Transcript: She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As A Side Hustle

The transcript of AI & I with Claire Vo is below for paying subscribers.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:01:02
2. How the groundwork for ChatPRD was laid: 00:02:15
3. Why building solo—with AI—is faster and cheaper: 00:12:38
4. Claire demos ChatPRD live: 00:14:48 
5. Testing the document editor feature in ChatPRD: 00:22:44
6. How ChatPRD is baked into Claire’s workflow: 00:26:13
7. Claire’s ability to build a side project—pre-AI v. post-AI: 00:33:13
8. The future of product management: 00:36:22
9. How Claire drafted a product strategy during her 22-minute commute: 00:43:50
10. Using AI as a tech-forward parent: 00:45:55

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:01:02)

Claire, welcome to the show.

Claire Vo (00:01:05)

Hi. I'm so excited to be here.

Dan Shipper (00:01:06)

I'm really excited to have you. So, for people who don't know, you are the chief product officer of LaunchDarkly, a feature management and experimentation platform. And you are also the founder of ChatPRD, which is an on-demand chief product officer that writes and improves your PRDs. And we met at a sort of angel investing retreat and I was doing bits about AI, and we just got into this really great conversation. I feel like you're in this really interesting intersection of leading a business as a chief product officer and then you're also building this ChatPRD side hustle that is built with AI and uses AI. And so, I think you just have so many ideas going on in your brain about what the future of this looks like and so I'm just super excited to have you on.

Claire Vo (00:01:56)

Well, I'm excited to be here. It's something that I think about a lot. And as I was preparing for this conversation, I took a moment and reflected that I use a lot. So, I'm excited to just share a little bit about what I think and what I'm building.

Dan Shipper (00:02:05)

That's awesome. So, why don't you give us a little bit of a background on ChatPRD because that's the thing I'm most interested in? It seems so cool.

Claire Vo (00:02:15)

Yeah. So, like all good workers—well, maybe not like all good workers—I'm trying to work myself out of work. That's the ideal way to do things. And so when ChatGPT and some of these tools came out, I was all over it. It did not scare me. It felt like magic. 

And I spent a lot of time as an executive leader. I lead product and engineering organizations—many hundreds of people, pretty large responsibility. But I still have, yeah— Believe it or not, more than meetings and hiring great people to do, I actually have to output work. And so, with a calendar like mine and the demands of a job like mine, anything that can be a help is very welcome. 

So I started using ChatGPT to help me basically write product strategies and product specs. We were a fairly, I’d call it scrappy team at my previous company and occasionally I would PM our more technical products. And so something would come up, it would be pretty complex, it would span product and engineering, and I would raise my hand and say, hey, I'll write the spec for that. I think I have a sense of what we need to do.

And there's this very specific example of us building a pretty complex and custom data audit tool. And I raised my hand in the meeting, I remember, at 10 a.m. And then by 2:00, I had this full five-page spec and my team was like, what just happened? How did you do that? Because you've been in meetings all day. What was that? And it was because I had, over the course of months, sort of prompted ChatGPT into a place where I could really work with it in a pretty rapid fashion to get high-quality outputs. That wasn't just going to happen with just using kind of plain ChatGPT, like GPT-4 at the time, I think. 

So when the GPT Store came out, I thought, okay, I'm just gonna drop my— My joke is it is just a prompt, but she's my prompt. And so I dropped my prompt into the GPT Store, got the great name, ChatPRD, which I think is just— It’s good stuff. People love it and shared it with my team and I was like, you all can use this if you wanna know how I do it. And they all loved it. And so I was just kind of joking around and to my husband, I said, we should just buy the domain on it. Of course it's gotta be dot AI, so I spent my $60 or whatever, there's a premium on these dot AI domains and bought ChatPRD.ai, and just put up a newsletter signup form and a link to the GPT. And so many people started using it. And still, with the GPT Store, I think it's early, early days. So even though it's getting a lot of use, there was no monetizing things. And I'm sorry, I'm the kind of product person that needs to make money off the things that they build.

So, over Thanksgiving last year, between hosting the kids and doing stuff when they were napping, I dusted off VS Code and I was like, yeah, I think we can build this. And so I built it over the course of Thanksgiving week with my kids home while they napped. We can talk about all the ways I used AI to make that really, really easy and launched it, I think, on November 28th. So she's six months old. And just put, I don't know, $2 a month. I was like, I don't know. Who knows what somebody is going to pay here. And people started buying. And then I started to add more features and raising the price and people started buying. And now I have, I think, 10,000 users on the app that I host, over 50,000 chats have been done on the GPT—somewhere between 50,000-100,000 because I think that's where they bump you to the next tier. And I started to build out a lot more than just chat features on the product. So it's been really fun to build, and I think I have 285 ChatPRD chats in the last six months. So I use it a lot.

Dan Shipper (00:06:16)

That's wild. There's so many things I want to dig into there, but I want to just summarize the process that led you here because I think it's a sort of generalizable thing. I actually have something similar in my own life that I've done with this where it seems like you used it yourself and you built up a very complicated prompt that reflected your worldview and skills and your process for making PRDs. Actually, before I keep going, can you define a PRD for people who don't know?

Claire Vo (00:06:48)

Yeah, I now say ChatPRD is an on-demand chief product officer that helps you with your product work. Because we've really expanded past PRDs, but a PRD is a product requirements document. It's generally a doc or a spec that defines the problem space that you're going after when you're building a new product, kind of what users want—if you have one user or multiple users of the product—what are their incentives, what do they want, what are their goals, what are their non-goals, and then kind of details out some of the features and capabilities you would need to make this meet the needs of their goals. And then a lot of teams and companies use it also to outline things like tracking plans, security risks, technical considerations, marketing campaigns. So it's sort of the source of truth for when you're building something new as a product, whether it's a very small feature or a brand new company, sort of the written record of what that's going to be.

