In this episode of 'The Next Next,' host Jason Jacobs interviews Jay Singh, co-founder and CEO of Casper Studios, a New York-based AI product studio. Jay shares insights into his journey from working at LinkedIn to founding Casper Studios, where the team designs and develops custom AI solutions for startups and creators. The discussion delves into topics such as the founding story of Casper Studios, the evolution of their client base, and the types of AI products they develop. Additionally, Jay talks about his personal entrepreneurial journey, the implications of AI for the agency world, and the excitement and challenges of working with AI tools. Jason and Jay explore the broader implications of AI on workflows, product development, and the future of customer interactions. The conversation also touches on strategies for client acquisition and the potential impact of multimodal AI models. Throughout, Jay shares his insights on driving business growth, the importance of understanding customer needs, and the evolving landscape of AI-driven product development.
Exploring the Intersection of AI and Creation with Jay Singh of Casper Studios In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs sits down with Jay Singh, co-founder and CEO of Casper Studios, a New York-based AI product studio. Jay shares his journey from working at LinkedIn to founding Casper Studios, which focuses on designing and developing custom AI solutions for startups and creators. They discuss the compelling need for AI tools in product development, the creative processes behind building AI solutions, and the importance of understanding one's target audience. Jay elaborates on his strategic focus on creators with large followings, his excitement about new AI functionalities like multimodal models, and how he plans to balance product development with running an agency. This conversation dives deep into how AI is redefining the agency world and the creative economy.
00:00 Introduction to Jay Singh and Casper Studios
00:50 Founding Story and Early Days of Casper Studios
03:58 Jay's Background and Journey to AI
05:47 First AI Product and Transition to Full-Time
06:26 Casper Studios' Business Model and Client Focus
14:35 Building AI Products for Creators
21:51 AI Tools and Team Dynamics
26:36 Common Pitfalls for Creators
26:53 Understanding Your Audience
28:19 AI's Impact on Creativity and Critical Thinking
32:24 The Future of Agencies in the AI Era
34:05 Balancing Product Development and Agency Work
39:22 Leveraging AI for Business Growth
44:03 Exploring Funding and Business Models
48:14 Final Thoughts and Farewell
Jason Jacobs: Today on The Next Next, our guest is Jay Singh, co founder and CEO of Casper Studios. Casper Studios is a New York based AI product studio that designs and develops custom AI solutions for startups, as well as building their own AI products in house. Before founding Casper Studios, Jay spent over five years at LinkedIn, where he played a pivotal role in expanding identity verification services globally, including markets like India, Europe, and Latin America.
Now, I actually reached out to Jay cold because he was building this agency, Casper Studios. He's been doing it a few years now, focused squarely on AI products. And I really wanted to know what was going on under the hood at one of these companies. And Jay was kind enough to take my call and to agree to come on the show.
We talked about the founding story for Casper Studios, how it started as a nights and weekends endeavor. We talked about what first led Jay to get down the path with AI tools and how that. Exploration is gone, which things he's doing himself as a non engineer and which things he's recruited. Partners for we talk about the customer profile and how, initially it was kind of a wide range, but they've been zeroing in on the creator market because creators have big followings and a lot of ways that they can monetize and stuff they can build, but they don't necessarily have technical teams in house and AI is a nice fit to leverage both for building the products as well as the functionality, , that the products can have as well. And we also talk about Jay's plans for Casper Studios. , we talk about where this is going. We talk about what the implications of AI will be for the agency world. And we talk about what kinds of products Jay is most excited about.
At any rate, this is a good one. And I hope you enjoy it. But before we get started
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay, Jay Singh, welcome to the show.
Jay Singh: Hey, Jason, thanks for having me.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks for coming. Yeah, thanks for accepting my cold LinkedIn outreach with no warm connections or credibility. So I greatly appreciate you. Being generous with your time. And we didn't even do a prep call. We're just doing it live here.
Jay Singh: I respect anybody who does that because I do it all the time myself.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, but the reason I reached out is that seemingly, it seemed like you were at LinkedIn for a while and you were doing various things in sales and business development and you Left a few years ago and started a firm that is doing building AI applications for clients and also building your own products in house.
And I don't know a ton more than that, to be honest, but I'm really interested to learn and generally. At the Next, if if I'm having a discussion where I'm excited to learn and the person's comfortable, I just record it so that other people can learn too so here we are.
Jay Singh: I love it. I love it.
Jason Jacobs: Kicking things off, maybe just talk a bit about Casper Studios and what you do.
Jay Singh: Sounds good. I also like the bent that you take with your guests around more personal upbringing and everything too. So I'm going to give an intro on that and then I'll get to the business. Does that sound
Jason Jacobs: Awesome, yeah, oh yeah.
Jay Singh: Cool. A lot of it connects to me in terms of
Jason Jacobs: I would have asked you that next anyways, so yeah, so it's,
Jay Singh: I'll give it to you.
I'll give it to you sooner. I'll give it to you sooner. Yeah, both I was born in the Bay area. Both parents are Indian immigrants. Came to the Bay Area in the nineties classic kind of immigrant story of, dad was a cab driver. Mom supported him. They both became real estate agents and built like businesses, but I've always, been an entrepreneur, not because they really had a choice because that's just the only way that they could have, earned a keep.
