Transcript: ‘How We Incubate and Launch New Products With AI’

The transcript of AI & I with Danny Aziz and Brandon Gell is below.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:01:08
All about Spiral, the tool we recently launched: 00:02:15
Why Danny left a $200,000 salary to work at a bootstrapped media company: 00:04:06
How we do a lot of things well at Every: 00:10:33
What makes Every’s flywheel turn: 00:14:44
The kind of people who fit right in at Every: 00:17:11
How Every is differentiated from a standard VC-backed startup: 00:23:25
How Danny found his way into the world of startups: 00:36:11
The tech industry’s affinity for potential over experience: 00:46:43
Where each of us sees ourselves in the next one year: 00:52:38

Transcript

Dan Shipper (00:01:00)

Danny, welcome to the show.

Danny Aziz (00:01:01)

Thanks for having me.

Dan Shipper (00:01:02)

And Brandon, welcome back to the show.

Brandon Gell (00:01:04)

Thank you.

Dan Shipper (00:01:05)

So we are doing a little bit of a different episode today. For people who don't know, Danny Aziz, you are running Spiral, which is an Every product. We just launched an entirely new version of Spiral. And Brandon you run our studio, which produced or created Spiral. And we wanted to all come together and just talk a little about what we're doing, because I think we have a little bit of a different model that we're trying to figure out for media, which is having a core underlying media business— So we have a newsletter, we've got this YouTube channel, we do podcasts, all that kind of stuff, and then build software out of the experiences and out of the ideas that we have running the media business. And so Danny, you're one of the first people to come in and help us do that. So you're a little bit of a little bit of a guinea pig for us.

Danny Aziz (00:01:58)

Yeah, definitely a guinea pig.

Dan Shipper (00:02:02)

And we're trying to share a little bit about what we're learning and what that's like. So maybe start by telling us what's new with Spiral and maybe give us a little bit of background into what it is and what we just launched.

Danny Aziz (00:02:14)

So Spiral allows you to automate 80 percent of the writing that you have—the repetitive writing. You can give it how you tweet, how you write newsletters, and then it learns your tone, the voice, the structure that you want. And then you can give it your rough drafts, or maybe you've done a podcast and you want to turn that into a tweet. And it just gives you the content from the content that you already have that sounds just like you. What we've just launched is a brand new design. It looks completely different, far more organized. And then the biggest piece I think we're the most excited about is 250-plus public Spirals. So we've gone through, we've handcrafted—plus, obviously, with the help of AI—all of these Spirals that will turn one form of content into another. And we've spent a lot of time just making sure that we're happy with it so that everyone else will be happy with it. And then people can take them, they can clone them, they can change it so it sounds like them, and they can continue using it.

Dan Shipper (00:03:06)

That was really good. I love listening to you talk.

Brandon Gell (00:03:09)

Yeah, you are very good. I really struggle to pitch Spiral to people because I'm like, you could turn a thing into another thing. And they're like, what things? But that was actually— That was good.

Dan Shipper (00:03:23)

I think you nailed all the beats of— When i'm when i'm pitching it— You nailed all that stuff, but your voice and your inflection, everything is just so much better.

Danny Aziz (00:02:34)

I mean I was born with this voice so I can't take credit for it.

Brandon Gell (00:02:37)

It kind of reminds me when we first met Danny I was like, is he 45 and just super mature and this is his voice, or is he like 22? I kind of can't tell.

Danny Aziz (00:02:45)

Somewhere right in the middle.

Dan Shipper (00:02:48)

How old are you actually?

Danny Aziz (00:02:45)

I'm 27.

Dan Shipper (00:02:52)

Okay. Yeah, so that’s what Spiral is. That's kind of what we're launching. Why are you doing this with us? Obviously, you're super talented. You've got a long history of working at different startups. How did you end up doing this?