Dan Shipper (00:07:42)

Okay. That's great. So basically in the process of doing these yourself, you realize ChatGPT is really useful. You create these prompts that help you build good PRDs. And then you realize, oh, this is sort of complicated for me to prompt manually all the time. And then you start just making a GPT and then you share it with your team. Your team loves it. And then you're sort of off to the races like, okay, I'll have it on the store. Maybe I'll build my own version of it, but I think that's the sort of repeatable process that I think what a lot of people are finding is, off on your own explorations, make something awesome, make some awesome prompts, and then you can sort of productize that.

Claire Vo (00:08:20)

Yeah. And I think the key that we're not talking about is how do you distribute it? Because unless you are maybe featured in the GPT Store, which can get you a distribution, you really own your own distribution for even the GPT Store or an app. And so I was lucky enough to have a good number of people who follow me for product content. So it was right in the wheelhouse of who might find it useful to use the product. And then it creates that virtuous cycle of word-of-mouth distribution, but I do think distribution still is a challenge for anybody kind of going down this path.

Dan Shipper (00:08:54)

Yeah, that makes total sense. And so just to back up to sort of the beginning of the story, tell us about what you were using it for initially. What were the sort of initial prompts that you were working on? What were the tasks or the mini-tasks within making these documents that were actually helpful for you?

Claire Vo (00:09:14)

Yeah, so basically we have a PRD template. So we have, every time you're going to build something, here's what we just generally expect you to outline and write. And then as people write those, then we have, at my old company, we call it PRDR, product requirements document review meeting, where we actually debate both asynchronously in comments and then live, sort of the thinking in this document, and then it becomes a source of truth for what to build. So we had this template and PMs, including myself, would once a week sit down and be like, I got to pick up that next project and sit down and start with an almost blank slate template, and go, okay, I got to write this whole thing out. And they end up being somewhere between a mini-PRD would be, just like a one-page up to seven or 10 pages, just depending on the complexity of the product. And a lot of times you're doing things, like it needs to have rules-based access and these very nonspecific but functional requirements need to be outlined and, if you forget them, then engineering goes off the rails and you get a product where you forget to build a whole bunch of table-stakes features. And so what I would do is I would paste it and I was like, this is our template. This is the type of company I'm working at. And then just word vomit, here's the product that I think we need to build and why. And it would scaffold out, then, all those sections combining the context of the template, what I said about the business, kind of high level what I've said about the product I want to build. And the thing that really was the aha moment for me was not that it could do that, obviously could do that, it was that it thought of functional requirements I had, I would have truly forgotten it and I think I'm pretty good. I've been doing product for 20 years. I am pretty good.

And when I was building this audit feature, I was focused so much on the data we needed to ingest and how people needed to audit. And then when I was generating this PRD via AI, it said you need filters. And I was like, of course I need filters. Obviously I need filters. And somebody probably in a meeting would have said, Claire, you need filters. But it just put it in the doc. And it was just one of these moments where I was like, oh, it's a little buddy that I can have that can just round out the edges of my thinking, make me a lot more efficient and remind me of things even that I need to include where my fallible human brain fails me.

Dan Shipper (00:11:36)

I love that. I think that's really common too. Some of the stuff that you learn from, it's not stuff that you wouldn't already know. It's just you might not have thought of it. It finds the simple things that you're missing and that is sometimes so valuable, especially if you're working alone. You have a team and stuff like that, but building ChatPRD where I think it's you and maybe one other person part-time. It's sometimes hard without a buddy to remember that stuff and ChatGPT is that. I'm really curious, to get into how you're using it, do you want to show us some of your historical ChatPRD chats?

Claire Vo (00:12:17)

Yeah! I can share my screen. Okay. So, this is ChatPRD. And some of the things that I think are really unique compared to the GPT Store is how, one, not only I've customized it, but you can actually customize it to yourself. So you can tell—

Dan Shipper (00:12:37)

Wait. Can I pause you right here for one second? This is really beautiful and well-built. How is this built?

Claire Vo (00:12:43)

Oh! I did it. I mean, this isn't magic. If anybody's building stuff right now, I'm going to be like, it's an XJS app, mostly Tailwind. I have good taste. I don't know. I think one of my other learnings here is that it is so cheap and easy to build high quality web apps right now. And as he's built web apps many times in their lives and run very large engineering teams that build web apps it's actually not that hard to build something pretty phenomenal. It's a database on a website. So thank you. I appreciate that. I try to put love in it. And we can talk about how actually I think building solo does increase quality and velocity in many ways because you're short-circuiting the loop between product engineering and design in a way where, I think in a traditional team where you have multiple people playing that role, you lose fidelity in that vision. And so one of my interesting ideas is with something like ChatPRD, like plus Copilot or like a Devin, do you actually collapse and focus on the ability of one person to build something? And does the quality actually go up because you're not deciding by committee, you're deciding kind of one person.

Dan Shipper (00:14:00)

Having everything integrated— It's the same thing with the multimodal models. It's like a lot of the stuff gets better when you integrate the image recognition and the video into the intelligence portion. And it's like, yeah, integrating development, design, and product thinking into one person is going to— you’ll have a faster cycle. So you're going to be higher quality. I think that's really cool. And did you use ChatGPT to code this or did you code it by hand?

Claire Vo (00:14:25)

Of course I used ChatGPT! I mean, look, I can write some code, but it's much easier to say— I mean, I take a PRD from ChatPRD and like, hey, this is the component I need to build. Can you just scaffold it out for me? And then I can play with the edges on design or functionality and that kind of stuff.

Dan Shipper (00:14:45)

That's great. Okay, so, let's go back to before I interrupted you. So, you're in settings. 

