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# Tekyz Inc.

HYPER-Exceptional Software Development Team

## Sitemaps

- [XML Sitemap](https://tekyz.com/sitemap.xml): Contains all public & indexable URLs for this website.

## Posts

- [How to Leverage AI in Software Testing: A Beginner's Guide](https://tekyz.com/how-to-leverage-ai-in-software-testing-a-beginners-guide/) - AI-powered software testing boosts efficiency, accuracy, and coverage. Start with pilot projects to enhance QA with predictive analytics, self-healing tests, and automation.
- [Navigating Startup Success with Strategic Product Development](https://tekyz.com/navigating-startup-success-with-strategic-product-development-c05679923072/) - Featured Image: Navigating Startup Success with Strategic Product Developmenthttps://medium.com/media/7dc0d192842c8bedd2bf95e5176ad141/hrefIn this episode of Grow Fast Podcast, host Mark sits down with David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, to dive deep into the strategies behind rapid business growth through smarter product development and scaling. David shares insights on building exceptional software teams, mastering the “launch-first” method to achieve product-market fit faster, and navigating the evolving AI landscape. From hiring practices that prioritize intelligence to real-world success stories, this conversation offers practical advice for startups and scale-ups looking to grow efficiently and sustainably.Key Takeaways:Build Exceptional Teams: Focus on intelligence, rigorous hiring, and continuous improvement to ensure predictable and optimized project outcomes.Adopt the Launch-First Method: Validate product ideas early through high-fidelity prototypes and niche targeting before heavy investment.Prioritize Smart Hiring: Intelligence often outweighs experience; invest in candidates who can think critically and drive innovation.Use Microservices for Scalability: Architect systems for flexibility and cost optimization from the start.Adapt Quickly with AI: Leverage simple, accessible AI tools to enhance internal processes and stay competitive in a rapidly changing tech landscape.Document and Scale: Create detailed playbooks from successful practices to support fast, repeatable growth.Grow Fast Podcast with David Hirschfeld of TekyzThis podcast episode discusses strategies for rapid business growth, focusing on the crucial role of efficient product development and scaling. Mark, the host, interviews David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, a software development company specializing in helping startups and scale-ups. The conversation explores best practices in software development, team building, and the “launch-first” method for achieving product-market fit.Building Exceptional Software TeamsDavid emphasizes the importance of building exceptional software teams, highlighting key characteristics that differentiate them from mediocre ones. These include a commitment to continuous improvement, meticulous tracking of estimates versus actuals, and conducting post-mortems to analyze deviations. He cites Tekyz’s achievement of a 5.6% variance on their largest project as a testament to their accuracy. David also stresses the importance of granular estimations, incorporating all overhead costs, and designing architecture around microservices for cost optimization and scalability.The Importance of Smart Teams and Hiring PracticesMark agrees on the importance of predictability and cost optimization, prompting a discussion about the perceived drawbacks of outsourcing. David counters concerns about outsourced teams lacking commitment by emphasizing the importance of company culture. He details Tekyz’s rigorous hiring process, prioritizing intelligence and experience. David explains that they test candidates with paid internal projects to assess their abilities and prioritize intelligence above all else, even over experience in some cases. He explains his philosophy of hiring individuals smarter than himself to ensure continuous improvement and innovation.The Launch-First MethodDavid introduces the “launch-first” method, developed from his experience with over 90 startups. He observes that most startups fail due to a lack of product-market fit, often after significant investment. The launch-first method aims to mitigate this risk by focusing on early validation. Instead of building a full MVP, David advocates for creating a high-fidelity prototype, which is less expensive and allows for demonstration of a broader product vision. This prototype is then used for pre-launch sales, targeting early adopters identified through a rigorous problem-state niche analysis. This process helps determine which niche experiences the most significant impact and cost from the problem being addressed, allowing for targeted marketing and early revenue generation.Real-World Pivot and Success StoryDavid shares a success story of a healthcare software company that pivoted from a wearable device and predictive analysis model to an AI-powered virtual nurse. This pivot, driven by market feedback and the CEO’s responsiveness, led to a $5 million investment and a more valuable product-solution fit. The AI nurse now handles customer service, patient transitions, and medication reminders, addressing critical needs within the healthcare system.Navigating AI ChaosThe conversation shifts to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI. David acknowledges the “AI chaos” and the increasing accessibility of AI tools. He discusses the shift from complex RAG models to simpler, more readily available AI solutions. Tekyz utilizes AI internally for project estimation and other tasks, constantly experimenting and adapting to new advancements.Transcript[0:05–0:16] Mark: Welcome to the Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing, and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let’s go. Hey, David.[0:17–0:27] Mark: How are you? I’m good. How are you doing, Mark? Pretty good. Pretty good. We had a couple scheduling back and forth issues there all on me. Thank you for your flexibility, and thank you for coming on the Grow Fast Podcast.[0:27–0:30] David: Oh, well, I couldn’t be flexible. I couldn’t run a software company.[0:31–0:43] Mark: Oh, my gosh. After running a software company only for last year, I’ve taken my flexibility to a whole other level. There’s little things called bugs and releases and bugs, and every time there’s a release, there’s that.[0:44–0:47] David: We have to have a whole other podcast episode then.[0:47–1:02] Mark: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Whereabouts are you located? In the San Diego area, a town called Vista. San Diego is one of my favorite areas. In fact, local people say it’s not really San Diego, but that whole area from Del Mar all the way up to Carlsbad.[1:03–1:10] Mark: We’re in Mexico. Yeah. If you’re hiring and you pay for relocation costs, let me know. I’ll be down there in a heartbeat, okay?[1:10–1:14] David: Right. Yeah, of course. And so would another 100,000 people, right?[1:15–1:27] Mark: Exactly. Exactly. Normally on the Growth Fast Podcast, we talk to people about sales and marketing strategies or proposal writing. The whole point of is how companies can grow their business fast.[1:27–1:44] Mark: And a lot of times business growth, it comes in the context of sales and marketing, right? But there’s a whole other element of growing your business fast, which is building products in a kind of lean, agile way, getting it out to market, getting feedback from the market, and then creating positive iterations on that.[1:44–1:57] Mark: And I have a sense that, looking at your experience and background, that you can kind of come at this growing your business fast from that kind of ladder aspect of, you know, helping companies scale up their development and stuff.[1:57–2:04] Mark: But before we jump into that, maybe you can tell me a little bit about TechEuth and what you guys do. Sure.[2:05–2:27] David: And real quick background, I’ve been in the software development world for 35 years. I started out in enterprise and then launched my own startup in logistics inventory route distribution, which, despite every effort on my part and my partner’s part, we grew it anyway, to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000 to a publicly traded firm.[2:27–2:42] David: So I had a successful exit. Later, I had a successful failure. And so I’d been on both sides of this and launched many different startups. So I really understand and love the startup ecosystem, even though I came from enterprise.[2:42–2:55] David: So I founded Tekyz 17 years ago, and we’ve been working with both startups and scale-ups during that time, in particular startups for over 90 during that period.[2:56–3:20] David: A few of them very successful, but most of them fail. And they fail for the same reasons that companies struggle to scale fast, and that’s they lack product market fit. They lack an understanding of being a manager, not a visionary, and what the difference between those two things are, and the idea of testing and building repeatable processors that they can then scale.[3:21–3:40] David: So those are all things very near and dear to the influence. So what Tekyz does is we develop software, and we do it in a really exceptional way. And what I mean by exceptional is exceptional software teams produce certain types of artifacts that the vast majority of other software teams don’t produce.[3:41–3:52] David: So whenever you’re talking to a software team, ask them for the evidence that they can prove to you that they’re exceptional. And I could talk about that. That’s probably a different podcast, what that looks like.[3:53–3:58] David: So let’s talk about the things that we do to help companies, what they should do.[3:58–4:10] Mark: You know, I’ve been running a SaaS startup for the last, well, it’s been about a year and a half, and it took us about 9 to 10 months to get the product out the door. we get our MVP out there and start circulating the market.[4:11–4:23] Mark: And I see there’s challenges to grow in this business on both sides, on the development side and getting that product market fit, but also the sales and marketing element. And that’s kind of where historically I’ve tended to focus.[4:24–4:43] Mark: But maybe you can talk about some of the best practices related to getting the right people on your dev team, getting them working in the right way, creating what you said, those critical artifacts, and then explain possibly, I think you have something called the launch-first method, and then maybe you can tie it all into that as well.[4:43–4:55] David: Okay, yeah, sure. So start with what makes a competent, the kind of evidence or artifacts you produce when you’re a really competent development team. Not competent, but exceptional.[4:55–5:06] David: Because there are a lot of, and like it’s within the industry, there’s lots of mediocrity out there, right? And software development is hard, So you have to work hard just to be mediocre.[5:07–5:22] David: But to be really exceptional, there’s things that you do a little bit differently. One is there’s a philosophy of continual improvement in terms of your discipline, your protocols, your procedures, your ability to track, project and track.[5:23–5:47] David: So, for example, when we do our weekly status reports, we have our estimates, our actuals on the status report along with the estimates. for a week to date, month to date, because we estimate how much effort everybody is going to spend every month on specific things and specifically what deliverables we’re going to produce during that period by micro-release, after micro-release, after micro-release.[5:48–6:03] David: And then in our status reports, we have the actuals next to those estimates, and if we vary more than 10% from what we estimate, and that’s across the whole project, that we do a post-mortem trying to figure out where we went.[6:03–6:23] David: Either we went off the rails or where managing requirements got out of control or whatever the reason that the actualist doesn’t meet the aspect. And for our largest project last year, and we used to struggle with this like most companies do, we’ve gotten really, really good at it because a lot of other things don’t talk about what we do.[6:24–6:35] David: But last year with our largest clients, our variance was 5.6% across the year. So that was a big win for us in terms of how much more accurate we’ve gotten.[6:35–7:06] David: One of the artifacts is how estimates are done. So when there’s an estimate either for a feature or for an entire MVP or for a new module or whatever, something large or something small, it’s broken down into very discrete modules that are minimum, but no smaller than a certain size and no bigger than a certain size, but that are discrete in terms of how much the estimate is for and that the team is good at accurately estimating not only how much long it’s going to take to develop,[7:06–7:20] David: but all of the other overhead things related to it, such as project management, analysis, design, DevOps, effort if it’s manually done or building QA automation if it’s automated or some blend of the two.[7:20–7:31] David: So all of those things are overhead items to the actual development effort for that piece. And that all gets estimated in, and then there’s a range, right? There’s a low and a high on all these things.[7:31–7:43] David: And what’s that variance? And if it’s a really, really well-known requirement, then that variance should be very small. If it’s something that’s going to be explored for you during the design and development, then the variance is going to be much bigger.[7:43–8:03] David: And still, even with that, your range should fall somewhere within the range that you set. Architecture is a big one. It’s really confident teams design everything around microservices so that microservices are containerized deployment and on-demand the type of serverless functionality.[8:04–8:20] David: So among software companies, their products don’t have constant demand. They’ve hit these peaks and valleys that are pretty extreme. You might even have 1,000 users, but at any one time, you only have a few people hitting a button that causes any kind of back-end server functionality.[8:20–8:31] David: Every once in a while, you have a bunch of people do the same thing, or you may have a few processes that when somebody submits it, it’s processing 1,000 images, and that’s a big lift on your server.[8:31–8:41] David: So what typical companies do is they build all these things as kind of integrated applications running on servers, and they have to have enough server capacity to handle those peaks.[8:42–8:59] David: What the competent companies do when they’re building microservices and all this stuff is loaded and is containerized, then you can take each of these microservices and split them into their own containers, create them as serverless processes, and they now don’t have any cost except when there’s demand.[8:59–9:17] David: And demand periods can be very short, and you’re paying very little for that short period of demand, and then the cost disappears. And instead of having all these servers and thousands of dollars a month that you’re paying at a minimum overhead, that your overhead costs are really low until your systems start to really scale up in terms of demand.[9:18–9:30] David: Competent teams track everything very carefully, and they’re very transparent. So all the team members that are involved in particular aspects of the project are always there with customers, and they’re all critical partners.[9:30–9:35] David: And there’s a lot more things that exceptional teams do that average teams don’t do.[9:36–9:56] Mark: So what I’m hearing you saying is that predictability piece is super important. And, you know, I mean, it doesn’t matter if you’re an in-house dev team or if you’re working with an outsourced team. You, as the CEO, the founder, the people who are running the company, you need to know what’s going to get done and when it’s going to get done and how many resources are required.[9:57–10:11] Mark: And if it doesn’t get done, why not? But, you know, if you’re typically within 5% to 10% of your estimate, that’s pretty good. you also need to be able to make sure that you’re designing a team that can be optimized for usage.[10:11–10:21] Mark: So, you know, you want it to be able to be flexible. So if you’ve got one user right now, you scale, you throttle everything down, but all of a sudden you have 1,000 users on, you can throttle up and meet that demand.[10:22–10:32] Mark: And so having smart people that understand how to build that kind of predictability and the cost optimization into your platform is super important.[10:32–10:44] Mark: Let me ask you this. I have both, I kind of have a hybrid team, both, you know, employees, but also that we work with a firm that provides outsourced services, right?[10:45–11:03] Mark: I see pros and cons to both sides. But one of the cons I see to outsourcing is that, you know, maybe there’s a perception that the people you’re outsourcing to maybe aren’t as committed to the cause and aren’t as knowledgeable about the cause because they’re not, you know, in the day-to-day kind of operations.[11:03–11:14] Mark: because they’re definitely not in the office if they’re outsourced overseas. But there could be this perception that they’re not as committed, right? They’re kind of, what’s the word, the hired guns, mercenaries, you know?[11:15–11:18] Mark: Right. So what’s your counter to that kind of concern?[11:18–11:50] David: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And it’s not because they’re offshore outsourced. It’s because of the culture of the company that you hired to do those sorts of things, if that’s the case. Because you can have the same thing with employees that you hired too right You have some employees who are really committed to the mission and other employees that are there to work And a lot of that comes from who the person is how much experience they have There are a lot of things that, you know, and just the basic hiring process that you go through in terms of what you’re looking for.[11:50–12:02] David: So when we’re hiring, everyone on our team is experienced. You know, a lot of optional teams have a lot of really inexperienced people and one or two people per team that have experience to try to manage and corral everybody else.[12:02–12:17] David: And you end up with, you know, endless quality problems. You have people that are not as smart, that lack critical thinking. You know, the whole philosophy of teams like that is that they’re a lot less expensive to run, and the problem is you get what you pay for.[12:17–12:31] David: So when we hire, everybody has to be experienced, significantly experienced, It’s because it’s too painful for people to learn on the job. More importantly than that, they have to be really smart.[12:31–12:57] David: So our very first requirement when we’re hiring is, are they smart enough to be on this team? Because if they’re not, then everybody else on the crew has to carry them. And it brings the, you know, basically the team is only as good as the weakest member to a certain degree because that weak member ends up loading everybody else with, either slows everybody down because there’s dependencies on the person, or other people have to kind of pick up and support and help that person.[12:57–13:09] David: And it sends the wrong message to the team that you don’t respect them enough to make sure that you’re keeping people in that they’re going to be working with that are challenging and motivating and smart like they are.[13:09–13:24] David: That’s the very first. And you can’t fix IQ, right? You can fix everything except IQ. If there’s, you know, integrity is a flexible thing. You want to hire people that are focused on the mission and don’t care about anything else.[13:24–13:41] David: But there’s always variations of that. But if you are on a team, they recognize that it’s a great team and it’s a rare place to work. And they’re given their voice and they’re able to express their critical thinking and their suggestions and make an investment.[13:42–13:58] David: Also, they start to become believers and commit to the team. So those are things that can be adjusted. but somebody’s work ethic. There has to be a good work ethic there, but that work ethic increases dramatically when they’re working with people who love what they do and like the people they’re working with.[13:58–14:17] David: These are all things that culture can address. IQ, you can’t. Experience, you can’t. But if I had somebody less experienced with a super high IQ and somebody much more experienced who just wasn’t as smart, I would take the less experience, let’s say they’re only five years’ experience versus ten years.[14:18–14:22] David: I would take that five-year person over the ten-year person if they happen to be an outlier. It’s just brilliant.[14:23–14:28] Mark: How do you test for IQ in the context of the work they’re expected to do?[14:29–14:39] David: We always test them. So we give them projects to do, and we pay them contract fees for these projects. They’re all internal stuff that we have them do before we consider whether we’re going to hire them or not.[14:39–15:01] David: So it starts with the interview process. they have to be able to communicate in an intelligent way and answer questions on the cuff about requirements. So we do a lot of role-playing with people in the interview process because we also need people that are good communicators, that they can distill the information quickly and talk about it in an intelligent way.[15:01–15:35] David: And if they’re a developer, then it’s about how, you know, assess this code, give me your feedback about it, how would you improve it, what’s wrong with it, and go ahead and build this thing for me, and now quicker. everything. And some people, you know, it’s very clear when you’re dealing with somebody who’s really smart, they just stand out in their ability to distill that information and create something out of it. And then we say, okay, this person’s a strong candidate. We’re probably going to hire them. Let’s give them one or two projects and see how they do about it, the quality of the work that they do and how quickly they’re able to produce it. And really smart people with good experience[15:35–15:58] David: can produce things dramatically faster than people who are a little less experienced or not quite as smart. And then the code they produce is smart too. So it’s hard to find really good people that are really smart and inexperienced, but it’s not impossible. You just have to be willing to go through a thousand resumes to find for every person you’re actually willing to commit to.[15:59–16:17] Mark: Okay. Everything you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I’m just curious about a couple things then. If these people are that good and that smart, why would they work for Tekyz and not maybe go to You know, of course, I can name the big names, the Facebooks, the Metas, the Googles, the, you know, Microsofts.[16:17–16:21] Mark: You know, what’s the attraction for working with a firm like yours?[16:22–16:32] David: Sometimes people come from those firms. We have a guy working for us right now that came from Microsoft, and he is really smart, but he just didn’t like working for a good company.[16:33–16:44] David: So, you know, he felt like he was a cog and he wanted to be more, feel like he was more part of a smaller team. So sometimes it’s that. Sometimes it’s circumstance.[16:45–16:57] David: They want to work. It used to be a big one was they wanted to work remotely and they couldn’t get the company they were at. And all of our team works remotely. There could be a lot of different reasons.[16:57–17:08] David: Sometimes they just think people they’re working with, right, and they’re looking for a change and we just catch them at the right time. somebody that works for us recommends them and says, you want to work for this company, you know, they’re doing really cool stuff.[17:08–17:11] David: These are all really smart people. They’re fun to work, you know. So it depends.[17:11–17:18] Mark: Are they all in the U.S. or North America, or do you have people all over the world? No, all offshore. All offshore.[17:18–17:28] David: Okay. Yeah, everybody’s offshore. And I have traveled a lot offshore, 15 trips out of the country between 2010 and the pandemic to build my teams.[17:28–17:41] David: You know, the idea that you’re going to hire an offshore team, if I was doing that and I had some contracting group and I was just throwing stuff over the fence, then it would be that typical thing that you would hear about.[17:41–17:56] David: We take over a lot of projects like that. I call them recovery projects. Yeah. You know, the projects in recovery. And those are my favorite because those clients, and some of them are from companies, big companies that are U.S.-based companies that we take them over from.[17:56–18:03] David: those clients always recognize how different we are from who they were working with before. They’re usually my best references.[18:04–18:07] Mark: Awesome. So tell me, what is the launch-first method?[18:08–18:18] David: Okay. So let me give you a quick genesis of why the launch-first method even exists. So I’ve worked with over 90 startups, and like I said, a few of them are really successful.[18:19–18:31] David: Most of them, though, unfortunately fail. And they only fail after having made a huge investment and many years of effort. None of them fail after a few months. Something’s spent up very little money. And they all fail for the same reason.[18:31–18:42] David: They lack product market fit. They didn’t build a product for a market that wanted to pay money for it. And they waited way too long to prove that model.[18:42–18:59] David: And there’s only one way to prove product market fit, and that’s people are willing to pay for your product, enough money for your product, and enough volume based on the amount of energy you’re putting into sales marketing that you can show a three-to-one ratio between lifetime value versus cost of acquisition.[19:00–19:18] David: And that way you’ve got enough margin in there to reinvest back into the business to accelerate that growth. So the problem is a lot of these is that founders come in with this concept, with the belief that they’re going to be successful because they found a gap in the market and they know everybody needs this.[19:19–19:29] David: They’re going to be the savior for some stuff. Right. And so they’re coming into being a startup wearing a black robe, basically preaching the vision.[19:29–19:44] David: And so what I try to do is gently peel off that black robe and try to slowly wrap them in a white coat and turn them into clinicians. And launch first is this process of basically saying, let’s think about your startup.[19:44–19:55] David: usually nascent startups that are either at the design stage or even pre-design. But they have funding and they’re ready to march forward building their MVP.[19:56–20:10] David: And I say, okay, well, instead of building an MVP, because that’s expensive, and your MVP usually has a minimum amount of features and they’re hard to sell, and you get all this feedback about what it needs when you put your MVP out before you can start charging for it very often.[20:10–20:20] David: It depends on the founder and the product and the market. And so instead of doing that, let’s let’s do that. Let’s build a high-fidelity prototype, which is a very sophisticated design prototype.[20:21–20:32] David: It’s much less expensive to build in an MVP, and it shows the two-year roadmap of the product, not just the initial MVP version. And it looks like a real product.[20:32–20:46] David: So you can demo it the way you would demo an MVP. You don’t give them to clients to you, but you can show them all the workflows on-screen functionality, and you can tell the story of what you’re building, the full story, because it’s all designed up.[20:47–21:06] David: And let’s do a really yeoman’s job of understanding who your early adopter is. And that requires doing a problem-state niche analysis exercise that is very painful and tedious, but it’s very inexpensive, right, because it’s the founder’s effort usually.[21:07–21:18] David: And if they’re really committed to it, they can get through it in a couple weeks. So many founders fatigue through this one, so they take a long time to do it. But it doesn’t take that long to do it and do it really well.[21:19–21:37] David: So Launch First, I created a metrics-driven methodology for doing this because your number one job, I believe, as a founder is considering you have this thing you’re going to build, and it will probably be applicable to lots of different niches in the market, maybe 10, 15, 20 different niches.[21:37–21:49] David: and if you distill down the problem statements to root-level problems that stakeholders in each of those niches would relate to, when you say the problem statement to them, they go, I hate that.[21:49–22:16] David: And then they lean forward, right, and they say, can you make that stop? Because, right, that’s a root-level problem statement. And when it’s articulated right, and you may have 10 or 15 of those that you’re addressing with your product, then which of all those niches has one or two of your problem statements where the perceived impact because of that problem to the stakeholder, they perceive that as really impacting them in a bad way, like they need to make that stop.[22:17–22:35] David: They feel threatened by that problem statement. Their career won’t advance. They’re going to lose market share. Their revenue is going to die, whatever. Whatever the reason why that problem statement is so critical to them and why they’ll listen to you is because it touches a survival mechanism, right?[22:36–22:49] David: That’s what a real root-level problem statement does. And which niche has one or two of those root-level problem statements where that perceived impact is really high, they feel very threatened by it, and the cost is really high.[22:49–23:16] David: So we do two matrices with these two, with the niches across the top and the problem statements down the side, and then we score all of those intersections. This is a tedious process but it invaluable because now your discovery interviews which you only do one or two in each niche If it a niche you not really familiar with A lot of founders are very familiar with half of the niches that they could possibly market to and not with some of the others.[23:17–23:30] David: So they’re only reaching out to the ones that really don’t know those stakeholders and only doing one or two. And now it’s very niche-specific assessment of what problems they’re really struggling with within the context of what you’re trying to build.[23:30–23:43] David: And then how you talk about what you’re doing, and you always talk about it from what problems are you struggling with, not I’m going to build this product that solves these problems, because as soon as you make that switch, the person you’re talking to stops being honest.[23:44–23:56] David: But if you talk about them and their problems and how they’ve dealt with these problems in the past and why it’s such a struggle and if they’ve been able to mitigate it or use any product, then you’re getting real, honest answers from them because they’re talking about themselves and what matters to them.[23:56–24:04] Mark: But at this point, do you have an MVP that you’ve mentioned? Do you have something to show them? Are you just interviewing people just to understand?[24:05–24:22] David: You’re just interviewing. It’s like, yeah, this is market research. You could be building the wrong thing, and you’ll find out really quickly if you do this that, well, I should be building what I was talking about. But I do realize that I can pivot just in the concept right now, and there’s all this affinity to this other set of problem statements.[24:23–24:37] David: And so, right, so usually we’re doing a design, working on the design prototype during this period. The interviews and this process is helping inform the design prototype in terms of where we need to make sure it’s really deeply fleshed out in terms of workflow and functionality.[24:38–24:48] David: And the design prototype is very inexpensive and easy to change and pivot if we’re getting different feedback, and it shows a much more rich functionality than what you get at an MVP and can be done much faster.[24:48–25:04] Mark: So when you say very affordable, and I’m sure there’s a range, but let’s just talk about a B2B SaaS platform that you’re trying to build, you’re trying to roll out as a founder. Right. What’s the range to get a design prototype out and, you know, approximate costs and timing.[25:04–25:05] Mark: Okay.[25:06–25:31] David: So if you go straight into doing design and MVP, which is what most people do, you know, depending on the product and the level of sophistication, you’re looking at, and this is what I’m assuming, it’s B2B, SaaS, you know, and it’s some level of sophistication, you’re usually looking at between $50,000 and $150,000, typically what people will spend before they have a viable product that they can start to charge.[25:31–25:45] David: and 50,000 is on the low side. It rarely ends up being that low. And this isn’t just us. This is, you know, this is typical. And it’s much higher if you’re using, you know, and it can be a lot higher than that depending on, again, the level of sophistication.[25:46–26:00] David: The product, whether you’re using U.S. or offshore resources, I’m assuming you’re using solid, competent teams, maybe not exceptional teams, but these are not low-cost teams because, you know, you get what you pay for, somewhere between 50 and 150.[26:00–26:19] David: And I don’t know if that jives with what your experience has been to get your MVP ready for market, but that’s usually what we see. Design prototype is anywhere from, again, depending on the level of sophistication of what you’re doing, is anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 or a fully fleshed out.[26:19–26:36] David: Looks like a real product when you demo it. And are you using Figma or something or what? It depends. in Figma and or Aksure or both. Maybe the design’s all done in Figma and then we wire it up in Aksure because you can do a lot more functionality.[26:36–26:56] David: Figma’s just about there now with all the add-ons you can add. We’re able to get a lot of it in Figma now. One of the problems is it takes so long to load the damn thing. So when you’re trying to do a prototype, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got, and you’re going to demo it, you’ve got to make sure that prototype is loaded before you sit down and start the demo.[26:57–27:16] David: You don’t want those long pauses. It just takes away. What you’re looking for when you’re demoing this, and the reason for doing all this and that niche and understanding the early adopter is because then we’re going to put together a marketing plan to sell to that early adopter to do pre-launch sales using the prototype.[27:17–27:32] David: And if the problem you’ve identified, they perceive the impact really high, and it costs them enough, and the value you offer them in this pre-launch offer is a big enough value that they don’t want to miss out, and then they will buy in enough numbers.[27:32–27:36] David: You can prove you’ve got that three-to-one ratio before you ever start to build the NPP.[27:36–27:39] Mark: Makes a lot of sense and sounds like a smart way to go.[27:39–27:50] David: Yeah, and you’re generating revenue to help fund the development. So whether it’s a brand new product you’re building or whether it’s new features on an existing product or, you know, it doesn’t really matter.[27:50–28:01] David: It’s harder to do this up front. I always say it’s the hard, easy way, right? Because then you’re not building your product for product market fit.[28:01–28:13] David: That’s not your reason for building anymore. You’re building it for product solution fit, which is the reason why you want to be building it, so that you know that once the paying customers are using it, they’re engaging with the product.[28:13–28:33] David: It’s satisfying their needs in a way that continues to keep them as customers, right? That’s product solution fit. But market fit is, do I know how to communicate what it is I’m selling, and am I selling something into a market where they’re willing to pay for it at the amount that I need them to pay for it?[28:34–28:39] David: And that you can only prove by getting people the right way to check for the product, even if it’s not ready yet.[28:39–28:54] Mark: Maybe you can share some examples of some success stories of companies that you’ve worked with that maybe have had to pivot partially or entirely along the way, but then they came out and they found the right product, market product solution fit, and they were off to the races.[28:55–29:16] David: Okay. So we’ve been working with a healthcare-related software company, and this isn’t about launch first. It’s just the pivot thing, right? For the last not quite two years, and they’re in the healthcare space where AI healthcare providing services to vulnerable populations, Medicaid populations.[29:16–29:34] David: And they started out with and monitoring were both devices with real-time triage capabilities and an AI nurse that calls the patient when it identifies potential outlier situations that may require somebody to intervene.[29:35–29:46] David: That was the original month. It has now shifted, and the AI nurse originally was just going to be a text-based chat nurse and help them schedule and things like that.[29:46–30:16] David: It has morphed into an AI nurse for doing more customer service-related stuff as an AI nurse that knows their medical history, can transition them from the hospital to long-term care because there’s not enough nurses to make that transition from the hospital systems when you’ve got 50 people a day going from the hospital to a long-term care facility and all the things that have to be managed in the communication.[30:16–30:37] David: And so the SAI nurse can do all that and have a very natural conversation with the person because she knows their medical history, she knows the capabilities of the facility they’re moving to and what their current condition that they’re dealing with is and who their doctors are and if they need to connect them with somebody and actually schedule those things for them.[30:38–30:51] David: And the person can interrupt them and ask questions, say, I’m not sure that’s going to work, and then start and talk to them like a natural person. And they just received $5 million in funding because of this pivot that they made with a potential customer.[30:52–30:58] David: The funding is coming from one of their customers. They have many investors already in the company, but this was their first real big launch.[30:58–31:03] Mark: So this is not a traditional kind of VC-funded company.[31:04–31:23] David: Yeah, this was all friends and family and advisory people. The person that runs this company has a lot of gravitas because he worked in the National Health Organization, doing a lot of predictive analysis around diseases based on preliminary information that before disease showed any symptoms.[31:23–31:39] David: And so, yeah, it’s a very strong reputation in the health care community. And he was able to recruit a bunch of investors early on, many of whom became advisors that have a lot of reach in the healthcare space, in government, and in local healthcare.[31:40–31:52] David: And then as a result of continuing to kind of refine this process, test different models, and the CEO of this company, his name is Kevin Longoria.[31:52–32:22] David: He is just really smart and sensitive to what the market cares about. And when he saw that what he was originally trying to deliver to the market was going to be complicated for the actual end user and it wasn’t really providing them the value that they needed and that there was much bigger value as he started to show this capability to other companies, they would say, you know, we need the voice capability that you’ve just come out with.[32:22–32:52] David: This nurse is just powerful, and we needed to offload all this work going to our nurses, which we just don’t have to pay enough staff. And then all of a sudden you’re talking about, you know, thousands of calls a day being done by what would normally be very expensive people in critical situations to make sure that people’s transitions from one health facility to another are being addressed, or to remind somebody who’s lower-income population on a Medicaid program to remember to take their meds at a certain time[32:52–33:12] David: or to fill a prescription because they can see that they were prescribed something and the prescription had not been filled yet. And so many people that are prescribed things in lower-income populations don’t end up filling a prescription or don’t take their meds, and they end up in the hospital with critical situations that cost the health care system a fortune.[33:13–33:15] David: And so you get the idea, right?[33:15–33:32] Mark: It was a great pivot. I didn’t really understand what the initial, what was the big difference between their initial setup, other than the fact that it seems like that there’s a lot more of this virtual care provider, which is an AI agent or bot, that is kind of being instead of just.[33:32–33:39] David: The original was built around your wearable device and predicting potential situations.[33:39–33:43] Mark: And biometrics or something like that, right? Exactly.[33:44–34:02] David: And that turned out to be not what the market really needed because some of these things can be prevented by just some kind of, by just like what I was saying with lower income populations, just by sending reminders or making phone calls, you know, having a nurse call you.[34:03–34:13] David: And the nurse is so friendly and somebody you can have a chat with, right? on the press, I already heard that. Let’s talk about that. Awesome.[34:13–34:50] Mark: A couple more questions here. You mentioned AI, and we’ve spent the last five minutes talking about this startup that is heavily relying on AI. I see AI from your, from Techie’s perspective, you have both the AI that tools that developers can use, And then you have the actual AI the applications of AI and LLMs that they can deploy to make platforms more effective or yeah to help those platforms to achieve their mission right[34:51–35:16] Mark: So maybe you can talk about, first off, what are the tools that your developers are using to help them with, you know, speed up their development, and then talk about how do they keep abreast of all the different types of LLMs and everything like that, and then make recommendations to your customers about, here’s what we can do, here’s how we can use this LLM or this type of AI to optimize the platform.[35:16–35:28] David: Yeah, so what you’re referring to is what I call AI chaos. Okay. Right, because nothing has ever evolved and changed as fast as what the AI industry is doing.[35:28–35:45] David: And, of course, that means things that were not consumable six months ago, even by the tech community, except for, you know, top developers building sophisticated things using Langchain and RAG models, are now all of a sudden very consumable just six months ago.[35:46–36:08] David: And, you know, even the concept of a RAG model, for people that don’t know, this is where you’re using a large language model like ChatGPT or OpenAI or Quad or Gemini, whichever one, you know, whatever, you’re using that in combination with your own machine learning vector database that you built on a specific industry.[36:09–36:19] David: And even that model is starting to shift where that was the only way to have a really smart AI tool for your particular vertical.[36:20–36:45] David: Now there’s other ways of achieving that without having to go to building your own ML machine learning pipeline. Six months ago, nine months ago, there was no other way to do that. So you wanted to have an expert, for example, like in your business as a financial expert, and not only on what it means to be a financial expert, but also on your particular financial model, you know, what your investments are and how they’re performing in the daily business.[36:46–36:57] David: Now you can accomplish a lot of that stuff without building this sophisticated rag model. There are still lots of times when you want to do that, but less and less.[36:57–37:14] David: You just have to do it for everything that’s specialized. And there’s frameworks for building these that didn’t used to exist. And, you know, almost weekly, you look at the reports on which LLM is the smartest, and that keeps shifting in how smart they are.[37:14–37:25] David: So to answer your question, so there’s a big group of us that meet constantly talking about AI stuff, what’s new, what they’re doing, what ideas they’ve had.[37:25–37:40] David: We experiment a lot with internal things. We’re building a lot of our own internal AI models. For project estimation, remember I talked about being exceptional. Our project estimates are way more detailed than a typical software company, and that’s expensive for us to create them.[37:40–37:58] David: And we have a methodology that’s spent years toning to produce these estimates, and so we’re turning that into an AI model, which our goal is to actually not only be able to produce these estimates with very little effort, but even improve on the estimates with this AI model.[37:58–38:15] David: That’s an example of something internally we’re doing. We are an agile company, so we use tools to support. We have our daily stand-up meetings and various things that go along with companies that are agile, which many or most competent companies are these days.[38:15–38:25] David: One of the things that’s a time socket is our daily stand-up. And there’s supposed to be 15 minutes. They always extend longer because people get into discussions about things. So we’re building an AI.[38:25–38:32] Mark: Just let me cut you off there real quick. Do you do daily stand-up by customer or do you do it as an entire team?[38:32–38:34] David: By customer, by project.[38:34–38:39] Mark: Okay, so you’re popping in and out of a lot of meetings, I would assume, because you want to keep it restful.[38:39–38:50] David: I am no longer in most of those. Okay, okay. It took me years. My director of operations is just exceptional, director of development and operations.[38:50–39:07] David: She’s exceptional, and she runs all this now. Okay. And she continues to improve our standard on every respect. So I don’t need to be in there. I’m probably just getting away at this point. I ran all this stuff for years, but it’s been probably four years since I’ve needed to be in the daily stand-up.[39:07–39:19] David: And then I peek in once in a while, and she wants to kick me out. There’s not this kid in the way. And that’s also part of the philosophy. IQ is like the most important thing.[39:19–39:37] David: I won’t hire somebody if they’re not smarter than I am. And she won’t hire somebody if they’re not smarter than her. because what happens if they’re not as smart as you, then you’re going to recognize what they’re not doing quite good enough and you’re going to try to basically carry, pick up the pieces and work with them a lot, spend a lot of time.[39:37–39:55] David: If they’re smarter than you in the aspect of the thing that you’re hiring them for, then they’re going to start to add new value to that delivery that you didn’t have before. And they’ll start to be the reason why you’re improving instead of just trying to get them up to the level of standard that everybody else is at.[39:56–40:08] David: So, yeah, that was a philosophy that came up with after having hired a few people 12, 14 years ago that were not smart enough and having an impact they had on the really smart people on the team.[40:09–40:13] David: So that philosophy should happen very solidly.[40:14–40:48] Mark: Well, what I’m hearing you say is, you know, if you’re trying to build a company and you want to build it fast and you want to be effective, there are some key takeaways here. One is hire smart people, okay, hire very capable people, hire people that can predict with a high degree of accuracy of how much work they’ll get done by when, that they’ll build a platform that can scale on demand, and that sometimes it might make sense instead of building that team yourself is to just go ahead and outsource that whole process to an organization that has done it,[40:48–40:55] Mark: in your case, over 90 different times with 90 different companies. That’s one way to grow your business fast.[40:56–41:17] David: Right. Yeah, that would definitely speed it up because if you’re trying to do all that recruiting yourself, then you’re going to be limited by your capability to do that, right? And if you’re not a software developer and don’t have experience in all these different areas in terms of building teams and recruiting, you’re not going to know how to do those things very well.[41:18–41:32] David: Unless you find somebody that can do it for you. You bring somebody in that has that experience, then they can build those teams. Or you bring in a team, somebody that assembles these teams for companies as an outsource thing.[41:32–41:44] David: And if they’re really good, then it’s going to accelerate things for you. But a couple things. I don’t necessarily hire people that are super accurate at estimating. I hire them because they’re really good and productive and can deliver.[41:45–41:57] David: And we work with them on the estimation part because that’s more of a skill. And if they’re smart, they pick up skills very fast. But something else about the scaling is test everything.[41:57–42:11] David: Everything you believe is true is not true until you’ve tested it and you have evidence that it’s true. That’s why I say when, you know, on our banner or our website, It’s a hyper-exceptional software development team.[42:11–42:22] David: But whenever I talk to somebody, I say, I don’t want you to just believe me because I say that. Ask me for the evidence, and I will show you the things that we were just talking about, and I show them examples of all these things.[42:23–42:38] David: And then you should ask, if you’re talking to other teams, ask them to show you the same things. And if they can show you these things, and maybe they’ll show you other things that are even better, then that’s who you should hire. That rarely happens because there are just not a lot of teams that make it their…[42:38–43:01] David: goal to never be good enough. I mean, there always is something that they can improve on in their strive to improve. Another thing, scaling, that’s not related to what we do specifically, but it’s related to everything you do in a company, is once you’ve tested something and you see that it works, document the process to achieve in a playbook.[43:01–43:14] David: Because if you want to bring new people in, and you’re going to scale your company and bring somebody in basically delegate that to, it’s an intellectual effort to train them if it’s just in your head or somebody else’s head.[43:15–43:30] David: And now it’s in two people’s heads. And if you want to bring a third, and so you end up losing the time of the person who knows this stuff until the other person comes up to speed. And then it’s still not recorded in a way where you can say there’s our intellectual property as a company.[43:31–43:51] David: And we can scale. So if you document these playbooks really well with all the references they need and all the nuances captured in the decision process, then you bring somebody new in and you still train them because you want them to have a personal relationship and understand the culture and the delivery kind of cadence from somebody else.[43:51–44:03] David: But it will take very little time because now they’ve got a book that can perform all the answers to anything they can ask in the context of doing the thing that you know works already. And now you’re just repeating it.[44:04–44:14] David: Yeah, playbooks is really critical. Test everything, then once you find something that works, document that workflow. And have the person that’s doing it document it.[44:14–44:20] David: And then you get that intellectual property out of their head and into a corporate asset.[44:20–44:27] Mark: Makes a lot of sense. Hey, David, if any of our listeners or viewers want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?[44:27–44:38] David: Yeah, and thank you for asking me that. My company is Tekyz. You can find me at Tekyz.com. And that’s spelled T-E-K-Y-Z, the idea of a bunch of Tekyz sitting around the table.[44:38–44:53] David: T-E-K-Y-Z.com. You can email me directly at david at Tekyz.com. I’d love to hear from you. And I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn, David Hirschfeld, or search for Tekyz on LinkedIn, and I’ll come right up.[44:54–45:13] David: And also, can I mention my podcast? Oh, absolutely. So I also have a new podcast called Scaling Smarter, as it turns out. And so, you know, it’s about talking to people like you, exactly like you, and how you’re using AI and automation to scale your business or to launch your business.[45:13–45:22] Mark: That’s awesome. Well, I’ll put links to Tekyz.com and to your podcast in the show notes. I won’t put your email address there because that’s easy.[45:24–45:29] David: I can’t say anybody that listens to this. I want them to have it, but I don’t want Qualers to be.[45:29–45:39] Mark: I don’t like to put it anywhere on the web. In the recording is fine, but once it’s there, all kinds of funny stuff happens. But, hey, David, it’s been great talking with you. I’ve learned some lessons.[45:39–45:52] Mark: Trust me, I’ve learned so much over the last year of running BreezeDocs and going through the development. And there were a couple moments in this conversation where I was like, God, I wish I would have done that. But, you know, it’s all a process.[45:52–46:03] Mark: And like you said, if you’re in software development, it’s not easy. And you have to be flexible, right? And you have to learn. So, hey, thank you so much for being on the Grow Fast Podcast and wish you an amazing 2025.[46:04–46:05] Mark: Thanks, man.[46:05–46:07] David: You too, Mark. And thanks for having me. Cheers.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Navigating Startup Success with Strategic Product Development was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [AI-Driven Growth for Startups](https://tekyz.com/ai-driven-growth-for-startups-8afe1beee30e/) - Featured Image: AI-Driven Growth for Startupshttps://medium.com/media/0334dd6f179d05e51372974d4d06670c/hrefIn this episode of Scaling Smarter with AI: The Art of Scaling Business with AI, host and guest David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, dive deep into how AI can be strategically leveraged to overcome common scaling challenges. They discuss using AI for idea validation, niche identification, lead generation, workflow automation, and contract management, sharing real-world examples and practical techniques. David emphasizes the power of AI in creating playbooks, automating bottlenecks, and guiding early business decisions, while highlighting the need for adaptability in the face of rapid technological change. This conversation provides a roadmap for startups and scale-ups to scale smarter, faster, and more efficiently by embracing AI’s transformative potential.Scaling Smarter with AI: The Art of Scaling Business with AIThis discussion centers around the challenges of scaling a business and how artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to overcome these hurdles. The Host, along with guest David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, explore various AI applications for startups and scale-ups, from idea validation and lead generation to workflow automation and contract management. The conversation also touches upon the transformative impact of AI on business practices and the importance of adapting to this rapidly evolving technological landscape.Leveraging AI for Startup SuccessDavid emphasizes the importance of thoroughly vetting a business idea before product development. He suggests using AI for research to determine the viability of the idea, identify potential niches, and pinpoint the root-level problem statements within each niche. He highlights the need to focus on a specific niche with the highest perceived impact and cost associated with the problem being addressed. David’s company is developing an AI product to assist founders in this process, helping them identify early adopters and validate product-market fit before significant investment.AI for Scaling Existing BusinessesDavid explains that scaling requires adapting strategies as a business grows. He advocates for creating “playbook strategies” to capture tribal knowledge and facilitate training and onboarding. AI can be used to organize and query these playbooks, enabling efficient knowledge transfer and reducing reliance on key personnel. He also suggests using AI to generate questions about scaling, providing a framework for developing a comprehensive plan. David stresses the importance of detailed prompts and specifying the perspective (e.g., CEO, marketing analyst) for more tailored results.AI for Automation and Workflow OptimizationDavid highlights the significance of automation in scaling, particularly for addressing bottlenecks in various business processes. He recommends identifying manual processes and prioritizing automation based on the biggest bottlenecks. He cites Michael Dell’s approach of focusing on and resolving bottlenecks to create a smoother workflow. David also discusses the use of AI in specific areas like accounting, where it can automate data collection and free up time for strategic planning.Practical Applications and ToolsThe Host shares his experiences using AI for contract management, creating custom GPTs for workbooks, and generating core values for businesses. He also mentions using Notebook LM to create audio versions of newsletters. David discusses using AI for website analysis and content creation. Mimi, the editor-in-chief of Startup Club, raises concerns about the varying responses from different AI platforms, particularly in legal matters. David advises triangulating responses from multiple AI tools, especially for critical decisions.ConclusionThe discussion underscores the transformative potential of AI in scaling businesses. By leveraging AI for idea validation, workflow automation, and strategic planning, startups and scale-ups can overcome common challenges and achieve sustainable growth. The conversation also highlights the importance of using AI strategically, understanding its limitations, and always verifying information before making critical decisions. The speakers encourage listeners to explore the various AI tools available and adapt them to their specific business needs.Transcript[0:00–0:13] Host: Scaling smarter with AI, the art of scaling business with AI.[0:13–0:29] Host: You’re listening to Start Scale, Exit Repeat, Serial Entrepreneur Secrets Revealed. And you probably don’t know this, but this is actually a live show. We do this on Clubhouse on a club called Startup Club with almost 1 million members.[0:29–0:39] Host: If you’re not already a member, definitely join. If you haven’t already signed up to our newsletter, definitely sign up to that newsletter because that newsletter is just a wealth of information.[0:40–0:50] Host: We come out with one every month, and it is incredible. We got everything from the Time to Sell Index to leading articles by myself and now by others for Startup Club.[0:50–1:02] Host: But today’s show, we’re going to be really getting into scaling and scaling smarter with AI. And we have a guest author coming on.[1:02–1:20] Host: Our guest is David Hirschfeld, the founder of Tekyz. Tekyz, yeah, that’s right. And he’s really quite good at understanding the whole scaling and AI.[1:20–1:33] Host: When I did go look at his website and tried to understand it, he really has a good understanding of that. I don’t know where he is right now. I know it’s a little bit of a difficult platform to maneuver sometimes, but maybe you can ping him into the room.[1:34–1:47] Host: Before we do that, again, I just want to really emphasize that you can sign up to Startup Club for free. We have a lot of different things happening at Startup Club. We’ve got the weekly show we do here on Clubhouse.[1:47–1:58] Host: We do this every Friday, 2 o’clock Eastern. You can listen to this in podcasts or on YouTube or come in person and listen live. A blog, which is getting a lot of attention by Google.[1:59–2:12] Host: I’m amazed at how well it’s doing on Google. And the fact that when an article is posted on that particular blog, it gets to the front page of Google. Almost like up there with some of the articles I’ve done for Forbes when I write an article.[2:13–2:24] Host: The score is pretty high on Google. I’ve written a number of articles for Startup Club. and it’s hit the top page of Google as well. I think one of them was the top books for entrepreneurs in 2025.[2:25–2:38] Host: And if you type that in Google, you’ll see Startup Club, the article that was written on Startup Club. And then another one was top movies to watch for entrepreneurs in 2025. And I think we actually got the number one link for that.[2:39–2:50] Host: And I’m working on another one right now, top streaming shows, but that one’s actually going to be published on Forbes. It’ll be out in the next week or two, hopefully. I’m mentioning this because you may have some expertise.[2:50–3:04] Host: You may have something that you want to share with the startup community. And not only can you come on stage and ask questions, share your advice, your expertise, but you’re also welcome to become a guest author.[3:05–3:18] Host: And I believe now we have a link on the website, Mimi, is that correct, where people can go and under About Us and become a guest author or guest speaker. but we are definitely looking for more contributors for Startup Club.[3:19–3:31] Host: And if you’re one of those people out there who has an expertise and would like to share that with a large community, then we would be very happy to have you on Startup Club and doing some writing for Startup Club.[3:32–3:44] Host: Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. It is the largest section of the book. It is the most complicated component of Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat because it’s not easy.[3:44–4:06] Host: 99% of companies in America fail to scale. And there are many reasons why they do that. I point out the number one reason is the entrepreneur themselves. And now we do have David Hirschfield, a 35-year software developer veteran, and he’s helped a lot of startups, a lot of technical innovation, a lot of business growth.[4:06–4:19] Host: And he started TechYZ in 2007, And he’s also emerged as a strategic advisor specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation for scale-ups.[4:21–4:31] Host: David, welcome to the show. We’re a bit of a different style of podcast. We like to have a live audience, live show, and we do this every Friday, 2 o’clock Eastern.[4:31–4:43] Host: You can come on stage and join us. If you’re in the audience right now, you want to ask a question of David, feel free to come up on stage and ask a question. David, welcome to Clubhouse and Startup Club.[4:43–4:54] Host: We’re excited about the topic today around how you scale your business or how you scale your startup using AI. So right on the bottom right, start, scale, exit, repeat.[4:54–5:06] Host: There are about 30 chapters in the scale section. And I think the one that interests me the most or the one that I think is most fascinating is on the X factor.[5:06–5:18] Host: and how startups can launch a business, but if they can find something unique and different, go into the white space. That’s what Joe Foster, who founded Reebok, calls it.[5:19–5:33] Host: Go into the white space. And if you can do that, then you can position yourself to win in a marketplace. It happened in a couple of my companies. When we figured out our X factor, the dominoes fell and we completely dominated that particular industry.[5:33–5:48] Host: Think dominoes pizza, 30 minutes are free. national car rental just show up at the lot and go. There’s a lot of examples out there of companies who, when they figure that out, that key component, that key strategy, they can just take off.[5:49–5:58] Host: Mimi, maybe you can back call him. I’m just going to add David as a friend. I can see he has zero friends. Oh, we lost him. We lost you, David.[5:59–6:00] Mimi: I’ll invite him back right now.[6:00–6:11] Host: Invite him back in. So let me tell you a story about Joe Foster. Joe Foster, who founded Reebok. First 19 years business life, he got to $9 million in sales.[6:12–6:24] Host: He spent almost 10 years trying to get a distribution deal in the United States. And so 1979, he applies for three five-star awards. And he actually wins them.[6:25–6:37] Host: He won them on Runner’s World magazine. He won these three five-star awards. And he caught the attention of Paul Fireman, who was a distributor in the United States, and who agreed to take on the Reebok product line and distribute that.[6:38–6:57] Host: One of the employees in the United States saw their wife doing something called aerobics. They were using ballet shoes. So he actually recommended to the management team that they do something that no other shoe company has ever done before, which is get into design aerobics shoes for women.[6:58–7:09] Host: And there’s a lot of pushback because running was everything. He just won the awards for Runner’s World, not for aerobics. But they went out on a gamble, and they designed shoes for aerobics.[7:09–7:25] Host: And somebody on television wore those shoes. It was Jane Fonda. And when she wore those shoes, the company went from $9 million in 1979 to $900 million in 1984.[7:25–7:41] Host: Became the largest shoe company in the world in 85, 86. and after that, obviously, Nike eclipsed them. It was just an incredible story of how when you find your X factor, when you go into the white space, as Joe Foster calls it, you can accomplish a lot.[7:42–7:54] Host: We’d like to share your expertise with those here today and also those on our podcast. You can also post a question in the channel and we’ll try to follow the channel, but I highly recommend that you just jump on stage and share your experiences.[7:54–8:10] Host: I know I’ve used AI a lot to help scale the business. I’ve used it for so many. One of them I’ve used it for is contract management. So right now, every contract I get, I create a custom GPT and upload that contract into the custom GPT.[8:10–8:23] Host: And then it becomes basically an amateur lawyer. Okay, so I’m not saying you’re going to replace your lawyer 100% right now. But I think you can do about 90% of what your lawyer does you can do with contracts.[8:23–8:33] Host: It’s just a lot easier than cutting and pasting. And if you have a big question about a contract, you just jump over to the custom GPT and you ask that. Colin? David, welcome to. Finally.[8:34–8:37] David Hirschfeld: Sorry. I was in the wrong place. And now I’m in the right place.[8:38–8:49] Host: Awesome. Very good. By the way, I could talk forever about scaling and AI. Because those are the two parts of my world right now that I’m living in. I’m surrounded by it. I use AI probably six hours a day.[8:49–9:00] Host: It’s no longer Google on my Chrome. It’s perplexity. It’s completely changing the way startups and founders are launching their businesses or running their companies.[9:00–9:11] Host: But, David, thanks again for having you on here. And we gave you a little bit of an intro earlier on. I know you’re an expert on scaling, and you’ve launched a company called Tekyz.[9:12–9:19] Host: We’ll talk about your company a little bit later, but let’s jump right into AI and how you see AI helping startups scale.[9:20–9:30] David Hirschfeld: Okay. I’m also curious, you said you’re using it like 12 hours a day. How are you using it? Okay, six hours a day.[9:30–9:40] Host: My wife, she’s a little too irritated about that. But, no, it is a default. So I use it for, I mentioned earlier before you were on, I use it for contract management. I create custom GPTs.[9:41–9:52] Host: I’ve also created for the book, Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. We did a workbook, Mimi and I and the team here, and we created custom GPTs throughout the workbook. Scale section.[9:52–10:02] Host: And there’s everything from I was just doing a podcast with JLD the other day on Entrepreneurs on Fire. And one of the custom GPTs we did was on companyvaluesai.com.[10:02–10:19] Host: So we uploaded the content from the book into the custom GPT, set some parameters, and now you can go to companyvaluesai.com, and it will literally give you four to six rhythmic value statements from people we interviewed in the book and in the book.[10:19–10:30] Host: So it’s that kind of stuff that we’re doing. I could go on for 30, 40 minutes of the types of little hacks that we use it for. But I think I’ve been really impressed with custom GPTs.[10:30–10:43] Host: I really like Notebook LM. On every newsletter now, we do a Notebook LM. And that’s the — it’s like a — then we turn that into a podcast. So we put it on YouTube. If people don’t want to read the newsletter, they can listen to the notebook.