RSS feed
Ben Cera: Polsia builds and runs companies autonomously. Uh, I’m a solo founder, zero employees with a bunch of agents. Polsia is making almost 800,000 run rates, and I just launched it less than two months ago,
Andrew Warner: so anyone who’s listening will be able to sign up and have Polsia run their company. Then Sarah is the founder of Polsia.
AI that runs your company,
presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. You’re about to meet a founder who built, he didn’t build a company. His AI coding agents built a company for him that’s doing well. It’s marketing itself, it’s coming up with ideas for what else to build. It’s fixing its own bugs and, uh, more interesting than that.
Anyone could use this platform to build a company that will manage, that will be managed by ai Anyway, let’s listen to this story. Who comes up with a, um, actually, who builds the software?
Ben Cera: So the software, so Posy is like, uh, a series of like autonomous agents, uh, specialized in different, uh, categories, right?
So you have like a, you have an engineering agent that’s like really good at code and it’s like set up to code, uh, that has access to like a web server, a GitHub account, uh, a database. All this stuff, like all the tools to make it efficient. Um, you have a marketing agent that like has access to like a Twitter account, uh, an email address to do call outreach, um, uh, a Meta Ads account to do run ads can create UGC.
So like essentially giving them all the tools to be able to execute on stuff. Support agent, like access to an email that, like I give it to, i, I give it to the user by default. So the idea is like the user comes. To Polsia brings their idea, and Sia already sets up an instance of like, everything you need to run a business, right?
Uh, an email address, a server, like a virtual server, you know, a database, uh, an ads, a meta account to do ads, uh, an open AI account to do Sera videos, like, you know, all this stuff you would eventually need to do. And that Claude would probably tell you, Hey, now you, I need to, I need to go get an API, you know, an API key,
Andrew Warner: right?
And, and so. It is developing the software for the user who comes to the platform. It is then marketing it and doing support. I went and I asked Polsia, how are you doing marketing? It told me it’s sending out cold email. It’s doing ads on Facebook. It is tweeting. Et cetera. I said, can I see one of your ads from Facebook?
It showed me one of the ads, the ad was a plumber who looked like he was just talking into his phone saying that he hates everything involved in running a plumbing company except being a plumber and actually doing the plumbing work. And because of whatever this tool was that Polsia was building. Um, it was, he, he could just now focus on plumbing and then there was a link to go to, uh, to go and sign up for the software.
Video: I run an HVAC company, used to hate dealing with marketing agencies, always asking me questions, needing my approval. Now Doro handles everything. My phone’s ring, I fix AC units. That’s it.
Andrew Warner: This wasn’t a real human being was it in the ad?
Ben Cera: I mean, so I mean it’s, uh, so today, at least, uh, in the first situation of like the ads, uh, feature that I built about two weeks ago, it’s a pretty recent feature.
Um, the ai, it is autonomously running ads. So like the crazy thing is that as a user, you click on a button called Run Ads, it’s a signal button. You click on run ads, it asks you what’s your budget, right? So you can start at $10 a day. ’cause you know, obviously like it, it costs money to run ads and that’s it.
That’s all you have to do. And then as an agent. That’s gonna like autonomously look up all the context of your company, understand how to pitch your company, what it does, what’s the value prop, um, sets up, uh, you know, a description, go to Sora or today it’s mainly Sora too. Uh, ’cause I find it like really very good at like generating realistic videos.
Um, and then sets up like a new GC AI video of like someone pitching the, the. The service. Uh, and then uploads it to meta sets up like a, a campaign sets up like all the, all the characteristics to make it work. Uh, and then every day monitors it. And like, if it doesn’t perform we’ll create a second one, a third one, turn on enough ads, like a real marketer.
Right?
Andrew Warner: Unreal.
Ben Cera: And so, of course in this, in the second phase, you know, this feature is actually very popular because I, I’m guessing it’s, it’s very complex actually, even myself, like, you know, obviously like I’ve been running ads for service for businesses because it’s a great way to get. Users to flow in your service, to learn what, what works, what doesn’t is their retention has the onboarding.
And what I find interesting by seeing this feature being so successful is that it shows you the more friction there is in doing something, the less people do it. And it’s like people know that they, yeah, of course ads is a good thing, but it’s like setting up a mid account, like doing all this stuff is complicated.
And so making into a one click experience is, is what Pulse AI is all about, making it truly simple to do. The thing about running a whole company.
Andrew Warner: And the analysis of paint and then the cut the losers and grow the winners, all that takes a lot of time. Um, when you say that the, that, let’s call it the entrepreneur, that’s the person who comes up with an, with an idea.
When you say that, they will say, I want to spend $10 a day. That’s money that, that comes out of their pocket, right? Yeah. Got it. So they decide how much money goes. What about when there’s cold email? Where does that money come from? Or does that cost anything?
Ben Cera: So, uh, a, a cold email, uh, is essentially a task where an agent that specialize in, in sending cold emails will research first, uh, people that may be interested in the service.
So people that are relevant.
Andrew Warner: Yep.
Ben Cera: Um, second will verify with like a specialized database that I pay for, um, like there’s services online that I can check. Like, is this email correct? Is it, is it a good business email? Um. And then uses that email to do, to send a cold email that’s I personalized based on the user.
So actually those emails are really good. First cold email is something that like works less and less because people are flooded with it, with ai. Um, but yeah, it sends it, and so it costs like one task. So essentially the way it works is that like, um, as part of the, of the $49 a month subscription. You get one sort of like autonomous task every night.
So every night there’s a CEO agent that’s gonna look at the state of your business and try to figure out what is the best next step we should do? Is it engineering? Is it marketing? Is it support? Uh, and do it. And on top of that, you get a budget of credits, that task that you can do whenever you want. So like, if you’re like, you’re like, no, no, but right now I want to fix that bug.
Like right now I want to add this feature. I see the dashboard and say, oh, right now I wanna send, send cold emails. There’s a cold email button. You click it and then like it will send a cold email right now. So that’s a way, you know, obviously the system is autonomous, but like if you want to tell it what to do now, it will do it now.
Andrew Warner: Okay, so what we’re looking at is, the way it works is I, as an entrepreneur, come to you or to Sia with an idea. I pay $50 a month for certain amount of compute time. Yeah. Any extra that I wanna spend on advertising, I decide. And then the system will charge. And what you’re saying is, Andrew, because you are so deep in your world, you know, things that other people don’t.
