How this founder built a better Duolingo with Codex | William Imoh

William Imoh is the founder of Hackmamba, a developer marketing company, and the creator of Mural, a real-time voice app he built to learn Norwegian after moving from Dubai to Norway. He has a chemical engineering degree, taught himself to code, and spent four years as a product manager, but he had never written a line of Swift. In this episode, William shows how he used Codex and GPT-Live to build Mural natively for iOS and Android, then walks through the Lord of the Rings–themed Grok Bot “fellowship” that helps him run a team of about 25 as a solo founder. What you’ll learn: The design prompt that made Mural look nothing like any other language appWhy 1,000 days of Duolingo left him unable to hold a conversation in NorwegianWhat GPT-Live-1 costs per session and the latency threshold that makes or breaks a voice tutorHow he assigned every solo founder role to a Lord of the Rings character in GrokWhy he gave his agents access to everything across 15 open tabs, except one thingWhat he still has to do himself after the models improvedWhy the fear that keeps him up isn’t replacement—it’s dependency— Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more Vanta https://www.vanta.com/howiai—Automate compliance and simplify security — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Teaser (02:52) Introduction to William and his language learning app (05:58) William’s tech background and how he started building (08:07) The first prompt (11:09) The importance of design language and articulation (14:38) Live demo: a Norwegian conversation (21:11) Having a growth mindset (22:48) Why GPT Live works for this (23:34) What it costs to run (24:50) Running Hackmamba with agents (26:58) Codex projects for organization (28:47) His Lord of the Rings Grok Bot fellowship (34:05) Recap (34:54) Prompting strategies (37:21) Where to find William — References: • Mural on GitHub: https://github.com/Chuloo/mural • Codex: https://chatgpt.com/codex • GPT-Live: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/ • Grok Bot: https://grokbot.com/ • Cursor: https://cursor.com/ • Boki: https://boki.io/ • Notion: https://www.notion.com/ — Where to find William Imoh: X: https://x.com/iChuloo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-imoh Hackmamba: https://hackmamba.io/ Hackmamba Podcast: https://hackmamba.io/eoc-podcast/ Mural: https://mural.chat/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I tried building this app, but it just wasn't a great experience. Bombed the hackathon. I think I probably came in last with it.

• 0:06Claire Vo?

  The meta skill that you have, which is like a growth mindset, which is I can learn Norwegian. Like I can learn something. If you just have this confidence that this thing is a solvable problem. Learning a language is a solvable problem, building an app is a solvable problem. And if you can just ask the right questions and get the right feedback, you can get there.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  I wanted to speak Norwegian as someone to something first that wouldn't judge me and something that would correct me. Now, I know it's counterintuitive in some parts and some conversations that you want to be skeptical about what AI has access to. For me, I just let all that fly out the window. The only thing it doesn't have right access to is the bank.

• 0:47Claire Vo?

  You run a business and like me, like to keep that business lean with agents. So tell me a little bit about how you run your business with agents.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  I don't get frustrated. I get scared because I'm so dependent on agents now that I fear for myself. What if these agents go to zero tomorrow? What am I supposed to do?

• 1:08Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clara Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have William Emo, founder of Hackmamba and creator of Mural Chat, a real time language learning app that he built for himself to learn how to speak Norwegian of all things. William's going to show us how he went from knowing nothing about native development to hacking together one of the coolest native apps I've ever seen, plus how he uses an army of Lord of the Rings themed Grok bots to run his business as a solo founder. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work.

• 1:50Claire Vo?

  Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features

• 2:32Claire Vo?

  so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. William, welcome to How I AI. Thanks for joining.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Thanks. Thanks, Clara. Thanks for having me.

• 3:01Claire Vo?

  So I invited you on the podcast because I saw this app that you have up. In Mural, I think it's Mural Chat, and I just thought it was such a cool use of AI and something that, you know, a year or two ago would have been sort of like unimaginable for someone to build on their own, like almost impossible. And you've shown that you can build this amazing app with this really interesting use case and do it all by yourself with AI. It's just, it's, it's kind of unbelievable to me. So tell me what brought you to building this app? Like, what problem were you trying to solve? What was driving you?