We immigrated then to Canada. That's where most of my formative years were from 11 to after graduating college based in Vancouver. I went to university at UBC, which is a really beautiful campus and college on the West side of Vancouver and,
Jason Jacobs: You a skier or a
Jay Singh: yeah I didn't realize how good I had it, but I literally learned how to snowboard and on Whistler Mountain and
Jason Jacobs: Ah.
Jay Singh: later.
Yeah. Later. I only recognize how good I had it. And yeah, got into it a lot more actually during covert, which is great. I I then graduated came down to LinkedIn. I started working at LinkedIn out of school. Was in their sales team and product team and then BD teams their lead started our verification efforts.
So if you see any check marks on your LinkedIn profile that was a small team that myself and a few engineers then helped scale up to around 50M members verified over the course of a year and a half. That was a ton of fun was a deal lead for LinkedIn and clear LinkedIn and persona and a couple other government bodies across the world.
And then I leverage some of those relationships and insights to learn more about AI Microsoft owned LinkedIn. And so at the time, this was the summer of 2022 the teams at Microsoft were really excited about this new, interesting AI company called OpenAI. I don't know if you've heard of them.
And so got a little bit of a sneak peek, maybe like literally two months ahead of the world to be like, Whoa, this is going to be really interesting. And so I've always been interested in new technology. So just started to hack away on the side with a few friends. One of those products that we built, it's a Chrome extension, ended up getting up to 20, 000 users.
And while that wasn't a big success. We just use that as a way to go out and ask other founders and other businesses, Hey, if you need help designing and building AI products we're not necessarily experts at the time. We just said that at once. But if you need help, let us know. And so I've effectively just been saying that for the past two years.
Jason Jacobs: And was that nice and weekends at the time or
Jay Singh: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I did that for a year, part time and then earned enough revenue to be able to feel confident to make the jump early last year.
Jason Jacobs: got it? I have more questions about that, but maybe just skip ahead for a minute and talk about Casper studios and what you do.
Jay Singh: Yep. So the business today helps creators and founders to be able to design and build AI products. We then use those learnings to be able to design and build our own. I then share all of that on LinkedIn and social media to be able to help attract more creators and founders. And so that's the main key flywheel that I'm starting to see more iterations on we, we help other people build products because of that.
We learned what's going on. So we build our own and I'm able to share a lot of that myself on LinkedIn. That helps us to attract more customers. That's the business that
Jason Jacobs: Nice. And and so when you first started messing around with these tools, so you're not a technologist by training, correct?
Jay Singh: I'm just the BD guy
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. Yeah. Like me. Tell me a bit about that exploration. Where did you start? How did it go? What'd you learn?
Jay Singh: Yeah, I was very grateful for my time at LinkedIn. Actually I became the new tech kid. They put me on web three for a little bit when that was a thing. And then when I started coming up again, too, they're like, just go figure out what's going on here. And so that actually it was awesome that they provided me the opportunity to go get paid to learn and share insights back to the team.
And whether it's meeting other startups in this space and just generally trying to help, LinkedIn get up to speed on what was happening. This was almost 3 years ago now. So that is what kind of got me into the space more that through work and it just like everybody else, when you start playing around with these tools, it just captured your attention.
And that was how that original journey started for me.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And at what point did it switch from playing around and getting to know the tools to building things and what was the first thing that you built?
Jay Singh: Yeah. Also related to some of the work that I was doing at LinkedIn. So the BD function and a lot of these tech companies, but at least that LinkedIn, a lot of it was around being able to understand ecosystem insights and be able to then share it with your internal product teams to help them make decisions on, what products they should launch, what markets they should get into.
And so a lot of that work was just reading a lot of articles, getting up to speed with whatever tech crunch articles there were. Yeah. If, if X competitor launched a similar feature in a different region, we'd always get these emails being sent by our CEO say, what does this mean for us?
You drop everything. You'd have to read a bunch of articles, get up to speed on it, and then create the so what for the company. So I'd say half of the time was just reading. And so I was using playground at the time. This is before chat, just to. Copy paste articles, dump it into Playground and then be able to get a summary of it.
I felt like I was cheating a little bit at the time because I was able to get the summary of at least that news insight really quickly. And so I, I was like, wow, it would be really great if we could actually just be able to have this experience wherever you are. And so just put together a PRD, shared it with a few designer friends and just let it go.
I didn't really think much about it. One of those designers ended up shipping, that PRD of a Chrome extension that could help summarize content really easily on a web page using AI. He designed a Figma prototype of it, and I was like, holy shit, this needs to be in the world immediately. And then like a traveling salesperson just took the Figma around to other friends that were engineering counterparts to see if anybody would build it out for us.
And that was our first product. That was a product that ended up getting up to 20, 000 users. Of helping users to summarize webpages really easily using AI.
Jason Jacobs: Got it. And with the success of that product what was the next step from there? And were you, and also, were you still thinking about it as just a hobby to learn at this point or, how did that transition start occurring where you felt like maybe this could be something more?
Jay Singh: Yeah, that's a good question. I, at the time it was more just a hobby and a way for me to learn what the best in class technology is. So honestly, this helped my day job. And I think when I realized that this could become a business is when we just, we like brought on our first customer and they were like, Hey, we need to, AI product as well.
Here's our unique insight on the market. Can you help us do that? And, we did that on nights and weekends myself and our designer and our engineer that had built that original Chrome extension. And so I think getting paid for building a product to for somebody else was the 1st time.
