’m going to explain why.

The point of my product is to be able that from a that a designer just open my plugin, and easily just type and the design to app. But here’s the trick. That need to be done — so vibe designing with your existing component, with your existing design system, button, spacing, design token, and everything else. That is what I’ve been doing.

So this is again, if you want more information, the site is online, but the product is not usable yet. It’s actually ready. But, as this is going to be a Figma plugin, I need to wait for the Figma team to review and validate it. But that is working.

Now why I’m saying — and I’m just going to do a quick little note on Figma MCP. The main difference is this. Figma MCP, first of all, is something that means you are basically a developer, because you are comfortable with the idea of using a terminal, using Claude code or something like that.

But even let’s say you are — even the more I spend time with AI, the more I realize that yes, it can access your data which is the first step which is most of the time very important. But then you wanna have the whole process. And you guide the AI to do a specific thing. In my case, if you want to vibe design with your existing content, you wanna say, first of all, I want you to know all my components and then you have to choose the relevant one. And so on and so forth. So this is a specific workflow that you have to teach the AI. And I think this is where the added value of my product is going to be. That the work is done. All you have to do is prompt and wait.

Okay. I’ve already went a bit too much into the product, which I usually tend to do.

The philosophy — why specialized AI?

Anyway, that was the two first products. As I said, two first products. That means — and this is where I’m going to be interested in — my philosophy, what I’m trying to build here is really a set of specialized AI for different parts of my work, but basically different parts of industries, niches, and anything in between. I think that is my opportunity. Let me explain the reason and the reasoning behind my choice.

As I said, I spent the last couple months playing around with AI. I’ve done this with my ecommerce store that I had — I just wanted to play around. What can I do with it? And that was kinda impressive. Especially with Claude Code and basically anything that is code related. The amount of work the AI can do. But the more I play with it, the more I understand — and I saw two things.

The first one is, data is super important. Like, this is what is missing most of the time. It’s not that the AI and the model is not smart enough, most of the time it is. The problem is, most of the time you do not have the right data as input.

So data as input might be the docs if you are doing code. It might be the logic. Let’s say — if we go back to my two products, we are talking about videos and — well, how do you get the content and how do you access the content of a video. Now YouTube is kinda easy, but what about Instagram? Let’s say you wanna analyze an ad or even just a short form content you saw on Instagram or TikTok. Do you have the right data? If so, what kind of data?

• Do you have the video?

• Do you have the transcript?

• Do you have the actual visual?

And more importantly, what kind of data does the AI has access to? Same for design. What kind of data does the AI has access to regarding your existing design components?

So that is the first — I’m not gonna say limitation, but I think understanding — to best output my AI work.

The second thing that I’ve realized is the idea of workflow, of prompt, and of — you wanna give the best amount of context to the AI. Not too much, not too little. And the best explanation I can give right now is that:

If you really want to do great with AI, you wanna be a micromanager. The more you micromanage your AI, the better your results are going to be.

What do I mean by this? That means you want to teach and tell what to do, how to do it, and check at every step.

Let me tell you maybe a broader example. Let’s say that you wanna do an SEO research for your application, for your business, whatever, and you wanna use AI for that. Now what you could do is go on Claude and say, okay, here’s my website. Here’s my brand. I want you to do an SEO audit. And Claude will give you a result. Now how good is this going to be?

My thoughts on this is that what Claude is going to do is basically go to your website, get the data off your home page, and say okay I understand what kind of product you sell, what kind of brand you are. And based on this, I’m going to make a small research on Google to understand the level of competition and give you an overview of what’s going on.

Now let’s go back to our two levels of limitations:

• The first one is the data. What kind of data does the AI have access to here? Not a lot. The only data he has access to is your website contents and web search.

• The second limitation is you never teach Claude how to do the job.

And I think the opportunity would be to create a specialized SEO AI agent that would be able to do that one thing and do it very well. If you create an AI that is specialized in this, that connects to the right data — that is the first step, getting the right data: how much volume a specific keyword is getting monthly and the difficulty of that keyword.

Second step, micromanage the AI. Because you wanna tell it: if the user wants to do an SEO market research:

1. Go on the website, fetch each and every page to really get an understanding of the business

2. Generate a list of 10 broad keywords relevant to the business

3. Get the actual volume and difficulty for each keyword

4. Generate a refined list of long tail keywords — less competition, less volume, but easier to target

5. Review and explain to the user what is the best strategy

As you can see, not only I’ve given the AI the right data to work with, but I also micromanaged each and every step to explain and teach the AI how to do it.

