$215M AI CEO: How I’d Build a Profitable AI Startup in 30 Days (2026 Playbook)

Young Zhao is the CEO of OpusClip, one of the fastest-growing AI tools with 50M users and a $215M valuation. In this episode of Silicon Valley Girl, Marina Mogilko talks with Young about how he built a profitable AI startup after multiple failed attempts. They break down a realistic 2026 playbook for founders — how to find a problem worth solving, when to pivot, how to get your first users, and how to think about pricing and unit economics early. A practical conversation for founders, solopreneurs, and anyone serious about building an AI startup that actually makes money.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:59Marina Mogilko?

  So let's imagine you have to start a company again. Walk me through the first 30 days. What will you do?

• 1:05Speaker 03

  If I have to start a company again, I think the first thing is...

• 1:09Marina Mogilko?

  This is Young, co-founder and CEO of Opus Clip, an AI tool that turns long videos into viral short clips. In just two and a half years, he built it into one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world. 50 million users, $215 million valuation. LLMs are advancing so fast and large companies are releasing better and better products. Do you think there are any niches or problems that are not worth solving anymore?

• 1:35Speaker 03

  If you asked me like three years ago, the answer would be much simpler. I think every AI founder should be somehow AGI-pilled, which means that you can predict what the foundation models can release in the next few weeks or months.

• 1:47Marina Mogilko?

  The rules have changed and most founders don't see it yet. Young breaks down where the opportunities are, what to avoid, and what it takes to win in 2026.

• 2:00Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, Young, thank you so much for being here. You've built one of the fastest growing AI companies. Twelve million users in 12 months, 215 million in valuation. Can you introduce yourself in 60 seconds? What do you do?

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, Marina. I'm Young, co-founder and CEO at Opus Clip. We build the products that turn long-form, dense information content like articles, blogs, footage, papers into engaging contents like short-form videos that can attract your audiences worldwide. We have gathered actually more than 15 million users in the past two and a half years.

• 2:35Marina Mogilko?

  What? This is crazy. Wow.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  Super crazy.

• 2:38Marina Mogilko?

  And also, like, your story is fascinating because you started during COVID and you started with all the different features and only this one stuck. Can you talk to me about this mindset of like trying things and seeing them not work and not giving up?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of frustrating for sure. I think in the early days, like, we are like new founders or early founders. It's actually the passion that drove us to continuously try different things. But like probably after half a year or even one year of trying like, let's say, three to four different things. If you don't still get any early signals of the product market fit, you will be easily fatigued. So I think that's the challenge and we're kind of lucky that we first built a live streaming tool. Nobody likes it, but there's only one feature that is like the clipping feature in the live streaming tool that had somehow early signal of the product market fit.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  And also thanks to the time, which, you know, actually in the same week, ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. So we quickly married that to this, you know, standalone feature and pivoted to a new product, which is the Opus Clip right now.

• 3:50Marina Mogilko?

  What should people pay attention to when they decide to double down on one particular feature?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Good question. So we were not tracking any classic OG AARRR kind of metric. We didn't build a product for Opus Clip in the first day. We actually engineered the results, the final outcome, the final videos, and just emailed them to all of the potential customers.

• 4:16Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, so you're like manually created?

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:19Marina Mogilko?

  That's how you start.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like we... We man, uh, we, we work, we work with the AI to edit all these videos and write and send out to all the um potential customers. And I think we got like more than sixty percent of positive feedback.

• 4:33Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  I love this clip. I wanna use it, like, I just wanna tweak one thing and, you know, I can publish it right away. So those are the very early feedback. And this, then, like, after a few more weeks, we built the product into a Discord bot. Still no interface, right? So we save a lot of time building the, you know, UI UX and all that, all that kind of stuff. And just focus on deliver, delivering the value, validating the outcome. So we grabbed, you know, hundreds of, uh, thousands of, uh, creators into our Discord channel and they are playing with the bot. So what we were looking at are basically their retention, right? Their engagement of that tool. And but, but beyond that, we also look into the discussions around the content. Like, uh, we saw people, hey, how do you get that content?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  How do you get that piece of, um, the clip? So I think in the early days, quantitative data are important, but qualitative, um, data or feedback is also super important. When we start hearing people, uh, complaining about the queue, complaining about the quota of their data usage, we realize this is the part of market fit moment.