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you're also correct that a year ago, it was technically impossible. It was possible to build the app, but with a poor experience because I tried. I was at a hackathon in San Francisco.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  And it was, I think it was an all things web hackathon. I tried building this app, but it just wasn't a great experience. Bombed the hackathon. I think I probably came in last with it. And the, the main motivation behind this is I live in Norway and I wound up and moved from Dubai to Norway because I wanted adventure. I didn't know what to expect. I just hoped everyone spoke English. Soon as I got here, I learned that people actually speak Norwegian. And to make it by, I mean, a lot of people speak English, but you need Norwegian to get by. But then Norwegians are also very polite in the sense that if you try to speak Norwegian, then by it's poor, they'd speak English back, unlike the French.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  So they speak, they speak English back to you. So this might, I couldn't learn Norwegian, right? And then I tried using Duolingo. I had a thousand day streak on Duolingo. I was always like chasing streaks. And, but I wanted to speak Norwegian as someone to something first that wouldn't judge me and something that would correct me. But also I wanted to experience that felt like being thrown in a Norwegian village where you have no other option but to speak Norwegian. That was just the experience I wanted.

• 5:08Claire Vo?

  I love this because in our house, we are trying to, we, my husband and my kids are trying to learn Italian. And they're doing it this like very classic language learner way, which is a combination of Duolingo and like listening to Italian, like basically these like tapes, these audio lessons. And so they're in the car and they're like, you know, hearing somebody speak Italian and they repeat it. But the only way you can really learn a language is immersion. And I love what you call out because it's so counterintuitive, which is you said, you can't learn this language because people are so polite. They will respond to you in English and so you can't actually get that reinforcement loop of like,

• 5:52Claire Vo?

  did I say it right? What am I supposed to hear? And so you built this app to give you that experience. Tell us a little bit about, like, are you an iOS developer? Are you like a fancy developer?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  So first, I have a chemical engineering degree, but I taught myself to code, to do some web development. So I did a lot of web development over the last five, six years. I can write some frontend, I can, and then I can write some backend code to save my life. Building a web, building a mobile app, I can do it with something like React Native, for instance. But I wanted today, at least when I built Mural, I wanted a native experience. So I wanted like a premium feel to it because I felt like I could build anything, but I wanted to optimize for the best user experience possible. And I wanted to use like all the, the better iOS features. So I decided to build in Swift.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Well, it wasn't going to be me building it. I needed Codex to build it.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  So I, this is building Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. I guess when we have AI agents building stuff, like the language doesn't matter. Like the language I know doesn't matter anymore. I just choose the best possible language for the tech that I'm building. So that's why I went with Swift and Kotlin, even though I haven't written a line of Swift in my life.

• 7:21Claire Vo?

  You know, what's really funny about this is, you know, over 10 years ago, I did a, like a venture funded startup, a real startup. And we picked the language we built that application in based on who we knew could write that code. So we were like, well, we know a bunch of people that can write Python and we know a bunch of people that can do this. And so we're just going to build our app in that language to optimize for humans we knew, knew how to write that code. And now I love what you said, which is you can just pick the best language for the user experience, the thing that you want to build.

• 8:00Claire Vo?