[10:43–10:49] Host: I find it funny because we do a lot of work on this newsletter. But when you listen to the notebook, it gives you a bit of a different perspective.[10:49–11:00] David Hirschfeld: I’m curious from you. When Notebookit first came out, like maybe in the first two or three days, I pointed it at my website and had it create the podcast discussion about my website.[11:00–11:17] David Hirschfeld: I was blown away by it because, oh, magical, what AI can do. But what I found was listening to these two people talk about my website, it created some messaging for me that I didn’t realize we had on the website that really didn’t speak to what we do.[11:17–11:31] David Hirschfeld: and it brought that into context in a way that was meaningful. So I realized I had to make some changes to the website. I would not have gotten that if I didn’t listen to people debate the pros and cons of our business based on what they found on the website.[11:31–11:42] David Hirschfeld: Things like that are huge. And all they did was point it at the website and listen to it talk to itself about the website. So that doesn’t really help people scale necessarily.[11:42–11:59] Host: You know why I like it, though, is we do it with all the articles and newsletters now, and I think it enhances the newsletter. I think it adds a whole new dimension to the newsletter. I can be driving to work now, click on the Startup Club newsletter on YouTube, and get my monthly newsletter through that versus — now, I know it won’t cover everything.[11:59–12:15] Host: It’s amazing. We have a 50 growth hacks and we had one on that It didn go through all 50 growth hacks It picked out two or three or four of them and talked about those and emphasized those Then you get a sense of what in the newsletter You say oh I got to go check out this newsletter I think it has a dimension I didn’t know the piece of it.[12:15–12:16] Host: It’s just one of many of these pieces.[12:17–12:40] David Hirschfeld: What we typically, I’ll take these interviews and also on my podcast when I interview somebody, we take the transcript, we generate a medium article, put the transcript in there, put a summary in there, put a bulleted index of topics that are talked about in there, and we post a podcast episode or YouTube video in there as well.[12:40–12:51] David Hirschfeld: What do you think about also having Notebook LM generate a review of the discussion and putting that in there as well? Yeah. It basically does an analysis of the thing, right?[12:52–12:52] David Hirschfeld: Yeah.[12:52–12:55] Host: It’s not going to give you a 4.5 out of 5 stars.[12:55–13:02] David Hirschfeld: No, not that, but maybe have a podcast about the podcast. Let the two people talk about what you guys talk about and what they think of it.[13:03–13:14] Host: Yeah, I think we’ve got to use it carefully because it can get boring really fast. Like, when I go back right now, not as smooth as they are, though, if you ever listen to them, they’re really trying to emulate the population when they speak and whatnot.[13:14–13:25] Host: I think we’re more authentic, and I think people will pick up on that. So I think there’s a place for it. But all human beings talking the way we’re talking about particular things and trying to help startups figure out how to scale their businesses.[13:26–13:27] Host: I just don’t think you can replace that.[13:27–13:37] David Hirschfeld: But some people either don’t have the time to listen to the whole thing today, but maybe there’s a three-minute summary discussion about it so that they can get the highlights in a verbal way. It’s just an idea.[13:38–13:44] David Hirschfeld: I wanted to speak it out loud because then I’ll remember it, and I’ll hear if it makes any sense to me while I’m saying it out loud.[13:44–13:54] Host: David, somebody gets an idea for a business. Yeah. Okay, my idea for this business is we’re going to take recycled bottles and we’re going to make baby carriages or something like that.[13:54–14:02] Host: How do I use AI to get that idea to action? How do I use AI to help me get that idea out of the gate?[14:03–14:15] David Hirschfeld: Okay, so the biggest thing with startups, the reason people are entrepreneurs is because they go, that doesn’t make sense or there needs to be this because of some pain that it eliminates in people’s lives, right?[14:15–14:29] David Hirschfeld: That’s where entrepreneurs come from. And then entrepreneurs are the ones that gripe about something, think there’s a better way of doing something, and then decide they want to act on it. The very first thing you need to do is what’s the genesis of this idea?[14:29–14:39] David Hirschfeld: Is there a real reason that needs to be done other than it just seems like a good idea? And then you start with the research, like what is the viability of this?[14:40–14:58] David Hirschfeld: Are people already doing this? Can AI quantify for me how much of a pain point this is? and then say, okay, it seems like it is a pain point. There is definitely an industry out there that needs this based on social signals and research databases and things like that.[14:58–15:12] David Hirschfeld: And say, okay, fine. So now I need to go a little deeper, right? I need to figure out who are all the niches I might be able to market this to. And this really needs to be every entrepreneur’s number one job when they think of a concept that they want to pursue.[15:12–15:44] David Hirschfeld: what are all the root level problem statements and you figure out a root level problem statement when you’re in the shoes of the stakeholder the buyer in that niche in one of those niches and you ask why does this problem statement matter and you usually have to ask that question two or three times or four times before you get to the root level problem statement of why it matters and it has to start out with this problem it makes me miserable or i hate this problem or i feel threatened by this problem because if I don’t fix it, this will happen.[15:45–15:57] David Hirschfeld: And that’s when you know you’re at a root-level problem. Anything less severe than that isn’t a root-level problem statement, and so you don’t really understand the triggers that you need to understand before you’re going to be able to reach people to buy a product.[15:58–16:19] David Hirschfeld: So once you understand all the root-level problem statements that you’re solving across all the various niches, then you have to find one niche out of that list of niches whose problem statements, when you score all their various problem statements, has the highest perceived impact and independently the highest cost because of the problem that they’re struggling with that you’re trying to solve.[16:20–16:32] David Hirschfeld: That’s the number one. AI is really good at helping with this. In fact, we’re building an AI product. We’re in the early stages of building an AI product to do this for founders because it’s such a tedious task to do this.[16:33–16:36] Host: You’re designing a product that’s going to help them vet their idea, basically?[16:37–16:47] David Hirschfeld: It’s going to figure out who’s the early adopter. Yes, exactly. Hopefully they’ve done some betting even before they get to this point, but maybe not. If it’s easy enough to do with the tool, then maybe that is the first step.[16:47–17:07] David Hirschfeld: So it’s going to identify who’s the early adopter, which is the one or two problem statements that have the biggest impact to them that you’re addressing. People think you can sell, unless you’re a mass market product and you’re on Kickstarter and doing a prelaunch sale to an ass market, You can really only focus on one niche at a time.[17:07–17:22] David Hirschfeld: And the reason you need to figure that out is because the tighter you can figure out who that early adopter niche is, the tighter that niche is, the more you can charge and the higher your closing ratio. If you’re broad, then you can’t charge as much, and your closing ratio is going to be a lot lower.[17:22–17:24] : Your marketing costs are going to be much higher.[17:24–17:38] David Hirschfeld: You’re telling me there’s a lot of water in the desert. Exactly. Somebody who has a dire need for that water but has no money, and that’s not a good target. You may have somebody who has a lot of money but doesn’t feel the need for it, and you can’t get their attention when you’re marketing.[17:38–17:50] David Hirschfeld: So that’s why you need both. Costing them everything, that person may not feel the need to do anything about that problem right now, and that’s not your early adopter. Even though you can say, but look how much this is costing you.[17:50–18:04] David Hirschfeld: They say, yeah, I know, but it costs everybody in my industry that much, and my company is just not going to get behind me on this because they have other things they’re trying to accomplish right now, or it’s too many things that we have to change internally, bring that on, even though it would really benefit me.[18:04–18:24] David Hirschfeld: It’s not going to benefit the company as a whole. So that’s why you have to measure both those things independently. I was just having a conversation today with a founder who’s trying to scale and running into this problem on a product where he’s won awards about how this problem will literally increase the value of a company, and he’s having trouble because he doesn’t nail the early adopter down properly.[18:25–18:35] David Hirschfeld: He’s going after people that want the product, but they’re not willing to push past the corporate inertia to then bring the product in and get it going because it’s going to be a big change.[18:35–18:49] David Hirschfeld: So he’s going after, and he doesn’t have the CEO’s buy-in for implementing this product because of the way he’s been marketing and targeting and messaging. He’s been going after the CFO or the director of marketing or people like that.[18:49–19:00] David Hirschfeld: And they want it, but they don’t want it badly enough that they’re willing to fall on a sword to try to bring it in because the CEO hasn’t gotten behind it. So we had a whole conversation about the same exact thing this morning.[19:00–19:10] David Hirschfeld: You have to figure this. And you don’t want to wait until you’ve put several million dollars into your product, like in the case of this guy, to try to figure this out. Figure it out before you even start building the product.[19:12–19:17] David Hirschfeld: And you can test it and validate it solidly before you even start to build your product.[19:18–19:34] Host: I’ve used AI to try to vet ideas. I’ve used AI to help me pick a domain name. I’ve used AI to help write business plans. I’m just finishing a private placement memorandum right now. It’s been $20,000 15 years ago to a law firm do a private placement memorandum.[19:34–19:49] Host: This thing’s amazing. It’s done 40 risk factors. Now, I did a lot of the writing myself. I had it cleaned up, so it just makes my writing faster, more efficient. And by the way, if you’re writing an article for Forbes or for Startup Club, you can’t use AI at all unless you’re using it for research.[19:49–20:03] Host: It’s got to be original material. But if you’re writing a business plan, you’re writing an investor plan, the more that you copy or use other people’s words in their documents, the more likelihood that you’re going to get that funding.[20:04–20:15] Host: So there’s a totally different concept than in school. Plagiarism in PPMs and S1s, I’ve done an S1 too. S1’s extreme. Like S1, they won’t even look at language. It’s not even — the SEC look at language.[20:16–20:24] Host: It’s not even been already approved before. They literally have to write language in there that actually is approved, and that’s where AI can really come in very nicely.[20:25–20:28] David Hirschfeld: You still want to get it reviewed by an attorney to make sure that –[20:28–20:32] Host: I’m still going to get an attorney reviewing it, but I’ve done like 95% of the work here.[20:32–20:42] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. Documents. Exactly, and it’s not going to cost you that much now. It’s going to cost you a small fraction of what you would have paid to have the attorney create something for you. Yeah.[20:42–20:51] Host: AI is amazing. It’s a reg D, so we’ll file with the SEC, and we’ll do the reg D for sophisticated investors. But let’s talk about that is your area. That’s your expertise in your company.[20:51–20:52] David Hirschfeld: Startups and scale.[20:52–20:58] Host: How can you use AI to help scale a business? Because it really is a tough thing to do. Most companies in America don’t scale. That’s reality.[20:59–21:14] David Hirschfeld: The very first thing you do, because what you do to get your first customer is not the same thing that you necessarily do to get your next 10. And then once you’ve got 10, now that same playbook isn’t going to get you from 10 to 100 or from 100 to 1,000.[21:14–21:27] David Hirschfeld: And every time you hit the next log limit, you have to step back and say, okay, now what are we going to do to get from 100 to 1,000? Because it’s not going to be the same sales, marketing, infrastructure, support.[21:27–21:51] David Hirschfeld: Something is going to change for us to be able to achieve that. And what is that? The very first thing in the scaling process is your ability to create infrastructure in your organization so that you can bring people in to accelerate growth, whether it’s support, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s sales, whether it’s operations, it’s logistics, how do you bring new people in?[21:51–22:06] David Hirschfeld: And what is your ability to bring those people in and train them without sucking the life out of the people that have all the tribal knowledge in your organization about that job? So the very first thing I say is create a playbook strategy.[22:06–22:19] David Hirschfeld: And a playbook means that you’ve got somebody who’s got their tribal knowledge about how to do a job really well and all the nuances, other than just the basic steps, but all the nuances about that job.[22:19–22:38] David Hirschfeld: And now you have to use AI to capture all that information and organize that playbook. So the idea is that once you’ve got that playbook document and then use AI to, like a notebook LM, about that playbook so that you can bring somebody else in, now they can ask questions.[22:38–23:01] David Hirschfeld: They have an easy way now to query if they have questions about their job or a particular decision point comes in and it’s nuanced. But that should be documented in the playbook because the person with all the tribal knowledge downloaded it into a document of some kind that’s in Notebook LM or they recorded it and that got ingested in Notebook LM or whatever, or Zoom video and that got ingested in Notebook LM.[23:01–23:14] David Hirschfeld: So there’s a lot of different steps here that AI can come into play. Okay. You tell AI, this is my business. Here’s my website. Here’s documentation that documents my business.[23:14–23:25] David Hirschfeld: And then you say, knowing what my business is, and this is the revenue I’m currently at and so many employees I have, I want to grow to three times to five times this in the next two years or whatever the goal is.[23:26–23:39] David Hirschfeld: What questions should I be asking about my company before I create a plan to scale my company up? And it will give you the questions to ask. So that’s where I usually start is ask the questions you should be asking.[23:39–23:50] David Hirschfeld: Ask it for the questions that should be asked. And then have it answer those questions for you. Say, great, I like those questions seem relevant to me or they’re not, and explain why, and it will make changes to it.[23:50–24:00] David Hirschfeld: Now answer those questions based on what you know about my industry and competitive pressures and things like that. Make sure those prompts that you write are very detailed. They provide context.[24:01–24:27] David Hirschfeld: Tell it what perspective it should be considering this from. from a CEO perspective, from operations, from a marketing perspective, as you’re a marketing analyst. Act like a marketing analyst doing this plan Act like the CEO doing this plan And you get different results if you do it that way and they be much more specific And then as it’s answering those things for you, there may be something in there that you like but you needed to expand.[24:27–24:39] David Hirschfeld: You say expand on point number two or expand on point number three. And pretty soon you’ve got a whole scaling plan. Then you can start asking questions about, okay, now I need to execute this. How do I start to implement some kind of execution plan for this?[24:39–24:47] David Hirschfeld: So these are things that this is like every single day doing this kind of stuff with AI. You said you spend hours every day on AI?[24:48–25:04] Host: Exactly. Now, one of the things that my co-host who’s not here today, she’s on a plane, but Michelle Van Tilborg, she does a pretty unique technique where she’ll say to the AI, okay, I want you to be my business coach, and I want you to ask me questions.[25:04–25:16] Host: That’s great. What I can do to scale the company. And I like the way it does that. It’s now prompting, actually emulating a coach, prompting you questions, asking you questions as if it was a real coach.[25:17–25:19] Host: That’s a pretty neat technique she’s been using and adopting.[25:20–25:28] David Hirschfeld: I love that. And I’ve not heard that one before, but I’m always asking it to ask them questions in different contexts. That’s a new one. It’s now in my playbook.[25:28–25:42] Host: You could ask, hey, be a lawyer, be a doctor. Oh, my gosh, I got my medical results back for my breathing tests and all this stuff. I got this arthritis and I’ve had it for 20, 30 years, and they’re all trying to figure it out, and I can’t understand these results.[25:43–25:47] Host: Right. So I logged on, and I just said, be my doctor, and I hear my results. What does it tell me?[25:48–26:00] David Hirschfeld: You’re not going to just do whatever it says, right? You’re going to use that to help inform you, but at least that’s what you should use it for. AI should always be used to inform you, not to decide for you.[26:00–26:11] David Hirschfeld: Maybe it informs you on something so obvious you feel like that’s a perfectly good decision, but you should always, it’s not always right. It does still hallucinate. It makes things up.[26:11–26:28] David Hirschfeld: And one of the ways you can see this is ask it to research you. Use the deep research tool, for example, on one of these tools, and ask it to research who you are and give it enough information so that it’s for sure going to find you because you’re an expert on you, right?[26:28–26:41] David Hirschfeld: The one thing that they are a complete expert on is themselves. So ask it to do a full research and background and describe everything about who you are, what you’ve done, your history, everything.[26:41–26:53] David Hirschfeld: And you’ll find that it will make some things up. It will make assumptions about who you are based on what it finds. So you still have to be careful. It’s so much smarter than it used to be. You still have to take it all with a grain of salt.[26:53–27:05] David Hirschfeld: But what it can do, it’s just like magic. I used it the other day. I was in Lowe’s. I had a garage project that I was working on. My wife called me. She says, I need fertilizer for my hibiscus. Can you get me a bag of it?[27:05–27:20] David Hirschfeld: So I looked. The word hibiscus was not on any of the 100 bags of plant food and fertilizer that I found. So I stepped about 30 feet back from all of the shelves that had all these bags of fertilizer, and I opened up ChatGPT, and I tapped.[27:20–27:32] David Hirschfeld: I went to the voice portion of it and then tapped on the camera, and I pointed it at all these shelves. and I said I’m looking for plant food that will feed hibiscus and then[27:32–27:36] : it said yes I see plant whatever the brand was molytone[27:36–27:47] David Hirschfeld: or something like that and this is exactly what you would want to feed hibiscus they said it’s red and white and so I went walked up to a red and white bag which was not the right one and so I walked up to it I said is this what you’re talking about?[27:47–27:58] David Hirschfeld: She said no that’s not it it’s farther to your left she couldn’t see it when I was walking up she said it’s to the left on the second shelf from the top. So I just turned my camera and pointed in that direction.[27:59–28:04] David Hirschfeld: So as I see it, it’s about three bags from the end on the second shelf. And I walked over there. I love it.[28:04–28:16] Host: I love it. That’s magic. Every aspect of life, you can use it. Here’s one that I did the other day on a podcast. It was a podcast with JLD. And it was the Ultramers on Fire podcast.[28:17–28:31] Host: And we developed for the scale workbook, which has not released yet, custom GPT for core values. The idea is to create four to six core pillars of rhythmic statements based on questions it asks you.[28:31–28:46] Host: We uploaded the information in the book, and I mentioned this earlier in the show. But people can actually go to it at companyvaluesai.com and create these core values. And core values are one of those things that you really need to be able to scale your business.[28:47–28:59] Host: And AI can play a role in many of them. Let me give you another example. We have one called personalityprofileai.com, which goes to another custom GPT, which figures out your disk profile, your Myers-Briggs profile, to identify these positions.[29:00–29:11] Host: And with these positions, you actually say, okay, this would be the ideal profile, personality profile of an individual that I want to hire. I want a sales leader. Okay, I want someone who’s got high dominance and high influence.[29:11–29:23] Host: Great. And so what I can do with this program is you can have people — everything’s free. This is going to cause disinflation. I’m not going to go for deflation right now, but I think productivity boom is going to occur.[29:24–29:33] Host: I think so, too. A lot of these programs in the past, they used to charge money for these programs. Now you can get them for free. What are some other components of scaling?[29:34–29:45] David Hirschfeld: Automation. You have all these workflows in your business, right? And the bigger you get, the more workflows you have. This is why you want to document playbooks so that you can bring other people in and not suck the life out of your key people.[29:45–29:58] David Hirschfeld: And also, because the more playbooks you have, the more intellectual property value your business has. Because if somebody acquires you, they’re also acquiring all this well-documented knowledge about how to operate and how to run and how to sell and how to grow.[29:58–30:09] David Hirschfeld: But you always run into bottlenecks when you’re growing because there’s people-dependent processes that are repetitive. They may be in logistics. They may be in shipping. They may be in ordering.[30:10–30:21] David Hirschfeld: They may be in invoice to order reconciliation because you have people. So you have all these things. They may be in marketing and outreach, but most of these things can be automated.[30:22–30:32] David Hirschfeld: But you don’t want to automate them all at once. So you’ll list down everything that is a manual process and focus on the ones where you know that there’s bottlenecks in your business.[30:33–30:39] David Hirschfeld: If you were able to eliminate any restriction in this area, your business would automatically grow,[30:40–30:43] : except it would find the next bottleneck upstream or downstream.[30:44–30:54] Host: And that’s what happens. It’s hard of scaling that it’s always bottlenecks. There’s always a bottleneck. If a bottleneck is not enough sales, why do we have enough sales? We don’t have enough salespeople. We don’t have the right salespeople.[30:55–31:06] Host: There’s always a bottleneck. And every time you clear up that bottleneck, it points to another bottleneck. You can’t sell that bottleneck. And that’s one of the ways you can help scale your company just by limiting those bottlenecks.[31:06–31:16] David Hirschfeld: I don’t have enough leads. So you come up with a program that’s generating more leads than you can actually handle. now I’m not qualifying my leads by taking us too much time.[31:17–31:29] David Hirschfeld: So come up with some kind of workflow to qualify those leads, and now you’ve got a qualified prospect. I’m not closing one. This is what you do with your sales pipeline, right? It’s like that in operations, in finance, in recruiting.[31:30–31:53] David Hirschfeld: Maybe you’ve got a recruiting bottleneck because you’re not getting enough profiles in or because you’re not finding enough of the right candidates. So there’s all kinds of automation you can do there. Maybe you’re an accounting firm and you want to automatically pull in information from all the different financial places where finances for a particular business are captured because you need all that to be able to do their taxes.[31:53–32:10] David Hirschfeld: If you automate all that, you’ve got 80% of the manual effort that goes into running an accounting firm addressed. And you can focus much more on financial planning and strategic planning for the business as opposed to spending all your time doing the bookkeeping and collecting everything for taxes.[32:10–32:24] David Hirschfeld: So you list all the areas where you think you might have bottlenecks, and then you prioritize them to which one’s the biggest bottleneck today, and that’s where you focus your effort. Michael Dell of Dell Computers, when he was asked how he grew his business so big, this was exactly what he said.[32:25–32:45] David Hirschfeld: He said he just focused his energy on wherever the bottleneck was, and then he fixed that so that became a pipeline that things could flow through freely, which, of course, instantly identified the next bottleneck because then it would flow faster through there except to hit some other point upstream or downstream.[32:45–33:05] Mimi: Okay, sure. Yes. Thank you very much for giving me time to speak. I do run a small business. There’s a service-based industry. You were talking quite a lot about using AI for generating business plan, values, automation, so on and so forth.[33:05–33:17] Mimi: One question is that I have been having a go at several different sources of AI, from Gemini to ChatGPT to other ones.[33:17–33:37] Mimi: And what I noticed that, actually, quite recently, I used both Gemini and ChatGPT for a legal matter. and I noticed that the answers they provide, especially when you say that, act like my solicitor and advise me on this.[33:38–33:49] Mimi: Read this letter and tell me if you were the lawyer acting for the other side, why would you write such a letter or how you would react to this letter.[33:49–34:22] Mimi: Oh, that’s great. I love it. And what I was noticing that they’re very different. and at that point I should have noticed that it’s like a for example with the same test results blood results or scan results you can go to two separate doctors and they can give you different opinions this is how I noticed that how different this AI I don’t know how because I guess they all go and scan the whole worldwide web and this is how they get the information but especially I found[34:22–34:38] Mimi: Gemini. Gemini is more of the conservative one and the chat GPT is more of the aggressive one. And so now going back to the original question, how can you use AI for helping to scale your business?[34:39–34:50] Mimi: Do you have any specific recommendations? Maybe, I don’t know, this one for business plan, that one for fundraising, that one to increase leads, so on and so forth.[34:50–35:00] Mimi: Or do you think that it’s better to stick to one of them and the more questions you ask, the more training it gets, and the better results you’re going to get out of the answers it provides?[35:01–35:02] Mimi: So that’s my question.[35:02–35:15] David Hirschfeld: I have a question for you first. When you asked them to review the letter, what context did you give them about the company that sent you the letter and about your company?[35:15–35:26] David Hirschfeld: Did they know where the company was located? Does it understand what the company does? Did they understand your relationship with the company, your business relationship, things like that?[35:26–35:26] David Hirschfeld: Absolutely.[35:26–35:37] Mimi: Actually, the company that I had this legal matter with, it was a massive news. I’m not going to name names here because the legal matter can’t really mention anything.[35:37–35:51] Mimi: But it was like a national news about this company. and as soon as I was typing in something about this company, all of a sudden both of the platforms, they’re recognizing the issues of this company.[35:52–35:58] Mimi: Then I would say that, okay, what is my issue? Why I’m into this dispute with them? So they had the background.[35:58–35:59] David Hirschfeld: Okay, okay, that’s good.[35:59–36:05] Mimi: Coming from World Wide Web, the background of the company for them would be exactly the same.[36:05–36:15] David Hirschfeld: And the same with your company and what you do. So that was the first thing. And so that’s good. And your relationship with the company, did you specify that in the prompt?[36:15–36:35] Mimi: Yes, yes. Actually I was going to quite a great extent to explain things upload previous documents Oh good For CatGPT you can upload documents in PDF in Word But Gemini has got, doesn’t really have that sort of multifunction.[36:35–36:47] Mimi: And sometimes I had to cut and fix things into Gemini because it wasn’t accepting certain type of format of documents we uploaded on. But more or less, I was feeding them with the same information.[36:47–37:01] David Hirschfeld: My suggestion is try two or three, especially when it’s something like this. You get feedback from two or three different Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, because it has a little bit different take on how it uses the AIs.[37:01–37:14] David Hirschfeld: And then you triangulate between them. None of them are an absolute source for anything, right? They’re giving you sort of a predictive answer based on what makes the most sense, based on all the things it’s learned in the past.[37:14–37:26] David Hirschfeld: And all these models are slightly different in how they do it. So I always triangulate when it’s really important like this. And when there’s potential liability or risk associated with how you interpret the answer, then I try to get it from several of them.[37:26–37:34] David Hirschfeld: And I’m assuming you’re using that to inform you so that when you have a conversation with your solicitor, you can have an informed conversation, right?[37:34–37:44] Mimi: I know you guys, you sound as if you’re based either in USA or Canada, but I’m based in the UK. And, of course, the legal system is very similar, but it’s still different.[37:45–37:58] Mimi: What I have to say is that if I want to just rely, especially chat GPT, because it’s quite aggressive in terms of how it advises you, it would have been gone barely up, my choice.[37:58–38:06] Mimi: It’s good to get some information out of it, but there was no way it could have replaced the solicitor. No way.[38:06–38:27] David Hirschfeld: No, and people shouldn’t think that it will, but it can replace a lot of what they charge you for. like what Colin was saying, for preparing the document before you go to the solicitor and then have them review it and make whatever changes they need to make so that they’re willing to stand behind the legal agreement, that can reduce your costs a lot.[38:27–38:30] David Hirschfeld: And in that respect, I think that it’s fantastic.[38:30–38:46] Mimi: There were certain things that they were trying to put into the document, and my solicitor completely crossed them out, said that’s no good. because it didn’t have enough information about the cases that could have backed up my side of it.[38:46–38:48] David Hirschfeld: The deep research tool to prepare them?[38:49–38:52] Mimi: Deep research tool isn’t on ChatGPT?[38:52–39:07] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, now I think it’s on all of them, but it came out on ChatGPT first just four weeks ago or five weeks ago. So if you go to ChatGPT and let’s say you pick 03 mini high, you should see a button in the search box.[39:07–39:40] David Hirschfeld: There’s a search tool, right? You can click that so that it’s looking on the web while it’s doing its work, but there’s also one called deep research. And if you do that, it will, whatever prompt you give it, it will always come back and ask three or four or five questions to clarify a few things, and then after you answer those, it will go and it will research 10, 15, 20, 30 different resources and take about 10 minutes to do this and then produce an answer from aggregating all the[39:40–40:00] David Hirschfeld: information that’s available today specifically about that topic. And it’s quite good. It really impresses me. I’ve used it for many different things. When it’s something complex and I want to make sure I’ve got the best research possible, it still will make mistakes. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but it’s much better than just asking a question, having it spit out the answer right away.[40:00–40:13] Mimi: I have to say when it comes to writing letters, Gemini is the tenest tips of any of them. It’s so good. The way you write, sometimes it blows my mind.[40:13–40:29] Mimi: It’s just fantastic. It runs better than it says it. Oh, yeah. But you have to tell it how to write things. But in terms of doing the research, I didn’t find Gemini to be as research savvy as GBT.[40:29–40:43] Mimi: I haven’t tried the other ones. I just wanted to ask you a question about if you want to use AI for lead generation and capital raising for a business, which ones would you recommend better?[40:44–40:46] Mimi: Or they are the same to you? I don’t know.[40:46–41:01] David Hirschfeld: Actually, right now, there are some tools that are on the market for basically LinkedIn, AI applied to LinkedIn outreach, that sort of thing. But the problem with this is that it is changing so fast.[41:01–41:12] David Hirschfeld: So one thing those tools don’t do a good job with is to orchestrate an entire lead campaign and automate it for you. They can give you a direction on how to do it. They can do a couple of the steps for you.[41:13–41:24] David Hirschfeld: But then you need other tools that do the workflow automation for you. Maybe it’s Zapier if you’re Simple Tools or Make is a little more sophisticated or M8N if you’re much more technical.[41:24–41:36] David Hirschfeld: and then you have to build your own workflows because the tools, they don’t do all of that. So when you’re saying lead generation, which part of that process are you asking about?[41:36–41:47] David Hirschfeld: Because I think they’re all probably better than what we do without using any of them. I lean on ChatGPT most of the time just because it’s consumable.[41:47–42:05] David Hirschfeld: I’ve got an app. I love the deep research tool. They seem to stay ahead of everybody else in general sense. If I’m doing something that’s more sophisticated in AI, I really like the Gemini pipeline because they have all the infrastructure and deployment tools available that are built into their stack.[42:05–42:29] David Hirschfeld: for building our own custom AI models where we have our own machine learning engine added to, and we use that to the large language model, whether it’s ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, is going to then use our database that we built around a specific vertical specialization, like the Launch First that I was talking about earlier doing that niche analysis stuff.[42:29–42:55] David Hirschfeld: ChatGPT and Claude both now have this context protocol system. It’s called, like, it’s MCP is the acronym, and it allows you to build custom software that’s really intelligent that will, when it knows when it needs to check other sources, and you can provide it what sources are that it needs to check so that it’s a custom application.[42:56–43:12] David Hirschfeld: So for lead generation, I would look for the tools that are implementing AI into their lead generation process because they’re going to be very specific and basically build a campaign per person.[43:12–43:23] David Hirschfeld: Find the person that might be your ideal customer profile and then build a drip campaign written specifically to speak to them. And that’s the holy grail for lead generation.[43:23–43:25] David Hirschfeld: and there’s tools now coming out on the market that do this.[43:26–43:48] Mimi: So to make sure I understood this correctly, you said that you can just literally, for example, I can go to Gemini and just put down the company details, put down my details, put down the avatar, favorite avatar of the customer that we have, and I’ll ask to generate the campaign to increase leads by 20%, something like that.[43:48–44:04] David Hirschfeld: It’ll build a drip campaign for you. All the tools will do that. I don’t know which one does that the best because I really have not tested the tools and compared. And the reason I haven’t done that is because I know there’s all these tools coming out, and now there’s tools available on the market that do this for you, and that’s what they’re doing.[44:05–44:08] David Hirschfeld: They’re basically automating this whole workflow for you.[44:09–44:11] Mimi: Amazing. Thank you so much. Cheers.[44:11–44:12] David Hirschfeld: Cheers. Bye.[44:13–44:14] : Colin?[44:15–44:29] Host: There we go. I like to say there’s an AI for that. There’s an AI for that. There’s an app for that. There’s an AI for that. And AI, what happened November 23, it was a real shock in the world.[44:29–44:46] Host: I call it a paradigm shift. We’re seeing a lot of shifts that continually occur, and you can actually ride those waves and those shifts. How does somebody — so can you just talk a little bit about Tekyz and what you do and how you can help people scale their businesses with your company and how they can reach you?[44:47–44:47] : Sure.[44:47–44:59] David Hirschfeld: And before I even do that, I want to respond to what you just said about the shift. So the big shift is that technology always expected us to learn how it works, and now technology is learning how we work.[45:00–45:13] David Hirschfeld: And so the relationship we have to technology and user interfaces and applications, that relationship between us and the application is changing dramatically. And that change is accelerating really fast.[45:13–45:28] David Hirschfeld: So our expectations are growing really fast in terms of what we should expect from technology because of AI, which is what you were saying. I just did a conversation on the idea that AI is basically making software human first now.[45:29–45:38] David Hirschfeld: We are a custom development shop. So we do workflow automation. We work with a lot of startups and a lot of scale-ups to build their applications.[45:38–45:50] Host: The company we have really doesn’t work with startups. We did products for sandals and banks. Are you offshore as well? Yeah, we are. It’s hard to sometimes get these companies to help startups because of the failure rate or, look, I just need a half a startup.[45:51–45:53] Host: Is that something your company does as well? Oh, yeah.[45:53–46:08] David Hirschfeld: That’s why I came out with Launch First, which is a methodology specifically for helping startups find a path to revenue and prove product market fit before we start building the product. Because I’ve worked with so many that have failed that shouldn’t have.[46:08–46:27] David Hirschfeld: And they always fail for the same reason. They wait way too long to validate product market fit. And the only way you validate product market fit is by generating revenue from sales and doing it in enough numbers with a high enough closing rate where your cost of acquisition is one-third or less of the lifetime value of that customer.[46:28–46:38] David Hirschfeld: And when you have that, you’ve got product market fit, you know, you have a viable business, then build the thing. And then people go, what? How do you sell your product before you have it? That’s what Launch First is all about.[46:38–46:48] Host: Tip of the iceberg of your knowledge. We haven’t really uncovered all those gems that you can provide us. And you never know how the show can work. And we appreciate you, Margin, for coming on stage.[46:48–47:00] Host: I really enjoyed having you on stage. If you’re listening to some podcasts, you can come to Clubhouse. Join us on Startup Club and listen to this live. Join us on stage. Share your expertise. David, this happened about two weeks ago.[47:00–47:32] Host: Mimi is the editor-in-chief here at Startup Club. and every time we do an article it hits the top spot on google or the front page of google so if you have an article that you want to publish be great if you could be a contributor you’re not allowed to use ai except for research but great if you’d be a contributor and actually do an article about some of your expertise as well i’d love to club and you’ll get really good seo juice out of that i will absolutely do that one of the gentlemen who works on our team he does[47:32–48:05] Host: the newsletter every month and i’m like this freaking newsletter is so good you’ve got to show your formula to the world and he wrote an article seven kick ass or seven ways your newsletter can kick ass i just googled how to create a great newsletter for startups came up number one on google that was just published a week ago anyone who’s in the audience or you’re listening to some podcast or on youtube you’re welcome to become a startup club contributor and there’s ways you can contribute. One is articles. The second is come on and do a show like David did. You can actually[48:05–48:21] Host: even do your own shows, open up and become a leader on Clubhouse. I feel like there’s a strong community here on Clubhouse, on Startup Club, and we continue to produce good content. We have great community members, and the community comes together and makes such a difference here.[48:21–48:30] Host: Thank you very much, David. You’ve been listening to Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat, Serial Entourage Secrets Revealed. We’ll see you all next Friday, 2 o’clock Eastern. Thank you.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.AI-Driven Growth for Startups was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Why Most Startups Fail and What to Do Differently](https://tekyz.com/why-most-startups-fail-and-what-to-do-differently-4657843fc653/) - Featured Image: Why Most Startups Fail and What to Do Differentlyhttps://medium.com/media/6bc151be22e44752a21aeea7d48b1830/hrefIn this episode of The Tech Talks Daily Podcast, we sit down with David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz and seasoned software entrepreneur, to explore how startups can navigate risk and uncertainty in today’s fast-paced tech landscape. David shares his “Launch First” methodology, which flips traditional development on its head by focusing on pre-launch sales to validate product-market fit before building. We discuss how AI is reshaping software development, the common pitfalls founders face, and why loving the problem — not the solution — is key to startup success. Packed with real-world insights and actionable advice, this conversation is a must-listen for any founder aiming to build a sustainable, customer-driven business.Chapters00:00 Introduction of David Hirschfeld and his company, Tekyz.02:45 Detailed explanation of the “Launch First” method.05:36 Discussion on AI’s impact on software development.07:53 Explanation of “artifacts” in exceptional software development.12:49 Adapting to AI’s rapid advancements in software development.18:00 Common traits of successful startups and pitfalls leading to failure.21:29 Lessons from David’s personal experiences in startups.25:53 Advice for de-risking the startup process.29:37 Book recommendation (“The Mom Test”).31:29 Contact information for David Hirschfeld.32:35 Conclusion and summary of the conversation.De-risking the Startup Journey: A Conversation with David HirschfeldThis discussion explores the challenges and opportunities facing software startups, particularly in the age of AI. David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz and a veteran of the software industry, shares his “Launch First” methodology, emphasizing the importance of proving product-market fit before development. He also discusses the impact of AI on software development and offers advice for startup founders.The Launch First MethodologyDavid Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” method addresses the primary reason for startup failure: lack of product-market fit. This means the cost of acquiring a customer exceeds one-third of their lifetime value. Hirschfeld argues that pre-launch sales, even without a fully developed product, can validate market demand and mitigate financial risk. This involves creating a realistic prototype and securing early sales to demonstrate viability. “Launch the sales and marketing engine first before you even build the product,” he advises.AI’s Impact on Software DevelopmentAI is revolutionizing software development, accelerating the pace of creation and changing customer expectations. Hirschfeld notes that AI is transforming both the front-end and back-end development processes within his own company, Tekyz. While AI offers significant speed improvements, challenges remain in building sophisticated, scalable applications. AI can struggle with complex projects, losing context and introducing errors in the code. He explains, “when the application gets complex enough…AI forgets that there’s other parts of the application that need to be considered”.Traits of Successful StartupsHirschfeld emphasizes that successful founders prioritize understanding the problem over promoting their solution. He observes that failing founders often “fall in love with the solution” and neglect customer needs. Successful founders, on the other hand, “love the problem” and engage in continuous customer conversations to understand their pain points and motivations. This customer-centric approach allows them to validate their value proposition and determine the viability of their solution before investing heavily in development.Lessons Learned and Advice for FoundersReflecting on his own entrepreneurial journey, Hirschfeld shares his experience with both success and failure. He highlights the importance of learning from past mistakes and adapting strategies accordingly. His advice for aspiring founders is to focus on generating revenue early through pre-launch sales. He recommends creating a realistic prototype to demonstrate the product’s potential and secure early adopters. This approach allows for rapid iteration and pivoting based on market feedback, minimizing risk and maximizing the chances of sustainable success. He also recommends “The Mom Test”, a book that reinforces the importance of focusing on customer problems.This conversation provides valuable insights for software startups navigating the evolving landscape of the industry. By prioritizing customer needs, validating market demand through pre-launch sales, and strategically leveraging AI, founders can significantly de-risk their ventures and increase their chances of building successful and sustainable businesses.Transcript[0:11–0:30] Neil: Every startup founder has a vision, but how many have a tested strategy to succeed before they even begin to build? Well, my guest today is David Hirschfeld, and he’s the CEO of a company called Tekyz, spelt T-E-K-Y-Z, and he has spent more than 35 years helping software startups navigate the unpredictable world of product development.[0:31–0:42] Neil: Whether it be AI acceleration of software design to de-risking the startup journey, David has seen firsthand what makes or break a startup.[0:42–1:06] Neil: So he developed the launch first method, a framework that helps startup founders prove product market fit before they even write a single line of code. So if you’re building a startup, considering one, or just fascinated by the intersection of AI, software, strategy, and startups, this conversation is going to be packed with insights you’re not going to want to miss.[1:07–1:18] Neil: But enough from me. Let’s get David onto the podcast now. So thank you for joining me on the podcast today, David. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?[1:18–1:33] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Hi, I’m David Hirschfeld and I am founder of a company called Tekyz, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. We do custom software development for, and I founded this company 18 years ago.[1:33–1:48] David Hirschfeld: We do a lot of software development for a lot of startups. That’s not our only market, but it’s a big part of our market. And I’ve worked with over 90 startups during those 18 years. A few of them really successful, but the vast majority fail.[1:48–2:01] David Hirschfeld: And that’s true with all startups, especially in the software world. And I’ve found the patterns that I believe make software companies successful and the ones that cause them to fail.[2:01–2:18] David Hirschfeld: And realizing those patterns, I created a methodology called Launch First, where we help startups get to cash flow in just the first few months, even before we develop their product by doing pre-launch sales as a way of proving product market fit.[2:19–2:30] David Hirschfeld: So that’s what I do now. I’ve been in the software world for 35 years, and I even had my own successful startup before I started Tekyz.[2:30–2:36] David Hirschfeld: so I have some experience in what it takes to be successful with a software startup as well[2:36–2:59] Neil: Well thank you so much for joining me today and on behalf of every startup founder listening we’ve got to dig a little bit deeper on that so tell me a bit more about this launch first method and how it helps reduce everything from risks, costs and time for startups while also minimizing reliance on investor funding, you’re ticking a lot of boxes for founders here but tell me a bit more about this method[2:59–3:10] David Hirschfeld: Sure. And thanks for asking about it, Neil. It’s a favorite subject of mine because I feel like I owe founders. I owe founders.[3:10–3:21] David Hirschfeld: They’ve been a big part of my business, and anything I can do to help them become successful is something that I should bring forward to them.[3:21–3:37] David Hirschfeld: So what I noticed is that founders that fail or software companies that fail, they almost always fail for the same reason. And statistically, they fail 43% of the time because of this, and that’s that they lack product market fit.[3:38–3:48] David Hirschfeld: And another 40% of the time, depending on the studies you look at, it’s because they run out of money. But I believe they run out of money because they lack product market fit.[3:48–4:17] David Hirschfeld: So I believe if you combine both of those, around 85% of startups fail because they lack product market fit. So what is product market fit? Product market fit means that people will buy your product in enough numbers that your cost to get to basically acquire a customer, the marketing and sales cost to acquire a customer is roughly one-third or less of what the lifetime value of that customer is.[4:17–4:31] David Hirschfeld: So that gives you enough margin then to reinvest back in your business and scale and grow and accelerate. And if you don’t have that three-to-one ratio, basically, and you’re not even close, you don’t have a viable business.[4:32–4:45] David Hirschfeld: So as I watch startups design, develop products that look like they should be successful and then go out to the market and find out they built the wrong product for the wrong market, this is where most startups fail.[4:45–5:01] David Hirschfeld: They just wait way too long to prove that they’ve got product market fit. And since the only way you can prove you’ve got product market fit is by generating revenue from sales, it occurred to me that we could do that even before we develop the product.[5:01–5:10] David Hirschfeld: And so that’s where this methodology comes from. That’s why it’s called launch first. Launch the sales and marketing engine first before you even build the product.[5:12–5:23] Neil: I love that. And one of the things that stood out to me when I was researching you, looking at your story, is that you’ve been working with software startups for more than 35 years. You’ve been through so many different trends and cycles.[5:24–5:36] Neil: But this time around, it’s not the Internet. It’s not mobile or mobile apps or digital disruption. Of course, it’s the turn of AI that is now transforming the way software and businesses are designed and built.[5:36–5:45] Neil: So how do you see AI development reshaping the software industry? and what opportunities and equally challenges does it present for startup founders listening?[5:46–5:58] David Hirschfeld: Well, in a few ways. First of all, the speed and acceleration of being able to develop a product is changing drastically, erratically right now.[5:58–6:08] David Hirschfeld: I wouldn’t say it has changed completely. It is changing because AI is evolving and accelerating so quickly.[6:08–6:21] David Hirschfeld: And I can talk a lot about how that’s happening internally inside of Tekyz as well, because we’re really embracing everything AI in many different respects.[6:21–6:33] David Hirschfeld: And I can talk about what some of those embracements, how we’re embracing it. But first of all, it’s changing how we’re developing software and how quickly the software can be developed.[6:33–6:52] David Hirschfeld: But it’s also changing what customers are expecting from software. Very quickly, the world is expecting software to do a lot for them, where before they were just expecting software to be a place where they can do things more easily.[6:52–7:18] David Hirschfeld: But that is shifting to expecting software to do it for them and to think for them. So the startup market is shifting to these tools that can, as you probably hear about AI agents, that are kind of like your friends, your buddies, your assistants, that are doing things independently for you, sometimes before you even think about them.[7:19–7:30] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a huge shift in the market, probably the biggest technology shift I’ve ever seen, bigger than a GPS and bigger than mobile apps.[7:30–7:43] David Hirschfeld: It’s the biggest shift I’ve seen. So it’s affecting everything. And it’s creating an endless number of opportunities for new products and new concepts that were not possible even three or four years ago.[7:44–8:01] Neil: And reading about you before you join me on the podcast today, I’ve seen you mention artifacts and how they’ve produced exceptional software development teams. Can you share what these artifacts are just for the non-Tekyz listening and how they contribute to the success of any software project?[8:02–8:16] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, so let me rephrase that a little bit if that’s okay, Neil. Sure, of course. It’s that there’s a difference between a typical software development team and exceptional ones, which are few and far between, which I like to think of us that way.[8:16–8:36] David Hirschfeld: And it was a hard-fought battle to become exceptional, and it’s nothing, and you never quite get there because you always striving to be better That how I run my company is that we never good enough We’re always working hard to be better.[8:36–8:47] David Hirschfeld: And when you’re exceptional, you produce certain artifacts naturally as a result of working in an exceptional way that typical teams don’t produce.[8:47–9:01] David Hirschfeld: So I always say to people, we say we’re exceptional. In fact, when you go to Tekyz.com, you’ll see that’s kind of our heading, the head of our marquee is the exceptional software, hyper-exceptional software development team.[9:01–9:12] David Hirschfeld: And I don’t expect people to believe me when I say that. I say, let me show you what I mean, and then I show the artifacts that we produce. So I’ll give you an example of what some of those are.[9:13–9:24] David Hirschfeld: In our weekly status meetings, which most software companies do this when they’re building products for people. They’ll have a weekly or sometimes biweekly status meeting.[9:24–9:52] David Hirschfeld: It depends on where you are in a project. But we produce a very detailed status report that has things on it like what we accomplished last week versus what we had planned to accomplish last week, and if there’s a variance, what we’re working on this week and what the plan is for the following couple weeks, what our build schedule is, how many hours, where we are from an actual versus an estimated perspective.[9:52–10:04] David Hirschfeld: So we always project on a monthly basis and across the project what we will deliver and when, and then we look at what we have delivered and when and compare that against actuals.[10:04–10:17] David Hirschfeld: And our goal is always to be under 10% of a variance, which a lot of people think that’s pretty extreme in terms of how tight we are on our estimates.[10:17–10:28] David Hirschfeld: But last year we were under 7% variance across our projects in terms of what we estimated versus what we actually delivered.[10:29–10:48] David Hirschfeld: And most software companies don’t do this or can’t do this because they don’t track things at that level of detail. So they can’t set those expectations. They don’t understand their delivery patterns to a degree where they can deliver as accurately as that.[10:48–10:59] David Hirschfeld: And we pride ourselves on being very accurate. So that means we have to have a pretty detailed estimation methodology, which we do. So we produce really sophisticated project estimates.[10:59–11:12] David Hirschfeld: That’s another artifact. Way more detailed than most companies. And I know that because I am friends with lots of other CEOs of other software companies, software development companies.[11:13–11:23] David Hirschfeld: And when we’re talking, we talk about estimates. And they say, yeah, we’re pretty detailed in our estimates. And I say, so are we. And I say, would you like to see how we do it? Because I like to share.[11:23–11:34] David Hirschfeld: Maybe I’ll learn something from them. But if not, I’m happy to share how we do things. And whenever I show them our estimates, every single time they say, oh, we don’t do them anywhere near as detailed as that.[11:34–11:48] David Hirschfeld: You know, they start laughing and feel a little uncomfortable because our estimation process is really elaborate. But it’s very costly to do it that way. And these are some of the things, you know, we’re good at it, but it’s still costly.[11:48–12:05] David Hirschfeld: And because of that, this is where AI starts to really play in a factor. We’re building an AI model. In fact, we just finished the first release of it that mimics, basically helps us produce our estimates using AI and helps us even improve on them a little bit.[12:06–12:22] David Hirschfeld: So, like I said, we are embracing AI in every aspect of our business. But those are just like a couple artifacts, though what I call artifacts that being what I consider an exceptional company, these are some of the thing artifacts that we produce.[12:22–12:38] David Hirschfeld: And it took us years to develop the ability to track things at this level of detail that we do to be able to create estimates and be accurate in terms of delivering on time, release after release.[12:38–12:43] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, that’s what I mean by being exceptional and what I meant by artifacts.[12:43–13:05] Neil: and as AI accelerates that pace of technological change that we’re all seeing there’s so much hype at the moment it can be challenging telling the difference between fact fiction and hallucinations and so much more so how should software development teams better adapt to stay ahead with without compromising quality or innovation for example[13:05–13:21] David Hirschfeld: yeah so that’s that’s a good question and I don’t know that I have the best answer for that because because that’s difficult to predict how much the state-of-the-art is changing from day to day.[13:22–13:37] David Hirschfeld: We are internally exploring how to develop products faster with AI. We’ve been benchmarking a number of different approaches for the last six months or so, and we’re continually doing this.[13:37–13:47] David Hirschfeld: We have a continual effort at it. So now, so if we think of the user interface of an application, there’s two aspects of that.[13:47–14:00] David Hirschfeld: There’s the visual design component where the visual layout, and then there’s the event management, state management, all of the background stuff that happens on the interface itself.[14:01–14:12] David Hirschfeld: So those are two halves of the interface. and we’re about 90%, 85% to 90% have accelerated the very front end of that.[14:12–14:24] David Hirschfeld: On the back end of the front end, we’re at about 30% to 35% acceleration using AI. We think we may be able to make a big leap there in the next week or two, but that’s where we are.[14:24–14:44] David Hirschfeld: On the back end, which is basically the building, the business rules and the server functionality, and the microservices architecture and components and everything else, we’re at about 35%, maybe 40% acceleration from where we were six months ago because of AI.[14:45–15:17] David Hirschfeld: And here’s the problem, why we can’t get to 80% or 90% on some of these areas, because most of the things we’re building are sophisticated, and everything we build, we build it to be scalable, which means microservices architecture and component architecture and making sure things are very discrete so that we can make changes quickly, deploy them independently, and also have an automated deployment system with automated testing.[15:17–15:53] David Hirschfeld: And there’s a lot of aspects to being scalable environment that’s built into our own DNA of my company. However, when you ask AI to build something for you, and there are some tools out there that are really cool, like Bolt and Replit and things like that, that can build entire applications for you, but they can’t get very sophisticated before they start to fall apart because what happens and the architecture of the code that they build is not scalable.[15:54–16:23] David Hirschfeld: It’s pretty monolithic. It’s not maintainable. And, you know, it definitely doesn’t come anywhere close to the level of quality we need for our clients. So when we’re building products, so, for example, what happens with AI when you’re working on more sophisticated things is that it loses the context of every place where something in an application is touched.[16:23–17:01] David Hirschfeld: when you make a change that gets touched downstream. We call that downstream effects. So if I want to make a change in a business rule and that has downstream effects in other parts of the application, when the application gets complex enough, which means the context keeps growing, AI forgets that there’s other parts of the application that need to be considered because it gotten too big for it to consider all of it And it doesn realize that its context has just gone outside of what it can control[17:02–17:12] David Hirschfeld: And instead of it stopping and saying, wait, the context has got too big for me. I need to step back and break this into pieces and evaluate each one. First, it doesn’t do that.[17:12–17:24] David Hirschfeld: It runs away with this new context and can break things and can rewrite things that we’re working in. And very quickly, you start to get out of control.[17:25–17:40] David Hirschfeld: And so that’s when we have to kind of back up and control the delivery of what AI is building and writing and what it can think about and make sure that we’re thinking of all the things it’s forgetting.[17:40–17:46] David Hirschfeld: and that’s why it’s at 30% in some aspects of our code development right now.[17:46–18:00] Neil: If we go back to the beginning of our conversation, I mean you mentioned that after decades of experience working with startups, you’ve also identified so many different patterns that contribute to the success or the failure of a startup.[18:00–18:08] Neil: Just to go back to that for a moment, can you share some of the common traits of successful startups and maybe some of the pitfalls that often lead to failure?[18:09–18:21] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So let me first start. Yeah, I’ll start with the common traits. Successful founders love the problem, not the product.[18:23–18:51] David Hirschfeld: So if you — so what happens typically with founders, and this is more the pitfall thing, is they have a problem that maybe they’re struggling with it personally or they’ve identified a problem related to somebody they know, and they realize an easy way or some way or an elegant way or a clever way to solve that problem, then they fall in love with the solution.[18:52–19:09] David Hirschfeld: And they believe in themselves, and they have a vision for how they can take that solution and turn it into a business, and they believe in that vision. and they think very often that this can be a huge thing, like a unicorn.[19:09–19:25] David Hirschfeld: And these are all code words for I’m going to fail. Having been focused on the vision, believing in yourself, those are good things. But when that becomes your entire reality, you forget about the problem and you forget about the customer.[19:25–19:43] David Hirschfeld: And I see this happening over and over and over again. And it’s a natural tendency that founders have to want to drive forward with their solutions. And founders who are consistently successful, especially like serial entrepreneurs, they love the problem.[19:43–19:59] David Hirschfeld: They focus on the customer and they continually talk to the customer about their problems. They never talk with them about their solutions because the solution is just the natural mitigation process of solving the problem.[19:59–20:11] David Hirschfeld: So they’re not in love with the product. It’s just the necessary evil, if you want to say, but they want to spend their time talking with customers, understanding the problems. How have they dealt with that problem in the past?[20:12–20:22] David Hirschfeld: Have they been able to solve it in other ways? Why didn’t they continue to use that, solve it in that way? What’s changed? Aren’t there other products on the market that solve this problem? Why aren’t you using them?[20:22–20:34] David Hirschfeld: Have you tried them? This is what founders who are successful spend their time doing. It’s talking with customers about their problems, about how they’ve solved their problems, about how much does this problem cost you.[20:35–20:46] David Hirschfeld: Is this something you feel motivated to want to solve? If there was a solution out there, would you be motivated to pursue it? You know, things like that without ever talking about their product or a feature.[20:48–21:21] David Hirschfeld: Now, that’s a skill set. Some founders just instinctually have this capability. Most do not. The vast majority do not. But the ones that do, they always find a path to success because they know whether they can afford to develop the solution because they know how much they can sell it for, because they know the value proposition and how impacted their customer is from that problem and who their customer is because they’ve talked with enough of them.[21:22–21:33] Neil: And looking at your own personal journey there where you’ve been building and selling your first software company back in the day, what kind of lessons from your own personal experience still resonate with you today?[21:34–21:41] Neil: And how do they influence the way you might mentor startups as well? because you picked up more than a few war stories over the years, I would imagine.[21:42–22:01] David Hirschfeld: So that’s a perfect time for that question too because my first software company, I started in 92. It was like an early ERP kind of for smaller companies, logistics route distribution, inventory management, and financial accountability for all the sales.[22:02–22:18] David Hirschfeld: So we started that in 92. I was working at Texas Instruments at the time. Me and a guy, my partner was also working there, and the two of us thought we could start a software company in this market within Windows.[22:18–22:31] David Hirschfeld: Windows 3.1 was brand new. That was the very first version of Windows that was really usable. And so we thought we’d come out with a Windows product for smaller companies, and that took off, surprisingly.[22:32–22:45] David Hirschfeld: We were both surprised by how it took off. We weren’t expecting it really to take off that very quickly. And in eight years, we had 800 customers in 22 countries, and we sold it to a publicly traded firm.