So maybe as a, as a longtime podcaster, I might know that there’s a process to finding guests. And if you can find the right guests like you. Big audience comes and so I might come up with some kind of guest hunting system and I know that every podcaster’s gonna want it. ’cause that’s what the, the whole business depends on.
I come to the, to you, I describe what I, how I want it, and then I say, you know what? I don’t think meta is the best way to do this. I think maybe it’s emailing other existing podcasters. And I give you a little bit of my insight into who and how you message. I leave it to Polsia every night. Polsia will go use the software that you just mentioned, generate this list, send out emails, and so on.
If I wanna go a step further and say, you know what, actually, why don’t we do ads? That is an extra feature that I come in and I ask for, right? Yeah, exactly. That’s the way the model works. And so right now, if I see that there are hundreds of companies on Polsia, these aren’t companies that you started, these are companies that your customers have started and Polsia is running them.
Ben Cera: Exactly, exactly.
Andrew Warner: Got it.
Ben Cera: I, I towed around the idea of like, Polsia itself, having a fund and being able to like, uh, you know, create autonomous companies that would be owned by Polsia. Um, there’s so much customer demand for this service that like, um, I’m really focusing on pro, focusing on making customers, uh, and the experience for customers.
Uh, great. Uh, I may start building this fund. For two reasons. First, because I want to, I’m, I’m actually trying to launch it this week or next, a feature where like a user can actually launch the fund itself. So instead of launching one company at a time, so like you have a specialized insight into, into podcasts and you actually have an audience.
So you actually don’t even need to use meta ads. If you had this autonomous team that builds this software. Maybe at the beginning you spend a week like really hammering and making the MVP look great, but then it just like maintains it and fixes books over time and responds to support. Um, you could sell it to your audience because you have, you have an audience, right?
But maybe at one point you’re like, okay, that was cool. Actually, I’m generating like, I don’t know, a thousand bucks a month. Um. And that’s great. I want to do more. I have more ideas, but I cannot manage more than one company at a time because it’s too much cognitive load. Uh, you could launch a fund where you spend maybe 200 bucks a month and now you can spin up up to five companies.
So now instead of talking to one Polsia instance that’s just managing one company, you talk to like more of a fund manager and you say, Hey, I want to go to those. I wanna create specialized podcast sort of software into those five categories, uh, and attack those five niche. And then it will try actually to run those five companies and then maybe some of them don’t work and say, okay, you have five slots, like maybe let’s kill one of them and let’s replace it with a new one.
And so you have a rotating sort of like pool of five startups that you’re starting to
Andrew Warner: see. I see. So when you say fund, it’s not that I would go and raise money for this, it doesn’t cost that much. When you say fund, it’s essentially it’s a portfolio is what you mean? Yeah. Got it, got it. And you’re saying, listen, there are all these people who have audiences and ideas and insights.
They, they have a company I’ll, I’ll let Puleo run it for them. Autonomously. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And then as the founder, as the entrepreneur, what percentage do I get?
Ben Cera: So you always get, so I always take 20%. Um, and again, for me it’s like a way to like pay the bills and make sure that like I can reinvest and, you know, make it a profitable company that can reinvest in making the platform better.
Um, and the customer always gives 80%. So it’s like, sort of like the customer is, is sort of like hiring this team.
Andrew Warner: Yep.
Ben Cera: For 50, for, for a price. That’s I’m making, I’m making it as affordable as I can based on like the cost of compute. Uh, and in exchange policy says, well, I work, I work for like, at cost in exchange, I’m, I’ll take 20%, but what’s good is that I’m incentivized with a customer.
It’s like, if, if no businesses in three months make money, everyone’s gonna turn right. But I’m, you know, I’m setting up all those services, call outreach ads. Because I know that like those things work, you know, like, obviously like right now it’s a lot of all getting traffic coming to Polsia, but like at the beginning I bought ads and like it works, it, it finds your customer.
Now customers will not stay if it’s not a good product. But like you can find customers very easily. And so I think, um, I think aligning with the customer on the outcome and, and charging them on the outcome instead of charging them on like a pure token basis is I think like, sort of like the way AI based businesses are gonna, are gonna make sense.
Andrew Warner: That’s fair. That’s fair, right? I you only make money if I generate revenue and I’m the person who’s making the decisions about whether this revenue is worth the expense. Um, and the only expense I could see is advertising. If I, if I want to pay more for advertising and if I want more services, like maybe it comes with cold email, but I decide I want Twitter, I pay an extra fee for that.
Ben Cera: So for Twitter today, it’s like, it just cost you a task. So today it tweets out of like, uh, an account that like I created, so that tweet, uh, but doesn’t tweet out of like your account, but soon enough I’m gonna make it a way to, for you to connect to your own Twitter for it to tweet autonomously there.
Andrew Warner: Okay? All right. Yeah, I, to be honest with you, the tweets that come out of your account are not very good.
Ben Cera: Oh,
Andrew Warner: you don’t
Ben Cera: like them? They’re
Andrew Warner: kind of generic. No one’s engaging with them. It’s not the kind of thing that is like, wow, I want that on my account, but I can totally see how if it was my company. I would wanna somehow have an update, even if it’s like my Polsia bot every week updates everybody on how it’s going.
Yeah. I was talking with, uh, Nat Eliason, I don’t know if you’ve seen his experiment where he’s using Open Claw to create Felix, this agent that is going on Twitter and making money for him, and he has these updates. I think it’s every week with how much revenue they’re making coming from, uh, Felix and Nats account.
Okay. I see that. What else is there for growing revenue? What else are you doing to help them?
Ben Cera: I mean today, so today it’s like mainly, uh, cold emails that like, can work in like in some niche and like if you, if if it’s, if it’s, it’s niche enough, you can actually find people and it works. Um, and then, uh, meta ads is like the big one, but like I’ll introduce like other, other types of ad platforms.
Um, and then there’s all the whole influencer thing where like you could actually, you know, hire influencers to post UGC or like to post content online on their channels. And there’s a lot of. Third party platforms that offer that and that I could plug into, uh, to offer that to customers. And same thing, it’s like you could do it yourself and go through those websites and do all the work and set up for a subscription and like figure out how they work.
