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.
And then, and then right after that, it's the backlash that's like, well, homie's making more money than this. Exactly. Homie's charging $160 an hour to build AI stuff for people. And he's probably banking because he's meeting people where 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
CEO printing off emails, getting their secretary to print off the emails, and then they highlight them. And then they think, 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
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, current like builder methods, and going back many years, it's always been the middle of the funnel and down and never getting like the exposure to the higher funnel. And frankly, if I look at most B2B, like especially like bootstrapped independent SAS, like the part of it is like we can build a successful business enough just focusing on like the direct to our direct like ICP customer, whether it's SEO, you know, high intent SEO or ads high intent or cold outreach or, you know, or even like content that is targeting solution or pain aware, solution aware people. That's been my entire business. I think most of our businesses, I think it's really interesting. Like obviously, Jordan, you know, you're playing that larger game, which is like, okay, we've got that dialed. Now let's go out to the broader
market and
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 where it's like, how, how can I start to like get exposure or create assets that would drive audiences outside of what I'm actually doing at my desk every day?
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 thought like maybe 1% or 2%, but this is Apple has all of the marketing power in the world.