I was like, oh, what is this business called? Oh, it's an agency. Interesting. Let me learn more about that. And so that was the first time where I was like, okay, if I can get, X amount more of these, I can cover my salary and then that'll lead to Y amount. And so that was the early days of building out the business.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And so in those earliest days, were the roles on the team pretty similar to if it wasn't building AI products and it was just traditional software?
Jay Singh: Yeah, exactly. You had someone who was more familiar with ML and AI that we're building on top of these models, but in reality, it could also just been a full stack developer who is. Who wanted to learn, like, how these models work, how these APIs work. I don't think you necessarily, at least for the products that we're developing, need to have some crazy expertise in AI.
While we do have that on the team, at least at that stage we had that on our team. But I think any full stack developer that really wants to lean in and learn these models, learn prompting, learn how they all work understand the pros and cons of each of these. Can become really valuable to teams instead of necessarily coming from an AI background.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And what about a non Fillstack developer who might not be an engineer at all? Maybe they come from a sales and business development background like you. For example if they want to bring AI products into the world, should they? Go find someone technical to build it like you did or do you think the tools are getting to a place where they can build products themselves?
Jay Singh: I think I heard you say something like this in a podcast, but I think it's important for people to know what their zone of genius is and what gives them a lot of energy. What gives me a lot of energy is having conversations like this, meeting with potential founders, like understanding what they want to build.
And then, inspiring a team, whether it's our team or the client team to be able to build that. That's always been my skill set and where I like to spend time. For me, I never really thought about building a one person shop the entire time, even if the AI tools are getting to a place where I could do that the reality on the field is that you can build really great kind of early versions of a product quick proof of concepts like.
Early, early MVPs using no code automation tools. You can use cursor, you can spin up designs in V0 but to actually, have a customer feel like you can launch it to, hundreds of thousands of users, or even tens of thousands of daily active users. Like I, I still want to be able to have a stamp of approval from a really competent engineer that they've been able to build that product and a really competent designer that they've been able to design that product.
So long winded way to say just understand what you like, and if you want to be able to lean in to build these tools, have at it, that's awesome. For me, I've always wanted to come with my product strategy, my BD lens, and also team that up with design and engineering. So it could be a smaller team, it could be like a three person team instead of a six person team.
Because of AI tools, but I still want to feel I still want to have those experts around me as well. I
Jason Jacobs: And maybe talk a bit about the types of projects you did initially and how that's evolved over time. And then the same question in terms of the types of clients that you worked with initially and how that's evolved over time. In no particular order.
Jay Singh: mean, 1st year of business, just trying to assign whoever to be able to earn a keep and start bootstrapping. We haven't raised any outside capital, so effectively anybody that was coming inbound and asked for a little bit of AI support or AI product development, we were focusing on them. The customers in the 1st year of business were pretty.
We're, it ran the gamut, whether it was, one of the top 20 fiction book publishers in the US who wanted us to be able to design and build a product that would help authors to get feedback using like LLMs for their manuscripts. That was like a product that we designed and built a PR agency in Singapore that wanted to be able to automate their own internal processes, externalize a product, and then give that to founders to create PR campaigns.
And so there was a creator that wanted to be able to partner with us to learn what her audience wants and be able to design and build a product that fits the content she shares to that audience. And that, that those are a couple of kind of examples of some of the customers we worked with early on that last example actually has been important because it's I've understood that maybe our niche should be with more of those people where, and I can share why, which is helping establish creators to be able to design and build AI products.
That's actually been our, like this year, that's been our ICP, that's been our focus and it's opening up a lot of really great opportunities with folks that are. I think on the surface or they feel like creators, but in reality the scale that they're at is like a series B, series C company.
They're doing like 10 million, 10 million of revenue a year. They have like massive audiences. And I want to position our business to be able to help those established creators to be able to monetize their audience through software development.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And what are some examples of how software development might enable those creators to monetize their audience?
Jay Singh: I think creators as an industry or creators as a, like a type of person in the economy, I think a lot more influence is going to go towards, that segment of the population. We're already seeing it, the election last year was coined the podcast election more capital is flowing into these creators.
Today, you really just see, a very large amount of inequality between the economic success of these creators. The top, 1%, top 5%, making quite a bit of capital. And I think. On average, the creators outside of that bucket are making like 40, 000 a year. So there's a very big gap that being said, I think over time, we'll have more influence go to these individual creators.
More influence will come in more capital. And that's the tailwind that I want to try to also align our business with the question was around like what, why build software for audience.
Jason Jacobs: The question was you'd made the comment that software can help them better monetize their audiences. So it'd be great to understand. I didn't ask this. This first part in the initial question, but I'm going to add it now, what ways they're typically monetizing their audience and then how software can help them either monetize in those ways better or monetize in additional or alternative ways.
Jay Singh: Yeah, great question. So today, the way that creators will make their capital, it'll be a mix between maybe like brand deals advertising relationships or companies to be able to share about those companies on their content. YouTube is by far like the platform that creators will make the most amount of capital, both from YouTube revenue share that is offered to them and also the brand deals that go like brands feel more comfortable advertising with creators on YouTube, because there's just like longer form content and the rates could be higher for creators because you have their attention longer than short form content.
And it's a mix between brand deals, like YouTube rev share, it could be digital courses like these types of like levers. And I think it's, I think like building a product company is still not necessarily spoken about. I think the networks are not they don't speak to each other that often.