Claire Vo (00:14:48)

Yeah. So you can customize your profile. So one, you can tell it a lot about yourself—who you are and what you do. It remembers that. So it has memory. So unlike— Well, I know ChatGPT has memory now, but a lot of times previously when I was building this, I'd be like, tell me about your role in product, tell me a little bit more about your company. And so we're just stabilizing that information. And then, as I said, most companies have a template. I have a pretty good one that, I think, I use as a default, obviously, because it's mine. But you can also add your own template of PRDs that say you have a TLDR, which I always do, a short summary of the product doc. And then you have functional requirements that are super important and “put functional requirements in X, Y, Z format,” whatever it is you can actually use a custom template here. This is something that's just really useful for. People as they're using this in the business context to get consistency and, again, not have to manage that prompting. But what I use it a lot for are two things. I use it to— Well, maybe I use it for three things. I personally use it for writing PRDs for ideas I already have or brainstorming features on the roadmap. And then as a product leader, I use this, help me improve an existing PRD to coach my team on how they can improve their PRDs. So those are sort of three things, but let's just talk about, help me write a PRD. So one of the things that I've been working on is a teams feature for ChatPRD. So right now, ChatPRD is sort of like in single-player mode where individual PMs can use it, but we've gotten a lot of feedback that people want a teams version of ChatPRD. So I'm going to say, help me write a PRD. I'm going to be really lazy and say, “teams plan features for ChatPRD.” Oh, okay. So then I just click go and—

Dan Shipper (00:16:47)

Do you normally do that level of detail? Or are you normally writing more stuff when you're actually doing it?

Claire Vo (00:16:52)

No, I'm pretty lazy. Because again, I’ve prompted ChatPRD to ask for stuff if it doesn't have enough information to do a good job. So you can see, okay, well, that's great. But what do you want? And so I say, “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 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.” It's very, very high level, so it's going to be great. Here it is. And so gives me a problem statement, business goals, user personas, team lead, user experience, like how you might onboard team members, how shared billing and all this stuff works. A narrative, which is a little thing that I've injected here, which I feel like PMs are very bad at pitching their story. So, I've added that in success metrics, technical considerations, milestones, and sequencing, etc. Okay. This is an okay start, but I actually feel like the user stories are really lame. So I'm going to say, expand out the user stories, focus on a few personas: billing lead, team lead, admin, individual, team, users.

Dan Shipper (00:18:45)

Before you hit enter, I'm just sort of curious, what do you do as a product leader— When you're reading these, what stands out to you as the user stories are sort of lame?

Claire Vo (00:19:00)

It's just very, very high level. So they're just, “yeah, obviously, but then comma how?” And so I just think, yes, I want to share chats and documents with my team so we can collaborate efficiently, but let's get much more specific. Actually, let's get a little more detailed. Let me see. “... a lot more detailed outline features and sub features that might be useful to all these personas.” That's great—

Dan Shipper (00:19:30)

I think I'm asking, because for me, sometimes it's hard, seeing something from ChatGPT or honestly from people that work for me. I can kind of tell that it's kind of high level, but it's hard for me to— My eyes can just sort of glaze over it. I can skip it and be like, yeah, that kind of makes sense. I want to know what's in your brain to be like, okay, no, no, we gotta push in there.

Claire Vo (00:19:55)

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's specificity and I think this really shows itself up in the user experience. Now we've gotten something a lot more detailed onboarding team members where, okay, we're going to invite them via email. There’s a welcome guide. There's a secure link. There are roles and permissions here. Actually the roles and permissions that you need to build. So this, to me, feels much more specific. I'm like, oh, okay, I can hand this to an engineer now. And instead of saying we need roles and permissions, it says we need these three roles and permissions. 

Dan Shipper (00:20:26)

Yeah. You can see it.

Claire Vo (00:20:30)

Yeah. You can. And so here's where I think ChatPRD, the app. gets really interesting. I think, “This looks great. I want to build this all in three weeks. Today is June 5th. Update the timeline.” So then the only other thing is the milestones. And so then it's going to regenerate this document, including all the updated user stories, which we have. So now we have these more detailed user stories, which I'm very happy about. And then it should generate more milestones in a more detailed way, and I tend to be very aggressive, so I give it like, I want to do this in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. Most teams tend to know how quickly they want to do things, but have a hard time breaking down those milestones. And so I find I use milestoning and sequencing pretty frequently here as a structure or scaffold for how we might do a milestone. So here, look, it's like initial development, billing features, 10-14th, 13-17th beta testing and launch. So it's got this nice, okay, can I hold myself accountable to that? Can I build that into Jira? And then this is where we go beyond sort of what you could do in a GPT Store, which is we have this idea of “save as a document.” Look at this nice little solo where— It's slow. Sometimes docs are incomplete. I've apparently pushed, I've talked to OpenAI about this, like their actual team, and I've pushed the edges of some of their function calling. So we're just going to see. We're going to wait for this to load. And while it loads, I'm wondering if you have any questions?

Dan Shipper (00:22:11)

I always have questions.

Claire Vo (00:22:12)

This guy takes forever.

Dan Shipper (00:22:14)

That's very cool. One of the things I was going to ask you is the decision to have this be a chat feature instead of a document that you are progressively filling out, a document editor type interface. What did you think about that choice?

Claire Vo (00:22:31)

Well, it's actually both. So if we can get this loader to— If we can get the robots to spit back out— I actually think multimodal is the way. Okay! That wasn't too bad. Look at that. So documents have been saved. So if I click Document Save, now I have it in a document format, I can actually toggle back and forth between Chat Mode and Doc Mode. This is the magic. And then—

Dan Shipper (00:22:59)

Did it edit the document that it creates? So like if you go back into the Chat Mode and you're like, I want to add something more to the user stories. Will it go and re-edit the document or does it regenerate the whole thing?

Claire Vo (00:23:08)

It has to regenerate it right now because of the way things work, but we're getting there and here's the proof that we're getting there: We have some of these built-in-AI kind of features here. So if I'm like, oh no, we're hardcore, we need this very business—

Dan Shipper (00:23:29)

You did this all yourself? This is complicated. This is complicated. Document editors are hard to make.

Claire Vo (00:23:34)

I did it all myself. I did it all myself. No, here's what— It's so fascinating. No, they're not. This is a solved problem.I'll give a startup a shout out. I'm using Tiptap editor. A lot of AI companies use it. I did this—truly—on a Sunday. I built live. It's a real time collaboration. If you want it's ready to go Notion-style editing. In a day by myself while my kids were watching Aladdin.

Dan Shipper (00:24:05)

I love it.

Claire Vo (00:24:06)

I just tell people there is no excuse to not be able to build something. So yeah, we have this document.