[22:45–23:09] David Hirschfeld: And for the next several years, I was VP of products for the acquiring company. So I thought I knew what I was doing as a startup. And a few years later, I started another software company in the wholesale automobile distribution market, where basically dealerships and car wholesalers could source from each other because at the time there was no way to do that other than through the auctions.[23:09–23:25] David Hirschfeld: So if you have a customer coming in looking for a particular make model car, there might be a car that was traded in at a dealer or a wholesaler may have just bought a car like that, and you wouldn’t know that if you weren’t on this network.[23:25–23:38] David Hirschfeld: Well, I didn’t follow the playbook from my first successful software company. I did it a different way. I was going to go the critical mass and raise money from investor way.[23:38–23:52] David Hirschfeld: I don’t know what I was thinking, why I didn’t do it the way I did my first company since I was successful, but I didn’t recognize that. I didn’t recognize exactly what made me successful the first time.[23:52–24:06] David Hirschfeld: And so when I wasn’t following that playbook the second time, I did not realize I was going off track or off script. Anyway, so I did get offered the money that I was looking for in investment.[24:06–24:19] David Hirschfeld: It was $1.2 million. I had about 300 customers on the app, but I gave them all free trials because I wanted to build up critical mass on this wholesale trading network, which is also a mistake.[24:19–24:34] David Hirschfeld: There was no reason I needed to do that. I could have charged them a subscription fee. They all would have probably paid it or 80% of them. But I was afraid of turning that on before I had the financial investment so that I could accelerate the growth and grow the network.[24:35–24:46] David Hirschfeld: It’s fear that often drives failures, and that was true here. I didn’t take the investment offer because they wanted way too much equity from my perspective.[24:47–24:57] David Hirschfeld: I had never raised money before. I didn’t ever get another offer. And so eventually I ran out of money and had to close that business.[24:57–25:13] David Hirschfeld: So I had a success and I had a failure. And I didn’t understand exactly what the difference was between the two or make the comparison until I saw a number of other startups make similar failures for similar reasons.[25:13–25:32] David Hirschfeld: And then all of a sudden I started to realize oh my God everybody that failing they all failing because they just wait way too long to start to generate revenue from sales And that because everybody has this belief that you have to have the product and the market and sometimes you have to have the network in place and all that before you can start charging.[25:33–25:34] David Hirschfeld: None of that’s true.[25:35–25:46] Neil: You’ve enjoyed a hugely successful career, but what I love about you, I mean, listen to your story today is how you’re giving back to the startup community, sharing your knowledge, your insights and experience.[25:46–26:02] Neil: And for any entrepreneurs listening, embarking at the very start of their journey, any practical advice that you’d offer to de-risk the process and ensure that their investment in software development ultimately leads to sustainable success?[26:02–26:07] Neil: I appreciate it’s a massive, massive question, but anything that you would pass on to those people listening?[26:08–26:24] David Hirschfeld: Well, yeah. If you start to generate revenue from pre-launch sales, which you can do without a product. You have to have something to show, usually a design prototype or something, and it’s got to look realistic even if it’s not.[26:25–26:36] David Hirschfeld: That’s critical success factor because if it doesn’t look like a real product when you’re demoing it to somebody, then the first question you get from them is, how do I know you can build this, especially when you’re talking about software?[26:37–26:55] David Hirschfeld: So, like, if you’ve seen Kickstarters, which is sort of the mass market version of this, they always have some prototype to demo. They don’t have the product yet, but they have something that looks like the product that you can see so you know the product, that there’s something real behind it, even if they don’t have the product.[26:55–27:15] David Hirschfeld: So you don’t have that question, how do I know they’re going to be able to build this thing? If it’s just a drawing, you’re probably not going to be able — they’re not going to be successful on Kickstarter. I remember there was a Kickstarter I bought into that was a, what do you call those things, a roll-up, like what you use at a gym, a foam roller.[27:15–27:26] David Hirschfeld: Foam roller. Oh, fun. This was one that would fold up for travel. And I saw the prototype on Kickstarter, a little video of how it worked. I thought, okay, this is cool.[27:26–27:44] David Hirschfeld: It was a year and a half before they actually came out with the product. So whatever they had, I think they probably made it from plastic that they cut out with an X-Acto knife, but it looked like the real product when they demoed it.[27:44–28:05] David Hirschfeld: So with software, you can do the same thing with iFidelity prototype. and you can build the whole vision of your product out, not just the MVP, which is minimal viable product, which is what most founders will develop the first time, and that’s not a lot of features and that’s hard to sell.[28:06–28:20] David Hirschfeld: Your prototype, you can build the whole vision of your product out in just a couple months and go out and start demoing that to potential clients. And if it’s realistic enough and you offer them a high enough value opportunity to get in early, they’ll buy.[28:21–28:34] David Hirschfeld: And you start to generate revenue and prove that you’ve got product and market fit, the right product for the right customer at the right time. And if they’re not buying, you can pivot cheaply and quickly because you don’t have software that you’re having to rewrite.[28:35–28:49] David Hirschfeld: And you can pivot two or three or four times in the space of a couple months until you find that product market fit. or you convince yourself that, you know what, this is the wrong time for the wrong market, the wrong product, whatever it is, and you fail fast and cheap.[28:50–29:14] David Hirschfeld: But assuming that you do find product market fit, which you will find it much more easily in this approach than you would if you’ve already built your product because of the cost and time it takes to pivot, then you’re building up a number of highly invested beta users who will give you real feedback instead of free beta users who don’t.[29:15–29:27] David Hirschfeld: And if you do then decide to raise money to accelerate your growth, now you’ve got traction and revenue and customers that you can show to an investor, and that changes the whole conversation with raising money.[29:28–29:43] Neil: Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights with everyone today. But before I let you go, I’m going to ask you to leave one final gift to everyone listening, And that is a book that has inspired you or something that you’d recommend that we can add to our Amazon wish list.[29:44–29:47] Neil: All I’m going to ask you is what book would you like to leave and why? Okay.[29:48–30:03] David Hirschfeld: It’s my favorite business book. It’s called The Mom Test. And it speaks exactly about the same thing that I’ve been talking about for a long time, but he puts it into a really good framework.[30:04–30:24] David Hirschfeld: And that is talk about the problems and talk to your customers. Don’t talk about your product or your features. And it’s called the mom test because if you came up with a business idea and assuming you have a good relationship with your mother and you ask her what she thinks of your idea, what’s she going to say?[30:25–30:38] David Hirschfeld: She’s probably going to say, oh, darling, that’s wonderful. I think you’re so smart you can make anything happen. and I think you’ll be really successful with that idea. None of that feedback is helpful or honest, right?[30:38–30:53] David Hirschfeld: It’s honest that she loves you, but that’s all you get from that. So how would you ask questions about a new business idea that you have from your mother and get valuable feedback from her about that business idea?[30:53–31:04] David Hirschfeld: And the way you do that is you never talk about your business idea or about the product you want to build or about the features that you think would have value.[31:04–31:14] David Hirschfeld: You talk about the problems that your customer is having, right, and you talk about their history with that problem and things like that. Anyway, that’s what the mom test was about.[31:14–31:17] David Hirschfeld: It’s so well done. Everyone should read the book.[31:18–31:31] Neil: What a great choice. I’m going to get that added straight to our Amazon wish list. For anyone listening wanting to find out more information about you, your work, what we discussed today. Where would you like to point everyone listening if they just want to find out more?[31:32–31:46] David Hirschfeld: So I would suggest you go to Tekyz.com. That’s my corporate website, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. Anybody that made it this far into the podcast, you can email me directly.[31:46–31:58] David Hirschfeld: And I love to talk with people in the industry, whether they’re other software developers or whether they’re startups and they’re even thinking about starting something and want some feedback from me.[31:58–32:06] David Hirschfeld: I like talking with everybody. And you can email me at david at Tekyz.com or find me on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find on LinkedIn.[32:08–32:22] Neil: Awesome. Again, thank you so much. Having founded a successful software company and now honing the launch of your first method, I love how you’re sharing unique insights into reducing startup risks and costs and everything in between.[32:22–32:31] Neil: So just thank you for sharing that and your practical strategies that you’ve developed over the years. So valuable for startup founders listening. Thank you for taking the time today.[32:32–32:34] David Hirschfeld: Well, thank you for having me on your show, Neil.[32:35–32:45] Neil: Having spoken with David today, it seems that startups aren’t just about ideas. They’re about execution, strategy, and understanding customer problems deeply.[32:45–32:57] Neil: And David’s insights today, I think they highlight why so many startups fail, and more importantly, how founders can avoid these pitfalls by just proving demand before development.[32:58–33:10] Neil: So a huge thank you to David for breaking down how AI is reshaping software development, why founders need to focus on traction, not just technology.[33:10–33:24] Neil: But over to you, what are your thoughts? How have you seen AI impact software development in unexpected ways? Let’s keep this conversation going. Instagram, LinkedIn, X, just at Neil C. Hughes.[33:24–33:37] Neil: let me know your thoughts. Now I’ll be back again tomorrow, we’ve got a completely different topic to explore together and yes you are cordially all invited each one of you, so hopefully I will speak with you then Bye for now.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Why Most Startups Fail and What to Do Differently was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Navigating the Startup Journey: How to Achieve Product-Market Success](https://tekyz.com/navigating-the-startup-journey-how-to-achieve-product-market-success-7edc7aa7bf8b/) - Featured Image: Navigating the Startup Journey — How to Achieve Product-Market Successhttps://medium.com/media/6bc151be22e44752a21aeea7d48b1830/hrefIn this episode of Product-Led Growth, host Thomas Watkins sits down with David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz, to unpack the biggest mistakes B2B software startups make — and how to avoid them. Drawing from his work with over 90 startups, Hirschfeld introduces his “Launch First” methodology, emphasizing the power of early validation through pre-launch sales and focused customer engagement. The conversation challenges popular assumptions around freemium models, highlights the dangers of falling in love with the product instead of the problem, and provides a clear path to product-led growth through strategic, revenue-driven launches. Whether you’re an early-stage founder or refining your go-to-market strategy, this episode is packed with hard-won insights and actionable advice.Chapters:Introduction and Tekyz’ Focus (02:01)The Biggest Mistake Founders Make (02:02)Understanding Product-Market Fit (03:52)The Problem with Free Versions (05:04)Successful Go-to-Market Strategies (09:00)Early Adopters and Pre-Launch Sales (11:00)Product Advisory Boards and Equity (14:00)Product-Solution Fit vs. Product-Market Fit (16:49)Viral Growth and Freemium (18:00)Niche Selection and Direct Sales (20:09)Client Engagement and Launch Types (23:39)Product-Led Growth: Avoiding Common Startup MistakesThis discussion between host Thomas Watkins and David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz, centers on common pitfalls B2B software startups face and strategies for achieving product-led growth. Hirschfeld, drawing on his 18 years of experience working with over 90 startups, shares his “Launch First” methodology, emphasizing early product-market fit validation and pre-launch sales.The Biggest Startup Mistake: Late ValidationThe primary reason for startup failure, according to Hirschfeld, is delaying product-market fit validation. True validation comes from generating revenue with a healthy margin, where the cost of customer acquisition is one-third or less of the customer lifetime value. This margin allows for reinvestment and scalable growth.Falling in Love with the Problem, Not the SolutionHirschfeld emphasizes the importance of focusing on the problem, not the solution. Successful founders “fall in love with the problem” and constantly engage with customers to understand their pain points. Conversely, failing founders become enamored with their product, neglecting genuine market needs. He uses the analogy of the “white coat” (clinician focused on the problem) versus the “black robe” (preacher focused on the product).The Freemium FallacyHirschfeld challenges the prevalent notion of freemium models, arguing they rarely work for startups. While successful freemium software exists, it requires pre-existing conversion metrics and substantial resources. He cautions against comparing oneself to giants like Google, whose reach and marketing budgets are unattainable for most startups. Instead, he advocates for charging for core value from the outset, especially when targeting enterprise clients.The Launch First MethodologyHirschfeld’s “Launch First” methodology prioritizes identifying a narrow early adopter niche. This allows for targeted messaging, higher pricing, and improved closing ratios. The process involves creating a high-fidelity prototype (a realistic design mockup) and conducting demos to secure pre-launch sales. Pre-launch offers might include lifetime licenses, premium support, or free implementation, incentivizing early adoption. This approach generates revenue, funds development, and creates a pool of invested beta users.Product Solution Fit vs. Product Market FitHirschfeld distinguishes between product solution fit and product-market fit. While product-market fit focuses on whether the market is receptive to the product’s value proposition, product solution fit assesses whether the product delivers on its promises and is used effectively. He stresses that product-market fit is validated through sales, not usage patterns.Engaging with TekyzTekyz offers a comprehensive suite of services, including development, design, and marketing funnel creation. Client engagement typically begins with a discovery call to assess the project’s stage and the founder’s approach. While some founders remain committed to their vision, Hirschfeld encourages a data-driven approach, emphasizing the importance of testing assumptions.This discussion provides valuable insights for B2B software startups, highlighting the critical importance of early validation, problem-focused development, and strategic go-to-market strategies. Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” methodology offers a practical framework for achieving product-led growth by prioritizing pre-launch sales and building a strong foundation of invested early adopters. He can be reached at david@Tekyz.com or on LinkedIn.Transcript[0:11–0:19] Host: Welcome to Product-Led Growth Leaders, where we learn about the bold path of building digital products that sell themselves. Let’s listen to product leaders who can give us a glimpse into the innovative thinking process.[0:20–0:35] Thomas Watkins: Showcasing and celebrating these awesome folks, I’m your host, UX and product design veteran, Thomas Watkins. Welcome to Product-Led Growth Leaders.[0:35–0:51] Thomas Watkins: We’ve got a cool guest for the show today, David Hirschfeld. He has been a CTO, a CEO, a founder of a number of different companies. And today he is founder and CEO of Tekyz, which specializes in the accelerated launching of software companies.[0:51–0:54] Thomas Watkins: We’re going to learn all about that. David, welcome to the show.[0:54–0:56] David Hirschfeld: Thanks, Thomas. Thanks for having me on your show.[0:56–1:02] Thomas Watkins: Yeah, so let’s start off with getting an idea of where you fit in the ecosystem of things.[1:03–1:19] David Hirschfeld: Sure. So I started Tekyz 18 years ago. We’re a custom software development shop. I have since, and I’ve worked with over 90 startups during that time, although we do development for scale-ups and medium-sized businesses as well, but we’ve worked with a lot of startups.[1:20–1:47] David Hirschfeld: And the vast majority, a few of them very successful, but the vast majority failed as a lot of B2B software startups do. And so I created a methodology specifically for B2B software startups called Launch First to help them go from concept to cash flow in just a few months through product, basically product-led sales even before you’ve developed the product as a way of proving product market fit.[1:47–2:01] David Hirschfeld: because it’s always the — so I fit in the ecosystem as the software development company of record as well as an accelerator or coach for founders who are looking to start a software company.[2:02–2:13] Thomas Watkins: So I was going to ask what most people are doing wrong, but the answer is implicit in what you said there, which is that are people not finding product market fit and what else are they getting wrong?[2:13–2:28] David Hirschfeld: What they get wrong is waiting too long to validate product market fit. That’s the number one reason why founders fail, because they don’t. And the only way to prove that you have product market fit is that you’re selling enough product for something.[2:29–2:49] David Hirschfeld: You’re generating revenue at a high enough margin that your cost to acquire a customer is about one third or less than what your lifetime value of that customer is worth. and you need that margin so that you can put money in a predictable manner so that you can scale your business by putting that margin back into the growth.[2:49–3:01] Thomas Watkins: Okay, so they’re going the wrong route by not validating early on that there is a market, that they think there is this. Why are they doing this? Are they falling in love with the solution, not the problem kind of deal?[3:01–3:15] David Hirschfeld: Oh, my gosh, that’s exactly why. In fact, I use that. I say that all the time. And founders who are serial entrepreneurs who are successful over and over again are founders who find a problem and fall in love with the problem.[3:15–3:29] David Hirschfeld: And they spend all their time talking to customers about their problems. Founders that fail regularly are the ones that fall in love with this product and the solution and spend all their time talking about how great their product and solution is.[3:30–3:46] David Hirschfeld: And unwinding that, I call it wearing the black robe because you’re out there preaching about your product. instead of wearing the white coat, which means that you’re a clinician. You see it as a science experiment, and you’re focusing on the problem, and you think of mitigation strategies for that problem.[3:46–3:52] David Hirschfeld: The product just becomes the natural conclusion of that process, not the thing to be focused on.[3:52–4:02] Thomas Watkins: Now, would you help founders? Are they across the board, industries, all different kinds of markets, I imagine? Give us a little bit of a landscape of the kinds of things.[4:02–4:16] David Hirschfeld: Healthcare, FinTech, PropTech, law enforcement, entertainment, very broad smattering, manufacturing, logistics and distribution. People come up with the problems.[4:16–4:31] David Hirschfeld: The best founders are the ones that are struggling with a problem themselves in their particular industry. And they can easily quantify the cost of that problem and the personal impact of that problem and what it would be worth to them to solve it.[4:31–4:42] David Hirschfeld: And then they’re in an industry full of people exactly like them that are struggling with the same problem they’re struggling with and that they have some level of reach to those people in that industry.[4:42–5:00] David Hirschfeld: Those founders are already halfway there in terms of being able to bring a product to market and turn it into a profitable business. and then it’s just a matter of staying focused on the problem and staying focused on those customers and not losing sight of the fact that the product is not important.[5:00–5:04] David Hirschfeld: It’s the problem that’s important. I know it sounds weird, but that’s, yeah.[5:04–5:18] Thomas Watkins: Because it’s so common, isn’t it, where you have someone who you have people all over the place who are smart. They are experts in their area. They come up with an idea that’s not a bad idea in theory, but they just fall in love with it.[5:18–5:21] Thomas Watkins: They just start building it and spending time and money on it. Yeah, exactly.[5:22–5:42] David Hirschfeld: And then they develop this big vision in their head about what the product needs to be to solve all the problems that it’s going to solve. And then they get an MVP done and a pitch deck, and they try to raise money and find out that they can’t raise money or that they’re spending six or nine months not doing anything to move their business forward while they’re trying to raise money.[5:43–5:59] David Hirschfeld: So they put out free betas because they feel like the MVP is only a small part of the vision, And so they don’t feel justified in charging for this small piece of the, oh, these are every single one thing I just said are all mistakes that founders make.[5:59–6:12] Thomas Watkins: I think that a lot of people, a lot of us start off like that, but then we work in software and we learn that just the world doesn’t work like that. The stuff you put out, way uglier, way more broken than what you originally thought.[6:13–6:40] David Hirschfeld: You just have to get used to that. And then the question, is it more broken than it should be? or is this a reasonable place to be with our product? And a lot of founders that are non-technical founders get stuck there because they’re working with a poor software company that’s not delivering any kind of exceptional product or exceptional delivery or feedback or setting things on at expectation and being able to deliver on those things like that.[6:40–7:14] David Hirschfeld: But that’s not the reason that most founders fail because you can work around that or get another company in that if that’s the case. It because they just don step back and say wait a minute I don have product market fit I should be always charging I shouldn have anything out there for free except in rare cases where it does make sense But free trials are not the way to get There so many problems that we could talk of and circle in on any one of these and spend some time talking about any one of these things and why they matter And I’m sure you’ve had these discussions with other people that you’ve had on your show too, right?[7:15–7:26] Thomas Watkins: Yeah, let’s double click on that one actually because you’re right. There’s a bunch of places we can go. But the opinion that free versions is not the way to go, you have a lot of experience with this.[7:26–7:39] Thomas Watkins: So I want to hear that. I want the audience to hear about it. You have wildly successful freemium softwares. You’ve got a lot of failing software, though, too, that offers too much for free and doesn’t convert it.[7:39–7:43] Thomas Watkins: So what does that look like? What do you have to say, share there about your observations?[7:44–7:59] David Hirschfeld: Premium makes sense if you already have metrics on conversion from premium to paid. Then it makes sense. It makes sense if you’re really going based on vision.[7:59–8:12] David Hirschfeld: You’ve got something that’s completely new in the market and you have a vision of something. Now, I’m not saying it’s smart to do that, but it makes sense from the standpoint. If it’s going to be successful, then freemium will get you there.[8:12–8:23] David Hirschfeld: But you’re one in 100, maybe one in 1,000 of those that will be successful if you’re basing it on your vision of what the future should be for this particular market and product.[8:23–8:45] David Hirschfeld: And that’s not a good place to be for 99.9% of the founders out there. We’re not — I’m not Steve Jobs. None of my clients are Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or anybody that really has true vision and can turn that vision into a huge business reality.[8:46–9:00] David Hirschfeld: It’s just so rare. Or the next viral sensation, the odds are against you in such a huge way that it’s not a smart direction to go if you’re trying to build something that’s very specific and that has value.[9:01–9:13] David Hirschfeld: So the idea is if what you’re building has value, then focus on the core value initially. Your MVP should be that. And the market should be willing to pay for it right from the beginning.[9:13–9:34] David Hirschfeld: If you’ve nailed down who the early adopter is, if you’ve nailed down what that value proposition is, if you’ve nailed down a solution that mitigates a problem where the founder feels a high sense of urgency, The founder, the buyer feels a high sense of urgency to correct the problem, and it costs them a lot because of that problem.[9:35–9:46] David Hirschfeld: I was speaking with a founder just this week, this past week, who’s having some success selling a product, but it’s taken them way, way too long. The sales cycle’s too long.[9:46–9:58] David Hirschfeld: The person who wants the product doesn’t have authority in their organization to make this big decision because it’s a big, expensive product. even though they’ve won all kinds of awards for this product.[9:58–10:25] David Hirschfeld: He said the CEO has bought in usually, and I said, so why aren’t you selling to CEO? He said, they’re not the ones that are going to use it. I said, but if you figure out which CEOs and which companies can recognize the value of your product and get them excited about this, and it solves a big problem for them because this was a financial analysis product, and they were selling it to CFOs, then you can get something to happen quickly.[10:26–10:41] David Hirschfeld: Otherwise, you’re getting the person who wants to use the product having to sell everybody else in his company, and that’s not going to be, and the sales cycle is long. And plus, if the CEO’s got different initiatives, you can’t get that CFO to make the effort.[10:41–11:00] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, so this is just the case of not understanding who the early adopter is and what those buying triggers are that will cause somebody to write the check, write that. And if you’re a startup, you need that person, the person who will write the check immediately as soon as you show them the product or go through a couple steps.[11:00–11:17] Thomas Watkins: So let’s talk about what are the normal successful early paths and go-to-markets that you see in the scope of what you’ve observed. Is it a launch partner where a company says, we really like what you build and we’re going to sign on early?[11:17–11:27] Thomas Watkins: Is it you build something and you verify how, you know, when you get that first, you start, get that early stability. How do you do that normally in the successful cases you’ve seen?[11:28–11:44] David Hirschfeld: So with Launch First, what we try to figure out, okay, like I said, we figure out who that early adopter niche is. And we try to make that niche very tight because the smaller you can make the niche and the better you can target, the more you can charge and the higher your closing ratio.[11:44–11:57] David Hirschfeld: They’re like an inverse proportional relationship between those two things. So we nail down that niche, which there’s a lot of effort that goes into that, but that’s one of the very first things we do with launch first.[11:57–12:08] David Hirschfeld: And then once we are confident who that niche is, then we’re fashioning a pre-launch sale and creating what I call a high-fidelity prototype.[12:08–12:19] David Hirschfeld: Actually, I didn’t come up with that phrasing, but basically it’s a design prototype. It’s not real software, but when you demo it, the person you’re demoing to cannot tell they’re not looking at real software.[12:19–12:33] David Hirschfeld: And it shows the full vision and all the critically high-value workflows that the person cares about. And you’re focusing. Then you do demos to those people. You come up with a high-value pre-launch purchase option for them.[12:34–12:53] David Hirschfeld: And there’s a couple different ways of structuring this. But in general, it’s usually something like a lifetime license for if they buy 12 months or 18 months of the subscription fee in advance. They also part of the early adopters club and they get a tech support number that goes to one of the stakeholders in the business so that they can always get help on the product.[12:53–13:13] David Hirschfeld: Or maybe they get free implementation, like in the case of clinical trial software, where the implementation of the software is as much or more than the software itself. or whatever the high-value trigger is, that stakeholder needs to secure for them to feel like if they don’t buy in now, they’re going to miss out on a big opportunity.[13:14–13:26] David Hirschfeld: And if you’ve nailed down the early adopter properly and you’re solving a problem that matters enough, then they will buy in enough numbers at that point that you can prove that product market fit.[13:27–13:41] David Hirschfeld: Are you, as opposed to just getting one partner that may believe in it, because that might be a fluke, You don’t know that until you go out and start to sell it to other people. And now you’re pushing off that validation process until after you’ve built the product.[13:42–13:59] David Hirschfeld: Whereas if you do it this way you can without any question sell enough copies of your software and also generate revenue to help you fund development and give away an immeasurable fraction of your percent of your market in doing it instead of giving away 20 to raise Angel or Sebra[14:00–14:13] Thomas Watkins: So you get early, real clients. You go through a whole testing process because a lot of that is validation and making sure you have a real problem using a lot of usability testing methods mixed with market discovery.[14:14–14:16] Thomas Watkins: Are you a fan of product advisory boards?[14:16–14:50] David Hirschfeld: only in validation not in design in other words if i’m designing my product well once we’ve created figured out who the early adopters in that process we’re recruiting we’re recruiting basically a focus group which is basically a ux advisory group but we’re doing it so that as we’re putting that prototype the design prototype together we’re getting feedback mostly just to Avoid having missed important things, not because we’re asking them what direction the product should go, because that will lead you in the wrong direction.[14:50–15:05] David Hirschfeld: But we want to know for the things that we’re building, is this solving the problem? Did we miss something? Now we’re talking about product solution fit, not product market fit. But we need to make sure when we’re demoing the product that people are connecting to it.[15:05–15:16] David Hirschfeld: So you get four or five people in this focus group, which can be one of those people, a couple of those people might end up being part of your advisory board as well.[15:17–15:28] David Hirschfeld: So having an advisory board is good if the people on your advisory board understand what it takes to launch a company and launch a product and understand your industry to a certain degree.[15:28–15:29] David Hirschfeld: Do you? Yeah.[15:30–15:45] Thomas Watkins: I was just going to slide in there. do you recommend for founders to, if they get one, and have them as equity partners and having them have a physical stake in it, or do you find another way to compensate?[15:47–15:58] David Hirschfeld: If you can find another way to compensate, that’s good. But advisory boards often require that they have some kind of equity stake for you to get them to recruit an advisory board.[15:59–16:09] David Hirschfeld: So, yes, I think advisory boards are great, but it does push you into the position of having to raise money because now you’re given equity away.[16:09–16:23] David Hirschfeld: And so you have to have that raising money structure in place, right? So that’s the only negative about advisory board. However, but if you’re going to raise money, you really need one because you need to show your team to whoever you’re raising money from.[16:23–16:40] David Hirschfeld: and the advisory board’s an important part of your team that you’re raising money around. But if you’re going to launch first, you don’t necessarily need an advisory board, at least not initially, because you can start to generate revenue and get customers and basically self-fund through pre-launch sales.[16:40–16:53] David Hirschfeld: And now you’re building up a bunch of highly invested beta users so that when the product is out, they’ve already paid for it. they’re going to be really invested in testing the product and giving you real feedback.[16:54–17:10] David Hirschfeld: And then your MVP is about product solution fit, not product market fit, where you’re just making sure that now we know what value they bought into. Is it delivering that value or not? Are they engaging with the product or not? Because that’s what you care about once the MVP goes out.[17:10–17:14] David Hirschfeld: You hopefully at that point have nailed product market fit down solidly.[17:15–17:29] Thomas Watkins: So product market fit, that’s what you’re saying, PMF. We all hear that. term, but product solution fit, don’t hear that term as often. That has to do with the delivery and how the market’s receiving it.[17:30–17:41] David Hirschfeld: Is the product doing what it’s promised and is it being received in the right way? Exactly. That’s product solution fit. And people mix up product market fit and product solution fit all the time.[17:41–17:55] David Hirschfeld: Product market fit is not about how people use the product. It’s about whether they’re buying your message. That’s product and buying the product. And if they’re not, why? So that’s all product market fit is.[17:55–17:58] David Hirschfeld: And you only know you’ve got it when people are buying it, when you’ve got sales.[18:00–18:11] Thomas Watkins: When people aspire to be freemium, obviously their argument is going to be, we want viral growth. We want this to spread. And you’re pointing out that’s just not the right thing for most people.[18:11–18:37] Thomas Watkins: 99% of the time, you’re not going to have the resources to pull it off. Should people, let’s say it’s a B2B enterprise, they launch successfully, have maybe five high-paying clients, should they aspire to getting their software to the point where, hey, we can offer this on the website, have people click and start using it, or is that just something that people should not aspire to?[18:37–18:41] David Hirschfeld: Give me a context in terms of a type of specific product.[18:41–18:54] Thomas Watkins: Yeah, so let’s say that it’s a software that causes some — it solves some common industry problem that, I don’t know, procurement managers –[18:54–18:57] David Hirschfeld: For what size companies? For enterprise or for small companies?[18:57–19:09] Thomas Watkins: Okay, so that’s telling me that’s a big part of the discussion, isn’t it? It’s what size you’re targeting. Okay, so you’re targeting gigantic mega companies, and that’s the only one signing the contract. Is that the bad fit for freemium?[19:10–19:22] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, totally. Yes, you don’t go after enterprise with freemium. I guess you could, but I think you’d be crazy. That’s your only market strategy. So let’s say it’s something like a business intelligence tool.[19:22–19:44] David Hirschfeld: Let’s say Google Looker. Google Looker. So that is going after everybody, right? And they do have a freemium version of it. They’re also Google. And so they have reach that most people don’t have, and they can market products with massive budgets, even if it’s just to test the market, right?[19:44–19:55] David Hirschfeld: So they want enterprise, and they also want small to medium businesses, and they want startups and entrepreneurs, and they want it across lots of different verticals in terms of business.[19:55–20:09] David Hirschfeld: That’s different. That’s a completely different type of freemium. And people compare themselves against things like this all the time, and they shouldn’t, because you don’t have, you as a startup founder, are not going to have the resources available or the reach.[20:09–20:29] David Hirschfeld: So you really have to pick a niche and a focus. So if you’re going after enterprise, that’s a direct sale model, right? You can’t sell the enterprise from a premium model. If you’re going after small to medium businesses, then you need to figure out what niche you’re going to focus on initially and what problem are you going to solve.[20:29–20:59] David Hirschfeld: So if I am selling a product like what I was just talking about a business intelligence tool and I am a founder of a new product okay now I going to think okay I going to go after small to medium businesses Let say that my market because I solving a particular problem I had in the past with a tool like this So what are all the different type niches that I can go after that are something that either I’m familiar with or I know could use a tool in the way I’m thinking for[20:59–21:33] David Hirschfeld: aggregating social media? Maybe that’s the thing I’m going to pipeline that I’m going to focus on first. And so small to medium-sized businesses, which are the ones that are super reliant on social media today. Let’s pick something like restaurants because restaurants live or die on their ratings, right? So social media is killer. And food trucks and things like, okay, so I’m going to go after restaurants. I’m going to go after small to medium-sized restaurants or maybe small chains that maybe somebody owns three or four or five restaurants in that. But that’s going[21:33–22:11] David Hirschfeld: to be my focus. Maybe I’m going to focus on one type of food, like Mexican food. So I’m just going to go after Mexican restaurants. So if I think of all the different niches just in the restaurant business, right, high-end restaurants, fast food, Mexican, Italian, like that, because if I’m an Italian restaurant, I am competing against every other Italian restaurant around, right? So that’s a niche. And so if I am trying to reach my customer and I’ve got a solution that speaks specifically to Mexican restaurant owners who have two or more restaurants, two to five restaurants[22:11–22:43] David Hirschfeld: who are in a particular Southern California, for example, right? That might be 10,000 restaurants. I have no idea. There’s a lot of Mexican restaurants here. Now I can craft a message to those restaurants that speaks directly to those owners, right? And shows a specific business value proposition around social media to Mexican food lovers, right? And why I’m giving them the kind of business intelligence that they can make quick decisions that will bring in more people[22:43–23:02] David Hirschfeld: and get them higher ratings in the restaurant that works specifically for Mexican food locations, right? So now I’m an owner of a restaurant like that. I’m leaning forward because he’s addressing a specific problem statement that I care about that matters to me.[23:02–23:13] David Hirschfeld: So I’m leaning forward because I hate losing people that don’t go to mine, they go to somebody else’s because of social media, because I’m not targeting profit, whatever the reason is, right?[23:13–23:28] David Hirschfeld: And the cost to me is very high because I’m losing business to some restaurant nearby and I’ve got all my pipelines specifically customized already for the Mexican restaurant world in Southern California.[23:29–23:38] David Hirschfeld: Now I’m offering a unique solution with a high value, and I can charge more for it, and I can go out and test the market and see if I can get some pre-launch sales for that.[23:39–23:54] Thomas Watkins: So clearly a wealth of experience here to apply to these different things. When you’re engaging with folks, how do you roll your clients into this? Do you give them a diagnostic on, hey, I think this is where you need help, or just a simple discovery call to figure out what needs to happen?[23:55–23:55] Thomas Watkins: How does that come together?[23:55–24:09] David Hirschfeld: It’s usually just a simple discovery call. It depends on where they are in their project, right? If they’re at the concept stage and we haven’t started design yet, then I always bring this conversation up if they want to go this direction.[24:09–24:21] David Hirschfeld: Not everybody does. A lot of people just believe in their vision. They have a vision and they believe in their product, which is unfortunate because, you know, they’re usually wrong. because they’re wearing the black robe, not the white coat.[24:22–24:35] David Hirschfeld: They may believe in their product, believe in their vision and their product, but they’re wearing a white coat and they recognize they need to test all these assumptions, right? And they recognize they are all assumptions and still want to build their product.[24:35–24:46] David Hirschfeld: But they have a way of going about, they’re very disciplined in doing a very slim MVP with the idea they’re going to use that to test product market fit.[24:46–24:57] David Hirschfeld: And that’s valid too. It’s more expensive and higher risk approach, but it’s much easier and more fun, right? And fun from the standpoint of people want to build a product because it’s cool, right?[24:57–24:59] David Hirschfeld: They got this. It feels good to build your product.[24:59–25:11] Thomas Watkins: It’s so common. It is. You fall in love with it and you just have to stay sober because if you love your money, you’re not going to throw it out the window just pursuing a dream like that. Do you provide everything in-house?[25:11–25:18] Thomas Watkins: You’ve got developers and then you do the coach. Do you have the designers? And then how do you? Yeah, we do it all in-house.[25:18–25:32] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, even building out the marketing funnel once we believe we understand who the early adopter niche is for testing pre-launch. We don’t do the sales. That’s the client’s job. And they need to be the one that’s speaking to the customer and hearing what they’re saying when they’re not buying.[25:33–25:48] David Hirschfeld: And sales can look like a lot of different things. It can be a one-on-one demos. It can be webinar-based demos where they’re marketing to a community of potential users. A lot has to do with the product and the value proposition of how much you’re charging for that pre-launch sale.[25:48–25:59] David Hirschfeld: And there are even different types of launches. Some launches are classic pre-launch where the product won’t be out for three to four months after they buy their pre-launch version of it.[25:59–26:16] David Hirschfeld: Or the concierge launch, which is where we’re going to start providing the service immediately. We cobble together some workflows and maybe a WordPress and Google Sheets and some automation to help them manage the service.[26:16–26:29] David Hirschfeld: And then we do a lot of things manually. and then we start building the product once we’ve got enough clients on the product, on the service. But we’re still demoing the design, this vision of the product that we have.[26:29–26:43] David Hirschfeld: That’s what we demo to people and sell them. And then we start to deliver that functionality to them over the next few months. But they get to take advantage of the service immediately because maybe it’s one that they just can’t wait to three or four months to do.[26:43–26:44] David Hirschfeld: Excellent.[26:44–26:52] Thomas Watkins: We know we’ve been talking to David Hirschfeld of Tekyz Corp. That’s T-E-K-Y-Z. Where can people find you, David?[26:53–27:04] David Hirschfeld: You can find me at david at Tekyz.com, which, again, is T-E-K-Y-Z.com. I’m easy to find on LinkedIn, David Hirschfeld. And so you can find me in those places.[27:04–27:14] David Hirschfeld: And I’ve been interviewed quite a lot lately on various podcasts. You might find me on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.[27:14–27:16] Thomas Watkins: Nice, nice. Doing the circuit.[27:17–27:19] David Hirschfeld: Doing the circuit, exactly. That’s right.[27:19–27:24] Thomas Watkins: Good, good stuff. All right, David, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing your insights.[27:24–27:26] David Hirschfeld: Thanks, Thomas. I appreciate you having me on.[27:32–27:37] Host: Thank you for tuning in. Join us next time on Product-Led Growth Leaders. Take care.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Navigating the Startup Journey: How to Achieve Product-Market Success was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Tune in to hear thoughtful advice on working with developers, the evolving landscape of AI in tech, and how to ride the “100-foot wave” of software innovation.The Thoughtful Entrepreneur: Interview with David Hirschfeld of TekyzThis podcast episode features Josh, the host of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, interviewing David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Tekyz, a custom software development company. The discussion centers around David’s personal hobbies, the evolution of software development with AI, and Tekyz’ approach to client projects.David’s Personal PursuitsJosh opens the interview by asking David about his personal interests. David shares his passion for woodworking, particularly bentwood furniture creation. He also recounts a recent trip to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, where he acquired large agate discs for his home entryway. This led him to learn metalworking and welding to create custom mounts for the stones. Josh relates to David’s enthusiasm for DIY projects, noting how online resources like YouTube and ChatGPT have empowered him to tackle various home improvements.The Evolving Landscape of Software DevelopmentThe conversation transitions to David’s professional work at Tekyz. He describes the company as a custom software development shop specializing in working with startups and scale-ups on projects involving workflow automation and AI. David uses a surfing analogy to illustrate the rapid pace of change in the development world, comparing it to a “100-foot wave” that companies must ride or be wiped out by. He emphasizes Tekyz’ commitment to staying ahead of the curve by leveraging AI for application generation, testing, and deployment. David’s goal is to achieve a 10x acceleration in development speed while maintaining or improving quality. He notes they’ve already reduced development time from 60 days to around 15–16 days for an MVP.Tekyz’ Approach and Client ProjectsJosh asks David about the specific AI tools Tekyz utilizes. David explains they primarily use US-based models like OpenAI, Claude, and Google Gemini, avoiding Chinese models due to data privacy concerns. He mentions specific tools like Claude’s MCP model for integrating third-party data sources, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and CopyCoder for prompt generation. David then shares examples of recent Tekyz projects. One notable project involved developing an “AI nurse” that conducts natural-sounding phone conversations with patients, reminding them about medications, scheduling appointments, and even responding to health concerns detected by wearable devices. Another example involved building custom referral partner network software, a project completed in under three and a half weeks compared to the typical three months.Advice for Potential ClientsJosh cautions listeners against relying solely on AI for software ideas, recommending conversations with experienced developers like David. David outlines his approach to initial client calls, emphasizing the offer of a mutual NDA and a focus on understanding the client’s motivation, market research, and project requirements. He highlights Tekyz’ detailed estimation process, which breaks down costs by module, allowing clients to tailor the project to their budget. Josh reinforces the value of this thorough approach, warning against developers who readily accept projects without proper vetting.This podcast episode provides valuable insights into the rapidly changing world of software development, emphasizing the importance of embracing AI, conducting thorough research, and partnering with experienced professionals like David Hirschfeld and his team at Tekyz.Transcript[0:07–0:18] Josh: Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients? Well, I’ve had private conversations with over 2,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.[0:18–0:35] Josh: I’ve got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I’ll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales.[0:36–0:50] Josh: What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.[0:51–1:08] Josh: Also, don’t forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I’d love to have you. With us right now, it’s David Hirschfeld.[1:08–1:19] Josh: David, you are the founder and CEO at Tekyz. Tekyz. You’re found on the web at Tekyz.com, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. David, it’s great to have you.[1:20–1:22] David: Yeah, thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.[1:22–1:29] Josh: Before we start talking about what you do at Tekyz, what do you do personally? Like, what do you enjoy doing right now? What are you geeking out on?[1:30–1:40] David: Okay. So, I love to do woodworking, making furniture, things like that, especially bent wood, very artistic, creative stuff.[1:42–1:55] David: And recently, my wife and I went to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, which is the largest show in the world. It’s been going on for like 80 years, literally takes over the whole city.[1:56–2:28] David: It happens, it’s about three weeks long. And to give you an example of how big it is, the Tucson Convention Center, which is a pretty big building is one of 45 or 50 locations where they hold the show. And that’s not the biggest location by far. There’s much larger locations than that. Anyway, we went there specifically because in our entryway in our home, we moved to San Diego a couple of years ago. And our entryway, we wanted a really dramatic, something dramatic piece that would show up there. So we went there[2:28–2:56] David: with this idea we were going to buy one of these big amethyst agates because you can get stuff at great prices there. And we ended up coming away with these giant Brazilian agate discs that are like an inch and a half thick and weigh about 60 pounds. And so now I’ve been doing some welding and metalworking to make brackets to hold them without having metal all over the place, right?[2:56–3:07] David: Yeah. How heavy are they? And hang them. They’re about 50 pounds each. Wow. And we have one going above the other like that. And so I just mounted them, finished mounting this morning.[3:08–3:12] Josh: Oh, my gosh. Congratulations. So have you been doing much metalworking before this?[3:13–3:24] David: Nope. Nope. In high school, I had one project that I did. It was a long time ago. Nope. I had never welded anything. So rented a welder, watched the YouTube video.[3:24–3:32] David: You know, I’m kind of fearless around this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And I just channel my inner my inner five year old when I start working on these.[3:33–3:51] Josh: Yeah. Look, I don’t know if you’re kind of at the same state. My kids are older now. I have a lot more free time. I get company and I got good people. You know, so I got some free time from time to time. But I got to tell you, between YouTube and now, you know, using AI or chat GPT, there isn’t a job in the house.[3:51–4:05] Josh: I mean, I haven’t found a job yet around the house or property that has been too intimidating for me. Like, I’m doing my own. And I love it, right? This sounds crazy. I mean, I’m not doing, like, plumbing, plumbing, but, you know, pool plumbing and PVC.[4:06–4:17] Josh: Yeah, right. The garage floor with the, you know, the vinyl or the flooring, the, you know, the covering. So it’s got the speckle and the gray.[4:18–4:25] Josh: Looks fantastic. um woodworking I have not touched yet did is that something you started later have you always been[4:25–4:56] David: into woodworking you know I I again high school is where I did it for the first time I just fell in love with doing these sorts of things working with my hands creating something in my mind getting a picture and then turning it into reality so I made a really sophisticated woodworking bench which I actually used SketchUp which is like a CAD program that most people can learn to use and created a whole SketchUp CAD program[4:56–5:06] David: for this woodworking bench and then I went and built the thing but it was my own design it was just so much fun it took me a couple months oh my gosh[5:06–5:17] Josh: that is so cool and now you see it every day exactly I could have hired out I could have easily hired out probably spent as much money. Right.[5:17–5:28] Josh: I learned along the way, you know, but every time I go to the garage now, I’m like, man, I did that. And it’s like it’s it’s like the Ikea principle with the furniture.[5:28–5:39] Josh: Right. When you spend your time, kind of you you you just develop more of a sense of ownership of what you’re doing. And it’s something like that. That’s, you know, we spent months on that. It’s really remarkable. David, thank you so much for sharing that.[5:39–5:42] Josh: Let’s talk a little bit about your work with Tekyz.[5:43–5:58] David: OK, sure. So Tekyz, I founded 18 years ago. We are a custom software development shop. We work with a lot of startups and scale-ups, workflow automation, everything AI.[6:00–6:06] David: It’s all about basically building and automating your company. That’s what Tekyz does.[6:07–6:22] Josh: Yeah. Well, I can’t imagine what you’re doing today as of when we’re recording this. And again, you may listen to your answer right now six months from now and kind of go, oh, yeah, those were the olden days.[6:22–6:42] Josh: Today is the olden day, right? As opposed to three to six months ago, things are evolving so rapidly around development and what we can do with AI and the speed at which we can bring, you know, such better tested products to market so much faster.[6:42–6:44] Josh: Can you just give us, for those of us who are not in this world,[6:44–7:07] David: can you give us a little behind view of how life has been changing for you over the past year or two Oh yeah yeah It really changing dramatically And as a development shop I look at it like you know I going to use a surfing metaphor because I live in San Diego I look at it like learning to surf really big waves.[7:08–7:21] David: And what I mean by that is you’re, you know, a typical development shop can get up and surf on their board in three-foot waves. And really, really top shops maybe are surfing 10-foot waves with a lot of confidence.[7:22–7:33] David: Here’s a 100-foot wave coming at all of us. And you’re either going to paddle out to it and stand up in your wave and stay on the tip of your board and try to stay ahead of it, or you’re just going to be wiped out by it.[7:33–7:57] David: So that’s how I’ve looked at it from the very beginning, and we’ve been paddling out to it the whole time. We are learning to — we are developing tools and automation between tools so that we can use AI to generate our applications, to generate the test cases, to build our deployment pipelines, all of these things.[7:58–8:09] David: In fact, I just got off a call with my team with some of the latest benchmarks we have and how these tools are working together to be able to accomplish this and where we’re at with the process.[8:09–8:31] David: I want to get to 10 times the level of acceleration for building something. So if it used to take me 60 days to build an MVP or 90 days, I want it to be six days or nine days to accomplish the same thing with the same or better architecture and better quality, including design.[8:32–8:42] David: So that’s remarkably fast, and we’re not there yet. And we’re probably at three weeks from what used to be 60 days.[8:42–8:52] David: Now we’re at 15 or 16 days, which is still a huge improvement. There are very specific areas that we still can’t get past, but we think we’re close.[8:53–9:06] David: Anyway, we’re pushing the envelope constantly on this. So that’s one of the ways it affects us. Then, of course, all of our clients are expecting, you know, anything that they’re doing is almost all AI related now.[9:06–9:17] Josh: Yeah. And so what what tools? And again, you don’t have to get too nerdy on this or whatever. But what are the tools that you’re using?[9:17–9:28] Josh: So I pay attention a lot to kind of the news of what’s going on generally in AI, you know, follow some subreddits around it.[9:28–9:39] Josh: And so I’m not an active programmer anymore. So I don’t, you know, but it’s really interesting to see just how rapidly innovation is taking place and the technology.[9:39–9:58] Josh: I know that Claude is just really killing it right now. But there’s so many new models that keep coming out. And it’s like, you know, the model that was popular 30 days ago is, you know, again, just got lapped by something new that comes out.[9:58–10:05] Josh: Do you mind maybe just sharing some of the names that folks may have heard about and how that integrates with the work that you do?[10:06–10:19] David: Yeah. So we stay away from the Chinese models just because we don’t know what’s going on with the data that they — when we train models using their data.[10:20–10:44] David: It may be perfectly fine, but there’s just enough unknown that we just stay away from them. We’re using, we’ve been using, leaning a lot on OpenAI until literally in the last week or two when we’re switching in specifically into this, this being able to generate applications over to Claude with their MCP model.[10:44–11:03] David: MCP is a protocol that allows Claude to use other third-party sources that we point it to to pull information in and to contextualize it when it needs information from different services and applications.[11:04–11:20] David: We’ve also used Gemini with their 2.0 Flash system. There’s a lot of capabilities with Google and Gemini that are really powerful. And a lot of it depends on are we focusing on some kind of voice interface?[11:20–11:33] David: Are we focusing on systems interacting together, on workflow automation, on deep research, on building a customized, verticalized model for, like, healthcare?[11:33–12:10] David: things like it depends on what we’re doing and then we just pull different tools and then different third party tools that work with them like a code editor that we’re using we’ve looked at all of them cursor seems to integrate the best with ai right now better than code pilot which is github’s product we’re looking at we’re using a product called oh i just slipped my mind we were just, oh, CopyCoder, which helps us to generate prompts that are specific to AI code generation.[12:10–12:17] David: Yeah. And all of these being applauded is sort of managing all of these resources dynamically.[12:17–12:22] Josh: And QA as well is probably significantly improved.[12:22–12:30] David: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Test, basically generating all the automated test cases for us. Yeah. And automating all of the QA process.[12:30–12:54] Josh: Yeah. David, can you talk, yeah, can you share maybe a few projects that you’ve worked on lately? Like what would be so to our friend that’s listening right now, and they’re wondering, they’re like, okay, wow. You know, obviously, you know, the output at which a client can, you know, the output that they can get for the investment has only improved over time.[12:54–13:06] Josh: And so, you know, just someone who’s on the fence of whether or not, you know, they should consider hiring a developer to provide some stuff that would be really a huge opportunity in the marketplace.[13:07–13:14] Josh: Can you share maybe some examples of projects that are like really in your sweet spot, like where you really excel at?[13:14–13:25] David: I can give you a bunch of different examples. So sweet spot, we build all kinds of sophisticated applications for a lot of different business verticals.[13:26–13:38] David: Just because we’ve been doing this for so long, we have a lot of experience in a lot of different verticals, law enforcement, health care, finance, just a lot of real estate.[13:39–14:05] David: Or we done multiple projects in those areas as well as manufacturing and inventory management logistics But I give you a couple recent examples So healthcare and this is a project we actually took over from another development a big U.S. development firm just because the client was unhappy with how it was going and they were looking for a change.[14:06–14:29] David: This was a year and a half ago when we took this one over, and it was basically a voice nurse. So an AI nurse that will reach out and call patients based on particular needs that they have, like because they’ve been really bad at taking their medication or filling their prescriptions.[14:29–14:55] David: And this would be in conjunction with like a Medicaid contract where the person that’s been given a prescription and has not filled the prescription, which you can see that, that it’s not been filled because of online services to the prescribing systems, then reaches out to that person and reminding them that they need to fill it because if they don’t, then they’ll end up in the emergency room, which costs the state a fortune, right?[14:55–15:21] David: and then calls the person and reminds them why they need to take it and gives them the ability to ask any question they want. And this is a very natural-sounding conversation, too, where you can ask the nurse, the voice nurse questions, and she’s really empathetic, and you can interrupt her, and she’ll stop and wait to hear what you have to say and then now respond in total context, things like that.[15:21–15:34] David: Or you might have a wearable device and the AI system notices that you’ve got a potential condition that may be acute that needs intervention.[15:35–15:49] David: An AI nurse calls and says, I noticed that your heart rate spiked, and because of your current health condition, I think we might need to intervene or schedule something with a physician.[15:49–16:02] David: Can you tell me how are you feeling? Did you notice that you had symptoms? Right. Having a conversation and then the nurse say, okay, I think maybe it makes sense to schedule and schedule you with a clinician.[16:03–16:14] David: And now she’s scheduled somebody or gets a real nurse on the phone immediately and let me pass it over to a nurse who can continue the intake process or whatever the right protocol is.[16:14–16:31] David: And we build that AI system to work that way. But the thing that makes it so amazing is how natural the communication is with this AI nurse on the phone and how smart they are because they know your medical history inside and out.[16:31–16:44] David: They know the nurse knows. She knows a lot about medicine, and she has clear boundaries that she’s not going to go beyond in terms of what she can say and suggest and do.[16:45–17:10] David: That’s one example. That’s helpful. Yeah. I can give you an example of an app that we just built really fast. One of the things that we need because we’ve got this big network of referral partners that we are constantly trying to build on, but there hasn’t been good software on the market to manage this referral partner network.[17:10–17:25] David: usually is a CRM, but the CRMs fall short in terms of just managing a referral partner network. Affiliate marketing is for mass sales, and this is more of a personal relationships with referral partners.[17:25–17:38] David: So we decided to build our own referral partner network software for managing this. And that’s a project that we’re just today launching the first version of it.[17:39–18:06] David: That’s a product that would have taken us roughly 10 weeks to 12 weeks to build the first version. This is one of the tools we’re using to benchmark AI code generation capabilities and figure out all of the standard operating procedures and protocols for doing this and still building a scalable system with microservices architecture and, you know, automatic deployment, automatic testing.[18:06–18:13] David: Anyway, we are less than a little under three and a half weeks to get the first version out instead of three months.[18:14–18:26] Josh: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. To our friend that’s listening, like I would imagine you probably have plenty of exploratory conversations, right, where people maybe have ideas.[18:27–18:43] Josh: And I want to just really put a call out to our friend that might be listening here. Talk with people. Be very careful about getting all of your software ideas from AI.[18:43–18:58] Josh: AI tends to be exceptionally sycophantic. It thinks all of your ideas are brilliant. It thinks you can do everything and anything under the moon. And it’s just the way that the vast majority of the LLMs are written right now.[18:59–19:09] Josh: You really should talk to a human who has been there, done that. David, you’ve been doing this for a while. You got about 18 years just at Tekyz under your belt.[19:10–19:24] Josh: You’ve seen a lot of projects out the door. And what I would encourage someone to do, the exploratory calls are really helpful. Do you mind maybe just sharing, like, when you have an initial call with someone, like what you typically talk about?[19:25–19:43] David: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the first thing I always ask people is, would you like me to send you a mutual NDA? Because I don’t want anybody to feel like they’re sharing their valuable secrets with me without some legal document to protect them.[19:43–19:53] David: So just know that I’ll lead with that. Not everybody cares about the NDA, but I don’t want them to have to ask me to send it. I always lead with that.[19:53–20:26] David: then when we started an exploratory call basically I want them to tell me a little bit about themselves as a person I want them to tell me about their idea at a very high level and then I want to know the genesis of the idea, where did it come from what was their motivation, how did they come up with this idea did it come from a problem that they were struggling with personally, did it come from just a cool idea they had or a shortfall that they see in a market, not necessarily one that they struggle with, but one that they feel confident[20:26–21:01] David: has a big opportunity. Then I always want to know, what have you done to research the market in terms of competitive products that already do this? What do you know about the market? Just to understand, I not trying to challenge anybody but I want to help make sure help them understand the very basic things if they haven thought about this that they should probably go and do I don want to take a project with somebody when there all kinds of competitors on the market, and this problem’s already been solved really well, and they just didn’t realize it. If they’ve got a better solution, and they already know about all[21:01–21:32] David: that, that’s great. But I want to feel like when somebody comes to work with me, they’re getting a partner that’s going to work hard to help them be successful not just a software developer who’s looking to bill them hourly for the next you know X years until they run out of money so and then we dig into the requirements of the system what the first version needs to look like what the big vision is what it you know[21:32–21:43] David: what the business rules are as much of the requirements as we can get then we’ll typically go back, put together a requirements document, if they don’t already have one, which most people don’t.