So, I was told that this could be

between five and 55 minutes long, quite

a range, and that I could yap and go on

whatever side tangent I wanted, and

it'll be fine. So, I'm just prepping you

and giving you some explanation for why

this is the way it is. Uh, so my name is

Dax. I work on a project called Open

Code. It is one of the most used coding

agents out there. Uh, it's fully open

source, works with any model. Um, every

other company likes to say we have the

smartest coding agent. Well, we've got

the hottest coding agent. You go take a

look at it. It's a great experience. Uh,

awesome UX, totally themeable,

personalizable, fun fun project to use.

Uh, that's all the shilling I'm going to

do for now. Um, but let's get into the

meat of this talk. So, what I want to

talk about today is why AI is not going

to make you a winner. Um, we're at an AI

conference. There's a ton of AI content

out there. It's all anyone's ever

talking about these days. You got lots

of people saying that this is the

future. It changes everything. The way

like software development is going to

change. Software development is not

going to exist. You've got all these

crazy proclamations about how suddenly

everything is different and if you hop

on, you're going to be able to get the

benefits. Um, and some of that is, you

know, there's some truth to that to some

degree, but I want to focus on the stuff

that hasn't changed, the stuff that AI

is not going to help you with. Uh, the

things that are critical to make a

successful product that people use,

these things haven't changed. They're

not going to change anytime soon. And to

be honest, AI has not really helped us

with them. So, I'm going to talk about

things in terms of funnel. If you think

about I'm making a product, I've got

users that I want to start using my

product. They start from knowing nothing

about you to hearing about you to trying

your product to liking it to then like

fully converting. Uh if we think about

that journey, there are critical

moments. I'm going to identify three

critical moments that you need to focus

on. And

it's this has been true since for I mean

my whole career. It hasn't changed. It's

the things that I think about every

single day that I struggle with. uh

despite all the experience I have, it's

still very very challenging and the AI

stuff really hasn't done much for me.

So, let's yeah, let's get started with

the first one. So, the absolute top of

the funnel is marketing. And I'm going

to say off the bat that what I'm about

to say, you're going to feel a ton of

resistance to. So, I'm going to preface

that off the bat cuz I remember when I

felt that way. Uh and it took a lot of

effort in getting over like my own

psychology uh to do this part. Well, um,

the idea behind marketing is simple. You

have someone that's going about their

day. They got their problems. They got

their worries. They're focused on their

life. They do not give a about you

or what you're doing. You have to figure

out how to get them to stop in their

tracks, drop everything else that they

have, and look at you and think about

you and look into what you're offering

them. This is a really, really high bar

to clear. Um, and I think when I talk

about it in this way, the reason people

feel resistance is because most of us

aren't good at this. You know, it's a

skill like anything else, you are not

going to be amazing at it from day one.

It's way outside your comfort zone.

Unfortunately, a lot of people's

reactions to that truth is that they

feel like they shouldn't have to deal

with this problem. Uh, there's a lot of

thoughts like, "Hey, if my product is

good enough, it'll sell itself. Um, I

don't need to do marketing. I don't need

to do things that are gimmicky. You

know, I'm above that. The truth is,

there's people that make products that

are better than anything you're ever

going to do in your whole life. Like the

absolute best products out there, they

still have to think about this problem.

So, if they're not too good to think

about, hey, how do I get people's

attention? Neither are you. Neither am

I. Like, we all just just got to do it.

So, I might as well start to get good at

it. Um, the way that I like to think

about it is

you need to do things that have a shot

at being shared. So, if you think about

standard marketing, people will write a

blog post about a new feature or they'll

hire an influencer to like talk about

the new feature or just kind of the

things that pretty much anyone can do.

Uh, you know, everyone just buys

billboards these days for some reason.

The thing with these efforts are they

make sense, you know, you're like

telling people about the thing you

built, but there's basically zero chance

that somebody sees that and they're

like, "Oh yeah, I got to show my friends

this blog post about this 76 feature,

this product release, right? No one's

getting excited about that. They're

probably going to scroll right past." I

mean, you know what people are like

these days. You're all on TikTok. I know

your attention spans are just basically

deteriorating into nothing. Uh, no one

can focus on something that's boring.

Um, so none of these things really count

as top level marketing. They're not

stopping someone who doesn't know about

you to start thinking about you. Uh, the

key here is to come up with something

that someone's going to see and they're

going to think it's so crazy or so funny

or so uh, deep or so, you know, it it

strikes a chord where they're like, I

got to show this to my friends, to my

co-workers. uh can you believe that they

did this? You know, you want to elicit

that type of uh emotion from someone.