Danny Aziz (00:04:10)

I've been following Every for a while. I've been following the content you've been putting out for a very long time. And, to be fair, I hadn't actually seen any of the products that Every had put out. It was always just the content. I have actually just like a bunch of bookmarks of things that you've written, Dan, and other people have written. And when I saw that you guys were looking for EIRs—entrepreneurs in residence—I was like, this makes so much sense. I think a lot of what I've been feeling, working at startups— Every startup that I've worked at has raised money. And I've always felt this tension between what felt right for our customers and the business right now vs. the grandiose vision that we think we're going to go do. And then when I first met Brandon and Brandon was kind of explaining to me like, we have this media business and then we have all this consulting and we're trying to chart our own destiny, it all just resonated really well with how I was feeling.

Dan Shipper (00:05:09)

I love that.

Brandon Gell (00:05:10)

I want to do a callback to your introduction of what we're trying to build here, which is a media business as a foundation and a number of things that are layered on top of that, and one thing kind of helps the other succeed. But there's another thing that you just said, which is a lot harder to put your finger on and a lot harder to figure out if we're actually doing well, which is charting our own path and doing it in a way that feels really right for all of us as individuals. And I feel like when we first had the idea, which you've been thinking about for many years, but then we sort of came together and we're like, let's do this thing. We were like, we're pretty sure this is going to work. We just need to do it. And then there's this other piece, which is like, but are we still going to be happy that we're currently figuring out. And I think that was a part of working with you. I think that Danny feels what we're trying to do. I think that he's trying to do that too.

Dan Shipper (00:06:14)

Yeah, how has that been for both of you? I think there's that thing that we're sort of aspiring to. A word that we often use internally is building a little bit of a creative playground. And then there's also the sort of reality of, it's really fucking hard to run a business and it's hard to run three businesses all at once. So, yeah, how has that been for you, Danny, and then, I’m curious, Brandon?

Danny Aziz (00:06:45)

It’s a little bit difficult for me to answer that question for everyone, because I'm 95 percent of the time focused on Spiral. And obviously, it came out of Every, and I've spent the last couple of weeks just talking to the people who are using it a lot and 80 percent of the people that I've spoken to are using Spiral because of Every. I actually spoke to somebody the other day and she literally said, whatever Every tells me to do, I'm gonna go do.

Brandon Gell (00:07:09)

That's incredible.

Dan Shipper (00:07:10)

Don’t do everything we say, but it's nice. I like to hear that.

Brandon Gell (00:07:19)

Do as we say, not as we do.

Danny Aziz (00:07:21)

I feel like I get to focus a lot and so I haven't felt that tension. And because the media business is doing well enough that it can support something like this, I don't feel this tension of, oh, I have 18 months until I have to raise another round. And I think we have a team of people where everything we need to do, we can do. And then we just know people who can help us with the other things. So I haven't felt this pull of anything other than I get to focus.

Dan Shipper (00:07:49)

That's cool. What do you think?

Brandon Gell (00:07:51)

I go through phases of feeling that freedom that I was searching for for so many years while running Clyde. I go through phases here. A really good example is this morning when we needed to make all these changes to Sparkle. So, Sparkle is our AI file organizer, so it helps you organize your computer using AI. It's a really amazing little product. We put it out a number of months ago—

Dan Shipper (00:08:18)

May or June or July, something like that.

Brandon Gell (00:08:20)

Yeah. It works really well. It's pretty basic. Gets 50 new customers per day and we're just sort of trying to see what happens to it right now without us needing to invest a ton, but we're also realizing that we need to continue to invest in it. And this morning we were doing a bunch of annoying stuff to save ourselves from a tax situation in the future, basically. And I was just kind of flustered because I didn't really like my morning routine and because I just went straight into solving this problem. And I turned to my wife Lydia and I was just like, this sucks. I hate it. And she looked at me and she was like, this is the work part of your job. And I was like, you're right. And I rarely feel this way. So this is a good thing. I love that. So that's how it's going.