• 5:39Marina Mogilko?

  Nice. And was there a metric, uh, when you said you were tracking how often people were coming back to the bot in Discord? What's a good number? Cause it's not, I feel like it's not something like Google, right? When you're like Googling several times a day.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:51Marina Mogilko?

  But for a feature like yours, what's, what's a good metric?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, the general use case for content creator, let's say, they would normally have like one piece of long form content, uh, long form footage. And they want to use our tool to, to generate like five to ten short clips so that they can post to their channels. One clip a day. Um, so I would say the average, uh, frequency of using our tools like on a weekly basis. But when we see people like come to use it every day or, you know, multiple times a week, that is a very strong usage.

• 6:26Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Beyond what we can imagine.

• 6:27Marina Mogilko?

  Uh, so based on this story that we just talked about, of you ended up finding this feature, what would be your advice to all the startup founders? What would you say is the key learning from that?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  The key learning is that you should build a real business with the product, not a cool demo, right? Because many people just start with building a very cool demo. Um, they showed it off to the people and, you know, it looks like magic. Because the demo really.

• 6:54Marina Mogilko?

  You follow the way it looks, right?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:57Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the demo shows a very strong capability. But um many founders failed because they didn't find a product market fit for a real business. What that means is that they are not solving, probably they're not solving a real pain point, a real painful job to be done in the real world. Because before your product, if they, if it is a real painful job to be done, there must be a lot of alternative solutions. Like, you know, humans do the job, or they build some internal tools, or they manually just, you know, concatenate a couple of different snippets of the, or solutions to make it work, right? They spend extra time, effort, or, you know, painful hours to get the job done.

• 7:42Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  So are you really replacing those type of like tedious or human heavy workflows? That is one part of, you know, whether it is a real business. The second thing would be how your customers uh understand the values you created, right? If you can tell your product value in just like ten words, maybe or probably you're close to a real business. If your product is just cool and all the feedback was like, this is amazing, this is awesome. But nobody wanna give you uh their credit card information, nobody wanna ask you what is the, you know, what is your pricing tier? It's also not helping you um get to the product market fit as well.

• 8:21Marina Mogilko?

  I really like the way you approach this. So you figured out the problem that people are solving manually. And then you created a product manually without any interface. And then you saw early users' feedback. I really like that approach. If people wanna use that approach, what would you say comes first? Passion about particular problem or the, or the problem itself?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say both of them are super critical, um but my first principle for passion is actually not necessarily the passion for solving the problem. I think passion is something more emotional. I think all the entrepreneurs, all the founders need to have the passion to be a problem solver. You need to have the passion to be a builder, to do something that people want, to do something that, you know, ideally change the world. I think that's the passion founders need, right? You don't have to have a passion for like video clipping. You don't have to have a passion for like, you know, running a restaurant. I think all you need to have for passion is to be a problem solver,

• 9:25Speaker 03

  be a builder, be a game changer. And rationally speaking, the real painful job to be done is something that is inevitable in your journey. Um, you have to be very rational to figure out this is a real problems to be solved by my passion, right? Um, so the deep understanding about the industry, about the workflow, about the customer profiles, about the use cases, those are all rational. Um, so I think an emotional passion for like a bigger picture, um, just, just to be a builder, plus, um, the rational conviction for solving a concrete problems that you know very well. Those are the necessities for becoming a founder.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked three hundred fifty thousand Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 11:09Marina Mogilko?

  Let's talk about your new agent Opus.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 11:12Marina Mogilko?

  Because I was, I I heard this presentation where you compared uh where you tool is, your tool is doing now to human editors and yes, human editors are slightly better, but when it comes to someone who's just starting out multiple channels, agent Opus becomes invaluable because it just takes all the content creates, I guess, all those channels. Can you explain how it works?