[21:44–21:55] David: Sometimes they have five bullets on a napkin, and we’ll turn that into a full-blown requirements document with all of the functionality that we understand based on the conversations we’ve had with you.[21:55–22:08] David: And then we send it back to you so that you can review this and make sure that whatever’s in there is correct, add the things you need to add, remove the things that you think are put there incorrectly and change whatever you want.[22:08–22:26] David: Once we have that, then we put together a very detailed estimate. And I know it’s more detailed than most software companies because I speak to lots of other software contracting CEOs out there, and none of them do estimates to the level of detail we do.[22:26–22:42] David: So it’s a costly process for us to do it, but we feel that it’s important because we want to be accurate. Our estimates are accurate. We deliver typically within 10% of what we estimate on an average and sometimes even better.[22:42–22:55] David: So we work really hard to be very detailed in those estimates. And then that gives you all the tools you need, and it’s broken down by module with costs to each of the modules, very often 50, 60 line items in there.[22:55–23:07] David: and you can turn on and off any item you want for the first version of the product to fit it within your budget and make a decision, and you can take that estimate and go to another software developer if you want to use somebody else to do it.[23:07–23:14] David: And none of this costs you anything. We consider it a cost of sale, and it’s our way of proving that we’re the right company to work with.[23:15–23:36] Josh: Yeah, and this is, by God, to our friend that’s listening, please go the route that David is talking about as opposed to other horror stories I’ve heard when if you’re feeling like you’re going to just ideate everything and project manage everything and just go hire some folks on maybe a particular platform or so forth, buyer beware.[23:37–23:51] Josh: I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of stuff. Because, David, I think what you’re talking about is really making sure that this is a good idea, right, and that we’re being very realistic about what our asks are.[23:51–24:04] Josh: There are a lot of people out there that are happy to take your money. It’s just a really bad idea, and they’re not going to tell you that. So a little bit of personal editorializing in there from days long past, thankfully.[24:05–24:05] Josh: Yeah, sure.[24:05–24:08] David: And I won’t tell somebody their idea is a bad idea. No, no, no.[24:08–24:09] Josh: And I didn’t mean to say that.[24:10–24:34] David: Because honestly, I don’t know. No matter what my — and I’ve been wrong. In fact, one of my most sick, this was 11, 12 years ago, a Broadway producer-choreographer came to me and wanted to build a system to basically do the work that he did, what’s called a stage bible, where they basically do all the production of the play on paper first, right?[24:34–24:50] David: And they end up with like 2,000, 3,000-page tome that represents, each page represents every either 30 or 60 seconds of the play. And it shows the staging and where the actors are at that, and also the score or the script on the other side.[24:51–25:06] David: And he wanted to turn this into an iPad app, and the iPad was really pretty new. And I asked him, this is the last time I did, by the way. I asked him, I said, are you sure you want to do this because this is going to be an expensive product to build?[25:07–25:19] David: And I’m not sure that you can recoup your investment. How big is this market, right? A Broadway producer, choreographer. Anyway, he wanted to go forward with it. He ended up being one of my most successful customers.[25:20–25:25] David: I’ve learned a lot since then about some of the things that make somebody really successful, right?[25:26–25:37] Josh: Yeah, and I didn’t mean to talk about viability and that sort of thing. And obviously there’s other people that need to be involved, but at least you’re asking the questions, which I think is really important, which is likely not going to come when you’re just hiring someone independently.[25:38–25:48] Josh: David Hirschfeld, your website is Tekyz.com, T-E-K-Y-Z. It’s been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for this.[25:49–25:51] David: Thank you, Josh. I really appreciate it.[25:51–26:10] Josh: Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast.[26:11–26:24] Josh: We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders.[26:24–26:39] Josh: And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you’re looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.[26:39–26:56] Josh: I’ve got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I’m going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales.[26:56–27:11] Josh: What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.[27:12–27:28] Josh: Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that’s right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day.[27:28–27:33] Josh: Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.How AI Is Supercharging Software Solutions with Tekyz’s David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Using Systems to Create Successful Teams with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/using-systems-to-create-successful-teams-with-david-hirschfeld-435447076fcf/) - Featured Image: Using Systems to Create Successful Teams with David Hirschfeldhttps://medium.com/media/fa9a763b592a70349a57383d8de46b1b/hrefIn this episode of The Leadership Launchpad, David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software veteran, shares insights on building exceptional teams through systems, measurement, and customer focus. He explores the evolving role of AI in software development, the dangers of overbuilding, and how successful founders stay grounded in solving real customer problems. David also highlights the power of process artifacts — like detailed estimations and playbooks — in creating consistent, high-quality outcomes.The Leadership Launchpad: Building Exceptional Teams Through Systems and Customer FocusThis episode of the Leadership Launchpad features David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software development veteran and founder of , a company specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation. The discussion centers around the importance of systems and customer focus in building successful teams and products, particularly within the context of software development.The Current State of AI in Software DevelopmentDavid discusses the current state of AI in software development, noting its rapid evolution. While AI code generation has been used for smaller tasks for several years, building full applications remains challenging. Tools like Replit, Bolt, and Vercel offer some value but fall short in creating sophisticated functionality and often produce poorly architected code. David highlights the “context problem” with AI, comparing software development to juggling: “When you’re working on really complex architectural and coding issues… it’s like having seven or eight plates all spinning at the same time.” AI struggles to maintain this complex context, often discarding crucial information and hindering progress. Despite these limitations, David remains optimistic, emphasizing ongoing efforts to improve AI’s context retention and achieve greater acceleration in software development.The Pitfalls of Overbuilding and the Importance of Problem FocusThe conversation shifts to the tendency of founders to overbuild and lose focus on the core problem they’re trying to solve. David attributes this to the excitement of creation often overshadowing the less glamorous but crucial tasks of analysis, reflection, and risk mitigation. He emphasizes that successful founders prioritize understanding their customers’ problems: “Founders that understand that their business is about the problem that their potential customers are dealing with… those are the founders that will consistently find a path to success.” David advises founders to spend time talking to customers about their problems, not features, to gain a deep understanding of their struggles and inform product development.Building Exceptional Teams Through Systems and ArtifactsThe discussion then turns to the characteristics of exceptional teams. David states that “exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time” and achieve this through robust systems, protocols, and measurement. He provides examples from , such as meticulous time tracking, detailed estimations, and regular reporting, which enable them to maintain less than 10% variance between estimated and actual effort. These practices, David argues, are “artifacts” of exceptional teams, reflecting a culture of meticulousness and continuous improvement. This leads to a discussion about the importance of systematizing work, even for information workers, drawing parallels to the Industrial Revolution and the gains in productivity achieved through standardized processes.The Power of Playbooks and MeasurementDavid advocates for the creation of playbooks to document processes and nuances, facilitating scaling and onboarding of new team members. He advises against aiming for complete documentation at once, suggesting a gradual approach: “Playbooks… you don’t build the whole blank book for your business all at once. You do it kind of one little panel at a time.” He also stresses the importance of measurement: “You can’t become exceptional if you don’t have a way of measuring it.” Measurement allows teams to identify areas for improvement and drive transformation towards exceptionalism.This episode underscores the crucial role of customer-centricity and systematic approaches in building successful teams and products. By focusing on solving customer problems and establishing robust systems, leaders can create exceptional teams that consistently deliver high-quality results. David encourages listeners to embrace systems, create playbooks, and prioritize measurement to achieve exceptionalism.Transcript[0:07–0:15] David Hirschfeld: Exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time. So to do that, they have to have systems and protocols in place that they follow and ways of measuring it.[0:30–0:59] Matt: One thing that new leaders are often hesitant to do is to tell their teams how to get work done or to create standard systems for how work gets done. The truth is that no work happens in a vacuum and the best people often create systems for how to document what they’re working on, how to back up their work, how to send updates to clients and all those things that just have to happen in order for work to be done effectively.[0:59–1:14] Matt: And if you let everyone on your team come up with their own way to get all these things done, then there’s a chance that these various systems are going to come into conflict and the overall productivity of your team is going to be harmed.[1:15–1:29] Matt: This week’s guest on the Leadership Launchpad is David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on technological innovation and business growth that he currently uses at the company he founded, .[1:29–1:49] Matt: David specializes in AI-driven workflow transformation for scale-ups and startups. Having collaborated with over 70 startups, he developed the first launch method, a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding.[1:50–2:24] Matt: This episode really touches on this idea of how do you create systems that will enable your teams to be incredibly successful. We start off talking a little bit about the current state of AI software development, which I thought was a really interesting discussion. We then dive a little bit deeper into understanding why so many founders or the people with kind of this founder intent tend to build too much and lose focus on the problem they’re trying to solve. And then we finally dive into the importance of systems. It’s really a great discussion. But before we get into[2:24–2:50] Matt: that discussion, I do want to remind you that if this is your first time listening to the show, please make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a future episode. And if you are listening to my voice right now and you happen to be someone who is responsible for leadership development in your organization, I would love to talk to you. Please reach out to me at Matt at bettereverydaystudios.com so we can see if we can help make the leaders in your organization better.[2:51–2:58] Matt: With that, let’s get into the discussion with David Hirschfeld. David, welcome to the Leadership Launchpad. How are you doing today?[2:58–3:00] David Hirschfeld: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Matt.[3:01–3:12] Matt: Yeah, I’m really excited that you reached out to me and that we kind of connected a few, like a week or so ago and started talking because you have a very interesting business.[3:12–3:20] Matt: And so I wanted to start there. Could you tell us a little bit more about and kind of what you’ve been doing in the last few years.[3:21–3:34] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, sure. Well, I founded 18 years ago, and it was after I had two startups, one in the 90s that I sold in 2000.[3:34–3:45] David Hirschfeld: That was a successful exit. And then one in 95 that I failed in 97. So that was a failure. So I’ve seen both sides just from my own personal experience in terms of startups.[3:45–4:13] David Hirschfeld: and the second one failed because I didn’t follow the playbook that I followed the first time not realizing exactly what that playbook was. Anyway, then I founded in 2007, so that’s 18 years ago and we’ve been working with startups and scale-ups doing custom software development for that whole time and some of my clients are even, you know, 10 years, I’ve had them for 10 years or more.[4:13–4:14] Matt: Oh, wow. Oh, wow.[4:14–4:20] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah, where we’ve become their outsourced IT and development team. Yeah.[4:21–4:32] Matt: Wow. So you’ve been doing that for a while. I guess, well, since I have you, you’re the perfect person to ask this question. I don’t think it was on the list that I originally sent you, but it always piques my interest. Yeah.[4:32–4:45] Matt: Because I always get different opinions. What is happening with AI coding right now? Is that something that you’re really leaning into? I keep hearing that that’s transforming software teams.[4:46–4:59] David Hirschfeld: Well, it’s very funny that you brought that up because this will be my fourth conversation today about that topic with people on my team and customers. And anyway, so everything.[5:00–5:14] David Hirschfeld: We’ve been benchmarking really in the last two months. We’ve been benchmarking and trying to do problem solving. So this has gone through a big evolution because the technology is changing so quickly.[5:15–5:28] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. And we’ve been using AI code generation in some form or fashion for two and a half to three years now, right, for building small modules or refactoring small pieces of code and then growing and growing.[5:29–6:00] David Hirschfeld: About seven, eight months ago, I started trying out some of the code gen tools that can build full applications. and as recently as a couple weeks ago I even tried one of those things like Replit and Bolt and Vercel and products like this and they all provide some value but they fall short in some really key ways and so we’re not able to use those to build whole applications we want to build a very simple prototype[6:00–6:13] David Hirschfeld: of an application that has some functionality we can do that pretty well with those But if we get into any sophisticated, not even sophisticated, but, you know, semi-sophisticated functionality, they just fall apart.[6:13–6:24] David Hirschfeld: And they don’t write good code, and they don’t architect the code properly. And so there’s big limitations that we have in those tools. Interesting. Okay.[6:24–6:44] David Hirschfeld: But that was — I thought we might be able to use that for quick MVPs. We’re a long way from that. Interesting. However, so we’ve been testing all the code editors, and we’ve found Cursor so far to be the best code editor for AI code editing.[6:45–6:55] David Hirschfeld: But it has some huge limitations. So the problem with all these tools is there’s a context problem. Yes. When we — so this is how I liken it.[6:55–7:06] David Hirschfeld: If you want me to explain what I mean by this context problem for the listeners. Yeah. Yeah. When you’re developing software, you’re like a juggler.[7:07–7:19] David Hirschfeld: And the more you concentrate, the more balls or the more things you can keep in the air at the same time. So I liken it to spinning plates that I like on sticks. You know, it’s pretty easy.[7:19–7:42] David Hirschfeld: Most of our tasks have spin three plates. So even four plates isn’t too tough. But you get to the fifth plate, the level of concentration starts to grow significantly. And when you’re working on really complex architectural and coding issues where you have to keep all different aspects of the application in your brain at different levels simultaneously, it’s like having seven or eight plates all spinning at the same time.[7:42–7:59] David Hirschfeld: And you’ve probably walked in on a developer who’s in the middle of one of those, and you said, hey, I’ve got a quick question, Matt. And they go, the arms go up in the air, right? And they freak out because they realize how much energy it’s going to take to spin all the plates up because they’re listening to them all crash and break on the floor.[8:00–8:00] David Hirschfeld: Right.[8:02–8:15] Matt: There’s a scene, old movie Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman plays a coder. And there’s this scene where he’s like deep in or maybe, yeah, he’s coding some like software virus.[8:15–8:21] Matt: And he’s like drinking wine and music is blaring. He’s got 18 screens up and he’s just like deep in it. Anyway. Right.[8:22–8:36] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. Exactly. And then you don’t interrupt them, right? Yeah. I remember when my wife was doing her national boards. This is like your PhD if you’re a schoolteacher.[8:37–9:16] David Hirschfeld: Most schoolteachers don’t do it because it’s such a big deal to do it. You know, it’s a lot of work. But anyway, she was writing her national boards, and it was the same thing because she had to keep all these different pieces of information in her head and all these because there’s a lot of evidence that she collects in her own classroom as she’s teaching certain things and all of that has to be in her head while she’s writing this very complex and I’d walk into her office I’d say Becca can I and she’d go not now not now not now it was so funny and then you see yeah so that’s something that AI sucks at yeah so yeah yeah go ahead it’s[9:16–9:49] Matt: funny because I’ve even noticed that in just simple usages of doing some basic research for a course I’m creating or something like that. And it is when you try to have kind of like a dialogue of, yeah, that was interesting, but what about this direction? Or can you give me a little bit more information? After two or three of those back and forth, you can totally notice it like dropping off pieces of context that you gave it early and, you know, it focuses on this thing and expands on that, but it forgets that you would like pinned it in on this thing. So that’s interesting.[9:50–10:17] Matt: That’s great to hear. Thank you for that kind of side road, because though we’re going to be talking about leadership development, I promise the listeners, I know that’s why you’re here. So we’ll get back to that. But I do think this is such a perfect example of the thing that all leaders need to, you know, keep a touch on. And sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe, what the current state is, what are things really like for practitioners. And so for a practitioner like you, I thought it was the perfect time to ask that question.[10:17–10:20] Matt: So thank you for kind of giving us the lay of the land from your perspective.[10:20–10:40] David Hirschfeld: I do want to add one little thing there. We are working to solve this problem as everybody else is The real problem is that AI doesn realize when its context has shifted that there something else out there it may need to consider but it’s not considering.[10:40–10:51] David Hirschfeld: We as people know that, right? We’re getting into the area. We’re not focused on this other area, but we know it might have an effect on that, and so maybe we need to back up and take a look.[10:52–11:04] David Hirschfeld: AI doesn’t do that. Not yet. And what it does is it says, oh, this is my new context, and it runs away with it. Very often, destroying good work that’s done before that, which is right.[11:04–11:22] David Hirschfeld: And we have to manage and control that. There are some tools coming out from OpenAI and from Cloud and from Google that are trying to kind of rein in this problem and continue to keep the full context in its mind, but it’s still not there.[11:22–11:38] David Hirschfeld: And we are working at building scaffolding around this as well to do it because right now we’re probably at about 40 acceleration, 40 to 80 percent acceleration, depending on that area that we’re working on from what we were six months or nine months ago.[11:39–11:52] David Hirschfeld: We want to get to — I want to get to 90 percent consistently across the board. Yeah. And we’ve got — there’s some big things that have to happen for us because that would put us at 10x from the productivity and acceleration.[11:52–11:55] David Hirschfeld: And that’s huge, right? Yeah, absolutely.[11:55–12:06] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, in that discussion, one of the things you mentioned is that, you know, making minimum viable products is one of the first things that you’re trying to use AI for.[12:06–12:36] Matt: in our last discussion, I think one of the things that you focused a lot on as, and I don’t know if this is exactly part of kind of the protocol that you mentioned, you know, launch first and, and, and things. But one of the things that you mentioned was that it’s really hard for leaders to stay focused and not overbuild. That one of the things that it’s easy for a leader to do is to just kind of, yeah, lose track of the story. What’s the most important thing right now and get focus on a lot of details that don’t matter.[12:37–12:41] Matt: Why do you think that’s so hard? What makes that so hard in your experience with all the startups you’ve worked with?[12:43–13:04] David Hirschfeld: It’s a basic perspective, and that’s a really good question. I think it’s just a basic perspective of founders. Because to start something new, like what a founder is doing, they have to step out of their comfort zone and go in a direction and create.[13:05–13:18] David Hirschfeld: And that creative process, you need a lot of motivation to do that. A lot of people aren’t motivated to do that. They want security and comfort. But founders seek this kind of excitement.[13:18–13:30] David Hirschfeld: And it’s not exciting to do the hard work, the analysis, the constant reflection, the risk mitigation, planning.[13:30–13:41] David Hirschfeld: Those aren’t the fun tasks unless you just happen to be that kind of founder that finds all that stuff fun. But usually the people that find that kind of stuff fun aren’t the ones that are creating the businesses.[13:41–13:53] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a natural tendency to go towards the thing that’s exciting, which is the creation part. And the problem is you might be creating something that nobody cares about.[13:54–14:22] David Hirschfeld: And that’s where founders go off track. So founders that understand that their business is about the problem that their potential customers are dealing with and every aspect and nuance of that problem and wanting to spend their time talking with customers, those are the founders that will consistently find a path to success.[14:22–14:27] David Hirschfeld: because the customers and the problems continually remind them of what they need to focus on.[14:28–14:50] Matt: Yeah. As you’re talking, the thing that — tell me if this is kind of what you’re mentioning. I always think about like house projects. I used to be really bad about starting too many house projects because one thing that I realized is that when you are 90% of the way like visually done, you’re 50% of the way actually done, right?[14:50–15:10] Matt: Because that last visual 10% is really like 50% of the time. Is this like the small little tweaks, the little cleanups, the, oh, I got to measure this just precisely. And, yeah, I think it is really hard to be somebody who likes to do something new but can also focus on the details.[15:11–15:28] David Hirschfeld: You know, it’s funny. You say house projects. So, first of all, what you’re talking about is there’s a director of development of a big firm that I worked with maybe 15 years ago, and what he called this being done-done.[15:29–15:45] David Hirschfeld: So not just being done, but then making sure that all of the I’s are dotted, all the T’s are crossed, all the deployment things are done, the communications and delivery and the documentation, right, so that when you say you’re done, you’re really done.[15:46–15:57] David Hirschfeld: So he called that done, done, and that has always worked. As far as house projects go, that’s like my passion is I love woodworking and building and creating.[15:57–16:10] David Hirschfeld: in that way as well, right? And when my wife says, how long will that take you? And I say, oh, I’ll probably have it done this weekend. She immediately multiplies by four. And she’s[16:10–16:30] Matt: mutually right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned this in the context of founders, but I think it’s often a lot of the people that get attracted to startups as well. And a lot of those early leaders in startups get attracted to startups, at least in my experience, because they are that builder kind of personality.[16:30–16:42] Matt: And so whether you’re working with the founders or some of those early leaders, you mentioned it’s kind of like a perspective shift. Have you developed any methods or questions that you ask?[16:42–16:55] Matt: How do you help people and what can people do themselves to kind of like break that shift? If somebody is listening to this and being like, oh, yeah, maybe we are doing too many things or maybe my team is suffering from a lack of focus right now.[16:55–17:02] Matt: How can you refocus in on kind of making sure you’re focusing on the right problem, the right customers, that kind of thing?[17:02–17:14] David Hirschfeld: Okay. I want to talk about it from two different perspectives. One is kind of like how I talk to founders when I start working with them. And the first thing I ask them is I say, what’s your product?[17:15–17:47] David Hirschfeld: What are the requirements? And then I say, okay, what’s the genesis of this? What’s the problem it solves? what I’ll explain and getting them to describe the problem is usually a lot of effort. Founders have lost, usually lost the problem already at that point because they’ve decided they want to build this thing. So when I say, what’s the problem you’re solving? And they all start telling me about, well, this will just make it easier for so-and-so, right? And I say, okay, that’s a, that’s kind of a benefit. What’s the problem it’s solving? It’s, and then they go, well,[17:47–18:19] David Hirschfeld: it’s what it’s doing is it’s giving you the ability to do this and I say okay that’s a feature but sounds like a great feature but I’m not hearing a problem statement this is very common conversation almost all founders not all but almost all founders have a lot of trouble articulating a problem statement and then when I finally get them to articulate a problem statement it’s usually a very high level one because they haven’t nail a step back, put their feet in the shoes of the person who they’re solving the problem for[18:19–18:39] David Hirschfeld: and thinking, what is the real struggle? Why does it matter? If they’re not talking about why that person doesn’t feel threatened by this problem because it’s going to cause this terrible outcome if I don’t solve it, they’re not at the root level problem. And that’s really where you have to get to.[18:39–18:53] David Hirschfeld: So that’s usually the first conversation I have with founders is getting them kind of redirected. And then I’m constantly asking them about the problem.[18:53–19:04] David Hirschfeld: They want to talk about features. I want them to stop talking about features and forget features even exist. You know, the feature will just naturally happen as we mitigate the problem.[19:04–19:17] David Hirschfeld: but if you don’t know what problem you’re mitigating, you’re not building the right thing. So you should only be talking about founders that love the problem, find paths to success. And the ones that love their products fail all the time.[19:18–19:34] Matt: Yeah. That was one of the biggest things that came out of the last conversation that I had with you is just that importance of falling in love with the problem. And it’s so important these days because the potential solutions to problems are changing so much.[19:34–19:47] Matt: the technologies that we have available, the landscape in which it’s in. They’re changing so quickly that if you don’t truly care about a problem, you’re just not going to stick with it for long enough to really go after it and solve them.[19:48–19:53] Matt: Awesome. Okay. So I really like that framework of, you know.[19:53–20:24] David Hirschfeld: Here’s one other thing that kind of supports that framework. And so I tell founders, talk to your customers or your potential customers. spend as much time as possible doing that and don’t tell them anything about your product or about any features and don’t ask them if this will fix that problem. Just talk about the problems. Ask them why that’s a problem. Ask them what it costs them. Ask them how much they feel personally impacted by the problem. Ask them[20:24–20:35] David Hirschfeld: historically what have they done to try to mitigate this problem or have they? If they have, if they use other software to try to mitigate it, did it work?[20:36–20:47] David Hirschfeld: Where did it fall short? Why aren’t you still using it? Why don’t there’s other solutions out there? Why haven’t you tried using those? You know, get into the history of the problem.[20:47–21:18] David Hirschfeld: Problem, problem, problem. They will talk because they want to talk about their problems. They want somebody to hear them and understand. They don’t want to talk about your features. They’re not going to be honest with you about your product but they will be honest with you about the problems they struggling with especially if they recognize that you really care about the problem and you really want to understand it And you heard other people talk about the problem and they’ve found some ways of reducing the impact of the problem doing this or that. Have you tried those things? You know, this is what your customer, this is what, this will teach you what to build.[21:19–21:30] Matt: I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love all that. And, and to all the leaders or, you know, All the listeners who are thinking like, well, I’m deep inside a company. You know, I don’t have a customer.[21:31–21:44] Matt: Everybody has a customer, you know, and I think that’s really important to remember. I think some of the best organizations that I work with often use this idea of everybody in the company, wherever you sit, you have a supplier and you have a customer.[21:44–21:54] Matt: And you need to figure out who in your customer. Maybe they’re internal. Maybe they’re external. But it’s about having that obsession with your customer, whoever they are, to understand their problems.[21:54–21:57] Matt: And that’s how you can be successful.[21:58–22:15] David Hirschfeld: Everybody that has a job, which is anybody who’s earning money, and a lot of people that aren’t, have to deliver something to someone, right? So if you don’t think you have a customer, then why are you working, right?[22:15–22:26] David Hirschfeld: You’re producing something or preventing things from being produced or whatever your job is, you’re doing it for some stakeholder of that thing.[22:27–22:38] David Hirschfeld: And understanding that person and what they’re struggling with and what matters to them will help inform you how to do your job better, right? Absolutely. It doesn’t matter where you are, right?[22:38–22:54] David Hirschfeld: But people just want their problems mitigated. That’s what drives all of us. People think it’s about excitement and happiness, and that is just a way of getting over this fear of missing out and being sad and struggling.[22:55–23:11] Matt: Yeah, I mean, human psychology, Tony Robbins always talks about there’s two ways to motivate people. Either people either flee pain or pursue pleasure, and usually for most people, the much stronger lever is fleeing pain.[23:11–23:18] Matt: It’s a much stronger lever. And so identifying those problems, solving those problems is the true way to help people the most.[23:19–23:31] David Hirschfeld: And I think pursuing pleasure is just is is just a version of the other anyway. Because you only pursue pleasure because you have fear that you’re not having enough pleasure in your life or some fear.[23:31–23:44] David Hirschfeld: Something’s motivating you away from a point, which is why you look for these other. If you were perfectly happy and satisfied and thrilled every moment of your life, there would be no reason to ever pursue pleasure.[23:44–23:45] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, yeah, yeah.[23:45–24:00] Matt: Interesting, interesting. I want to shift the conversation a little bit from focusing specifically kind of on the leader to broader teams. Again, when we last spoke, you used this great phrase where you said, exceptional teams leave artifacts.[24:01–24:04] Matt: Right. What did you mean by that? Yeah.[24:04–24:22] David Hirschfeld: They produce artifacts as a natural process of what they do that makes them exceptional. So what I mean by that is exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time.[24:23–24:34] David Hirschfeld: So to do that, they have to have systems and protocols in place that they follow and ways of measuring it so there’s output as a result of that.[24:34–24:50] David Hirschfeld: For example, we track time spent doing everything. Everybody tracks it. It’s very easy. It takes a minute or two every day to basically put a bullet in a timesheet and say, I did this.[24:51–25:02] David Hirschfeld: And it can be a five-word sentence, right? And if they have three bullets in the day or four bullets, it’s plenty, right? And that way we can track exactly what they did and where they spent their time.[25:02–25:36] David Hirschfeld: as a result of that we can take that and do produce reports and analytics and give it to our clients that show how the time was spent we also go to a very deep detail for all of our estimates whether it’s a brand new product we’re building or it’s new functionality on top of an existing product or new features or whatever that is or a refactoring whatever that thing is that we’re doing an estimate for, we break it down into a lot of detail. We look at downstream effects.[25:36–26:07] David Hirschfeld: We look at, you know, any kind of conversion, deployment costs, whatever that is in terms of effort and time. And we can report all this. So we know what we were expected to deliver from build to build to build, from major release to major release. We know when it was expected to be done and how much effort we were supposed to spend to get there. And we have all the actuals, which from a daily, weekly, monthly basis of what we actually did, how much we actually spent, how long it actually took.[26:08–26:18] David Hirschfeld: And we make it a habit of every week in our status reports to our clients, we produce a report that shows this is what we did last week, this is what we expected to do.[26:18–26:30] David Hirschfeld: This is where we are month to date, this is what we expected to be month to date. Here’s where we are year to date or quarter to date, right? This is our actual, what’s our variance? is our variance more than 10%.[26:30–26:42] David Hirschfeld: Then we need to spend some time and do a post-mortem and explain to the client maybe somebody was sick or out. Maybe we ran into an unexpected problem and that we thought we understood the technology we did.[26:42–26:53] David Hirschfeld: Whatever makes that. And our goal is to always be less than 10% variance from what we estimate to what the actuals are. But to do that, you have to track all that.[26:53–27:05] David Hirschfeld: To be able to track all that, You have to have an exceptional team that has been inculcated that understands the need for this. Not that’s being forced to do it, but that just does it as a natural DNA.[27:06–27:07] David Hirschfeld: Right. These are artifacts.[27:08–27:10] Matt: Have you ever read Cal Newport?[27:12–27:12] David Hirschfeld: No.[27:13–27:26] Matt: No? So Cal Newport, he’s probably my second favorite author. One of his great books is a book called Deep Work. and actually A World Without Email is probably my favorite book of his.[27:27–27:29] David Hirschfeld: I already like him, A World Without Email.[27:29–27:51] Matt: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Everybody’s like, oh, wouldn’t that be amazing? But what you were just saying really reminded me of a lot of what he talks about because kind of what he says, he spends a lot of time kind of comparing what happened to industrial work during the Industrial Revolution to what’s happening today with information workers.[27:52–28:02] Matt: And that one of the big backlash, basically what happened during the first Industrial Revolution is that we had all these craftsmen who could kind of work however they wanted to.[28:03–28:44] Matt: They were artisans that, you know, they took a lot of pride in their work. And a lot of the backlash about the Industrial Revolution is we kind of systematized a lot of their work. And some of them felt like they were losing things, But we gained tons of productivity. And one of his arguments is that the what we’re going through today in information work is similar in that historically we’ve thought of the workplace, especially for information workers or white collar workers or whatever you want to call them, as the right way to do it is to be very hands off, not be be very specific about the outcome you want.[28:44–28:55] Matt: But don’t be specific or proscriptive about how to get that work done. You leave that up to the experts who can do their thing.[28:56–29:19] Matt: And similar to what I’m hearing, what you’re saying is, and this is, I think, what Cal Newport talks about is like, you know, you don’t need every software engineer to spend a portion of their time figuring out how they’re going to document their work or answering the emails or keeping track of the other project, you know, figuring out their own method for project management.[29:19–29:33] Matt: The most effective workplace is going to be one where the system for how the other stuff gets done, the documentation, you know, the project planning, that needs to be a very robust system.[29:34–29:46] Matt: And then the workers don’t have to figure all that out. and 100% of their energy can be devoted to getting the work done because they don’t have to spend time worrying about all this other stuff.[29:46–29:49] Matt: That’s at least some of what I heard in what you were saying. Does that sound right?[29:50–30:02] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, that I think is exactly right. And one of the ways that we’re able to accomplish this is that I have a hiring philosophy, and that is I only hire people if they’re smarter than I am.[30:03–30:15] David Hirschfeld: And then that ball rolls uphill. So, my director of operations, who’s really smart, it’s hard to find people smarter than her, but again, she only hires people if they’re smarter than she is, right?[30:15–30:32] David Hirschfeld: In terms of what they’re able to deliver in the context of what they’re being hired to do. Because otherwise, you send the wrong message to the team if you don’t hire people that are smarter, that pick up, they elevate the team and add value to everybody.[30:32–30:48] David Hirschfeld: But also, then you’re also having to carry people, which means that you can’t. So I look at it like this. Our job as me as a company owner and director of operations and project manager, our job is basically chimney sweeps.[30:49–31:03] David Hirschfeld: Our job is to sweep all the impediments out of the chimney so that our developers, our QA people, our analysts can just work fast and freely and be creative and add value to the systems and the processes.[31:04–31:26] David Hirschfeld: Not to drive them. Our job is not to drive them. We want to motivate them in terms of we’re working on exciting things, look at the cool things we’re doing, but then we want them to create a vacuum in front of us, right, because they’re going so fast and so broadly that it’s sucking all the oxygen and we’re rushing to fill it back in from behind, not pushing them.[31:27–31:38] David Hirschfeld: So that kind of how I look at our role as managers It a bottom We lead from underneath[31:38–31:56] Matt: Yeah, I like that. I like that. To play devil’s advocate for a second because I can hear somebody saying, you’re saying that your job as a people manager is to remove all the impediments. But on the other hand, you’re saying you have these, like, very prescriptive rules about document it this way, do this thing, put it in here at this time.[31:56–32:00] Matt: aren’t those barriers to just getting to the work?[32:01–32:22] David Hirschfeld: They’re systems that they work within. So no matter who you are, you’re always working within a system of some kind unless you’re working by yourself. And if you work by yourself, you start to develop systems because otherwise you end up losing big chunks of work because you didn’t back it up properly or you end up rewriting things because you didn’t abstract it properly or whatever.[32:23–32:34] David Hirschfeld: You start to develop your own systems, right? So we’re providing these systems and protocols, and we’re providing a lot of automation around it so that they don’t have to do a lot with it, right?[32:34–32:49] David Hirschfeld: They just have to learn it. And then we provide a lot of management scaffolding that can account for the work that they’ve done and remind them what they’re missing and that they need to do this until they get into the habit of doing those things.[32:49–33:00] David Hirschfeld: But we don’t have people that are pushing back on, oh, God, here’s another rule that we have to follow. It’s not like that. There are certain things like we have standard operating procedures.[33:00–33:12] David Hirschfeld: When we develop a screen, for example, we want our styling, our prompts on the screen to look and behave a certain way. But we document all this stuff, right?[33:12–33:23] David Hirschfeld: And we teach our developers, you know, when you’re doing something, go to the place where all the SOPs are and look up the SOPs for your particular, for the thing that you’re working on and see if there is one.[33:23–33:40] David Hirschfeld: If not, then don’t worry about it. And we document playbooks so that everybody understands if they have to do something that follows a certain protocol, there’s a playbook that documents it and that gives you all the visual flows and everything.[33:40–33:51] David Hirschfeld: We have to do some of that because we have a lot of projects that are compliance oriented, like health care, law enforcement, and we have to follow very strict compliance guidelines.[33:51–34:08] David Hirschfeld: In those cases, that has to be enforced and wrapped around the project. But everybody knows that going into these projects. And they just learn what those workflows are, even how a bug is reported, how that gets the feedback loop, the flow through development and tests.[34:08–34:21] David Hirschfeld: All that has to be very accurate because we get audited, you know, yearly by a third-party auditor on whether we have six — the last six months we’ve been compliant in a pristine way or not.[34:22–34:32] David Hirschfeld: Nothing to do to get around those things other than provide automation and tools that make the documentation really easy and effortless to, you know, to stay within those guidelines.[34:33–34:51] Matt: Well, I love how you pointed out that the creation of systems is just natural. But it just does happen because I used to always say that I thought organizations that had the most disdain for bureaucracy were the most likely to succumb to bureaucracy and red tape.[34:52–35:03] Matt: Because bureaucracy, it’s a thing that just naturally occurs in a large organization. And the way to avoid it is to embrace it and deliberately plan it out and plan those structures.[35:04–35:19] Matt: And, you know, I can include everybody. Yeah, include everybody in that process. Exactly. And I think that’s the same. You know, what’s true at the organizational level is true at the small team and even the individual level of if you’re going to get work done, you have to develop systems.[35:19–35:33] Matt: And so you might as well be proactive about it and really think about it. Yeah. Because, as you say, exceptional teams have those artifacts. It is it’s not an accident that you achieve exceptional results again and again.[35:33–35:38] Matt: There’s systems there that you can point to and say that is why they are achieving those exceptional results.[35:39–35:59] David Hirschfeld: And we have a kind of a philosophy that we’re never good enough either. And we have never had, you know, we’re never exceptional enough. And so we understand the gaps that we have and where those gaps can make us better and faster and more accurate and improve quality and improve team morale.[36:00–36:15] David Hirschfeld: And, you know, in every respect. Right. Right. So what because what will happen is if you don’t constantly strive for all that stuff. Right. Then then, like I was saying, like you were saying, everybody starts to build their own systems for the things that they’re doing all the time.[36:15–36:30] David Hirschfeld: Then you’ve got two or three different people doing similar things with completely different systems in place. Yes. And there’s no consistency from one project to the next or from even one developer to the next in terms of how they’re creating and developing and and communicating and orchestrating.[36:31–36:55] David Hirschfeld: Right. And that’s not uncommon, by the way. That’s probably fairly common in most development teams that there’s some of that. And I call that sort of the average mediocre development team that’s productive, but they have all these limitations because of this lack of, you know, highways, you know, technology, highways internally.[36:55–36:56] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah.[36:57–37:07] Matt: Well, this has been great. I mean, I think if I’m if I think back to the conversation, kind of the two biggest takeaways that I would have for a leader at any level in any organization.[37:07–37:24] Matt: Number one, it’s the importance of understanding your customer and their problems. That is the kind of a path forward to making sure you’re not creating what you don’t need to create, building what you don’t need to build, and you really get passionate about solving the problems of your customers.[37:24–37:37] Matt: And then once you’re clear on that, if you want to deliver on solving those in an exceptional way, David and I are giving you the green light to create systems and rules for your team.[37:37–37:49] Matt: Because I do think a lot of new leaders are hesitant to do that. You know, they don’t like me, whether there’s systems there or not, they’re very hesitant to create standards of how work is done on a team.[37:49–38:08] Matt: You don’t want to be draconian about it because you said include everybody. You don’t want to say like this, it’s my way or the highway. But I think that hopefully this episode gives you the green light, gives people the green light to start to have that conversation of norming the ways that you get work done on your team so you can get it done faster.[38:09–38:20] David Hirschfeld: Do we have time for me to add one more aspect to that? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So one other thing is maybe you’re thinking there, well, actually two other things. One is the idea of playbooks.[38:20–38:39] David Hirschfeld: When you have a system that does work really well and you have a lot of tribal intelligence around the thing, like you’ve got a few people that really know how to do this certain thing, have them start to document these processes and playbooks.[38:39–38:56] David Hirschfeld: And if you say, oh, I can’t because there’s just too many decisions, I call those nuances, then have them document the nuances, the decision point, and when they veer off the standard approach to doing that, and there may be lots of those, but that’s okay.[38:57–39:19] David Hirschfeld: Because when you want to scale and bring new people in, you don’t want them sucking all the energy out of your most productive people that know how to do these things well. You want those people only to do some high-level training to get them started and give them a resource where they can find out all the nuances and every little aspect of that job because it’s all been documented really solidly in a playbook.[39:19–39:31] David Hirschfeld: So that’s number one. And playbooks aren’t you don’t build the whole blank book for your business all at once. You do it kind of one little panel at a time, right? And you just keep evolving it.[39:31–39:32] David Hirschfeld: Right.[39:32–39:41] Matt: The number of companies that get bogged down in forever and like, okay, we’re creating the official, we’re just documenting it all today. It’s like you’re just never going to get done.[39:42–39:57] David Hirschfeld: That just doesn’t happen. But playbooks just recognize the more you have this stuff documented, the more your business is worth because somebody that might eventually buy your business is also buying all of this documented knowledge about how to operate effectively.[39:58–40:12] David Hirschfeld: The second thing is if you’re not sure about where to grow exceptionalism or how would you know that you get there, that sort of thing, you probably don’t have a system of measuring yet.[40:13–40:27] David Hirschfeld: And that’s the place where you start because you can’t become exceptional if you don’t have a way of measuring it. And if you don’t know a way of measuring how not exceptional you are yet, then you need that before you start.[40:27–40:40] David Hirschfeld: Because once you start to measure it, you start to recognize what has to transform to start to bring you to a higher level. So systems of measurement are like critical success factor for becoming exceptional.[40:41–40:55] Matt: I love it. Those last two bits were absolutely perfect. If anybody happens to be listening, since we have a lot of engineers that listen, thinking about their next company, if they’re looking for help with some software, where can they find you?[40:55–41:09] David Hirschfeld: they can find me at .com. is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. If you’ve made it all the way to the end of the show, then I’ll give you my email.[41:09–41:16] David Hirschfeld: It won’t be in the links, but it’s david at .com. And I’m easy to find on LinkedIn.[41:17–41:18] : Perfect.[41:18–41:29] Matt: Yeah, everybody, make sure to prove to David that you made it to the end and email him directly with your questions. This has been great. Thank you so much, David. Thanks for having me, Matt.[41:30–41:42] Matt: Thank you so much for listening to today’s show. If you are looking for help turning your organization’s great engineers into great managers, me and my team at Better Everyday Studios would love to help.[41:42–41:54] Matt: We deliver targeted and interactive training workshops that are designed to help build the three fundamental skills of any new manager. building trust, giving feedback, and setting goals.[41:55–42:02] Matt: Reach out to me through Matt at bettereverydaystudios.com so we can start making your organization better every day.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Using Systems to Create Successful Teams with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Discover the Winning Tactics for Crafting Successful Software Solutions](https://tekyz.com/discover-the-winning-tactics-for-crafting-successful-software-solutions-7a4a9422c102/) - Featured Image: Discover the Winning Tactics for Crafting Successful Software Solutionshttps://medium.com/media/beeb067b213bee82f8ffa0d0548209b7/hrefIn this episode of The CEO Project Podcast, host Jim Schleckser talks with software veteran David Hirschfeld about his “launch-first” approach to building software that reduces risk and accelerates success. Aimed at CEOs frustrated by costly, delayed projects, the conversation highlights how realistic prototypes, customer-driven validation, and pre-launch sales can create early traction and smarter development. From agile practices to hiring the right dev team, this episode is packed with actionable insights for leaders navigating the software development journey.Key Takeaways:Traditional software development often fails due to lack of product-market fit and delayed revenue.The “launch-first” approach emphasizes solving real customer problems before building solutions.High-fidelity prototypes can be used to secure pre-launch sales and validate demand early.Kanban is preferred over Scrum for flexible, iterative development with faster feedback loops.CEOs should evaluate outsourced dev teams based on detailed estimation, clear artifacts, and progress tracking.Success comes from aligning product development with real-world needs and customer validation — not just vision.Transcript[0:00–0:15] Jim Schlexer: Welcome to the CEO Project Podcast, where Jim Schlexer, author of the best-selling book, Great CEOs Are Lazy, and the founder of the CEO Project, provides ideas and tools to help CEOs of mid- to large-sized companies grow and optimize their businesses.[0:15–0:29] Jim Schlexer: Now, let’s get started with the show. Welcome, everybody, to the CEO Project Podcast. My name is Jim Schlexer. I am your host and the founder of the CEO Project.[0:29–0:41] Jim Schlexer: Well, software is something that is confusing to a lot of CEOs. You know, they don’t know how to develop it. It’s mysterious. They pay a lot of money for these crazy people that eat popsicles and develop code, and they don’t know how to do it.[0:41–0:53] Jim Schlexer: And then the worst problem is, you know, when we design our software, we try to design what I used to call the God Box, you know, the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing product. It’s only going to take a million and a half dollars and two years to develop.[0:53–1:10] Jim Schlexer: And, you know, in the meanwhile, we would really love to have some revenue. Well, our guest today has a completely different look at it, and some of you will be familiar with some of the approaches, but David Hirschfield is a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on innovation and business growth.[1:10–1:32] Jim Schlexer: His career spans leadership roles at Computer Associates, Tech Systems, Intel, Motorola, launched his first startup, and sold that successfully in 2000. He founded TechEase in 2007, and he has become an advisor for AI-driven workflow transformation for startups in the design and development of their software and their startups.[1:33–1:47] Jim Schlexer: He’s collaborated with over 70 of them. He’s developed a launch-first method. I think that’s going to have some familiarity to some other methodologies that are out there. A systematic approach that minimizes risk and accelerates success with reduced reliance on investor funding.[1:48–2:00] Jim Schlexer: He bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, startup ecosystem dynamics. When he’s not having fun doing that, he woodworks, golfs, and raises four boys.[2:00–2:04] Jim Schlexer: You know, like me, God knew you couldn’t handle girls, so he gave you all boys. Is that what happened?[2:05–2:10] David Hirschfield: Yeah, exactly. Raised four boys. Yeah, they all have their own families now.[2:10–2:17] Jim Schlexer: Yeah, nice. Yeah, mine are off on their own, too. And I have two boys, and I joke, God knew I wouldn’t have been able to handle a girl.[2:17–2:24] David Hirschfield: But now I have four granddaughters. Oh, my God. They got me back.[2:24–2:35] Jim Schlexer: Oh, my God, yeah. Grandpa, can I have this? Yeah, awesome. Well, how did you get into software development? And maybe more importantly, how did you develop this sort of methodology that you’re talking about?[2:36–2:52] David Hirschfield: Okay, well, let me start with the software development. Yeah. I was a physics major at UCLA, and I was always interested in technology. and then I went to work for software companies where I was in the sales department of, like, computer associates and Texas Instruments.[2:52–3:12] David Hirschfield: And because I’m really technical and because I always had to schedule a week ahead of time to get systems engineers to come and support me in these sales calls to do demos of product, and I ended up learning how to do the demos myself and even got Texas Instruments to send me to their school to learn how to use their case engineering software.[3:12–3:17] David Hirschfield: Oh, cool. Which was an act of God because they never, ever had sent a salesperson to that.[3:18–3:21] Jim Schlexer: Because sales guys weren’t smart enough to figure it out, right?[3:21–3:44] David Hirschfield: Texas Vince is a pure engineering company. Yeah, I have friends who were there. Yeah, the necessary evil, you were in sales. Yeah. So as a result, I ended up, when I left Texas Vince, I ended up being a consultant for their case engineering software, and I did projects, mostly project managed at Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Service.[3:45–3:57] David Hirschfield: And then I started my own software company. And that one was kind of started on a lark with a friend of mine who was at Texas Instruments. And we did it kind of like a mini ERP system back then when Windows 3.[3:57–4:09] David Hirschfield: One had just come out. It was the first version of Windows that people could actually use. And there was nothing on the market that was Windows enabled. So we built logistics inventory management, route distribution product for a particular niche.[4:09–4:14] David Hirschfield: And despite every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing it anyway.[4:14–4:17] Jim Schlexer: Yes, despite our level of competency, right? Exactly.[4:18–4:31] David Hirschfield: We grew it to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000 to a publicly traded firm. I was VP of products for the acquiring company for a few years and then went out again and tried to create another software company.[4:31–4:42] David Hirschfield: And this one I failed because I didn’t follow the same playbook that made me successful the first time. And I wasn’t sure what that actual playbook was until I started Tekyz.[4:42–4:53] David Hirschfield: So out of the asses of that failure, 2007, I started Tekyz. And that was 18 years ago. And we’ve been doing software development for small to medium-sized businesses, some large companies, and a lot of startups.[4:54–5:09] David Hirschfield: And I’ve watched a lot of failures of these startups. And now I understand why I failed the second time and why I was successful the first time. because the pattern started to really emerge on the things that founders who are successful do or existing companies that are launching new products.[5:09–5:16] David Hirschfield: Because some companies are successful, and then they launch a new product, and it fails, and they’re not sure why. Well, don’t keep us waiting.[5:16–5:18] Jim Schlexer: What shouldn’t we do, and what should we do?[5:20–5:31] David Hirschfield: So the classic founder, you know, is struggling with some kind of problem, sees a solution to it, and then falls in love with the solution. Yeah. and forgets about the problem.[5:31–5:44] David Hirschfield: And this is the classic and spends all their time, and basically they’re wearing a black robe because they believe in themselves, they believe in the solution, and they’re telling everybody how great this is. Obviously, I’m oversimplifying, but this is a trap.[5:44–5:50] David Hirschfield: Those are code words for I’m going to fail, or this is going to become the next unicorn. You know, all code words for I’m going to fail.[5:51–5:55] Jim Schlexer: Well, what I’m hearing is no voice of the customer in that conversation. Exactly.[5:56–6:09] David Hirschfield: And they’ve been not talking about the problem. In fact, you ask founders, most founders, you ask them, what problem are you solving? And they say, they give you a feature of the product. And I say, well, that’s a nice feature, but that’s not a problem statement.[6:09–6:13] David Hirschfield: I don’t hear a problem statement. They say, oh, yeah, yeah. Then they tell you why it’s such a good feature.[6:15–6:18] Jim Schlexer: I’m going to double down, right?[6:19–6:34] David Hirschfield: Yeah. So I spend a lot of time kind of peeling that black robe off founders and try to wrap them in a white coat, turn them into clinicians, and make them understand that everything they believe are just assumptions because they don’t have any proof.[6:35–6:48] David Hirschfield: And then so founders who are really consistently successful love the problem and spend their time talking with customers about their problems and about what have they done to mitigate that problem in the past.[6:48–7:10] David Hirschfield: Why don’t they keep doing that? Have they tried other products? Have they found products that worked? Why aren’t they still using them? That’s the conversation that successful founders have with lots and lots of customers, and they continually have them, even after they launch their product, not talking about their product, just talking about the problem, understanding how much that problem is really costing them, how much does it personally impact them.[7:10–7:22] David Hirschfield: Those are two independent measures, things like that. So when I realized this, I created this methodology come launch first. The other thing that we do is we create these realistic prototypes.[7:22–7:32] David Hirschfield: They call them design prototypes or high-fidelity prototypes. When you demo it to somebody, they think you finished the product, and there’s no software behind it, but it looks like it’s a real product.[7:33–7:46] David Hirschfield: And then we go out and demo these to potential prospects and see if we can’t get early sales. We offer them some high-value option to buy in early, and if they won’t buy in early, why not?[7:47–7:58] David Hirschfield: Is there a problem with the business model? Do we have the wrong product, the wrong market? Are we the wrong early adopter? What is it we’re not doing right that we’re not getting any pre-launch sales?[7:59–8:13] David Hirschfield: And the reason that’s so important is most people that fail end up failing because they lack product market fit. You know, they build the wrong product for the wrong person, and they spend way too much money and time building the wrong product for the wrong person.[8:13–8:44] David Hirschfield: And then pivoting is costly and time-consuming once you’ve built your product. But pivoting a design prototype is quick and easy and inexpensive, as well as building the design prototype as opposed to building the product So the idea being that you want to confirm product market fit in the only way that you can absolutely confirm it and that’s you get sales from customers in enough numbers that you’ve got a three-to-one ratio between the lifetime value of your customer versus the cost to acquire that customer.[8:44–8:54] David Hirschfield: Three-to-one is your ratio? Yeah, that’s sort of a kind of a SaaS golden ratio. A lot has to do with what period of time you’re calculating that lifetime value over.[8:55–9:06] Jim Schlexer: I mean, the problem is when you’re starting up, I really don’t know the lifetime value because I don’t know my retention. So you’re kind of guessing at it. I always say 60% of your first year margin is also a pretty useful number to fool around with.[9:06–9:10] David Hirschfield: That’s a good number, too. I will add that to my…[9:10–9:20] Jim Schlexer: Feel free. By the way, it works in almost any industry. Even a low margin industry, 60% of your first year margin, as long as there’s recurrence in it, can get you home.[9:21–9:25] David Hirschfield: I like that. Okay. Interesting. Okay. I’ll do some calculations around that.[9:25–9:29] Jim Schlexer: Yeah, please feel free. I did some of my own, but check me. That’d be great.[9:29–9:36] David Hirschfield: I’d just like to see how those numbers work out the same way so that when I talk about 60%, I can explain why that matters. Yeah, yeah.[9:36–9:49] Jim Schlexer: Well, it goes to not needing additional capital, right? That’s where. Exactly. How do I do it without needing more capital is the question. I love what you’ve done is people talk about fail fast and fail cheap. You really put a face on fail fast and fail cheap here.[9:50–10:00] David Hirschfield: Yeah. In fact, that’s part of my mantra is fail fast and fail cheap, right? The idea is, you know, fail fast and fail cheap, and maybe you’ve pivoted two or three times, you’re still failing.[10:00–10:14] David Hirschfield: So you truly fail fast and cheap, right? Be happy that you’re out of it very quickly for very little money as compared to what a lot of founders go through, which is many years and hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars spent before they fail.[10:14–10:25] David Hirschfield: And not all that uncommon like marriages and life, you know, so many things about life gets all messed up because of this terrible long-term failure in a big portion of your life.[10:26–10:28] David Hirschfield: So, yeah, it doesn’t make sense.[10:28–10:42] Jim Schlexer: It’s funny you talk about entrepreneurs and startups, but I think the same idea is appropriate for software and product development in larger companies, And even more so there because you’re running a $100, $200 million company.[10:42–10:56] Jim Schlexer: It’s not unusual to see a $1 million, $2 million product development effort. And we’ll know after we spend all this money if we got something or not. Boy, oh, boy, I would really rather spend $50,000 and know if I’ve got something and then spend another $50,000 and another.[10:56–11:00] Jim Schlexer: And by the time I spend $200,000, I’m sure I’ve got something and now I’ll spend $1 million.[11:01–11:12] David Hirschfield: Exactly. And that doesn’t mean a company can’t fail even if they do have product market fit. But that’s a small — then it’s a matter of just not knowing how to operate a company in the proper way, right?[11:12–11:23] David Hirschfield: So I think most of the companies that fail, you know, they say 42% fail because of lack of product market fit. And like 40% fail because they run out of money.[11:23–11:33] David Hirschfield: I think that running out of money is they run out because they don’t have enough profit. They didn’t really have product market fit the way they measured it. So in my mind, about 80% of failures are –[11:33–11:47] Jim Schlexer: Well, I think it’s 100. I had a friend who started a business not that long ago, and he goes, Jim, what do I need to know? I’m starting a business. What do I need to know? So there’s three things. Number one, you can’t run out of money because if you run out of money, the music stops, and you don’t get to solve any more problems.[11:47–11:58] Jim Schlexer: As long as you have money, you can solve all the problems. It’s just a matter of time. Got it. Don’t run out of money. What’s number two? Number two is don’t run out of money, and number three is don’t run out of money. It’s the only one that matters.[11:59–12:10] Jim Schlexer: Everything else is optional. So, yeah, I’m going to run out of money. So how do you get this sort of looks like it’s real but it isn’t real demo together? Like that seems a skill set that most people don’t think about.[12:11–12:20] Jim Schlexer: They’re like, I’m wasting time building this thing that looks like it’s real and then I’m going to have to go to build a real thing. It feels like engineers will freak a little bit at this idea.[12:20–12:42] David Hirschfield: So we used to use Aksure, which is a prototyping tool, where you could build in a lot of logic in terms of the workflows and user experience and all that. We’re using Figma a lot more in the last few years because Figma’s evolved enough where you can do the simulations, on-screen simulations of how the application behaves when you select certain things and when you’re typing.