Ted, welcome to Early Days.
Yeah, looking forward to the conversation today.
Yeah, so you're building FeedFilter.ai.
How much AI is there in FeedFilter and could have been built four years ago before any of this AI stuff that's going on right now?
Well, I guess I can back up for a moment and say that part of the reason I'm making a tool that filters the social media feed is to deal with some of the AI content that has come up.
I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with dead internet theory, but the idea there, right, is that the internet will become kind of overrun with bots and AI and other things that make it not useful in terms of getting information on any subject you might be interested in.
So in order to sift through that, there has been a lot of technology that's much simpler that doesn't require any sort of statistical model on like AI.
What people have been using is keyword searches.
You know, right now you can go into Twitter or X and mute words that you don't want to hear.
So like I have Trump muted, I have Harris muted.
I even sometimes mute Bitcoin when it's getting too raunchy and I just want to tone it down.
So I use those mute words very aggressively, but it doesn't capture any of the nuance.
Something could come out that is, let's say it's something Trump is doing that is extremely
relevant and pertinent.
I want to know that information.
Well, a basic keyword search is not going to catch that.
And so what happens is people like myself who use these tools, they're not working in
the way that we attend it, which is we want to cut out the noise and get to the information
we actually care about.
And it really wasn't until the AI, the LLM started coming around and being able to interpret
the meaning behind the words that has enabled a tool like feed filter to exist.
Wow.
And here comes the ambulance now.
I wonder what happened to them.
I don't know.
Six in Congress is crazy, especially during the, um, during the summer.
Um.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is, you know, just with like Elon taking over Twitter.
Now there's Noster.
And for me personally, like I find myself in neither one of those places very often, you know, other than just to post on social.
I spend most of my time on Stacker Days, as everybody knows.
But a lot of it had to do with just the content that I was seeing.
It was just extremely jarring for somebody like me who looks at content and wants to be inspired by it or wants to feel like it's wholesome enough to share with somebody.
I didn't feel like that when I was on Twitter.
I felt like that in the early days of Noster.
I think it's going to get better over time with Noster, so I don't want to discount it completely.
But I do see that kind of curation naturally happen on Stacker News.
How can FeedFilter help with that type of curation?
Yeah, that's such a good question.
I think there's different solutions for different people and to different levels, like different degrees.
So you could almost imagine like a pyramid.
And for some people, Stacker News might be at the pinnacle.
Like I know for myself, when I'm looking for kind of very deep Bitcoin content or even just content from people who kind of accept the premise that is Bitcoin, like that Bitcoin is inevitable.
In that case, there's no better place than Stacker News, like hands down or coming into Ploblab, right?
This is kind of ground zero in terms of getting to that culture and that group of people that are talking about this type of content.
But that's such a small group of people, you know, such a small percentage.
The vast majority of everyone is getting their information from Facebook and TikTok and Instagram.
Right. And then Twitter is only a subset.
So that's really what FeedFilter is targeting.
It's a group of people that I feel might be in these social media environments getting content that they may not like,
but they don't necessarily have the tools or be comfortable with using the tools that are there
to improve their situation. And it goes more than just seeing better content. It's about
unlocking yourself too, because I find that when you get sucked into doom scrolling on a feed,
like for me, what I'm interested in is business and technology. Those are pretty much my only
interest like that's that's basically you know science and space too but what do i see in my
x feed i mean i deleted twitter the reason i deleted it was because all i was getting was
politics violence and cute puppies so you didn't even get the puppies part i don't know at least
get some puppies but the thing is i'm like i'll watch the cute puppies like they're great but
i don't even like animals like i don't have a pet i don't have any intention of getting a pet so why
am i getting all these puppies well you know it's because that's how the algorithm works yeah so
So that's really the goal is people who are in my situation, they're doom scrolling and that doom scrolling is getting in the way of what they're trying to accomplish in their life in general.
Starting a business or learning more about Bitcoin or catching up on your friends, what your friends are actually doing, not what they're pretending they're doing.
All of those things are things that could really benefit from a filter on the traditional social media feeds at first.
And then later they might move into those different arenas, which has more concentrated content that they're interested in.
I guess the thing that I'm kind of wondering now is like, are you afraid of the people that have already left Twitter or Instagram or some of these other places like Facebook?
Like, do you think that maybe, you know, that they already moved on to other kind of closed gardens and there's just a, or do you think it's, we're just at the tip of this kind of new, because AI is, I mean, obviously there's going to be new AI users and these type of bots that are going to exist in these platforms.
And I think that's just going to happen even more and more and more over time.
And I think even Elon has said publicly that there are AI bots on Twitter that are responding and stuff.
And you can pay for that kind of engagement.
How do you see FeedFilter working with a lot of that kind of new features that are going to be rolled out to these platforms?
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely so in some sense, it's kind of competing against some of those new features.
I was just on YouTube and I saw something I'd never seen before popped up and it said, please provide feedback.
And they have a feedback section, but this feedback was in line on YouTube.
And so what it was doing is just collecting.
I don't know if it was going to a person on the support team, or maybe it was just going into their AI to tune the algorithm based on your kind of conscious statement.
So those types of solutions are competitive against FeedFilter, as are better platforms that allow people to get better content.
So if you're on Stacker News and you're not really seeing very much clickbait or politics or misleading posts or things that are irrelevant to you, if you're getting better content on one of these platforms, you don't need a feed filter tool.
You know, feed filter could work on something like Stacker News or on Noster, but that's not really my priority.
My priority is TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook is really bad.
So those are my focuses.
And I view it more as a kind of a jumping off board or a first step that someone could take going from an unfiltered feed to a slightly better, more curated environment.
And then later they might say, hey, look, maybe I don't need a social media account or maybe I just want one like you did.
Right. Kind of pare it down.
OK, so.
Let's let's run through this real quick.
so hypothetically you have this twitter user that exists this this ideal customer that you that you
want um let's just say he's like 21 to 35 or whatever and uh he doesn't have to be into bitcoin
he's just a technologist that's into business let's just say he's you like you know five years
ago right how do they find feed filter how are they going to know that they need something like
feed filter. And then the second question to that is, is there enough there that he would even
recognize the difference? And how are you going to kind of work through that? Like, how are you
going to show that kind of happening in real time? Those are really good questions. That's honestly
what I'm struggling with right now. So that's, you know, like when we talk about the founder's
journey, like we were just talking about this before we went on the pod, you don't always have
everything figured out, right? You have to kind of operate by faith a little bit and just be,
you know, confident that you will figure some of these things out later on. Right now, probably one
of the biggest things I'm thinking about is how do I get in front of the right people at the right
time? And also explain this type of tool. In some sense, it's very simple. You know, cut the crap out,
get stuff you don't want to see out of the feed. So people, okay, I get that. But how do you do it?
Oh, well, it's a Chrome extension or it's a mobile web app. Like, so now I'm getting more
to the technology that, okay, do I install it?
Do I have to sign in?
What's the privacy considerations?
Yada, yada.
So all of this needs to be explained.
That adds burden to the user,
just like Bitcoin adds burden when you're explaining it.
So I need to find the right medium
to get in front of these people.
And to be honest, I haven't figured that out.
I mean, I've been going to a lot of different events
like health, AI, but not AI builders,
but people who are using AI to improve their lives.
I was at a gym in Houston.
Did you get feedback?
Yeah.
So I'm getting feedback from all these places.
What are they saying?
Yeah, this is good stuff.
A lot of people, we did a little vote and the fitness center in Houston, they voted for TikTok first and foremost.
And they also overwhelmingly wanted a mobile app versus a computer app.
I was aware of that.