• 11:33Speaker 03

  We can't have two products, right? The Opus Clip product is like a very refined workflow um or agentic workflow that follows um a rigid um plan and then execute it. The agent Opus on the other side is more um is more agentic. Um there is no preset workflow um and the interaction for users is that you can just drop your um drop your idea, your story, or some links, or some, you know, assets, and instruct the agent to do whatever you want them to create. So the agent is more is playing the role like a director, right? It's not a video editor, it's not a video creator, it's not a

• 12:16Speaker 03

  video generator, it's not a designer, it is a director. I think about, you know, what, how director works in those uh movie studio. They are like a true leader um managing and collaborating with multiple different functions. Like there are designers, producers, um artists, um researchers and script writers, scene writers, right? There are so many sub-agents in Agent Opus, all reporting to the central director agent. Um so I think that's the magic part of it. Um because when, well, everyone says I'm using AI, I'm building AI,

• 12:58Speaker 03

  but I think building a team of AI is another level of challenge, but it also unlocks another level of superpower. So when, when we saw that um agent, uh the agent of the central director agent, um you know, designing a plan and also orchestrated among the other eight to nine agent.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  It is a truly end-to-end autonomous experience. Where the input is just some article or pieces of news. While the output consists like, you know, well-written script. Polished voiceovers, um, real photo realistic avatars. Real world assets sourced from the entire internet and also YouTube. Plus, AI-generated scenes, animations, infographics along the video. So, it's a true multi-agent, multimodal agent workflow.

• 13:58Marina Mogilko?

  And so, or I can drop my LinkedIn post, right, which is a written post and you'll be able to create.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:04Marina Mogilko?

  A video out of it?

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 14:06Marina Mogilko?

  So, can you show the new AI feature? Cause the, this is something that we're doing a lot. We're trying to repurpose whatever is going viral on LinkedIn. This is so funny. I posted myself sitting in the garage on a call. Because my kids were going crazy upstairs. They just couldn't take the call upstairs and I'm like in this messy garage and freezing. Um, and it got a hundred twenty thousand impressions. And ideally, I want it to become, you know, something else I can post, so.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 14:35Marina Mogilko?

  So, copy link, right?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, you copy and paste. Uh, you can just say like, create a video of this LinkedIn post. And.

• 14:46Marina Mogilko?

  Shall I add more prompts, like, uh, m- make it a viral reel or?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:51Marina Mogilko?

  Or it should, or is like pre-prompted?

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pre-prompted, but you can always, always add. Um, or you can, uh, you can add some thought on it, um, up to you. So, uh, for voice, you wanna also create your own voice, but let's just like use a, use our default all voice. Um, okay.

• 15:10Marina Mogilko?

  What is the hook?

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Hook is that you will have different, um, hook templates.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Like the fast cuts, article highlight. Right now it's kind of slow, uh so probably takes about like thirty to sixty minutes.

• 15:24Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, thirty to sixty minutes, okay.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we're optimizing this this speed, hopefully it can get to like twenty minutes uh in two months.

• 15:31Marina Mogilko?

  I'm gonna show you the result.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Work and home lives blend together now more than ever. A constant zigzag between professional calls and family chaos.

• 15:40Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, so with all of this, what will happen to creators in three years? So like in general, creator economy, how do you see it evolving with all the agentic tools?

• 15:48Speaker 03

  I think the entry barrier to create something is going to dissolve. So that everyone has the superpower to become a creator. Um, that's a brutal fact. Um, and it makes the competition much more challenging, to be honest. But the good thing is that um everyone now don't have to think about, you know, what tool do I need to use? Or what techniques, what uh expertise do I need to learn? But now you can focus on figuring out what is your uniqueness? How should you stand out, right? What is your unique narrative of your of your uh story? What is your unique messaging? What is your unique tone? Um, what sets you apart? Um, so just focus on yourself, focus on your own storytelling.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  And in, you know, one to two years, no more than three years, AI can just deliver the job for you. They're doing actually the dirty work for you, but you're gonna be the real creative one.

• 16:43Marina Mogilko?

  But it's crazy, the competition is gonna be insane.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  It is.

• 16:47Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think there is less and less time to build a personal brand? Because what happens if in three years, everyone has access to tools? Everyone tells a story and then we don't have enough eyes to consume all the content. Do you ever worry about it?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  I don't worry that too much, um because think about like ten years ago, five years ago, when you wanna build a personal brand. Um, I think most of the time you're you're wasting is to, um, you know, edit the video scene by scene, right? It's to designing, designing your colors, designing um everything like page by page. I think that's how you waste the time. So the analogy is that is that if you have to spend five months um building your personal branding from zero to one, but nowadays it's like you just need a couple of weeks.