Dan Shipper (00:09:16)

That's really great. I feel similarly—the sort of ups and downs. But having run Every for five years, this is without a doubt my favorite era of the business. And I'm someone who, I feel— I think you really like to focus on one specific thing. And I'm just like, I want to do 50 things all at once. I love that. And so my day is very much— I'll often start in the morning and I like writing for a couple of hours and going back and forth in case there are fires or, we always publish in the morning, so I'm usually involved in that in some way and then the rest of the day is talking to various people about the different businesses we have going on and looking at Spirals with you today or we have a couple of alpha products that we're working on. So trying to figure that stuff out and or some of the consulting that we do. And I love, love, love the variety. And I do feel like it's sort of this playground, which is very special. Because all the stuff we do is stuff I'm deeply interested in, which is cool, but it’s a lot.

Brandon Gell (00:10:20)

I think this is an interesting transition to, how do we do this well? Because I really like doing a lot of things. Every does a lot of things, and you do one thing at Every, but you do a lot of things within that one thing. And, so far you've kind of only done one thing, which is get us to this V2. And I'm curious how you feel about, we're starting a new journey where you're going to be transitioning to doing other things besides what you've done for the past many years, meaning marketing and growth and all of these things.

Danny Aziz (00:11:00)

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the thing that I'm most excited about is throwing myself kind of in the deep end. And it's also why I love the idea personally for me to continue answering your question then of why am I working on Spiral. I think I've spent most of my career having ideas of how I think all these other things should work and I've never been in the environment to actually go test those ideas because it didn't make sense if you've raised around and you have 18 months, you're not going to let the engineer go do X, Y, and Z. You're going to go hire someone who actually knows how to do X, Y, and Z. So, nervously excited is how I'm feeling. But I think it's going to be like, we had this product that people love. And really it's just about figuring out what's missing for them and then who else is just like them and how do we go get them? Not to make it sound too easy. I think it's going to be pretty difficult, but yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:11:53)

Did that answer your question?

Brandon Gell (00:11:54)

I think so. Yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:11:57)

How do you feel about it?

Brandon Gell (00:11:59)

I mean, I think my genuine question is like, does it work? Does the model work? For many, many years, there's been this whole thing of go raise a bunch of money, go hire all the people you need to do all the different jobs, and our model is the complete opposite of that. Don't raise any money and don't hire anybody. Do it all yourself and we're going to support you with ideas and resources. And I think that's my biggest question is, does it work? I think it'll work, but yeah.

Dan Shipper (00:12:25)

And it's definitely really hard. I think one of the other parts of your question we haven't touched on is it's really hard to run multiple businesses. And for example, putting out a daily newsletter that's really high quality and a podcast and doing courses and doing training. All of that is a lot. And then layering on other software businesses is a lot. And usually I think people have a hard time balancing those things.

And, I think, part of the reason it's worked so far is it took us a long time to get there. I guess this is almost exactly five years since I started Every. It was Thanksgiving of 2019, which is crazy. I actually hadn't even thought about that.

Danny Aziz (00:13:17)

Congratulations.

Dan Shipper (00:13:19)

Yeah, and there's been a lot of a lot of different eras and we've tried a lot of different things, but I think this latest spurt in growth and things that we're doing, it all basically started when you joined. And I think one reason for that is, obviously you're just super talented and super hardworking and you brought so much to what we do. And another reason is there was a foundation there that we could bring you in and there was a lot of potential energy to be unlocked. And I think that's really hard to do that if, like what you've been talking about, if you've raised a big round and you have 18 months. We raised a little bit of money in 2020, but we never spent it. We have basically the same amount of money that we raised. And I think that afforded us the time to let this thing bake a little bit so that when we hit the right moment, we could let it rip a little bit more.

Brandon Gell (00:14:18)

Fuck yeah. Let it rip. We are letting it rip right now, I’d say.

Danny Aziz (00:14:21)

Time will tell if it will work, I’d say.

Brandon Gell (00:14:23)

Yeah, well, I think it will. It's working. It's working. Something is working. We just don't exactly know what it is and how big it will go.