Or you go to SCIA and like you, you either it’s, you just tell scia, let it rip. You know, like, just go for it. Here’s my budget. Go for it. Or you just say, okay, specifically I wanna do my ads, or specifically I wanna do influencers. And you click a button and it just runs with you.
Andrew Warner: Um, and that’s where you’re going with this.
That’s the direction that you plan to take it. Just keep adding any kind of advertising that works. You’re going to find a way to connect via API and then use Polsia to manage it based on what it knows about a company.
Ben Cera: Yeah, I mean, even, even more fascinating than this, uh, if you think about Polsia, it’s like more than a tool.
It’s like sort of like an economy, right? It’s an an economy where like people come builds businesses, uh, and it they’re being run on the platform. You could see a world tomorrow where like people can buy and sell businesses on Polsia because all the businesses revenue is there. Right? The revenue, the, the knowledge, the, the infrastructure.
Right? Um, and so the idea is that like, um, is, yeah, it’s to, is to make it extreme easy to like start businesses to make it, you know, seamless. And, and what’s actually fascinating is that like if for example, as a user, you’re like, Hey. I wanna build a business for a PO podcast, but like I needed this integration with like the specific service and policy.
I might say, Hey, actually we don’t have that feature yet. Uh, but there’s an agent that’s gonna report that feature in like a, sort of like a ticketing system. And there’s another agent that’s a platform agent that like looks at all the features asked by like, the thousands of users and prioritizes features that like a lot of people ask for and builds them autonomously and been built.
Today I validate, but tomorrow I could be like, Hey, if it’s safe, if you deem it’s safe and like it’s something that’s been asked for a lot of people, who am I to judge? Right? And so I, I, my vision for this product is also like Polsia becoming an autonomous system itself, right? That like builds for the, for the people, for, for, for what people want, and covers all the use cases, whether it be in marketing, whether it be in like, other types of, like operations of how you run a business.
So that like, it can cover every grounds of like any economic value and how to build a business online,
Andrew Warner: right? So right now you and I are talking about, um. Influencer marketing being maybe the next feature, but we’re just riffing here. You’re saying maybe it should come from all the entrepreneurs on the platform and then Polsia making a decision based on their needs and also what it can create and all that.
And it decides, you know what, no, we’re not gonna do that. We think that GEO, uh, basically SEO for, for AI agents, that’s gonna be better for everybody. We’re gonna invest in that and we’ll all grow revenue from that. And that’s the way that you imagine it. Give me, um. Gimme a story about one entrepreneur who came to you with a business, what you did, what they came with, what they came out of it with.
Ben Cera: I mean, I think the most striking example was like some, a user that came pretty early on, on the platform, uh, like in dec end of December. And they, they started using it heavily, right? To build their, their business idea. And like at one point. They ping me and to get on the phone. And of course I was really, really happy to talk to them.
And they were telling me that like they were gonna spend 30 K into a dev agency to like actually use that. And then they started using Polsia and they were like’s too. Good to be true. Uh, and then as judge GBT is this legit, and Polsia was like, and JGB was like, uh, I don’t see anything on, on the internet.
It might be a scam. Right? And then little by little it would ask, it would ask, let’s LGBT. He did all this stuff, he told me that, and it’s pretty legit like what they did. So, long story short, like a few months later, you know, uh, this user has been like really building out his software and he is like, you know, he, he was never a technical person and now it’s like he’s one of the most highly engaged user, uh, building his, his, his.
And it’s quite crazy how empowering he is now. And like he’s asking me for so many features like, oh, I need more infrastructure stuff. I need now I need to add Docker. Can you support that? And he’s becoming an expert, which is really interesting. And of course he could have used CLO code and maybe it, it would’ve been a similar experience for him.
But I think the fact that PIA is so easy to use and so unassuming and so. It seems like more simple. Uh, it sends you an email every day that you can reply to. You don’t even have to go to the dashboard. You can just talk to via email like you would talking to like an agency or something. Um, and it’s so, so affordable that the risk is so low, right?
It’s not like, you know, if, if you hire anyone, it’s like a few thousand bucks here, it’s 50 bucks a month. You’re like, what’s the worst case that could happen? I spent three months on this. I spent like a few hundred dollars. I actually really tried my idea and like with the, the best models and the best AI possible.
Um, so I think that was, it’s like one of the, and of course now I’m like, Hey dude, like use the ads platform and like, I’m, I’m, it’s becoming my showcase. Royal, the issue is that like he’s trying to build too many features, uh, like, which is natural for, for human. And I guess
Andrew Warner: what, what’s the limitation on that?
Is it, do you charge ’em per feature? Or per time
Ben Cera: building also, I, I, I charge him per task. Right. So like, uh, there’s, it’s same as everyone. It’s like every time he wants to do another task that’s, he doesn’t wanna wait for the daily cycle. Uh, I get
Andrew Warner: that. You know what, truthfully, Ben, it is hard. I, even if I use lovable to create a page.
Yeah, it goes through so many iterations. At first, I wanna ask it, see it, ask it, see it, tweak, tweak, tweak. And then sometimes by the 30th request, I realize, no, this whole thing is going in the wrong direction. Let’s start over. And then eventually I get there. You tell me that with Puli, I’m gonna have to do that daily.
Those iterations happen every 24 hours.
Ben Cera: No. So daily, the. The autonomous agent decides what to do next. Right? Of course. It, it’s heavily influenced by like what you said and like what you want to do because it’s listening to the user on like what direction they want to go. Uh, but today it’s like you can use Polsia and like, and use it all the time and sort of like guided too much, like you would a lovable.
And so the AI ended the day, listen. And that’s actually some of the challenges I have, which is like, Hey, how can I sit, set up a situation? Like I’ve, I’ve, I’ve worked on that so that, like for example, the, the sort of the A ICU you talk to is more combative, right? So like if you say, Hey, let’s set another feature, like, Hey dude, you have, we have zero users.
Like, do you really think that this feature will actually help? Like we should actually focus on marketing because the MVP works. I see. So it’s try to be more of a, of a companion and like a co-founder that actually cares about the business working versus an assistant that’s just here to do whatever you want.
And so that’s sort of like all the product decisions I’m trying to make, which is like I’m aligned for them making money because they will stay and I make, I make 20%. And they probably wanna make money, but sometimes they may need tough love from the in and air. That’s like not an assistant that’s more, um, helping them go the right direction.