• 17:31Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Or three days.

• 17:32Marina Mogilko?

  My like thing, because I started ten years ago and I remember editing all the videos.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:36Marina Mogilko?

  Something that set me apart was the willingness to do that. So my content was super mediocre. But because I took the chance of like, you know, spending six hours to edit a video, I got my followers. It's impossible today. Like if my content is mediocre, it's not gonna be noticed. That's the thing, right? So your story either has to be extraordinary or or that's it. Do you think we still have this opportunity to showcase our personal brands or because there are so many, we're getting saturated?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  The good storyteller um or the the real unique people can still um have the advantage. Uh think about um you know carriage versus cars, right? A hundred years ago, very few people have cars. Uh so it become a privilege to be, you know, one of the fastest people in the world. Nowadays, everyone are able to to drive a car. Almost everyone are able to drive a car. Um but there are still Formula One drivers. There are still, you know, W D C drivers who are, you know, way faster than ordinary people. So I think this probably, you know, ten years ago, you showed your willingness to be uh to build your personal branding by uh spending extra time, um writing content, um polishing your website, editing the videos.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  But I think in the future, you people who wanna stand out should still probably spend a same amount of time on something else. Not using the tools, not, you know, building by yourself. But the time should be spent on thinking through how you should stand out. So I think time spent probably the same, but the actual work are completely different, which is more human, actually.

• 19:17Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, yeah, I like that reply. I like that car analogy, actually. Thank you. So let's imagine uh you have to start a company again now. Walk me through the first thirty days. What will you do?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  If I have to start a company again, the first thing is always to figure out what is what is the real painful job to be done. I wanna, so I I'm the prototype of founder who don't start everything from technology, but from um users, from the market. I have to segment my market uh to a very clear, very vertical niche that I can clearly understand their existing workflow, their existing pain point, their existing alternative solutions. And then, so I think probably I I would have to spend, you know, the first couple of weeks,

• 20:10Speaker 03

  two or three weeks, understanding the real use case, um the very specific I C P. And the second thing is to just engineer a, you know, prototype or proof of concept. I can do that very easily with all the vibe coding tools right now, right?

• 20:26Marina Mogilko?

  What's your favorite?

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I I'm a heavy um cursor user, um but I I tried many other different tools. The cursor is my go to, go to tool, yeah. Cause I came from engineering background, so it's um.

• 20:39Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, more familiar with the I D E. The step two is actually just um couple of days should be good enough uh to have a proof of concept. Uh and then I go back to share that with uh the early users, um the I C Ps to get, you know, their feedback. The feedback should not only about, do you like the product? But also like what kind of problems are are I solving for you? And what is the value you perceive, which means how much money you are willing to pay for it. Right? So tha- that process probably is the majority of the early thirty days. But I think on the other side, I'm also, I also need to think it through about what kind of proprietary, proprietary data can I possess along the way?

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And will that data set grow as the product grow, as the user grow, right? We don't have to build toward a moat um or a very clear plan of defensibility. But I think we need to have that idea. At least well thought in the first early days. Um, cause you have, you you can't avoid it, right? When you really launch the product, so it's better to have something in mind, have some idea in mind.

• 21:51Marina Mogilko?

  Like what makes you stand out?

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:54Marina Mogilko?

  And what makes people come back?

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you ask this question, especially nowadays, especially we are entering twenty twenty six.

• 22:00Marina Mogilko?

  We're switching between apps like crazy. Like there's new shiny app, you install it, you're like, oh, I love it now, but the next day, something else comes out and it's so easy. Unless you have history with a certain app, right?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. So the last thing I think we should consider is the distribution channel. Um, I think the competition is totally different. Yeah, two years ago, two years ago, you can easily say you are the chat G P T of A B C, right? It's so easy to go viral at that time nowadays, like everyone knows A I, everyone has used A I. Um, so figure out a distribution channel will help you better refine your user experience, your onboarding. And also um your target I C P as well.

• 22:41Marina Mogilko?