Dan Shipper (00:14:19)

I think one question on my mind is: This model feels like it should not work. If you asked someone a year ago or two years ago or three years ago, I want to do this with this newsletter. We're going to have the newsletter and then we're going to make products. And we're going to bring people on to help us run the products and build more of them. And they would say like, it's not going to work for five different reasons. And I can list those out, but it is kind of working. And one of the questions in my mind is why is it working now? And I think it is working uniquely now in a way that it may not have been able to four or five years ago. And that a big reason is AI stuff. It is just so much cheaper and faster to make products. And I'm curious how that has been for you, or how using AI tools has life changed your workflow or your productivity level or what you're able to do.

Danny Aziz (00:15:30)

Before I answer the question, I think AI has also made it super easy to do the media part of stuff. I was shocked to see that the images that we have is a custom ChatGPT that spits out images and then we do a little bit of tweaking.

Dan Shipper (00:15:45)

And by the way, this whole podcast—AI-generated.

Danny Aziz (00:15:49)

We're not really here.

Brandon Gell (00:15:50)

You’re not supposed to tell anybody that.

Danny Aziz (00:15:51)

But to answer your question, I think the obvious answer is it just allows me to move so much quicker, but it also allows me to do the mundane things a lot quicker. I'm able to build tools for myself in a way that I was never able to do. And I think if we think 10–15 years ago, if you wanted to kind of do that, you'd have to probably get resources in a budget and, okay, I want to get three engineers because we're going to build this internal tool. And now I could just ask Claude or Cursor or Windsurf, hey, build this internal tool and it's 80 percent get there and then I can finish it off.

Brandon Gell (00:16:23)

Didn't you just do that?

Danny Aziz (00:16:24)

I did just that. So some of the Spirals that we have, we’ve built out the data set of examples really well, and it turns something into something. So for example, it turns transcripts into tweets. We can also use that exact same data set for turning an article into a tweet. And we don't need to build a whole new Spiral. So I just built a really quick tool that allows me to take a bunch of Spirals that could easily be twisted into something else, and I can just be like, hey, this can also twist into that. And the way that I would have done that otherwise would have been to make them from scratch, which would have taken forever. Do it inside the database viewer, which would have taken forever?

Brandon Gell (00:16:58)

Okay, so this is exactly why, like you're saying, it shouldn't work, and there's all these reasons why, yes AI. And then the other thing, which is the hardest part of this business, is just choosing the right people to work with. And we were talking a little bit yesterday about— We weren't really talking about this explicitly, but essentially this is why you are the right person for this. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit. I feel like there's a certain amount of curiosity that you have that is not normal or it sort of feels normal for a lot of Every people, honestly, but it's what I think makes Every in the playground special.

Dan Shipper (00:17:38)

What was your perception of him and why did you want—?

Brandon Gell (00:17:43)

I just had this sense, very, very quickly that he was going to be really into doing all of the things that aren't just engineering—

Dan Shipper (00:17:50)

While also being technical.

Brandon Gell (00:17:52)

While also being technical, which is so important for us. I just got the sense that you were really technical, you had great taste, and actually, the second we met, I was like, this guy's got great clothing. His hair looks great. He has a bunch of plants behind him. He's very suave. I was like, this is not normal for an incredible engineer and at least in my experience, I was like, this is a good start. But I think it's having high IQ being technical, but then most importantly having high EQ. It's a very good test for us.

Dan Shipper (00:18:28)

That's what I was going to say. I remember the first time we talked, Brandon was like, okay, you're going to talk to this guy. He really wants to build therapy software. And I was like, yes! We're going to have a great conversation.

Brandon Gell (00:18:41)

Well, yeah, most of the time when I speak to somebody and they're like, I want to be an EIR, I know there'll be a good fit if the conversation just goes from them talking about their background and their work experience to just riffing on an idea. And that's immediately what we started doing.

Danny Aziz (00:18:56)

Yeah. I mean, I remember we jumped on the Zoom. It was in the morning and you're like, that's a lot of greenery. And I remember that vividly. I'd like to call out all the greenery because of my wife. It's not because of me. You've got to put that in there or she'll kill me.

Brandon Gell (00:19:09)

Good taste. You have good taste.

