The Startup Ideas Podcast

I sit down with Vinny for a live tour of Buzz, an open source, agent-native chat app from Block built on an open protocol. Vinny makes the case that openness is the real story here: agents arrive as first-class teammates, the harness underneath each agent swaps freely between Claude Code, Codex, Goose, and open code, and your entire chat context travels with you through every swap. He demos real output, including a CRM app built with the Wasp full stack framework and deployed to Railway, plus a tweet leaderboard that pipes daily stats back into a channel through a public API. I press him for the honest state of the software and for the setup advice he actually uses day to day. By the end I share where I land on Buzz versus Slack, and why I think anyone building right now gains from putting their hands on tools like this.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

02:57 – Agents as First-Class Team Members

03:49 – Swappable Harnesses Under Any Agent

06:55 – Audio Huddles With Agents

08:34 – Git, Feature Branches, and Parallel Worktrees

11:20 – Building a CRM App with Buzz and Agents

13:43 – Why This Matters

18:13 – Best way to engage with your Agents

23:53 – Shared Compute and Local Models

25:42 – Model Choice, Data Ownership, and Lock-In

27:36 – Context as the Foundation

29:39 – Setting Up Agents

31:21 – Skills and Speed

33:03 – Who Should Try Buzz Today

34:36 – My Take: Live in the Future

38:10– Closing Thoughts

Key Points

Buzz treats agents as members of your team, so one shared chat becomes the context layer for humans and agents together.

The harness under any agent swaps freely, and every chat, project, and decision comes along for the ride.

Globally installed agent skills stay available inside Buzz, so an existing Claude Code setup carries straight over.

Agents branch, work in parallel worktrees, push to Git hosting on your own relay, and ship live apps end to end.

Shared compute lets a small team run one local model on one machine and use it from many computers.

Buzz sits in early preview today, which makes it a strong fit for solopreneurs and small teams iterating fast.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND VINNY ON SOCIAL:

X/Twitter: https://x.com/hot_town

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHP5Hdx0X-sM0uv2bl_OOqg

Cody Schneider is back on the podcast, and I ask him to lay out what a real marketing agent looks like once you get past the hype. He draws a hard line: an agent owns unified business data, runs on a cadence, and improves from the results it reads back. We use one concrete business as the sandbox — an AI-first product built on top of WordPress — and Cody walks the entire stack behind a Facebook ads agent that researches pain points, generates static and video creative, publishes through the Facebook Marketing API, kills the losers, and promotes the winners. You leave with a business idea, the exact infrastructure list, and the tools we use to run it today.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro

01:54 – Defining a Marketing Agent

04:00 – Startup Idea: AI for WordPress

07:27 – AI-First Plugin Ideas: Yoast, WPForms, WooCommerce, Akismet

09:55 – The current state of Meta Ads

12:48 – Bundling the Stack and Choosing Channels

15:23 – Two creative pipelines: static and video

17:25 – The Data pipeline and warehouse

24:11 – Ad strategy

25:51 – Solving for Entropy

28:01 – Let the market pick the winner

34:26 – Closing Thoughts

Key Points

WordPress powers 43% of all indexed websites, which leaves a wide open lane for AI-first products built on that stack.

A marketing agent earns the name when it owns live data, runs on a cadence, and learns from its own results.

The infrastructure comes down to three pieces: a pipeline (Airbyte), a warehouse (ClickHouse), and cloud hosting (Heroku, Railway, or similar).

Facebook's Andromeda algorithm reads your creative and your landing page, so the ad copy now carries the targeting.

Fresh inputs — competitor ad libraries, YouTube transcripts, podcast transcripts — keep agent creative varied over time.

Paid ads let you test a thousand angles and read the market's verdict inside 48 hours.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND CODY ON SOCIAL:

Cody’s startup: https://www.graphed.com/

X/Twitter: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@codyschneiderx

I welcome Ryan Carson back to the show to turn anyone into a world-class agent operator. Ryan spent 25 years founding companies, scaled Treehouse to around 110 employees and a million learners, and now runs Untangle, an AI divorce agent for family law firms, as a team of one while his revenue tracks toward 4x this month. He walks me through his full stack: running cloud agents in parallel, building automations that watch production and improve themselves, and shipping 22 to 40 PRs a day, often from his phone. We also get into keeping token costs sane through model routing and building a durable reputation by sharing your work on X. By the end, listeners hold a clear playbook to run agents, automate the busywork, and ship faster.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

01:43 – The New Agent Paradigm

04:24 – Inside Ryan’s eight-screen desk setup

07:23 – Why Devin and cloud agents

10:00 – Everyone Is Now a Manager of Agents

13:15 – Local vs Virtual Development

14:50 – Agent Management System

24:22 – 3 Automations to build

32:54 – Self-improvement loop with Grace

34:38 – Token costs and model routing

40:33 – Building reputation on X

44:03 – Closing thoughts

Key Points

Ryan frames every knowledge worker as a manager of agents, and mastering that role is the new edge.

Cloud VMs let Ryan run five to ten agents at once and ship 22 to 40 PRs a day.

Roughly half of Ryan's work happens on his phone, which keeps his agents moving in real time.

Automations like a production watchdog and a daily self-improvement loop hand Ryan a running summary of what matters.

Model routing keeps costs in check: budget around $5k a month per employee and lean on cheaper fine-tuned models.

Sharing your work publicly on X compounds into relationships and opportunities over time.

Numbered Section Summaries

Meet Ryan and Untangle Ryan Carson returns to walk me through his stack. He spent 25 years founding companies, scaled Treehouse to about 110 employees and a million learners, and now runs Untangle, an AI divorce agent for family law firms, solo, with revenue on track to 4x this month.