  So basically you start with expertise, it looks like. You need to understand at least one niche to be able to build something, not like, oh, this market looks good. I'm gonna try and build something for it. No, you need to be deep in that market and understand the problem.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, because you asked me a question, uh, the assumption is today, right? A I has been there for like more than three years, the L M has been there for more than three years, right? It's because if you ask me like three years ago, um, the answer was would would be much simpler, but nowadays.

• 23:09Marina Mogilko?

  With A I. But now, when you know L L M's are advancing so fast and large companies are releasing better and better products. Do you think there are any niches or problems that are not worth solving anymore? Just because the companies can take over in like a week?

• 23:26Speaker 03

  I think two major types of problems that a founder should avoid. Um, the first one is that you are just building a feature for an existing type of I C P, ideal customer profile. Within an existing workflow built by the incumbents. So basically what that means that is that um the incumbents can easily build a feature that, you know. Bundles everything, right? And probably you won't have your own distribution channel. For example, I think like if you wanna build a notetaker, think of throw, right? Probably find another direction. Cause it's super easy for Zoom or you know, Google Meet to have that feature in their existing workflow.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Because you're targeting basically the same I C P, same market, same, almost, you know, same or adjacent use cases. Attached to a big workflow, a big platform. I think every A I founder should be somehow A G I P O'd. Which means that you can predict or you should be confident. To make some predictions about what the foundation models can release in the next few weeks or month. Right? If they are already doing, you know, some job eighty percent very well, ninety percent very well. I think it's, you know, in their second, in their next few release, they can probably do that job. Like ninety nine percent well, or even a hundred percent, right?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  So um, run that test in your internal strategic discussions. If you're just becoming a rapper with some prompts. Then probably you don't have to write any prompts in the second release, in the next release of um, Gemini or Chat G P T. You need to focus on solving like a vertical business problem. Um, by like integrating the workflow end to end, right? You need to own the workflow end to end. So that, you know, A I is part of the workflow, but it's not all, right? Instead, like, if you build a rapper with some prompt engineering, A I is almost the end to end workflow itself.

• 25:28Marina Mogilko?

  Can you also walk me through um, the process of coming up with pricing for an A I tool? How do you decide on, cause I know you have lower tier, but then you also have like a twenty K. Check for um, bigger companies, how do you come up with a price?

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Pricing is a, is a real science. So, couple of factors we uh, considered in the first place. For example, first, what is your value creation? How to measure your value creation, right? Um. Before using your product, what would your users do to achieve the goal, uh, to get the job to be done? Uh, they probably, you know, spent their own time, which there is a price for their own time, right? They probably outsource it to some vendors or, um, yeah, they pay humans to get the job done. Or they may like use some like OG tools, uh, by some professional guys like, you know, in our use case, professional editors to get the job done.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  So in our industry, like editing a clip, editing a like a viral ready, high-quality clip, one-minute clip often takes about one hour or at least thirty minutes. And the price, the market price is about twenty-five to fifty dollars. So that's the value creation we're benchmarking against. The second thing is about your unit economy, um, because you have inference cost. Um, and that can, even that can go down in the future, but, um, it's still very pricey in early days. And also for videos, another elephant in the room for the cost is the storage.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  The storage can be just five percent in the early days, but it can become like fifty percent of your total COGS after three or five years.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So the unit economy, you wanna make sure it's healthy, it's, um, sustainable. Third one, I was, I would say, just do as many experiments as possible. We actually sent out like thousands of service in the first few months. And we tweaked our pricing logic again and again, well, in the early days, right? You don't wanna change drastically in the, in the late stage. But in the early stage, uh, we, we did a lot of survey, customer interview to understand how much they are willing to pay. Um, because even you have a clear value creation and a well-calculated, um, unit economy, can users still perceive that, right? Is your metric clear enough for user to understand the value creation? You know, to buy in your value creation that is still.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Relying on your market messaging and also your metric setup like most of the products are using a metric of usage instead of seat. I think that makes sense, especially for solo printers. But the experiment really tells us what price to go because you don't have to set up a price that everyone are happy with. You probably have an assumption or hypothesis of what kind of customers you want to target to, right? All you need to do is to make sure those ICPs are okay, are happy with the price. You probably have to say no to like seventy percent of the early-stage users, but you should be to only focus on your ICP in the early days.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  And then maybe you can develop other pressing or even product capabilities for the rest of the users.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a seventy-five-dollar sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked three hundred fifty thousand Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 29:50Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, the importance of saying no, right?