Danny Aziz (00:19:11)

Yeah. That's all me. It's got nothing to do with that. Even though I really love doing one thing and focusing, I love getting my fingers in everything. And yeah, I love just riffing on ideas and taking them a little bit further. The therapy one was really interesting to me for a while—until it wasn't.

Brandon Gell (00:19:31)

And ironically now we have a bunch of therapists that are using Spiral and they love it and it's far better than any of the therapy-specific tools that they're using. And I think that actually is just worth noting that I think one of the reasons that Spiral is going to be so successful is it's so simple. And there's something really beautiful about that. And that's something that we should keep in mind as we build it. It's just like, how do we always have that feeling even while we pack it with a lot of interesting functionality?

Dan Shipper (00:20:03)

And I think the reason it's simple, at least to start, it came out of something that I was just doing myself. So, I was prompting Claude to just make tweets for me. And because it had to be useful, it had to be simple. And so I think one of the special things about what we have is everybody is using the stuff we build every day. We're not building for people who are different from ourselves, at least not yet. And I think that that feedback loop helps keep things simple. Because we have a better idea of what's necessary and what's not. And a better idea of is it being overbuilt or is it too complicated now? I really like that. I'm kind of curious, Brandon, your last business. You raised $50 million for— And just going back to the, why is this working when it kind of shouldn't, I guess. In your view, what's different now about this era and about what we're doing and everything, than the constraints or what was possible when you were running your last business. What have you noticed?

Brandon Gell (00:21:15)

Well, they're very different businesses, I think. I decided to build— I cannot imagine a more complicated business. For my last company, it was, so it was an insurtech business that helped any brand launch their own version of Apple Care. So I was 22. I'd never built an insurance company before, and I was essentially building an insurance company that also had this whole tech side of it. And it was just an insanely complicated technical fear, financial fear. Then we had to fix people’s shit, which I didn't realize when we launched it initially. And it was just really complicated. So I think that the— If I had to boil it all down to one thing, it's just the simplicity of the second we tried to go build Clyde at Every, it would consume all of our time.

Dan Shipper (00:21:08)

Because of the regulations and the complexity of just insurance or—?

Brandon Gell (00:22:12)

I think just the size. It was a huge product that we built. And it kind of had to be because it was B2B2C. So we had to build a business for end consumers. We had to build a business for the businesses that we were selling to. And then we had to build a product for the insurance companies that we partnered with. So we kind of had to build three products and they all needed to work really well together. And then also e-commerce just sucks to build for. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. And e-commerce merchants are really hard. So I think the simplicity side of the business of the products that we're making is why we'll be successful and because I think we're focusing almost inadvertently on prosumery-type products where we can just convince you as an individual that this is a good thing for you. And if we do our job, you're likely to share it with your coworkers.

Dan Shipper (00:23:10)

That makes sense. What about abstracting out from your specific client experience and, I think we have a bit of a different ethos for how we're building stuff. It's attached to a media business. We're not really raising that much money—all that kind of stuff—vs. the more standard venture back startup path for the last 10 or 15 years. What have you noticed that is different? Either good or bad?

Brandon Gell (00:23:35)

I mean, personally, I think it's just all good. I guess the only bad thing is, I feel like we maybe have a bit of a ceiling where we're not going to go from $0 to $30 million. I mean, we could, but it would just, again, consume us. And that wouldn't be a bad thing. Danny, if you want to do that, we won't be mad. So maybe the ceiling is kind of a bad thing, but not really for all the good things I'm about to say. I think the biggest differentiator is when you raise $50 million, I kind of felt like I personally and the business was always sprinting to make sure that we didn't like to topple over ourselves. We didn't fall forward, I was always running to keep my feet under me and I felt that personally and I felt like the business felt like that. And I think here because we keep things simple because the types of things that we're choosing to invest in and because we're not raising money, so we don't owe it to anybody except ourselves. By the time people listen to this, we will have just sort of put ourselves in a position where we were leaning a little bit far ahead of ourselves. We were taking a risk, but then we'll take a couple of weeks to get our feet under us again. And I think just when you raise money, it's hard to do that.