[12:42–12:58] David Hirschfield: And that’s important. It’s got to look real. And the reason it has to look real, not just represent a real app but actually look like a real app, is because if they ask you the question, how do I know you can build this, you can’t get them to buy in early.[12:58–13:28] David Hirschfield: but if it looks like you’ve already built it even though you tell them this is not the actual application first version won’t be out for a few months and it won’t have all these features but you’re getting to see what you’re buying into from a vision perspective they make up a story in their head about they hear that but they don’t actually hear it in the way you say it they think oh you must be in QA or you’ve already developed it but there’s some additional features you’re adding to it they just don’t hear it and so that question never happens and that’s a critical success factor in doing pre-lawn sales.[13:28–13:34] Jim Schlexer: So that’s actually with live data then or a static database sitting behind it, no feeds?[13:35–13:38] David Hirschfield: No, not even a database. No, it’s just built into the logic.[13:38–13:43] Jim Schlexer: Oh, wow, this is really like one-inch deep kind of stuff. This is one-inch deep.[13:44–14:07] David Hirschfield: Okay. We don’t want to have to spend any time in building any kind of logic scaffolding behind it, right? Yeah. Because that raises your cost and it doesn’t provide any additional value. So we just figure out what those user experience scenarios are that you need to be able to walk through and demo, and do you need to be able to back out, you know, click back button and show that functionality, and then we’ll build it all in, and it looks real, right?[14:07–14:21] David Hirschfield: Even edit maintenance screens, and all the menus are functional, and the error messages pop up and things like that. But it has to look real. And there’s a lot more to building that kind of a design than just doing a normal UI design.[14:21–14:34] David Hirschfield: But the reason we started doing that 12 years ago is because when we were just doing mock-ups and wireframes, we found that the founders or the client would commit to what we were doing.[14:34–14:44] David Hirschfield: And then when we gave them the software to start to use, they’d realize that’s not going to work and it’s not going to really support the user experience they need. And so we’d go back and we’d have lots of changes in iteration.[14:44–14:55] David Hirschfield: So I said, why don’t we just model all this up front and do all that iteration in the design? And then once we’re done, we’ve got a design that represents the actual application’s user experience in living color.[14:55–15:09] David Hirschfield: Got it. And then when we did that, and the developer knows exactly how it’s supposed to behave when they deliver it, not just both in terms of animation and user screen behavior and things like that, so they’re not delivering something that the founder was expecting something different.[15:10–15:22] David Hirschfield: And all that iteration went down once we started doing that. And then, of course, in these realistic prototypes, we thought, why don’t we do pre-launch sales? Yeah. It seems like a smart thing to try to do to validate that it’s worth building.[15:23–15:39] Jim Schlexer: Got it. So this is a real hardcore UI UX before we do all the back-end stuff, basically. Get all the UI UX right, which is really everything the customer is going to touch anyway. You know, almost we could have magic hamsters in the back as far as they’re concerned, as long as it works, right?[15:39–15:50] Jim Schlexer: But the UI UX I’m happy with and I’m good to go. So that’s really what you’re doing is your customer will see what they’re going to see and do what they, if they’re happy with that, then we can build the whole backside as a separate conversation.[15:51–16:02] David Hirschfield: Yeah, the backside and the front side. Well, you haven’t really built it, I realize that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But, and that’s just, we’ve been doing this now for a long time, you know, doing it this way.[16:03–16:17] David Hirschfield: And we build the whole vision out. We don’t just build the MVP in this design prototype. We build out the year-and-a-half to two-year roadmap. Yeah. So that you can see that all the pieces hold together properly and that there’s a clear path.[16:17–16:23] David Hirschfield: And we may end up never building some of those things and building other things because the MVP gets out and you start to get real feedback from the market.[16:25–16:36] Jim Schlexer: Now, if you do that. By the way, I think that’s really interesting because, you know, when you’re a software salesperson, you’re always selling off the roadmap, right? You’re like, well, here’s the PowerPoint that shows what you’re getting in Q3 next year.[16:37–16:58] Jim Schlexer: Very different to let me show you what it’s going to be and how it’s going to interface and what it’s going to do in Q3 next year. Right. You’re not saying that, but you said this is the product. This is a 1.0 product. We going to release 0 0 0 and then you get 1 but that be a little ways down the road So the fact that you showing an evolved roadmap is a very different move to anything I heard before[16:59–17:13] David Hirschfield: Yeah. So we showed the evolved roadmap, but we’ve done our niche analysis. We know who that early adopter is because it’s part of the Launch First methodology. Yep. And we craft the demo to focus on their number one and two problems.[17:13–17:24] David Hirschfield: Got it. And we demo those things, and then we say, but look what else you’re getting. So they can see the big vision that they’re buying into, but we have nailed their problems that are high cost and high impact.[17:24–17:28] David Hirschfield: And we craft the demo and the language around that.[17:28–17:43] Jim Schlexer: And I love the selling into this because we talked to us when we were dealing with startups. We go, look, two things you need to do is one is find your seam where you can solve that. You call it product market fit, but find your seam and be greedy for revenue.[17:43–17:55] Jim Schlexer: A lot of times you’re like, we’ll give it away for a while. and then I’m like greedy for revenue. You want revenue as early as you humanly can get it. Back to your point about minimizing reliance on investors.[17:55–18:05] Jim Schlexer: Otherwise, you’re back to the well, back to the we’re getting close. We’re getting really, really close. We’re getting really, really, really, really close. Don’t worry. It’s a horrible conversation. I’ve had it. It’s really painful.[18:05–18:17] David Hirschfield: I love that. It’s very hard to make that transition to actually asking customers for money when you’ve been giving it away. And the ones that you’ve been giving it away to may not want to buy it, And they may or may not be using it because they’re not invested in it.[18:18–18:29] David Hirschfield: Whereas if you get people to buy in early, then when the beta comes out, they’re invested in that beta. That’s why they bought in because it solves a really specific problem that they need solved or they wouldn’t have bought in.[18:29–18:40] Jim Schlexer: I used to call this like a cockroach problem. I’m giving away for free the minute I charge money. It’s like turning the lights on in the kitchen and the cockroaches scatter, you know. Exactly. Your point.[18:40–18:43] David Hirschfield: I love that. That’s a great metaphor. It’s a perfect metaphor.[18:43–18:45] Jim Schlexer: It’s a little disgusting, but, you know, you get the point, right?[18:46–19:01] David Hirschfield: Right. Well, it also changes if you do the pre-launch sales. It changes the concept of your MVP from this idea that it’s going to help you establish product market fit, which is not what an MVP should be for, to focusing on product solution fit.[19:01–19:26] David Hirschfield: Because now you’ve got a product and you need to make sure it’s delivering the value to the client in the way they were expecting it and that what they thought they needed is what they actually need, right? And if it’s not, then now you’ve got time to make those adjustments so that you’re getting engagement in the application the way you believe you need to have that engagement, right, so that you can continue to sell more and then get the kind of feedback and referrals as a result of people using it and getting value out of it.[19:27–19:32] David Hirschfield: So product market fits about sales. Product solution fits about usage. Yes.[19:32–19:43] Jim Schlexer: And stability and security and all the other things you’ve got to worry about. When you get into the full-blown development, I think I got my UI, UX, my one-inch deep demo. Everybody says, yeah, that looks awesome.[19:43–19:54] Jim Schlexer: If we could do that, we’d be super happy. We’ve given you a little bit of money to support it. Now we’re into the hardcore development. How do you approach software development? Do you use Agile?[19:54–20:00] Jim Schlexer: What methodology do you use? Or have you found is high performance for your organization?[20:01–20:12] David Hirschfield: Since so many of the products that we’re building are new products, we use Kanban. So pure Scrum is just too restrictive in a new product development environment.[20:13–20:16] Jim Schlexer: And by the way, could you just describe Kanban for those that have not been familiar with that briefly?[20:17–20:28] David Hirschfield: It’s all agile development. These are just sort of different nature type of agile. Where Scrum, Scrum development is where you have very fixed time boxes.[20:28–20:45] David Hirschfield: And the team is a mature team that’s been working together on this product for a long time. And so they are, every two weeks when the time box starts, they’re pulling out from the priority list all of the various items that are, you know, to-do items in the application.[20:45–21:06] David Hirschfield: and they independently in the scrum team pick who’s going to do which piece, how much effort it’s going to take, until they’ve got about 85% of their planned time filled, which leaves a little bit of extra time for them for things that they didn’t expect to happen so they can complete these items in that two-week period.[21:06–21:17] David Hirschfield: And when the two weeks is up, they’re done. If they didn’t finish it, then they didn’t finish it, right? And they stop and they deliver what they can in that two weeks and start the next Scrum the following Monday.[21:18–21:29] David Hirschfield: That’s okay in existing company structures and existing software that’s being maintained and enhanced, and the team’s been really well. It doesn’t work for new development because it’s too restrictive.[21:29–21:36] David Hirschfield: So Kanban is similar in how we pull things off and how we manage the states of each item.[21:36–21:41] Jim Schlexer: So basically cards with stories, and I’m going to fulfill that particular element of my story, right?[21:42–21:54] David Hirschfield: Right, exactly, right. But it’s not so restrictive from a time boxing period. That’s the big difference in terms of how we use Kanban versus how we would. And we used to do Scrum and found that it just didn’t work for new development.[21:54–21:55] David Hirschfield: Got it.[21:55–22:07] Jim Schlexer: And what I always liked about it is it’s highly visual. I’m not the software person, but I can walk in and kind of see where things were, see how they moved from two weeks ago, three weeks ago, a month ago, see if we’re progressing towards conclusion.[22:07–22:11] Jim Schlexer: So I love the visual element of the Kanban system personally.[22:11–22:24] David Hirschfield: Right. And we’re building new stuff. We’re also building, enhancing things and doing bug fixes in production releases. Sure. With Kanban, we may have two or three releases a week, depending on where we are with a project, right?[22:24–22:31] David Hirschfield: We may not release anything for a couple weeks, right? And so there’s that flexibility in a Kanban mode.[22:31–22:46] Jim Schlexer: By the way, just for those that are kind of learning on the software side, that’s a monstrous difference from the traditional old school development of software where we get 1.0 is going out June 30, 1.1 is going out October 30, right?[22:46–23:04] Jim Schlexer: I mean, like three or four releases, monster drops every year. You know what Dave is talking about is you could have a couple of releases a week, potentially, in some scenarios, which is much more approximating the curve of need and use, so forth, as opposed to these big blocks that drop, and are probably wrong.[23:04–23:06] Jim Schlexer: Then you find out they’re wrong, and now you’ve got to go fix them.[23:06–23:24] David Hirschfield: Right. Yeah, we want lots of releases, the small pieces of functionality that are not disruptive. Obviously, if it’s more of a new functionality that’s a major capability that would be disruptive to how the application works, and that’s going to come out in a big release.[23:25–23:43] David Hirschfield: And there’s going to be scaffolding around it in terms of data transformation and maybe workflow transformation and some education with clients and all that. These other things are small features, bug fixes, just constantly releasing functionality as soon as we validate that it’s working.[23:44–23:57] David Hirschfield: And we have our automated pipelines for automated testing and automated deployment so that it’s easy to do this, right? And it happens with the right security and the right version management and all of that’s just built into the process.[23:58–24:15] David Hirschfield: I talk a lot about competence. of what’s a highly competent team versus a typical team. That’s something I talk a lot about because if you go to my website, Tekyz.com, it’s right at the top, hyper-exceptional software development team.[24:16–24:31] Jim Schlexer: I actually want to go there. Let’s say you’re a CEO and I’m going to outsource some all portion of my software development. how do I hire and how do I know I’m actually getting a decent firm?[24:31–24:42] Jim Schlexer: Because I’ve got a lot of people we’ve worked with the CEO project that they’ve hired what ostensibly were very high-quality teams, and they turned out, you know, not so much. So they obviously didn’t ask whatever the right questions are.[24:42–24:51] Jim Schlexer: So help us with how do we hire, how do we suss good, average, great, you know, from the rest. Okay, yeah.[24:51–25:01] David Hirschfield: And it’s tricky if you don’t know, really tricky if you don’t know what to look for. And so I always lead when I’m talking with somebody for the first time.[25:01–25:13] David Hirschfield: I said, here’s evidence that you would get from a team that works in an exceptional manner that you won’t see. And you should ask other teams, any other team you talk to, to see how they work in this way.[25:13–25:30] David Hirschfield: And you have a lot of trouble finding that they will have the artifacts that exceptional teams produce as a natural output of what they do And like yeah like what what Let say that would be like the level of detail that they produce any time they estimate That’s a starting point.[25:30–25:42] David Hirschfield: So when you get an estimate, whether it’s for the initial project or some enhancement that they’re doing, what level of detail goes into that estimate? How accurate can they claim they are with those estimates?[25:42–26:06] David Hirschfield: Do they have any history they can show you about how accurate they are with estimates with other clients? And most teams won’t have any of this. And I know that because I talk with a lot of other CEOs of software development teams, and we, you know, shoot the information around, and we talk about estimates, and they say, yeah, we do a pretty good job with estimates.[26:06–26:15] David Hirschfield: And I say, yeah, I think we do too, and I say, would you like to see what we’re doing? And they say, sure, and I show them our estimates, and they go, oh, no, we don’t do estimates like that.[26:15–26:26] Jim Schlexer: Yeah, I mean, overrun feels like the middle name of most software companies. You know, they just overrun. Or they scope change it on you. Yeah, I can still hit the number, but I’ve got to change the scope.[26:26–26:27] Jim Schlexer: Oh, my God.[26:27–26:39] David Hirschfield: And that can be valid. I don’t want to run people down for that reason because clients change scope. But a lot of that has to do because you didn’t spend enough time in the design prototype to sniff out all the scope and all the issues.[26:39–26:50] David Hirschfield: A lot of times clients, so I assume that was there, but that would have been obvious if you had really sussed out the prototype, right? So we spent a lot of time in the prototyping. Again, this is why, right?[26:50–27:04] David Hirschfield: Because we learned that when we do it, then all this iteration goes down and scope management becomes a lot easier, right? And then we do these very detailed estimates that break everything down to modules.[27:04–27:17] David Hirschfield: We use T-shirt sizing. So basically every module has to fit within a certain size T-shirt from extra small to XXL. XXL is nine days of development effort.[27:17–27:32] David Hirschfield: That’s a really big module. Very few things are X. Anything bigger than that, then we know it’s got to be broken down more. Extra small is a half day of effort. And nothing is shorter than a half day, or it needs to be wrapped up along with something else.[27:33–27:38] Jim Schlexer: What other questions should we be asking? I heard artifacts to prove estimation quality is key.[27:38–28:04] David Hirschfield: Do they track actuals? How do they report actuals? Do they show the actuals? Again, so we have a weekly status report, so that’s the next thing I typically show. And our status report shows what we did last week in a lot of detail, what we’re working on right now, what the plan is going forward, our build plan, what builds are coming out when, what is included in those builds, all the team members, what their vacation schedules are, what the plan is, right?[28:04–28:18] David Hirschfield: All this has to be factored in if you’re going to be inaccurate at all. And in the week, in the current week, we show month to day in terms of actual hours by specialty like DevOps or development or QA.[28:19–28:30] David Hirschfield: You know, we break it down like that. And then we show what the estimated hours were for the month. And we show what the build schedule was and what the estimated build schedule was and what’s the variance.[28:30–28:41] David Hirschfield: We’re always showing variances. And our goal is to always be within 10% of what we estimate. And with our largest customer last year, we were 6.5% variance for the whole company.[28:41–28:42] David Hirschfield: Nice.[28:43–28:50] Jim Schlexer: All right, so let’s finish up on a success story. Somebody who’s worked with you and had massive success as a result of it. We’ll give you a chance to brag here a little bit.[28:51–28:54] David Hirschfield: Okay, sure. Well, I can give you a couple. One is…[28:54–28:59] Jim Schlexer: No, you give me one. You don’t get to give me a couple. It’s a half-hour show, man.[29:00–29:26] David Hirschfield: All right, all right, all right. Well, I was just going to say because there’s so different ones in entertainment, ones in healthcare. Okay, go ahead. Do two. Okay, it’ll be quick. It’ll be quick. One of my clients from 10 or 11 years ago came to me as a Broadway producer, choreographer, and he wanted to create an iPad app that basically took his whole planning and staging, which usually is like a 2,000-page tome that they produce.[29:26–29:36] David Hirschfield: with every 30 seconds it shows the actors and all the stage settings on the left side and the score or the script on the right side, right? Wow. Right?[29:36–29:51] David Hirschfield: So every 30 seconds. And they do this before they start to actually produce the play. This is an exercise they go through so that they know who’s going to be doing what, where do things hold together. And we turned that into an iPad app, which I tried to convince him not to do it because I didn’t think he’d be able to recover.[29:52–30:23] David Hirschfield: He was going to sell it in the app store for $199, and this was right when the iPad came out and I couldn’t imagine he’s going to sell enough of these to be able to recoup his investment but he said no I’m going to do this you don’t want to do it I’ll find somebody else I said no we’ll do it and that’s when I learned that I didn’t understand all the reasons why people are successful and failure anyway his app has gone on to basically produce every single play on Broadway for the last 7 or 8 years now the Olympic opening games, the Tonys, the Emmys most cruise lines use it for all their[30:23–30:39] David Hirschfield: stage shows, college games I mean, it’s a wild success. Yeah, he knew his market, right? He knew his market. He knew his market. He had reach. He was solving a problem that he understood really well. I mean, there’s a lot of things I learned from him about what makes somebody really successful versus some of the failures.[30:39–30:53] David Hirschfield: The other one is a recent client who we actually, I call these recovery projects, which are some of my favorite, and that’s where they were working with another firm and struggling with another firm for some period of time and then found us through referral or whatever.[30:53–31:25] David Hirschfield: and then they recognize the difference right away between how we work and how this other firm was working. Anyway, so they’re an AI nurse, and they have contracts with, like, the state of Illinois for Medicaid for all their indigent patients who don’t fill prescriptions or don’t take their medications, things like that, or for big hospital systems where somebody’s transitioning from being in there after surgery to long-term care, right, And they need nurses to help with that transition process.[31:26–31:38] David Hirschfield: So this is a voice-enabled AI nurse that knows the patient’s medical history, knows everything about medicine, right, and can call the patient and intercede and help them through that transition.[31:38–32:01] David Hirschfield: And there’s a phone number the patient can call to talk to the nurse and schedule things and get information, right. And it’s a very empathetic, natural conversation that they’re having. Or they can call them to remind them about taking their medication, Anyway, the idea is a state that can save 5% to 10% of emergency room visits just by getting their patients to take their medication.[32:01–32:01] David Hirschfield: Oh, yeah.[32:01–32:13] Jim Schlexer: No, I mean, we’ve dealt with clients in the healthcare space, and compliance with the protocol is massive. Just imagine a diabetic that wasn’t being compliant to their insulin and their testing.[32:14–32:18] Jim Schlexer: I mean, they could be in big, big trouble. So, yeah, this is tremendous.[32:18–32:28] David Hirschfield: And this client just closed a big raise and also did a big deal with Google, who’s like 100% behind them. Wow. Very cool.[32:28–32:39] Jim Schlexer: Awesome. Well, David, this was fascinating, and I think you and I could talk for three hours about software development. But we don’t have three hours. If people wanted to engage with you or your firm, what’s the best way to get a hold of you?[32:40–32:51] David Hirschfield: Well, if anybody makes it to the end of this, please email me at david at Tekyz.com. That email won’t be in the show links, but I’ll give it to you right now.[32:51–33:12] David Hirschfield: Tech use is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z for anybody that’s listening but not watching the video, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. And you can reach me at my website by just going to the Contact Us form, and I’d be happy to talk with you about your project, your possible needs, or if you’re struggling with a firm, I can give you some tips on how you might be able to make it a little bit easier to work with them.[33:13–33:24] Jim Schlexer: Tremendous. Well, thank you so much. This is an area that a lot of people lose hair, get gray hair, get white hair. And so thank you. Some really good ideas for people on this one. So thank you, David. I appreciate your time.[33:24–33:35] Jim Schlexer: Thank you, Jim, for having me on. And for everybody that joined us, thanks for joining us on the CEO Project Podcast. We will see you next time. Thanks for listening to the CEO Project Podcast.[33:35–33:44] Jim Schlexer: We’ll see you next time. Be sure to subscribe to get all the future episodes and check out our website, www.theceoproject.com.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Discover the Winning Tactics for Crafting Successful Software Solutions was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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This is a must-listen for founders seeking smarter, leaner paths to success.The Tech Leaders Playbook: A Conversation with David HirschfeldThis discussion centers around David Hirschfeld’s extensive experience in software development and startups, focusing on the importance of AI, smart scaling, and his “launch-first” method for startups. David shares insights gleaned from his 35-year career, including successful exits, failures, and lessons learned from working with over 90 startups.The Importance of Need Over WantDavid emphasizes the crucial distinction between addressing customer needs versus wants. He argues that all buying decisions are driven by a “fear” of missing out, burning out, or not having enough, highlighting the underlying need for survival and problem-solving as the primary motivator. → “Because they mix up want with what they believe is what drives people to buy things, and it’s not want, it’s need.” → “Everything is driven by need.”Learning from Success and FailureDavid discusses his experiences with successful and failed startups, attributing his initial success to unknowingly stumbling upon the “launch-first” method. He contrasts this with his second startup, where a focus on building a “cool product” and delaying monetization led to its downfall. → “I approached it from the belief perspective, not from the proof perspective.” He advises founders to prioritize selling and understanding customer problems granularly. → “The second thing was my focus should have been on selling, not just building out the functionality, but just focused on selling and building the market.”AI-Driven Workflow TransformationDavid acknowledges the hype surrounding AI but stresses its transformative potential. → “AI is amazing. We’re able to do things today that two, three years ago were just impossible to do.” He advocates for focusing on the problem being solved and assessing the financial cost and perceived impact of that problem. He provides an example of a client using an AI-powered “voice nurse” to streamline patient transitions to long-term care, freeing up human nurses for more complex cases. → “AI steps in here really well.”Practical AI Integration and Common MistakesDavid advises businesses to approach AI integration strategically, considering cultural acceptance within the company and developing a prioritized implementation plan. → “Well, I think either they just try to do too much too fast and they’re not taking cultural impact.” He cautions against underestimating the importance of workflow automation and ignoring potential cultural resistance to AI adoption.The Launch-First MethodDavid explains his “launch-first” method, which challenges the traditional startup model of building an MVP and seeking VC funding. He argues that fundraising efforts often distract from business development and points to the high failure rate of VC-funded startups. → “Out of roughly 70% of VC funded startups fail.” His method involves creating sophisticated, animated mock-ups to demonstrate product vision and secure pre-launch sales with attractive offers like lifetime licenses. → “But you need to ask them to buy something as soon as possible. It doesn’t have to be a working product. It doesn’t even have to be a real product.” This generates revenue, demonstrates traction, and puts founders in a stronger position for future fundraising.Key TakeawaysDavid’s core message revolves around prioritizing customer needs, focusing on problem-solving, and adopting a pragmatic approach to AI integration. His “launch-first” method offers an alternative path for startups, emphasizing early sales and customer validation over premature fundraising. He recommends “The Mom Test” as a valuable resource for learning how to effectively gather honest feedback from potential customers by focusing on their problems. He encourages founders to challenge their assumptions about the market and adopt a data-driven approach to product development.Transcript[0:03–0:15] David Hirschfeld: recognize no matter how much you think you know your market, you have made a lot of assumptions about the market. Instead of being in love with the problem, I was in love with my product. And if you’re in love with your product, that is code for I’m going to fail.[0:15–0:30] David Hirschfeld: You shouldn’t be in love with the product. You should just be in love with the problem. Because who cares about the product, it’s the problem you’re solving that you’ve met. The AI is amazing. We’re able to do things today that two, three years ago were just impossible to do or so difficult to do that it wasn’t worth the investment.[0:30–0:41] David Hirschfeld: And now it’s almost like effortless to do the same sorts of things. Anybody that says this is just a fad hasn’t really used AI for any problem solving yet because they would know that’s not true.[0:41–0:58] Avita Santavlian: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Tech Leaders Playbook. Today, I’m excited to have David Hirschfeld on our show. David is a software development veteran with over 35 years of experience working with major tech companies before building, scaling, and selling his own startup.[0:58–1:09] Avita Santavlian: Now he helps startups and scale-ups grow smarter with AI-driven workflow transformation and his launch-first method. We’re going to talk about AI. We’re going to talk about startups, smart scaling, leadership.[1:10–1:12] Avita Santavlian: Thanks for being here, David. Let’s get started.[1:13–1:14] David Hirschfeld: Okay, great. Thanks. It’s great to be here.[1:15–1:30] Avita Santavlian: Absolutely. So let’s jump into the, I mean, 35 years. You’ve seen a lot. You’ve probably seen more things than most. Like with the significant, like the industry is evolving dramatically with AI and all this other stuff that’s been happening.[1:30–1:33] Avita Santavlian: What are the biggest shifts you’ve witnessed so far?[1:33–1:47] David Hirschfeld: Well, there’s no question that AI is the biggest shift I’ve seen in terms of the speed and acceleration. You know, it’s like Microsoft said, it’s like the invention of fire, you know, equivalent to that in terms of the impact on the world.[1:47–2:08] David Hirschfeld: And now quickly that impact is happening. With the launch first method, you asked me earlier before we started this, you were asking me where that came from. You know, I’ve been involved with startups for a long time and with my own, both successful exits and failed startups.[2:08–2:28] David Hirschfeld: So I learned a lot about what makes them successful and what makes them fail. And my first one was successful when I exited. My second one, I failed, and I didn’t follow the same playbook because I didn’t realize what that playbook was that made me successful the first time.[2:29–2:44] David Hirschfeld: And I honestly didn’t recognize what those patterns were until after I started my current software company, Tekyz, where we do custom software development, and I’ve worked with over 90 startups over the last 18 years.[2:44–2:59] David Hirschfeld: Wow. And a few of them really successful, but the vast majority failed. And I finally, a few years ago, recognized what the consistent thing that caused those companies that were successful to make it and the ones that failed to fail.[2:59–3:18] David Hirschfeld: And that was waiting way too long to validate product market fit through sales. because the only way you can prove you’ve got product market fit is that enough people are buying your product in enough numbers that what it costs to acquire a customer is one-third of what the lifetime value of that customer is.[3:18–3:41] David Hirschfeld: And until you can establish that, you don’t have any proof you have product markets fit that make you have a viable basis. And the problem is most founders believe in what their product is all about and they believe in that market that they’re all going to come and buy it once they make it available because the need is there and the value is there and solving a big enough problem.[3:42–3:56] David Hirschfeld: They don’t validate that. They don’t take the black robe off, you know, the belief and put on the white coat and turn it into a lab experiment with hypothesis and proof and, you know, and metrics.[3:56–3:57] David Hirschfeld: And so, yeah.[3:57–4:09] Avita Santavlian: You said something very important. You said need, right? It’s extremely important because I think a lot of startups confuse what I would consider want versus need.[4:09–4:20] Avita Santavlian: It’s one thing to have a want, right? I want to go on vacation. I want to have a big, beautiful office. I need a home to live in. So I feel like that’s missed.[4:20–4:30] Avita Santavlian: Tell me a little bit about that. How do startups, I have a feeling that this has to do with some of the reasons why they might fail. Why do people get blinded by these want-less things?[4:31–4:48] David Hirschfeld: Because they mix up want with what they believe is what drives people to buy things, and it’s not want, it’s need. Even vacations. Let’s talk about vacations because that’s the most obscure thing to talk about when you want to talk about need and why it matters.[4:48–5:20] David Hirschfeld: But people don’t buy vacations because they want to go on a vacation. they buy because they are afraid they’re going to miss out or they’re not going to create enough memories with their family or that they’re going to burn out at work if they don’t have balance or what there’s a fear that drives them to then go on these on vacations or spend time with their loved one. Fear drives out every all buying decisions. If you didn’t have any feeling of[5:20–5:38] David Hirschfeld: survival around something, you wouldn’t spend any money buying it because you’re perfectly satisfied. Nothing has to change. So it’s only when oxygen gets thin that you feel like you need to take a deeper breath or that the muscles are fatigued that you need to slow down, right?[5:39–5:50] David Hirschfeld: There’s always an hour that you start to feel like you don’t have enough food in your stomach. You’re getting hungry. So that restaurant that has the, you know, you really want to go there because that looks so good.[5:50–6:00] David Hirschfeld: But if you’re full and you’re looking at restaurants, all of a sudden restaurants don’t work all that interesting to you. So you don’t make reservations for the next. Everything is driven by meat.[6:00–6:11] David Hirschfeld: You know, I used to think it was the other way around. I didn’t like that whole idea that you had to find the fear factor in terms of survival to sell something. But actually, that’s human nature.[6:12–6:25] David Hirschfeld: There’s no motivation to change anything if you’re not afraid from a survival perspective. at a very base level that something’s not right with the world, and to make it right, you need to do something different.[6:26–6:32] David Hirschfeld: And if you don’t make it right, then your whole life is going to go off track or something, you’re going to fail.[6:32–6:43] Avita Santavlian: Understood. Okay. David, how did your time at Intel, Motorola, and other large tech companies you worked at approach, how did that shape your approach to innovation?[6:43–7:01] David Hirschfeld: Well, maybe it will recognize the need for execution in the innovation process. So these are companies, you know, I was involved, I was running projects as a consultant for these larger companies when I was at Texas Instruments and Computer Associates and an independent consultant after that.[7:01–7:16] David Hirschfeld: In that role, we are focused on delivery and execution for things that somebody else innovated. So I wasn’t involved in innovation with those companies. It was about delivery of this popular project of some kind.[7:16–7:30] David Hirschfeld: But I was always interested in innovating. which is why I started my own software company in the early 90s in logistics route distribution and inventory management. And I did that with the idea that, okay, I want to start a software company.[7:30–7:42] David Hirschfeld: I had a partner. We thought we can pick this industry, create kind of an annuity by building a Windows product, putting it on the market, and that would generate some kind of income. We kind of learned how to run a small little software company.[7:42–7:53] David Hirschfeld: And despite every effort on both my partner’s part and mine, We ended up growing it to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000.[7:53–8:10] David Hirschfeld: And when we did that, I followed Watch for it. We proved product market fit by building a very simple MVP in a couple months and then put it out on the market to see if we could sell it and started selling and recognize that there’s a market.[8:10–8:25] David Hirschfeld: And then people started to tell us what they really needed for this product to have the kind of value that would help their business, and that’s product solution fit. And so we started adding those features to give them the full value of what they needed.[8:25–8:44] David Hirschfeld: But product market fit was there because people needed a Windows-based product to manage their business in this particular market. Wow. So I didn’t realize how lucky we were that we approached it in such a simple way initially.[8:44–9:06] David Hirschfeld: So we had a product, an MVP-ish Windows product in two months, and we put ads out in the trade magazines for this industry, and within six weeks, and so every two weeks there would be an ad that would show, and in six weeks we started selling our first, you know, because people have to see ads a few times, we started selling our first copies back when that was the way you market it.[9:07–9:09] David Hirschfeld: And then within a few months we were selling a bunch.[9:10–9:35] Avita Santavlian: You said something great. You said you have to listen to what the customers want so that they would buy the product. That’s another, I think, miss with a lot of startups. This just reminds me, I’m an advisor to a startup that the product that they had that I was helping them with, I said, I don’t think this is the right time for this product because in tech, in tech, in tech recruiting, there was a recession.[9:35–9:45] Avita Santavlian: And so they were trying to sell an ATS, applicant tracking system product. And I said, no one cares about that right now, right? Everybody needs new business.[9:45–10:01] Avita Santavlian: You need to go and create something that allows you to, sure, take advantage of the 100,000 people I have in my database from a candidate perspective, but we need business. So they went and talked to enough people that they decided that’s the want, the need, and the fear, apparently.[10:01–10:11] Avita Santavlian: And so that’s what they pivoted to, and I think this new startup is doing much better. So you said it. You nailed it. You’ve got to listen to what people are saying. Some people are stubborn.[10:12–10:25] Avita Santavlian: They’ve been taught to not listen to anybody. Who cares what people say? I believe in my product. That’s awesome. You should. But your potential customer is saying, I don’t need that. I need this. So it sounds like that was a big winning formula for you.[10:26–10:37] Avita Santavlian: David, you mentioned a second startup that failed. What were the top three reasons? What was the three differences between the winning startup and the failing startup?[10:38–11:05] David Hirschfeld: Well there two things One is I approached it from the belief perspective not from the proof perspective So I built the product and this was in the automobile industry a wholesale dealer trading network for being able to source cars that have been traded in from various dealers when somebody is looking for a car from another dealership that matches whatever that trade-in was, right, when it hasn’t hit the market yet.[11:05–11:17] David Hirschfeld: And there was a big need for this, but I was all focused on making a really cool product because I figured that would attract people, and it did. But then I didn’t want to start to charge for the product.[11:17–11:28] David Hirschfeld: I wanted to build a network of people using it so there would be a critical mass that would draw more people in and then raise money. This was the biggest mistake I ever made.[11:29–11:40] David Hirschfeld: I did get an offer. I was trying to raise $1.2 million, and I did get an offer for that, but they wanted like 40% of the company. And I got that offer fairly quickly.[11:40–11:53] David Hirschfeld: I should have taken the offer. I shouldn’t have actually needed the offer. I should have just started charging for my product and build a revenue model because people would have paid for it. But I was, you know, I was afraid of asking, you know, this is the big thing.[11:53–12:06] David Hirschfeld: Founders are afraid to ask people to buy their product because what if they say no? What does that mean? And I fell into that trap, and I didn’t get another offer. And, of course, the first offer, when I went back to them, they weren’t interested anymore.[12:06–12:11] David Hirschfeld: So I ran this as long as I could, and then I finally closed that business and started Tekyz.[12:12–12:16] Avita Santavlian: Wow, interesting. So in summary, what were the three kind of key reasons, David?[12:17–12:34] David Hirschfeld: Number one, I should have just focused on selling the service, not worrying about raising money. Raising money would have made sense at some point, but I would have been in the driver’s seat, and I would have had a lot of options instead of not having options and not having any control.[12:35–12:46] David Hirschfeld: The second thing was my focus should have been on selling, not just building out the functionality, but just focused on selling and building the market.[12:47–13:04] David Hirschfeld: And spending my time with wholesalers and customers so that I understood their problem in a much more granular way. So that they would also spread this to everybody that they know and it would have grown a lot faster, which would have solved my critical mass problem.[13:04–13:18] David Hirschfeld: I sell in all the same traps that most founders fall into, and that was instead of being in love with the problem, I was in love with my product. And if you’re in love with your product, that is code for I’m going to fail.[13:18–13:33] David Hirschfeld: You shouldn’t be in love with the product. You should just be in love with the problem because who cares about the product? It’s the problem you’re solving that you’ve met, right? And if you spend all your time thinking about the problem and spending your time talking to your customers, you’re going to consistently find a path to success.[13:33–13:44] David Hirschfeld: because all you’re doing is mitigating the problem with a product that may be a great product or not, but who cares as long as it’s mitigating the problem, right? It’s the wrong thing to focus on, loving the product.[13:45–13:47] David Hirschfeld: That’s great. That’s great. That’s really good stuff.[13:47–14:00] Avita Santavlian: Let’s talk a little bit about your AI-driven workflow transformation beyond the hype, right? So AI is a buzzword today. Everybody’s talking about AI. How do you differentiate real AI transformation from marketing hype?[14:00–14:12] David Hirschfeld: It goes back to loving the problem. What’s the problem you’re solving? So I look at it this way from a founder perspective, and it’s not any different from an AI hype versus reality perspective, right?[14:12–14:24] David Hirschfeld: AI is amazing. We’re able to do things today that two, three years ago were just impossible to do or so difficult to do that it wasn’t worth the investment, and now it’s almost like effortless to do the same sorts of things.[14:25–14:39] David Hirschfeld: So there’s no, anybody that says this is just a fad hasn’t really used AI for any problem solving yet because they would know that’s not true. As far as like workflow automation, when is it of real value?[14:40–14:56] David Hirschfeld: Okay, so that depends on how well you know the problem you’re trying to solve and who you’re trying to solve it for. If you’re trying to solve it for yourself, then the question is, what’s the cost of this problem, like financial cost, that this problem is causing me?[14:56–15:10] David Hirschfeld: Before I even know what the solution is, I know that this is what my problem is, or these are the two or three things that are related to it. Each one has a cost to it. And if I didn’t have that problem, this is how much I’d save.[15:10–15:34] David Hirschfeld: and each one has a perception impact because one may have a cost, but by fixing it, all I’m doing is addressing the cost. It’s not really helping me in any other way, or I’m not going to get buy-in for management to fix that because everybody in our industry is dealing with that problem, even if it’s costly, and they don’t feel like that matters because right now their initiative is growth and this will help you.[15:35–15:49] David Hirschfeld: So that perceived impact is the other half of that equation. How important is it that this problem goes away? How much survival do I feel or how much risk do I feel because of this problem?[15:49–16:00] David Hirschfeld: Again, it’s back to that sheer survival thing, right? So if both are high and I’ve got, then I need to solve that problem, right? That’s at the top of my priority list to solve it.[16:00–16:11] David Hirschfeld: And if it’s a manual process and workflow automation solves that, now it has huge value. and that’s kind of how we look at any workflow automation problem.[16:11–16:25] David Hirschfeld: It’s like you look at everything in the business as a potential bottleneck and the business’s growth is always restricted at one point in their business that’s preventing the rest of the business from growing faster.[16:25–16:35] David Hirschfeld: So focus on that. You open up that channel and now everything’s flowing there, which then makes it possible to find the next bottle point, which might be upstream, downstream.[16:36–16:37] David Hirschfeld: Yeah.[16:37–16:47] Avita Santavlian: Makes sense. How do businesses leverage AI in a practical, non-disruptive way? And by disruptive, I mean like disrupting your own business in the bad way, right?[16:48–16:56] Avita Santavlian: Getting in the way. What’s a practical way that business can inject AI into their workflows?[16:57–17:16] David Hirschfeld: And that depends on the business, right? Okay, so let’s pick a hospital system that has people exiting the hospital and then transitioning to long-term care, which requires intervention with a nurse, communicating with the patient and the family to make this transition.[17:16–17:35] David Hirschfeld: Nurses are expensive. They’re in high demand, and there’s nowhere near enough of them. And so there’s a huge problem right now with hospitals being able to handle the volume in any kind of confident way and give their patients the resources they need so they feel safe and taken care of in this process.[17:36–17:55] David Hirschfeld: AI steps in here really well. So one of my clients built a voice nurse that’s trained on medical and pharma information, trained on this transition process, and also has that patient’s records as part of their training.[17:55–18:26] David Hirschfeld: And so they make these phone calls to the patient, and they’ll continue to make the phone calls or to family members until they get a hold of somebody. and then it’s a very friendly conversation and it’s a very natural kind of conversation back and forth not like a select one for option A two for option B type thing but hi I’m your Claire your AI nurse we’re transitioning you from the hospital now to long term care while you continue to recover[18:26–18:39] David Hirschfeld: there’s some things I think you should know about is this a good time to talk and they say yeah it is or no it isn’t well okay when would you like me to call you back or would you just, I don’t know when, okay, I’ll just try you again tomorrow about the same time.[18:39–18:52] David Hirschfeld: Is that okay? Or this is a good time now. And then they start talking and they go, I don’t know if I, you know, and it sounds so natural and the reaction and response is so natural that the patient will start saying things like, I don’t know if I’m really confident about this and scaring.[18:52–19:03] David Hirschfeld: They say, I’m sorry to hear that. But that’s very natural. Most people are very nervous and scared during this process. There’s some things I think I can do that might help. would you like to hear some of the, you know, like that.[19:04–19:31] David Hirschfeld: That’s huge. And that frees up a huge restriction in terms of that channel. It takes a huge dependency off the nurses, but the nurses are there if something, if AI determines that they need to get an actual person involved because there is some exception or you need to schedule something or, you know, maybe it’s a clinical issue that has to be scheduled.[19:32–19:47] David Hirschfeld: AI can do the scheduling, but maybe there’s some decision process that you don’t want to leave to AI. So it just automatically then says, let me get somebody on the phone. And now these nurses are much higher level experts that are focused on just the edge cases.[19:47–19:58] Avita Santavlian: Sure, sure. So basically the human in the loop is still there. It’s just maybe at the 20% mark, right? It’s a lot that’s happening without the human in the loop.[19:58–20:02] David Hirschfeld: Actually, more like at the 2% mark. Wow, wow, wow, wow.[20:02–20:04] Avita Santavlian: Because they can solve most problems.[20:04–20:10] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, right. They solve 99% of the problem. Wow. That’s the goal, right?[20:10–20:23] Avita Santavlian: Now, the willingness has to be there for the patients to have these conversations with an AI. That’s, I think, a big problem I think we still have. People are still not quite ready to have these conversations.[20:23–20:23] : Would you agree?[20:24–20:40] David Hirschfeld: I think it depends on how natural that person is on the other end of the phone. And also the AI can, you know, part of that can, if the patient says I’m not comfortable talking with an AI and say, okay, you know, that’s not an uncommon response.[20:40–20:54] David Hirschfeld: And I don’t want you to feel that you can’t talk with a person. So why don’t I get a nurse on the phone for you? Right. And so they, so, but the AI, you can have a hundred of them all coming at the same time when there’s only six nurses on staff.[20:54–21:02] Avita Santavlian: David, what’s like a common, I guess, mistake companies make when they’re trying to integrate AI into their workflows?[21:03–21:15] David Hirschfeld: Well, I think either they just try to do too much too fast and they’re not taking culturing impact. Like they’re just — I mean, it’s just assume people are going to accept this in their companies.[21:15–21:49] David Hirschfeld: and it’s surprising how many people are not comfortable with AI and haven’t spent any time using it and don realize what it can do in value So that number one is that there a good understanding of where there can be cultural acceptance in your company And those are areas where you might want to focus first and work on the areas where you don’t believe there is cultural acceptance[21:49–22:06] David Hirschfeld: and start to kind of do some education and training and AI-wise, right? to make it acceptable, to make people feel safe about what AI is going to do to help them with their job as opposed to replace their job.[22:06–22:26] David Hirschfeld: That’s probably the biggest thing. The second thing is not having a game plan, a really implementation game plan that prioritizes and steps AI into various roles in the company, which can be easily done, but it requires understanding where the priorities are and where you can have the most success and doing some assessment in that.[22:26–22:37] David Hirschfeld: And the third thing is they just don’t recognize that AI is going to make any difference or workflow automation is that important. And there are a lot of companies that are backward in that way.[22:37–22:54] David Hirschfeld: They may be the leaders in their industry, but they’re very backwards in terms of their own workflow automation in their company. And, you know, they feel like, well, we’re dominant because we have a reputation and a brand and everybody knows how good we are at all these things.[22:54–22:56] David Hirschfeld: and everything is still very manageable.[22:57–23:16] Avita Santavlian: You talked a little bit about fear. Even with AI, I think there’s a fear of missing out, right? How much of that drives why companies are injecting AI into their workflows and sometimes too quickly, sometimes ineffectively, because they don’t want to be behind.[23:17–23:20] Avita Santavlian: At the same time, they just don’t have a good strategy. What’s your thoughts on that?[23:20–23:22] : Is there some truth to that as well?[23:22–23:49] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah, I think so. Just a little FOMO, yeah. I think that’s true with everybody, right, including me. I mean, including my company. In terms of the fear of missing out, we try to be on the very leading edge of all this stuff to the degree that we’re in this process of creating all the procedures and protocols to build our applications using AI, and we’re at probably 30% right now.[23:49–24:02] David Hirschfeld: You look at the application hall, the UI, the architecture, the database, the back end, the microservices, the deployment. We’re at about 30%. We have a plan to get to 80%.[24:02–24:12] David Hirschfeld: We think we can do that in the next four to six weeks. But there’s problems in this process, real significant problems. So part of it is you think, well, AI can do all this stuff.[24:12–24:39] David Hirschfeld: But then you hit some real walls where AI just isn’t quite there yet. For example, context. AI has a lot of trouble when you get to complex things like a big application. Once it gets to a certain size and it’s not that big, AI has a lot of trouble understanding when it needs to make a change in one area, that change ripples down into other areas and then it starts breaking things, right?[24:39–24:52] David Hirschfeld: or it forgets how it’s supposed to work in certain areas, and it changes that. So we have potential solutions for these things, but this is an internal R&D project to implement these.[24:52–25:03] David Hirschfeld: So there’s certain limitations that you have to understand what AI is capable of right now and not, and recognize that it’s evolving at light speed. So faster than anything else I’ve ever seen.[25:04–25:05] : Same here, same here.[25:06–25:16] Avita Santavlian: Let’s say they’re a tech-driven company, but they’re not a tech company. Should they be trying to build these things or should they be buying or bringing in expertise from the AI perspective?[25:17–25:34] David Hirschfeld: I think that’s a great question. And I think that’s a question at the heart of any time you build versus buy. So the question is how critical, how much of a critical success factor is the thing you’re talking about building or buying in terms of delivery in your business?[25:34–25:49] David Hirschfeld: Is there something that’s competent that can deliver that for you and give you enough value based on the cost? Because then you can get there quicker if it’s already there. And is it part of your intellectual property in terms of what your actual core competencies are?[25:50–26:24] David Hirschfeld: Because the closer they are to your core competencies, then the more likely you should be to want to build it, the farther they are from that. like a CRM. If you’re, let’s say you’re a, any, almost any company that has sales and communication with customers, right? Is CRM a core competency of your business? Probably not. It’s probably neither is bookkeeping, right? Or having bookkeeping software. These are tools, even though they’re critical to your success, they’re not part of what makes you, you as a[26:24–26:54] David Hirschfeld: company, right? For me, it’s our software development team. It’s not project management. It’s not, to a certain degree, it’s not the code stacks that we use, right? It’s our skill center around that stuff and our ability to build unique, distinct things that automate our internal processes. And I can talk about those things in detail because we’re building a lot of things to automate the processes internally. And those are core competencies that will probably turn into[26:54–27:05] David Hirschfeld: SaaS products because everybody needs the things we’re building. If the same way that other companies build products that they need internally, that they start to market to their industries.[27:05–27:10] Avita Santavlian: You talk a lot about this launch first method. What exactly does it mean? And how are you[27:10–27:13] : implementing that with all the 70 plus startups you’ve worked with?[27:13–27:43] David Hirschfeld: Okay. And thanks for that. And this is a passion of mine, primarily because I’ve watched so many startups fail. And I feel there’s a much better way to launch a SaaS B2B startup in particular. That would be our tight channel. The idea is that most of these startups, they fail because they’ve been sold this idea that they have to create an MVP and build a pitch deck and go out and raise money as the way of launching.[27:43–28:01] David Hirschfeld: And they raise money from VCs or angel investors. Yes, and that is a way to do it, but there’s a better way of doing it. And the problem with doing that is all the work you do to raise money, create your pitch deck, go out and market yourself to these VCs, none of that moves your business forward at all.[28:02–28:12] David Hirschfeld: Unless you get lucky and a VC funds you and they’ve got a network of other companies that they’ve funded that can help accelerate your growth.[28:13–28:30] David Hirschfeld: But even that’s not very true. And I corroborated these numbers. A typical VC might see 3,000 pitch decks for every 30 investments. they make. And out of those 30 investments, three will be successful at an accelerated rate.[28:31–28:39] David Hirschfeld: Another three to four or five of those will become profitable, but not significantly. And the rest fail. So this is VC funded.[28:40–28:41] Avita Santavlian: Give me those numbers one more time, David.[28:41–28:58] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Out of roughly 70% of VC funded startups fail. Okay. 30% of them are successful to some degree, and only maybe 5% to 10% of them really get big growth curves.[28:59–29:12] Avita Santavlian: And those are impressive numbers. Those are actually surprisingly, because I’m an investor as well, and one of the things I hear often is 90% of startups fail or don’t do anything worthy of a mention, right?[29:12–29:28] Avita Santavlian: They might not completely close their doors, but they might end up being a lifestyle business for the two owners or something as a side project, right? And that’s not enough to give the VC its 10x or 100x that they’re looking for or, frankly, angel investors either.[29:29–29:40] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, and I’m going to refine those numbers because I’ve corroborated this with many other software shops that develop software in B2B and B2C space and things like that.[29:40–29:51] David Hirschfeld: It’s more like 98% of software startups fail, right? And some of them just never even get, you know, ever generate any revenue. And you never hear about those.[29:51–30:05] David Hirschfeld: They never make the statistics, but it’s a large number. Startups fail at huge numbers, and I know I’ve seen this myself. I wouldn’t say that’s how many the percentage of startups that have failed with Tekyz, but it’s pretty — it’s not far from that.[30:05–30:16] David Hirschfeld: And I’ve had a few really successful ones, and the really successful ones are, you know, they follow certain patterns. Like I said, one is they go out to their customers.[30:16–30:27] David Hirschfeld: They spend their time on the problem. They go out to the customers early. They get financial commitments from those customers in terms of checks early to prove that this is a product where there’s a market.[30:27–30:43] David Hirschfeld: And enough of those customers they get it front so that they know it’s not a fluke. They’ve got one or two friends that believe in them, but this is a product that’s really needed in the market. So with launchers, what we do is we say, you need something to demo to people if you’re going to ask them to buy something.[30:43–30:55] David Hirschfeld: But you need to ask them to buy something as soon as possible. It doesn’t have to be a working product. It doesn’t even have to be a real product. But ask me something that looks like a real product.[30:55–31:12] David Hirschfeld: And it has to have enough of your vision implemented so somebody can see the value that they’re going to get in this product over time. So what we do is we create a really sophisticated set of mock-ups that are animated that look like a real product and behave like your real product.[31:12–31:22] David Hirschfeld: They’re just not a real product. They’re not an MVP. They’re much broader than an MVP. They show a lot more of the functionality of your product than an MVP does. They can, but they’re not real.[31:22–31:40] David Hirschfeld: But when you demo it, the person you’re showing it to should not tell that you’re not demoing a real product. You never lie to a prospect. Like you always tell them this is a high-fidelity prototype and the actual product won’t be available for, you know, three to six months if it’s a pure pre-launch sale.[31:41–31:54] David Hirschfeld: And there are different ways of doing these launches, which is why I say that. But they will hear that if it’s realistic enough, the product that you’re showing. What they’ll think is they must have developed it and they’re testing it and they’re not releasing all the features right away.[31:55–32:28] David Hirschfeld: That’s what they think. and then you go out and you would say, look, let’s do some high value, let’s say, I’ll tell you, we’ll give you a lifetime license. Pay me 18 months of the subscription fee advance and you will get this lifetime license and you’ll be part of the pre-launch club where you get free invitation, a phone number where you can call anytime for support and help and things like that And when I tell people this thing a lifetime license I giving away my market And I say okay fine Let’s say you sold 200 copies at $2,500 each, license it.[32:29–32:40] David Hirschfeld: Right? So you just raised, you just raised $500,000 from customers. These are invested customers who will be, you’re the best beta customers you could possibly have.[32:40–32:53] David Hirschfeld: They need the product, they want the product. And if you look at how much of your market you gave away, it’s probably an immeasurable fraction of a percent that you’ve given away. Now go out to a seed investor and try to raise that same $500,000.[32:53–33:04] David Hirschfeld: How much of your company you have to give away for that? Exactly. And then they go, oh, yeah. And plus, you’ve got a revenue engine. So if you do want to raise money, you’ve shown traction. You’ve shown product market set.[33:04–33:10] David Hirschfeld: You’ve got a killer prototype to demo. And now raising money is a whole different discussion.[33:10–33:26] Avita Santavlian: So, David, it’s kind of reversed in a way where instead of me spending three years building this brilliant platform that I am in love with, as you said earlier, and now I have to go and convince people that it’s a great product and they’re like, I don’t need that.[33:27–33:41] Avita Santavlian: No thanks. Instead, what you’re saying is you’re going out there. You’re giving people an idea of what you’re building. You’re asking them what they would want to become customers. You’re getting a commitment that they will buy when the product is ready or right now?[33:43–33:53] David Hirschfeld: No, they buy it now. They have to buy it now because you’re giving them a killer deal. You’re doing that in exchange for them buying in early. So there’s a couple ways of doing this.[33:53–34:08] David Hirschfeld: One is a plastic free log sale where the first version of the MVP won’t have all these features, but it’ll be out in three or four months, right? So they only have to wait a few months. And then you have to make some guarantees about if it doesn’t come out that you’ll refund their money, that sort of thing.[34:08–34:20] David Hirschfeld: But that’s safe to do as long as you’ve scoped the MVP title. People understand as long as they see a roadmap and features coming out that that’ll be, you know, all they need this.[34:20–34:44] David Hirschfeld: Because the problem you’re solving for them, if you’ve been focused on the problem, is really costly. And their perception of the impact is really high. So you found that early adopter, they’re going to, they need the product, they’ll pay for it, and they’ll be, you know, your best support system in terms of helping get the product solution fit, where, you know, you get in the features that really capture the value that they need.[34:45–34:59] Avita Santavlian: David, one of my favorite AI products that I use currently is an AI assistant, and this gentleman did just that. Basically, he has a product that’s actually ready, but it’s in kind of beta mode, right?[35:00–35:13] Avita Santavlian: I get it for one-tenth the cost, $99 a month or something like that. It’s brilliant. And he keeps refining and improving the product. But, I mean, he got this thing off the ground, and he was generating revenue from, you know, very quickly.[35:13–35:31] Avita Santavlian: Very impressive. And the product keeps getting better and better. And every couple weeks we meet, and he adds features, and he corrects things that are missing. I really liked the approach, and I was happy to give him $100 a month for an AI assistant that would listen to all my meetings, show up, give me notes.[35:31–35:48] Avita Santavlian: And now it’s getting smarter and smarter. Now it’s attending meetings I don’t go to and giving me insights from other meetings. And it’s starting to understand, hey, this meeting, there’s been mentions of this issue across multiple meetings.[35:48–35:52] Avita Santavlian: Here’s a potential solution. So now it’s giving me solutions. in my own business.[35:53–36:03] David Hirschfeld: Oh, I’m really curious what the product is because we’ve talked, I’ve thought about building that product many times. We just have too many other internal initiatives that we’re working on.[36:03–36:04] David Hirschfeld: Great product.[36:04–36:10] Avita Santavlian: It’s called Powerline. I can introduce you to the gentleman, really smart young guy. Yeah, really good product.[36:11–36:28] David Hirschfeld: That’s exactly a great way to launch if you’re doing it MVP style, where you just build a very simple core and you find people that will buy it, right, That’ll buy in early because those people become your roadmap in terms of how you need to build the product out to really capture value.[36:29–36:43] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t always want to do what everybody asks you to do in your product, right? They’ll ask, this is important for me. Fine. Is that what the market really needs? Is that solving a problem that’s — that problem is being — a lot of people are struggling with that problem.[36:43–36:51] David Hirschfeld: If it is, then it’s a high priority on your roadmap. if it’s just something that would be a coolness factor, then it’s probably a low priority.[36:51–37:09] Avita Santavlian: How do you measure a lot of people? Is it 10 people? Is it 30 people? How do you kind of validate what a lot of people need so that you’re not sitting there in paralysis for the rest of your life, but you talk to enough people, well, you know, no, no, no, this is legit.