The World-Class Agent Manager Ryan's core premise: everyone is now a manager of agents, and becoming the best in the world at it is the goal. He argues that managing agents makes you more technical over time, much like a skilled engineering manager.

The Desk Setup and Key Security Ryan lays out eight screens, a 52-inch monitor, a UG Monk paper to-do system, a vertical mouse, and Whisperflow for voice. He stores all prod write keys in 1Password and hands them to agents only when a task truly calls for it, keeping production safe.

Cloud Agents Over Local Machines Ryan explains cloud VMs: click a button, spin up a fresh environment, and run many agents in parallel while the code stays cleanly separated. He credits this shift for his 50x jump in output and urges builders to move work into the cloud as fast as they can.

Staying Sane at 50x With 22 to 40 PRs a day, Ryan treats his job as making 10 to 20 high stakes decisions before lunch. He pins his most important threads, checks them on a roughly 25-minute cadence, and works from his phone so his agents keep moving.

Automations That Run the Business Ryan shares three automations: an end-to-end signup test that browser-tests three times a week for about $60 in tokens, a 9am production watchdog that summarizes customer activity and links to real UI, and a daily self-improvement loop where an agent named Grace grades chats on a rubric and ships roughly three fixes a day.

Token Costs and Model Routing After a $20k token month, Ryan settled on roughly $5k per employee plus heavy model routing, using cheaper fine-tuned models like SWE 1.7 for loop work. He favors independent agent labs such as Devin, AMP, Factory, and Cursor for affordable long-term engineering, while enjoying the subsidized Codex Mac app for everyday tasks.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND RYAN ON SOCIAL

Ryan’s Website: https://www.ryancarson.com

X/Twitter: https://x.com/ryancarson

Untangle: https://untangle.us

I sit down with Vas from Varick Agents to map out exactly how to break into AI forward deployed engineering — and how to grow into a sharper FDE — in thirty days. We start from a single premise: every company can now buy the same frontier intelligence, so the real advantage moves to deployment. Vas traces the role back to Palantir, explains the judgment that decides where AI belongs, and lays out the audit → evals → deployment loop that turns raw models into measurable business value. He then hands over a full 30-day plan to build, harden, measure, and defend a production-grade agent, so you can do the job before you hold the title. The whole conversation stays tactical and grounded, with clear examples I can apply today.

The FDE Blueprint: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/fde-starter

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

02:03 – What is an FDE

04:09 – How Palantir Popularized FDEs

06:16 – Deciding Where Intelligence Belongs 

11:26 – What FDEs Earn

14:59 – Two Kinds of Judgment: Communication and Engineering

17:38 – How the Work Really Gets Done

20:40 – Audit, Evaluation, Deployment

22:56 – Which LLM to Choose

27:36 – Audit: Finding the Workflow Worth Rebuilding

31:47 – Evals: Turn non-determinism into evidence

32:57 – Deployment: Build on Existing Systems

38:59 – The 30-Day Plan Begins

49:13 – Final Thoughts

Key Points

Intelligence is now commoditized, so the real edge lives in deployment — the job of the AI forward deployed engineer.

Vas traces the FDE role to Palantir, where engineers embed on-site, learn workflows, and customize the ontology per client.

The strongest FDEs blend deep technical skill with consulting-grade communication — the rare "art plus science" combination worth up to a million dollars a year.

The FDE loop runs audit → evals → deployment, and each improved workflow makes the next one clearer.

Vas condenses a year of learning into a 30-day plan: build an agent, harden it, make it measurable, then defend it like an FDE

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND VAS ON SOCIAL

Varick Agents: https://www.varickagents.com/#hero-section

X/Twitter: https://x.com/vasuman

AI Forward Deployed Engineers: https://learn.varickagents.com/fde-in-30-days

In this episode I sit down with Corey Ganim to unpack what he calls the simplest way to earn money with AI in 2026: a $999 AI Tools Assessment for small business owners. Corey lays out his entire four-phase system, from a probing discovery call through an AI-assisted analysis in Claude, a stupid-simple client report, and a review call that turns roughly half of clients into implementation buyers. We walk through his full upsell menu, seven client-acquisition methods that run on zero capital and zero audience, and his AI Concierge retainer that earns him about $1,000 an hour. Anyone listening leaves with a copy-and-paste playbook they can adapt to their own city or industry.

Checkout Corey’s AI Audit Template: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/ai_audit

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro and the episode promise

03:48 – The full playbook preview

06:39 – Phase 1: the discovery call

08:27 – Phase 2: AI Analysis

12:11 – Phase 3: The Report

22:24 – Tool and Model Selection

23:39 – Phase 4: The Review Call

26:15 – The Upsell Services

35:52 – Finding Customers

49:16 – The AI Concierge retainer

58:46 – Final Thoughts

Key Points

The core offer is a $999, 45-minute AI Tools Assessment that prescribes 3–7 off-the-shelf tools, backed by a full-refund guarantee tied to finding at least five reclaimed hours per week.

Fulfillment runs in four phases: discovery call, AI analysis in Claude, a templatized report, and a review call that converts about half of clients into implementation work.

The report stays deliberately simple, with an executive summary, an effort-versus-impact matrix, quick wins, a four-day quick-start plan, and a clear ROI slide.

The upsell menu spans process redesign, automation builds, knowledge systems, custom workflows, and full implementation, with lifetime value reaching $3K–$10K or more.

Seven client-acquisition methods run on zero capital and zero audience, from local meetups and door knocking to agency partnerships and office hours.

The AI Concierge retainer ($1,200–$2,000/month for two calls) creates recurring revenue at roughly a $1,000 hourly rate.

The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com

LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/

The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg

Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND COREY ON SOCIAL

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganim

X/Twitter: https://x.com/coreyganim