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:53Marina Mogilko?

  All the time. When you said you do customer interviews, how many interviews do you need to do in order to land on some kind of a decision?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  I think the number of customer interviews are not the key, but how you do it is more important. I think we did about twenty to thirty uh for on average for one single um critical product decisions. But we set the distribution of the those twenty to thirty um customers in a in a very um messy way. Where like, okay, four marketers, you know, five creators. And also they're in different industries, they're they come with different um you know, purchase of power coming from different ge- geographic locations, backgrounds. You wanna make sure they are representative enough.

• 30:38Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  To help you make a decision.

• 30:40Marina Mogilko?

  I love it.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  You don't need a lot, but you need to have a clear concise set of um testers.

• 30:47Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, you wanna make sure you get like a full picture of the market. That's really helpful for the research and validation phase. Now, once you're in building mode, what about the A I skills? What is the number one A I skill everyone should be up working on right now?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  The number one A I skill is should actually go for first principle. It doesn't matter like if you're using A I for um you know, design your poster, um you know, vibe code your prototype. I think everyone should treat A I as your thinking partner or even thought partner. Which means that when you are having a problem of understanding your users, when you are having a problem of managing your teams, when you are having problems of um figuring out your pricing or you know, all the critical decisions in your lifetime. Uh when you are a founder, I think traditionally you will just go reach out to your coach or some more senior people. Uh or people with relevant experience, right, to ask for their advice.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  But I think in this era of A I, you should run through it with your with, you know, Gemini or Chat G P T. They are actually a very, very senior, very omnipotent thinking partner. Um just, you know, instead of like asking one line of questions um through as many contests as possible. Um and also, you know, do like more than twenty rounds of back and forth um communications. You will be mind-blowingly enlightened through these conversations. So now it is that's how I practice myself.

• 32:18Marina Mogilko?

  Do is there a certain daily practice that you have? I I talked to Mustafa Suleman on this podcast. He's a CEO of Microsoft AI and he shared that every single day he would talk to Copilot and just tell Copilot about what the day has been like and the decision that he's made and how those decisions made him feel. So that when in three months he has something like a similar problem, he still talks to the same thread in Copilot. And Copilot be like, oh, when you made that decision three months ago, you actually regret it. So this time, listen to this. Is there something similar that you have?

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Cause I think the current chatbot memory is so powerful that uh so what I um like monthly. One of my monthly ritual is that I ask ChatGPT about um you know, what are my major decisions in the past month. Um you know, give me some comment, um feedback, um.

• 33:14Marina Mogilko?

  But that that means you shared every single decision.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:17Marina Mogilko?

  How does it like every night you just said, like, these are the decisions I made or?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, sometimes I, you know, talk to the AI in that way and sometimes I would just um um forward my decision just um like I captured like a screenshots of our group discussion. Um I dropped the link of my the document of a of a PRD of a spec. Um that kind of thing too. I yeah, I I I kind of force myself to.

• 33:45Marina Mogilko?

  To document.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, to document it.

• 33:47Marina Mogilko?

  Uh is so you said Gemini is the best for it or?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm not heavily using both Gemini and ChatGPT.

• 33:54Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I think recently I realized they really memorize almost everything I talk to them. So now I can start a new question like. What is the biggest mistake I've made in the past six months? Uh, what is one thing you you wanna suggest to me, uh, if you could, three months ago? I think this becomes super powerful right now.

• 34:16Marina Mogilko?

  I love these questions. Let uh, everyone, go and go to your favorite app and ask those questions. I'm gonna do this right after the interview.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:24Marina Mogilko?

  It's a good, like, end of the year practice to see what's what's going on. Love it. Do you have any top three AI business ideas you would start if you hadn't had Opus Clip?

• 34:34Speaker 03

  It's hard to name like three ideas, uh, cause I'm not an investor. I, you know, I I don't meet as many founders as possible. Um, but I think the general first principle, uh, for now, right? The question is to start a business like in twenty twenty six.