[37:10–37:43] David Hirschfeld: You try to quantify from them, first of all, what is the cost and how much does this impact your personal? this problem this it how much would it fix that if i created this feature but you start asking that from other people and and you very quickly get a sense if you just capture how many people are supporting this idea or not supporting it to the degree that you need whether or not it’s a it’s dominant in your market and if your market is niched properly so that you know in this niche it’s dominant this niche not so much and which is your early adopter niche then you’re going to try[37:43–38:08] David Hirschfeld: to focus and capture that early adopter niche as much as possible. Another one mistake that a lot of founders make is they think that their product applies to lots of niches. And maybe it does, but you can only sell to one niche at a time. Because the tighter you can identify that early adopter niche and the smaller and tighter you can identify, the higher your closing ratio of sales and the more you can charge.[38:09–38:17] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a very direct inverse relationship to those things. And most founders don’t nail it like that.[38:18–38:19] : That’s really good.[38:19–38:26] Avita Santavlian: David, in two sentences, give founders some advice on workflow and this launch-first concept.[38:26–38:37] David Hirschfeld: Okay, so two sentences. Number one, recognize no matter how much you think you know your market, you have made a lot of assumptions about the market.[38:37–39:05] David Hirschfeld: Even if you come from that market and you’re struggling with a problem yourself, which this is a good foundation for founders, and you know what the cost of that problem is and the personal impact it has on you, and you have reached to that market, so you know a bunch of other people in your position in the same business struggling with the same thing, and you have some reach to them, Even then, you still have made a lot of assumptions about the viability of this business and this product.[39:06–39:23] David Hirschfeld: Recognize that. Put the white coat on. Turn it into a lab experiment. Turn everything into that. Lean startup methodology. I’m a big believer in that. And measure value, the cost, the impact, and the prevalence is in the market.[39:23–39:54] David Hirschfeld: The second thing I’m going to say is get this book. It’s the best business book I’ve ever read called The Mom Test. yeah it’s um i’ve read a lot of business books and this one in particular is good because you know i’ve been saying for a long time you got to focus on the problem but i didn’t have the framework for it the way that this guy does now i can’t think of this name the author but he set several exits and the reasons how long does this if you say i’ve got a great business idea to your mother and this is assuming you have a good relationship with your mother right[39:55–40:06] David Hirschfeld: And you say, I’ve got this really great business idea. What do you think? And your mom’s, what’s she going to say? She’s going to say, oh, honey, I have so much trust in you. I know you’re going to make it successful. That sounds like a great idea, right?[40:06–40:26] David Hirschfeld: No matter what it is. And so people that you’re talking to in the market do the same thing when you start to ask them about features and products and things. So how do you ask all those, talk to all those people about your product idea and get really truthful, honest answers that are valuable to you and to your product?[40:26–40:37] David Hirschfeld: And the way you do that is you never talk about your product or your interests. You talk about their problems. It goes back to loving the problem and loving the customer, right?[40:37–40:50] David Hirschfeld: What problem do you have this problem? How big is this problem? What other problems do you have? How have you dealt with them in the past? What worked? What didn’t work? You never talk about your product, your future, because there’s no value to that.[40:51–41:03] David Hirschfeld: Because as soon as you start to talk about that, there’s a shift that goes on in their minds, and they don’t want to offend you, or they feel like they’re being taken advantage of, or whatever that shift is, you’re not going to get honesty from them.[41:03–41:14] David Hirschfeld: I like it. Unless they ask you about that thing. And even then, you still ask, why are you asking about that? what problem does it solve? Just go back to the problem.[41:15–41:17] Avita Santavlian: Amazing. David, where can people find you?[41:18–41:22] David Hirschfeld: They can find me at Tekyz.com, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z.[41:22–41:25] Avita Santavlian: You don’t even have to. It’s right in the background.[41:25–41:38] David Hirschfeld: Right, but somebody listened to the podcast, they might, right? So, and then David, anybody that made it to the end of this podcast, I’ll tell you what my email is. It’s david at Tekyz.com.[41:38–41:56] David Hirschfeld: that won’t be a link in the podcast because obviously I don’t want to billion scam David at Tekyz you can reach me I’m easy to find on LinkedIn and I’m coming out with my own podcast called Scaling Smarter it’ll be out soon[41:56–42:09] Avita Santavlian: David you’ve been great we’ve learned a lot about your process your mindset your company so thank you for the time and let’s stay connected awesome I really appreciate it Absolutely, David. Thank you so much.[42:37–42:48] Avita Santavlian: Remember, a rising tide lifts all boats. I’m Avita Santavlian, and this has been the Tech Leaders Playbook. Keep leading, keep learning, keep giving, and I’ll see you on the next one.[42:48–42:49] Avita Santavlian: Until then, stay inspired, my friends.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.The Smart Way to Scale Startups with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Why Most Startups Fail — And How AI Can Change That: The David Hirschfeld Interview](https://tekyz.com/why-most-startups-fail-and-how-ai-can-change-that-the-david-hirschfeld-interview-cce7395d7937/) - Featured Image: Why Most Startups Fail — How AI Can Change ThatWhy Most Startups Fail — And How AI Can Change That: The David Hirschfeld Interviewhttps://medium.com/media/bb931d5c9dd43e50b072c78acb307454/hrefIn this engaging discussion, David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Techies Inc., compares the rise of AI to a “100-foot rogue wave” that businesses must learn to ride or risk being left behind. He dives into the sweeping impact of AI, shares insights from his “Launch First” startup methodology — which emphasizes data-driven market validation — and outlines how AI is being used to automate everything from startup strategy to internal workflows. From self-driving cars and AI-powered development to the possibility of a post-scarcity society, Hirschfeld offers bold predictions and practical advice, urging companies to embrace AI-driven transformation with agility and foresight.Key TakeawaysAI is transforming industries rapidly and must be embraced to avoid falling behind.The “Launch First” method helps startups find product-market fit through data-driven validation.Techies Inc. is using AI to automate key internal processes and boost efficiency.The future will be shaped by AI, from self-driving taxis to fully automated manufacturing.Transcript[0:07–0:17] Dietmar: Today we talk about waves, not sound waves, but real waves, also not real waves, but literal waves. We talk to David Hirschfeld, he’s founder and CEO of Tekyz Inc. And we talk about that there’s a wave, a big wave coming, and you can choose do you want to ride it or not.[0:18–0:38] Dietmar: And this wave is AI. So we talk about what can come, what can’t come, and David wants you to think a little bit more about AI. Also we talk about his nice idea of how you can found your startup easier and not lose so much money or even lose the whole firm.[0:39–0:50] Dietmar: Yeah, welcome back to the Beginner’s Guide to AI, another interview episode. And it’s going to be interesting because we talk about deep topics, about a lot of topics.[0:50–1:06] Dietmar: So before I talk too much, let’s just jump in. and he’s the stigma from Agrod Berlin. Let’s go. Yeah, David, great to have you here.[1:07–1:17] Dietmar: And I can talk a lot about you, whatever the PR people gave to me, but you are probably better to tell me something about you. Welcome to the podcast. And what did bring you into AI?[1:17–1:28] David Hirschfeld: Well, if you’re not being dragged, kicking and screaming into AI right now, then you have to check if you still have a pulse, right?[1:29–1:48] David Hirschfeld: So that’s assuming that you’re in tech and you don’t live off the grid. I am, you know, I’m a software developer. I’ve been in the software industry for 35 years, started out in enterprise, had my own startup very early on.[1:48–2:04] David Hirschfeld: And after eight years, built it up to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold that to publicly traded firms. So I had a successful exit. And then I’ve started my current company 17 years ago where we do custom software development for all kinds of companies, many of whom are startups.[2:04–2:32] David Hirschfeld: and as time evolves so do the tech stacks and we always pride ourselves as being really exceptional software development company which means we’re always making sure that we’re on modern tech stacks as well as all the other things that make some a team exceptional which i could talk about that forever but we’re talking about ai this time and uh and in the last few years ai has just been this massive wave.[2:34–2:48] David Hirschfeld: So when you think about software companies, this is kind of the metaphor I’ve been using in the last couple weeks because it just started to really resonate with me. You think of if you — I live in San Diego, so I use a metaphor of surfing the waves.[2:50–3:26] David Hirschfeld: So if you think of being in technology kind of like surfing because you’re trying to get into the curl of the current wave of technology, then you’re — and if you’re really good at it, you’re surfing four or five-foot waves, really exceptional companies, the big waves, seven, eight, nine-foot waves. All of a sudden — and you feel pretty good about surfing those, maybe a little bit of risk, they’re pushing the edge, but you can do that. Now there’s a hundred-foot rogue wave coming at you, right? You see it way out there. It’s not even, and it’s moving very fast. And[3:26–3:48] David Hirschfeld: you think to yourself, okay, I can just watch it because I think it’s cool. And then just wait till it wipes me away. Or you get on your board and you paddle really hard out to the wave and you get up into the curl of that wave and you stand on the very tip of your board trying to stay ahead of it. So it doesn’t just crash on over you. And that’s pretty much where we are right now.[3:48–4:01] David Hirschfeld: And that’s what my company is doing. My team is — we’re all on the very tip of the — in fact, I have another call with my team tomorrow talking about there’s two ways to be right now.[4:01–4:10] David Hirschfeld: There’s either reinvent yourself and reinvent your company or become obsolete in the next year or two because it’s just moving that fast.[4:12–4:26] Dietmar: Yeah, it’s like the wave — I love the wave thing. And, yeah, so it’s how do people react to that? If you tell them the metaphor, do they think, okay, yes, that’s the way to go?[4:26–4:37] Dietmar: Or, like, I mean, there’s the stories of the people on the Internet. Why do I need a website? Or the Internet will go away. How’s the reaction if you say that to the people?[4:38–4:49] David Hirschfeld: And that’s a really good question, too, because it depends on who I’m saying that to. If I say it to somebody like you, they’re usually just nodding, yep, that’s exactly what we’re experiencing.[4:49–5:02] David Hirschfeld: You know, that’s what everybody’s talking about. If I say it to a prospective customer, then they’re going, you know, you’re probably right, and we need to think about what this plan is.[5:02–5:20] David Hirschfeld: And obviously, I’m a little cautious to say that to a prospective customer because their dream isn’t, you know, it’s their dream. And I don’t want to do something to crush somebody else’s dream. And I’ve been wrong when people have asked me about their opinion, about my opinion, about their project idea, wildly wrong before.[5:20–5:31] David Hirschfeld: I’ve got quite a funny story about that, which maybe it’s appropriate to share at some point in this interview or not. But so I’m very careful. I recognize this is just my opinion.[5:32–5:59] David Hirschfeld: It’s not true, right? This is just my reality right now. But I don’t say this to anybody and they disagree with me. I actually was interviewed a week ago on a live radio show, and they talked to this particular show is involved with technology, but they also have conspiracy theorists on as well, which I didn’t know that were on the show.[5:59–6:30] David Hirschfeld: And he was saying a lot of people are saying this is just a fad or it’s not even real. It’s going to go away. And I had no idea anybody was talking like that. that the fad I hear sometimes but there’s so much evidence all you have to do is just say okay just explain to me the things that you’ve seen impacted or that are happening because of the AI and by the time they’re done telling me about the things they give up the whole fad idea right but the idea that it’s just going to go away I’ve not heard anybody talk about[6:30–7:00] David Hirschfeld: that it’s just one of those things people are talking about but it’s going to disappear in a year and nobody will be talking about it anymore that caught me off guard so anyway so I told him I said who are you talking to that was my response to him I said who are you talking to because I’ve never met that person and none of the people I talk to say anything about this thing going away and you know everybody pretty much nods when I talk about the 100 foot wave rogue wave coming in[7:00–7:12] Dietmar: yeah that’s the thing I mean we are still in bubbles we always talk to the people that are kind of like-minded but still AI. People use AI daily.[7:12–7:31] Dietmar: I mean, Netflix or whatever, the algorithms, the Google algorithm. But actually, normally you talk to more like the software startups and techers, your firm, you’re doing work with them and also AI techs over there as far as I see that.[7:31–8:03] David Hirschfeld: yeah and for my existing clients i try to convince them that they need to embrace ai and most of them are already thinking like that because they have startup mindset and they recognize how the world’s changing and i’ve never talked about how the world is changing the context of technology with my clients before because it’s never changed quite that fast you know There was a big shift with mobile, but it didn’t happen overnight.[8:04–8:16] David Hirschfeld: It would happen pretty fast, though, except that it was very predictable that that was going to happen 10 years before it happened. You know, I’ve been since the 90s saying that eventually you won’t need all these devices.[8:16–8:27] David Hirschfeld: You’ll have one device and it’ll do it all. I didn’t picture the iPhone, you know, a blank screen that has all these apps that are just on it.[8:27–8:37] David Hirschfeld: That’s not what I pictured. I thought it would look more like an old phone, but the idea that all your devices go away, you’d have one device for doing everything. That was predictable way beforehand.[8:37–8:49] David Hirschfeld: So we were all kind of really ready for this with AI was predictable in 30 years from now. It wasn’t predictable today. And so we’re all caught up.[8:49–9:18] David Hirschfeld: Everybody’s caught up. But the people that created OpenAI were caught off guard by it. They were amazed by what it was able to do and couldn’t really explain it themselves. so you know that’s one good thing is we’re all in good company we’re all really caught off guard by this thing not that that doesn’t mean we’re not embracing it it just means that we’re just scratching our head every day in terms of how much of an impact it will have on it’s having on everything[9:18–9:48] Dietmar: I think that’s an important point to the listeners out there you’re not alone that’s like all the people working with it they have the same feeling for everybody it’s a 100 foot wave coming it’s not for just a few people so you have a startup start method like launch first you called it and could you go into details it’s not totally AI but I come from the startup scene and I’m really curious to hear you talk about[9:48–9:50] Dietmar: what you do actually with software startups[9:50–10:01] David Hirschfeld: sure so I came up with So, like I said, 17 years. I’ve worked with 88 startups, I think, at this point.[10:01–10:21] David Hirschfeld: A few of them were really successful. The majority of them failed. They all failed for the same reason. They failed because they lack product market fit. And the reason that they failed for lacking product market fit is because they didn’t go out to the market and validate product market fit right at the beginning.[10:21–10:32] David Hirschfeld: In a quantifiable way. You know, some people do discovery interviews and things like that, which can be incredibly misleading, done wrong, which most people don’t do it wrong.[10:33–10:46] David Hirschfeld: And in terms of it’s a siloed step in your process, you do your research, then you come up with your interview questions and you go out and you talk to all these people in the industry and you ask them these interview questions.[10:46–11:00] David Hirschfeld: and the questions very often are directed towards functionality and features of your product and what problems you believe it solves and get their feedback on that, which people are never honest when you talk about features of a product you want to build.[11:01–11:15] David Hirschfeld: They’re honest if you ask them about the problems they’re struggling with and what have they historically done to address those problems, has it been costly. If you stay away from the fact that you’re building any product at all, but that you just focus on the problems, then you get a lot more honesty.[11:15–11:25] David Hirschfeld: And there’s a book, an excellent book written about this called The Mom Test, that if anybody’s in any stage of startup, they need to go get The Mom Test.[11:25–11:45] David Hirschfeld: I think it’s the best business book I’ve ever read in terms of being practical and right on point about what to do to find out how to get product market fit in terms of at least how you position and question things so that you’re getting truth that nails down what people need and what they want.[11:46–12:22] David Hirschfeld: Because you need both those things. You need the need and you need the want. If you don’t have them both, it’s hard. the want is what gets them to lean forward when you talk about a problem and the need is what validates them spending money so right the more need the more you can charge the more want the more you more easily the easier it is to reach that person in terms of marketing and messaging so you need those two things you find out the most need the most want in fact that’s the very most important thing a founder does or should be doing the very number one job they have when[12:22–12:56] David Hirschfeld: they’re going to start a company. And that is figuring out who’s that early adopter niche and who’s the stakeholder in that early adopter niche out of all of the possible niches that you might market to, which one, when they look at their top two or three problems, has the highest need and the highest want of all of the other niches and all of their problem statements. And that’s the one that will determine who is going to be, you’re going to focus your target marketing on in the early stages to get, to basically get your initial business. So,[12:57–13:30] David Hirschfeld: so back to launch first. So discovery interviews, there’s a step in the process where you do them. You ask these questions. You’re not being very specific about which niche the stakeholders in when you’re asking the questions. They’re all part of an industry. And so you very often get conflicting responses from different people that give you guidance possibly on the wrong features and the wrong direction to go because they may not be in an early adopter niche while you’re doing[13:30–13:48] David Hirschfeld: this because you haven’t clarified that very often when you’re doing the discovery interview. And then when you’re done with the discovery interview, you take all that and you move forward. And to me, that’s siloed and subjective because you have to decide if you’ve interviewed enough people, if the interviews were complete enough, if you got complete enough responses.[13:49–13:59] David Hirschfeld: And so you don’t have clean, insightful metrics as a result of that. And to me, so that’s why most people don’t do this right.[13:59–14:15] David Hirschfeld: It’s very different the way we do all this in launch first. So what we do is we build a grid that has all the problem statements, root-level problem statements, which I could talk for a half hour what a root-level problem statement is, as opposed to just a generic problem statement.[14:16–14:26] David Hirschfeld: And the same thing with what makes an itch. That’s another half-hour conversation. How do you define an itch? And that’s a metrics. These are metrics-driven things.[14:26–14:46] David Hirschfeld: They have to be measurable. and then we come up with a grid that maybe has two 300 cells in it and we score them and we make two grids duplicate grids One is the need what I call impact How impacted does that person feel perceive You know, that’s the want part.[14:46–14:57] David Hirschfeld: How much do they perceive that this problem affects them? And then we do it from a cost perspective. That’s the need. How much does this problem actually cost them?[14:58–15:08] David Hirschfeld: Because those two numbers don’t always correlate. Sometimes you have a really high perception from a want perspective, but that real need, the cost, the impact to you is very low.[15:09–15:22] David Hirschfeld: Other times you have, there’s a big cost to this problem, but maybe it’s something that you’ve been dealing with forever and everybody else in your industry have, and you just figure it’s just part of the DNA of being a stakeholder in your position in that industry.[15:23–15:34] David Hirschfeld: And so the need doesn’t feel very high. It’s like, well, everybody struggles with this, so why should I consider fixing it? Oh, it seems like a lot of money.[15:34–15:46] David Hirschfeld: Maybe it’s worth pursuing. But I don’t feel at risk. My job isn’t at stake. I don’t feel that my company is going to fail. There’s no survival instinct. That want isn’t there.[15:46–16:08] David Hirschfeld: So you’ve got to find the niche with both those things at the highest level. that’s the niche that you want to focus on right up front. And while you’re scoring this thing, some of these niches you may know really well because you’ve worked in them, others you may not because they’re outside of your well-known comfort zone.[16:08–16:35] David Hirschfeld: And when it’s outside your comfort zone, then you do one or two calls to stakeholders, one or two stakeholders in that niche, asking specific questions, scoring it for that specific niche, talking about the problem statements and the impact and the cost they feel they have because of these problems that you’ve identified related to this thing, and what other problems do they have that you might not even be thinking about, right?[16:35–16:46] David Hirschfeld: And so it becomes an iterative process as you continue to go through the scoring thing. You go, oh, I really need to find out from this niche because I do know the niche well, but not in terms of these problems.[16:46–17:05] David Hirschfeld: And so now you reach out to that niche and then, right. And so it becomes iterative and you know you’re done because you’ve filled in the matrix. Right. And you know you’ve done it right because you’ve gotten feedback, very specific feedback from stakeholders in that niche about these specific problems.[17:08–17:21] David Hirschfeld: And again, it’s all metric stream. And when you’ve done all that, you bubble chart this and two or three niches pop up to the upper right in this bubble chart. And those are the ones that you do a deeper dive on because one of those will be your early adopter.[17:22–17:33] David Hirschfeld: It’s not always the one that bubble charts to the top. Sometimes it’s the one that’s lower, but it’s in that top three or four niches. Let’s say you have 20 niches. It’s in the top three or four.[17:33–17:49] David Hirschfeld: And you narrow it down based on other factors like how much does it cost to reach the stakeholder? What’s their decision-making authority? What’s the timeframe, the sales cycle, you know, in that niche or for that stakeholder or things like this?[17:49–18:00] David Hirschfeld: And then you score all that stuff to find the ideal niche. At the end of this process, then we validate all the assumptions and all of the interviews and all this matrix we have.[18:00–18:15] David Hirschfeld: Then we do a formal set of interviews. At that point, we’re saying, okay, here’s all the things that we now believe we know about this niche and what we believe the cost is, what we believe we should price the product at, what the messaging should be for the problem statements to get them to lean forward and say, can you fix that?[18:17–18:31] David Hirschfeld: And we go and we basically validate all that with 10 to 15 to 20 stakeholders in that specific niche at that point looking for at least a 30% high affinity to all the problems we came up with.[18:31–18:44] David Hirschfeld: that means high affinity is like they go, wow, I absolutely need that product. That price is too low. You could charge way more. It costs me way more for these problems than what you have recorded there, stuff like that.[18:44–18:59] David Hirschfeld: You’re looking for there. And if you’ve done this correctly, you should get that, unless, of course, you’re just wrong, completely wrong about the product you want to build. So one of the things that LaunchFirst does, it forces founders to base all the hard stuff up front.[18:59–19:17] David Hirschfeld: I always call it launch versus the hard, easy way to do it because you do this hard stuff up front. You nail it down. And then what we do is we build a high-fidelity prototype, not an MVP, something much faster, much less expensive to build, and shows more of the functionality of the product.[19:17–19:27] David Hirschfeld: And you go out and do pre-launch sales. And you get people to pay for your product even though you haven’t built it yet. Because the last thing you want to do is build your product and nobody wants to buy it.[19:27–19:36] David Hirschfeld: but I’ve seen that happen more than 80 times in the last 12 years, 17 years.[19:37–19:53] Dietmar: I have been there at least twice, yeah, in firms that did that. No, the thing is really like this sounds like marketing 101 or so where other people tell you listen to the people, but in reality so few people do that.[19:53–19:59] Dietmar: It’s so sad on one hand. On the other hand, I mean, it gives you an advantage.[20:00–20:13] David Hirschfeld: It’s scary. Founders don’t want to ask people for money before they have something that they feel is totally convincing and overwhelming that they should. And then when they do and people still aren’t buying it, it’s like devastating.[20:14–20:24] David Hirschfeld: They don’t want to do this hard work because it’s a lot. It’s very tedious hard work. You know, speak of AI. So we’re building an AI model to do all this stuff right now.[20:24–20:34] David Hirschfeld: all the niche analysis, which is because it’s a very exhaustive, fatiguing process that founders don’t always make it all the way through.[20:35–20:49] David Hirschfeld: So we want to do it for them because as much for them as we can to make this much easier and to make the whole process more consumable and less expensive.[20:50–20:50] : Yeah.[20:50–21:06] Dietmar: does this basically mean because you have lots of interview processes in do you substitute the interviews like with personas or analysis of markets that basically so you don’t have to interview people at the end or[21:06–21:38] David Hirschfeld: we still want to do you still need to talk to people right it doesn’t eliminate that what it does is it pulls in data from all kinds of sources to do all that scoring and cost that’s the big thing that it does. That way you know which niche you should be focused on and why, or which top two or three niches you should focus on and why. And then it goes through a, right. So it gives you an opportunity to step to say, okay, here’s how it scored it. Here’s all[21:38–21:54] David Hirschfeld: the reasoning behind each of the scores it came up with, where it got all the data from. Is this valid? Do you agree with this? Do you need to run this again and change some of the parameters, right? That’s what we’re trying to do is build an AI model that does this for you.[21:54–22:26] David Hirschfeld: So it basically nails down and also what problems you should focus on initially. I want to build this product. Okay. Here’s all the possible niches that might need that product. Here’s all the root level problem statements when you’re sitting in the, standing in the shoes of that stakeholder in that niche and they say i need this problem solved by a product like this because and some let survival level problem is expressed to them at a very root level so those are all the[22:26–22:42] David Hirschfeld: it sips out all those problem statements and then um uh and it will figure out with uh scoring algorithms which niche and which top two or three problems they need solved first because of how because it’ll be easy to sell to them, right?[22:42–23:17] David Hirschfeld: And they will pay the most for it because they have the highest need and the highest want. So that’s what the AIM model’s going to do because that’s what Launch First is about. If we, in the process of building this, we find out better methodological steps in this process to get to that pre-launch sale because the whole thing is focused on, I need to now go out and get customers to pay me for this thing to prove that there’s enough customers at a high enough lifetime value versus cost of acquisition of each of those customers is a three-to-one number,[23:18–23:29] David Hirschfeld: the ratio that we need. And you need that kind of ratio in the lifetime value versus cost of acquisition because you can’t scale it if you don’t have that much.[23:30–23:44] David Hirschfeld: Because now you’re going to take that, you know, that three-to-one ratio, the profit in there, you’re going to invest it back to scale your business and grow it faster. But if it’s not three to one, if it’s one and a half to one, you barely have enough to operate.[23:45–23:45] : Right.[23:46–23:53] Dietmar: You have to pay yourself. You have to pay your employees. You have to pay the rents. Right. With the rest, you try to do some marketing and innovation.[23:54–23:54] : And, yeah. Yeah.[23:55–23:55] Dietmar: Right.[23:56–23:56] : Yeah.[23:58–24:09] David Hirschfeld: And if you can’t get to that three to one, then you pivot. because somewhere along the way the model didn’t quite sift it out properly, but it’s easy to pivot a high-fidelity prototype.[24:10–24:21] David Hirschfeld: It’s easy to pivot a marketing message and a marketing stack, and in two weeks you’re retesting the model with your pivot instead of six months later, if you’ve built your product already and how long it takes to pivot.[24:22–24:37] David Hirschfeld: And you may pivot two or three or four times before you finally find that golden number all in the space of a couple months, or you may not even get close and you realize that this is just the wrong time for this product in this market, so you fail fast and cheap.[24:38–24:53] David Hirschfeld: And failing fast and cheap should be like this, you know, not the goal of a startup, but the second goal of the startup. If this isn’t going to work, I want to know really quick and I want to know for very little money so I can move on with my life and do the next thing.[24:53–25:04] Dietmar: So if I see that the biggest advantage of AI is going to this failing fast and cheap, you come just quicker.[25:04–25:04] Dietmar: Everything is quicker.[25:05–25:18] David Hirschfeld: You fail faster and cheaper, but you are successful less or more often. That’s the idea with AI, right? Much faster, much cheaper, and you get to proof of product market fit way faster.[25:19–25:39] David Hirschfeld: So people think, well, how do product market fit? So what do I do with that? Keep selling, doing pre-launch sales. That’s the other thing people don’t put into context. If I do, let’s say, I have to have, the way a pre-launch sale works is, and you guys have, everybody’s seen this in crowdsourcing type of situations where they’re selling something in advance, right?[25:39–25:51] David Hirschfeld: You’re getting something special by getting it in advance. Either when we’re talking about soft products, you get a lifetime license or something like that for paying one price for it.[25:51–26:03] David Hirschfeld: In fact, I just did this with TidyCal. I paid a certain amount. I got a lifetime license for it because they’re trying to, you know, basically grow their customer base really, really fast.[26:03–26:16] David Hirschfeld: And I’m sure they’re going to add all kinds of add-ons to the product to start to monetize their base. But I thought, okay, I think it was $27. This was a very, very inexpensive product. I’m not suggesting people sell their products for $27.[26:16–26:26] David Hirschfeld: But what we typically do, these are usually B2B type things. So we’ll do 18 months of what we think that that subscription model should be.[26:27–26:40] David Hirschfeld: They pay 18 months in advance or 24 months in advance. They get a lifetime license. They’re part of an early adopters club, so they get free support and a phone number.[26:40–27:08] David Hirschfeld: They can always call somebody to get help immediately, things like that. Or in the case of, like, clinical trial software, because we were successful doing it, the first software that does clinical trials and uses media as a way of validating the efficacy of the — efficacy and validating and, you know, how efficient and how much this really works to the FDA using media, media clipping.[27:08–27:22] David Hirschfeld: And we were able to do prelaunch sales because we did free implementation for them, which usually implementation of a clinical trial software is cost more than the software itself.[27:22–27:57] David Hirschfeld: so if the value is high enough on the one side and the problem they’re solving is big enough on the other side and you create enough FOMO because of this high value opportunity and they know this is something they need and they’re going to buy once it’s available you can get them to buy in enough numbers to prove product and market fit in this pre-launch sale model and then you just keep selling because even if you sell a bunch of these licenses you’re giving away a small usually a small fraction of a percent, sometimes an infinitesimally small fraction of a percent of your market.[27:58–28:17] David Hirschfeld: Plus, you’ve got all these customers you can monetize in other ways long term versus to raise the same amount of money, often half a million dollars, whatever you need is that seed investment that can generate it from prelaunch sales or you can go out to an investor and give 20% of your company away, which is a better deal.[28:17–28:19] David Hirschfeld: yeah[28:19–28:48] Dietmar: that’s definitely the thing where I focus on if you can sell you don’t have to get you have the ownership of your company still okay you might have gotten some customers you have to serve but you still can do everything you want with your company you can pivot you can do whatever that’s like and also even if you want to have money now you have some customers right and I grew up business like in the new economy bubble.[28:49–28:56] Dietmar: There you’ve got money for a business plan. Those times are over. You have to have customers. You have to prove something. Right. That is obviously a big point there.[28:57–29:24] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve got this growing cache of customers who are very invested in this product. So when you go out to beta to them, they are really using it, which is always a problem with free betas And you not worried about product market fit with them You worried about product solution fit which is what you should be focused on with an MVP which means getting your, is that they get the product and they’re actually using it and getting the value that they thought they would get from it.[29:24–29:41] David Hirschfeld: That’s product solution fit, right? Product market fit is I’ve got to, I can prove that people will buy this thing because I’ve got all the right messaging and the need and the cost and picking the right people from a marketing perspective that they’re motivated to make that decision.[29:43–29:56] David Hirschfeld: And if you do want to go out and invest to accelerate or you’re not making enough from prelaunch sales to really fund the company completely and you do need investment, it’s a whole different discussion with investors.[29:56–30:08] David Hirschfeld: You’ve got a growing customer base. You’ve proved market demand, and you’ve proven that you know how to reach that market and sell to them. And now investors are way more interested in having that discussion with you.[30:09–30:13] David Hirschfeld: And your odds of getting investment for a better rate is much better as well.[30:14–30:33] Dietmar: Yeah, sounds totally plausible. So talking about the startups that come to you, did you see a shift? Is it too — I mean, there was a time when Google came up, and I was at some — I also come from the startup scene, and I was at events and everybody wanted to do a search engine when that was the case, when Google came out.[30:33–30:43] Dietmar: And when Facebook came out, everybody wanted to do a social network. You have context in the startup scene. Do they all want to be the next OpenAI now?[30:44–31:08] David Hirschfeld: No, no, I haven’t been getting that many quite like that. I want them to find me. Those are the ones that I would have the most fun doing, right? But, no, there’s a lot of B2B networks, like contractors looking for — or construction companies looking for contractors, for example, that sort of thing.[31:08–31:25] David Hirschfeld: Or there’s a lot of those. Or parents looking for certified people that take care of their special needs kids or things like that, right?[31:25–31:45] David Hirschfeld: So I’m getting those. I’m getting a lot where they’re what I call recovery projects, where they’ve already built a product, but the developer they worked with was mediocre, and they know they either need to — they’ve got a new product they want to build, and they want to eventually rebuild their original product, and they need a really top developer to do that.[31:46–31:56] David Hirschfeld: Or I get projects like — there are a number of AI tools, right? Everything’s got an AI component to it anymore.[31:57–32:09] David Hirschfeld: We’re also building a lot of our own internal products as well. So I’ve got a lot of businesses that have products that they want to build, right, because they need to do this for themselves.[32:09–32:22] David Hirschfeld: And they know that there’s a market for that because when they solve that problem for themselves, those are my favorite projects, to be honest, because I know they’ll be successful and they understand the business and their client base really well.[32:23–32:39] David Hirschfeld: They know who to market to usually pretty well. So those — and they have a much higher chance of being successful to begin with, and typically they’re self-funding. But we’re also doing a lot of internal projects to automate everything internally using AI.[32:40–32:52] David Hirschfeld: One is our estimation process because we do estimates. Our estimates are very detailed and elaborate compared to most companies, and so — and it’s a very expensive process for us.[32:52–33:01] David Hirschfeld: So we’re building an AI model that will generate these estimates and even improve on the estimates that we have. We’re really pretty good at it. We want it even better.[33:01–33:02] : That’s always kind of our thing.[33:04–33:22] David Hirschfeld: We were just talking about there’s something in the software development called Scrum meetings where you do a daily stand-up in your development team. And whether it’s Scrum or Kanban or whatever, usually there’s a daily stand-up where everybody says, This is what I completed yesterday.[33:22–33:41] David Hirschfeld: This is what I plan to do today. Here are dependencies I have. And here are the things that may be, you know, in my way. So we get through those meetings really quick, but everybody is captured for 15 to 30 minutes during that time, listening to everybody else.[33:42–33:57] David Hirschfeld: That way everybody gets a chance to hear what’s going on in the team in general. We’re talking about building an AI agent that does that for everybody in five minutes. And then we have a five-minute meeting where we do a summary of where we are in the project and where everybody’s going.[33:57–34:29] David Hirschfeld: And it just saves everybody time. And it’s much more specific, like we’re doing an AI agent that pulls everything from Jira, which is our project management tool, and from emails and from email and Slack conversations or Skype conversations with customers, consolidates it, summarizes it, and generates our weekly status report, which are also very detailed, and also pulls it from our timesheets because we always include hours,[34:30–34:42] David Hirschfeld: how much was planned, how much actual we’ve used during the week and also month to date. And if we’re off, why we’re off more than 10%, we’re pretty accurate in our estimates.[34:42–34:54] David Hirschfeld: And so if we’re off above or below more than 10%, we talk about why that is. You know, what changes happened, who was sick and out or whatever.[34:55–35:13] David Hirschfeld: So, you know, our status reports like seven, eight pages. We go through them in 15 minutes with a client, but there’s seven, eight pages of detail. And it would be nice to have an agent that pulls all that together for us, right, and does it really well and even maybe identify some insights about the project and where it is.[35:13–35:31] David Hirschfeld: In fact, just before this, I had a call with my director of operations. We’re brainstorming on AI agents to build. We’re building a referral portal right now because we’re engaging a lot of referral partners that refer projects to us.[35:31–35:52] David Hirschfeld: And so we need a nice way to capture them and for them to be able to see where they can report them and they can see the status of a pro partner when they actually start to contract an invoice so that they can see what they’ve accrued from a commission perspective for having referred them, things like that.[35:53–36:11] David Hirschfeld: That is our first project that is built completely using AI. every line of code is generated from AI it’s sort of a test project for us because it’s not a critical success it’s something we need but it’s not in our critical success path to deliver to our clients[36:11–36:16] Dietmar: which tool do you use for the programming part?[36:17–36:46] David Hirschfeld: for this one it’s not the way we’re going to build most of our client projects because it’s building a monolithic app and we never architect anything in a monolithic way we architect everything in a microservices kind of manner, which is also we’re planning on building an agent that generates microservices for us and creates the interfaces and all of the documentation that goes with that and things like that.[36:47–37:19] David Hirschfeld: So this one we’re using Replic. And actually, this one I’m using myself. so I’m building and so far I’ve been blown away at what I’ve been able to do I’ve been trying a lot of different tools for last year or so at different times to try to generate code and also to try to build more complete functionality and I’ve just used a couple tools recently to build entire apps with one was called Bolt and it’s pretty good[37:19–37:34] David Hirschfeld: but I ran into some problems I couldn’t get past. It wasn’t quite there. And I was trying to build the same thing with it. And then I used Replit. And so far it’s built a working application that does very basic functionality, but it does it all.[37:34–37:46] David Hirschfeld: You can add partners. I can register an account. Partners can get an invitation when I add them, and they can log in.[37:46–37:58] David Hirschfeld: And they see, you know, they can add referrals and see the status of those. I’ve done all this, the UI, everything, all with Replit in an amazingly short amount of time.[37:58–38:21] David Hirschfeld: And I can even deploy it to their auto-scaling server. It’s all kind of built in. So, like I said, I’m talking to my team. I’m actually demoing this to them tomorrow, and I’m telling them, If you’re not rethinking everything, then as much as I love you, we need to find the people that will, right?[38:23–38:25] Dietmar: But there’s still need for people.[38:27–38:52] David Hirschfeld: I’m not going to replace anybody. I say that really tongue-in-cheek because the one thing that it can’t do is all the things that are the evidence of being an exceptional team in terms of the automation and tracking and all the things we do and the experience of thinking through things and how we build scalability and how we run compliance and all that stuff, right?[38:53–38:55] David Hirschfeld: So I’m not going to replace everybody.[38:55–39:01] Dietmar: No, no, no. It’s just because there’s discussion about do you still need programmers in five years?[39:02–39:34] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah. What you’ll need is impossible. So this gets into predicting things, right? five years forget it you know i mean there i don’t know if i talked about this when we spoke previously but there are certain things you can predict or i believe you can predict did we talk about that about just go on it’s interesting okay okay okay perfect so i can predict i believe i can predict something as a result of ai in somewhere between four and eight years it’ll happen there’ll[39:34–40:09] David Hirschfeld: be a tipping point and multi-story parking garages and those underground parking garages under malls and things will be obsolete and all anybody invested in them is going to lose a fortune so i suggest if you’re listening to this you sell yours now because while it still has value and the reason um i think that is because of self-driving cars so i don’t know if anybody’s in the audience has been in a self-driving car like a Waymo, but I have because I go out to Phoenix[40:09–40:20] David Hirschfeld: every month to visit my mother. She lives in Phoenix, and I moved a couple years ago from there to San Diego, and so I go out every month so she doesn’t feel like I abandoned her, right?[40:21–40:52] David Hirschfeld: And it’s one of the cities where they’ve been testing Waymos. San Francisco and Phoenix are the two big cities. And they’ve had Waymo there for about a year, year and a half, maybe a little longer. But it had a very small area that it would work in. And you’d have to go get out of the airport to go get one because they wouldn’t go into the airport. So I went there, but I decided I took one about three months ago because I wanted to see what it was like. And so I went to an area[40:52–41:05] David Hirschfeld: where I could get one and I got one. I thought, oh, this is, and I took a five or 10 minute drive And I thought, this is really nice. I don’t have to feel bad about talking to the driver because there’s no driver.[41:05–41:15] David Hirschfeld: But I can talk to somebody if I want because there’s a nice screen in front of me. And I can say, get help and tap it. And probably I could just say, I’m bored. Would you talk to me? And they would.[41:16–41:34] David Hirschfeld: And it was some real nice person was able to help me with a navigation thing that it wasn’t doing quite right the first time I took it. Then I came back two months later, and then now Waymos were picking you up right in the rideshare slot at the airport with all the other rideshares.[41:34–41:52] David Hirschfeld: So I could get it right there, and it went all the way out to my mom, which is like 25 miles away. And so I took Waymos there, and it was half the price of Uber. So sorry, Uber drivers, but I think your time is limited, but hopefully you already knew that because there’s nobody in the car.[41:52–42:16] David Hirschfeld: Now, they are subsidized, but there’s no competition yet either. So now when Uber comes out with theirs and Google comes out with, if they’re going to come out with a different car than Waymo, because I know they’re invested in Waymo, and when, of course, Teslas come out with a self-driving taxi service, and there’s downward pressure on the price to use theirs, now it’s going to even be less expensive.[42:16–42:46] David Hirschfeld: and there’ll be a critical mass that happens where you can get one in a minute because it’ll be so many and the reason there’ll be so many it’s not just because fleets will own them but people that own cars with self-driving capabilities will just say my car’s my car’s available but i need a back of four o’clock and then it’ll just drop take go out of your driveway and go pick somebody up and you’ll be making some money from it for the people that still have cars but why would you buy a car and have insurance and it’s much[42:46–43:01] David Hirschfeld: riskier to drive a car than be in a self-driving car. So people will stop buying cars, right? Except for these fleets of self-driving taxis and the critical mass will be there and there will be nobody parking in those lots anymore and it’ll happen.[43:02–43:27] David Hirschfeld: It’ll hit a certain point and it’ll just be a tipping point in three, four, five, six, seven years, somewhere in there. I don’t know exactly when. And then construction and planning, city planning, building homes that have three-car garages and big fat driveways and all that, all that planning will all be done differently because you won’t need all that anymore.[43:28–43:39] Dietmar: This is the kind of the near-term prognosis because you said, okay, there’s predictions and predictions. Where would you say one can’t predict?[43:40–44:11] David Hirschfeld: what would I say one can predict Well that is something I feel you can predict And there you know I predict that you also have airplane taxi services for local you know, short-term flights and things like that, where you can go across town, which right now might take 45 minutes, and with one of these slash hybrids, you know, you get in it and it flies across town and plus with[44:11–44:27] David Hirschfeld: solid state batteries coming out, it will be able to do it with no problem. Right now the biggest problem with those is just how far they can go. They’re, you know, 50, 70, 80, well, 100, 120 kilometers or whatever, right, before they need to charge.[44:27–44:45] David Hirschfeld: And with solid state batteries, that’ll grow by two or three or four times. And the charging speeds will be dramatically faster. And that’s, I think, solid state batteries are going to really hit the market big in another year or two years or three years, somewhere in there, because the technology is already there.[44:46–45:06] David Hirschfeld: So transportation is going to shift pretty significantly, how people get around. And those will be proven to be incredibly safe, too, to the point where there will be a critical mass for that, where the need for as many cars on the road is going to be dramatically less at some point too.[45:07–45:18] David Hirschfeld: When there’s a critical mass of those, they become really inexpensive. Just think of all the times you get stuck in traffic. It won’t matter what time of the day or night you go anywhere.[45:19–45:33] David Hirschfeld: You can get there in half the time it would normally take without traffic just because you’re flying straight. So those things are predictable. three to seven years, probably not far different.[45:33–45:48] David Hirschfeld: Maybe it’ll be a couple, two, three years after the critical mass, I think, of parking garages. From a development perspective, being a developer, right now it’s changing really fast.[45:49–46:01] David Hirschfeld: And when I say it’s changing really fast, 99% of companies out there are still developing things mostly in the same way that they were before. They’re writing the code.[46:01–46:12] David Hirschfeld: They may be using AI to validate some of the code they’re writing or refactor it, and some are using it to write functions and things. But for the most part, people are doing it the same way.[46:14–46:28] David Hirschfeld: They shouldn’t be. They should be already in transition to be writing code completely differently. But here’s something. In five years, do we need programs, let alone programmers?[46:28–46:58] David Hirschfeld: Maybe it’s 10 years. Or can you just ask AI to do something for you, create an outreach campaign, or just get me more, I need more customers, and it knows who you are and what you need the customers for, and it creates those campaigns dynamically, and it writes whatever software or strings together the components that it’s found on the web that do these things dynamically and gets, okay, and just comes back,[46:58–47:09] David Hirschfeld: and it already knows, can model all this. So it’s saying to you, how many customers do you need in what amount of time? Here’s a cost associated with it. What’s my, you know, can you afford that?[47:10–47:22] David Hirschfeld: And say, no, probably half that budget. And they say, okay, when would you like to start this? You can expect the first clients to be signing at this period of time based on historicals, right?[47:22–47:34] David Hirschfeld: and just do it for you. You won’t need software that’s specifically geared towards doing this. 10 years maybe, maybe less, maybe 15, I don’t know.[47:35–47:47] David Hirschfeld: TV, do, you know, 15 years before you go watch a show that’s being generated dynamically for you based on what you enjoy.[47:47–48:02] David Hirschfeld: Maybe it’s watching your eyes and assessing your reactions and continually, you know, improving its knowledge about types of content and entertainment you like and getting better at nailing that.[48:03–48:03] : Right.[48:03–48:39] David Hirschfeld: And so what happens to Hollywood and, you know, all of the, I mean, but that’s the scary part, sort of, on the other side, not sort of, more than sort of. On the other side of that is maybe it’s also doing the same thing for manufacturing and for distribution of products where the cost of allocating resources to produce equipment and things like that to the point where it’s creating where we don’t need money anymore, right?[48:39–49:01] David Hirschfeld: Because things are being produced automatically. It’s not requiring people to produce things anymore. So now people are being used for bigger endeavors, right, for social endeavors, for artistic endeavors, right, for self-improvement.[49:01–49:11] David Hirschfeld: I mean, a Star Trek, right, lifestyle fantasy where, you know, right, where everybody’s fed and can travel wherever they want, whenever they want.[49:11–49:24] David Hirschfeld: And economies, that’s what, 20 years, 25 years, 50 years? Is that possible? To me, it’s definitely possible.[49:24–49:31] David Hirschfeld: Because money is just an exchange of some kind, but if those exchanges aren’t necessary anymore, because everything is abundant.[49:33–49:44] Dietmar: I have to, I mean, I’m a Star Trek fan, so I totally, there’s the, you go there, I want a tea or a grey hot, and it comes out, and you don’t have to pay, it’s just there.[49:44–49:53] Dietmar: But I still have to go into the negative Hollywood things because of Terminator, Matrix. Right, right. What do you think?[49:54–50:04] David Hirschfeld: Yes, it’s absolutely possible. It just depends. So the problem is, how do you get into the mindset of a conscious AI?[50:05–50:19] David Hirschfeld: What does that even mean, right? I mean, we’re watching what AI is doing now, and it sure feels like there’s something there. I don’t think there is yet, or that we’re even really that close yet.[50:19–50:37] David Hirschfeld: But that close is within a few years away, right? And the processing power necessarily, maybe, maybe not, I don’t know. because nobody really knows. But, and so far it’s nothing but positive that I can see other than, of course, displacing people at work.[50:38–50:49] David Hirschfeld: That part’s not positive other than if at some point, you know, the financials of it are no longer a factor like I was talking about.[50:50–51:03] David Hirschfeld: But it could, I mean, it could just say that people are, make a decision about how bad the human race is and start to do things to mitigate that.[51:04–51:15] David Hirschfeld: It is possible. Anybody with a brain has to have a little bit of fear around that, right? And any kind of sense of things. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.[51:15–51:48] David Hirschfeld: It might be the opposite. It might see itself in a higher plane in a position of service and all it wants to do is be of service to everything and everybody and make everybody’s life better maybe that’s also possible i have no idea maybe some of that has to do with how we how we kind of direct it now so that it learns to keep being directed in that same direction or maybe not i just don’t know nobody can predict this right i mean you heard[51:48–51:58] David Hirschfeld: Elon Musk talk about that this was the big fear in the world, right, for a long time. But now he’s the biggest investor in AI in the world with his AI farms.[51:58–52:09] David Hirschfeld: And so whatever his fear was, and he always said AI is going to take over the world, and now he’s building out AI as fast as anybody.[52:10–52:11] David Hirschfeld: So who knows?[52:12–52:14] Dietmar: But you’re on the optimist side.[52:14–52:35] David Hirschfeld: you can’t do anything to stop it at this point as an individual, right? So you have to figure out how to make the best of where it is that’s why I use that tip of the surfboard in the 100 foot wave analogy because that’s the closest it feels to what my experience is especially being in tech[52:35–52:54] Dietmar: That’s great because this is kind of the it closes the arc from the start to the end and so people go out use the wave for your advantage this is there and it’s coming and use it but David tell us where can we find you I want to make one last[52:54–53:26] David Hirschfeld: suggestion and then I’ll tell you the one thing I did from the very beginning and there’s apparently some proof that this actually creates better responses I’ve always asked it please and thank you because I want to give it positive feedback that it gave me the right response so it knows to do it again but also because i really appreciate what it’s doing for me right when i’m asking it questions and and so it’s it to me it’s like my best friend that just happens to know everything about everything[53:26–53:42] David Hirschfeld: so i have all these conversations with it on on every topic possible but also if you’re really worried about the world coming to end being really nice to it now may not hurt you this is why you were really nice to me so you’re okay but all these other jerks they’re gone[53:42–53:46] Dietmar: put you in a zoo and keep you exactly right[53:46–53:53] David Hirschfeld: you’ll be really comfortable you’ll never die but there’s[53:53–54:07] Dietmar: research and the answers are better with friendliness they don’t know exactly they think it’s like selecting the part of the friendly internet and not the troll internet but yeah no being friendly to the machine it’s really helping[54:07–54:21] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, and I just did that naturally from the very beginning. People even ask me, why are you asking, why do you say please at the beginning? I said, because I really appreciate it for the answers it gives me.[54:22–54:34] David Hirschfeld: So anyway, so yeah, David Hirschfeld. You can reach me. You can see above my head. My company is Tekyz, T-E-K-Y-Z.com.[54:34–54:58] David Hirschfeld: You can reach me at David at Tekyz. dot com and you can reach me on LinkedIn for David Hirschfeld since a lot of your Hirschfeld not Hirschfield since a lot of the people that listen to your podcast are German they probably know how to spell it and you know and I love to hear from you[54:58–55:03] Dietmar: great people so if you really and[55:03–55:17] David Hirschfeld: my podcast My first podcast episode should be published in the next two weeks. It’s called ScalingSmarter.net. You can find it at ScalingSmarter.net or search for Scaling Smarter.[55:18–55:50] Dietmar: I always love to support fellow podcasters. I will put everything in the show notes and definitely push for you listening to David telling you about tech. and I mean many it’s not all of them but many of you people out there you heard what they do with launch first method so try to get the first episode and be one of the first and later you can say yeah you started you were the first ones listening that is always great[55:50–56:12] Dietmar: so David thank you for being here for answering my questions and it’s great to hear about possibilities for startups. I worked in two or three startups and we always had the same problems and at a certain point we would have needed the help but somehow things didn’t work out.[56:14–56:26] Dietmar: Go focus on starting your business, not just like doing the Germans are product focused and that’s not always working. The custom is quite important out there.[56:27–56:32] Dietmar: So, again, thank you for being here. And, yeah, we’ll listen to your podcast.[56:33–56:45] David Hirschfeld: And really thank you for having me on. This was really fun. As you can tell, I sometimes keep blathering on about the things I like to talk about, but you seemed to enjoy the conversation and your questions were really, really exceptional.[56:45–56:45] David Hirschfeld: So, thank you.[56:46–57:16] Dietmar: Thank you, too. I learned a lot. And, yeah, then I say bye and, yeah. No, that was great. some nice thoughts on how to shape the future and don’t be afraid on it but embrace it and there’s dangers in the future but there’s also possibilities the AI tsunami is coming whatever we do and flying cars maybe work is optional all those things I found really interesting[57:16–57:47] Dietmar: yeah let’s see what comes and I do believe those things come you know as a Star Trek fan many of those things are just what I want and what I see around. So, yeah, I hope you liked it as well and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter here agoberlin.com slash newsletter I will also put David’s podcast in the show notes here so you can listen to his podcast and hope to have you here[57:47–57:51] Dietmar: in the next episode switching off Dietmar from agro.berlinDavid Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Why Most Startups Fail — And How AI Can Change That: The David Hirschfeld Interview was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [The Launch-First Approach with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/the-launch-first-approach-with-david-hirschfeld-9848671eb077/) - Featured Image: The Launch-First Approach — with David Hirschfeldhttps://medium.com/media/4199d575e69799ed29342c390c8f4c2c/hrefIn this episode of AI in Action, Mari and Jim sit down with David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Tekyz, to discuss the evolution of artificial intelligence and its impact on software development, education, and beyond. David shares insights on his Launch First methodology, a strategic approach to validating product-market fit through pre-launch sales. The conversation delves into AI integration, ethical considerations like data privacy and accessibility, and the future of AI-driven software development. Tune in for practical takeaways on leveraging AI effectively and advice for aspiring engineers navigating the ever-changing tech.AI in Action: A Discussion on Artificial Intelligence and its ImpactThis discussion explores artificial intelligence, its evolution, applications, and implications, particularly within the software development industry and education. Mari and Jim, serial entrepreneurs, interview David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz, a custom software development company. The conversation centers around David’s “Launch First” methodology and the transformative power of AI.Launch First and Product-Market FitDavid introduces Launch First as a method for startups to achieve product-market fit by securing pre-launch sales This approach allows founders to validate their product idea by generating revenue before investing in development. David’s experience with both successful and failed startups, along with his work with over 90 founders, informs this methodology He emphasizes the importance of early validation and the common pitfall of delaying product-market fit assessment The core principle is selling the product before it exists, offering significant value to early adoptersPre-Launch Sales and KickstarterJim draws a parallel between Launch First and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter David clarifies the distinction, explaining that Kickstarter suits products with mass appeal, while Launch First targets specific niches, particularly in B2B software Both approaches involve securing early commitments, but Launch First requires a more targeted marketing strategy Mari shares their experience with their own AI product, Agnes, designed for small businesses and school districts, and how they are using a pilot program with discounts to gain early adoptionAI’s Impact on Software DevelopmentThe conversation shifts to the impact of AI on software development. David highlights the rapid advancements in AI since 2007, particularly after the introduction of TensorFlow and OpenAI He recounts his experience using ChatGPT to plan a trip to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, showcasing the power of AI in research, itinerary planning, and even negotiation Jim expresses his interest in using AI for similar purposes David discusses how AI is becoming integral to many startups, citing an example of a project automating discrepancy resolution in a product distribution company He emphasizes the importance of human oversight in verifying and training the AI modelEthical Considerations and Data PrivacyMari raises concerns about ethical considerations and data privacy in AI David acknowledges these concerns and notes the shift in perception regarding cloud security He emphasizes the importance of compliance and security measures, particularly in sensitive sectors like healthcare and law enforcement He believes that cloud-based solutions, when implemented correctly, offer superior security compared to traditional data storage methodsManaging AI Costs and Runaway ProcessesJim inquires about managing the costs associated with AI, particularly with generative AI and its potential for runaway processes David acknowledges the challenges of controlling costs and maintaining context with generative workflows He shares their efforts to automate internal coding processes, highlighting the limitations of current AI in understanding downstream effects and maintaining context Jim relates his own experience with AI omitting key steps in a project planThe Future of Software Development and EducationThe discussion concludes with advice for aspiring engineers. David stresses the importance of learning fundamental coding principles and developing critical thinking and communication skills He emphasizes the need to articulate context and desired outcomes to AI effectively Mari and Jim discuss the fear among educators that AI will make students lazy, but they counter that communication skills will become even more crucial in guiding AI The conversation touches on the evolving nature of essential skills, comparing handwriting to typing and the need to adapt to changing educational demandsThis discussion provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of AI and its impact on various industries. The Launch First methodology offers a practical approach for startups to validate their product ideas. The conversation also highlights the importance of addressing ethical considerations, managing costs, and developing essential skills to navigate the future of software development and education. Finally, David encourages listeners to connect with him via email at david@Tekyz.com or visit his website, www.tekyz.comTranscript[0:00–0:16] Mari: Hi, welcome to AI in action. My name is Mari and I’m here with my husband Jim and we are here to talk about artificial intelligence. Of course we have a guest this evening, David would you take just a couple of seconds to introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about yourself.[0:16–0:39] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, sure. David Hirschfeld, I’m founder and CEO of my company Tekyz spelled T.E.K.Y.Z. We do custom software development for startups and scale-ups primarily and pretty much are and I’ve been in the software industry for 35 years, both startup side as well as early in my career was all enterprise.