But TikTok is a tricky platform because you just kind of get one video at a time.
um so so that way hang on so you're saying they don't want to they want to be able to swipe up
and not see a video of somebody throwing up or something oh yeah so the way you want the filter
to occur is instantaneously seamlessly behind the scenes with zero user input and it automatically
tunes exactly to what you want it basically reads your mind and gives you exactly what you
really want to see
not just what
you would be most
addicted to
or engaged with.
Right?
So that's like
the perfect world.
So then we kind of
back out from that
perfect world
which is
I don't know how to do that
but I'm going to do my best
to figure out
what's the closest
we can get to that.
And
so
the way I make it work
is
well it's
it's
close to instantaneous
gives the user
the experience
of instantaneous
but
you know
nothing is
perfectly fast behind the scenes.
It worked out of the box,
but a little user tweaking goes a long ways.
So it kind of gives that experience.
Tuning to the user's needs is very difficult
because I can't use engagement metrics
or else I'll just recreate the algorithm
that is causing all the problems to begin with.
So that's a challenge.
And yeah, so I guess like the goal,
ultimately I don't know how to get there yet is
it's seamless instant you know reads their mind gives them the exact feed they want
I think one of the biggest challenges I have in all this is that a little bit of
conscious statement by the user goes a long ways so if I say verbally out loud you know I want
motivating, actionable, practical advice that I can immediately apply.
If I write that out as a sentence and put it into feed filter, well, that's going to filter out all
the content that doesn't meet that criteria. So that's extremely powerful. But for me to write
those words out, that's from a user's perspective. It may, as a developer, I'm like, oh, sure,
they can write out a few words in an app, but no one wants to do that. Let's be real. We want to
click one button max, like getting us to click the download button is already hard enough. So
getting the user to click the install button and then like sign in, I mean, that's consuming. So
that's such a cost that's been imposed on the user. So by the time they get to the app, you know,
you're very lucky if you get to that point. So right now what I'm doing is I'm using, I'm actually,
as part of the onboarding process, I'm asking them to give feedback on three posts. So like I said,
it works out of the box, you apply feedback to three posts, and then that tunes the instruction
set, basically the prompt that goes to the AI that tells the AI which posts the user does or
does not want to see in their feed. Now, if the user would go in and edit the settings even more,
that would make a big difference. But my hope is to generate enough difference, like you said,
to show that this new feed that they have is going to be a lot better than what they were
seeing before i think i think the thing that i that you were you were saying this and i immediately
saw like an overlay like is have you have you is there like a raw version of this where you can
have like an overlay of of feed filter and you can just search over it or or like it basically just
pulls the data and there's an overlay and then it just like what you just said right now it just
like searches over, this is what I want.
Does that exist?
Yeah, well, I mean, the feed itself is kind of an overlay, right?
Because if you think about it, the client, the browser, the software that's running in
the browser is making a request to the social media company's server, and then they're serving
up that content.
That content is then inserted into the feed, but a lot of that is either off screen or in
a case of like Instagram or Facebook, it's being loaded up behind a loading overlay that's hiding
that content. So from the user's perspective, like in those cases, they don't see all the content
that's actually there, but feed filter goes in and gets all the posts that have been returned by the
server. And then amongst those will filter, uh, well, basically you could call it a search, um,
and whittle that down to just the ones that pass your criteria.
Now, I can't search beyond what their server serves up in the first place.
So like I'm not going out and fetching brand new stuff that you'd never see before.
It's only kind of reducing of the stuff that, you know, Instagram or Twitter was going to
feed to you.
I can reduce that set, which causes Instagram or Twitter to go serve up more content and
also adapt their algorithm over time to match the content that's actually making it through
and getting your engagement metrics.
So I guess I guess kind of like and can we just go down this road real quick?
Because I'm just curious if you've actually have like considered this or even gone down
this road.
Just thinking about it, at least on the web version, it does seem like there's an abstraction
layer there that should exist somehow because you're filtering things out but i wonder what
what happens when you do the when you take the the content that's actually that's being lifted
above the filtering and what if that was broken into a separate page where it's just now it's just
goodness it's pure fruit yes it's just bounty and then that second page is literally looks like the
exact same page of your normal feed, it's just all bouncy.
And then all that's doing,
so you basically have two tabs and then it's just,
all it's doing is feed fillers just serving up
this separate tab of just nothing, of like everything.
It's all because you went over the overlay
or what you're calling it, it's just like this overlay
of your running search and just like,
give me the top Bitcoin podcast
or the top Bitcoin tweets of the past 24 hours
the top Bitcoin, you know, entrepreneur tweets of the past 24 hours.
And then it's like doing this thing.
Yeah, so what I'm trying to understand that, because to some degree, it kind of does do
that, but the overlay is the feed itself.
Yeah.
So it's basically, the goal is to make your feed be just pure goodness, right?
So that's the goal.
But it sounds like what you're talking about is kind of storing those best posts and kind
of keeping them in almost like a repository, almost like a dashboard.
Do you remember Instapaper?
No.
So Instapaper was this thing where it would, this was back when like we only had like 2G
and like really like CDMA.
Like it wasn't, we didn't really have a very, we didn't have very strong bandwidth back then.
And so Instapaper was this little kind of thing where people would, would save websites
and articles on the web and they would, it was this extension and you would hit it and
And then they would send it to your own personalized web.
It's the paper site.
And then people would share those links and all that stuff.
But you would be able to read it offline just because we didn't have 3G, 4G and all these other things.
At least that's how I understood and grasped it.
And it kind of, we're kind of, so like, I guess I'm thinking in that kind of thing where it's like, it's doing this kind of, yeah, I don't know.
I guess we're just going down that road.
It's almost like saving the posts, right?
Saving them for later.
so you can reference only the good posts
that pass the filter
or you could search through them later?
Well, I guess I'm trying to figure out
like if you've thought about this like from,
because you're removing things, right?
And I'm wondering if like,
you're obviously not recreating it into a separate tab,
but I do wonder, I'm like,
huh, I wonder if he's thought about like,
because you go to TikTok
and imagine you went to TikTok and this is,
I don't know, does TikTok have a web browser now?
Can you browse it on the web?
Or is it just on the phone?
I think you can, yes.
Well, let's just say hypothetically, like imagine just seeing nothing but goodness of stuff that you wanted to see on TikTok.
And it's because I know you've shown me the the Instagram post, which is like a pure like thing that you have to kind of scroll past.
Yeah. But I wonder if like if there's another way to approach it.
Yeah. So like on and so what we're talking about is that on Instagram specifically right now, feed filters is blacking out that post, which kind of creates a hole in your feed.
Yeah. Whereas on Twitter, I actually delete the post entirely.
So you don't didn't even know that the post was there to begin with.
It's gone. So you never even see it.
Now, that's ultimately what Instagram will look like, too.
So you'll have the option to completely remove that post from your feed as if it was never there.
So in that case your feed then becomes that kind of dashboard Well it sounds like you talking about the next level of then taking all that goodness aggregating it together in a separate tab but then you could search
But maybe this is the mobile app then.
Maybe what it does is like feed filters the actual app.
And then what it does is like, so feed filters the app that lives on your phone.
and then you what you actually do is you pull a feed filter and then it pulls all the goodness
from twitter shows it in line in the feed filter app pulls all the goodness from tiktok
shows it in line and you're seeing like all these things inside your feed filter yeah yeah and you
can take the different platforms is that possible yeah yeah that's i mean that's kind of uh what i'm
looking at i mean i haven't decided whether or not to i mean i don't know if it could be done but
it's just the more and more you start when you start saying these things it's just like huh
what you're basically describing is just like this glorified version of
of like insta the only thing i can think of is like instapaper
instapaper did it but it was just um it was just done like in like web 2.0 days like yeah
um i think they're probably still around now um but it was just it reminded me of that when you
started saying that there was this overlay i'm like when did you do this overlay but i guess so
So it's almost like the next level of the overlay.