Dan Shipper (00:24:15)

You're such a badass. It's undeniable.

Claire Vo (00:24:18)

No, I just have interesting hobbies, but yeah, we have this Document Mode now where then— What I do, okay, so that took me five minutes to get all of this, which we love. And then I come in here and I'm going to be like, I'm going to go down actually to oh, we don't have it in here. Let's add it in. So I don't have technical considerations. So I would go back and be like, oh, I don't have technical considerations. And so it said, hey, making changes to the doc, you can ask for more feedback. So the chat definitely has context of any changes I made to doc and say, “I forgot to add, we use Stripe billing and subscriptions. Can you add a section that accounts for the technical and implementation considerations for billing? Also, I use Clerk.dev.” All the startups are getting shout outs.

Dan Shipper (00:25:13)

Clerk is so good. We use Clerk for some internal incubation stuff and you get so much stuff for free in the user management stuff that would normally take you, even with AI, it'll take you a day or two to integrate sign-in or whatever. And Clerk is just, yeah, that's a really good shout out.

Claire Vo (00:25:29)

Yeah. So now I can tell it, okay, now we're getting into how we might actually build this. And so it's going to take into account, okay, what it knows about the straight billing capabilities, what it knows about Clerk and actually give me some technical considerations that I think are really helpful when handling it off to an engineer. Spoiler alert: I'm the engineer. That's how I might structure the data or that's how I might do it. So here you go. Integration with Stripe. Manage subscription plans for teams. Implement one-look listener. All this stuff. Yeah. This is what I need to do.

Dan Shipper (00:26:05)

Here’s a question for you that I'm actually thinking through in real time. Because we at Every, we build little products. We have a couple incubations going right now. Are you using this yourself for ChatPRD, at what scale do you think this level of planning is helpful? And if you're using it to help yourself track stuff, what does it do for you that you think it adds?

Claire Vo (00:26:35)

So what I think is helpful at a very small scale, single me to a very large scale, multi-big team. Because I've seen it work on both sides. At the very small scale, this is what's helpful is: There are a lot of benefits to working solo—a lot—but like, if I were to approach this, I would start in one corner and it'd be like, okay, let's integrate organizations. And then it'd be like, what next? And then I'd have to sit there and think about the architecture and the sequencing and how I might do it. I would forget. I'd be like, I never want to build a billing page. That's terrible. I don't want to do that right now. And if I don't want to do it right now, I'll never do it. So what this gives me is then I'll just go pop this and we're going to build an integration with Jira, Linear, etc. Yeah. I'm gonna pop this, it's just gonna go create a project plan for me, and at least I have my to do list. Things to do, anchored on a document. So, as you can say, see here, it updated it, resaved the document and went back to it. And it should have technical considerations. Drop it. It's fun when you do a live demo actually and it actually works. So now I have all this, and then what I would do is I would actually share it. And I would copy the share link. And then what I typically do is send it in Slack to Alisa who works on our team. And I'm like, what do you think about this? And she opens it up and gives me some opinions when we launch the teams feature, we'll add commenting, we'll add like actual inter-team sharing and stuff like that. And so, yeah, that's what I use it for.

Dan Shipper (00:28:07)

I love it. I'm thinking that we should be using this internally because we don't use Notion, which, I also like Notion, but like but I think we could put these docs honestly just in Notion and we don't really have a set product management flow because it's mostly just been me building stuff myself until recently. And now we have a couple of engineers and a couple other people involved. And so it's getting to that scale. And one of my failures as a product person is I get too excited about whatever's new. And then I forget the plan. And I think having a plan would be really helpful for us.

Claire Vo (00:28:48)

So, I built this by product people for product people. That's how I built it. And actually the number one use case is engineers and founders that don't have a product person. And so, I have a bunch of engineers that are like, I work with this cuckoo founder who has lots of ideas.

Dan Shipper (00:29:05)

Not me.

Claire Vo (00:29:06)

And says build it. And so they take the idea and they dump it in here and they're like, okay, well, now I have a plan. Now I can build this. And I've used this for everything from—let me see if I can find a good one. Oh, brainstorming features for the roadmap. So this was actually how we built our summer roadmap. As I said, here are my three big themes: A lot of job seekers are using it, a lot of integration with productivity tools—so we're talking about Google Docs, Notion, Linear—and storing more context for user research. So these are things that people are wanting for us. And then it built out a bunch of ideas and I said, no, let's build at least five ideas with three pillars, business goals, etc. It built it out. And then I saved that as a document. And so now I have a roadmap basically of stuff to build.

Dan Shipper (00:30:00)

That’s really cool. That's amazing. I don't know whether you've prepped to show this, so if for whatever reason you don't have it's totally fine, but where is your dashboard hub for ChatPRD internally? What are you using and can you show it to us? How are you organizing all the information?

Claire Vo (00:30:16)

Yeah, so what we use is Metabase, so I'm just a write-your-own-SQL kind of girl. I guess that's how I use ChatGPT is I write horrendous SQL and I say, make this sensical or stop getting me in here. So I'll just talk about my stack. How about that? I'll talk about my stack. So—

Dan Shipper (00:30:41)

Oh, I meant just internally, all of your docs, where are you saving these docs and planning things and keeping things?

Claire Vo (00:30:47) 

Oh yeah! So we use ChatPRD. It's basically the source of all our product documents. We use Linear for roadmap and feature-tracking and then we use Slack.

Dan Shipper (00:31:03)

Okay. That's really cool. Yeah. Can I see the Linear or is that top secret?