  And it doesn't matter if you have somebody on staff that knows that language or not, because you have our friend Codex on staff. Speaking of Codex, do you mind pulling it up and just showing us how you, how do you get organized around a Swift? I've actually never, don't tell, sorry, we're doing admission right here. I have not built a native mobile app ever, even in the age of AI, I have not built one. So I am learning as we go. How do you, how did you kick this off? How do you, you know, how do you work it?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Background, because I have some software engineering background, I understand how to architect apps. I understand like what's required if I need to make the frontend, the backend. Also the experience that I want. I think that was the most important piece here is the experience I wanted for this app. I used to be a product manager as well. I was a product manager for four years. So I've learned to work in epics and user stories, right? Because those are closely tied to user problems. So that's one way I've found, I've had like the best results when building AI apps. So how did you start? I first started with a very long prompt. That was very specific. And this prompt opened with literally, I want a very aesthetically pleasing application.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Like this is my equivalent of make no mistakes, but is I want an aesthetically pleasing iOS application that would, that I can learn Norwegian with. And I described the experience I want, which was basically I want this application to run on GPT Live One. Because GPT Live One was just released, I think, a week after. So GPT Live One was the technology that I tested that enabled me build this. I don't think I'll be able to build this without GPT Live One today. So I specified we need to use GPT Live One. And then we needed to use GPT Six Luna for any other AI, any other AI tasks on it.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  I described also the experience I wanted. So I wanted an orb that was, you know, a pulsating orb that I could talk to that felt like a phone call, like a familiar interface that we would use. And then I went on to describe the, the style. So I wanted something one. I literally wrote, I want something that feels like fall, like autumn.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Use fall, fall colors. And again, it should be really beautiful. Follow design best practices like you are senior designer at Apple. So I've just given it, I've just given you references of like, I, because I needed to get the taste that I wanted. Because I live in Norway now, I, I love to adopt like a very minimalist style. So I was like naked, like it should be really minimalist. No element on the screen should exist unless it absolutely has to. And if something isn't necessary, remove it or put a toggle for it.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  So this was the, like the base experience. And then I requested that it reviews it, the design after it's done. The first design it produced was shit. It was in dark mode.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  It's dark mode. I was like, no, this isn't gonna work.

• 11:20Claire Vo?

  Maybe that feels like autumn in Norway, right? It starts to get really dark.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  So, uh, yeah, I had to refer to refer to, I was like, first, this shouldn't be in dark mode. Not everything belongs in dark mode. Um, it should be light mode, use light, warm colors, explore gradients. And I'll use liquid glass as much as possible as well.

• 11:45Claire Vo?

  So I want to pause really quickly because what I think is so interesting about what you just said in that prompt and our conversation so far is, look, you don't need to know Swift. Like, you just don't. It's none of your business. You don't need to know. You need to know that. Maybe that you should use Swift, although AI could figure that out. But what you do have that I feel like a lot of people haven't invested in their own skilling is design and product language. Like truly the ability to describe what you want with specificity. And when people talk about taste, they talk about taste all the like, what is taste?

• 12:27Claire Vo?

  We need taste. And really what you need is design language and references in the world that you can point to. You need to know what liquid glass is. You need to know what minimalism is. You need to know what a gradient is. And, and I think the more rich your reference set is when it comes to design, the better. And then on the product side, the more you know how to articulate a user journey in a way that anybody can execute on, an engineer, human engineer, a, a, a AI engineer, the better that like workflow will be. And so, you know, when people ask me like, how do you develop taste?

• 13:09Claire Vo?

  Or how do you get good at work? I'm like, describe websites, like use your words to describe what makes brand A versus brand B special, or what makes website A or app A better. And the more you practice that, I think the better you can be at prompting agents to do a great job.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I agree. I look at, and as soon as I put this out there, I didn't intend to share it with anyone because I wanted to build this for myself to use just by myself. And then I put out tweets out, hey, I made this thing. I think it's really cool. I'm not going to share because I don't want the burden of having to maintain it and having to like deal with users' expectations. Every, not, everything has to be a business. I already have a lot of problems running the business. I don't want another one. Uh, so I put it out there and people loved it and not just people liking the experience, but I also saw a lot of people that had similar applications. And then I looked at the difference between what I built and theirs, and I noticed a lot of it

• 14:09Speaker 00

  just had to do with the experience, like how it felt when you looked at it, right? A lot of it were, was also in dark mode. Like I rejected first. It had a lot of, a lot of features, right? Um, for, for me, I just wanted speech and a caption. A caption would be the only way you would understand what's being said if you're just hearing the language for the first time. That was my opinion and that was the only thing I wanted.

• 14:38Claire Vo?

  Can you show it to us real quick? We're gonna put your Norwegian to the test.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, can you hear me?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Ja, jag hör dig. Vad snakar du?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Um, jag är på möte.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Pratisat, det heter ett möte. Vad sker i möte?