So I was talking mostly about the overlay inside your browser or on a mobile device.
But the next level that I think you're getting at is what is FeedFilter server overlay?
Because FeedFilter has all those posts that were ranked as either good or bad by which user.
Now, I'm going to make that pseudo anonymous, but you could still find like which users are correlated to which other users.
And then you could actually pull like I could say, hey, me and Cara might be pretty similar with our views.
so perhaps some of the posts that car finds interesting very interesting show up in mind
this is basically how all the social media companies work but the main difference is
they're motivated by engagement metrics and it exactly what passes a feed filter criteria is
different so if it's not addictive engaging content it's you know whatever the people said
as their filters which generally is along the order of you know factual informative not clickbait
you know pretty much no one wants to see politics i mean some politics but like that's
people generally don't want to see violence yeah 100 so it's like it's um more wholesome content
that you're going to get yeah people still okay with some jokes and stuff but you don't want to
be all jokes in your feed but you know it's really cool though because that's something
where like i would i think i would look into something like that well that's great to hear
because with the overlay no well like this feed filter app that can bring on the goodness from
all these different accounts yeah and then it doesn't require me to go into these accounts
what other or i don't know i don't know you tell me i don't know if i would have to
other than just because the reason i want to go on like twitter again is just to source news but
i don't want to withstand having to um look at all the craziness um yeah same thing with tiktok
Because I know there's like good videos, I hear about them all the time, but I don't want to withstand all the, you know, pornography that's on there.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Suggestive content is a major issue.
It's probably one of the number one requests I get.
Yeah.
So I think the feed filter could definitely deliver that kind of experience that you're talking about.
It would make you feel like you never even logged into those platforms.
what's happening behind the scenes is you are logged in,
but with the feed filter overlay, like you're saying,
that is going through sorting out all the crap,
getting the goodness,
and then queuing it all together into a single feed
that has the best content.
So you're not actually engaging on Twitter or Instagram.
You might see an inline Twitter
and then an inline Instagram.
It's just pure pipe.
I got to play with some of these different UIs.
Yeah, it's just pure content pipe.
But yeah, I think that's what, I think when you initially pitched me the idea, I was concerned about a lot of these things.
But I think I knew at some point I was like, well, Ted's smart.
You've done two startups in the past that I want to talk about.
But, you know, I think there's, you know, it's just like building any product.
You're going to start building it and then you're going to realize, okay, dead end here, maybe a dead end there.
But there's enough traction here or like you'll start, you'll just figure it out and then you'll just move in the direction that you want to go.
and then you'll hit pay dirt.
And then before you know, you're off and rolling.
That's the hope, right?
That's the hope.
I mean, you stick around enough,
you'll find some traction,
especially if you're working.
I mean, what's the saying?
Like you can't just keep hitting your head
against the wall until, you know.
Yeah, I find it fun to do this.
I know you do too.
Me too, it's so much fun.
It's like one of the most fulfilling things
that anyone can do
is try to solve other people's problems.
And I'm a very analytical kind of guy.
And so like, that's kind of how I express empathy
is if I can understand your problem
and game out the arbitrage to solve it in a cheaper way
than you're getting it done today.
Also navigating all the competitors
and their technical and legal barriers
that they're putting up.
I just find that it's a game
and it's a really fun game to play.
And it's like, honestly, the game
that kind of moves society along.
Totally.
That's why we're in Bitcoin, right?
Because it makes entrepreneurs and builders,
gives fuel to the fire, right?
I was talking to somebody in the,
I won't say who it was,
I was talking to somebody in the lab
a few weeks ago and they had mentioned they're like yeah well it just sucks because you know like
you know they're so much bigger than us and you know we're so small and i'm like it's fun it's
like this is fun like that's business man like you're supposed to want to go out there and compete
that's these are the men in the in the arena like that's fun that's the fun part this is the stuff
that when you when you're when you're going to be in your 70s and 80s or whatever this is stuff
you're going to remember you're going to remember like oh remember we went toe to toe with people
and like did all the like this is the fun shit dude like this is the shit that you get up in
the morning for yeah it's also where the opportunity is too right like i don't i don't know i don't
know i just feel like it's uh it's uh yeah it's i think i think maybe once you go through it a
couple times we get punched in the gut and you get kicked in the face then after a while you're
just like oh i love that blood oh that dirt tastes pretty good and then you start getting
kind of like you start getting a little a little bit of thing and then before you know you're just
like more you start turning into like uh uh what was that guy's name from fight club uh tyler
durden yeah well it's you know i don't know if i like getting punched in the gut but i would say
that what i one thing that i do find is that and this is also i think bitcoin also just in general
i i've always been kind of a contrarian and but i don't like i don't believe in being contrarian
for no reason. Totally. But I do kind of observe a system and then I see where's the opportunity
here. And what I've kind of learned, like when I was really young, when I was in middle school,
you know, kids in my state wanted fireworks and there was no fireworks allowed in Massachusetts.
But I had fireworks in Maine. I don't think I was even supposed to have them in Maine,
but I got them from New Hampshire. And anyway, so I had fireworks and I was like, oh, well,
I just need to transport the fireworks from this jurisdiction to this other jurisdiction.
So I'm out of my, well, the losses, I can't do that, but I, you know, realized, okay,
like here's how you're going to get caught or not caught.
Oh, wow.
Did you figure it out?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
You know, I made, you know, 50 cents selling this firework and $2 selling that firework.
And I remember some kids I sold my fireworks to one time came outside and just set them
off right outside my house.
I was like, come on guys, what are you doing?
But then like now you think much later in life, you know, as you do more and more complicated startups, it's the same kind of thing where you're looking at all these intertwined competitors or legal issues or, you know, users wanting impossible feature sets.
Yeah, totally.
And you say, OK, well, how can I solve this multidimensional problem?
Yeah.
Can I can I can I hack it?
Can I make this whole thing work somehow?
and it's amazing the kind of shit that you can get working yeah you know one of my projects was
real fun i made a jet uh jet pack i don't know if i ever told you about no something about it i was
working in uh denver colorado and uh for this company uh called um apollo flight labs what
that sounds so cool yeah they were owned by go fast energy drink and they ended up pivoting from
jetpack machines into energy gum.
But before they completed that pivot,
they were trying to build a flying motorcycle effectively.
No way.
Yes way.
Wow.
Yeah, I know.
I didn't realize that's what I was signing up for.
I just thought it was a drone that they're working on.
But I toured the factory.
They showed me what they were building.
How far did they get, Ted?
Well, we got off the ground.
We got maybe, I don't know, 100 feet off the ground.
Oh, wow.
We could keep going.
I mean, it's jet engines,
So just keep going until you don't have enough oxygen.
But, you know, we're flying over water.
We want to be pretty careful.
So it's two small jet engines you strap to the beginning of the end.
The product didn't work at the end.
Like the financials, like not enough people wanted it.
And it would destroy concrete because it would superheat the concrete and the bubbles would expand in the concrete.
So maybe not the best product or a vehicle.
I mean, it looks sick, right?
I mean, it looks really cool.
But, you know, that didn't work.
But it's just a matter of, you know, you have this crazy idea and you figure it out.
You, you know, read the manual of the jet engine and you say, OK, if I deliver this voltage, then the jet engine will work in that way.