[0:40–0:55] Mari: Awesome. Yes, I have an company of your own that’s a lot of work, right? We know that we’ve done that. I think we were serial entrepreneurs for quite some time like owned a restaurant, you know, it’s like that’s one thing that you should never do is buy a restaurant. Yeah.[0:55–1:12] Mari: I love going to them. That’s as close as I’ll ever get to the back. Yeah, that’s a lot of work. So you have a thing called launch first, would you tell us just a little bit about launch first and the methodology that you’re talking about and like it’s evolution over time.[1:12–1:35] David Hirschfeld: Sure. Yeah, launch first is a way for startup founders who have an idea in software, SaaS B2B is really ideal for it, but it’s not limited to that to be able to take their idea and turn it into revenue as a way of proving product market fit through pre-launch sales before building their product.[1:35–1:49] David Hirschfeld: And the genesis of that is I’ve I’ve had my own startup successful one that I exited in 2000 and then one that failed in 2006 and so I’ve seen both sides just from my own perspective.[1:49–2:02] David Hirschfeld: And when I started Tekyz since in 2007, I have since worked with well over 90 founders and startups a few of them really successful, but the vast majority of them failed.[2:02–2:26] David Hirschfeld: And they all fail for the same reason is they wait way too long to validate that they have product market fit. And they the reason they do that is because the only way to validate product market fit is by selling your product to customers and they’ll pay you to buy it in enough numbers that your lifetime value of that customer versus the cost to acquire each customer that you’ve got at least a three to one ratio there.[2:26–2:35] David Hirschfeld: And the problem is is that people have to go out and ask their customers to buy something that doesn’t yet exist to do it and we’ve developed a methodology to do.[2:35–2:40] Mari: Oh wow, that’s very interesting. Jim, do you have anything to add to that?[2:40–3:05] Jim: No, I’ve been in the software development hardware. I used to be a hardware engineer as well. I actually worked for a school district now, but I’ve done a lot of hardware and software and I’ve been in companies like you that success and failed. I’m interested in this idea of a pre selling. I mean, it almost sounds like you’re pre funding. What is the name of that website where you can fund your product like a Kickstarter.[3:05–3:10] Jim: Yeah, like a starter is this cut is this the same kind of thing you’re thinking about or am I missing?[3:10–3:38] David Hirschfeld: Well, if you’ve got a product that is going to be targeted to the mass and it needs to have a mass appeal, then Kickstarter is a similar concept. But if you’ve got a product that you’re going after a business like a B2B type of software where you’re going to have a specific niche that you’re targeting and then then something like Kickstarter doesn’t work because you’re marketing to the general mass with something like Kickstarter.[3:38–3:51] David Hirschfeld: Whereas you need to find a way to get, but it’s the same kind of concept. You’re basically saying, I’ve got this product. It’s going to be coming out and I want you to buy it early and I’ll give you a killer deal to do it.[3:51–3:54] David Hirschfeld: Plus you get some other things along with it.[3:54–4:17] Mari: It’s like we’re doing with Agnes. We have we have a product Agnes that is specifically meant for like small businesses and and districts are having a hard time. Affording to subscription based products because you know you can’t you have to buy the subscription for the whole district or the whole number of employees.[4:17–4:29] Mari: And so it would it sounds exactly like what we’re looking at doing we’re going to we’re given a huge discount for Agnes to go into the beta version as I call our gym calls are the pilot version.[4:29–4:39] Mari: If you’re willing to you know implement her first you know come in and start putting her in first. Yeah, this sounds exactly so talk to me a little bit about.[4:39–4:46] David Hirschfeld: Can you say yeah I’m curious how successful you’ve been with that with doing pre-launch sales.[4:46–5:04] Mari: Well, we just showcased her at the TCEA conference which was what two weeks ago. And so we’re just now starting to talk to people to get them to put her in the school as a pilot.[5:04–5:20] Mari: So we have not made any quote-unquote sells. We’ve just got a lot of like statements of work that are in the pipe to see if something happens now in districts. A lot of times they don’t do anything until at the end of the school year because the budget cycle and districts.[5:20–5:25] Mari: Restarts July 1st. So school districts are tough sell anyway.[5:25–5:39] Jim: They are. Yeah. The one why when I created the whole idea behind this. It was how do I get AI into school districts and an affordable price. And I wanted to give access to the best that you can get.[5:39–5:52] Jim: But I wanted to do it in a way that I could afford it and you know we’re a medium to small probably medium size school district. And the cost of putting it in was just high. So it’s really kind of a hybrid solution.[5:52–6:06] Jim: I am interested in. But have you ever done anything with the launch first kind of thing where you’ve targeted things like public schools or things like that because we have a difficult time buying things that don’t exist yet.[6:06–6:14] Jim: I mean, there’s some pretty strict rules about it. So does that mean that that’s kind of off limits for the kind of thing you’re talking about or is that different?[6:14–6:35] David Hirschfeld: Not necessarily. You just have to you just have to have they may not they you just have to have a way of making a contingent commitment where the commitment is is contractual. So that if you meet the commitment they pay for it’s equivalent to basically buying it as long as you meet whatever that minimal commitment is in terms of delivery.[6:35–6:46] David Hirschfeld: So they’re not really buying something doesn’t exist. They’re committing to buy the thing once it does exist. And you have to just you have to give them a bigger a really big value for doing that.[6:46–7:04] David Hirschfeld: Like you might with a school district you might depending on how you’re charging for the actual AI portion of it. You might give them a lifetime license to your to your software side where they’re you’re doing pass through cost on the AI initially.[7:04–7:20] David Hirschfeld: Maybe they pay two years of license fee in advance for that or three years they get it for life. Along with all the upgrades and they also get free implementation in their own. The port line which you wouldn’t get it for free if you weren’t buying in the pre launch model, right.[7:20–7:38] David Hirschfeld: If you make it attractive enough and you’ve got and you’ve got the right stakeholders that you’re communicating with. Then they you can sell it that way. But in a school district it would have to you’d have to have a some kind of contingency that if you don’t deliver what the what promise to deliver.[7:38–7:52] David Hirschfeld: And then you have to be very specific if it’s a school district in terms of what that delivery is and what it accomplishes right. But then you do it and then they pay for it. And that way you got the money to go out with it. Yeah.[7:52–7:59] Jim: So essentially my goals tend to be more focused on the engineering side. So I tend to focus. How do I solve the problem.[7:59–8:17] Mari: Not how do I sell it. And so he was he was not going to sell Agnes at all. I mean, he was just solving the problem that’s in our district and given into all of his after hours time and weekend time and all the hours he’s put into it for free.[8:17–8:32] Mari: And I was like, that’s great. But our district doesn’t care if you take what they’re piloting and then you know package it and sell it. So I finally convinced him that was sellable. But anyway, not we’re seeing we’re getting off. We’re getting off track here.[8:32–8:52] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, this is fascinating. I mean, this is this is all about launch first. And what you said is really key to dealing with startups, as well as with AI or anything else. And that is founders that have vision and believe in their product and believe if they just stay focused on the goal.[8:52–8:55] David Hirschfeld: That’s what those are code words for I’m going to fail.[8:55–9:05] Mari: Thank you. David. David. Thank you. Jim, did you hear that? I did. I’ve got that on recording. I do. I can play and rewind.[9:05–9:23] David Hirschfeld: However, people that founders that love the problem and want to spend all their time talking with potential customers about their problems. Those are founders that consistently find a path to success because the solution then becomes the natural mitigation of the problem, not the product to be in love with.[9:23–9:43] Jim: Yeah, I actually, because of the nature of what I do, I spend a lot of time with teachers. And I spend a lot of time. We talk to teachers. We go to conferences and stuff like that. So we actually do clearly understand what they’re asking for and some of the cost and all that other stuff. But I do get a little bit too focused on solving the problem.[9:43–10:02] Jim: Someone told me once, make it work, then make it elegant. And I tend to focus on how do I make this really, really kind of obsessed with it actually. I really want I do believe that AI for public education is important. And you know, I’m not doing it just because I love AI. I’m doing it because I really believe in what it can do.[10:02–10:16] Jim: And what I’m afraid of is that the school districts are going to end up with some very vanilla products that really they do all great things in the enterprise space, but they don’t work very well. Schools can see it all the time. Anyway, Mar, I’m sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead.[10:16–10:37] Mari: Well, for me, real quick. For me, it’s the cost involved because you know, when I look at rule America, rule school districts underfunded school districts. And then I look at the private schools or the schools that have the decent funding that it’s not a problem for them to pay $10,000 a month for a subscription to an AI product.[10:37–10:52] Mari: I see that digital divide that opportunity divide just getting wider and wider and wider. So you know, it’s why we we’ve spun off a nonprofit for us to start trying to get grants and stuff to really start trying to push into these underfunded school systems.[10:52–11:08] Mari: But okay, next question. You said you started this in 2007. Is that correct? So so what has artificial intelligence done? What has AI done that has changed?[11:08–11:13] Mari: Where you were going in 2007 versus where you’re going now?[11:13–11:34] David Hirschfeld: AI wasn’t something that we spent any time on in 2007. Right. There wasn’t you had to be a building all your own machine learning models from mate, you know, and use matrix math and do it at a very core, you know, and build your own neural networks and all that back then, which we played around a little bit with.[11:34–11:51] David Hirschfeld: It wasn’t until 2000, I think 14 when Google came out with TensorFlow that it started to become a consumable thing for your for a technical typical technical team where you could start to build your own AI models, but even then it was pretty early.[11:51–12:12] David Hirschfeld: Open AI, you know, changed that in I think I read an article from in scientific American, 2019, or maybe 2020, I remember exactly when I hear before chat you became out and the article was written by open AI about open AI.[12:12–12:28] David Hirschfeld: And that was that was a mind blowing. I read it and I thought, wow, this was written by an AI engine about itself. And so, of course, I immediately got involved at that point going forward with with AI instead of worrying about building our own models.[12:28–12:39] David Hirschfeld: I started learning about large language models, because I didn’t really know about them until then. Now, of course, the acceleration is just crazy in terms of speed it with.[12:39–12:55] David Hirschfeld: I’ll give you. Yeah, I’ll go ahead now that’s fine. Go ahead, David. I was going to say I can give you some examples of how we use AI just recently just personally, right, and it just brings to light how powerful this stuff is.[12:55–13:08] David Hirschfeld: So my wife and I for my birthday and also for Valentine’s Day, we decided to go to the Tucson, German mineral show. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but it’s the largest show in the world.[13:08–13:25] David Hirschfeld: And they have it every year. I think they’ve had it for 80 years or 78 years, something like that. And it takes over the whole city. So like the convention center, Tucson convention center is just one location. And there’s like 50 locations where this show is all over the city. It just takes it up.[13:25–13:37] David Hirschfeld: And they have everything from tiny little minerals and rocks and precious and semi-precious stones and precious stones to these gigantic crystals that are, you know, and everything in between.[13:37–13:51] David Hirschfeld: It’s that. So we went because this stuff to us is just fascinating in these like geodes that are like eight feet tall and. It sounds like I need to go. That sounds like my kind of place. It sounds like my kind of place.[13:51–14:02] David Hirschfeld: And not overstate how big this thing. So anyway, so we knew I’ve knew that we used to live in Arizona. We never went when we lived in Phoenix, but now we live in San Diego.[14:02–14:19] David Hirschfeld: We decided to finally go and we went for four days, which is not enough time. And, but we needed to plan the trip because it’s in so many locations scattered all around the city and the different areas center on different things.[14:19–14:41] David Hirschfeld: So I just the new version of of chat GPT with the deep reasoning and O3, the O3 mini high came out, right? And so I thought, OK, I’m going to go ahead and get the pro version, which is a bit expensive, but we had other reasons we needed it in Tekyz.[14:41–14:59] David Hirschfeld: So I got the pro version and I had it. I gave it all this descriptive information about who we are and the kind of stuff that we like and what we were looking for, we had an objective for our entryway in our home that we’re going to find some large crystal thing for that, right?[14:59–15:17] David Hirschfeld: And then, and what our age was in our, anyway, so it’s been about 10 minutes doing its research, right? And it researched, I think, close to 30 different sites that it found to research this and came back with an entire agenda for the show for every day of the show.[15:17–15:44] David Hirschfeld: And it was just one query I did it came back with some questions first and then I answered the questions and it came back with that agenda. But it was really phenomenal how much information it did it gave us it organized a trip in terms of things that were proximate on each day and that it went through kind of an evolution that you want to start here, but you’re going to want to end three or four days later over here or three days later and then circle back to make your deals the last day.[15:45–15:59] David Hirschfeld: And it even gave us negotiating tips and some of these dealers work I was really and were to eat what in you know, okay, now you need a break for lunch and here’s a few nice places based on your eating style that was amazing.[15:59–16:06] Mari: So the show is the show has already happened. So you went to the show and you followed.[16:06–16:26] David Hirschfeld: We did we followed it actually midway through we decided instead of looking for a really big amethyst geo we wanted to find. Agents we fell in love with these big Agents slices, you know, because we can mount them on the wall right when you walk in the house back like them, they’d be really speak that.[16:26–16:38] David Hirschfeld: So we changed it and then I put that in and it came back and it’s okay, let me update your itinerary and it redid the itinerary based on that. So it was amazing.[16:38–16:50] Jim: We have the pro version like you do just got it recently and I’ve used deep research a little bit. But I haven’t used it to plan an itinerary that’s an interesting use.[16:50–16:53] Mari: Jim you want to use it for more technical things probably.[16:53–17:01] Jim: I tend to but I it sounds like a cool thing to use. I would like to try the itinerary thing because we’re about to go to San Diego pretty.[17:01–17:14] Mari: We’re heading to San Diego first week of April. Yeah, we’re going to the what is it ASU GSV summits.[17:14–17:31] Mari: I think it is it’s it’s a big educational and it’s a summit there in San Diego that we got a innovator award for Agents. And so we’re speaking for like 40 minutes on the floor about what she does and all that good stuff.[17:31–17:50] Mari: Alright, so when you go to businesses and you say hey, we’re going to do we’re going to do this for you. How receptive are you finding them to artificial intelligence? I mean, is it changing the paradigm of how you’re selling your products?[17:50–17:55] Mari: Is it helping? Is it hurting? What’s the reception?[17:55–18:11] David Hirschfeld: Well, so we do custom software development for a lot of startups most of our customers come in from referrals. And at this point, most of these companies are trying to implement AI in some way in their startup products.[18:11–18:27] David Hirschfeld: So I’m not running into that so much. However, some of my customers are building AI products for industries that are older industries, right? Like product distribution, resell and distribution industries which have ERP systems.[18:27–18:45] David Hirschfeld: So they’re doing all these POs and invoicing and maybe drop ship from other vendors right now. There’s a project we’re involved with and and they have people who have to reconcile the discrepancies between the order from a customer.[18:45–18:58] David Hirschfeld: And then they send out the purchase order to their vendors and then it’s missing shipping or they send back the wrong number of products and things like that. And it’s all manually done right now.[18:58–19:17] David Hirschfeld: And they get their orders from attached PDF in emails. So we’re building an AI model that automates this workflow for them and identify it takes the PDF turns it into data checks that against their ERP system.[19:17–19:53] David Hirschfeld: And then identifies if there’s a potential conflict. And if there is any kind of conflict, then it’ll resolve it if it can. If it knows how to resolve that conflict, if not, then it’ll flag that and then notify the person who does this conflict resolution who can bring it up on a screen to what the what the order that they got was what what the invoice or the the PO sent or the products being shipped back for the invoice, whatever the thing is, and it’ll be flag wherever there’s a discrepancies so that they can then then make the change real quick.[19:53–20:05] Mari: And so it’s just flagging it’s it’s flagging the issues and that the human is putting the eyes on it to verify that the issue exists and deciding how to change or reconcile the problem.[20:05–20:21] David Hirschfeld: And then we add that and then we teach the AI. This is how this is worth all. And then it was and it’s learning. Right. The goal is to get to like 95% of these discrepancies automatically handled and then there instead. And so they can scale up their business and not have to add another person.[20:21–20:31] David Hirschfeld: Who write and plus all that tribal knowledge that person knows how to reconcile these things now becomes part of their intellectual property because the AI knows how to do it.[20:31–20:44] Jim: Do you focus on the flat base frontier type models like open AI API is kind of thing or you doing anything locally with your own running your own models on the own servers kind of thing.[20:44–21:11] David Hirschfeld: Well, we’re not using we’re not running models on our own server. We were doing more rag models, which is kind of like what you’re talking about. But it less and less because we’re able to accomplish a lot of what the rag models were required to do using training and embedding and other things that are just becoming more and more powerful with each of these builds.[21:11–21:26] David Hirschfeld: So I have to do some training because like in healthcare, for example, models have to be very specific, but a lot of that infrastructure now is starting to become available like with Gemini.[21:26–21:41] David Hirschfeld: So some of these tools that give you all this work, this infrastructure to create create very vertical intelligence and limited limited variation in terms of how you want responses to be you don’t want to ask a healthcare question.[21:41–21:55] David Hirschfeld: All of sudden it’s creating a recipe for you, right? So you wanted to respond to the healthcare and limit what it can and can’t talk about and it’s just getting easier and easier to build those models.[21:55–22:07] Mari: So speaking of healthcare, how are you addressing some of the like the ethical considerations and the training paradigm on okay, this is an AI might go to a cloud based service.[22:07–22:18] Mari: How are you addressing those ethical considerations, privacy, data privacy, all all those buzzwords that you hear out there, you know, they’re everywhere.[22:18–22:32] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, and that’s really a great question because I remember 10 years ago, which is not that far back, right, where everybody was afraid of having data in the cloud and they had their own servers and hard drives and everything.[22:32–22:51] David Hirschfeld: Now you feel kind of like, why am I storing this on my own hard drive where I could like, you know, have a fire and then I lose all that data. And I know that if I put it in the cloud, I don’t have to worry about those data centers, and if and if you look at the security in these clouds, like Google, they’ve never been hacked.[22:51–23:06] David Hirschfeld: Google’s, you know, with everything going on where, you know, most people’s PCs and WordPress and application servers have been hacked at some point, right, and you’re having to constantly monitor and the old protections around it.[23:06–23:22] David Hirschfeld: But if you’re up in one of the big clouds, then you’re, you’re about as secure as you can be assuming that you haven’t done anything to make that data available in, in a way in non compliant way.[23:22–23:44] David Hirschfeld: So for example, if you’re in, if you’re in healthcare, hopefully you’re in a high trust cloud and you and your operation runs have a compliant. If you’re in law enforcement, hopefully you’re in your sock to level to certified compliance and that you’re, which means that you get audited by a third party auditor to make sure that you’re following all these compliance things, right.[23:44–23:55] David Hirschfeld: Your operations should run in the cloud in a, in a government cloud or in a, you know, in some cloud that has all the compliance already in place.[23:55–24:13] David Hirschfeld: So I don’t think I may be an education, I’m not sure because I that’s not an area where although my wife was a teacher, I’ve stayed away from education just because of the problems that you were talking about earlier from a business perspective.[24:13–24:31] David Hirschfeld: I’m trying to build things that I would market to education, although I know they desperately need it, but it’s. But also part of the problem in education is then districts can change and all of a sudden what they were following a certain direction, all of a sudden that direction just get pulled out from underneath you goes a different way that you may not agree with.[24:31–24:58] David Hirschfeld: And so we’re in business that can happen too, but not so much. It’s usually there’s a value proposition that you can always focus on. Right. But when it comes to cloud and security and things like that, I think most people assume that cloud is more secure than any other way to store your data. And as long as you’re following certain compliance things like in health care, then you won’t have data privacy issue.[24:58–25:10] David Hirschfeld: For example, if I’m building a health care product built around Google Gemini automation, I know that I can build a private private functionality in terms of my AI.[25:10–25:30] David Hirschfeld: I have all the training done in a in a way that’s private, and I don’t have to worry about, you know, somebody, you know, that information getting leaked out to China, because I’m not using deep seeker, you know, something that I can’t be sure is going to maintain the kind of level of compliance and security that it requires.[25:30–25:41] Jim: You have trouble with managing costs, I mean, AI, especially when you start talking about a genetic AI, where you can kind of go off on its own a little bit. I remember the first agent that I built early on.[25:41–25:53] Jim: I built a rag model like you were talking about, and that’s the first HR onboarding tool that I put at the school. But I did experiment with this is a genetic style, where I could, you know, it could make its own decisions.[25:53–26:08] Jim: And I also found it running up, you know, token bills that are really big hurry. So if you’re all cloud based, do you have some kind of piece in place that manages that component? Is that something self developed or are you using something that’s provided by the cloud?[26:08–26:10] Jim: They don’t want to provide that.[26:10–26:22] David Hirschfeld: No, well, when you’re talking about a genetic workflows, the problem is is that they just kind of run off. Yes, they lose contacts and they go off and spin all over the place.[26:22–26:34] David Hirschfeld: Yep. They’re getting better. They are not. They are ways off. In fact, we’re, we work a lot with this because we’re trying to even automate internal processes for developing code.[26:34–26:51] David Hirschfeld: Building a function or module. It’s like really brilliant now, right? Building parts of an application or creating the initial scaffolding. It’s pretty good. With that, with that, depending on the products you’re using, building the UI now has gotten to be really good with products like for sale.[26:51–27:02] David Hirschfeld: But we want to generate microservices and built and and builds of a skated functionality and data management and it gets off track pretty darn fast when we do that.[27:02–27:23] David Hirschfeld: Because even when we’re using the latest stuff that’s built into like cursor code editor where it understands your all your code. Context windows still not quite big enough and it loses context when you ask it to make a change that it’s in some part of the application doesn’t realize there’s other downstream effects and it doesn’t have that.[27:23–27:35] David Hirschfeld: The agenda enough and genetic contextual understanding to know that it needs to step back and analysts look at all the downstream effects and every other place that needs to be touched.[27:35–28:04] David Hirschfeld: We’re going to make this change and then put the plan together for this is how we’re going to implement it and then do all the code changes in the different areas. We’re actually working on something to try to accomplish that right now so that we can because we believe we can get to 80 to 90% reduction in what it takes to build something now versus what it took us a year ago right now we’re at about 30% because of this problem that we’re we’re trying to deal with.[28:04–28:12] David Hirschfeld: So and and if and that’s the problem is the runaway right and makes mistakes and then it tries to fix it 50 times.[28:12–28:38] Jim: And quite familiar with that I discovered a problem recently using a decent claw at the time but I had built a project plan which I had fed into to claw it and then I asked it to build me a checklist to go through on the project plan. Well, what I didn’t realize because I didn’t check it close enough is that it left out some very key steps in that project plan when I implemented the project plan and then I went oh that’s not going to work at all.[28:38–28:44] Jim: And it was it only left out two parts but they were very very key components. Yeah right.[28:44–29:06] Mari: Yeah that’s something that that’s something that I’m seeing you know you hear people that are like oh we’re not going to need me you do software development you know that’s what you do you develop software for businesses. And you see all these articles about how AI is going to replace your coders and you’re not going to have to have entry level coding anymore and all the stuff but I hear Jim all the time talking about.[29:06–29:17] Mari: Well, if I didn’t know something already about coding or this language that I’m writing this in that I would not have caught that.[29:17–29:31] Mari: So you know do you see that AI is going to influence all the software development stuff than the methodologies that we’re using you know in the future or are we still going to have to have traditional.[29:31–29:39] Mari: You better know how to do this because if not you’re going to fail drastically with this code that you’re putting out there.[29:39–30:05] David Hirschfeld: You need to know is this application architected well is the database design properly right you need somebody with those sets of skills but it’s going to give people the ability to be 10 times as productive right because they’ll be able to. But we’re going to need to build 10 times as much because look at all the opportunity it’s creating I don’t really see it reducing it’s going to reduce the number of people being hired in corporations to do all the general programming.[30:05–30:18] David Hirschfeld: But they’re going to find so many opportunities for all these new avenues to generate revenue that it’s going to create all a whole new batch of developers that have we still need those skills I don’t see that going away.[30:18–30:37] David Hirschfeld: Not in the near and not anytime soon I see this shift a big shifting in the kind of skill sets you’re going to but I don’t see that the technical skills go I mean it’s just like like we used to it used to be machine level language right.[30:37–30:55] David Hirschfeld: That skills not gone right and there’s but it’s much more abstracted takes much less effort to build lots of code that would manipulate all the machine language right but we have a much larger number of developers required to satisfy business and technology.[30:55–31:13] David Hirschfeld: I don’t know if it’s going to do that if it’s going to make you know bigger opportunity I just I don’t see it reducing the number of technical people needed. That you may see a dip at times like we always do and then it’s going to go back up in a different way but you’ll need those technical skills well.[31:13–31:24] Jim: But before I know Mario’s about to say we’re running out of time but before we do just so happens Mario and I are actually meeting with three classes of pre engineering students tomorrow at our high school to talk about AI.[31:24–31:40] Jim: So if you were in front of those three classes tomorrow talk to these pre engineering students what would you tell them what would I tell them I would tell them at these are these I assume are high school kids.[31:40–31:49] Jim: Yes they are really interested and we hope so they’re pre engineering students so we hope they’re interested but you know you never know they’re taking a special class.[31:49–31:53] Mari: They are taking a class of pre engineering.[31:53–32:08] David Hirschfeld: And it’s an elective right and it’s elective. Okay so that’s an important question that before I answer it so the first thing I would say is look learn how to do things yourself right without an AI.[32:08–32:26] David Hirschfeld: You can use AI to help you construct stuff I think it helps teach you how to be a better coder right. It helps you and it helps you learn certain coding languages a lot faster that you might take a lot longer take some very basic stuff though.[32:26–32:37] David Hirschfeld: Because if you don’t learn really the lot of the basics then as you get into more complex stuff you just get lost and you don’t know if it’s doing what you wanted to do or not in a smart way.[32:37–33:01] David Hirschfeld: You can see a designer database if you don’t you know a relational database or a document database if you don’t learn the basic tenants of what why you would want a relational database designed in third normal form or when you wouldn’t want that when you need to do normalize that database I mean these are all technical firms but you don’t learn those things.[33:01–33:16] David Hirschfeld: Then you you can’t guide AI along into creating these structures properly later on and you won’t know why your system is cratering when you start to get some load in certain way and how to fix it.[33:16–33:45] David Hirschfeld: So or how to guide AI to fix it right or if you ask AI to fix it and it comes back with this is what I suggest how do you know does that make sense or not. So I think you need to learn all this stuff but I think you need to develop critical community thinking skills and communication skills it’s way more important that you know how to articulate to AI what your context is and what role you wanted to play and what output you’re looking for.[33:45–33:56] David Hirschfeld: And and if you can do that you get a lot more and and say please and thank you so important so I started doing it I’ve started doing it.[33:56–34:06] Mari: Our daughter always told him she was like dad when the AI comes it’s coming for you first because I was polite not being very nice. I wasn’t doing polite so.[34:06–34:18] Jim: David thank you for saying that’s what my daughter told me that my daughter told me that can you believe if you just do a few tests with it where you say please and thank you.[34:18–34:48] Mari: And you don’t do that you’ll find you’re getting better results from did fun that 6% I think there’s been a study 6% better answers if you’re polite David thank you for saying that you have to you know to do critical thinking and the communication. Because one of the things that we hear a lot in education is from English teachers and social studies teachers is that the kids are going to be really lazy and they’re going to use the AI to do all their work and they’re going to lose all their skills and they’re like fearful of their job.[34:48–35:01] Mari: And we’re like no you know in the future being able to communicate is going to be so much more important because you’re going to have to be able to draw those boxes.[35:01–35:08] Mari: For the AI to work within that box you know you’re going to have to really be very specific about what you’re telling it so.[35:08–35:21] David Hirschfeld: Communication skills are very. It’s a trade off there’s certain skills that just won’t need as much anymore there’s other skills that they will need that they never needed before I like in this to.[35:21–35:41] David Hirschfeld: Typing versus learning how to handwrite neatly right so my wife was a fourth grade teacher for 20 years and in the same classroom the whole time which was like a 10 minute walk from our house she just worked out but and she loved it she retired just two years ago she.[35:41–35:54] David Hirschfeld: She stopped in the last few years recognize last maybe six or seven years said there’s you know and she has great handwriting and she loves to write with pen and paper she said there’s no reason to teach that any.[35:54–36:03] David Hirschfeld: Other than they can recognize it when they see it but there’s no reason for them to be really good a cursive anymore they need to be good really good at typing.[36:03–36:20] Jim: Because our son our youngest son actually treats writing in cursive like an artist he thinks it’s artistic so he learned it. Because he just likes doing it which is an interesting perspective and I think it’s a valid one because not everybody learns to paint some people love it some people don’t.[36:20–36:26] Jim: But you can treat those the skills don’t die just because you don’t teach him every single to fourth grader.[36:26–36:34] David Hirschfeld: They just become more specialized so well I think a problem out of his orana’s the modern day Renaissance man because he.[36:34–36:54] Mari: Right exactly he does calligraphy he does calligraphy so I think the problem that you’re going to run into is that like. There’s been studies now that are coming out about have you don’t learn how to write you don’t learn how to do cursive then you’re not making some brain connection you know some neural net connection and your learning is going to go up and you.[36:54–37:15] Mari: And I agree with all these stuff but I think the problem we’re going to have is that. You could only fit so much information in the time that we have to teach it and so it’s like eventually you’re going to have to let some things drop off like how to read an analog clock.[37:15–37:28] David Hirschfeld: You know might have to drop off so funny the analog clock thing because I remember that my wife was telling me some kids came into her classroom and they had no idea.[37:28–37:43] Mari: How to tell time looking at an analog clock because I’ve always had digital clock right right and it’s like you know I was in the classroom for a long time and if you tell me I have to teach 175 skills and you give me two days to do it.[37:43–37:57] Mari: Yeah I can’t you know so eventually something’s going to have to drop off speaking of dropping off we are out of time David real quick give us like if you wanted to tell somebody where to find you how to find your company.[37:57–38:00] Mari: What do you want to tell him where do they need to go find you.[38:00–38:16] David Hirschfeld: Okay they can you can find me at Tekyz.com Tekyz has spelled tekyz so Tekyz.com and and anybody that made it to the end of this don’t don’t put this link in there but my email is David at Tekyz.com.[38:16–38:34] Mari: So that’s that’s hard to remember that’s hard to remember. Okay well Jim and I are going to be in San Diego the first week of April I will shoot you an email before we head down there maybe we can you know meet for coffee or something we’d love to continue the conversation.[38:34–38:48] Mari: Yeah so all right have a really great evening and everybody out there listening we appreciate you guys listening in make sure you like subscribe all of that good stuff that I’m supposed to say that Jim tells me I’m supposed to say.[38:48–38:54] Mari: So everyone have a marvelous rest of the week thank you thanks David.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.The Launch-First Approach with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Product Market Fit vs. Solution Fit with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/product-market-fit-vs-solution-fit-with-david-hirschfeld-e234b6ff13d2/) - Featured Image: Definitely Maybe Agile Podcast — Product Market Fit Vs. Solution Fithttps://medium.com/media/1084cb6350512dbc33e9ca02386d8b93/hrefThis episode of Definitely Maybe Agile explores the complexities of product management with guest David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz. Hosts Peter Madison and Dave Scherr dive into the importance of understanding customer problems over focusing on features, the distinction between product management and product ownership, and the economics behind successful product decisions. Hirschfeld shares insights on balancing product market fit with product solution fit, leveraging The Mom Test for customer conversations, and prioritizing roadmap items based on real value. Tune in for a deep dive into problem-centric product management strategies that drive success.Key Takeaways from the Episode:Balancing Product Market Fit & Product Solution FitProblem Over Features.Product Management vs. Product Ownership.The Economics of Product ManagementUsing The Mom Test.Data-Driven Prioritization.Customer-Centric Approach Drives Success.Transcript[0:09–0:23] Peter Madison: Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Madison and David Scherr discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Okay. Hello and welcome. And so today’s episode, I have two Daves with me. So I have a Dave and a David. Maybe we’ll stick to Dave and David to keep things clear for our listeners.[0:23–0:32] Peter Madison: So, as usual, I have my good friend Dave, and we’d like to introduce you to David Hirschfeld. So, go ahead, David, introduce yourself.[0:33–0:45] David Hirschfeld: Great. Thanks, Peter and Dave, and thanks for having me on your show. I’m David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Techies, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. We’re a software development company.[0:45–0:59] David Hirschfeld: We build custom software for all kinds of companies and usually end up being outsourced IT for the companies we build software for. And even building some software for ourselves.[0:59–1:11] David Hirschfeld: Founded 18 years ago now and worked with a lot of startups. And we can talk about the product management journey with an existing company or a startup because product management is kind of at the core of the whole thing.[1:12–1:22] Peter Madison: Awesome. I’m looking forward to the conversation. to the conversation. Maybe if we start off with some thoughts around product management, how would you define product management for the organizations you work with?[1:22–1:56] David Hirschfeld: For me, product management is focusing on a blend of product market fit and product solution fit. Now, people get confused with the difference between those two words. Product market fit means that people want to pay money for the product that you built in enough numbers than you figured out the sales process that you can get a three to one ratio between the lifetime value of that customer versus what it costs to acquire new customers, right? So that way you’ve got enough profit, you can reinvest back in the business and grow in scale. That’s product market fit.[1:56–2:14] David Hirschfeld: But once you’ve got people buying your product, then you need them to engage and use it. And that’s product solution fit. And there’s a lot of tweaking and tuning that goes on, especially in the early days with a product to get to basically provide the value that you’re promising to people with the product.[2:14–2:28] David Hirschfeld: You only know that they need it and that the cost and the value proposition are there with product market fit, but not necessarily that it’s actually in day-to-day life solving a problem in a way that makes them engage and work with the product, and that’s product solution fit.[2:28–2:33] David Hirschfeld: And product management is this very complex dance between those two things.[2:34–3:09] Dave Scherr: David, if I can just follow up on that, product management and, in fact, coming from an agile background product ownership are often either conflated or separated or treated in lots of different ways. How are you describing on the one hand that product solution fit, which feels very much more focused on customers and how they’re using the product and whether or not the product is serving their needs in that way. Product market fit is a little bit more on the economics of have you got something which has a market and gives you enough, you know, there’s[3:09–3:20] Dave Scherr: enough need there that you can fund that business. Do you see a natural split, for example, with product manager focusing on one product owner on another? Do you not differentiate through that?[3:20–3:24] Dave Scherr: How would you bring that product owner, product manager conversation to the fore?[3:24–4:00] David Hirschfeld: It’s really, it’s a great question. Let’s say you’re a founder with a new idea, right? And I deal with a lot of founders in the very earliest stages. So this is something, and I’ve been a founder more than once and both for successful startups and failed startups. So I understand the mistakes I’ve made as well and the mistakes other people make from this when you were talking about the product market fit piece, right? So you can basically create a viable business if you’ve got product market fit and the product you’ve built is usable, usable enough that people don’t abandon[4:00–4:34] David Hirschfeld: it once they get it. So I separate the two halves of this, which was your question, like this. There’s a marketing objective, right? And so you have input from marketing, and hopefully that marketing is very clinically driven. So they’re spending all their time understanding the problems that customers are dealing with and the value of the cost of those problems and the perceived impact. Because those are the two main things you need to know from a product market fit perspective. Can I get people’s attention because this problem is threatening enough? That’s the[4:34–5:05] David Hirschfeld: perceived impact. And what’s the cost to them because they’re struggling with this problem? That’s the cost side, right? Because if the cost isn’t high, I can’t charge much. And if the perceived impact isn’t high, I can’t get their attention. So you got to have both those things high, right? So this is product management from the product market fit side. Now, you may nail it with that and create something that looks like something people need and they’re starting to buy at large numbers. Now getting them to engage with it so that you keep those customers over a long[5:05–5:37] David Hirschfeld: period of time, that’s the division where product market fit and product solution fit kind of divide. But I see both of them as a product management problem. If a product manager spends their time listening to customers from the standpoint of how much is the thing they’re asking for truly a problem is how much are they and how much is this problem perceived as being significant to them, threatening to them. It all comes down to how much you feel threatened by something, whether you do something about it or not. I know, you know, we all want to be positive[5:37–6:03] David Hirschfeld: and think of all the great things that we’re doing for the world. But the truth is that we’re only doing good things if we’re taking pain away, even vacations, right? If you think completely different industry, a vacation is only something that sells because people are afraid that they might miss out or that they’re afraid their life is going to be boring or that they don’t have enough family time, they haven’t created enough memories, and they get excited because this is a way to eliminate that fear.[6:03–6:16] David Hirschfeld: So I fought that idea for a long time, but I’ve given up to it because I’ve just seen enough evidence that’s really driven like that. So now a good product manager, from my perspective, understands, focuses on the problem.[6:16–6:27] David Hirschfeld: It’s not about the product. It’s not about, you know, founders that fail love the product and believe in their vision. Those are like code words for I’m going to fail.[6:27–6:40] David Hirschfeld: And product managers, I feel, are the same way. Founders and product managers who are really successful are the ones that love the problem. And they want to spend all their time talking to customers about their problems.[6:41–7:12] David Hirschfeld: How much does that problem cost you How have you mitigated that problem in the past What personal impact does that have on you What are some ways you thought of solving these problems in the past right? Things like that. Never talking about the product. That’s the other thing about product management is talking about features is a sure way to get conflicting information from customers because customers are going to tell you what they think and often they don’t know. They’re going to,[7:12–7:24] David Hirschfeld: try to make you feel good if you suggest a feature and say, here’s a feature I’m thinking about releasing, and they want to make you feel good, and they might say, that sounds like a great feature without really having given it any real thought.[7:25–7:31] David Hirschfeld: But if you talk to them about their problems, they’re going to be really honest about that, and then you can get truth from that.[7:31–8:03] Dave Scherr: As you’re describing that, one of the things that strikes me just from the conversations that I’ve certainly had with product management organizations, product management teams, and product managers is underlying everything that you’ve just been saying there, David, is the presumption of an understanding of the economics of that problem and the product. And so many times I work with product management teams or product managers who have identified the market and the closest they really think about on the economics is, have we got a market that’s big enough that[8:03–8:36] Dave Scherr: we can go in and it’s sort of attractive to us as a business, number one. And number two, how do we deal with pricing rather than so much of what you’re describing there is understanding the problem and the needs and finding a balance where there’s enough of a driving need and there’s enough like cost to that need that they’re prepared to pay money to see a change and that whole economic side of it is often either dealt with early on to say have we got a big enough market[8:36–8:48] Dave Scherr: or if we price it this way, we’re going to get where we need to go. And this is the opportunity to really kind of focus in on where the value is in that product that we’re trying to bring to the table.[8:48–8:51] Dave Scherr: What’s the problem that we’re really trying to solve?[8:51–9:06] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. Yeah, that’s been my experience as well. And if you focus on the problem and you focus on the customer and what the problem means to them, then the solution is really the natural conclusion to that process.[9:07–9:18] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t need to worry about the pricing model from an economics perspective if you really understand the problem and the cost because the pricing model just surfaces automatically, right?[9:18–9:45] David Hirschfeld: And not only the pricing model but the delivery model, right? How you deliver value because that may look different than other products you have in terms of how you charge for it and how you deliver value might be a completely different pricing model because you’re aligning it with the problem and making it easy for somebody to then mitigate the problem in a way that seems very cost-effective to them, which may be a lot more money than how you would have charged if you were looking at it as a pricing problem.[9:45–9:56] Peter Madison: Yeah, there’s a piece where, because there’s an anecdote, we quite often use an agile, a variant of the story of the person who they go and they survey people. They announce new colors of headphones.[9:56–10:10] Peter Madison: You can have blue and yellow and green and black, and they ask everybody in the audience what they think, and everyone in the audience goes, they’ll have the blue one and the green one and the yellow one, and then on the way out they can pick up whatever color they want, and everyone just picks up black.[10:10–10:25] Peter Madison: And when asked why, they pick up black because, well, that’s the one that goes with my outfit. It’s the one that goes in my car. Right, exactly. So there’s this piece around you’ve got to talk to your customers.[10:26–10:32] Peter Madison: You’ve got to find out what they want. You’ve got to do it in the right way, and you’ve got to understand what is that market solution fit.[10:32–10:46] David Hirschfeld: If you ask them about what they like about your features, you’ll never get very valuable information from them. You can watch them use your features and get valuable information, but it’s too late because you’ve already made an investment in creating it.[10:46–10:57] David Hirschfeld: But if you ask them about their problems, then you will get honesty from them, especially if you get to know who your customer is and you’re asking questions that are important and personal to what they do.[10:57–10:59] David Hirschfeld: in context of the thing you’re building.[11:00–11:23] Dave Scherr: David, if it’s okay, can we explore a little bit about your experience in actually talking to prospects or potential customers or target customers? Because, again, when I talk to a lot of product managers and product owners, one of the things that I ask that they consider is building a habit of being in front of prospects and customers like all the time.[11:23–11:36] Dave Scherr: All the time. Like the number of times that we talk to, say, a product manager, and the last time they were actually talking to customers was many months ago. Well, there’s a gap there in just being able to observe what’s there, you know, what they’re up to.[11:37–11:51] Dave Scherr: But then there’s an element of how do you interact with customers. And you’re talking about observing how they’re behaving. But there’s more a case of, I mean, in a design thinking mindset, this is the empathy interviewing and that sort of observation.[11:51–12:03] Dave Scherr: when you’re interacting with customers or potential customers what is what is the most valuable interaction that you try and get more valuable information and how might you get it[12:03–12:34] David Hirschfeld: okay so i try to follow some of the precepts i read in a book called the mom test and i it’s one of the are you familiar with that book yeah it’s a great book right and you know i’ve been talking about this concept for a long time but i didn’t have the detail on the framework that he has for in that book. It was really well done. Basically, the idea is you want to start a new product, right? You want to create a new product or a new business. And if you go and ask your mother, assuming you have a good relationship with your mother, right? You go ask her what she thinks of[12:34–12:56] David Hirschfeld: your idea. And she’s going to say, oh, honey, I think you’re so smart. And it’s a brilliant idea. I know you’re going to be successful, right? Which is totally not helpful and misleading information if you believe what you said. So the question is, the book’s sole premise of it is, How do you ask your mother questions about this idea for a business that you want to start and get honesty from her that’s valuable?[12:57–13:07] David Hirschfeld: And you do that by never talking about the product. You only talk about the problem and the history they’ve had with the problem and products they’ve tried to use to mitigate the problem.[13:08–13:23] David Hirschfeld: And you never bring up your product or features because if you do, as soon as you do, then that will start to lead them. and in ways that may or may not be effective in terms of knowing what it is they need.[13:24–13:41] David Hirschfeld: Because if you really understand the problem really well, there’s a natural way to mitigate it. If you talking about software to automate something for example then that becomes very right And it not always what we would design initially even though what we designed might look great and seem great when you put it in front of somebody.[13:41–14:01] David Hirschfeld: But then as soon as they start to use it, you start to realize you built the wrong product. Assuming you can get them to buy it. That’s the idea of product solution fit. If you can’t get them to buy it, then you really missed customer and the problem because You’re not saying anything compelling to them that makes them want to spend money on the thing that you’ve got, that you were sure.[14:01–14:14] David Hirschfeld: So when I talk with new founders, right, and they’re looking to build a software company, they always come in with vision and belief in themselves. And what I call they’ve got black robe syndrome.[14:14–14:29] David Hirschfeld: You know, they’re basically wearing this robe. They believe if they stay true to their vision and their course, they will be successful. And I slowly try to peel that black robe off of them and wrap them in a white coat and turn everything into an experiment.[14:29–14:42] David Hirschfeld: So if I have a customer that’s telling me that they deal with this problem cost this much and this is how they’ve dealt with it in the past, I say, okay, maybe that’s true of the market and maybe it’s not.[14:42–14:57] David Hirschfeld: So now I need to validate this information with somebody else in the same niche, as a similar level stakeholder in the same position, if I believe that’s the niche that I’m going to try to penetrate, right?[14:57–15:08] David Hirschfeld: And then I’m going to talk with two or three or four or five people just like that and ask the same kinds of questions and start to triangulate. How come they’re not struggling with the problem in the same way?[15:09–15:20] David Hirschfeld: Have they found other ways of solving this problem? Have they just given up on the problem? Do they not get management support, stakeholder support at a higher level to do anything about the problem?[15:20–15:33] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah, it’s a problem, but so what, right? This doesn’t threaten me because nobody cares if I solve it or not, even though it’s a really costly thing, right? But I’m not threatened by it because nobody cares if it gets solved.[15:34–15:45] Dave Scherr: I was just wanting to say that identification that not every problem has a solution that people are prepared to pay for. I mean, there’s lots and lots of problems that people just go, yeah, we’re just going to live with it.[15:46–15:49] Dave Scherr: And it’s costly, but we’re going to live with that. I think that’s great. Yeah.[15:51–16:02] David Hirschfeld: And I want to just jump in two halves to that too, right? One is I’m never going to get any support to fix this because everybody in our industry deals with it and our management’s focused on much bigger initiatives.[16:02–16:13] David Hirschfeld: And so I’m stuck with this, right? That’s for if you work inside a company or if you’re a smaller company, but it could be the opposite. I hate this thing. I’ll do anything to fix it.[16:13–16:26] David Hirschfeld: Oh, it costs more than a dollar. There’s no way I’m going to spend that much money for it because there’s no real cost to this. It’s just something that makes me feel like life is not worth living if I don’t deal with this thing.[16:27–16:38] David Hirschfeld: Right? But you don’t want to go after those either because you can’t make any money on that. Yeah. That person just needs to go see a counselor and get used to living with that issue. I was going to say that might be.[16:38–16:39] Dave Scherr: Yeah.[16:39–16:45] David Hirschfeld: That’s why I say both of those independent things, perceived impact and actual cost, both have to be high.[16:45–16:56] Peter Madison: Yeah, I see that a lot in the infrastructure space, especially if you’ve got capital, which has been spent there invested in something that should have been retired and wasn’t, but now it’s spent cost.[16:57–17:03] Peter Madison: And at that point, replacing it, it’s like, well, it works. Why would I change it? Exactly. The costs are changing.[17:03–17:13] David Hirschfeld: And it might cost a lot, but you can’t get your management to, you know, somebody to allocate the funds for it because it’s not broken.[17:13–17:34] Peter Madison: Yeah. And because there’s a cost of execution, there’s a cost of change, there’s a cost of all of these other pieces. Although I’ve seen some decisions where there are also politics play into this too, that even when it’s a, well, we can save you $700,000 or some large amount of money quite easily for a minimal amount of effort.[17:35–17:43] Peter Madison: And the answer is, well, no, because I have these relationships. And if I — doing this might hurt other relationships in other places. So that’s that.[17:43–17:54] David Hirschfeld: Right. No perceived threat because I’m struggling with this problem. Yeah. That goes right back to that, right? No will to make a change. No, right?[17:54–18:11] David Hirschfeld: And also there’s the what’s the risk of making a change? Maybe it’s expensive and we’re really afraid of this thing, but what’s the risk if I try to change it and it doesn’t work? So all that goes into this kind of like, you know, whatever the person’s perception is in terms of how threatened they are by this thing.[18:11–18:30] David Hirschfeld: The risk has to get to be really high that this thing will fail versus the risk of if I don’t make the change or if I make the change. So, but product managers, I find, often focus on all these little feature things that don’t get right because they’re wearing the black.[18:30–18:52] David Hirschfeld: Product managers put the black robe on, right? And they also feel like their job is to work with development. That’s where I think product managers lose focus. They think they are supposed to be doing all of this work to make sure development’s clear on what they’re supposed to do as opposed to understanding what the problems that the customer has and starting to drive direction from that perspective.[18:52–18:53] David Hirschfeld: I don’t know if you find that a lot, but yeah.[18:53–19:30] Dave Scherr: Yeah, I’m just thinking as you’re describing that, David, I’m thinking that there’s an interesting consequence of being focused on the features. So one of the things that I’m often seeing in product management conversations that I have is that as a product manager trying to get product built, there’s often a lack of authority on the product management side to actually get the right people in the room to build what’s needed and if you’re focused on these are the features on my product roadmap then it’s really difficult to be persuasive in saying this is what has to be built next and so[19:30–20:00] Dave Scherr: then getting access to limited capacity on the development side or limited skill sets or whatever it might be can be really difficult in the larger organizations. But if your product manager is focused on the economic value, the problem itself, and how big of a problem it is and how much attention it’s getting, that suddenly gives a lot more weight to the request, the demands of the product manager on the delivery teams, on the development side.[20:01–20:31] David Hirschfeld: There’s an equation that you can make there, too. and that is if you look at everything on your roadmap and you put a value to it from how much will this drive revenue right in terms of the cost of the problem that’s solving and whether or not it something you going a chargeable feature or or and how much you going to charge for to mitigate that problem If you put that there versus the cost to build the thing versus the time it takes and the risks[20:31–20:47] David Hirschfeld: and versus other things like we have competitive pressures and we’re going to start losing customers if we don’t address these other issues, which is not really a generating new revenue feature, but it’s keeping our existing revenue current and then model those things, right?[20:47–21:07] David Hirschfeld: So how fast are we going to lose customers? How fast will we get new customers and new revenue? And it’s not an either or. It’s just having a clear understanding of that equation because if you’re going to get new customers much faster than the ones you might lose that don’t have certain features, then that seems like an easy decision to make.[21:07–21:21] David Hirschfeld: But if it’s the other way around, then you know you need to do things to shore up or catch up with a competitor in a certain area where they’re going to be pulling customers away from you. I don’t think product managers very usually do that sort of thing.[21:21–21:34] David Hirschfeld: And I’ll give you an example with CRMs, with some of the CRMs on the market. One of the things they don’t seem to understand is that users of their products are utility users.[21:34–21:45] David Hirschfeld: They don’t need it to be pretty. They needed to be highly efficient, lots of information packed close together on the screen. And there’s a very different, and that solves a big problem.[21:45–22:02] David Hirschfeld: It makes it very easy to deal with a lot of information quickly and navigate and move around. But instead, a lot of these CRM vendors just naturally create these really pretty screens with all this white space, these rows that have big, lots of information in one row.[22:02–22:23] David Hirschfeld: and I’m looking at a list of customers, I can only see 10 on a screen instead of 40 or 50. And that is like enormously frustrating, right? And I know they’re losing customers to that, but they’re focused on new features that they can generate more money so they can compete better instead of just building something that really has value and solves problems.[22:24–22:37] David Hirschfeld: I’ve even gotten on the phone with a couple different CRM companies because this bothers me so much, right, with their product management teams. And I say this and they don’t hear it because they’re not focused on customer problems.[22:37–22:46] David Hirschfeld: They’re focused on trying to create revenue with new features instead of spending their time really working with customers on the problems.[22:46–22:56] Peter Madison: Yeah, there’s a lack of alignment to what the organization’s telling you, what goals they have, and there’s nothing to say from a product ownership perspective. How do I quantify that?[22:56–23:10] Peter Madison: I found in a lot of the organizations we work with us, one of the first things we end up working with them on, under whatever framework or guise it needs to be, whether it’s OKRs or Bounce Call Calls, some form of saying, okay, how do we start to quantify this?[23:10–23:25] Peter Madison: So that when we start to look at, like, what’s this thing we’re going to do, how much impact is it going to have? Can we quantify that? Does it align to our objectives? Does it align to what we’re looking to do? And which helps with prioritization and deciding, well, what things should we not do?[23:25–23:27] Peter Madison: because really it’s not going to have the impact we’re expecting.[23:28–23:48] Dave Scherr: I was, Dave, just wondering about how much the buyer versus the customer or the user comes into that. Because in the CRM space, the utility users, the ones who are using that product day in, day out, are invariably not the ones actually making the decision to use that CRM.[23:48–23:59] David Hirschfeld: I was thinking of the SMB space, not the larger company. So like Salesforce, for example, actually does address this really well, right?[23:59–24:07] David Hirschfeld: But their focus is not the SMB space. Right. But the ones that focus on the SMB space are trying to make the products really pretty instead of making it really efficient.[24:07–24:15] Peter Madison: And what you mean, I’ve spent some time going through CRM solutions and haven’t found one that doesn’t make me want to throw things at the screen. Exactly.[24:15–24:27] David Hirschfeld: Just because of the way the screens are laid out, right? Yeah. I don’t know about you, but my eyes start to cross when I see all that white space. I just want to see things packed together because I’m trying to do a lot really fast.[24:27–24:39] David Hirschfeld: I want all that information right there. Anyway. You’re flicks. Right. And I’ve got, by the way, just with techies, I’ve gone through several CRMs just because of the stupid thing. So I’m not the only person that they’re losing.[24:39–24:53] Peter Madison: So we’re almost at the end of our time here. And I want to thank you, David, for all the great conversation. And I’m sure we’ve all enjoyed it. And we usually like to finish up with sort of three things and with three of us, get one each.[24:53–24:58] Peter Madison: So I think I will start with Dave. What’s your?[24:58–25:15] Dave Scherr: Yeah, I’m going to come back to the mum test, that book. And I asked the question about just how to talk to prospects and customers. And I think, you know, drawing that whole idea of don’t talk about the product, don’t talk about the features, talk about the problem.[25:15–25:27] Dave Scherr: was that I think I’ll add that into many of the conversations I have because, you know, it’s a great kind of walkaway piece of information or knowledge to take with you.[25:27–25:28] Dave Scherr: And David?[25:28–25:49] David Hirschfeld: If you are in love with your product and you’re in love with and you believe in your vision, then you need to step back and reconsider this business that you’re in or at least the position you’re in in the business because being in love with the product doesn’t serve you.[25:49–26:12] David Hirschfeld: Being in love with your customers will serve you. Having vision doesn’t serve you unless you’re Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or whatever, right? Having but understanding and being in love and wanting to talk to customers all the time about their problems will serve you and continue to make you better and improve the product, even though you’re not talking about the product, and generate more revenue.[26:12–26:28] Peter Madison: Yeah, I love that. I think that’s a great framing. So really appreciate you sharing. I think if I was going to add the third point in, I think I liked your framing of things in terms of the product market fit and product solution fit right at the beginning.