Dan Shipper (00:25:04)

I think you've just put your finger on something that has been really important for me. For me, the reason we didn't raise a lot of money in the last four or five years is not because I don't want to work hard or be stressed. There's a very big difference between stress that you put on yourself and you to choose when it's right vs. stress about other people and other people's expectations. I think for me as a person, I'm just already so sensitive to other people that a business that felt like it was I could, we could choose when to be stressed, felt like what I wanted, whereas I think some, for other people that are less sensitive to that, it doesn't necessarily change the character of the business quite as much, or they're maybe not as afraid of it as I was. And I just really like that, that freedom to choose to be stressed or not.

Brandon Gell (00:26:06)

Yeah. Have you felt this much as a founding engineer?

Danny Aziz (00:26:10)

The stress more comes from not agreeing with the milestones that we're trying to reach. Because they feel very short-sighted. The thing that's been very apparent to me in just three, four weeks is not the lack of money, but the lack of just that we can burn this because we're going to go race some more, has forced me to be a little bit more creative, which I've really enjoyed. I thought before it was like, oh, cool, I'm going to buy five seats for this thing. Cool, whatever. Now I'm like, okay, looking at the price. Do I really need this? Can we be a bit more creative about this? Is there a way that we can get this cheaper? I think in some places money is definitely meant to be spent on the right things. But I definitely found that before having venture-backed money, it was like, well, we have money, we should spend it. I was just not being as creative as I could have been. And so that's actually been really useful in this sort of expectations place, I think right now I've been feeling a lot of my own expectations, which have been very— The fuel from that feels a lot more longer-lasting than other people's expectations. That feels like just thinking about my own emotional journey, that Spiral happens, no pun intended, happens a lot quicker. Whereas right now this arc feels like it's going to go a lot further.

Brandon Gell (00:27:41)

Wait, sorry. I want to make sure I fully understand this. So you're saying when other people are putting expectations on you, that cycle of feeling stressed about those expectations is a quicker cycle.

Danny Aziz (00:27:50)

And then the fuel runs out a lot quicker. I'm in a pressure cooker and that can, and I get a lot of stuff done in a pressure cooker and he just, that's it. It kind of fizzles out for a couple of weeks and then it takes a lot of getting back into it. Whereas right now it's my own expectations. And I kind of feel at least right now I'll spend a couple weeks, but it feels like it's going to take me very far.

Brandon Gell (00:28:12)

Well, one and I don't know how much equity you owned in previous companies that you were part of, but one thing that I found during Clyde was I could beat the shit out of myself but kind of only because I felt I owned it and you now own a very significant part of Spiral. And I wonder if that plays a part of it at all, you're literally an owner? That's what's tough about being an equity owner in a business—being an employee that has equity—is really not that much. So the second you feel that pain, you're sort of like, eh, it's not a rocketship already, so it's really not going to be worth that much, which is what's tough about equity as an employee. That's not really the case for you. And I wonder if that comes into it at all.

Danny Aziz (00:28:58)

The counterexample of my options at other companies has definitely been conscious for me before in that I've never really exercised my options before. Because it's never made any sense to, and it's never been motivating enough, but I couldn't speak to, is that a reason why I'm super motivated right now? It definitely is playing a part in it for sure.

Brandon Gell (00:29:22)

Right answer.

Dan Shipper (00:29:22)

We knew we'd picked right. You did say the weight of your own expectations is sort of what's pushing you forward. And it made me think, what are your expectations for yourself?

Danny Aziz (00:29:37)

I think I've been telling myself this narrative for a very long time because I find all these other things interesting and my opinion might mean something in these other places. For me, I'm seeing this as an experiment, a big part of this experiment of running Spiral is, are those opinions worth anything? Probably not. And then it's like, okay, well, when reality tells me they're not, how do I react to that? How do I shift and figure out what actually makes sense? Will I figure out what actually makes sense? so it's in the, I'm being a guinea pig for Every in the studio. Everyone in the studio is also being a bit of a guinea pig to me. And so Spiral is kind of this symbiotic relationship.