And then you say, OK, the jet engines are attached to the body and the force is exerted in this way.
You know, how does the stability work? And you just kind of keep moving up like that.
It's the same in business. You know, if I file this paperwork in this jurisdiction, then now I have access to.
a Bitcoin bond market in Japan. And now I can arbitrage that against, you know, London or
whatever it is. I think business is very similar, kind of puzzle solving almost.
Absolutely. Yeah. It's just about getting enough traction, right? And then producing some sort of
revenue. And hopefully that turns into a lot of revenue. Tell me about the startups, because
I know about the one with the health one. I know about that one, right? Tell me about the other
one because i don't know if i've ever heard the other story about the other start i don't talk
about the first startup i did much really um because it's like a it was just flounder floundered
well i'll tell you my real first startup yeah yeah tell me yes when i was at the beginning of
middle school before i figured out the fireworks i uh said i was going to sell pencil lead and so
i take the pencils and i would like an old school pencil that you sharpen and i would pick apart and
get long pencil lead and try to sell that to or try to barter it with other kids like obviously
that doesn't make any sense right so that was the technically first startup but uh the first real
startup is um when i was leaving college i went to school in boulder colorado and uh me and my
two best friends at the time uh we founded a company called myra makes which was a children's
book actually i gave it to darren oh cool so darren's kid will eventually enjoy that but
the children's book market is a really tough market to go into. So it's, so picture this.
So it's like me and my two buddies, we're all engineers, you know, 20, early twenties engineers,
no kids. Making a children's book. Making a children's book, you know, and it's like four
kids, you know, age five to 10. And really the methodology we use there was just fail fast.
and the first thing I did was I used to work in retail when I was in high school. I was kind of
paying my own way through high school and so I was a cashier and so I called up the owner of that
shop and I said, I'm making a children's book. Would you be interested in supporting me somehow,
maybe putting one on the shelf or could I come in and show it to you? He said, I'll buy him. How
much? I said, $20 a book and he said, I'll get 10. So $200 order and our book was like, it was
sketched out. We basically had a draft book, but it was not complete. So I hit up my co-founders.
I say, all right, guys, we got to deliver this book in two weeks. And they were so mad at me.
They were like, what the hell did you disagree to? This book's not even done. You know, a huge
commitment, but we buckled down. We were able to get the book out to him and shipped it to him.
And then, you know, a month later I check in with him, you know, Hey man, how's the book selling?
I'd love to hear feedback. And he said, Oh, I actually was surprised that you even called me.
I thought this was a joke.
Whoa.
And I said, what do you mean?
So I walk into the store.
I talk to him.
He says, this book was so bad that I actually thought you were screwing with us.
And you had just stolen my money.
I mean, that's how bad the product was.
Did you have a registered for it?
Did you pay like half or quarter?
No, no.
He paid me up front.
I think it was, I don't know, Venmo or something like that.
Oh, so you actually had.
Okay.
Via email.
I mean, it's very basic, right?
But basically the point of this is that my product was terrible and is no wonder is terrible. This is our first book we ever created. You know, we were stapling it together. And so I said, OK, would you please explain? His name was Matt, the owner. And I said, Matt, will you please explain to me exactly why this book sucks so bad? And he said, OK. And he started listing. He listened maybe a hundred different things like the page width. It's not glossy. There's not enough pages in it. The animations look bad. The content's bad.
It doesn't stand out.
The title is no good.
And went through all these different things.
And I said, great.
And I just took notes on it.
And then we went and we made a V2.
And then I came back to him.
I said, what do you think about the V2?
And he says, OK, a lot better.
You fixed, you know, these 50% of the things.
But what about this?
And it's still not good enough.
Or, you know, when you fold it, that was a big issue for us.
The paper was probably one of the most difficult things in that book.
And so that's how that startup went.
It was just a lot of iteration and eventually got pretty good where basically passed the
smell test and I could go into any store.
I went into maybe 50 stores in Colorado and they actually, we came up with a deal where
basically I would keep the books in that store.
And then when they sold a book, I think then it was going for around $12 a book or something
like that.
You know, we collect a percentage of the revenue and they would get a percentage as well.
But it turns out people didn't really want that book and it wasn't a very good product.
the end users.
There was a small subset of kids
who actually really enjoyed it.
We really got held up with the parents
because the kids are playing Minecraft
or they're watching TV.
They don't want a book.
And the parents are really busy
and they need to occupy their child's time
so they can get some peace of mind.
And if it's educational, that's great.
But first and foremost is they need peace of mind.
So we did not, in my opinion,
we did not do enough market research to uncover that before going through this whole product
lifecycle. So at the end of this startup, which failed at the end of it, I was sleeping in a car,
I poured all my money in this thing, I was totally bankrupt. You know, our team split up.
And basically, I gifted all my equity to the two guys. And I said, Look, you want to keep going,
you can have all my equity and carry this forward. But I'm out. I don't see the future here. I just
think like i'm out of money so this this is dead uh basically and it's easier to start from scratch
over we finally got a sponsor can you believe it vintech they're a legal firm out of dallas texas
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All right, let's get back to the show.
This is about a two-year effort,
but I learned a lot about like market research.
I made like every mistake in the book.
Just going door to door.
Oh yeah.
Just going door to door
and like having to talk to each one of those book owners,
I think, or bookstore owners.
I would imagine that.
And it's still-
Farmers markets.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, like you said, gosh, I couldn't imagine what that was like.
I remember there was one day because we did a lot of like in-person sales too.
So I was like that annoying guy with a clipboard outside going up to people.
And I did a lot of that because the other two guys, my team, they were like, we do not want to do this.
I mean, who wants to do that?
No one wants to do that.
And specifically, we're targeting, like I said, kids age 5 to 10.
So I'm looking, I'm like out there with my clipboard looking for families.
It was the worst. You don't want to be in that situation, but there I was. And so I wanted to get, you know, I said to my co-founder, I said, oh, I'll get 50 signups. You know, just give me three hours out there. I'll get 50 signups. I was like, there's no way I'm getting 50 signups. But, you know, I go and I, you know, I go up and talk to them and you're just getting rejected over and over and over and over again. But you are also getting signups. You're getting sales.
um you know on occasion uh people would just buy the book outright right for me right at that moment
um I remember one day it was really bad day you know I got maybe two signups after hours of of
doing this at a farmer's market and my ego was so bruised that I had to step outside the crowd
for a moment and just just lean over and just be like oh my gosh you know like I can't believe this
what I'm doing. Maybe it was like $24 or something. Yeah. 20 bucks a book, you know, I was just like,
wow, this is, this is tough work. So, you know, long story short is the company didn't work,
but it was really valuable learning experience to just jump right in and just do this and get all
this knowledge about, you know, value proposition, market research, creating good product, getting
feedback from customers, sales, team, dealing with teams, legal.
What did the other guys say?
I'm curious, like, what were the other guys saying when all this was going on?
Did they see the same signs that you'd see?
Or did they all, like, what were you guys as a group of individuals like?
Yeah, that was really interesting.
We were very, very creative, the three of us.
And we had done projects before.
We actually started a student group, the three of us before.
And then we started to create another company, but we kind of bailed on that and we moved to Byron Makes.
But it was interesting.
One of the most interesting things to me is that on my way out of that company I felt like a lot of the learnings that I was taking away from that experience were not the same conclusions that they had drawn despite us three of us going through this side by side What conclusions did they drew well I would say for the most part they viewed it as kind of a perseverance problem
where we were doing all the right things
and we just need to keep at it and never give up.
And eventually it would work out.
And that's why I gifted my equity over
because I just fundamentally disagreed with that.