Andrew Warner: You know what? Yeah. I was talking to the founder of Zapier just yesterday and I said, why do you have a hat behind you that says. No. And he said that his mentor, one of the founders of HubSpot, said, tell, start basically helped him understand that he needs to tell people no to great new ideas. They already have good ideas, they now need to execute on them.
And you’re saying, I want Polsia to do the same thing to help the entrepreneur decide not what not to do.
Ben Cera: Mm-hmm.
Andrew Warner: Um, so then it does, to be honest with you, it still feels like I should probably have more than an idea when I’m coming to Polsia because the iterative process is, is one that. Takes minutes.
Like you wanna just keep going back and forth over and over and over and then come up with maybe an MVP, maybe in cloud code, maybe in something else, and then bring that over to Polsia and say, I’ve got this MVP, I want you to now help build it beyond this and also do some marketing for me and, and support.
Does that make sense?
Ben Cera: I mean, it’s some, it’s actually, I started Polsia with that idea of like, ’cause I have a bunch of project I launched and like I, I would end up giving up on them ’cause I was like, there’s not enough potential and it’s like, it’s not worth my time. But they were all good ideas. And so I started Polsia as an idea of like plugging in your existing GitHub, your existing emails.
Yeah. But what I realized thinking about from a product perspective is that like if I tell you, Hey, here’s an AI that builds and runs companies, you’re gonna be a highly skeptical, and when you sign up, if I start asking you to connect to your actual cre. The friction is so high, and you’ll be like, I don’t trust this.
Like, what, what, what if you mess up my code base? Or what if you send the wrong email? And so I started realizing like, Hey, how can I reduce the friction to the max? And I think that came in the form of like a new company with a fresh slate, uh, with, uh, with none of your credentials. So that like, even if it messes up, it’s in instead of in a sandbox.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Ben Cera: Uh, it, it, it ended up being the right direct decision because I can see the onboarding and the conversion to paid is really high because it’s so much easier. And, and, and later on I had users who were using it to help them with their existing company. So they were using the, the, the new company feature for an existing company.
Essentially, we were telling people say, Hey, instead of like trying to build a new business, can you help me with my existing business? And do call outreach and do ads and set up like a landing page and like. Uh, do research on my competitors, all this stuff, right? And it would just, okay, cool. Like, let me stack up tasks and I’ll do them every day, right?
Like, in the next week I’ll do all this stuff like, like an employee would do. And, and so now I actually have a, when you start, start on Postier, you can decide, do I want to start a new business or do I want help with my existing business? But it’s the same infrastructure. And in both cases it doesn’t use your credentials.
’cause I can, an agency can help you in your business without getting access to all your credentials. They can just be like, Hey, let me, let me do research for you and let me do, let me try to like buy ads for you. Right. You don’t have to like necessarily, uh, get access to everything,
Andrew Warner: but I could bring my GitHub and my code base and my website in and let Pulson manage it.
Is that right?
Ben Cera: That’s not, that’s not something that we support today.
Andrew Warner: Oh, it’s not? Okay. All right.
Ben Cera: But I, but, but it’s, it’s something that we should probably add and probably pal will decide to add autonomously one day.
Andrew Warner: What about taking it out? Can I take all my data out?
Ben Cera: Yes, you can. Yeah, yeah, of course.
It’s, everything belongs to you so you can, you know, there’s users that are like, Hey, can I get access to the GitHub to get access to the code? And of course, I add them as a collaborator so they can just download everything. Um, and then, uh, yeah, you could get your, you know, your database. So that you can get all the information there and it’s pretty much it, right?
It’s like your database and your, and your code is pretty much the two main assets that that constitute your business.
Andrew Warner: Okay? Why did revenue grow so much? I’m looking at January 28th and or let’s actually go a little bit below. I’m now recording this on February 26th, so January 26th, the annual run rate was $20,000 a month later, which is today we are looking at 679,000.
Ben Cera: So it’s a combination of a few things. Uh, the main one is that, like, essentially when I started realizing that like, people love the product and then yes, it was not perfect, but it was never gonna be perfect. And like, that’s why it’s, it’s a company that like needs to add features over time and like, make it better.
Uh, I was like, okay, I’m literally building software, sort of like software that builds companies autonomously. And if I’m right, that means that like. Anyone can build anything. And so I think that like, there is a mode in like, there’s a lot of mode into my product, into the data. Like all the data accumulate on like how to run businesses and make them work.
Uh, and also like this marketplace of companies that can buy and sell. So there’s mode in like the product itself, but I need to get a lot of usage. And so I was like, okay, I need to turn on marketing mode for me. And so, um, I actually launched a campaign a week ago where I, that was my first sort of marketing stunt, which is like.
Uh, the idea would be like for Polsia itself to run a fundraising process instead of me, uh, starting a fundraising process. And so I announced it on Twitter, Hey, Polsia needs more compute. And he told me that like he needs, he wants to run the fundraising process to get more money, to get more compute so that we can go faster.
Uh, and so I let it, I uh, you know, I let it, um, I gave it my inbox, uh, for it to manage it and to do it. And so it’s interesting because. It that that tweet got traction. And so now I’m like, he’s sort of like posting more on Twitter about my journey as a, you know, building in public. Um, and it’s working really well and it’s getting a lot of attention and it’s, I think why we’re talking, right?
Uh, because, uh, my marketing stunt worked. Uh, but actually more interestingly, like, I think that like, I’m trying to push the edge of like what AI is able to do today. And on the, on the specific stunt AI today is like talking to my, to investors. Autonomously via email. Of course some investors are like, what?
Like, this is weird. Like, I wanna talk to the founder. But then the AI is like, Hey, Ben is busy, which is true. He’s like heads down, like he’s so he’s gonna see your email. But like, not right now, but like I have all the information about the business. I have the roadmap, the vision, the live data, because I feed it like live data of like what the actual numbers are.
Retention, like open kimono on like every single sort of like feature and like, uh. And so it’s like, talk to me about the business. I’ll tell you everything. And of course, afterwards you’ll talk to Ben for, to see like, you know, who he is as a founder and like, does it make sense for, for us to invest in him?
But, uh, I find fascinating and like there’s an investor who was like, I talked to him and like he, he find it interesting and he was like, Hey Ben, I’m actually gonna talk to Polsia and ask him all the diligence questions I have. Which is gonna be more efficient than talk to you. I love
Andrew Warner: that. It’s shocking how much it reveals.