Obviously you have successes of like creators that are building software products. James Clear is one, one example. He's built his book. He created his book, Atomic Habits. And then build an application that would align to support the problems that reader had, which was that, okay, I've read this book.
I don't know how to track my habits. Can you help me with that as well? And so he designed and built a mobile app to help, help them track their habits better. And so those are a couple those are some of the way some of the revenue streams that they're doing that they're making today.
And then it's a curiosity to maybe explore software development as 1 way to also monetize.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And I'm curious. When you say AI applications, it's still a little confusing to me because AI can help. Build applications. And so I think leveraging AI to build software is part of the AI story and then having functionality within the products that leverage AI to fulfill it is also AI.
When you say AI applications for customers or creators, what do you mean?
Jay Singh: It's external facing products that are leveraging AI in the background and versus, and our team is using AI to be able to make our works more efficient but when I'm talking about developing and designing AI products, I think like a software product and that software product has AI at its core.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. Do you think that the amount That a team uses a I in their product functionality and the amount that they're using it for their internal development tend to go together. Or do you see why disparity sometimes where they might not have it in their products, but use it a bunch internally or vice versa?
Jay Singh: It's a good question. I think the more that customers are experimenting internally to just help their workflows, they start to then think of ideas that they're like, Oh, why don't I just make this into a product that I can sell to customers? I mostly see that happening where the internal automations and optimizations, even just using chat, GBT for themselves, they're realizing, wow, okay.
If I can do this plus this, like maybe I could actually monetize off of this and make some money off of it. I don't, I rarely see the opposite happening. It's mostly just internal first and then external.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And a bit of a different question. But for clients who might come to you do they tend to come when they have a specific product that they want to build? Or do you? Tend to get 'em at the stage where it's we're on the treadmill over here. Just, building and maintaining what we already have, but we keep hearing about this AI wave and we're worried we're gonna go left, get left behind, but we don't know where to start.
Jay Singh: I'd say it's somewhere in the middle. They, let's say they have an existing business. They are curious about how to be able to build a product. They keep hearing about AI and they're wondering if they can connect those kind of two concepts together. And so we actually do a lot of just like general like product strategy work before we even start building the product.
I think that's where our team can. We're not just like the dev shop effectively, like you can come to us and we'll think through the market and we'll think through the strategy. I'll put my BD hat on go talk to all the founders of the companies that are peers of this potential product that can all help guide what that product should look like.
So it's rarely they have a very specific idea of what they want to be able to build. They have an idea and then it's our job to be able to help them help guide that to the right. initial product to be able to develop. So yeah somewhere in the middle,
Jason Jacobs: And do you tend to take, stay engaged after the initial product is built and launched or are you more about spinning it up and then passing it off to maintain and improve?
Jay Singh: it depends on the team and the team structure that they have. We found that actually, when we worked with founders, we would do a really good job, but then they would just have, they have like team members to be able to take it internally. And so that was, we started to see our, the creator customers that we had They didn't have access to the type of talent that we were as readily were a commodity for startups effectively.
After we build out that initial kind of like a POC or MVP for them, because they've already, if they're well funded, they've already hired other people who were used to work at LinkedIn or Google, et cetera. We found that for creators, there's because the networks aren't as collaborative, we can actually benefit them over the long term, but even for them, it just depends if they have a team internally, they'll take it internally.
But we offer monthly maintenance contracts as well to be able to keep the product. Live or continuing to shift features for it.
Jason Jacobs: So it, it sounds like the fruit is riper for creators who don't have sophisticated technical teams in house.
Jay Singh: Yeah, exactly.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. For companies that do have sophisticated technical teams in house but have not historically done much with AI what's different about it? Is it just about Switching your attention the way you would from, building in this language to building in that language or or is there more to it?
Jay Singh: I think a lot of it will come down to because we're building these products for a bunch of different customers, like we can try to help them sift through the noise a little bit faster versus them just doing it themselves. So we know. You know these you're going to go spend like a month trying to mess around with this model with this architecture, but maybe just try this because we already did that a month and a half ago.
Or, maybe we have preferred partners of our vendors that we're working with, so we might have extra credits or something that we can provide to people. And and so I think the difference when people come to us is, I think people just trust our perspective when it comes to like, where, how to build and design these products whether it's from product strategy all the way to actual the design of the product as well. So that's how that's how we usually end up helping and winning.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And I guess what's different about how you work, either the way you work and process or the skill sets required on the team, given that you're focused on AI applications versus if it was just web or mobile applications without incorporating AI?
Jay Singh: Yeah, it's a great question. We're seeing our growth start to pick up quite a bit from a revenue perspective. And it's still our business is still in a state where, is not going to automate all of this work. It's going to be like, I need to staff more people to be able to go with the science.
So I'm hiring a lot right now and. What I'm looking for is someone who has good, let's say, engineering skill set or good design skill set, but has been messing around with these AI tools a little bit. I start to see that there's like a divergence of engineers or designers that kind of they are very good at what they do and they are very proud of what they do.
And a lot of them may see AI as a cheap tool or a something that's getting them away from their craft, which is very fair. I think we can talk about maybe why I agree with that in some sense. At the same time, for people that are going to be coming onto the team, I need to see that they've been experimenting with these tools a little bit.
I need to see that they've been Up to speed with, if they're a designer have you used B zero? Have you even tried it out yet? And if the answer is no then I'm like, okay, why? I would probably be messing around with this tool a little bit and tell me why, where's the gap, tell me why it's not valuable, tell me where it is valuable.