I mean, you could always do something forever
and the likelihood of it succeeding eventually is possible.
yeah but i kind of looked into myself and into the business and i thought you know we do this for 10
years and we finally get a hit okay first of all i need to go back to work because i'm out of cash
i've just put all my money saying i'm sleeping in a car you know like i smell bad because i'm not
showering enough like you know there's there's like like i was i don't mean to laugh but just
the way you say it's well that my friends didn't tell me this until afterwards i wish they told me
at the time you know it's like so but uh so from my perspective the issue was that we had not done
the foundational market research from the get-go and we're also not the right founders for that type
of business because we didn't have kids that's crazy right so like that seemed like very foundational
to me and you know probably need to do something in digital so the product was fundamentally
foundationally flawed too and we also had some uh team dynamic issues around kind of uh expectations
um like i think the three of us were kind of trying to build different types of companies
and um i was probably being a little like aggressive in general in terms of trying to
sell you mean or like or trying to make it a bigger startup than i think they might have been
What were they, I guess, what were the,
I'm more curious about the other two founders.
Like, whatever happened to them?
So one of them became a lawyer.
Oh, that's good.
And the other one, and he ended up the final founder
with the startup.
What happened to it?
Well, so it fizzled out.
Well, it's interesting to me.
How many books got created, though?
Oh, I don't know.
I mean, you have to do batch orders from Amazon,
so there's probably thousands of books.
I mean, I have 20 of them.
Oh, that's the one that, yeah, interesting.
I tried to find him the latest version for Darren's.
Okay.
So you have all these books that are just sitting there?
I only have those 20 remaining.
But for a while, you could buy on demand from Amazon, but it's no longer listed.
It kind of fizzled out.
And see, what's interesting is that I knew it was going to fizzle out, or I was very confident that would be the outcome.
But the other two founders really believed that they could keep it going.
And maybe they could, but you need to spend a lot of effort and energy and time to make these things happen.
And you also need to learn like the biggest thing, like one of the biggest takeaways for
me personally is that you have to learn from your mistakes and you have to be super honest
and humble about what you did wrong so that you can improve for the next time.
And if you have any sort of reality distortion, you can be reality distortion when you're
trying to sell to someone and sell them on your vision, but you cannot have any reality
distortion with yourself internally, which is very difficult to navigate that duality,
right?
Like I, I'm on the opposite end where I don't, I don't think I do enough like selling or marketing.
I kind of, I'm really hard on myself and my product.
I'm like, all this stuff is broken.
Like I'm kind of a little bit too much on that extreme, but if you're not doing that
at all, or you're not doing it very much, you're going to end up with a baby that's
ugly and you don't want to fix it.
You don't want to accept that's ugly and you'll blame everyone else for the reason
that product failed.
That's my read on that, that whole experience.
Yeah.
Oh man.
I could share a lot about that kind of stuff.
There's, I think for me,
I think the reality distortion field
that you're talking about,
you know, and Steve Jobs famously
is the one that, where that came from.
He had that.
But a lot of other founders think they have that
or they try to wear that
as like some kind of like badge of honor or something.
But it's not true.
Like what you're describing is the reality though.
Like that's why I think for,
it's so important to like bring somebody with experience in the fold like even if it's just an
advisor or like a um you know somebody that's it in your in your kind of uh in your group right
that's why like i think that's why i think club lab is such a great place is because right now
just before we started the podcast we were talking about a product that we're building in here and uh
like uh and it was great because we all came in and we're all having discussion and you know and
you there is no kind of there's no wiggle room around it we're all just going to have to like
uh you know it's a it's a it's a bloodbath of ideas right and like you know your your ideas
are going to get slayed and they're going to be in the bathtub and we're all going to look at and
say like yeah yeah your idea is slayed so don't even bother but it's good because we're all talking
about this thing that we just slayed in the bathtub. And then we go in the living room,
start watching, you know, we're all hanging out again, but there's, there's the bathroom of the,
of the idea that we just slayed. Yeah. And we're all, we'll all know what's in that bathroom.
Let's just give it 24 hours before we go back in there. Cause the main's going to go clean it up.
But what I'm trying to say is like, that's where it's so important to be around other builders
because you have to, it's good for somebody else to look at what you're working on and to
at least check right and but i think also too just having that experience but dude it's man that's a
tough one ted i never i never you never told me that i feel bad for you on that one that one's
tough yeah because like when you when you told me that the first thing i thought was like
yes 100 like no reason doing that startup right the second thing is like how do you
like so you're just going to sell books and like there's three guys like how are you going to eat
and then the third thing is like people are just too busy like they're just going to read the new
york times and they're going to tell them what to what to buy and then like you said you should
have been doing it digitally yeah and then the third thing is like the um like kids want like
those like kind of pop-up books and like something that's just more in front of retail and stuff so
it's just like all these other things yeah i mean you look at minecraft i was babysitting for these
two twin boys and they would, they took, you know, they showed me their Minecraft civilization
that they're building, like the most amazing universe you've ever seen. And they're getting
there. Oh, you know, we're working on this, like ask this room of this building on, in this part
of the continent. And there's no way a book can compete with that. And there still is a place for
books. Um, it's not like books are going out, but you, when you're creating a product, you want it
to be significantly better than the competition and so for us like you said all those things wrong
that we're doing in terms of our position of who we are as people going into this type of business
yeah on top of the revenue the you know you know we're probably spending like a hundred dollars to
get one twenty dollar sale well it's not even way out of whack it's not even that it's the amount of
like uh like the amount of work that y'all are doing for your own like you like you said you're
sleeping out of your car but like that was uh the actual work that you're right yeah you're not even
counting those hours yeah it was it was uh yeah so we basically made every mistake in the book
that's that's kind of the story i say is like we went in and we said we followed you know you can
listen all these advisors and they'll tell you you know lean startup or jobs to be done or all
these other you know frameworks and methodologies like no we're following nike advice just do it
And then don't even worry about all the other advice.
And like, honestly, that's a pretty fast way to learn.
Like just jumping in and we jumped in, we really meant it.
So like we did a kind of a short two month, um, what I described as an incubator or an
accelerator program.
And, you know, we're working full time.
I mean, I, I would try to sleep as little as possible during that time period.
I did probably permanent brain damage from, from, oh yeah, from that little sleep.
But we were really putting a lot of effort in, but we just made all those mistakes.
But now I know about those mistakes.
When I came back to do the health startup.
Yeah, so talk about that one because that's the one I know about.
Yeah, so this one was really cool.
Kind of very different than what I told you about before.
So after this children's book startup failed, I kind of went back to my technology world.
So I studied physics.
I was very interested in space.
So I started working in a space lab where I was kind of assembling small spacecraft.
It was pretty cool from a technology standpoint.
But I was studying a topic that no one was interested in.
This was space dust.
And they're like, whoa, that's far out.
Like you're studying space dust.
But at the same time, no one cares about space dust.
Like that is like some weird niche of science, right?
So I was like, OK, I want to go back into startups.
But I was just kind of shell shocked from this whole experience, right?
Like I'm very cautious now.
So what happened was I met this professor in the computer science department who had a technology he was working on.
It was a wearable and it could do all these amazing things.
It was basically electrodes that would go inside of your ear, but give you the experience as if you're wearing a full EEG, electroencephalogram hat that puts electrodes across your head and then monitors the electrical signals that are happening because of each of your neurons is firing potassium.
and potassium is charged.
So it's distorting the electrical field of your brain.
And then you can, you know, detect your level of alertness or your sleep stage or epilepsy.
A lot of things you can determine about someone.