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Can you speak English?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Jag hör på norsk. Vad sker i möte?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, please, please just speak English.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Jag förstår, men jag snakar norsk. Vad snakar de om i möten?

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Uh, ja, ja, vi kan snakka norsk.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Fint. Vad har ni möte?

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Uh, ja, ja, jag är på möte med vän min.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Pratisat, det heter vän min. Vad snakar de om?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Uh, jag snakar med vän min.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Pratisat, det heter vän min. Vad?

• 15:40Claire Vo?

  I am, one, really impressed. I'm very impressed. Um, at, at your Norway, I mean, I know nothing about Norwegian, but it impressed me. And two, I totally get it. Like, I get why that's the way you need it to learn, like need to learn. So can you just walk me through what that conversation we just heard kind of like was? Like, what were you talking about?

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Basically, I was trying to, first, I was like, um, hi, and because, um, Euro starts with hi and then figures out your level of language learning or speaking. Um, so I said hi back and then he said something complex. And I said something mildly complex back and I said, um, I'm doing all right. And it's, it, uh, Mural asked me, so what am I doing? I said, I'm in a meeting with a friend. And, um, Mural said something, but I ignored that. And I said, please, can you speak English? And Mural said, no, I cannot, I cannot speak English back. I have to speak Norwegian. So I think I can pull up the, the past conversation.

• 16:52Claire Vo?

  Yeah, yeah, I want to see.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, so it was like, uh, hi, like, what do you want to talk about today? I was like, oh, yeah. I was like, are you ready to start or do you want to think a little bit? I was like, hmm, and I said, can you hear me?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  And, and Mural said, yes, I hear you. What do you want to talk about? I said, yeah, I'm in a meeting. Uh, and I said a meeting wrong. I said, ja, på en möte. But that's a wrong tense. So it says, uh, it's called ett möte, not en möte. So it corrected me as I said that and then asked, what's happening in the meeting? Then I said, can you speak English? Uh, and Ruffio said, I'm only going to speak Norwegian. What are you doing in the meeting? I said, oh, please just speak English. And then Mural said, I understand, but I'm going to speak Norwegian. What are you talking about in the meeting?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  And then I gave up.

• 17:55Claire Vo?

  Quick, quick, quick question. When did you start learning Norwegian? Like, how, how long?

• 18:02Speaker 00

  So I started learning Norwegian. I mean, I had a thousand day streak on Duolingo.

• 18:07Claire Vo?

  Yeah. Okay. So you had a little bit of a head start.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yes, but I couldn't have this kind of conversation. I wouldn't know what to say. I'm, I'm stuck at, I'm a man or this is a phone, you know? Uh, so I would, I wouldn't be able to hold a conversation. Um, and then I took the Norwegian, I took the Norwegian language, um, exams. Um, and I took a course for like a week, like a short course for a week, just so I understood like grammar. Um, I took the exams, I passed. Soon as I came out of like the exam hall, I deleted Duolingo because I was like, nah, this is just completely useless.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Um, and I tried to, and that was my like, my motivation to build something like Mural started after that. So Mural has just helped me get better at practicing my Norwegian in different like settings. And you know, this is, uh, I could talk about like the weekend. Um, I can also see like the words that I've learned. Um, and how well I've, you know, I've gone with, like with each one. I recently introduced flashcards, for instance, in case I want to practice like the, uh, the words. Yeah, exactly. Um, and I also have themes because at the end of the day, you want to be able to speak these languages

• 19:30Speaker 00

  uh, within a particular setting. And I can also pick like a random theme about like maybe AI or something um, in the world today, you would search the internet and come up with a conversation about, uh, about that. But at the end of the day, it all leaves on the talk screen. I just go here, I start a conversation with Euro and I just talk about stuff, whatever. And it just keep nudging me further and correcting me as I go. And it wouldn't stop correcting me until I say it properly.

• 20:02Claire Vo?

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• 20:47Claire Vo?