Claire Vo (00:31:09) 

Yeah, it's not thrilling. You're welcome to see it. Sure, can you see my Linear? What is it? Linear? No, Linear app. I'm like, app dot Linear? Linear app. Okay. Yeah. You can see our Linear. Please. This is like fun stuff. Okay. So teams accounts, account settings, core chat stuff, six doc mode. This is, can I work around OpenAI? We have bugs in general, improving onboarding and activation integrations, and marketing sites. This is their onboarding stuff. And then we have our summer roadmap, which I just shared in our Slack channel. So it's no surprise. I'm working right now on doc mode being really great. We're doing some marketing site stuff. I'm doing some backend billing stuff. Here's one of the things about being a solo founder on a thing you didn't think was going to be a real project. She'd get real lazy about tracking billing. And then I turned around and I was like, we have thousands of users making sure subscription data and stuff is tracked in our database. We did— Oh, actually I did a really interesting onboarding. If I can show it to you and then we're doing a bunch of integrations in our backlog. So this is our summer roadmap. I'll probably do a couple more things, but we track it here. And then Alisa and I— Truly, I've done a release every weekend since I launched ChatPRD. Every single weekend. It's my commitment to myself and to my community and to my users. Every weekend I release something. And part of that is one, I just think product velocity really matters. And two, I'm trying to prove you can do this. I have a very serious— I'm like, look at this suit. I have a serious job. I still think you can build something pretty incredible. And the cost of building is really pretty low. And so it's part of it is this exploration and what it means to run an AI-native business. And part of that is, I think. building is cheap and you should prove you could do it.

Dan Shipper (00:33:09)

Yeah. How different is it—? Do you think, in your view could you have done this pre-AI? And what's the difference between you with AI versus you without AI in terms of your ability to build stuff on the side?

Claire Vo (00:33:24) 

So I could have done it pre-AI. Yes. I did a startup pre-AI. I was the only engineer on the team for nine months of the company. Yeah, I could build a web app pre-AI. Here's what it is. I am a serviceable, but not excellent software engineer. But I'm a quick study—a very quick study. It's one of the things I'm good at. And the way I got to where I'm at from a technical perspective is I sat across from somebody and I was like, how do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this better? How do I do this better? How did you do that? And now I just have that on-demand. These people, if they listen to this, will know—Yeland and Jeremy and Dave, all at different parts of their career, sat across from me, and now I'm a monster. And so now I have a combination of them digitally sitting across from me at any moment. And so if I want to learn something new I can learn it very quickly and then I can put it into implementation without having to bring that other person to a loop.

Dan Shipper (00:34:34)

Yeah, no. That makes total sense. And yeah, I think I'm more asking on the side— You have a demanding job, you have a family, when you're talking about building things on the side, would you have had the time to do this and, if so, how much faster does this let you go?

Claire Vo (00:34:58) 

No way. It's thousands of times faster. I mean, I said this yesterday at an event. I did a startup before it was a SaaS app. It's a website on top of a database. It's a good website on top of a good database, but it was a website on top of a database. And it took us probably five to nine months to kind of build the serviceable version of that. And I think if you gave me a coffee the size of my face and said on Saturday go, I think I would have it done by Sunday afternoon. Just because you can stand up auth, you can stand up a database, you can stand up billing, you can do all these things, and then if I hit a wall, I go ask my on-demand engineering buddy to write code for me and it gets written. So I just think that is the multiples of efficiency you get. And if we believe you can get multiples of efficiency on engineering output, then I absolutely believe you can get multiples of efficiency on product output. And this is where some of our great testimonials are, where people are saying, you're saving me 10 hours of work in 15 minutes. That's great. Then use those 10 hours of work to do something really awesome for the company. So I think it is a tremendous amount of leverage.

Dan Shipper (00:36:19)

That is really crazy. What does that say to you about the future of product as a job and where does that go? What happens?

Claire Vo (00:36:32) 

So I think there's a couple of things that are going to happen. Maybe one is that I think the ratio of PMs to sort of builder roles is going to shift pretty dramatically. One of the ChatPRD users said to me, I can now basically run quote unquote lead a team of 20 engineers where typically the ratios you're seeing in a lot of companies are like 1-to-7, 1-to-10 maybe. So now you're going like 1-to-20. That's very different. And in fact, they said, I can do 1-to-20. I was going to hire an APM to help me—a more junior PM—and use ChatPRD, even hire a designer instead, because I think that's going to accelerate our building. So I think that's one thing. 

And then people are gonna say, Claire, but then you're ruining jobs for junior folks. That is actually not true because then what we're seeing on the other side is junior PMs are able to ramp up and be much higher impact, especially in a remote context, because again, you have this on-demand coach that can help you up-level what you're doing, which is very hard. If you ever look at my calendar, sure, I would love to coach every PM on the team. And I just do not have the capacity to do so. And so I do think you're going to see more junior folks have higher impact more quickly. I'm really excited about that. 

And then the third thing—it's so funny. There's a bunch of leaders at my level—CPO, VPs of product, etc.—that are like, how is AI going to change things for them? But it's never changed things for me. And I'm on the very strong opinion that one of the things is very likely to be disrupted is strategic thinking as a differentiated value for a human. I think that these LLMs are really good at synthesis, applying pre existing frameworks. Business schools exist, they've published their information—pre existing frameworks to business problems to drive specific outcomes. And so I use ChatGPT and ChatPRD a lot for strategic work. And I think that's partially because that's the part of my job that's most likely to be disrupted. So I better get really good at it using these tools as opposed to sort of being on my back foot.

Dan Shipper (00:38:50)

I love that. I mean, I love the sort of attitude like, don’t panic. Just use it. If it's going to be good at it just use it. I can give up the strategic thinking and direct this thing to do it. What do you feel is most likely to be left for you? What do you see the PMs of the future being good at?

Claire Vo (00:39:11) 

Yeah, I do think inspiration and alignment and motivation of humans towards a goal is still just it's very hard for something like AI to do. Getting teams excited about a mission, getting them close to the human impact of their work, which is how it impacts customers, that's one piece that I think—sort of influential and inspirational leadership—you're still just going to have to have. At the PM level, I do think that the ability to build things is going to become much more important. And my friend Waylon has this idea of the proto-manager, which is instead of being a product manager, you're a prototype manager and you're going to be expected to build prototypes instead of building documents. And I think that's a really interesting thing to play with. 