The as simple as that bar is, you know,

it's very easy to tell whether

something's going to clear that bar or

not. It's extremely hard to come up with

ideas that do clear that bar. Um so

that's the challenge. You got to be

creative. You got to come up with ideas

that work. Uh and you're going to miss a

lot. It's just like swinging at

products. You're aiming for a hit.

You're going to swing a lot and a lot of

times you're going to miss. That's true

of marketing as well. Don't bother

taking shots that never have a chance of

being a hit, right? That's just a waste

of time. Um, it's okay to try nine times

on something embarrassing or crazy and

doesn't work, but that one that hits,

it's going to be seen by a million

people and your target audience is going

to be in that group or connected to that

group. Uh, and if you repeat this over

and over, that compounds, you get better

at it. Top level marketing, amazing. The

reason AI doesn't help here is it's all

about creativity. I have not had a

single good idea come out of AI. Even

[snorts] when I use it as like a

brainstorming partner, it like just gets

super corny. Uh just it just can't come

with anything that's cool. Like it you

can't do cool. Uh and top level

marketing is about is about cool. And

that sounds like an innate thing, but it

is a skill that that you can learn.

Okay. So now that you have someone that

is interested in what you're doing, you

got their attention. The next thing to

figure out is how to get them to the aha

moment. So, if you think about great

products, there's a moment where you've

had a certain interaction with the

product where it clicked for you. You

got what it was about. You were sold on

it. Uh, and you're like, "This is

awesome." And even if it wasn't for you,

you might think, "This isn't for me, but

this is cool enough that if I know

someone that it is for, I'm going to

recommend it to them." So, that is the

aha moment. You need to figure out what

is the singular aha moment in your

product and eliminate friction

ruthlessly to get someone to that aha

moment as fast as possible. So the

challenges here are

you might feel like oh there's a lot of

good features in my app. You know I want

them to know about features A B C. You

you have to be brutal. You kind of have

to like you know kill your children

here. You have to pick the one that

matters the most and deprioritize

everything else and look at every single

step that it's going to take for someone

to get there and cut it. When I use

products, like when someone sends me

like, oh, like I'm building this thing,

let me try it. The feeling like I get

this crazy amount of pain cuz I see all

the steps that it takes before I even

get to the point where I even understand

what the heck they're doing. Uh, and I

know that at each point they're losing

10% of their people, 20% of their

people. And I know that the percentage

of people making it to the end are so

small before we can even talk about

whether, hey, is the thing you're

building that useful? Uh, this is

another thing that almost no companies

get, right? Like, think about when

you're signing up for something, they

ask such stupid up front before you

even know if you want the thing. They're

like, "How big is your company? Like,

how many employees do you have? What's

your title?" like who cares about any of

this? You got to cut all of that out to

get people to the moment that that you

care about. And if you're able to do

this, that's how you build a product

that, you know, really starts to take

off, uh, really starts to grow itself.

All that work you did for the top level

marketing, if only like 3% of people are

getting to the aha moment, uh, you know,

that that's a total waste. The the hard

part, the other hard part is like maybe

you don't even have an aha moment. Um,

that makes you think a lot about, hey,

what am I even building? What am I

doing? Is is this is this worth the

effort and pain of trying to build

something. Uh, and I think it's worth

looking at some of the most successful

products of all time. Uh, some of them

have some like crazy crazy aha moments,

right? You think about chat GPT, which

is the most successful product, I would

say, consumer product ever that has

existed in in our lifetime. uh they give

you an input box where you can type

anything and you're going to get like a

humanlike interaction as a response.

Like literally anything in the world you

can type. That's like an insane aha

moment, right? The moment you see that,

like the dumbest person in the world can

use that, they can be like, "Yeah, this

is awesome. I get it." Uh it's very very

very compelling. Uh on the social media

side, right? You have something like

Facebook. uh you have a crush and you

can like send a poke to your crush where

you're like kind of flirting but it's

deniable. Instant aha moment like you

are sold on this product. You're going

to keep using it. Um so those are like

very extreme examples but every product

should have a singular moment where

you're like this is the reason I exist.

This is the reason why we're doing all

of this. Uh people that experience it

should get it. Um, again, the reason why

AI doesn't help with any of this is,

again, it goes back to creativity and

really understanding this space. Uh,

spend a lot of time thinking about it,

[clears throat] like gaining clarity,

like thinking about positioning, uh,

thinking about what you're doing unique

that nobody else is doing. All very,

very hard. You know, just cuz we have AI

that we can talk to, it's not suddenly

going to turn you into a winner at

making like, you know, amazing aha

moments. the people that are good at

that very very few people in the world

are going to keep doing that and keep

crushing the rest of us. Uh so again

another thing that we have no choice but

to try to get good at. So the last part

of this funnel is the retention side. So

let's say you've gotten the attention of

someone. You managed to get them to the

aha moment. They like what you're doing.