Same thing with the cursors, same thing with the GitHub copilot, like for engineers or maybe they've shipped small little POC using LLMs. I want to see that there's some excitement around AI, because if they're not excited about it, then it's like that. How can we help our customers be able to build AI products?
We have to be. Up to speed with everything that's going on as much as we can. So it's it's more, it's less the skill set. It's more the curiosity because it's such a new space. So everybody can get up to speed on it right now.
Jason Jacobs: And so for the creators that you do work with, once you've built a product, I know you said it depends whether you stick around for maintenance or not. What does it depend on? And then when you do the handoff, when it comes to maintaining and improving this stuff internally, if they didn't have teams historically, what kind of teams do they need to get in place?
And how is that different, if at all, from how it would have been before AI?
Jay Singh: I don't think, I think you'd be surprised with it's not too different. I think the difference is likely just the quantity of people that need to support a product. But outside of that, it's I've really copied and pasted what I've learned on LinkedIn to apply for our customers, right?
We have, we'll have a project manager who split like half of the time with other customers to manage it. We'll have a full time engineer that's staffed on it to be able to either maintain it or to build more features on it. If they want to move faster, we'll be able to allocate more resources towards it.
So it's less, it's I think it's less dramatically different than maybe how people would perceive it from the outside reading Twitter and one person teams building all these things. We haven't, we make sure, because we're in the client services business as well, that we do have a person staffed for you to help you.
And I'm proud of that. I want to keep doing that. Depends. So the creator, what happens in the maintenance mode, I think is. Is how what the ambition of the application is, so if people want to keep it relatively simple and they don't want to spend a bunch of time on it, and they just wanted to be able to monetize a little bit, and they don't want to start a sales team and build a whole org around it.
Then it's actually relatively simple but some of our creators are building this as a business. And so we will be, maybe staffing two engineers like on that project and shipping more features. We'll be getting into sprints. We'll be, like focus just like any product development team would be focused on.
So yeah, I guess it just depends on the ambition of the creator and why they're building the product in the first place.
Jason Jacobs: And what are some common pitfalls in terms of when clients do reach out or perspective clients? Do you see them fall into traps and have misconceptions and things like that? And are there parallels across the companies that you hear from?
Jay Singh: I think understanding their audience enough is an interesting place that we've been helping creators. They may not they may not know who their audience really is and what they want exactly. Part of that is because the platforms that they build content on don't provide that insight to them, really.
They have to do more manual efforts, reach out to them maybe have more FAQs, live sessions. It's more human oriented versus just click a couple buttons and see exactly who's in your audience. I know for myself, on LinkedIn, I don't actually I have to scroll through manually to understand insights about my audience.
So even for me, I would need help for someone or myself if I had the time for it, just to go deep on my own audience and see Oh, Jason's in there. What does Jason want? What is he looking for? What are his problems? How many people like Jason are following me? So thinking through more market insights, product strategy competitive landscape user research more of the early stages of, like, why you should build a product and how that relates to their audience.
I find that to be, like A potential pitfall, because you can come in thinking that, you know what you want to build. And then we've seen many examples of just like a product that just goes up and usage and then just dies because it, it was just a little bit of curiosity play versus actually sustaining longer term.
Value to that person, so that's where I think a lot of people may have a pitfall right at the beginning stages of, like, why are you even doing this? And for who versus just coming in with a pretty broad idea of that.
Jason Jacobs: Huh. And it's and similar to what you're saying about the kind of the bifurcation of the A. I. Curious versus the ones who are almost offended by its mere existence. I think there's a similar bifurcation in terms of on the one spectrum. If you ask people what the implications of I will be, they give you the most dramatic version about how You know, none of us are going to have work to do anymore and we better pick up some hobbies and stuff like that.
And then others who say, like on the other side, it's it's a lot more incremental. It's really not going to change a lot in the small and medium term. It's just another tool. And yeah, it can drive some efficiency and it can make things easier. And you'd be silly not to use it. But like the world as we know it is largely going to look like the world as we know it.
Directionally, how do you think about that?
Jay Singh: Yeah, it's a million dollar question. I try to live in the middle somewhere. I think it's prudent on me not to be lost in one camp or the other and just to be grounded in what's happening. What I'm noticing happening is that the fact that these tools are so readily available for people, it's opening up a new level of creativity and ambition.
In a lot of folks to create more and they try the products, they experiment with it. They realize, wow, I could actually do these other things with this and it creates even more almost like optimism or excitement around wanting to build something. It's I think it's like, Jimen's paradox, or the more available something is for people, the more people and the cheaper it is, the more people want to be able to produce it.
I'm definitely seeing that. I have a lot of our clients are, they come in and they've already built like a thing and, replit and they built a thing and cursor. And now it's breaking and it's not really working, but they already got some excited customers on board and now they need us to actually, professionalize it.
That's awesome. They wouldn't have that wouldn't have been an engagement for us unless these tools are so readily available. I think the biggest, I think the biggest thing that I'm personally trying to monitor around AI usage is the impact to my critical thinking. I'm worried about that, personally.
I, just like checking my phone now, I go to chat to BT immediately when I need to think through a problem. And that is, that feels in the short term, a nice Like a nice productivity boost, but in the medium to long term, I likely become redundant. Then, like, why are people paying me?