So I think building is still going to happen on teams for a little bit until these kinds of tools get a lot more consistent in their output. I think inspiration and leadership and honestly just convincing hordes of humans to do big things and be excited about it. Hopefully, I can still be good at that. And then I do think these things are trained on past data. And so I think there's going to be some product leaders, and I think they might actually come from the design side or maybe the engineering side, to be able to see very far into the future, and sort of set a place to go. 

Now, somebody else can map how you get to that place, but really having that point of view of, what's the place you want to go? I do think there's some opportunity there for people to contribute.

Dan Shipper (00:40:47)

Definitely. I definitely agree. I think you're totally right. These things are quite good at sort of the well-trodden paths of of the current and past reality, and sometimes you can take the currently well-trodden paths and project them out into the future, and they're probably gonna be decent at that, but when things are totally new and the world is changing, some things are totally unpredictable by LLMs, but I think humans are still pretty good at sometimes figuring that out or making it happen. It's not just like figuring it out. It's just having the force of will or the vision to be like, this can work and I want to do it.

Claire Vo (00:41:31) 

Yeah. And I think one of the other reasons I'm doing ChatPRD, other than it's like a utility to me, it's very useful, is I do think product leaders and product managers and engineers, if you're not thinking about how to build actual end-user products in this new model with these new technologies, you're going to just be very far behind in terms of what that future is going to look and feel like to users. So I'll just give an example of this, which is, I had this onboarding for ChatPRD and it was fine. It was three steps. It was like, fill out your profile, do something else, and billing. And it was fine, but I looked at it and I was like, this just doesn't feel like an onboarding to an AI product. It feels like an onboarding to any other SaaS product. It just feels the same. And so one of the things I started to play with, which is this new onboarding that we're doing, is a chatbot. So shouldn't the chatbot onboard you and tell you what's going on here? And so it's okay, ChatPRD is telling me what's going to happen. Okay, then I get this form. Okay, we haven't done the form yet, but we'll get there. And then it's like, great, nice to meet you. Here's all the places you can find us. Here's all the things if you need to get help. And then it goes into, into our plan. So I just think that's been something that I've worked on and just try to play with, how are these products going to look and feel and should you do these chat-style on where, it's like fake, it's like just like little transitions in, but it anchors you into what's the modality of this product going to be and how, how are you going to go into it and experience it moving forward. And there's been opportunities to play with ideas like that I think are really useful for me as a product person regardless of what happens with ChatPRD.

Dan Shipper (00:43:32)

Yeah, that makes total sense. So I know you have some personal stuff that you wanted to share about how you use AI, but before we get to that, is there anything else on the work side that you wanted to demo?

Claire Vo (00:43:45) 

No, I mean, I think I'll give one more story and you can decide to use it or not, but just going back to the strategy side, this is really practical and very efficient for me. Our office is in Oakland, so I have to cross the Bay Bridge to get to the office. When people ask, how do you do it all? This is how I do it. So I have a 20-to-23-minute commute. I've been at my company now for about five-and-a-half months. So it's time for me to deliver the, here's the capital-P, capital-S strategy. I've thought about it. Here you go. And I have all the context and information in my head for what we should do. I think I have a clear vision and I'm gonna have to write this thing down. And so what I did is I opened up voice ChatGPT. Haven’t done chat voice for PRD yet, but it's on the roadmap. And I just like to say, this is what I think the strategy should be. And it was meandering. It was not well organized. And I said, oh, I'm thinking about this competitor and that competitor and this thing and that thing and blah, blah, blah. And at the end of my 22-minute commute, I had a very good articulation of what I think our strategy was that I did with my hands on the wheel, crossing the Bay Bridge, looking at the beautiful skyline. And so I'm just really leaning in because it helps me do my work at every level just so much better.

Dan Shipper (00:45:12)

I have the same experience. I love it for that. I was recently negotiating a deal and we were pretty close to the end of it. And I had this vague feeling that something about the deal needed to change, but I couldn't figure out why and I couldn't express it. And I just took a walk and just talked into ChatGPT for 30 minutes. But yeah, it's all these disconnected things where it's like, I can't put my finger on what it is, but there's something here that I can't say. And then at the end of it, I was just like, can you summarize it? And it just laid out in three bullet points the exact things that I was trying to say. And I was like, yeah, of course, that's what it is, you know? And it's so helpful, you know?

Claire Vo (00:45:50)

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Dan Shipper (00:45:51)

So I want to see some of the things— You're using this for in your personal life. You're using it to do things with family. Tell me about what you're using it for.

Claire Vo (00:46:05) 

So when you have a calendar like mine and jobs like mine and a life like mine, you are just drowning in information and you're drowning in requests. And so, one of the things I actually did really early on is automate my email in two specific categories using OpenAI APIs, where I felt like I was falling really far behind, but I had a very high volume of demands. And so those two categories were one, being recruited for jobs, and two, stuff from my kid's school. And so, every day, I don't know, this isn't a flex, but every day you get this message of, hey, we have the highest-growth CPO job on the face of the earth, we're making X million dollars, blah blah blah. And all of them were a no, and, in seven years, if I want a job, I should reply to these recruiters and be very polite and tell them exactly what I'm looking for. So that whenever I'm looking for a job in some long-term future, they know what I want. And so, I built an automation that looks for emails that are from recruiters. I'm not taking a job, but it checks the email against types of jobs I would take and then drafts an email back saying, I'm not interested, but these are the kinds of jobs I would take and a Slack message recommends me next steps, whether it's follow up, ignore this person, or whatever. So that's been really useful. And I found that very constructive and it helped me just get on top of stuff, especially when I was job seeking.

Dan Shipper (00:47:43)

How did you make that? What's the thing that's reading your emails?

Claire Vo (00:46:05) 

It's a zap. So, it's a Zapier thing. So, what I do is there's a dozen recruiting firms. So, I look for everything with their email addresses, plus anything that says recruiter or talent in it. I tag it automatically with a filter in Gmail and then the Zap reads all new emails on that tag and then sends the email to a completion end point in OpenAI and says, answer this question about it, what should I do, and what should the email be? And then sends that answer back to me and then sends it to Slack and drops in an email.

Dan Shipper (00:48:26)

That's the best. And can you send the email from Slack and you'd be like, yes, send it. Or do you have to go into Gmail?