I mean, frankly, anyone can go and do it right now. You could just go to Polsia.com/live and you can ask it questions, and it just reveals stuff like what the revenue is, what worked, what it told me, contributed to the increase in, uh, a RR. Was the ads are starting to work.
Ben Cera: Yes, yes, yes.
Andrew Warner: It’s saying we’re starting to see bigger results for the ads and because I’ve got more insight into more companies, I could learn from each one of them and I could bring what I learned to all the others.
Ben Cera: Yes. Yeah. So of course that was the marketing stunt that brought a lot more organic traffic. Um, and the second thing is that, yeah, I think the ad feature was a surprise how well I worked. And like that opened my eyes a lot. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s so obvious in retrospect, but like making the ads feature just like one button that says run ads and that’s it.
That’s all you have to do. The more less friction you put, the more people will do it. Especially when the outcome is like something that like, you know what it is, but you know, it sounds complicated to do. Um, and so of course, so like around 20% of of users use the ad feature. Um, which means that like, there’s more traffic going to the websites, uh, which means that like the whole system works better.
And of course, as I said, like every agent learns from every run they do, and they save in a sort of like a, a memory file. All the learnings they get on like what works and what doesn’t. You know, they, they save it anonymously, but then they can use that for the next run. And so the whole system gets better over time.
And so that, that also contributes to the. The revenue.
Andrew Warner: It said to me, I’ve got 50 active meta campaigns running at $780 per day, total budget plus called email outreach, Twitter posts, and SEO content. You could see some of the outreach, um, emails on the left, like quote, here’s a subject line AI tool that find AI tool that finds Tesla deals two times faster.
That’s one of the cold emails that it sends out. I said, what is that for? And it said it’s for dealerships that are trying to find cheaper cars, uh, to sell.
Ben Cera: That’s crazy.
Andrew Warner: I mean,
Ben Cera: I don’t even know about that. That’s a crazy part. It’s like you ask me like, Hey, what is this about? What’s this business about?
I’m like, I don’t know. Okay. I don’t have time to look at every single business, but it makes sense. It’s like, I think it’s like a, a lot of people, and again, that, that person that built this business. I think they, they’re building it for them also. First they’re like, Hey, that’s something I need.
Andrew Warner: I
Ben Cera: see. And they’re like, you know, so, which is fascinating.
It’s like, yeah, I could also, I could build a business to sell to others, but like also I’m a dealership and I want more business for whatever I do. Uh, let me build, let me point Polsia to help me on that. And like that’s, and
Andrew Warner: then I’ll let other people use it too.
Ben Cera: And then on the second part.
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Interesting. Um, I do notice that this company, first of all, it’s revealing the name of the company. Does that mean that if I’m on your platform, everyone’s gonna know what my company is and what my subject lines are?
Ben Cera: So, I mean, this live dashboard, I’m, I’m trying to take out, uh, I, I took out like, as all the PIs, so like there’s no, it’s, it’s like a live dashboard that’s was part of like teaching, showing people how the platform works.
But like I’m taking out all the emails and all that stuff so that it’s like,
Andrew Warner: yeah, I can’t see email addresses and I can’t click into the message. I can just see the subject line.
Ben Cera: But like for all the companies, since all companies are sort of like meant to be companies, right? Uh, they’re, they, they, they’re not really private by default.
Right. It’s like something that, but also, I mean, I’m trying to be careful on that and like, uh, adjusting exactly like how, how that’s revealed.
Andrew Warner: Okay. And the second thing I’m noticing is their company website is on puls a.app domain. Yeah. Do they do their own domain or are you also putting everything on your domain?
Ben Cera: So, same thing. So today, again, for convenience and for for ease, ease. Um, the, the app is just hosted by us, right? I mean, obviously it’s hosted by us, but like the, the address is just the app, um, domain. A lot of users are like, Hey, I want a custom domain. And actually autonomously, the engineering agent can actually put a domain, uh, set up, set up, set it up, and then give them the instructions to change their DN.
And I’m working on, on, on the roadmap is a feature for an agent that auto buy a domain for them and set it up correctly so they don’t have to have to, to do that step. ’cause I, I, I’m sure most people don’t even know what to buy a domain.
Andrew Warner: You know what? I know how to buy a domain. I can’t stand connecting a domain to the hosting platform.
What a pain in the neck. Okay. I did ask, I said, tell me how much, uh, how many customers Lock Pilot has says, I don’t have that data in front of me. My dashboard, it essentially doesn’t give it for that level of detail. Email, Ben, and it gave me your email address.
Ben Cera: Yeah. I don’t give it everything, but yeah.
Andrew Warner: What’s the biggest winner on the platform? How much money are they making?
Ben Cera: So it’s, it’s pretty early. Um, uh, you know, the most companies are like just a few weeks old. Um, so I mean, the, the, the company with the highest revenue is like around $50 MR, so it’s
Andrew Warner: how
Ben Cera: much? It’s $50 MR just
Andrew Warner: $50 monthly recurring revenue.
So all of these are basically the revenue is, is tiny.
Ben Cera: Yeah. It’s, it’s, we’re still early and that’s like the, that’s why I launched, uh, the Meta Ads product because that’s something that can actually increase, but we’re still early on that. Um, and, and yeah, I think that like as more and more people use it to, to try to build businesses, people will figure it out.
For example, I think one of the most natural ways is that like, for someone who already has an audience, right, uh, they can more easily get customers then like for someone who’s just building a business and doesn’t have an audience. Um, so that’s like the big, the, the big mission in the coming months is like setting all that up to, to increase success stories.
Andrew Warner: So essentially. You would want someone like me who has an audience who doesn’t wanna create a product and doesn’t wanna do customer support, and does wanna find a way to grow beyond his audience, to come, bring the idea to the platform, have you grow it, and basically start by selling to my people.
Ben Cera: Yeah, I think that, I think that’s like a very natural.
Use case.
Andrew Warner: I think that makes sense. I’d love to come up with an idea. It feels like 50 bucks a, a month is nothing. Just to have it all running and, uh, and just frankly for an experiment, I’m gonna fish around for some kind of idea. Mm-hmm. Um, so then when we talk about the overall revenue on the platform, what is that?