So he was able to reduce all that to the form factor of an earbud.
And I just thought that was so cool.
And he was a really persuasive, compelling speaker as well.
Oh, wow.
And so I had one of those.
Yeah.
So I, you know, so I got involved with this and I said, you know, I'd like to help you take this from the lab out into the real world.
So I ended up becoming employee number one at this company.
It was kind of a, it's a technology spinoff from a university.
But because it was a spinoff, it already had grant money and it made it very easy for us to raise venture capital.
We raised a lot of money for this thing.
How much should you be asking?
I kind of lost count.
I think it was around the order of $70 million.
Really?
I left around 20 million though.
So I pulled myself out of that project.
But the, yeah, I mean, it was an amazing experience.
And it also gave me a deep understanding of kind of morality in business, the good, the
bad, and the gray.
I think the gray is the most interesting because there's a lot of situations you find yourself
in which might not feel right, but they could be right.
And you just need to like be very careful with your decisions to make sure that your feelings aren't getting in the way of what will succeed from the business.
And also you're doing a moral business and you're not doing immoral things to further that business.
That is very difficult, in my opinion, especially when venture capital gets involved.
And you're, you know, every founder does this.
You sell a dream.
Like when I talk about FeedFilter, I talk about the perfect situation.
But, you know, the product's not perfect.
Like it's not going to deliver the best experience for everyone, right?
There's work to be done.
So when you take a product, you know, some people are going to pitch that product further
than it is even possible to deliver on.
That's when you get into the territory, in my opinion, that is like impermissible.
So I'm okay with overselling.
I mean, look, everyone oversells.
You go to the car dealership.
Oh, yeah, this car's got no problems, right?
And then you drive it off the lot and the engine falls out the bottom.
It's happened to my friend.
is like the engine was like sitting on the bottom of the car.
You know, it's like, that's false advertising.
But is it immoral?
I mean, you know, that's kind of a stretch.
But now if you say that this car can fly and it can't fly, that's a problem.
Yeah.
So getting back to the story of this wearable device.
So the first thing I did was kind of take a state of what is the situation of this technology?
It's on a lab bench.
There's wires everywhere.
There's kind of a cool demo, but it's very technology savvy.
It's just showing wiggles on a screen and there's wires hanging off the person when they're doing the demo.
So I was like, OK, so we're going to take this.
We're going to take all the wires and put them in nice, clean, single cables.
And they already had a rendering of this.
So it wasn't like this was my idea from scratch.
But what I recognized was that we needed to get to a presentable demo to show to both investors and to customers to do customer research.
Because I had learned the importance of customer research from my past startup.
So we modified the product.
I mean, this is an MVP at this point.
And we're able to make it something that looks very presentable, very small and minimal form factor.
I was arguing with China to get the right size of battery and like spending a lot of attention to get the electrodes to fit into the earbud.
And then once we had it at that size, I did a similar thing to the pitch deck.
Because originally, this was a professor.
the pitch deck was very academic, long text charts. And I was like, okay, we need to delete
everything and make it just blue or black or white, right? Just make it very simple and say
our statements bold and in the center of each page and then get the total slide count out of like 20
slides. And then we started entering into some university pitch competitions, applying to some
more grants, and then eventually starting to apply to the Y Combinators of the world,
accelerators. We ended up getting into 500 startups, which is kind of a tier three.
So it's Y Combinator, then Techstars, then 500 startups. We got into that, and then I think that
really started unlocking the venture capital side. While that's all happening, I got us into a grant
program that would allow us to do market research via Lean Startup. This was called iCorps.
and for innovation corporations.
And so I would execute customer interviews
over the course of a two-month period.
And I conducted 117 customer interviews.
And each interview was around 45 minutes long.
These are long-form discussions.
And it was two people, so it was myself and a note-taker.
And we'd execute these interviews,
take all the notes about really everything.
I mean, the body language, the stories, the intonations.
I mean, we really want to sap all the information
out of the person we were talking to
to try to understand what their actual needs were.
And throughout all that effort,
my personal conclusion was that
the product really should be solving epilepsy.
And the reason for that is because
this is a specific group.
group. So you start with these broad groups and then you say, okay, this group doesn't have the
problem, but maybe the subset of the group has the problem. So we started out with general sleep tech
or people who are trying to get better sleep. I mean, that's everyone, right? That's one third
of the planet. At least that's what we said on the pitch deck slide. But then later I said, okay,
well, I'm not sure if that's a really, like I'm not seeing in my customer interviews that these
customers actually need that product. And there's much better, like Aura Ring is something I use or
eight sleep. These are like way easier wearables. They're not as accurate, but, you know, do these
users really need that level of accuracy, you know, to have something on your head?
And so then we started, what about people who have epilepsy while they're sleeping?
That broke us into the whole epilepsy world. And then we talked to people who had seizures of,
you know, they were controlled by medication. They were not controlled by medication, young, old,
doctors. And then we got to parents of people who, of kids who were recently diagnosed with epilepsy.
And it actually takes three years before the medication controls the epilepsy. So there's a
three-year period where the parent is working with the doctor to try all these different types
of medication to get the kid's epilepsy and seizures under control. And it's a traumatic
experience for the parent. Everyone thinks about the child, but it's actually the parent that is
struggling way more than the child. The child just wants to not be weird at school and just fit in.
They're embarrassed, right? But that's really the extent of their worry. They don't care too much
about the personal danger, but the parent is terrified that something's going to happen.
Like at night, the child could flip over on their front and stop breathing. So it actually is so bad
that actually interferes with their jobs.
They can't hold down a full-time job
because they're worrying about this so much.
So I discovered that through these customer interviews
that this was a real pressing need
with this group of people.
Probably 80% of people in this category
would buy this product at a certain price range.
And I really kind of nailed down
the level of accuracy the technology would need
to get these people to buy.
And so this was kind of all mapped out.
But the problem was the total adjustable market was not big enough.
And so the investors were like, we're out.
And the CEO was like, I don't want to, you know, if the investors are out, I'm out.
And what I said is if we're not going after the needs of the customers, then I'm going to be out too.
Because I just fundamentally believe in my bones that the purpose of a business is to solve customers' needs.
And if that's not what we're doing, that's not a business I want to be part of.
Um, so, you know, that was the end of that.
That's crazy.
That's insane.
Do they, are they still around?
Do they?
Sort of.
What do you mean?
Well, they're a zombie company.
They're a zombie company.
Um, yeah.
So it's, it's always possible like that, that technology gets rolled up into something else
or, um, but you know, fundamentally they're still going after sleep tech and the need
was in epilepsy or, you know, there might've been need in sleep tech, but if you're going to find it,
you got to do this kind of rigorous process. They never really agreed with my perspective that
the rigorous process did surface insights. They said, Hey, we did this whole customer research
effort and all you told us was something that the investors wouldn't even do. So you basically just
waste all this time. From my perspective, it's like, no, we found a real business and screw the
investors like you know like we just do the right business because they're going to get more than
zero they're either getting zero dollars or they're getting non-zero dollars yeah or we should do more
market research to find the need in something that'll make them happy yeah um but that that
was just my perspective i was not the founder of that company yeah gosh what uh i guess through all
that through these two failed startups what did you uh i guess what did you learn because you you
found your way to bitcoin eventually yeah and um it's probably because you you you went through
these i would imagine these two these learnings but um yeah what did you take away from from doing
these well there's so many things to learn and you know like sometimes you can kind of say the
learnings but you know people are listening they're probably like they hear advice or learnings from
all sorts of people.
So it's very situationally dependent.