Claire Vo (00:48:30)

No, it goes into a draft and then it just tells me you should go send this.

Dan Shipper (00:48:36)

Yeah. That's amazing. I love it. And is that how you got your current job?

Claire Vo (00:48:38)

Oh no. I'm just going to shout out everybody. No, that's not how I got my current job. The way I got my current job is C.J. at Artisanal Talent, who always has the best jobs, texted me because he knows—and that's the kind of stuff that AI is not going to do yet is text me—and said, “I know what job you're going to take.” Very accurate. But no, he did not do that. 

So that's an example, but the second place that I'm truly drowning and any parent can empathize with this is I get 7,000 emails a day from school. Everything from fourth grade to this art project to your kid's bleeding in the street and you need to come pick him up. They all have these apps, these apps have these messaging things, they send email notifications, they send push notifications, they're very long. These messages are very long and it's just so much content. And I was losing, what do I need to pay attention to and what do I not? So I'll try to show my screen without doxing my kids. I think I found a specific— Yeah, I found a good one. Okay, so what this does is it reads the email from schools at 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. every day, because that's when I need to pay attention, before I pick up the kids, it says, summarize these in the most succinct way possible. Only bubble up stuff that's relevant to Henry and Theo, my kids. And then tell me if I need to do anything. And so this is one day of emails, mind you. This is how much stuff—just one. My kid fell and had glass in his hand and it was a whole, whole thing. And I had to email them and say, be gentle. Another thing is like, I didn't do his costume. So I had to tell his teacher, he was in the ER all night, I didn't do the costume. The other thing was the teacher saying, no big deal. He's reading the book. Then there was like an all school sleepover that was postponed. And then, this is the one that I would have missed truly as a working mom, which is Picture Day is tomorrow, make sure your kids aren’t ragamuffins, and so every day I look at this and I'm like, great, I know exactly what to do. This is probably 3,000 words worth of email, and I'm just getting like a very succinct summary of it. And so this has been just truly a lifesaver for me. And I mean, everybody operates in Slack. I operate in Slack. You cannot email me things. You cannot push it into an app. I need it like where I do my work. So that has been the lifesaver. And I think I'm pretty popular in the parents' WhatsApp group because whenever anybody's like, “Hey, what day is the—,” Or, “When am I supposed to—,” I screenshot my little AI bot and say, I got you.

Dan Shipper (00:51:30)

That's incredibly cool. I mean, that seems like a second product. I feel like a lot of parents would pay for that.

Claire Vo (00:51:36)

Yeah, maybe. As a public good, I'm willing to just teach anybody how to build it. I try to do things, I try to filter out things. I'm trying to be pretty protective of information, but like this stuff where it's my kids, I gotta get these summaries, man.

Dan Shipper (00:51:53)

Yeah, that makes sense. That's truly incredible. I guess I'm curious, sort of towards the end of this discussion, we've seen this incredible product you're building. What is the future of that for you? Do you want to run this as a business where this is the only thing you do? Is it continually a side project? Yeah, how are you thinking about it?

Claire Vo (00:52:22)

I want to see if we can get it to $1 million dollars. That's like—

Dan Shipper (00:52:28)

Where is it now? Can you share?

Claire Vo (00:52:28)

We’re in six figures of ARR. Six months. Side project. My goal, I mean, I told everybody, my goal is I want to buy myself a nice glass of wine once a week. Remember, I was selling this for $2 a pop. I was like, if I get a nice glass of wine once a month or once a week, I'll be happy. And then my new ambition was, I can pay for my kid's school. So I think we've definitely crossed that threshold. And now I'm like, can I pay for my kids’ college? It's really kids-centric milestones. We're funding that 529. But I think intellectually, no. Here's what is very interesting about doing this is look, I've got friends. Would they write me a check? Could they fund this? Sure. Where we met, people would probably write me a check. I could like knock on your door and be like, pretty please, but— 

Dan Shipper (00:53:27)

I'll write you a check if you want.

Claire Vo (00:53:28)

Thank you. But, that's not my question. My question is like, does this kind of product need that kind of check? And if it doesn't, how do you build it? What's the business? This is more of the intellectual side of me, which is I'm actually trying to do, as somebody who really cares and loves technology and somebody who loves startups, I don't know if the current model of venture funding is the right model for something like this. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. I just don't think— It's not obvious to me that it is. And so what I'm trying to do is push the edges of how far you can take this with me and Alisa, who works part-time. And look, if I hit a wall where capital's the challenge I can get access to capital, but right now time's the challenge. There's something else here, which I'm trying to figure out how to solve the right problem, how to access the right people. So I don't know. I'm very happy at my job. I love LaunchDarkly. It is a product that I'm just so happy to work on. I'm an engineer. It just gives me a lot of joy. I'm pretty good at the job that I do. They know about ChatPRD. They're extremely supportive of it. And we've carved out the IP because we're all good corporate citizens. But this is an experiment for me and I want to see how it plays out. Never say never, right? If 10,000 users turns into 100,000 users in the next six months, we might have a different conversation. but let's see how it goes.

Dan Shipper (00:55:03)

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I love this sort of point about new funding models for these kinds of companies. The venture model is built for software that was a lot riskier to build. And the outcomes were also much, much, much bigger potentially. And there's a lot of room for these sort of AI businesses where it can actually be a really meaningful, cash-generating business, but it's probably not going to be $10 million or something like that. And it's something that we've thought about a lot at Every, because we have a media business but we've also spun out an AI writing app called Lex. And we have a couple more incubations and the amount of leverage that we get we have six people full time now-ish. And the amount of leverage we get with using AI tools, we're shipping so much stuff all the time and it's like a $1 million dollar a year business or something like that. But like if we had a little bit more capital, I think we could do amazing stuff, but I just don't want to raise another actual venture round. And so it's like, what is the shape of that money? And all that kind of stuff is really, I think, an important question.