Or why would I even have a job then if I'm outsourcing my thinking to this tool that everybody else has access to as well? What is my differentiator over time? I worry about that for myself. And even like with my writing, for example, my best writing was in, was before Chacha Boutique came out was when I had to just sit and look at a Google Doc and like really gram edit everything and make sure everything flew, was flowing properly.
And I'm almost trying to not, I'm trying to get rid of those tools now and just focus on my own kind of creative output so I can feel more confident in my critical thinking. I think if we aren't careful about that piece, we'll just outsource everything to this and it'll likely go leave us.
All thinking the same and not thinking uniquely anymore, which I'm that I'm concerned about just for myself.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I guess the question that comes to mind hearing that is that if you are focused on carving at the time and trying to resist the temptation to turn to the tools, are you doing that because that's going to deliver the best outcome? Or are you just doing that as a martyr who doesn't want to accept the fact that the machines might, that we might not be as special as we have historically been told that we are.
Jay Singh: Yeah, that's a good question. My thing has been around output. I don't think I'm delivering the best output if I'm just focused right away, being able to outsource my thinking to AI. I think I, personally, it's my best work is me just with the empty Google Doc thinking and then jumping into it to refine my thought process versus the creation of it.
Yeah, it's
Jason Jacobs: I'm no expert on the agency world, but I've heard rumblings that as AI tools proliferate, that agencies will be under threat. And here you are on year two or three of kind of digging in to go and build an agency. Granted, it's in an area where the puck is going, but it, it, by and large, Is an agency.
You use the word. What do you think is going to happen with agencies in general, and what are you seeing, and and then how do you think about the implications of that for Casper Studios?
Jay Singh: a good question. I'm learning myself about a lot of these business models. Like my background is coming from tech and my friends are YC founders and doing that kind of thing. And so my networks and my learnings actually are not within this type of business model. So frankly, a lot of it for me is also a learning process.
My, yeah.
Jason Jacobs: by the way. I say that when I don't know, and a lot of people feel like they can't, and you
Jay Singh: Yeah. No. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. It's right now, I am having a lot of fun. AI is it's so dynamic that this actually is providing us the ability to almost take an index fund approach to AI for startups. It's I'm seeing like, I'm like seeing a lot of where the market is right now, but I'm not personally saying this is where I need to go as a founder.
And I do think that there will be a time where. Just like through maybe it's like its own kind of like team that's it's like reports up to this agency. That is just like more startup focus, which we do. We ship our own products as well. Yeah,
Jason Jacobs: Just a Chrome extension so far, or have you done others?
Jay Singh: yeah, we shipped another one 2 weeks ago, which is the voice journal. It's a mobile application. You can download it yourself. It's called a record book. It was our attempt to learn more about how these voice models are interacting with folks. It was really helpful for our learning.
Jason Jacobs: But anyways, I didn't mean to keep you off or cut you off. Keep going. You were talking about how you also build your own products and that you're almost like an index fund approach across what's happening in AI.
Jay Singh: It's hard to know where the space is going. And while it's, while I still want to, I still want to be involved with the space. This feels like the best way for me to be able to do that. It's I may not get like the unicorn outcome in terms of valuation and like exiting, but that's not necessarily where my lifestyle goal is oriented around.
If I can build a business that's doing, like 50 percent margin 5 to 6 million dollars of annual revenue that's great. And I can, at least today, see out in the next few years to be able to achieve that running agency. Yeah, I'm, I don't know. I'm learning. I'm learning as I go.
How would you think about it? Do you have friends that are running agencies right now and thinking to this problem?
Jason Jacobs: No. And you're one of the first agencies I've talked to about it, which is why I was Excited to speak with you. And to be honest, I haven't even really dug in on the whys behind the people saying that the agencies will face increasing pressure. I guess it makes sense if you take stuff that historically has been done by humans and you give people the tools in house to do more of it themselves, then at minimum, there'll be pricing pressure, right?
But but yeah, no, it's just an area that I'm also still learning about What about the mix? Do you? Do you think you'll be an agency for as far as the eye can see? Or are you going to get more serious about the internal products? And what job are you hiring the internal products to do?
You mentioned learning. So maybe that's the job. But do you have any commercial aspirations with those products as well?
Jay Singh: Yeah, totally. I think there's a world where. It's maybe it's like running both businesses at the same time where we just have our product incubations team, and we have our agency team. And, they fly, they go together in really fun ways, because we're learning so much working with founders.
And if we build more, then we can help our founders a lot more too, and our creators, because we're just actually building it versus just talking about it or building it for other folks. Listen, Jason, it's 1 of these product incubations end up just really crushing it. And we really nailed distribution.
I'm happy to allocate a good portion of our team to just focus on that product. And so I think part of this idea of helping creators is I get to learn more about distribution, and I get to learn about the new way to be able to sell products, which is, tick tock and YouTube and creating content.
And so it's. It's like this interesting, like I'm learning how to distribute my products better because I'm working with people that know how to do that really well. So I'm okay, cool. Maybe we do try to talk, maybe we do try just like product that I think no one really heard about yet to promote our application.
And yeah, I think if we can nail distribution for one of these products. I'm happy to allocate, a lot of my time towards it. There's also some really cool there's really cool functionality coming out this year that I think will, that I'm finally feeling very confident about okay, that could be a really good bet.