• 34:52Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  As we discussed, the market is becoming super competitive and there are like, for most of the markets or industries, uh, there are like more than twenty fifty AI tools out there already. Um, so the first principle I would say is to find a really niche business. Oftentimes, many people don't really understand what is a niche. For example, is restaurant business a niche? No. Is Chinese restaurant a niche? No. Is um, Cantonese Chinese restaurant business a niche? Still no. Uh, you have to drill down. Uh, there are, you know, so many different types of Cantonese food.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Um, and even for one specific vertical, um, are you gonna target to be like the um, the Chanel of Cantonese restaurant? Or the Zara of or Uniqlo of of Cantonese restaurant, right? So a different pricing will ma- mesh to different um, markets, different ICPs as well. So pick a really, really, really small niche that you cannot further segment it to start with.

• 35:55Marina Mogilko?

  Wow, that's that's a good one. Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to ruthlessly um, segment your niche. The second thing is ideally pick something that's boring because the non-boring, the cool ones are. Definitely ten X or even a more a hundred X more competitive. You probably don't wanna work in those areas. That's why I mentioned earlier that the passion for building, the passion for problem solving is more important. Because your passion for a specific business is most likely not a viable business, right? So you need to have a passion to do something for a boring industry, but you solve a really big problem. And furthermore, ideally, there are a lot of existing services.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  I think we are actually, you know, changing from, we're redefining the term SaaS. And previously it was like software as a service. Nowadays, it's becoming service as a software. So in that specific market niche, boring market niche, are there existing services um done by like agencies, um by freelancers, um or some internal tools or some hacky solutions, imperfect hacky solutions, um that is your opportunity to tackle. Um so go through some boring task, go through some niche task and go through some service test. Um so these are the my first principles to find a new business in twenty twenty six.

• 37:20Marina Mogilko?

  That's great. That's great. That's amazing. Okay, and for young viewers who are watching, what is one principle that you wish you understood when you were twenty that would save you years?

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 37:33Marina Mogilko?

  It's like me talking to your internal Gemini chat with you.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  I really wish I can travel back to my twenties, but um I think the first principle is to be as disciplined as possible.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  I've been following um Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James for two decades. They are at their forties and they're still one of the best players in their fields. The the reasons are they are super disciplined in their early twenties. Uh you can't change your behavior when you are over thirty or forty. It's it's just impossible, um but if you are like in your early twenties or even younger, um. Make sure that you use time effectively. Make sure you can plan things accordingly. Make sure you push yourself to your to your boundary. Make sure you are okay with, you know, suffers. Um, you can recover fast.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Uh, make sure you have clear mission and you are well aligned with your mission. You work toward a mission every day. I think, you know, I can list a few different behaviors, but the key principle is to be super disciplined if you wanna be a successful founder uh later on. And also be disciplined to your own health, right? Like how many hours you should log to sleep, um, what you should eat or not, um, what kind of exercise you should do, you should do every day. Like I stuck, uh, uh, uh, I I saw many people started to develop these um patterns, these behaviors in their thirties, but not in their early twenties.

• 39:09Marina Mogilko?

  It's hard in your thirties. I love that. And also that brings you to say no to different things and it's also a great skill.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:18Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, this is something I've been hearing a lot when I'm talking to people who are building something amazing. I guess, discipline. Uh, I think Priscilla Chan just shared that she only has work and family. Parties don't exist in her life.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Not exist anymore.

• 39:33Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, and this is what you hear a lot from successful people here in the U S. They work like crazy. I'm I'm trying to learn, like, I think I'm disciplined, but like that level of discipline, oh, my God.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Because with a super high level of discipline, you can, just like Elon Musk said, right? You can segment your your time into, you know, buckets of five minutes. You can easily, you can easily get super focused and also switch contexts to focus on something else. That is the ultimate result of discipline. I saw many people like find really hard to switch contexts to focus for a longer time. That is because you are lacking the discipline from day one.

• 40:14Marina Mogilko?

  This is something I'll be teaching my kids. Thank you so much, Yama. It was amazing.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 40:20Speaker 01

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• 41:04Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.