  Want proof? Over sixteen thousand fast-growing companies like Ramp, Writer, and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. My listeners can get one thousand dollars off by going to vanta.com/howaiai. That's V A N T A dot com slash how I A I for one thousand dollars off. Okay, so we've had a lot of impressive people on how I, this is a lot of impressive things. One, let's put aside that you vibe could have this whole thing, which is awesome. Two, let me just say the meta skill that you have, which is like a growth mindset, which is I can learn Norwegian, like I can learn something.

• 21:32Claire Vo?

  And I feel like this is the skill that really helps people go very far in the age of AI, which is like, if you just have this confidence that this thing is a solvable problem, learning a language is a solvable problem, building an app is a solvable problem. Like, these are solvable problems, that you have the tools, and if you can just ask the right questions and get the right feedback, you can get there. I think that is just like, that is the skill of the, and also I'd say, being really low ego, which is like, I'm okay getting it wrong, as long as I can be corrected. And I think AI is such a great teacher, because I tell this to people about learning to code.

• 22:16Claire Vo?

  I say it is an infinitely patient, private tutor. Like, it's not gonna make fun of you, it's not gonna say you're stupid, it's not gonna be embarrassing. So like, the ability to use AI as a tutor for any topic, and let it be patient with you, and let it let you make mistakes. I just, I think it's the skill that is a real signal that somebody's gonna be very high impact in this, in this next phase of, of the world. And so, that is what I'm observing of you at a higher level. No, thank you, this is, this is so, I, like, it's like, given me so many ideas. The other thing I just wanna pause before we go into a couple other workflows is GPT Live. So for people that don't know what GPT Live is,

• 23:01Claire Vo?

  it's OpenAI's like, kind of real-time voice model, and it does really good with real-time experiences and like interruptions, which make it great for this kind of language testing. The other thing GPT Live is really good at is voice control of apps, because it's so fast. So, I think we did an episode, I'll have to dig it out, of voice control through GPT Live in your app.

• 23:30Claire Vo?

  So, I, I, I think GPT Live is a totally slept-on model that people don't appreciate how much you can do with it. The only thing, I have to ask you a question, is this expensive to run?

• 23:42Speaker 00

  So, the honest answer, um, yeah, but I just chugging into like my token budget, right? I made it open source, so anyone can run it. And it currently costs around, um, it costs about $5 to, to chat with Miro for, I think for 30 minutes.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for about 30 minutes, it's gonna cost $5 in, now it's gonna cost between $3 and $5 for 30 minutes. But then, I'm building this for fun, so I'm just, I, I put $1,000 on my OpenAI budget, and just let folks burn it to the ground. I think it's remaining like $100 now.

• 24:35Claire Vo?

