Brian Casel

Things Brian Says on Podcasts

Runs Builder Methods, a training and community site teaching developers how to build software with AI tools, after roughly two decades as a designer, developer and SaaS founder. Earlier products include Restaurant Engine and Audience Ops, a content-marketing service he sold in 2021; his current work centers on AI-assisted coding workflows and product prototyping. Publishes videos on his own YouTube channel and co-hosts The Panel with Justin Jackson and Jordan Gal, a weekly show on founder topics including pricing, product strategy and AI coding tools. Also turns up on Justin Jackson's show Justin's Brain, and formerly co-hosted Build Your SaaS.

Where to Find Them

Brian Casel writes Brian Casel , hosts and writes The Panel , hosts Justin's brain and writes UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy . They have also been a guest on Slow & Steady (2 times) , The Art of Product (2 times) , Offsite (2 times) , Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle , Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer , Indie Bites , Build Your SaaS , Remote Ruby and Makers.dev .

Recently: “I Email All My Bots” on The Panel (October 2026); “The Harder It Is, The Better” on The Panel (October 2026); “It's the End of the World of Coding, And I Feel Fine” on The Panel (October 2026); “It's the End of the World of Coding, And I Feel Fine” on The Panel (October 2026); “Eat Your Customer's Pain” on The Panel (September 2026); “Eat Your Customer's Pain” on The Panel (September 2026).

What They Said

“Is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job.” — Brian Casel, The Panel

Casel was explaining why he struggles to commit to any one product idea for the long term. His latest idea is in the video space, a big market where he thinks he has a distinctive take. This is the question that stops him each time.

The Panel · 2026-10-03 Permalink → Listen →
The Panel Around 36:44 into the episode
Brian Casel

…around to building. Um, but all of these the logic usually goes something like this: like, okay, I Feel Fine pain. I think that there is a gap. I'm not satisfied with the current solutions. I know I have some taste and an idea for how I want to solve this. I'm going to build it. And, and I also,

Speaker 4

but usually, as I go

Brian Casel

…good opportunity because it's a huge category. Yes, it's very competitive, but there's a world of customers out there, and I just need a small slice of them. And I do have a very unique, a unique take on this that I think is worth, that makes it noteworthy, that makes it worth paying attention to. Again, I still might do something like this, but I still come to the, at the end of the day, like, is this product going to be necessary in 2027, 2028? I mean, probably not, because literally the last three videos on my YouTube channel were edited by Claude operating Adobe Premiere for me, and it did a perfect job. I mean, you know, so it's the longevity,

Jordan Gal

right? What we've talked about in the past around valuations, that the terminal value, the thing at the end, it's similar in like a product decision.

Brian Casel

Yeah, or it's life like the it's like it's like, am I going to do, am I going to build something with platform risk? You know, that it's almost like every single category feels like it has platform risk at this point. You know, like, like, yeah, I could

Speaker 4

probably launch a product

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest, greatest model, we're going to brand it Astro, we're going to brand it Fable and everyone's going to care. But like 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point.” — Brian Casel, The Panel

The group had been talking about a consultant who charges by the hour to set up AI for small-business owners, and how much better that lands with customers than any frontier model release. Casel extends the point to the whole industry, labs included. The disconnect he is describing runs between people who follow model launches and everyone else.

The Panel · 2026-09-05 Permalink → Listen →
The Panel Around 30:03 into the episode
Jordan Gal

…they are instead of expecting them to come. Come up over into like inference NVIDIA land where everyone knows everything and the latest model matters. And is it fable? Is it soul? Is it Luna? Where nobody cares. And I take a lot of inspiration from that. Like, oh, I gotta, I gotta get it. Every

Justin Jackson

…like, this is, you gotta look at where the money is. We could, you can be a smug Gen Z or a smug millennial or whatever and say, ah, those guys, they don't know what they're talking about. But listen, Charleston AI, yeah, just show the old people with money how to do it or do it for them. You

Brian Casel

definitely see that with, I mean, like, like, it's like these huge AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, it's like they, and as like the rest of our tech industry, we're so in this bubble where we think, oh, the latest, greatest model, we're going to brand it Astro, we're going to brand it Fable and everyone's going to care. But like 99% of the world is mostly against AI at this point. Like they don't care about the fancy launches. So that, like, it's just like this is interesting, complete disconnect. But I want to go back to what Jordan was talking about, how like really the difference between that like middle of funnel and top of funnel exposure awareness. Because I mean, I think about that a lot. Like the only people who have ever really interacted with my products…

Justin Jackson

market and

Brian Casel

see how we can blow this thing up. But I am always interested in like ideas to open up my mind, even with the constraints that I operate under as a super small, you know, mostly solo person here. It's like, I, and, and like, yeah, like, even, even like experiments or systems or bots or processes…

Justin Jackson

How do you think that would work? See, I've always been like skeptical of this, like, convincing unaware people. It just feels like so much energy. It feels like even the richest companies in the world often fail at it. So, you know, how many people use shortcuts on their iOS device? I've always…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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