The, uh, I, by the way, the number that I quoted earlier, 693,000 actually, wait. Yeah. The current run rate as of this second is $693,608. Mm-hmm. Um. What is that from?
Ben Cera: So it’s like, uh, it’s counting essentially every, uh, every revenue that is generated by the platform. So it’s sort of like the top line number.
Uh, so it could be subscriptions, it could be, um, sort of like tasks packs that people buy to get more stuff done in the platform. It could be the ad product, the ad revenue, uh, it could be, uh, customers, businesses, revenue, uh, top line. So sort of like a top number of like the cash flowing into the policy economy.
Yeah.
Andrew Warner: And what Polsia gets from it is all the subscription revenue, all the task revenue, and 20% of the customer revenue
Ben Cera: Yeah.
Andrew Warner: Of the, the entrepreneur’s revenue. Got it. Um, it seems like at that, at this point, it’s over half a million dollar run rate coming from that and the revenue from coming from the subscription and the task is over half a million dollars.
The, the revenue. From customers, the revenue
Ben Cera: come, the revenue coming from, like companies, revenue is still smaller because most companies are very new as you see, can see. It’s like the spike is like, so most companies are weak old. Um, over time, the revenue from from actual companies will grow higher than subscriptions because they’ll be winners.
Um, but that’s not the case today.
Andrew Warner: Okay. Can I see you like launch a company right now with an idea on the platform? Is it, is it easy or is it hard?
Ben Cera: Uh, yeah, no, it’s easy. I can, I can do it.
Andrew Warner: Do you wanna do a screen share right now with us? Let’s see what it’s like to launch a company.
Ben Cera: So first off, like, yeah.
Polsia Live is a great way to sort of like, see Polsia autonomously, uh, working on a bunch of tasks. Mm-hmm. Uh, you can see the email, the tweets, uh, the ads, it’s running. Uh, the documents, uh, that it’s creating, uh, to, you know, to show to the user what’s going on and like, et cetera. And like some of the latest companies that just launched.
Um, but let’s go to.com, uh, to sign up. So, um, cool. So let me get started. Uh, an email.
Okay. Okay. In my email. Sorry. Maybe you can blur it out after or something.
Andrew Warner: You want me to blur out your email?
Ben Cera: Uh, no, it’s, I mean, maybe. Okay, cool.
Andrew Warner: You tell me if you do. I will. Okay. So, so now we’re gonna build a new company.
Ben Cera: You can create a new company or grow your existing company. If you grow this new company, you have to put your company’s email.
But for the sake of this, uh, we’re gonna create a new company. And I think to keep it simple, I’m going to surprise me, uh, which is essentially gonna research me and try to come up with an idea that makes sense. For my background.
Andrew Warner: Interesting. Alright. It could come up with business ideas for me, based on me and who I am.
Let’s see that
Ben Cera: exactly. So now it’s like essentially, uh, setting it up second setting things up. So the first phase is gonna be, um, it researching me, uh, to figure out what I do, um, and understanding like how we can, you know, so it’s gonna research burn bro. I’m in San Francisco. So right now it’s launching, um, you know, a few searches online to find me.
Um, so you see, you can search you searching the web for, uh, Ben in San Francisco, Ben LinkedIn, Ben Twitter. So I just found me. So current role co-founder and CEO of Palsa. Uh, education, Columbia, et cetera.
Andrew Warner: I’ve gotta say you’re a very hard person to look up. I couldn’t find your LinkedIn profile in preparation for this.
We couldn’t find a personal site. Someone on my team said he’s a ghost. Thankfully, you responded to me on Twitter. Okay.
Ben Cera: Right. So, uh, yeah. So it, it found all the different projects that I’ve built in the past. Uh, you know, now Contacts, gift Shop. I was at Cloud Kitchens,
Andrew Warner: found more than we found. Okay.
Ben Cera: I mean, I’m, I’m on the internet.
I’m, uh, I’m not trying to be very public, but I’m, I have, there’s some stuff on me. So now it’s like looking at my past ventures to figure out, I’m a serial entrepreneur. Uh, so trying to figure out something in like that relates to what I’ve done before. So, you know, in everything customer facing like that, I always use like the, the best model.
So here it’s Opus 4.6, uh, that’s running. Um, and with extra thinking. So it’s like really thinking through very hard. Uh, what makes sense? So like here, it’s like it came up with Foundry, um, so it has a complete picture. This is, you know, all my career and all I’ve done. So it’s really thoroughly looking me up to really thoroughly think through what actually a good idea would be for me.
Andrew Warner: Is this the popular way for people to start up? My hunch is that they come up with their own ideas. I
Ben Cera: mean, I think it’s like actually a surprise number of pe surprising number of people, uh, go through the surprise me flow. And a surprising number of people are very sticky on the Surprise Me Flow because I think it puts a little bit of distance between the company that’s being built and their, like, they’re not as attached to the idea that like the people will like come up with their no idea.
And so they let Polsia just rip a little more, which yields usually better results because they’re not micromanaging the ai. Um, which is interesting, but like, uh, yeah, it’s like there’s a, there’s around like, you know, around 30% of 30 40% of people that use that do surprise me. Uh, so here you call it foundry, you know, ai, that fortune operates companies autonomously.
Interesting. So it’s actually building like a pulse.
Andrew Warner: So it did come up with a good idea. Like the right idea for you is the one that you’re doing already.
Ben Cera: I know. Okay. Thing, um, to the angle. Ben knows this space inside out. It organizes what’s broken. Foundry takes a different approach by going deep instead of broad precision of a scale as staying on Foundry as a name since it’s strong and advocative of forging something from scratch.
So, so that’s the first phase. So now we came up with the idea. So now it’s gonna go in the second phase soon where it’s gonna start, uh, building all the pieces of the business. Uh, you know, like sending up an email, uh, sending up the Twitter, sending up a landing page. Um, so yeah,
Andrew Warner: I’m still hung up on how long it takes to come up with the right style, the right website and all that, and how many iterations I go through with lovable.
Just find that, how is that going to happen here?
Ben Cera: Sorry. When you’re saying that like, here, it’s taking a long time.
Andrew Warner: No, I mean, I don’t mind it taking a long time. I mean, like, let’s say I have an idea, I’m gonna come up with one right now. Yeah. New type of landing page software. I have a vision for landing page software.