  Well, what I, I'll also say is that it's less expensive than a one-on-one tutor. And, and you can't call your tutor to your house in the middle of the night and say, "I'm ready to practice some Norwegian." So, I, it's, it's so cool. Okay, we're gonna do a couple more workflows, we'll get you out of here. So, aside from building cool apps and learning Norwegian, you run a business, and like me, like to keep that business lean with agents. So tell me a little bit about how you run your business with agents.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, so first of all, in, sometime in June, when we started planning Q3, I put together a mandate internally, and I called it 100X. And this was a way for us to go 100X, our current like revenue goals, and the way we're set up as a company, without drastically increasing headcount. And this meant that we needed to use AI as much as possible, without using AI to generate content or seeding any of our creative work to AI tools.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Uh, so first of all, I had to figure out everything I, you know, I currently do. I put together a list on Notion, that was my first step. At least had everything, so as the founder, and I'm a solo founder, so I do a bit of customer success, I handle most of the inbound sales. Currently working, I think about 11 to 15 deals in parallel at the moment.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  I handle the product team as well, because I used to be a product manager. And I do a bit of like accounting, HR, interviews, like hiring, to just talking to folks. And we're a team of around 25 people internally. So I wanted a way to be able to manage a lot of things. First, I wanted to hire a chief of staff. I tried hiring someone, they didn't start, they quit on like, just before they started for some reason. I think that was like Hail Mary for me. So I decided to adopt AI tools. And I tried different tools, right? I tried Claude first, I got used to use Claude Coolwork, and then for some reason my account got banned.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  I don't know why, I skipped it, I went back to ChatGPT and installed Work. And I decided to use projects, as I currently have on here. I set up projects for everything, basically, because I just wanted a solid way to manage, to manage individual things I do. My company's called Hack Number, so for every critical piece that I work on directly, I create a project for it. I have a project for Hack Number operations, this is where I manage things like, you know, invoicing, campaigns, not just, and if anyone sends me a message on Discord, this is where that would likely fall into, and that task will be run from here.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  I have stuff for growth, so this is like, I also get like, an operator brief every Sunday night of the week. So what's something we should start doing, what's something we should stop doing and stop we should keep doing. I also ask you for like the three highest impact activities I would conduct this week. So that's a routine, so I use routines a lot as well.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  We built an internal tool for growth, this is what we use to, uh, we, we use with our customers. We go from content ideation all the way to distribution in bulky. I also support with the growth for bulky and content creation. Also, I created a project for it. For sales, I did the same thing for our website, this is my podcast, everything outside code. I manage like interview briefs and all that on India, and just every other thing. So I use projects a lot with, with Codex. Now for Codex, I kind of reserve, reserve like the complex work. So for instance, Miro, having written Swift, so I kind of like wanted Astro to work, to work on Miro.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  So I wanted Frontier Model on that stuff.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  That, that's what I do on Codex. But on the flip side, I found Grokbot, and instantly, I think it was amazing, like it was a game changer for me, because it gave me colleagues. Whereas with ChatGPT, I got, and like Codex, I got folders.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  And on Grokbot, I got my fellowship, as I like to call them.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  If you've seen a lot of the rings, you know what the fellowship of the ring is. So I just, um, I was first asked to create a chief of staff, I just called him Gandalf. Straight up, straight up. And then I asked Gandalf to create everyone else. I needed, um, other bots for engineering, marketing, project, product management, accounts, sales, and customer success. And kind of the personas are, you know, very close match, you know, like, Legolas is, you know, pretty Legolas, is the, the marketing dude, around the elf, runs engineering. I have Gimli, um, the dwarf with the coins, um, in accounts.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Argon recruits everyone and, you know, sells the fellowship, he runs sales. And Sam always plays support, so his, his customer success for this one. And yeah, Alfredo is in charge of getting the ring, uh, he's basically the product owner in this case. So Alfredo runs PM. And, yeah, so this, I set up the fellowship, and with, with my AI workflow, what I do first of all, after setting up the fellowship, and not just on Grokbot, but also on Codex, was to give it access to everything. Now, I know it's kind of intuitive in some parts and some conversations that you wanna be skeptical about what AI has access to,

• 30:42Speaker 00

  and what it doesn't what, you know, it has read or write access to. Uh, for me, I just let all that fly out the window. The only thing it doesn't have write access to is the bank. So I'm like, anything else can go wrong. I mean, I don't have access to customer data, right? So that's safe as well. But the bank and customer data, aside from that, every other thing is off the ground. So I gave it access to like Google Suite. I gave it access. I just looked at my browser window. I have like fifteen, sixteen tabs open and I just gave you access to everything that I could, you know, I could see from linear notion, my calendar, pipe drive, quick books,