I will say that these experiences like really coming out of my first startup when I was kind of looking around for other opportunities is when I found Bitcoin I was working I was living in kind of a hacker house with some other startup guys And then I was going to a accelerator in the university And you know I was kind of coaching at that point kind of like an advisor sharing my you know battle scars with people kind of trying to scare them off of what they doing not doing a very good job at it
founders are hard to talk down off the cliff.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's just basically I'd go up to a startup founder and say,
oh, what's your product?
And, you know, what need is it solving?
And I listened to it and I'd ask some follow-up questions.
And then I'd walk away and think to myself,
do I have any idea what they're building?
And 99% of the time, the answer is no.
But sometimes it's like, okay, kind of see it, but I'm not sure.
But I always give people the benefit of the doubt
because in a short conversation, you can't really fully see that.
um so then bitcoin was in the news and so i said can anyone explain what bitcoin is like i just
treated it as if it was another one of these products that i was assessing in the startup
world and one of my friends said you know he's a bitcoiner like not an og but he's maybe og
202 or whatever and he said yeah i can explain bitcoin to you but you know do you actually want
to know and i said yeah i want to know and he said well i'm gonna need one hour of your time
in a whiteboard.
Wow.
And we're in a space just like this,
kind of a startup environment,
but he's probably the only Bitcoiner there.
Yeah.
This is late 2017.
And so he pulls over a whiteboard
and I pull over a chair,
like right then and there,
he pulls out a marker
and he just explains cryptography and hashing.
Wow.
And so I walked away from that conversation.
It was a one hour conversation.
And I was like,
okay, I believe that Bitcoin is unhackable.
Like I'm sold on that belief
based on this technical description.
I mean, it's not terribly complicated.
It's weird, but it's not overly complex, right?
But then I had to ask, okay, that's a cool feature
that you have this thing that's kind of like money,
but it's unhackable.
So why would we want unhackable money?
I mean, it seems like that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
No one would not want unhackable money,
but why do we need unhackable money?
And that's what led me to Austrian economics
and all this other stuff.
Eventually, I'm a Bitcoiner.
So, you know, like, I guess the overarching learning is the number one learning is do
market research and talk to the customer and try to understand deeply what the need is
and why, what solution would best solve their need, because it's probably not the solution
that you start with, but maybe it's some variation or it's a solution that's out there in another
industry that you can pull over.
But really be humble and try to understand that.
Curious.
And then, you know, I've learned lots of other things about kind of more tactical stuff.
I would say that's foundational.
Get the value proposition right.
And then the more tactical stuff is like how to make a good pitch deck, you know, how to work with your team, you know, how to get founder market fit.
So make sure that you're working on the right domain.
Right.
Those types of things.
Yeah.
We're doing so we're doing.
I think I told you this.
We're doing a startup school right now.
And so I've, we've been trying to, me and Teresa have been trying to put this together for about a year now.
And, and, you know, since we started startup, startup today, we've always had these kind of like ideas swirling around about how are we going to do this and that kind of thing.
And I think one of the things I realized like doing this, because it's like a, it's like a Bitcoin version of it.
It's not like a traditional startup program that you would see from like a, you know, a traditional place like Antler or something down the street, right?
Like it's an actual Bitcoin version of it.
And so I didn't realize too, but like I'm stretching my mind, like literally stretching my mind, putting these things together.
Teresa's also doing the same.
And it's like, it's really hard.
Yeah.
It's like really hard.
But I told her and I was just and just through our conversations that we have, I was like, but I think we have enough data.
Like, I think Club Lab has enough data from 21, once we started till now to at least do the first iteration of it.
It probably won't be perfect.
It probably won't even be like.
Compelling enough, right?
And so we brought up we brought a startup in there.
We're working with him and we're going to have two initially.
and then you know the second one we realized you know it probably be best if we we have that person
maybe work more closely with him inside the lab as opposed to inside this program because
like you said founder market fit that kind of thing but this one person that we're working
with right now and we told him ahead of time like hey this is a new thing uh we're we're we're really
test running with you like like uh and none of this has been created before so uh welcome to
club lab, you know? Um, and kind of like what you said, it's, it's, uh, you know, we were able to,
we were able to divvy it up into four buckets, like foundation, product, revenue, and pitch.
And we think those are foundational to a Bitcoin startup. Now we'll see if we're right or not.
Um, we'll see if, um, if that's going to need some tweaking next, next year when we do it again.
but I do think there is something, like you said,
there is something worth pursuing
and then iterating as we pursue it
and then moving towards that direction
and moving towards this and then dialing it in.
And one of the things I've been lucky enough to have
is like these people down the street, like Antler,
like being able to talk to them
and ask them these questions.
That for me has been a big help for me this past year.
and just seeing how they're able to create their accelerator
and how they did it.
And I think without that kind of help,
and even with Capital Factory, how they're doing it, right?
I don't think I would have ever been able to,
at least me and Teresa would have never been able
to even think we even have the,
that we could take that next step to do that.
And I think that just kind of goes to what you're saying.
And it's like you have to go through these kind of like initial kind of like painful process of like birth, rebirth, birth, rebirth.
And then finally, you think that you you're there as a founder.
But, you know, I'm just out of curiosity.
Well, the foundation, I love how you categorize that into the buckets.
I mean, I feel like that's some of the hardest thing is just disentangling all the mess that is startups into simple buckets.
Yeah. What is in your foundation bucket? Yeah. So right now we have we start I would have to pull up the the thing that we're using. I'll show you after the thing. But right now we start off with like Bitcoin Ventures 101, Bitcoin Startups 101. We're literally getting into like what is a traditional startup look like? What are the pros and cons of it? What does a Bitcoin startup look like? What are the pros and cons of it?
I'm like really going into it. And that way there's a, there's a based reality, like an actual
based reality of what it's like building a traditional Bitcoin startup. Like you're like,
I was telling Keanu about this. I was like, I'm trying not to oversell this like dream. Cause I
feel like in, I felt like in like the normal traditional, and there's nothing against that,
But like, but in Bitcoin, there's just like, there's just a real this.
I don't know how to explain that in words, but there's just this.
There's a fundamental reality that you have to accept.
You always say this, building in a Bitcoin era.
I love that term that you say.
Because it's just a fundamental reality that you have to start building on it.
And then, and then, and then we get to the other part.
But yeah, this is not about us.
What I'm trying to say is, but like, this is about your, your, your thing.
But what I'm trying to say is like, there is this, this, this hardness that comes to
building a startup, whether you're doing it in a traditional space or whether you're doing
it in like the Bitcoin space, or eventually our hope is these things merge and they become
one.
And I think that's going to happen hopefully within the next five to seven years, hopefully
if we're lucky.
And then we won't have that kind of delineation anymore.
Yeah.
Yeah, I put a good amount of time of thinking about this specific thing of building a startup in the Bitcoin era.
So I've made a number of kind of unconventional decisions.
Like one of them is I don't have a co-founder.
I mean, a lot of people don't have co-founders, but if I had the opportunity to have a co-founder, I would.
But you want to be very careful about that.
Plus, you get more control as a single founder.
I think you have enough experience, though, where you probably don't need a co-founder, right?
Yeah, I've dug some hats and, you know, I leaned into more technical side.
I take on multiple roles, which is challenging.
Another one is I'm not pursuing venture capital. And the reason for that is my prior experience of venture capital. And also, when you accept Bitcoin as inevitable, and then you accept all the other things that happen because Bitcoin is inevitable, the Fed goes away, the finance system is wrecked.
You know, you have a hostile government. You might have hostile corporations romping around the world that have no checks and balances from a court perspective. Now, it might not be that extreme, but that's a possibility. So when I'm thinking about my startup, I'm like, OK, not only am I building a startup, but I'm building a startup that.