And I think this is, at least from my point of view, the opportunity right now with AI:

• If you try to do a generic AI, at some point a big player is just going to kill your startup in about three days

• But if you do a very specialized tool for a very specific use case in a specific industry, that might work — because no big player will do this, it’s way too specific

Specialized beats generic. Every time.

And it requires having access to the right data, connecting specialized tools first, and also creating a specific workflow for that specific use case.

So in my opinion, and this is what I’ve been working on for the last couple months, that is an opportunity that I think might be really useful and be interesting to go with. And I’m trying to do this, so let’s see how it goes.

Now again, I’ve already spent way too much time on the first chapter which is create. That is fine. But now it’s time to move on, and I think I’ve way more stuff to say about this, but that will be for another episode.

Explore: The Purple Cow

This week actually, I’ve been quite busy still optimizing a little bit the product and setting up everything, but I’ve spent a couple hours reading the Purple Cow book. By — I’m sorry. I do not remember the — I’m actually never remember people’s name. That is terrible. But whatever, famous guy — this is This is Marketing, and I wanted to read the Purple Cow which is a less known book but I think this is very interesting.

Because in the book he goes into the history of marketing and advertisement especially in The US. And I think that is — now this book is a bit old, I think it was written in 2002, if I’m being correct. And so it’s a bit old compared to what we have right now. It’s not like, how to go viral on Instagram. There’s definitely not going to be that in the book.

However, I think this is interesting to understand the history of marketing and of the advertisement industry. Again, just like investing, past performances do not predict future performances. However, it is still very interesting to learn from it.

So I’m not — I’ve not done the complete book. I think I’ve actually thirty forty pages in, and the book is pretty small. So that should be pretty quick to finish.

What I like so far

What I like about this is that he goes to say that the first phase of marketing was with the TV industry in The US. That itself created a complete — I’m not even gonna say industry, but a complete economic change in the way people buy, consume, and how companies are making money. Because at that time, you would basically have a TV spot and an ad spot. And if you had that, then you create a product because you will be creating the demand in the first place. So basically he goes that before it was really about marketing and distribution.

And now — put that in context, the book was written in 2002 — but around that time, it’s not working anymore because people are just fed up with ads and they don’t get their attention anymore and they just don’t care about the ads and just watch it and don’t care, move on.

So now, in order to get seen and to get known, you have to be remarkable. And this is the idea of the purple cow. The name cow, I believe, comes from the idea that he went on a trip in France and there were a lot of cows. And at first, it was impressive, and then about a couple days after he was just like, well, yeah, it’s — you know, it’s I’ve seen thousands of them for the last couple days, so I’m used to it.

If you wanna be seen, you have to be a purple one. One that stands out of the crowd.

And this is basically saying that you wanna have a product that is genuinely interesting and innovative.

My thoughts on it

So this is where I am in the book. Again, I don’t know where it is going to go after that. I think this is interesting. But I think this is not quite true for most products.

Now, obviously there’s a lot of truth into that — the ad fatigue thing is real — and that is true that every kind of marketing will at some point just be used and most people will be tired of it. And you have to move on and find a new thing. TV ads used to work like wonder and now, at some point, most people just become used to it, and to some extent, they become bored and just blind to it.

But that is true for pretty much everything. Like, you can say that for TV, but to this day, there’s still TV ads. There’s still a lot of brands that are still making most of their money from ads. So:

• True that there will always be ad fatigue at some point? Sure.

• Say that this is completely over? I think that would be absolutely not true.

Considering that ads will never go out. The moment there will be people that are ready to watch ads instead of paying for something — so instead of paying for Instagram, you wanna use Instagram for free but watch ads — there will always be advertisement.

Now by the way, great example of that would be Netflix. Netflix — I don’t remember if that was last year, maybe even before that — they introduced their plan with ads and everybody was like, that’s crazy. This is complete nonsense, I will never pay for this, blah blah blah. Well, turns out that is I believe their most popular plan — people buy this the most — and once they did that their growth went up again. Again, this is not the only reason, but you got the point.

And I think that’s interesting. But there’s some truth to that — that ad fatigue is real, and to some extent, forcing people to see something at the end of the day will always fade and be less effective over a period of time.

However, what I really agree with is that his solution is just a very simple one — to be remarkable. You have to do is be remarkable and create the best product ever. Obviously, I think there’s some truth to that. But I believe this only works if you’re really in the top 1% of products. Like, if you are really building a product that will massively shift if not change or create a new industry. For example, if you create a GTA 6 level product. Sure. That strategy will absolutely work and you probably don’t need marketing at all because people are gonna talk about the product anyway.