• 31:27Speaker 00

  everything that I had access to, I gave you access. And then for chat GPT, like for Codex, I just enable computer use and browser use. So if it cannot find it via MCP, just use my computer. That's all right. It's fine, like whatever. I, I, I just give it access. It's like allow once, I'm like, no, allow always. That's, you know, just use it. So setting those off, that was like the next thing. And that just instantly changed a lot of things for me, right? So I wasn't giving it information. I would just like, I could even put a typo in the input box. I would just like give it my, like a thought, like I've been hiring and talking to like a lot of candidates.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  I built a tool internally called Three Pipes. So, and the reason I built it is because I have a firm belief that at the end of the day, we're going to be left with systems of record, like a custom database that is designed around a problem. That's what's going to be left and an AI interface. So I would build these tools internally and they just become systems of record. Three Pipes is for people and HR. So now I just tell like my Grokbot. And the good thing is I don't need a skill for this. I talked to a candidate and I just say to my Grokbot, hey, I just spoke to this person. Get them into Three Pipes.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  It goes, scours my email, my calendar, looks at meeting notes, collects all that information, puts it in Three Pipes, gives me a summary. It's all done and then scores the candidate as well and says, you've spoken to fifteen people. This person ranks number seven on that list, just so you know, like FYI. And I skipped on it, then I can switch context to something else, the sales. So that's, that's like the one piece. And then the final piece of how I use AI and how I'm set up currently would be the skills that I have. So there are a couple of important skills that I do have. And I call these important because over time, while I've made a lot of skills,

• 33:35Speaker 00

  the models have gotten a lot better that I don't need these skills anymore. So there are just very few that stop. A skill I use for growth marketing, like to create a growth marketing strategy based on what we know at Hack Number. A skill to create a content strategy, also based on what we know. And then my content dislop skill.

• 34:02Claire Vo?

  Critical, critical skill in this, in this stack.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:05Claire Vo?

  I just, I, I think this is so useful. I mean, for folks that have stuck around this long in the episode, you've gotten like true gold, which is you have Codex for complex tasks, Codex projects to keep everything organized. Grokbot, as you do this very similar to me, where like Grokbot has roles. So it's like your marketing role, your HR role, your sales role. You need an eye of Sauron that looks across everything for things going wrong. That's the last one. Eye of Sauron. And then you use just like skills very precisely, like very specific ones.

• 34:43Claire Vo?

  William, this is one of my favorite episodes. I've done a lot of episodes. This has been one of my favorite, one of my favorite ones. I'm going to ask you our one question we ask every guest and then I'm going to get you out of here to back, back to all your awesome work. But when your Grokbox, your Codex, your Norwegian agent just is not replying to you, doing what you want, what's your prompting strategy? Are you polite? Do you yell? What's the, what's the real truth?

• 35:09Speaker 00

  So first I just restart the agent.

• 35:12Claire Vo?

  Just reboot.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  I just reboot. I reboot and I try again. And if it doesn't work, I try to be a bit more specific, right? Cause I know how to do it already. I just don't want to do it because it's like low level work. So I get very specific on do this first, test this first and also review what you've done to be sure this is what I asked for. So just asking it to like go over it again. And more recently, I've had my Grokbot drive my cursor agent. So while the cursor agent would do like some random stuff that isn't really accurate,

• 35:59Speaker 00

  my Grokbot is sort of like that agent that goes and reviews all that again and improves it also. So that, that's been like one way, but the agents have just been like really good. That if it doesn't get it, I just go on Twitter and I blame Tibo for not fixing.

• 36:19Claire Vo?

  At Tibo, that's exactly right.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Just add Tibo straight, you know, for not fixing Codex. Like, yeah, I tried, or I just switch the agent, use something else and wait and updated. But yeah, that's, that's typically my strategy. I don't get frustrated. The frustration I feel is if it eventually doesn't get it at the quality I want, I get scared because I'm so dependent on agents now that I fear for myself. I'm like, what if all this tanks? What if, like, what if his agent is good as zero tomorrow? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to manage fifteen different like sales opportunities in a week?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  In tandem, having all these calls, still doing like hiring, doing all these things at once. I, that's the only like panic attack I get because I'm like, this goes down, I'm screwed. What am I going to do?

• 37:17Claire Vo?

  What, what a perfect end to our episode. William, this has been super, super fun. For our audience, where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on X, at Itrilo, William Imo on, on LinkedIn. Just find a dude with, I put on headphones, I fly small planes on off days. So that's, that's a way to find me. And if anyone's interested in growth, especially if you have a Dev Tool product and you want to reach an X5, 10K users, I'm always happy to chat about like how we could do that together, basically.

• 37:58Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining How AI.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 38:05Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.