And it's like the intersection of all of these models coming together and what the use cases could be for that. It's like multimodal models. Terrible wording. But that finally has piqued my interest in terms of, okay I think I could see myself really, going heads, heads down on this area.
But so far, so excited about building the agency.
Jason Jacobs: What's excited about it? My sinus infection is inhibiting my ability to ask clear questions, but what is exciting about these multimodal models?
Jay Singh: Yeah, it's just a new way of interacting with your computers and your software. There's a really good demo that Google launched I think about a month ago. So you can, I can link it to you later, Jason. But you see the demo that you see is. A individual sharing their screen and having a conversation with a bot.
That's just helping you do your job better. And like, why that's interesting. And, we've been hacking away on a couple of these products ourselves. Why it's been interesting for me is that it's all just, it's all just coming together really easily. Now now I can just, screen share.
I have the AI that's looking at my screen. I can open my camera. I can look at me. I can go through the products and they could guide me through it and everything. So think like any onboarding use cases or any like FAQ or any kind of help centers. Or I don't know why like you ever need to read necessarily a help center before.
It should just be like someone like guiding you through it, right? But instead of that like Salesforce admin expert, that's sitting in the corner of your office it's going to be these agents that have all of these connected. They can speak to you via the voice model functionality.
They can look at the screen and look at you from my computer vision functionality. They can connect to the internet from like search functionality. They, you can upload a bunch of data and they can like leverage reg to be able to present it to you. So it's it's all of it coming together in an interesting way, which I think yeah, I, using these tools, I've had my next ChatGPT moment, and I haven't actually felt that for a while of whole this is going to be the new way that we interact with technology.
What the heck can you do with this thing? So yeah, that's been pretty exciting for me as of late
Jason Jacobs: Given how quickly the landscape's evolving in terms of The number of tools, the types of tools, the capability with those tools, et cetera. How do you find you stay on top of what's happening internally? And do you try to be generalist and get to know every tool? Or do you have standard tools that you've relied on consistently and a playbook, if you will that you lean on time and time again?
Jay Singh: and clarifying question. Do you mean tools that we use internally or do you mean maybe types of types, like within broader AI, like where we try to specialize voice or
Jason Jacobs: Could be either, to be honest. Yeah, it could be tools you're using internally to build, or it could be Tools that you're incorporating into products for your clients or for or on your own. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the landscape is evolving quickly across both of those dimensions.
Jay Singh: yeah, totally. Maybe internal and external, internal. I really liked using B0. It's like a, have you used B0 before? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Jason Jacobs: I've messed around with it a little bit, but I haven't used anything seriously, which I keep meaning to address, but but I'm a little booked in my zone of excellence as we've been discussing.
Jay Singh: yeah, exactly. Sometimes you just someone asked me like, Oh what are all the tools to use? I'm like, just use Chatshubpt better. Maybe you don't need to use everything. Maybe you just really focus on one and get really good at it. And stop being like, ah, there's so much to do.
That's so for me, it's not a lot of internal tools, frankly. It's like v0. And then I know my engineering team uses cursor to be able to build product faster. And then I used to chat to BT, deep research, like browsing, like every day. And so I actually don't use a lot of these internal those are my, that's my stack right now.
Effectively externally I think I think the 2 use cases that I'm excited to help recommend to our clients is around voice interaction. And then an extension, like I just mentioned around multimodal interaction. So I'm always it may not be a perfect fit for the use case that they want to develop or deploy, but I'm always pushing them to think about what's a way to be able to interact with this product via voice.
I think I don't know if. I think if we could have used our voice versus learning how to type, we would have just done that, but the technology wasn't there yet. So I think the future of software is going to be a lot of interaction, a lot of voice typing when needed. And so I'm always like looking for how I can integrate voice for those products.
And then now over time, it'll be how we can integrate voice plus vision, plus all these other pieces for multimodal.
Jason Jacobs: How do you get new business?
Jay Singh: All of our leads come from LinkedIn. I haven't done any outbound sales or anything just yet. Which Which is good, which has been mostly good. I had a mentor of mine tell me that was, that's a dumb answer because you need to be outbound as forcing us to be more focused on our ICP. And so now as I, as we like scale of the team, I'm going to start doing outbound.
But yeah, it's an all LinkedIn content.
Jason Jacobs: What do you think about using AI on the go to market side and potential versus pitfalls there
Jay Singh: Yeah, maybe I'd split it into like inbound outbound as a simple kind of framing. I think outbound is where people are leaning up really heavily on these like FCR AI tools and, leveraging Apollo and Lendless and all these platforms. I think there's a lot of value there. I do where I do see all these emails come in myself from people that are likely using these things and I just like immediately discredit them just as a potential buyer of these solutions.
So I'm sure it's worth it. I'm sure it has a place and people are going to be using these outbound tools to be able to get ahold of people. But at least with regards to email, it feels like it's a, I don't know, it's it's just a graveyard out there. I would, if people were asking I would actually do outbound via voice.
Speaking of I would maybe even try leveraging your original voice plus AI to be able to cold call people. Cold voicemail people have an interaction with the bot. I would try that if I was doing outbound. So that's like the outbound side in terms of AI functionality.
Inbound, how I define inbound is effectively content creation. And for that, I would for me, my content creation engine is really oriented around my meeting transcripts. And so how do I leverage my meeting notes across my internal team, but also with clients, when given the approval for it, be able to leverage that to create content ideas for myself.
