Inside the Pod: Build a Six-figure Side Hustle in One Weekend

Thank you to everyone who is watching or listening to my podcast, AI & I. If you want to see a collection of all of the prompts and responses in one place, Every contributor Rhea Purohit is breaking them down for you to replicate. Let us know what else you’d like to see in these guides. If you’d like to revisit my conversation with Claire Vo, watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.—Dan Shipper

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Vo is a parent who has a full-time job as the chief product officer at the software company LaunchDarkly, and she’s now running a six-figure business on the side. She built hers over Thanksgiving weekend last year while her two sons watched Aladdin—with a little help from AI.

Vo is the founder of ChatPRD, an on-demand AI copilot for product managers. The app, which has been used by more than 20,000 product managers, helps them and their teams write better product documents faster. The name itself is a play on “PRDs,” or product requirement documents, that are overviews of what new products should do, how they should look, and what features they need to have.

In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper interviewed Vo about how ChatPRD works, and how AI made it possible for her to build a thriving business. This is a great time to revisit their discussion from June because ChatPRD recently turned one year old. I’ll pull out the key themes from their discussion (with screenshots from Vo’s computer), including:

• Writing an actual PRD live on the show
• Brainstorming a product roadmap for new app features
• A look inside the stack Vo uses to run ChatPRD

This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to build a six-figure side hustle, or who works in product development.

A live demo of ChatPRD

As Vo demos ChatPRD, she explains that users can customize their profile on the app by including details about themselves and their company. This feature was included with the objective of “stabilizing that information,” enabling the model to provide relevant responses without asking repetitive questions.

Vo wants people who are using ChatPRD to spend as little time on the mechanics of prompting as possible. Users can either work with the default template, which Vo developed and uses herself, or create their own custom template to ensure consistent interactions with the model.

Writing a product document live on the show

Vo uses ChatPRD to help her write a PRD for a team feature for the website. She explains that many ChatPRD users have requested this functionality to help them collaborate with colleagues on the platform. (While ChatPRD didn’t have a team feature when this episode was recorded, Vo has since built it.)

Vo: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that teams want to use ChatPRD together. They have a few priorities:

• Shared billing
• Shared templates and stored company context and knowledge 
• Sharing chats and documents with each other
• If you have other ideas please share them
• I think we can grow to 100 teams accounts by the end of the quarter

ChatPRD generates a first draft based on this information. Here are a few of the sections the model writes up:

Vo: Expand the user stories. Focus on a few personas:

• Billing lead
• Team lead or admin
• Individual team users

With the user experience (UX), be a lot more detailed. Outline features and subfeatures that might be useful to all of these personas.

Here’s part of what ChatPRD generated:

Vo: This looks great. I want to build this all in three weeks. Today is June 5. Update the timelines.

ChatPRD regenerates the document with a section on the milestones. Here are a couple of screenshots from the PRD:

Vo: I forgot to add: We use Stripe for billing and subscriptions. Can you add a section that accounts for technical and implementation considerations for billing? Also, I use clerk.dev for authentication and I think I can use it for organization management as well. Let’s add that.

ChatPRD adds the section and regenerates the document. Here are a few sections of the PRD:

Vo explains that ChatPRD has document-sharing functionality, so her next step would be to use that to share the link to the updated PRD in Slack with a contract engineer who's helping her build the product.

Brainstorming a product roadmap for ChatPRD

Vo often uses ChatPRD to brainstorm new features and help her build a product roadmap. As an example, Vo shares a past conversation where she used ChatPRD to develop a product roadmap for new features she wanted to build over the summer. In Vo’s first prompt, she shared feedback that she’d been receiving from users about ChatPRD with the AI.

Vo: I’ve gotten a lot of feedback around three themes:

1. More features for job seekers
2. More integrations with current collaboration and productivity tools like Google Docs, Notion, Linear, and Jira
3. Storing more context from user research and other docs to improve the experience

Here are some of the ideas that ChatPRD generated around each of the themes:

Vo: Instead let’s build out at least five ideas within each of the three pillars, with a business goal, a one-sentence description of the UX, and measures of success.

Here’s part of ChatPRD’s output:

Vo: This is great, save this version as a document. 

Going inside the stack Vo uses to run ChatPRD

Vo gives us a look at how she operates ChatPRD:

• ChatPRD, of course, is the source of all her product documents like PRDs and roadmaps.
• She uses the product development tool Linear to store her roadmap and track the progress of new features.
• She uses Slack to coordinate with the engineer helping her build ChatPRD. 

Vo’s business is a testament to the fact that you can, in fact, do it all—have a family, a full-time job, and a six-figure side hustle. AI has dramatically the cost and complexity involved in building a great product, and as someone curious about the intersection of technology and business, I’m excited for a future where entrepreneurship is accessible to anyone who wants to give it a shot.

Rhea Purohit is a contributing writer for Every focused on research-driven storytelling in tech. You can follow her on X at @RheaPurohit1 and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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