Best of the Pod: She Built an AI Product Manager Bringing in Six Figures—As a Side Hustle

Our podcast is on hiatus for the month of August, so we're re-upping some of the best interviews we've done on AI & I. Today we're featuring Dan Shipper's conversation with Claire Vo, the founder of ChatPRD, an AI copilot that helps startups build product better and faster, and the chief product officer at the feature testing and management platform LaunchDarkly. Dan and Claire dive into how she built ChatPRD using AI and her predictions for the future of product management. As always, you can watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Claire Vo built ChatPRD—an on-demand chief product officer powered by AI. It’s now used by over 10,000 product managers and is pulling in six figures in revenue.

The best part?

Claire has a demanding day job as the chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. So she built all of ChatPRD herself—over the weekend—with AI.

ChatPRD is an AI copilot for all things product. Claire first built ChatPRD as a custom GPT that wrote product requirements documents, or PRDs, which is startup speak for an overview of what a new product should do, how it should look, and what features it needs to have. As her chatbot became more popular, Claire expanded its capabilities to other areas of product work—and she continues to ship a new feature every week. The current version can help you draft PRDs from a simple idea, set realistic goals and brainstorm metrics to track them, and level up as a product manager by providing on-demand feedback

I sat down with Claire to talk about how ChatPRD works, how she built it as a side hustle using AI, and all of the ways she’s using AI tools to accelerate her work and life.

You can watch the whole episode here:

If you want a quick summary, here's a taste of some of the themes we touched on:

1. Share your worldview with AI for better collaboration. Claire found that carefully refining her ChatGPT prompts enabled her to efficiently use the tool to draft product strategies and other documents, laying the foundations for ChatPRD. “I had, over the course of months, prompted ChatGPT into a place where I could really work with it in a pretty rapid fashion to get high-quality outputs,” she says.
2. No more excuses—build your side hustle. Claire, who single-handedly built ChatPRD over the course of Thanksgiving week, believes that bootstrapping a lean side hustle is part of an “exploration of what it means to run an AI native business.” She adds: “[I]t’s so cheap and easy to build high-quality web apps right now.”
3. The rise of the AI-enabled founder. According to Claire, solopreneurs can execute their ideas with unparalleled speed and precision using AI tools like ChatPRD, Microsoft Copilot, and Devin. “Building solo does increase quality and velocity…because you’re short-circuiting the loop between product, engineering, and design…In a traditional team where you have multiple people playing that role, you lose fidelity of vision,” she says.
4. 10x your efficiency with AI. Claire thinks AI tools enable her to bring her ideas to life faster than ever before—for example, a SaaS app that took her many months to build pre-AI would now take her a day. “[If] 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,’” she explains.
5. Build in AI to cultivate visionary thought. Building ChatPRD has helped Claire be a more effective product leader because the process has fostered forward-thinking perspectives. “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,” she explains.

The future of product management

This is how Claire thinks AI will disrupt product management:

1. Scale product manager leadership. Claire believes that AI tools will enable product managers (PMs) to lead larger teams. She says that “the ratio of PMs to builder roles is going to shift pretty dramatically,” increasing from 1-to-7 to about 1-to-20.
2. Empower junior product managers. According to Claire, less-experienced PMs will benefit by using AI tools as an on-demand coach to rapidly upskill. “I do think you're going to see more junior folks have higher impact more quickly,” she says.
3. Augment strategic decisions. Claire thinks that people leading product development at startups, like chief product officers and vice presidents of product, should use AI to help them strategize. “I'm of the very strong opinion that one of the things that is very likely to be disrupted is strategic thinking as a differentiated value for a human,” she says.

Here’s how Claire thinks the focus of human product managers will change:

1. Prioritize human connection. Claire believes product managers of the future will be more focused on the human-centric aspect of the role, which involves actively engaging with teams. “I do think inspiration, alignment, and motivating of humans towards a goal is still very hard for something like AI to do, [like] getting teams excited about a mission, getting them close to the human impact of their work,” she says.
2. Build prototypes, not just documents. According to Claire, PMs who have the ability to build basic products will have an edge over their peers. She talks about the idea of a “proto-manager,” which means that one is “expected to build prototypes instead of building documents.”
3. Lead with vision. Claire predicts that value will shift toward visionary product leaders who aspire toward uncharted territories because LLMs are restricted by being trained on historical data. “I think there's going to be some product leaders… [who] are able to see very far into the future and 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?’”

The best ways to use ChatPRD

Claire has incorporated ChatPRD into her own workflow. Here are a few examples of how she uses it:

1. Alter ChatPRD usage by role. Claire adapts her use of ChatPRD depending on the role she is playing at a given moment. “I personally use it for writing PRDs for ideas I already have or brainstorming features on the roadmap, and as a product leader, I use this…to coach my team on how they can improve,” she explains.
2. Accelerate with AI milestones. ChatPRD generates actionable milestones for Claire once she has a clear idea of the timelines in which tasks should be executed. “Most teams know how quickly they want to do things, but have a hard time breaking that down into milestones,” she says.
3. ChatPRD as a strategic ally. Claire notes that LLMs are especially good at applying frameworks, and leverages this quality by using ChatPRD to strategize. “I use ChatGPT and ChatPRD a lot for strategic thinking, 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 using these tools as opposed to sort of being on my back foot,” she says.
4. AI as a fresh set of eyes. ChatPRD has a knack for reviewing Claire’s work and catching small points that might have slipped through the cracks. “It's a little buddy that can just round out the edges of my thinking, make me a lot more efficient, and remind me of things that I need to include where my fallible human brain fails me,” she says.

How Claire uses AI as a tech-forward parent

Claire is using AI to both stay on top of updates from her children’s school and raise a generation of AI-enabled kids. A few projects she has built in pursuit of this include:

1. An AI bot that synthesizes wordy emails from school into concise bullet points
2. An application that transcribes her son’s favorite Greek mythology podcast and generates quizzes for him to complete at the end of each episode
3. Greek mythology-themed Pokemon cards that were entirely generated with AI tools
4. A website that makes it easy for kids to follow recipes by providing clear step-by-step instructions

This is a must-watch for anyone interested in turning their side hustle into a thriving business, or who works in product. Here is a link to the episode transcript.

You can check out the episode on X, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Links and timestamps are below:

1. Watch on X
2. Watch on YouTube
3. Listen on Spotify (make sure to follow to help us rank!)
4. Listen on Apple Podcasts

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

What do you use ChatGPT for? Have you found any interesting or surprising use cases? We want to hear from you—and we might even interview you. Reply here to talk to me!

Miss an episode? Catch up on my recent conversations with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a16z Podcast host Steph Smith, economist Tyler Cowen, writer and entrepreneur David Perell, founder and newsletter operator Ben Tossell, and others, and learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

If you’re enjoying my work, here are a few things I recommend:

1. Subscribe to Every
2. Follow me on X
3. Subscribe to Every’s YouTube channel

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.

We build AI tools for readers like you. Write brilliantly with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Deliver yourself from email with Cora.

We also do AI training, adoption, and innovation for companies. Work with us to bring AI into your organization.

Get paid for sharing Every with your friends. Join our referral program.