Sure. And he’s talking about this. Talking about what I believe is called the idea virus. So ideas that just share by themselves.

Level Up: We are in a weird spot with marketing and distribution

And that, I think, makes a great transition to the last chapter of this, which is level up. And in this section I’m just sharing one key lesson I’ve learned this week.

And this week, I think this is going to be related to what I’ve been saying about this book. I believe that right now we are in a weird spot when it comes to marketing and distribution.

Because basically let’s go back. The history kind of looks like this:

• TV era — if you had the ad spot on TV, boom, you won, then you figured out how to create a product. Distribution is the key.

• Product era — most people were like, you have to be remarkable, you have to create the best product ever. This is in those periods that you got the best products — Airbnb, that kind of stuff. But again, we’re talking very very top 1% products that will actually be an industry shift.

• Paid media era — social media ads and Google ads came in. So back to: distribution is the key.

So there was a back and forth between product and marketing.

But then right now we’re kind of in a different situation.

Creative is the new targeting

Because even though paid media is still and will always be a thing, you can see it start to decline a little bit. And not only that, especially from the attention point of view — like do people remember your ads? I don’t think so.

However, in the meantime, something happened which is earned media, which is content, which is social media content.

And to explain that, I’m going to take — and I’m going to do this. Yes. Okay. This is the first episode. I’m already talking politics. Crazy. But I’m talking about the US election. I know I know. Again, I’m just not going to talk about the ideas. I don’t really care about that, but I do wanna talk about it from a marketing perspective.

If you think about this, the Democrat party always had more budget than the Republicans. Again, this is not about ideas. I’m not saying it is bad. I’m not saying it is good. I’m just saying it is. From the paid media to the marketing, they had more budget. And that election was no different. They spent more on the marketing, on the ads, on whatever than the other party.

However, they didn’t win. But more importantly, I think to some extent, this election has been won because of a podcast episode. And two very different strategies:

• One candidate did a three hour podcast episode

• The other spent 100,000 to recreate the studio set

• The difference in views? 1,000,000 on one side, 40,000,000 on the other.

Now my marketing view on this. The person that won was the person with the most amount of distribution. So we all come back to the same idea — if you have more distribution, your product, quote unquote, will win.

However, and that is where it’s interesting — as before, in order to get the attention of people, you had to pay. So that was paid media. If you are able to pay more than your competitor, you will get more attention than your competitor, and you will win. That was TV, paid media, whatever. And most of the time it works.

But now it’s not the case anymore. Because in order to have attention, in order to have more views, you don’t really need to pay — but you need to create, quote unquote, great content. And that content will do the distribution by itself. Through algorithm and social media.

So this is a very interesting shift because we went from a pay to win system to now — all you have to do is create the best, quote unquote, content in order to get the attention.

And I think you can also clearly see that change in the way Meta Ads is shifting. Because for so long it was about targeting — if you were very technical at targeting people with the right audience, not too broad but not too narrow, you would have won. And now, Meta ads doesn’t want you to do anything. They just want you to focus on the content and create the best creative.

Creative is the new targeting.

Attention is the new moat

So now we see a shift where in order to get people’s attention, you really want not to focus on how much money you can spend but how great, quote unquote, your content can be. And that goes beyond just marketing and trying to launch a business even though this is what I’m trying to do. This is the same case if you’re an artist and you’re trying to launch a career out there. And even to some extent the political stage as well.

So that is I think the shift and I think the key lesson.

Attention is the new moat. And to get attention, you don’t need the biggest budget anymore — you need the best content.

And this is why I wanna spend the next couple weeks and months to really understand that. And basically understand maybe the most important skill in this century — how to get people’s attention. And I think there’s a lot of interesting things to learn from:

• The hook

• The story

• The structure

• The emotion triggers

And I think that might really work. But again, I need to learn how to do this. And I think with the right volume and intensity, I can achieve results.

So again, we’ll see. If you’re interested, follow along.

Mood

And finally, to end up this first episode — I wanna talk about the mood of this week.

Well, this week, I’ve rewatched Top Gun Maverick. Very great movie. I’ve actually never watched the first one so I’ve watched the second one before watching the first one, but whatever. And I’ve been — this is something that happens with me all the time. That’s terrible. But every time I come out of a movie, for the next couple weeks, I just keep listening to the music from that movie.

So that is the song of this week. Because this week there’s a song — I think it’s the main theme of Top Gun — the song is called Danger Zone... wait no. Okay well you know what the song is called.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how this very first episode is going to end. I will try to keep the weekly format and I like that it also forces me to document and keep me on track.

See you in the next one.