They're now like using your product. How

do you retain them for life? Like how do

you get a customer forever? Uh if you

aren't getting customers forever, you're

just leaking people through and you're

going to hit a ceiling on your business

and it's not going to be fun. Like it's

it's annoying when you grow on one side

but you're leaking on the other side.

You really want to get people for life.

So that number of customers you're

serving is compounding over time. Um

retention is interesting because you

have to think about it kind of

differently than the last two phases

because it's all about power users,

right? It's all about someone that's

using your product for a while that's

pushing the limits of what they can do

with it. They want things to be more

configurable. Uh they want more advanced

features. You have uh teams using it.

You have larger enterprises using it.

They have very specific needs. How do

you build things that support all of

that without sacrificing all the stuff

we did in the first two phases of

keeping things simple, having a very

streamlined initial first experience? Uh

it's hard to juggle both of these both

of these things. uh we've kind of been

forced to think about this because we

have been doing open source work uh for

me personally it's been like five or six

years now. Um open source products are

interesting because they are used by

both like a random indiv individual

hobbyists that just want something that

they can use uh that's simple and free

and whatever. Uh but also open source

projects are some of the best choices

for like mega enterprise companies,

right? These giant companies uh

typically want to run everything

themselves. They want to host everything

themselves. They're very sensitive about

uh data going anywhere else. Uh so open

source projects have this requirement of

supporting both like the really simple

case and both the really advanced case.

Uh the way we go about this is there's

kind of this there's like this I would

say misconception that products can

either be simple or they can be capable

and they'll say like oh we're like Apple

we're building a simple experience but

what they're usually doing is just

building an incapable experience and

they're saying that oh we're like Apple

cuz it's the simple experience. There's

actually no trade-off between these two

things. You can build both a simple and

capable experience. Uh the way to do

this, it's just it's just more work up

front, right? You think about a feature

you want to build that uh makes a lot of

sense for users. Instead of building the

feature, you kind of have to build

primitives that can be assembled into

that feature. So you think about the

primitive layers first, make them uh

pretty wide scoping, u make them really

advanced, really powerful. Then you take

those primitives and assemble your

simple experience that 99% of people

experience. Uh the what the nice thing

about doing it in this order is when

they get more complex, you can give them

more direct access to these underlying

primitives. They can get more advanced.

They can flex and bend your product and

hopefully they never need to outgrow it,

right? Because the key here is you don't

want to build a product that people

outgrow. uh because you're effectively

serving as a funnel for someone else's

product, whatever they whatever they

outgrow into. Uh so I really like

building things where think about like

everything we ever want to do and build

a set of primitives that can eventually

do those things and assemble our product

using those primitives. Uh this is

another area where AI does not really

help me because

it's like so hard, right? the building

and trying to build these set of

primitives is how you even figure out

what primitives to need primitives you

need and what you're trying to do. uh

that exploration process like sure you

can like again chat with AI brainstorm

but this isn't the type of thing that

like you to even like communicate to AI

what you want to do you have to

understand it really well yourself and

that's a task a task is to understand

what you're trying to do really really

well uh so this is a again a very

critical part of making a successful

product um

AI is not going to suddenly make you

amazing at it just it you just can't it

takes a lot of work, time, energy, uh,

until your brain can wrap its head

around the space you're working to

design the right set of primitives that

can kind of scale to to all these

situations. All right, so the last thing

I'll leave you all with is if you go and

try out Open Code, uh, and you go

through the full process that I just

talked about, you're going to find a lot

to criticize. You're going to be like,

he's not following his own advice here,

here, and here. And the reason that's

happening is even though I can

understand all this stuff and to the

degree where I can talk about it and

articulate it, it's just hard. It's very

hard to follow this advice. It's simple

to understand, I think. But executing it

well daytoday,

there's no getting around the fact that

it's enormously difficult and it takes

so much out of a person, a team to line

everything up to get it all working

perfectly right. Uh AI is amazing and

lets us do all kinds of things that we

couldn't do before. Does not save us

from that day-to-day pain uh in trying

to make something that's great. So yeah,

I wanted to do a talk that was about AI,

but kind of I'm tired of people feeling

like suddenly the tables are going to

turn and things are going to be easier.

They're not easier. My life is just as

hard as it's ever been. It's just as

hard as it's ever been to do something

amazing. But it's also where all the fun

comes from, where all the purpose comes

from. And people are worried about like,

oh, people are going to like not have

any purpose with with AI. Uh, no, that's

not going to be a problem because, you

know, things are just as hard as as they

ever were. So, I hope that inspires you,

scares you, I don't know, makes you sad,

makes you happy. I don't know how you're

going to feel about this, but that's all

I have. Thanks for thanks for listening.

>> [clears throat]