Like could survive without venture capital is can bounce from this jurisdiction to another jurisdiction.
So you're thinking about that Bitcoin era.
You're thinking of like, that's in the front of your mind.
Yes.
It was actually when I was first mapping about a year ago, I started mapping out this idea
of this company.
And I actually started pursuing a totally different company.
And I got one or two months into it and I killed it right off the bat.
I said, you know what?
I don't like the direction that the setting was a finance company is going to be a lot
more like helping people kind of like what Unchained does with their retirement calculator.
So like imagine that on steroids. So basically a portfolio tool that will allow you to invest
Bitcoin, which I do think like there's a definitely a need there to some degree. But, you know,
the route is managing payments. And I didn't want to have that sort of regulatory
burden or exposure.
So I decided, and also I just, I want to do something, what I feel is more meaningful
than just working purely in finance.
I want to get outside of finance a little bit.
So then I said, okay, I want to build a business for the Bitcoin era.
Feed filter comes out of that because I view, you know, the social media platforms as kind
of a hostile environment and increasingly hostile over time.
Now, you can leave entirely go to Noster, but, you know, there might be that middle period where you still might need to go into the hostile environment, but you need to go with a little bit of armor.
Right.
And so you need to go in with your tools.
And so FeedFilter is a tool in that kind of hostile world.
And, you know, I made a lot of technical decisions, like not just not taking on venture capital, but also the types of technology I'm using to make it really hard to shut down.
I mean, you really can't shut it down.
So that's the goal is to kind of systematically eliminate counterparty risk.
And so that's, it's not a Bitcoin company per se, but it is, you know, building for the Bitcoin era.
It's a company that should exist in Bitcoin world.
And that's hard to think about because, you know, there's a lot of similarities, a lot of overlap in startups, but no one else.
I mean, this is ground zero.
What you're doing here at Plob Lab really is where, you know, kind of you're breaking fresh ground.
What does it mean to build in the Bitcoin era?
I think that's something that over the coming years, you know, everyone, the whole world is going to have to really reconcile.
Adapt, at least adapt.
I think that's where I was going to.
I think that's where.
I keep saying this, but it's like Bitcoin was this thing.
And it had to fit in, like, at least in the 2010s, it felt like it had to fit.
inside of this like fiat like environment with these fiat rails and it was always trying to
fit itself into this thing into this structure even now you kind of see it now where it's still
trying they're like people trying to force fit this thing and for the first time in history we
have like ai and like uh and that's kind of taken off and then we're seeing like spatial computing
taking off and like this is going to be the first time where bitcoin's actually functioning in its
own environment and guess what like the rails are being polished and they're getting better all the
time and lightning's taking off and there's all sorts of really cool stuff that you know a lot of
companies in here that are doing and i'm just even more bullish than i was like a year ago six months
ago three months ago two months ago yesterday and that's where like for me i'm just like if this
keeps going that way like everybody else is trying to build for things to fit in this old
to me that's just like that's like trying to build yeah it just doesn't make any that's like
that's like trying to make like like net zero work in the broadband era it doesn't it doesn't
make any sense yeah uh and uh yeah i i don't know i don't know i just extremely bullish you don't
move into the collapsing roman empire and uh start buying up real estate now you you built you get a
castle outside on the edges yeah for sure i was gonna bring up something else that you had brought
up too but gosh i can't remember what it was it was uh maybe on the next podcast maybe on the next
podcast yeah where can everybody find out what um where to check out feed filter well that is uh
feedfilter.com is you got the dot com i thought it was a dot ai not anymore what feedfilter.com
and um there's a a button right there big button can't miss it add to chrome uh definitely love
uh any feedback that people can give me right now it's early days right so i'm getting the product
out there i'm doing live testing right now works for uh x and instagram on chrome on desktop so
yeah really appreciate anyone's feedback and just give you feedback on twitter is that right when
you install it there's a little feedback button that pops right up and just click on it's a little
survey really easy uh but if you just want to shoot the shit with me or give me some ideas or
um learn a little bit more uh you can send me a note i'm ted thayer underscore on twitter which is
Ted, T-H-A-Y-E-R underscore on Twitter,
or you can email me.
Find him at Plob Lab.
You're at Plob Lab.
Yeah, come right here.
I sit right there.
But yeah, my email too is Ted at FeedFilter.com.
And yeah, just really appreciate it
for the opportunity to be on this.
No, dude, thank you for just everything
you've done for us just internally
and just for being that great guy in the room
that's always speaking up
and explaining things on a much deeper level
than we can hardly grasp.
I feel like you're just like an intelligence, like kind of just like a brain.
And it's just like you always pull it back for us.
You're like, OK, hang on, guys.
You're always the sensible one in the room with things.
I feel like an internal student here in Plubb Lab.
So I'm honored to be in here.
Dude, I'm like that, too.
I feel like the dumbest person in the room because I know I am.
That's where you want to be.
That's exactly where I want to be.
What was I going to say?
OK, so VFilter.com.
And then does it cost anything right now?
Or is it free?
Free.
Free right now.
At some point it will cost money.
But anyone who is an early user is free forever for all eternity throughout the universe.
Oh, wow.
And at some point I am planning on doing a subscription.
Okay.
So it'd be, you know, I'm going to start with the highest number I could possibly think of.
$20 a month if you pay dollars.
But if you pay Bitcoin, it's $10 a month.
Okay.
And, you know, I'm kind of open to different financial angles.
Right now, if you pay for premium X, premium YouTube, all the, you know, to block all the ads, you're only blocking a fraction of your feed, but you're spending $50 a month.
Exactly.
So feed filter, while $20 does seem like a lot, it's priced to be lower.
It blocks more content that you don't want to see.
And it's the bad gray area content, but at a cheaper price.
I have to do the subscription because I do not want to sell data or monetize with ads.
Absolutely.
So I need to avoid the addiction engagement metrics.
And so that's the angle that I'm taking right now.
Yeah.
And I think most people are going to start seeing those prices come out everywhere.
Jim does that with Cascader.
It's like $49, but he's not doing any of that stuff.
Same thing with yours.
If you filter at some point.
you know yeah that's what you can pay me right now is feedback or just connecting is yeah the
other thing i was asking what so if when you do release a subscription we'll have new features and
when can people expect like new features and yeah i just put out some new features a couple days ago
um i usually push out a couple updates a couple times a week um so it's constant updates um the
next uh you know next updates are going to be some added functionality to uh instagram to allow
friends and uh family as well as block sponsored content uh then we'll be launching uh either
tiktok or youtube i haven't decided i personally am leaning towards youtube uh dude i think the
voters really wanted tiktok out so i'm talking to people and yeah if you have an opinion on that let
me know did you see what youtube added on their on their thing now in their app you can do like ai
summaries inside of the video that you're watching which is really helpful now like you can you can
be watching the youtube video and then it'll give you like a summary of the video while you're
watching that all the time i go to the video i grab the transcript dump it in hit the summary
then i have to watch the whole video but now it's doing that inside the video like you swipe over
the comments on it it's really cool yeah the way i want to do youtube is basically it pre-watches
the video ahead of ahead of you before you even see the video appear on your feed summarize it
then matches that summary against your filter criteria and it does that all instantaneously so
you don't even you just arrive on your feed and it's a it's a filtered feed so it still looks like
your normal youtube feed but it's pre-watch all that stuff and found out what's just clickbaits
or yeah actually that would be cool yeah that'd be really cool awesome well thanks
for coming on early days and uh i appreciate you good to be here
Thank you.
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