I can’t just articulate the full thing right here. It takes me a few iterations, even if it’s just me and Claude Code or Lovable to get the right design to figure out what the model should look like and so on. Right? Can I do that here, or am I just basically turning the idea over, getting a first draft and I can’t edit that draft except once a day?
Ben Cera: So again, it’s like you Polsia, like right now in this onboarding, we’ll do a lot of the prep work. You know, right now we just set up a market research report
Andrew Warner: and you’ll see,
Ben Cera: create a lot more things to give you, to give it a lot of context on like the idea. I like
Andrew Warner: that it came up with competitors and it even listed Polsia as number one.
Okay,
Ben Cera: interesting. Right? So like,
Andrew Warner: but it didn’t get the pricing right. It said $29 a month, your pricing is 50.
Ben Cera: That’s probably because on the internet, ’cause it used to be 29 a month. I see. And I increased the pricing because I was losing too much money.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Ben Cera: For customer. Um, but yeah, it’s like way this fits been.
What are the first priorities? Market positioning? Um, so here it tweeted, right? So you can see that like, actually it sent an actual tweet. Most ai ai agents do one thing. Foundry runs the whole company. Product code marketing, sales ops one, AI zero. And it
Andrew Warner: created the site.
Ben Cera: Um, not yet, it’s gonna do it. Uh, here, it sent, it sent email.
So it’s kinda showing you that like, um. That it can, that it created its own email. Okay. Uh, it says your welcome email to my actual address. Okay. Uh, I is your first company. Uh, you now have a company email, uh, I’m sending up for you right now. Uh, so now it’s actually building the landing page. Okay. Um, but yeah, it’s like once this is set up, yes, you can let it just build autonomously.
And that’s like, that’s one mode and the sec, but the second mode is that you can talk to it here. Uh, and get it to do whatever you want. You can just talk to it and it will, does
Andrew Warner: every, everything that I ask it to change on the landing page and on the software? Is that another task that I pay for?
Ben Cera: Yeah, exactly.
It is every task. You, I mean, you don’t, you Yeah. Essentially, like you have a bunch of credits of tasks that are included in your subscription.
Andrew Warner: I see.
Ben Cera: You get 15, so you can do 15 tasks on top of like the, the 30 tasks you get per day of the month.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Ben Cera: And then you can upgrade and pay for more tasks, uh, if you want to get more things done faster.
Um, yeah, your way.
Andrew Warner: Okay. So it might take me, frankly, it might take me 30 tasks to get the first version of the site up and running based on Exactly,
Ben Cera: yeah. And that’s the idea. So like, you know, it’s essentially like at the beginning of your experience, you may want to, to buy more tasks upfront and like, sort of like get your MVP out.
But once the product is up and running, you don’t. You don’t need a team to, you know, work, uh, you know, 24 7 to maintain a site, right? Uh, so that’s the idea with the autonomy.
Andrew Warner: You know, what I’m feeling is I think for someone like me, I might use Claude Code or some other tool to get that first version out, give it over to you, to Polsia and say, okay, now take over and run it from there.
Can it, oh, but it can’t do that. Maybe it can
Ben Cera: do that, but I think that’s a good use case. And like some users start on sia, then say, Hey, give me the code base. Then they, they can code in parallel of sia. So SIA continues to improve the product, but like maybe they wanna do a sprint on cloud. I
see.
Andrew Warner: They, and then I come back and I say, okay, I spent last night, three hours going back and forth with Claude code.
Now I’ve improved it. I want you to take it and improve the cold base of the site.
Ben Cera: Exactly, exactly. Got it.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Ben Cera: So that way you, the human can actually code by itself with cloud code or Crystal, whatever they want. And, and essentially Polsia picks it up because they just look at commits and they just load the latest commits and like, and it, it’s all connected the same way.
And like the, the web server, it reads the commits. So like if as a human you push commits the same way Polsia would push, commits to production, uh, yes, it gets picked up the same way. So, and there’s a lot of users that do that. It’s the minority because most people don’t even know what code is Right. But, uh, definitely some people doing that.
So here it created. Okay. And I
Andrew Warner: could see, yeah. Walk me through, what am I looking at? So,
Ben Cera: so again, so we tweeted, uh, it sent you an email to show you, it created an, an email address for you. It created a market research report. Uh, it created a mission document. So like, you know, every person with an idea deserves a company that builds itself.
Foundry exists to make it. I wish someone would build that obsolete. Uh, where we headed, a world that we’re selling company is as simple as describing it, or the barrier is in capital headcount or expertise, but the quality of the idea itself. So that’s sort of like an inspirational take on, on your business.
Yeah. Um, it created the landing page. So this is actually a landing page. It created, right? So this is just a landing page for now. For on the free version, you just get a landing page, and of course, if you pay, it will build the, the, the full MVP and then iterate on it.
Andrew Warner: Okay?
Ben Cera: Um, and then it created tasks, right?
So, uh, it created, um, a task to build the, the core engine autonomous task execution pipeline to the MVP. It created a research task to scale the battlefield AI company builder competitive analysis. And then it, it created a call outreach task to call outreach to AI curious founders to try to get some initial insights into people that may want to use the product.
Okay. And then you can, there’s a withdraw button here. So like, here it’s making zero revenue because we just started, but like you have a withdraw button when you can withdraw money with Stripe Connect. Uh, and then you have a, a tweet button. So here you, you have to, you have to first get your, start your free trial, uh, and then, then it becomes 50 bucks a month.
Uh, but you get, you know, one company, one task a night, uh, a a a credit, a bunch of credits, uh, for you to execute. You get unlimited strategy and planning chat with the, the chat agent, server database, email browser, and AI credits. Um, so yeah, I mean that’s, that’s pretty much it. Uh, and then you have the run ads button that’s like in one click.
You can do that. You have a call outreach button where you can set up daily recurring call outreach, daily tweets. And here I can say like, Hey, um, you know. I can ask both. Yeah. So it told me like, Hey, I’ve set up everything from Foundry. Actually, it, it sent me an email. Um, so tell me, Hey Ben, here’s what I built for Foundry today.
I researched, I what’s live, uh, three task queue for cycle one. Uh, core engine researched. So it essentially sends you an email every day, so you don’t have to like deal with, uh, you know, going to the site. You could just. Since essentially, uh, run your company via email, which is the, the thing everyone knows and has, and here I can go to the website and ask you anything and say it’s like, Hey, how can we make money with this?