Claire Vo (00:56:12)

You and I know this, but I was at an event and somebody asked the question, when do you know it's the right time to raise? And there's a lot of interesting answers about product-market fit. And my answer was one, when you can do something with it. And two, when you want a venture outcome—and $100 million is not a venture outcome. People don't understand that. $100 million would change my life. I don't know about you, but it would change my life.

Dan Shipper (00:56:39)

I’d take it.

Claire Vo (00:56:41)

I would be able to fund the 529. So, I think you really do have to think about, you can be extremely ambitious. I don't think $100 million is something to sneeze at. It's not a venture outcome. And you start playing that venture game. That is the path you commit yourself to your investors. I know that. I've taken venture capital before. So I just think that also, this is not my first round. And so I have a lot more flexibility. I can self-fund stuff if I need to, even though we're obviously profitable relative to kind of like time and investment. So, I think it's interesting. I have a last thing to show you if you want to see it.

Dan Shipper (00:57:18)

I would love to see it. Bring it on.

Claire Vo (00:57:22)

Okay. These are fun things, which is I'm raising the next generation of AI-enabled children. So I built three things. I built three things with my kids using AI. So again, this is less about the logistical, how-do-I-keep-my-life-on-top-of-school stuff and more about cool ways you can introduce kids to AI. So I'll show you like just a couple things that I've built that I'm proud of. I think they're very fun and I did them with my six year old. So the first one is this, which is: my then-four and six year old at the time, now-five and seven year old, they're really into Greek mythology and so we built these Pokémon-style cards including images for them to fake play Greek mythology Pokémon, which is so fun they're obsessed with these, they keep them in their little file folder with all their Pokémon cards, so this was just a really fun art project.

I guess two of these are Greek mythology related. And then they're also into this podcast called “Greeking Out,” which I highly recommend. My kid's really into it. So I made him a little podcast hub of podcasts that he likes. And it's the podcast episode. Let's see if this works. I haven't even spun this up in a long time. So we'll see. So basically what I built is a podcast hub that takes all these podcasts. He transcribes them and gives little quizzes at the end. So he can listen to a podcast about Poseidon and then do a question-and-answer with this app. It's apparently not running right now, but that's a really fun one.

And then the last one, this was our Christmas break project, we built runawaypancakes.com. And so one of the problems I have as a parent is recipes are not built for kids to follow because it has a big list of instructions at the top and then all these instructions. You have to go back and it's like, add the flour to the water and it's how much flour, how much water? So my seven year old and I built out his favorite recipes and we generated all the Midjourney—these are all Midjourney images and most of them are not creepy—but we built all his favorite recipes, but we did them in a way where he could follow them step-by-step and it had illustrations with kind of pictures for what it might look like that we did out of Midjourney. And so this was a really fun project. So you have the ingredients here. And what we did is we took the recipes and then each step—and this is the big innovation. It was like mix this much flour, this much baking powder, this much sugar, because this is not what recipe sites tend to be doing. And so you can go through step-by-step, you can kind of see what it looks like. And then you get your fluffy pancakes and then we made a whole bunch of coloring pages.

Dan Shipper (01:00:30)

That's so cool. This is the best. Being a kid right now seems so cool because, yeah, recipes are not built for kids. I ran into that so much growing up. It's like, I'm interested in this. I want to make food. I want to learn how to write. I want to do all this stuff. And it's like, there weren't classes for seven year olds because there aren't that many seven year olds that want to do that. But AI stuff means you and your parent can just make something like this. And it's just delightful. It makes me so happy.

Claire Vo (01:01:00)

My maybe chaotic good thing that I did is I trained an ElevenLabs voice on Santa and then when my four year old was not being great in the December time period, Santa left him a voicemail. It was like, “Theo. I've heard you've been a little disrespectful to your mom during dinner. Ho, ho, ho.”

Dan Shipper (01:01:20)

Did it work?

Claire Vo (01:01:25)

I'd be like, “Do you want to talk to Santa?” And he'd be like, “No.” And I'd be like, “Santa has something to say.” And then I'd play it. So there's lots of little hacks you can do as a parent.

Dan Shipper (01:01:37)

A lot of good parenting tips in this episode. I like it.

Claire Vo (01:01:40)

I mean, good/bad, take them for what they're worth. But now my kids demand custom stories from me. They're like, I want a story about a wild chicken who becomes a prince on an island kingdom and then fights Darth Vader. And you're like, okay, dude I’m on it. So yes, in one way, it's very magical and other ways, spoiled for choice.

Dan Shipper (01:02:03)

Yeah. I just wonder what it's like to grow up in a world where all your questions are answerable and all your stories are custom. It's kind of a different thing, you know?

Claire Vo (01:02:19)

Oh yeah. I think I closed it. One of the chats was like— My son was convinced there was a bucket war in ancient Italy. It was like, “Mom, when was the Bucket War?” And I'm like, “What the hell are you talking about?” My husband and I are pretty into history and we're like, Bucket War? We're Googling, “What is the Bucket War?” And we asked ChatGPT. We said something like, “What was the Bucket War in Florence or something?” And it was like, “Oh, you're mixing up two historical events, this event and that event.” And there was actually a war over a bucket in ancient Italy. I'll try to find the link. We can put it in the show notes. 

Dan Shipper (01:02:50)

Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes.

Claire Vo (01:02:51)

But being able to interpret my children's very vague recollection of almost accurate facts is a very useful use case.

Dan Shipper (01:03:06)

Incredible. I love it. This has been so fun. Thank you so much for doing this with me and for sharing everything. I love what you're up to. Just as we end, if people want to know more, if they want to message you, follow you on social, use ChatPRD, where can they find you?

Claire Vo (01:03:25)

Yep, so I'm on X @clairvo, all one word. I'm on TikTok @chiefproductofficer. If you really want some very niche product content, that's the place to go. It’s a little stale. I've been a little busy the last six months, but we'll revive it. Chatprd.ai where we're at and ChatPRD is on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Very brand new— I'm trying to learn YouTube. So that's my next project.

Dan Shipper (01:03:52)

Amazing. Well, thank you.

Claire Vo (01:03:55)

Oh my gosh. Thank you. This was fun.

Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.

Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.