And so that actually is like a really nice way to be able to build like a, an engine to use meeting notes, transcribe them leverage AI to be able to create content from it. That's been very valuable for me.
Jason Jacobs: any preferred tools for AI content creation?
Jay Singh: For me, I use fireflies in terms of my transcript. There's a company called Tone, which is putting together all of these pieces. And then I will then take, I will take that to either Claude or ChatGPT to be able to come up with content ideas. But then I try to from there, just go to Google Doc and start writing and typing versus just copying and pasting what it told me.
But yeah Tone is really good at being able to leverage meeting. notes and create content from it. So I've been testing out that tool. It's been pretty helpful.
Jason Jacobs: Cool. When you think directionally, are you going to stay bootstrapped for as far as the eye can see? Any thought of of raising capital yourselves?
Jay Singh: I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. Honestly, as a venture person as of late, I think I feel more confident about potentially raising capital. Now. I think the first year and a bit felt like, let me just go figure my stuff out. And now with the creator focus, like there's a suite of products we can start to build it.
We can start building for them. There's a, there's like a platform where you can start thinking about commonalities across these creators to start building for. So I think now that I have More focus around our ICP. It's helping me think that and we're starting to see the revenue uptick because of that.
I'm like, okay, maybe actually there is a place for raising venture. But how would you think about it? It's also right now an agency, so venture doesn't really love those types of business models, which makes sense.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, anything purely services is hard.
Jay Singh: Exactly.
Jason Jacobs: And plus, why would you, if you didn't need to if you find that you're cutting into bone and there's these other things you want to do and you just can't get there fast enough, then maybe consider it. But even then, I don't think, I don't think venture is right.
Now, if you had a product that you caught a tiger by the tail and you were going to spin that out into a company,
Jay Singh: Exactly.
Jason Jacobs: That's a different story. Gosh, I had a question somewhere in there. Oh, have you looked at Slow Ventures creator fund at all?
Jay Singh: Oh, I should I really want to connect with that team because they're focused on
Jason Jacobs: coming on, Megan's coming on the show. Yeah, and and it's, yeah, it's really interesting because they're, they have the same observation as you that that people are brands, right? And people with followings and strong brands can launch products. And yeah, and in some ways I'm a creator but I think, yeah, the thing, back to your should you raise one of the things I think about is sure, if I had a small team, There's a lot more I could get done and I want that small team and this is just like a journey It's not a business So I'd be crazy to fund that small team out of savings when I'm already worried about how I'm gonna feed my family so that doesn't make sense.
It's oh go raise it's yeah But if you raise then all of a sudden you have expectations and it needs to track to be Excised to be interesting and there's other voices at the table and like the whole flux of it in control Is paramount. And yeah, fortunately, I have some time right now and the goal is to get it to a point where it's self sustaining before I run out of time.
But if I can do that and keep, external voices out I think that's better unless I became convinced that they were so aligned around this bigger thing. And so aligned both in terms of the what, but also the how, yeah, and maybe that will come, but that's not where I am today.
Jay Singh: I know we're on time, but that could also be like some of the services component for you to write. Maybe there's some speaking engagements, or maybe there's some consulting that you can do to be able to get the profit. So then you can allocate the capital towards building product,
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I'm not trying to get rich. I'm trying to feed the machine. In order to feed the machine, it takes resource. And in order to get resource, you need to generate the resource. You need a business model. And, yeah but just, but business, I don't know. I'm just so free right now.
And it's so unbridled, right? And and business models in some ways are stifling, right?
Jay Singh: They have to be a little bit right.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, and so I'm just trying to, I'm trying to relish this spot and just go get the flywheel spinning as, as fast and as powerfully as it can for as far as the eye can see until I start feeling real time pressure.
And then hopefully the business model will present before I get there. But
Jay Singh: I think
Jason Jacobs: then we'll see.
Jay Singh: you should lean into what is where it's like short form video from like your podcast. I think that's a really. I actually think the value of podcasts are to have the longer from conversation or relationship building that happens with your guests first and then second is like the short, the clips that you can create from it and to be able to share that
Jason Jacobs: I post some on YouTube Shorts, but I really, I just hit a button in Riverside that says generate magic clips. And then I might tune it a little bit to the left or the right. And then, but even then it takes me a good amount of time, but then I'll just slap it up there. So like I read somewhere, you should care about thumbnails and descriptions and I don't,
Jay Singh: So much. I was thinking LinkedIn. It's supposed to be on LinkedIn.
Jason Jacobs: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I'm already posting too much on LinkedIn though.
Jay Singh: They like video. They like video these days. So you could just you just put the video, put the, put the copy in there. But yeah, that's another conversation.
Jason Jacobs: Hey, Jay, for anyone listening that's that's intrigued by your work. Who do you want to hear from and what would be most helpful for you?
Jay Singh: Yeah. You could find us on Cash4Studios. xyz or just hit me up, jsing on LinkedIn. I'm anybody that's that established creator that's looking to be able to monetize their audience through software development, hit us up. We're working with some pretty large ones right now that I'm excited to be able to share in a couple of months.
But we're I'd be really excited to be able to share some insights on ways that we can help you too.
Jason Jacobs: Sounds great. And anything I didn't ask that you wish I did or any parting words?
Jay Singh: No, that's good. Going good.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks for coming on. Congrats on what you've built and excited to see how it progresses and to watch your progress.
Jay Singh: Thanks Jason.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into The Next Next if you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week!