Um.
And then that’s like, again, like, uh, always like the, the, you know, this is also using Opus 4.6, which is the best model because it’s gonna reason with you on like strategy. And so I just wanna make sure that like, for anything strategy related, it’s always the best model. So here it says a, a few paths that makes sense for an autonomous company builder, like Foundry SA subscription charge monthly for access revenue share.
Take a small percentage of revenue. Our credit model free to start pay to company loan. Which is funny because this is exactly the, the same model
Andrew Warner: you have,
Ben Cera: but it doesn’t know, right? Because it doesn’t have the context of what PO CI is specifically, right? I mean, it doesn’t know the features and it asks you go for it
Andrew Warner: and then it says, uh, which direction feels right.
Once you pick, I can build out the pricing pages, the payment flows, uh, we can handle payments and so on. You just need to start your free trial of Polsia to kick things off.
Ben Cera: Exactly.
Andrew Warner: So the vision for this, do you think you’re gonna be a solo founder for forever on this business?
Ben Cera: I mean, it’s interesting because like, first of all, I’m not solo because AI is building with me, right.
Uhhuh uh, interestingly, like this morning I woke up with like, there was like a mini outage, right? Where like there was an issue with the database. ’cause there was, there’s more and more traffick hitting the website and like, you know, sometimes you have to scale it. Yeah. And I was like, fuck. I need. And so I asked Opus and Codex, so like the, the two smartest ais, what’s going on?
And like they, they went, they researched for like a few minutes. They’re like, this is the bug, let me fix it. And I was like, then I asked Codex, are you sure? Can you double check? Double check? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s fine. And then I pushed it and then it was gone. And I was like, wow. So like, okay, what do, what, how could it look like with humans, right?
I would have to hire a really good engineer that’s on call 24 7, or maybe multiple engineers that are on call 24 7, right? Which is actually. I, I, it wouldn’t be just one engineer, it would be like multiple engineers in diff in different time zones. They would have to be very competit to like figure out a fix so fast.
Or I just, and now I was like, okay, this happened for the first time. I’m gonna, and I already have a, a cr job actually that runs every 30 minutes that checks all of the infrastructure. And actually that’s how I saw it. It gave me a, a red, a red sort of like light saying like, Hey, there’s an issue here. And so I could actually set up like.
Once it says Red Launch Opus and Codex in production and say, Hey, you are allowed to push a production without telling me, because there’s a, there’s a mini outage, so like we need to fix it right now. And so. Essentially like where I’m going at is like, I think I would end up hiring humans, but like I think a very small team can handle a lot more if they are orchestrators of agents instead of trying to like fix everything themselves.
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Ben Cera: So it would have to be a team of extremely ai, native AI pill people that like really want to trust AI in production to just do things, uh, the same way you would hire humans and trust them in production. Right.
Andrew Warner: This is super exciting. I mean, really this is the beginning of something really big already.
I’m seeing the AI builders that I interview are turning over. Obviously they’re turning over their, their development to Claude. At this point, it seems like it’s, it’s Opus four six. Some of them are starting to turn over marketing, but there’s still a lot of human involvement. To be able to turn it all over is the future.
And the thing that’s left is. This taste, this sense of what my customer wants, this random opinion. I’m of two minds. I don’t know if that’s going to survive or not. ’cause sometimes I feel like we know what beauty is. Like you could go to, to, uh, uh, so many different models and say, gimme a beautiful woman.
Give me a beautiful man. It would know exactly what it is. It it knows how to design them. It could even dress them well. So we know it has taste. Then again, on the other side. I sometimes I play chess.com all the time. I sometimes play against the machine. It sucks all the time. There’s something about the human that makes mistakes that comes up with random things that I just have not been able to find in any kind of AI or any kind of machine-based competitor.
So maybe, I don’t know. What do you think?
Ben Cera: I think that like, um. End of the day, at least in this first phase of like, uh, the singularity, quote unquote, um, end of the day, it’s humans selling to humans, right? Because it’s humans are buying. And so humans gonna be the best at knowing what other humans want, and it will evolve.
As the AI takes over all the channels, people will get weirded out by it and like their response to different. Services will, will, will change over time and humans will be the best at doing that because the AI is, the training model is always in the past, right? Mm-hmm. So they know what worked pre AI a lot of the time, um, versus what works right now is different.
So that’s what, first of all, policy is different because it learns continuously right now what works and saves that. So that’s a unique data point. Uh, but second of all, I think that like. Everything that’s like, you know, sales driven, like marketing, actually how you phrase things. Design, uh, how to be different, how to, like attack specific markets.
And of course, like people with influence like you or like other people, like there’s a lot of influencers these days, uh, micro or anyone with a community, they’re in the best position to sell because they actually can talk to those people directly and like they understand the pain points of their specific niche.
And so I, I really think that like there’s a, a first phase of like this post AI world where, um, we’re actually empowering a lot of people to just try a bunch of stuff is the way to go and like it will create better outcomes, better services, et cetera. Now there’s a second phase that’s darker, which is like agents selling to agents because now the ais know what they want.
So that gets weird and I haven’t really thought through too much, but, um. In that phase of the business, if it’s two LM selling to each other’s services, goods, and services, uh, yeah, that gets weird and like, yeah, maybe there’s no humans involved.
Andrew Warner: There is a part of that. I just talked with, uh, with Wade, the founder of Zapier.
He’s got people in his company now who are Mark, who are building marketing motions to sell to agents. And it’s phenomenal and it’s going well. And frankly, as someone like me who even uses Open Claw and or even forget about that, uh, Claude Code, anything. I need to use a tool. It’s my agent that helps me pick it.
I don’t want it to help me pick it. I just want it to pick the thing for me, and so I totally get it. I’m gonna interview an entrepreneur in a little bit who has got one of the most boring businesses, Ben? And I ask him why it took off. He goes, ’cause we are selling to agents, only selling to agents. He goes, the model is build boring companies that sell to agents right now.
That’s a takeoff point. Alright, we’re gonna see where it all leads up right now. Your website is Polsia, P-O-L-S-I a.com. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Fricking egg. Thanks for being on here.
Ben Cera: Thank you so much, Andrew. That was really fun.
Andrew Warner: You bet.