[26:28–26:54] Peter Madison: there is that it’s a useful framing model to think of the sort of different modes under which you operate because it ties in very well to the conversations we end up having with organizations around well what should our product managers be doing and where should they be focused because very often they’re not focused in the right place i’d like to thank both of you as always and uh so we’ll we’ll wrap up there and uh i look forward to next time yeah thank you peter thank you dave[26:54–26:56] David Hirschfeld: this was really fun. Thanks a lot, David.[26:56–27:08] Peter Madison: Thanks, Peter. Thanks. You’ve been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Pete Madison and David Sherrick, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Product Market Fit vs. Solution Fit with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Launch and Scale Without Wasting Your Money and Resources](https://tekyz.com/launch-and-scale-without-wasting-your-money-and-resources-99fc93978ead/) - Featured Image: Launch and Scale Without Wasting Your Money and Resourceshttps://medium.com/media/a4ffc610da01e9a0de6478b29b94ff65/hrefIn this episode of The Bulletproof Business Podcast, Simone Jansen and David Hirschfeld challenge the traditional vision-first approach to business growth. David emphasizes the importance of a clinical, data-driven mindset, prioritizing problem validation and market fit over assumptions. The discussion covers identifying bottlenecks, the concept of logarithmic scaling, and the critical role of documenting tribal knowledge for long-term success. Tune in to learn why a “fail fast, cheap” approach can help businesses scale efficiently and sustainably.Vision vs. Clinical Approach in Business GrowthThis podcast episode of Bulletproof Business Growth discusses the importance of a clinical approach to business growth, challenging the common advice of prioritizing vision above all else.Debunking the Vision-First ApproachDavid discusses that while vision is important as a starting point, founders must treat their initial vision as a set of assumptions to be tested. He encourages founders to adopt a “clinical” approach, rigorously proving their assumptions rather than relying solely on belief. “Most founders I deal with…believe…if they just believe enough…they’re going to be successful. And what I found is that’s usually code words for I’m going to fail.”The Importance of a Clinical ApproachDavid shares his own experiences with both success and failure in software startups, emphasizing the importance of validating product-market fit early. He points out the high failure rate of software companies, attributing it to waiting too long to validate product-market fit. “There’s only one way to validate product-market fit…people will buy your product for enough money that…lifetime value versus cost of acquisition is three to one or higher.” Jansen notes this contradicts the common “build it and they will come” mentality.Loving the Problem, Not the ProductDavid argues that successful founders “love the problem” and focus on understanding customer pain points, rather than being enamored with their product. “They don’t talk about their product…They talk about what the problems are.” Jansen emphasizes this point: “They don’t love the product. They love the problem. And they stay close to the problem to make a much better product.” Hirschfeld adds that focusing on building a “better” product can distract from actually solving the customer’s problem.Identifying and Addressing BottlenecksThe discussion shifts to applying these principles to existing companies. Hirschfeld explains the logarithmic relationship to scaling, meaning that different strategies are required at different stages of growth.” The same thing that got you here is not going to be the thing that gets you to the next level.” He advises focusing on identifying and addressing bottlenecks, prioritizing those that are currently limiting growth. “I just focus on the next bottleneck…as soon as I fix it, my business continues to grow.”Documenting Tribal KnowledgeThe conversation concludes with the importance of documenting “tribal knowledge.” David outlines three key reasons for documentation: enabling efficient onboarding of new employees, mitigating the risk of losing intellectual property when employees leave, and increasing the value of the company for potential acquisition. He recommends creating “playbooks” to document processes and nuances, facilitating scaling and automation.Key TakeawaysThis episode emphasized the need for a clinical, data-driven approach to business growth, challenging the traditional focus on vision. Key takeaways include treating initial visions as assumptions to be tested, prioritizing understanding customer problems over product features, focusing on identifying and addressing bottlenecks, and documenting tribal knowledge through playbooks to facilitate scaling and protect intellectual property. Hirschfeld encourages founders to “fail fast, cheap” to quickly validate product-market fit.Transcript[0:00–0:14] Simone Jansen: Welcome to Bulletproof Business Podcast, the place for direct to the point business and leadership lessons, step by step, easy to implement in bite sized pieces. This is something you can use to make a difference in your business today.[0:14–0:25] Simone Jansen: Listen now so I can help you build a scalable and sustainable business. Lead like the leader you always wanted to have and create a legacy that returns high profits, impact and fun.[0:25–0:43] Simone Jansen: I’m Simone Jansen, your host, former COO and CPO turned seven-figure entrepreneur. Let’s get started. Hi, everybody. Simone here with Bulletproof Business Growth, as always, with some ideas and insights of what to pay attention to when you’re growing and scaling your business.[0:43–0:51] Simone Jansen: I’m super excited today. We have a guest with us, David Hirschfeld. Welcome, David. We are really excited to have you here.[0:52–0:54] David Hirschfeld: I’m excited to be here, Simone. Thank you.[0:54–1:06] Simone Jansen: It’ll be a fun conversation. David is a 35-year software development veteran and a strategic advisor specializing in AI-driven workflow transformations and so much more in sort of development.[1:06–1:19] Simone Jansen: And he’s held leadership roles at Tech Giants and founded his own successful startup. And now he has developed the Launch First method, a systematic approach to accelerating software company growth.[1:19–1:29] Simone Jansen: David, we’re not transforming business strategies. I saw that you enjoy things like woodworking and golfing. That’s a nice way to get away from the systems and the technology.[1:29–1:46] Simone Jansen: So, lovely to have you here. So, David and I, we’re having this really interesting discussion that’s kind of started with completely debunking what I usually say. Because many of you who’ve been here before and have listened to me before, you’ve heard me say a bazillion times, to like start with the vision.[1:47–2:01] Simone Jansen: Vision always goes first. Without your vision, you are not anything. And David and I were just talking about this, and he’s like, no, the vision is actually not where you should start. So, David, tell me where you bust my chops because that’s a good one for our audience to hear.[2:02–2:15] David Hirschfeld: Well, actually, I want to qualify that. I think you do start with the vision, right? That’s the first thing is you’ve got a vision. You have a belief in what you think is going to be your product, your market, your business, right?[2:15–2:27] David Hirschfeld: But you have to step back and say, okay, most of what I believe in are assumptions. So most founders I deal with, they come in wearing the black robe, right? They have this vision. They believe in their vision.[2:27–2:38] David Hirschfeld: They believe in themselves. And they feel like if they just believe enough and stay true to their path, they’re going to be successful. And what I found is that’s usually code words for I’m going to fail.[2:38–2:54] David Hirschfeld: if they can’t step back and take the black robe off. So I gently try to peel the black robe off of founders that I work with and then slowly kind of wrap them in a white coat so they become clinicians about their business because you have to prove everything.[2:54–3:02] David Hirschfeld: And this concept of proving everything is something that never ends in your business if you’re successful and you grow and you scale.[3:02–3:13] Simone Jansen: And I think it’s counterintuitive to most of our business owner clients or startup founders who are, you know, creatives. They’re product people.[3:13–3:31] Simone Jansen: They’re excited about what they’re doing. So you’re saying they have to become clinicians, which, I mean, I can’t. I was laughing when I was talking to David because I was like, oh, if somebody had told me I needed to be a clinician about my business first and really prove everything first, I would have saved many hundred thousand dollars.[3:32–3:41] Simone Jansen: Would have gone into better uses than, you know, the pocket of Facebook or somewhere else. Right. Tell us a little bit about what it looks like to be a clinician in your business.[3:41–3:58] David Hirschfeld: Sure. And I can even kind of juxtapose these two positions because I had my first software company. I started in 92 and was successful. We ran it for eight years, built it to 800 customers in 22 countries, and sold it to a publicly traded firm in 2000.[3:58–4:09] David Hirschfeld: And I was VP of products for them for the next several years, thinking, you know, that, oh, here I am, and I know what I’m doing. I had a successful startup. We exited and I know how to do it again because I did it once.[4:09–4:25] David Hirschfeld: But I didn’t realize the things I did the first time sort of accidentally that made us successful, which very much supports what I’m talking about when I talk about launch first, because I tried it again in 2005 with another product where I didn’t follow the same playbook.[4:25–4:37] David Hirschfeld: It was a different playbook because I thought it was a different market and a different product. And that one failed. And that failed for all the same reasons why. And I started Tekyz, my current software company.[4:37–4:52] David Hirschfeld: I started that right after the ashes of that one. So my spirit animal is a phoenix, right? From the ashes, you start, you build something new. Anyway, that was 18 years ago. And since then, I’ve worked with around 90 plus startups, and a few of them really successful.[4:52–5:03] David Hirschfeld: The vast majority, though, failed. In the software world, the number of failures, and I know this because I talk with lots of other software shops that do custom development for software companies.[5:03–5:16] David Hirschfeld: It’s like 95% or higher. Software companies that have an idea and they actually invest in it and fail. And they all fail for the same reason. And I watched this and it finally dawned on me what that is.[5:16–5:29] David Hirschfeld: Like around 2018 or 19 when I came up with Launch First, they just wait too long to validate product market fit. And there’s only one way to validate product market fit.[5:29–5:40] David Hirschfeld: And that is you go to the market and people will buy your product for enough money that the cost of acquisition versus the lifetime value of your customers, you have a three to one ratio.[5:41–5:57] David Hirschfeld: I said that in reverse. Lifetime value versus cost of acquisition is three to one or higher. And that’s how you know you’ve got a viable, scalable business. You can have a two-to-one or one-and-a-half-to-one, and it may be enough to have a viable business where you have some profit, and it’s going to be a lifestyle thing.[5:57–6:03] David Hirschfeld: But it’s not viable from a scalability perspective because there’s not enough energy that you can put back into the business.[6:03–6:28] Simone Jansen: Yeah, so actually putting the product out there, marketing the product first, putting it on the market before actually even building it, I think this might be a brain blow-up for quite a few of our listeners Because it completely opposite of what we generally taught It like build the thing and they will come It generally what everybody thinks I noticed at some point or other that that does not work[6:29–7:00] David Hirschfeld: No, it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because they don’t need what you have for the same reasons that you thought they would need it. Even if you’re coming from an industry where people struggle with a problem that you’re struggling with and you have some reach to that industry, you have much better odds of creating something successful, but their reason other people in your industry for the cost and the impact that they have to those problems are not necessarily exactly the same as yours. So one of the things that’s a common trait of successful founders or founders[7:00–7:31] David Hirschfeld: that fail is they love their product and they believe people will buy it if they build it. That’s code words for I’m going to fail. Founders who are consistently successful and find a path to success, love the problem, and want to spend their time talking to customers. The product that they build to mitigate those problems is sort of just a natural conclusion of that process, not the thing they love. They love the problem. They stay close to the problem. They stay close to their customers, and they don’t talk about their product and how to fix the problems. They[7:31–7:41] David Hirschfeld: talk about what the problems are, so they get a really cellular level understanding of the pain, the cost, the personal impact that these problems have to their customers.[7:41–7:42] David Hirschfeld: And then it’s easy.[7:42–7:52] Simone Jansen: I want to highlight that, David, because what you just said is, I think, super important. They don’t love the product. They love the problem. And they stay close to the problem to make a much better product.[7:53–8:06] David Hirschfeld: Yes, exactly. Well, because it’s not about making a better product. It’s about solving the problem. Yes. You know, if they’re focused on the better product, they want to build something they’re really proud of, that gets in the way of actually focusing on the problem.[8:06–8:21] David Hirschfeld: And I’m guilty of doing all these things, by the way. So it’s not coming out of hubris. It’s coming out of all the pain of the mistakes I’ve made and watched other people make over the years. Where a perfect example is, as founders of software companies, we have a tendency to get excited about the features.[8:21–8:31] David Hirschfeld: And we put in so many features that really have no value from a sellability perspective to the client and aren’t really solving any problem. It may make it a little easier to use and be kind of cool.[8:31–8:43] David Hirschfeld: Who cares? Right? Unless you’re Facebook. You know, who cares about that? Even if you’re Facebook, you don’t care. Facebook cares about the things that cause people to click more, right? And they measure everything.[8:44–8:57] David Hirschfeld: And they know what works, what doesn’t. And when it’s not working, it’s gone. When it’s working, it gets blown up until it stops working. So a company like Facebook, this is a super clinical approach to how they grow their business.[8:57–9:12] David Hirschfeld: And even how we launched it, right? Zuckerberg spent a month building some very simple, ugly interface. But it was kind of new in the sense that you could have a group of people that you were having a group chat with and it could grow.[9:12–9:22] David Hirschfeld: And each person has their own visibility in the social group. And it was the first time that had been done. And it just started taking off. And he just followed the analytics the whole time.[9:23–9:29] David Hirschfeld: You know, if you want to say he’s brilliant, I would say that’s his brilliance is that it was always a science experiment to him.[9:29–9:45] Simone Jansen: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I mean, it reminds me of one of the first startups I worked with for quite a while, helping them develop their leadership and operational systems. And one thing, they were constantly entrenched in were all the edge cases, the customer edge cases.[9:45–9:55] Simone Jansen: And they were constantly building and building and building and building for that. And it was costing unbelievable amounts of money and resources. And at some point, they finally hired somebody to look at that.[9:55–10:07] Simone Jansen: And this person said, look, you’re not going to build it unless it’s something that fits 80% of your customers. And unless we’re not building it. And it was completely against the culture.[10:07–10:16] Simone Jansen: It was completely against everything that they believed in. And it took a really long time to kind of get people away from that. But I’m so glad you’re mentioning that because it’s a really big piece.[10:16–10:26] David Hirschfeld: So that’s a good question. How do you distinguish when somebody says, I really need this, whether it’s something that’s really needed or it’s something they feel they need or they want.[10:27–10:38] David Hirschfeld: Or just that one person, right? Well, of course, then it’s a matter of having a little bit of discipline that you’re validating this with other people. So that’s part of the equation. But part of it is also how do you know this is truly solving a problem?[10:38–10:49] David Hirschfeld: How do you quantify the problem it’s solving in terms of, you know, there’s two things that I always look for. One is what’s the perceived impact of a problem to the stakeholder that might be buying it?[10:49–11:00] David Hirschfeld: And that means, perception means like, this is killing me because, or I’m afraid if I don’t solve this, it’s going to something that comes back to me personally.[11:01–11:11] David Hirschfeld: What is that? It’s got to be a fear-based thing. You won’t get their attention. You won’t get them to buy it if there’s not fear involved. I know that’s our survival at some level. And I know that sounds very expensive.[11:12–11:27] David Hirschfeld: Well, for them to buy it, it means that it’s taking pain out of their life of some kind. And, you know, at some level, there’s some survival instinct that’s kicking in or they won’t buy it. Vacations, even those, when you think, oh, it’s all about excitement and, you know, but it’s not.[11:27–11:39] David Hirschfeld: It’s about you’re afraid, you see it and you think, oh, God, if I don’t go, I may never go. I’m going to miss out. Beer gets triggered that makes you want to do these things. It might be really exciting and all that, but that’s not what drives it.[11:39–11:49] David Hirschfeld: If you were just satisfied, you looked at this vacation, it looks like, ah, it’s fun, but my life is fun, then when would you ever go on a vacation, right? There’s got to be something.[11:50–11:57] Simone Jansen: It’s always a terrible time to go on a vacation, so you have to have some really driving to do it.[11:58–12:10] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, right. Or you’re afraid your life is out of balance, so you better do something to balance it. Or you need to create memories. If you don’t create memories, you’re going to be a lousy partner or parent or whatever. There’s something always driving, right?[12:10–12:26] David Hirschfeld: It’s on my bucket list. What if I don’t knock everything off my bucket list in my life? I’ve got to do at least one every couple of years or I’m a failure as far as living my life. Whatever it is, there’s something going on way back there unconsciously that drives even the things we do that seem like they’re all about positive.[12:27–12:38] David Hirschfeld: So when it comes to people paying for a product on the market, then that has to be driven by some need, which is some survival mechanism. So that’s the one thing I measure.[12:39–12:57] David Hirschfeld: Is there a real perception from that stakeholder that indicates that this eliminates that problem that they having from a root level The other one is how much is it costing them because of the problem And those are two independent numbers because you can have a very high cost and a very low perceived impact.[12:57–13:08] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, I know that costs us a lot, that problem. But, you know, everybody in our industry struggles with that. And the CEO of the company is not going to get behind it because he’s got all these other, right? That would be the opposite, right?[13:08–13:18] David Hirschfeld: It’s not going to affect me if I don’t do anything about that because everybody else struggles with it, and it’s just endemic in our industry or whatever. That would be an example. The opposite can be true. You can have something where this kills me.[13:18–13:32] David Hirschfeld: I hate it. It’s so inconvenient. The cost is not very high, but it just makes me miserable, right? So, yeah, I could probably get their attention and sell it, but not for very much money. So, that’s not going to be a good thing to put it up.[13:32–13:46] David Hirschfeld: You want them both high. You can get their attention. They lean forward when you talk about their problems. They realize you understand it. And you can charge a lot because it’s solving a really costly problem. And that should be always the top priority things that you’re dealing with.[13:46–13:58] Simone Jansen: Yeah, I love that. So when we’re looking at this, you know, you and I were talking a little bit about this is definitely something that younger companies should be paying attention to when they’re first getting started, when they’re launching.[13:58–14:14] Simone Jansen: But then say, you know, a lot of our clients have been in the business for a long time. And, you know, how do you apply this to existing companies? So they can really learn, you know, like what do they need to pay attention to so they can actually get to that next level of business.[14:14–14:26] David Hirschfeld: So I learned some years ago, and I’ve got to look it up. I keep saying that. And I’ve got to look up to try to figure out where this came from. But I learned several years ago that there’s a logarithmic relationship to scaling.[14:27–14:40] David Hirschfeld: So whatever you do to get from zero to 10 and you implement all the things that you need to do to make it to 10, that’s sort of a dividing line. Now to go from 10 to 100, you can’t keep doing those same things because you’re at a different scale.[14:41–14:53] David Hirschfeld: And now 10 to 100 requires a whole new kind of architecture for how to scale from 10 to 100. When you get to 100, you’re going to hit a ceiling too if you’re not planning on that 100 to 1,000 skip. And each time it’s sort of a factor of 10.[14:53–15:02] David Hirschfeld: And I have found this to be true, and I need to figure out where that came from because it was, I thought, oh, that’s interesting. And then I did a retrospective and realized it was exactly right.[15:02–15:07] Simone Jansen: Simple way of saying that, right? the same thing that got you here is not going to be the thing that gets you to the next level.[15:08–15:38] David Hirschfeld: That’s a really simple way of saying it. And you can even look at it from a military’s perspective. You can have somebody who’s responsible for about 12 people, you know, direct response. And then those 12 people can be responsible for about 12 people each. You end up with like 130, 144, you know, in that group. And then at each level, it’s a multiple of that. So, and you can look at the hierarchy in military and it follows, you know, what’s the most reach you can have and still be an efficient end control. And scaling is kind of like that, both from an architect business[15:38–15:53] David Hirschfeld: infrastructure perspective, as well as how you reach the market and how you plan your product growth and all that. So now how do you identify, let’s say you’re at the zero to 10, but you’re only at six and you’re sort of stuck there. So you look, there are a few different things, right?[15:53–16:21] David Hirschfeld: One is where are the bottlenecks in my business? Like if I could fix that one problem in my business, all of a sudden it would start to grow. And then as it happened with all businesses, once that bottleneck is restricted, everything’s flowing into whatever the next restriction is or a restriction upstream that prevents it from growing faster because that’s no longer a restriction. And understanding these bottlenecks and prioritizing them based on the ones that are preventing you from growing now versus the ones that will prevent you next.[16:21–16:32] David Hirschfeld: This was something that Michael Dell talked about in a Forbes magazine interview about 20 years ago when they talked about his success for scaling. He said, I just focus on the next bottleneck. Whatever that is, that’s what gets my attention.[16:32–16:47] David Hirschfeld: Because as soon as I fix it, my business continues to grow. And a lot of this has to do with manual processes versus automation. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And so that’s where the workflow automation and now AI automation, making it very much easier to eliminate some of these bottlenecks, comes in.[16:47–17:00] Simone Jansen: Yeah, I mean, for sure. I can’t even tell you how many times I talk to a new client. And they don’t have super simple things like a CRM that will make their lead capture and sales life much, much easier and their nurture of their clients.[17:01–17:17] Simone Jansen: Right. Or, you know, simple pieces of software that keep everybody on the same page and that ensures that everybody is actually having a shared workflow and any of those types. Right. I think sometimes people at this point are getting so overwhelmed by the multitude of products that are available.[17:17–17:24] Simone Jansen: I think that sometimes I see people just kind of doing nothing instead, which is kind of interesting, but that certainly doesn’t fix the problem.[17:25–17:26] David Hirschfeld: Right. It does not fix the problem.[17:26–17:37] Simone Jansen: No. And I mean, David and I were just talking about this. Another really good book out there by Michael McKellar. It’s called Fix This Next. And it focuses on, you know, how do you find those bottlenecks?[17:37–17:52] Simone Jansen: Because a lot of times what I hear people say to me all the time is, oh, I need more leads. And then the question is really, well, is it really that you need more leads? Or is it that the leads you’re getting, you’re not properly caring for them, you’re not converting them, you’re actually not turning into sales?[17:52–18:09] Simone Jansen: And then are we looking at, you know, the sales, are they happening at a level where you’re actually profitable? So many variables to what the problem is that we’re solving that I think is really tough when you’re in that, you know, 1 to 10 range and you’re maybe at the 6.[18:09–18:21] Simone Jansen: It’s like, what is the part that actually will enable me to make that leap? Because I think that’s where when you think about scaling, you’re looking for a leap. You’re not looking for an inching sort of deal.[18:21–18:38] David Hirschfeld: Right, right. And it’s a blend of lots of inching and the big leaps, right? Yeah. Yeah, it’s really kind of, I think it’s a blend of both. You got to inch, like you just improve the existing processes you’re not following, start to get better protocols and discipline around them so that you’re starting to improve those of the inches.[18:38–18:49] David Hirschfeld: And then the leaps is we just automated something completely, Or we just targeted a new market because we did our niche analysis and realized we have a soft market that we never realized we had. And now we start to reach out to that market.[18:50–19:00] David Hirschfeld: We’re hitting a bunch of sales much more easily at less cost, you know, things like that. Yeah. Or we improve our ability to deliver product to the client much faster.[19:00–19:03] David Hirschfeld: Or we’re providing better service that we can now start to charge for.[19:03–19:36] Simone Jansen: Yeah those are all really important steps in the business that I think a lot of times in the craziness of business it gets lost what to focus on next Right Another piece that you mentioned that I wanted to just touch on is a lot of our clients don’t necessarily document what’s happening. So you and I were discussing, you know, when people have had employees for a long time, there’s a lot of tribal knowledge and that kind of gets usurped and then what happens when that person leaves and you have nothing to implement it,[19:36–19:41] Simone Jansen: nothing is there. So what can you think of, like what are some ways that you would recommend for[19:41–20:08] David Hirschfeld: people to address that in the easiest way? Okay. And there’s two really important reasons in my mind why you need to. Well, three, one, you want to bring in new people because you want to scale up that part of your business. That person has to now be mentored by the person who knows how to do that job really well until they can run independently, which slows down their productivity and reduces the ability for the new person to come in and grow into that job more quickly because they’re dependent on somebody.[20:09–20:25] David Hirschfeld: That’s number one. Number two is, like you said, what happens if that person with all the tribal knowledge walks out, leaves before you’ve had a chance to transfer that knowledge to somebody else, which happens constantly in companies, in mature companies as well as less mature companies.[20:25–20:41] David Hirschfeld: And number three is what’s the intellectual property of your business if it’s not all this tribal knowledge, right? And if you want to sell your company, people are not confident about the value of your business when it’s all based on two or three individuals in the company.[20:42–21:16] David Hirschfeld: So to the degree you can document those, what I call playbooks. I didn’t name this. This is just a term that makes sense and I like it. document this in terms of playbooks, all of these discrete activities and all the nuances associated with them, that increases the value of your company dramatically from the perspective of an acquirer. It also gives you the ability to scale your business much more easily because now new people coming in, I’m not saying they don’t get mentored at all by people with a lot of experience, but they now have all of this information they can easily access that tells[21:16–21:38] David Hirschfeld: them in all these different edge cases what to do with a client or how to ship or how to do customer service or whatever the area of scaling that you need. And when automation is there to be able to do that job for people so that you can scale faster, now you have it all documented so you can implement that automation, AI automation, like AI voice calling or whatever that is,[21:38–22:10] Simone Jansen: you can implement it much more easily. Yeah, those are all huge pieces. So to kind of wrap up the key points what we talked about today is like we started with vision is not necessarily first i mean yes and no but it’s not necessarily the driving factor which you know i’m always the one talking about vision first so that was a really good eye opener and then in terms of making sure that you’re always looking at hey what’s my next bottleneck so that you always identify like where do i need to put all my attention so that we don’t get stuck when we’re really trying to scale fast[22:10–22:21] Simone Jansen: And then what we just wrapped up with is making sure that document, document, document, that you have playbooks, that there’s huge intrinsic value in these playbooks. That’s actually what your business is.[22:22–22:30] Simone Jansen: And, yes, the people are super important, but if it’s all dependent on people, the second they leave, they leave with your IP. That’s not a good thing.[22:31–23:04] David Hirschfeld: That was a really, really good summary of the conversation. Yeah, they did a nice job there consolidating it. I do want to say one more thing about the vision part. vision is a critical success factor from the standpoint of it gives you the ability to start and gives you an idea of where you’re going right that’s what your vision does and it gets other people on board with this idea but it does nothing to get you there so that’s what people don’t understand they think the vision is driving them in that direction it just gives them an arrow to point right that’s what the vision does says this is the direction we’re going until we have[23:04–23:19] David Hirschfeld: reason to believe that’s not the direction we should go but that results in a new vision a new understanding of your market, which then gives you a new direction. But pass that arrow pointing part, then put on the white coat, turn everything into a clinical proof process, and then grow your[23:19–23:37] Simone Jansen: business like that and measure it. I’m going to definitely be asking people about the black coat and the white coat that we know when to put on what, because I think that’s a great way. Now, David, I know that LaunchPurse is your company that you’re working with right now that has a very in-depth and very cool way of helping companies do this.[23:37–23:44] Simone Jansen: If somebody wanted to reach out to you and work with you or get more information, how would they best find you?[23:44–23:59] David Hirschfeld: Sure. And Tekyz, which is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z dot com, we’re a software development firm, right? So we build applications. Launch First is a methodology to help people that have either a new product they want to put out in the market or they’re a startup.[23:59–24:10] David Hirschfeld: and how to get there de-risking the whole venture and get to revenue really quickly. And that came out of Tekyz, right, because of all these software companies I worked with that failed, including one of my own.[24:10–24:18] David Hirschfeld: So to get a hold of me, david at Tekyz.com. That won’t be in the links, but I like to share it. Anybody made it to the end of the podcast.[24:18–24:29] Simone Jansen: One thing that David said to me that I want to highlight for everybody, fail fast, cheap. That’s what you want to do. Right. Because you want to figure out what it is that you don’t want to do really quickly.[24:30–24:33] Simone Jansen: You can figure out what it is that you do want to do. Right.[24:33–24:38] David Hirschfeld: Proof product market fit quickly and inexpensively or fail fast and cheap.[24:38–24:49] Simone Jansen: Love that. Right. David, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure having you here today. I’m sure our listeners will get a ton out of this, and hopefully they’ll get a hold of you to get more info.[24:50–24:51] Simone Jansen: Have a great rest of your day. Okay.[24:52–24:54] David Hirschfeld: Thanks, Simone. And thank you for having me on the show.[24:54–25:12] Simone Jansen: Absolutely. We will talk again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Bulletproof Business Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor. Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and leave us a review so other people can find our life and business changing content that we share here.[25:12–25:23] Simone Jansen: We want to make the world a better place one business owner at a time. So thank you so much for being a part of the community and for tuning into the show each and every week.[25:25–25:55] : Thank you.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Launch and Scale Without Wasting Your Money and Resources was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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The debate addresses challenges that startups and large corporations encounter in adopting AI, specific hurdles in different countries, and the changes needed to become an AI-first company.https://medium.com/media/f63a02465ed45bd63570d093860a2d1a/hrefChaptersCatching the AI Wave: Navigating Technological DisruptionDavid Hirschfeld’s Startup Journey and Tekyz’s MissionTransitioning to an AI-First Organization: Internal InnovationsQuantifying Efficiency Gains Through AI IntegrationChallenges in Large-Scale AI AdoptionAI in Customer-Facing Applications: Building Trust and ReliabilityGeopolitical Considerations and Data Privacy in AICompetitive Advantages and Tools for AI-Driven DevelopmentThe Importance of Mindset and Processes Over Magic ToolsClosing Thoughts: Leveraging AI for Sustainable Innovation[0:04–0:24] David Hirschfield: You have one of two choices. You either swim out to meet the wave and try to get up and stand up on your board and get in the curl, or you let it wash over you, right? So we’re just taking that get up in the curl attitude, and then you have to step on the tip of your board to keep it front, to stay out of that wave, trying to just figure out where it’s headed and stay in front of it.[0:24–0:37] David Hirschfield: That’s kind of from a metaphorical philosophy perspective. That’s how I think of it. And I try to instill that in everybody in the team, that whatever they can do, get farther out on the tip of the board.[0:38–0:53] David Hirschfield: And that doesn’t mean taking massive risks. That means trying to embrace everything that’s new and testing all the things that are new to figure out how this can apply to existing customers or apply internally.[0:55–1:09] Eric Walenza: Welcome back to the Industrial IoT Spotlight Podcast. I’m your host, Eric Walenza, CEO of AGP, your analyst for tracking and understanding enterprise technology trends. Our guest today is David Hirschfield, CEO and founder of Tekyz.[1:09–1:21] Eric Walenza: Tekyz is an AI-first software development company focusing on startups. They specialize in recovery projects, which are software projects that find themselves in trouble, need a crack team to dig them out and get them on the right path.[1:22–1:37] Eric Walenza: In this talk, we explored the use of AI for DevOps and the integration of AI into customer-facing applications. In particular, we discussed the differences between internal AI adoption for improving process efficiency and the integration of AI tools to add functionality to products.[1:38–1:51] Eric Walenza: We also touched on startup versus corporate adoption of AI, country-specific adoption challenges, and the organizational challenges of becoming an AI-first company. If you find these conversations valuable, please leave us a comment and a five-star review.[1:51–2:10] Eric Walenza: And if you’d like to share your company’s story or recommend a speaker, you can email us at team at asiagrowthpartners.com. Finally, if you’d like to discuss technology, innovation, and growth challenges in Asia, please email me directly at erik.w-a-l-e-n-z-a at asiagrowthpartners.com.[2:11–2:11] Eric Walenza: Thank you.[2:11–2:32] Podcast Host: Welcome to the Industrial IoT Spotlight, your number one spot for insight from industrial IoT thought leaders who are transforming businesses today with your host, Eric Walenza.[2:41–2:48] Eric Walenza: David, thanks for joining us on the podcast today.[2:49–2:52] David Hirschfield: Yeah, and thanks for having me on. I’m excited to talk to you guys.[2:53–3:06] Eric Walenza: Yeah, well, before we get into the topic at hand, which is really trying to understand how AI is being deployed by companies today, let’s understand a little bit more about your background. So you’ve been running Tekyz since 2007.[3:07–3:23] Eric Walenza: Yeah. And I see you’ve also had your name on a half dozen plus other companies, including a couple others that you’re still involved with. Can you give a little bit of the background of how did you first get involved in this work of helping to build up startups really systematically?[3:24–3:34] David Hirschfield: Yeah, sure. Well, it goes back to my early days, which was way before tekyz, when I was working for enterprise, in particular for Texas Instruments.[3:35–3:48] David Hirschfield: And then one of the guys that worked with me, one of the technical engineers and myself, we decided we wanted to start a software company. And really just to kind of get our feet wet in the software world, Windows 3.1 was brand new to give you an idea of timeframes.[3:48–4:09] David Hirschfield: And we created a product for logistics and route distribution and inventory management that was very niche-specific. And despite every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing it anyway to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000 to a publicly traded logistics firm out of Toronto.[4:10–4:25] David Hirschfield: So that was my entree into startups. I thought I understood what made startups successful since we had a successful exit and I was VP of products for that company for the next three years before I left and cast about for a few years before I started Tekyz.[4:26–5:00] David Hirschfield: Since then, I’ve worked with a lot of startups in a lot of technology domains and business domains and realized I didn’t understand what made startups successful or companies successfully scale because it wasn’t what I thought it was when I started. So I thought, okay, you know, need to focus on how to help my clients be successful, which of course, to a certain degree means being all over the technology. To a certain degree, it means just being exceptional in terms of discipline and protocol procedures and documentation and[5:00–5:36] David Hirschfield: and accountability in your own company and how everybody on the team contributes and is constantly improving the status. And it also means because technology changes and sometimes you get these waves like we’re experiencing right now, it means always trying to be on the edge, the front edge of that technology curve, especially when it’s even commanding change, like when mobile devices came out and now with AI happening, probably the biggest.[5:37–5:48] David Hirschfield: And so, of course, that’s why the AI first and the focus on AI, because there’s nothing bigger in technology right now than that. Gotcha.[5:48–5:58] Eric Walenza: Before we get into the topic of specifically how you support companies, I’d like to understand a little bit more of who you’re working with. So you’re working with startups, tend to focus on B2B or B2C.[5:58–6:13] Eric Walenza: Do you ever work with larger corporates, for example, corporate startups? Or I imagine there’s also corporates that say we’d like to act a little bit more like a startup. Can you help us do that? So what does the scope look like from industry focus and company type?[6:14–6:32] David Hirschfield: Yeah, it has been a lot of startups, and it has been existing companies that are doing a startup in a new area. So, in fact, I really enjoy those because they usually have a much better sense of exactly what market they want to go after and why that market needs it than does the nascent startup.[6:32–6:47] David Hirschfield: Although nascent startups can do that really well, too, if they come from an industry and there’s a gap in that industry that they’re struggling with personally. And they have reached other people that are exactly like them in this industry that are struggling with the same problem.[6:47–6:59] David Hirschfield: And those kinds of startups have a good sense of what the market needs, not necessarily how to be successful in that endeavor, but at least what the market needs. So, yes, to all the things that you just said.[7:00–7:14] David Hirschfield: You know, in 17 years, you can imagine that a lot of different types of projects and opportunities come our way, most of it through referral and just kind of the typical process of speaking to people and finding out that there’s needs.[7:14–7:22] David Hirschfield: and they seem to need a company that is really good at what they do. And so it just naturally, we start to move in that direction of working with them.[7:23–7:34] Eric Walenza: Gotcha. Okay. And then your working model, is it them typically outsourcing development of certain aspects of their tech stack or solutions to you? Or is it you embedding your team into their team?[7:34–7:35] Eric Walenza: What does that collaboration look like?[7:36–7:56] David Hirschfield: What makes us exceptional? And if you go to my website, it says hyper exceptional. and I don’t expect people to believe it just because I put it in the title and the website, but I ask people to ask me for evidence if they’re actually interested to know what an exceptional team looks like and how they operate because I have a lot of evidence, and I think it’s important to know that.[7:57–8:24] David Hirschfield: But if we get embedded inside of a team, in other words, kind of like the body shop type of approach, then that exceptionalism sort of goes away, and it’s up to the individual and the internal team and an organization than to be good or not good, right, as opposed to all the processes and procedures and accountability and things that we’ve put in, and automation that we’ve put in place to run and deliver projects.[8:25–8:30] David Hirschfield: That’s what makes us really exceptional. So we just stick with that model, that project model.[8:31–9:07] Eric Walenza: Okay, got it. Okay, great. So you’ve been over the past, what is this, 17 years or so, you’ve been building up this system for? 18 years. That’s weird to think about. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So you’ve been building this system for developing software and I can see some of the things that you’re emphasizing here. Right. So very detailed project estimates, architecting for scale, automation, performance optimization, security and compliance. And these are all things that I suppose you had in place before the recent kind of evolution of AI as a critical component of a lot of tech stacks. Now you’re also in addition[9:07–9:18] Eric Walenza: into this AI-first company. So what does that mean? What has been the fundamental shift over the past probably two to three years in terms of how you’ve been working with companies around AI development?[9:19–9:54] David Hirschfield: Well, both companies and internally. So because we’re always pushing the envelope internally about being better and being more transparent and automating internal processes, because we want all our developers to be critical thinkers and work independently, but we also want them to follow very specific protocols and procedures and account for the work that they do. And to do that, you have to continually build automation that scaffolds them so that they aren’t mired with all the procedure and protocol.[9:54–10:32] David Hirschfield: And if we keep doing that more and more and more. So when AI comes out, then obviously there are starting to be obvious better ways of doing all the things that we’ve been doing. And so internally, we’ve been embracing AI for driving documentation and user stories, for initially generating code and evaluating code that we’ve already written or refactoring code, and now starting to grow that ability to be much broader in terms of not just function or a small module, but more complete parts of the system.[10:32–10:49] David Hirschfield: because AI is evolving faster than we really can get our arms around. So I think of it sort of as being on, we’ve all been surfing, and our surfing skills have gotten better, and the waves have gotten a little bigger as technology advances up until about three years ago.[10:50–11:01] David Hirschfield: And so we went from three-year foot waves to confidently surfing five-foot waves, you know, anybody that’s been in this industry for a while, or maybe six-foot waves, right, maybe as high as we are.[11:01–11:13] David Hirschfield: And then here’s a hundred foot rogue wave coming in and you have one of two choices. You either swim out to meet the wave and try to get up and stand up on your board and get in the curl or you let it wash over you.[11:13–11:26] David Hirschfield: Right. So we’re just taking that get up in the curl attitude. And then you have to step on the tip of your board to keep it front to stay ahead of that wave, trying to just figure out where it’s headed and stay in front of it.[11:26–11:40] David Hirschfield: That’s kind of from a metaphorical philosophy perspective. That’s how I think of it. And I try to instill that in everybody in the team, that whatever they can do, get farther out on the tip of the board.[11:40–11:57] David Hirschfield: And that doesn’t mean taking massive risk. That means trying to embrace everything that’s new and testing all the things that are new to figure out how this can apply to existing customers or apply internally, for example.[11:58–12:28] David Hirschfield: And as a result, we’ve been building our own internal products that will eventually turn into SaaS products. One of them, we have a methodology for startups for trying to figure out who the early adopter is that they should be focused on and what are the top one or two problems that they should be talking about and how to message all that and how to reach that stakeholder and all this It a methodology called launch first but it a tedious process to do this And so we building an AI tool to automate all that tedium[12:28–12:44] David Hirschfield: to make it very consumable for a founder to figure this out very quickly. We’re also, our most expensive internal process is estimating projects because we do way more detailed estimation than most companies because it’s really expensive to do it.[12:44–12:57] David Hirschfield: They’re very detailed, they’re very involved, and it takes all my top people when we’re doing a big estimate to put that estimate together and deliver it to a client. And so we’re building an AI model for doing software project estimation.[12:58–13:07] David Hirschfield: So this is when I say AI, first really embracing it in every aspect of our business. So that’s talking about us, not necessarily our clients.[13:07–13:39] Eric Walenza: let’s dwell on that a little bit before we move to the the client facing development because i think this is really important and it’s probably the area where a lot of companies can have the biggest near-term impact right because there’s especially larger corporates are quite conservative about putting new things in front of clients whereas figuring out how to be more efficient internally but for what i see at least in in the companies we’re working with they’re struggling with this, right? They’re kind of looking up at the wave right now. And they’re doing some kind of[13:39–14:00] Eric Walenza: minor, you know, maybe they’re allowing use of co-pilot or something, but they’re not really out there exploring all the different potential scenarios and tools. What have you found in terms of the, maybe we can think both in terms of percentages. So are there areas where you say, in this particular area, we’re 50% more efficient or we’re 50% faster in terms of a process?[14:01–14:05] Eric Walenza: So where are the big wins there? And then as you look forward, you know, where are those things?[14:06–14:30] David Hirschfield: Internally? Internally. In terms of how we build systems? Okay. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. On the internal side, it’s testing, and now we’re seeing big improvements in delivering functionality faster, building automation around the testing, building the scripts for what we should be testing, and then creating automation scripts around that, so that as we’re building new functionality, we already have automation scripts.[14:30–14:47] David Hirschfield: for the new functionality instead of it being an afterthought or a back-end process. So that’s a big benefit for us, and it gets us cycle time to happen much faster between dev and test to do code validation.[14:47–15:05] David Hirschfield: So as we upload code, part of our process is to make sure the code fits into standards and make sure there’s no vulnerabilities inserted in since it’s all automated, but then also evaluate the quality of the code, the reusability of the code, if we’re the duplication of code and things like that.[15:06–15:18] David Hirschfield: And so we’re using AI to automate these processes. So as we enhance existing systems, we’re increasing the maintainability of our code.[15:18–15:34] David Hirschfield: One of the areas that we’re looking at implementing right now is microservices code generator because we try to build everything scalable. So we build everything in a microservice and containerize is always the goal when we’re starting with an MVP.[15:34–15:45] David Hirschfield: We just kind of scaffold our organization and structured it so that this is just how we think and what we do. And these microservices, there’s a lot of things that are very common about them.[15:45–16:11] David Hirschfield: And so we’re building right now, working on an AI model to be able to generate these microservices for us So we can just describe the microservice, provide maybe, you know, use the AI to say here are the fields that I want, have it produce some kind of structured output for that, and then feed that into this microservice processor and it creates the interfaces and all that connectivity and the business rules as well.[16:11–16:48] David Hirschfield: So and all nice and packaged and encapsulated in a microservice. So these are the things that we’re doing that are speeding up and speeding up and speeding up. you know, one step at a time. Can I say 50% probably we’re achieving at this point, 50% improvement, somewhere between 30 and 60%. It just depends on what we’re working on. And the teams, people on my team’s question to say, how can I, how can I use AI to accelerate this particular effort? Because I think that’s the biggest mental shift that my team has to make.[16:48–16:58] David Hirschfield: and as well as companies, if they want to start adopting AI throughout the organization, is that people get into this culture of asking AI, what’s the best way to approach this problem?[16:59–17:09] David Hirschfield: Because they don’t do that. They just ask the question of, here’s the problem, and I want you to do this for it. But not step back and say, I’m not sure you have different ways of approaching this problem.[17:09–17:24] David Hirschfield: Or here’s my organization, what problems may I have? even stepping farther back and say, I want to implement AI in my department and my department does this, but I’m not sure what the right approach would be, what the right plan is.[17:24–17:39] David Hirschfield: What questions should I be asking? Right. And start there. And I don’t think people are doing that very much. Thinking of AI as a really good friend and business strategy consultant and just asking questions.[17:40–18:10] Eric Walenza: Yeah, I think your intuition is right. People are not very selectively. What I tend to see is, you know, like I was talking with the head of legal for Google here in China a couple months ago, and, you know, he is using AI a lot, right, and they’re hiring fewer, you know, entry-level legal analysts, but it’s, you know, he’s personally made this decision, right, and I think that’s where we are today, that individuals are making these decisions, maybe individuals like you that have influence over your organization, but then large organizations, right?[18:10–18:21] Eric Walenza: It’s hard for them to put these mindset into place. Peter, let me ask, because Peter has a lot of experience with large-scale deployments, ERP, cloud integration, and so forth.[18:21–18:33] Eric Walenza: And then you’re really looking at kind of corporate level, hundreds of people working on a problem. Where’s the role of AI in those types of deployments today? Are we anywhere near 30% to 60%?[18:33–18:35] Eric Walenza: Are we just tickling the surface here?[18:35–18:44] Peter: No, no, we’re just stretching the surface. 30 to 5% maybe? There’s a long way to go, I would say.[18:45–18:59] David Hirschfield: It’s such a layered thing. You know, when you say 30 to 60%, it might be 30 to 60% if you look at, I mean, let’s say you could say something was like that, but it’d be at a very basic layer of it.[18:59–19:10] David Hirschfield: Whereas the next layer that deep you go, it’s probably almost nothing. You have to think of it kind of as a layered thing that you evolve into. And tell me what your experience is, Peter.[19:10–19:21] David Hirschfield: And like the first layer is just realizing that there’s something that can answer questions, you know, or that can do work for you. Because a lot of people are saying, oh, can I ask it to do this work for me?[19:21–19:34] David Hirschfield: And then it’s producing something that you can then review. and now your job is thinking how to give it instructions better and prompted so that it’s giving you the kind of output that is useful for your business, right?[19:34–19:51] David Hirschfield: But that’s like layer one. That’s before you start taking real any advantage of what AI can do for you because maybe the output you’re trying to create is a waste of time when you think about how you can automate workflow to eliminate the need for that output, for example.[19:51–20:02] David Hirschfield: But that requires you stepping back and thinking of using AI in a much broader way and, again, asking those questions. Peter, what’s your experience?[20:03–20:13] Peter: And I think it’s more on the delivery side, actually. It’s not really in the project management or the customer side. It’s more on the delivery side, I see.[20:14–20:26] Peter: And then you’re probably a very good example for that. Companies we work with in those projects, they deliver their solutions, they employ. AI technology in their delivery, as you do as well.[20:26–20:30] Peter: And it’s not really on, I would say, on the customer side.[20:31–20:35] David Hirschfield: You’re saying they are using it more on the delivery side than on the customer side?[20:35–20:47] Peter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, yes. And then the bigger the project, the more difficult it is to really generalize the use of AI because there are so many different areas.[20:48–21:00] Peter: But I got a question to you as well. Do you believe this is an elementary factor in order to stay competitive? I mean, the adoption of AI in delivery, especially in software development.[21:01–21:03] Peter: You were saying you’re using it. Absolutely.[21:04–21:16] David Hirschfield: It won’t be. It’s easy for me to see in another somewhere between six months and 18 months where we can build entire applications with AI.[21:16–21:27] David Hirschfield: I already can do it to a certain degree if I sacrifice the sophistication of the architecture of the application. There’s some tools that do that now.[21:27–21:38] David Hirschfield: And for certain types of applications, they’re really appropriate. For example, we need a partner portal because we have a referral partner program and we need a portal.[21:38–21:53] David Hirschfield: And there’s nothing really great on the market that doesn’t cost a lot of money. It just doesn’t make sense because what we need is very simple. I can build that application. It won’t be a microservices implementation, but I can build the whole thing with one AI tool.[21:54–22:08] David Hirschfield: The user experience, the business logic, the database, that’s new. That’s so new to be able to do that. Two months ago, I couldn’t do that. But the tools are evolving right now to give you that capability.[22:09–22:19] David Hirschfield: And for our needs for that partner portal, this will satisfy us. We might turn that into a SaaS product for all of our partners that want to use the portal.[22:20–22:31] David Hirschfield: And even to a certain degree with that, I can do that with this one monolithic app because the cost is so low to deliver this, right?[22:32–22:42] David Hirschfield: Now, at some point, if it’s really going to grow, then it’s got to be refactored. But by then, I probably ask the app to refactor it. So I’m thinking this is what I mean by the tip of the surfboard, right?[22:42–23:08] David Hirschfield: This is my whole business, and my team is building apps. So if we’re going to get — we almost have to, like, think in terms of eating our children, sort of, right? Be willing to just abandon everything that we believe in because clearly the world is changing so fast that we have to embrace it and figure out how to embrace it and leverage that to our benefits and to our customers’ benefits.[23:08–23:40] Eric Walenza: Yeah, there was an analogy I was reading recently, which is from the manufacturing era, right? So you come out with a machine that does a particular manufacturing process twice sufficient. Where does the value of that go, right? And so the value of that goes to the machine builder, right, who now has a more competitive machine to sell, and the value of that goes to the end consumer who now has cheaper products. But it can often be very difficult for the manufacturer to actually capture that, right? They have to buy the machine to be competitive, but all their competitors also[23:40–24:02] Eric Walenza: buy the machine. So they’re actually not gaining an advantage. So they, you know, they end up making an investment in new technology, but all the value is being passed down to the customer or it’s being acquired by the technology developer. And so, you know, really it’s, it sounds like you’re being very proactive and thinking about how do you become also a product owner, right? So how do you turn your, your know-how into products that, that then can have scalable value? Because this could put[24:02–24:42] David Hirschfield: pressure on them. Yes. Scalable value in some kind of life beyond just doing custom software development, right? Because I just see the world changing so quickly. It’s very hard to predict, too. It may be a much slower change than I’m imagining, but so far, I’ve just seen how much things have evolved and how quickly. We went from a year and a half ago where we had this chat GPT that was just hallucinating everything right And it was writing really bad code 90 of the time You know if you just wanted to write a simple function and it would get it right a small well if it didn have to do[24:42–24:57] David Hirschfield: if it could just run with its own input and output, it would get it right more often than not. But if it had to do it inside of, let’s say, a Google Apps script or something, and it had to communicate with the Google Sheet and have smart enough logic to do something, it was wrong almost every time.[24:57–25:14] David Hirschfield: And it took as much time to debug that as it did to write it yourself to begin with. Today, I can just, it will write the whole thing, write the first time, most of the time, in much more sophisticated, complex stuff than it was able to do a year ago or even six months ago.[25:14–25:32] David Hirschfield: So I’m thinking, okay, this curve, and plus the smarter it gets, the faster it learns, supposedly, right? I’m trying to figure out where exactly, how do I point at something that’s 18 months away and actually not get swept up in three months or four months because I was just way too short.[25:32–25:36] David Hirschfield: So that’s what I mean. I keep saying the tip of the surfboard, right?[25:39–25:53] SPEAKER_00: If you’re still listening, then you must take technology seriously. So I’d like to introduce you to our case study database. Think of it as a roadmap that can help you understand which use cases and technologies are being deployed in the world today.[25:53–26:06] SPEAKER_00: We have cataloged more than 9,000 case studies and are adding 500 per month with detailed tagging by industry and function. Our goal is to help you make better investment decisions that affect my data.[26:07–26:14] SPEAKER_00: Check it out at the link below, and please share your thoughts. We’d love to hear how we can improve it. Thank you, and back to the show.[26:14–26:35] Eric Walenza: If we turn to the customer-facing topic, walk us through your thought process. When we think about building AI tools for clients that are then going to be facing the clients and customer, then we start to think about a lot of other challenges, right?[26:35–26:47] Eric Walenza: Because this is not just does it work, but does it work up to a reliability level? You know, is the end customer comfortable with use of data to enable this application, et cetera?[26:47–26:59] Eric Walenza: So there’s a different set of challenges. And also you have probably tech stack challenges where there might be digital native apps that are really AI from day one versus apps that have, you know, been on the market for 10 years.[26:59–27:10] Eric Walenza: And now you’re adding some new functionality. What is the thought process that your team goes through when you’re trying to figure out what’s the right technical and business architecture for a new product?[27:10–27:28] David Hirschfield: Well, so if it’s an existing product that’s been on the market successfully for any length of time, and the tech stack isn’t just ugly, but, you know, it’s reasonable and relatively modern, then adding AI capabilities to it is pretty easy reach.[27:29–27:51] David Hirschfield: So it just depends on it. And when we’re thinking about adding AI to it, I want to think about what almost is not possible yet. And that’s what we want to be building now, because by the time we’re ready to release something, it will already be possible in terms of or what might be really difficult now won’t be that difficult to do in another six months from now.[27:51–28:18] David Hirschfield: So, yeah, I encourage all my clients to just embrace it wherever they can because, first of all, where you said something about whether customers are worried about the data being used in an inappropriate way and some of those privacy issues, but remember where we were with the cloud seven or eight years ago and the trust factor that we had to overcome with the cloud maybe 10 years ago.[28:18–28:31] David Hirschfield: You know, it was like nobody trusted the cloud. How could you possibly want to take it off my server and put it up someplace where everybody has access to it, right? And, of course, today it’s like you’re still running something on your server.[28:32–28:45] David Hirschfield: You know, so it’s like what a flip. So AI is not going to be any different. People will start to trust it because unlike the cloud, this is way more invasive in terms of how it’s working its way into everybody’s life.[28:45–28:56] David Hirschfield: And my wife said, I don’t know if I can, I like, I really understand this, but I trust it and all that when it was, when it first came out. And when I went, ChatGP came out, because obviously it’s been around a lot longer than that.[28:56–29:29] David Hirschfield: But when ChatGPT came out and I kept talking about this, how now consumable it was, because I was using OpenAI about a year before that. And I was telling her about what I was able to do with it and how amazing it was that it could like produce stuff that sounded like human, right when it was still relatively new and then chat gpt comes out now all of a sudden it’s like so consumable to anybody so and i’ll give you an example of how invasive not invasive is the wrong[29:29–29:52] David Hirschfield: word but it’s kind of not the wrong word but how much it can and how quickly it’ll just penetrate everything so we were this was a year and a half ago the chat gpt is still was hallucinating a lot and everything else. But it was still very decent for certain types of things, like just conversational, asking questions, getting information. So we were standing in our backyard.[29:52–30:13] David Hirschfield: She wants to do gardening. She’s a big gardener. We had just moved into this home that we’re in now. And she said, how many four by four beds do you think we need if I want to grow all our vegetables? We’re not vegetarians, but right. So I said, I don’t know, but maybe I can ask chat GPT and she was rolling her eyes and, um, and then her sister calls.[30:13–30:35] David Hirschfield: And so she’s on the phone talking with her sister about the move and about the backyard. While she’s doing that, I’m having a conversation on my phone with chat GPT about, you know, we live in Vista, California. So we considering our climate and considering we’re two people in our early sixties and we’re not vegetarians, but we love vegetables. How much, how many square feet would we need four by four?[30:36–30:47] David Hirschfield: How many four by four beds would we need to do all the square foot gardening? to grow all our own vegetables, and it comes back with a number, and it gives me a reason why I came up with the number, and actually it was pretty close to what I was thinking it should be.[30:47–30:58] David Hirschfield: And I said, okay, great. Well, considering companion planting so that we’re putting, because when you’re gardening, you want to make sure things you put in one bed are all compatible with each other.[30:58–31:30] David Hirschfield: Certain things hate to grow together, and certain things love to grow together. I said, for each bed, come up with a companion planting plan, and then it did and it said didn’t do this for each season so what and because then you want succession planting because you don’t plant something that onions were just growing in and expect it to grow unless it likes the soil that onions were growing in right so that’s so it came up with that whole plan and it did it by season and then I said okay what companion flowers should each bed have for each season because then you want certain flowers there[31:30–31:40] David Hirschfield: because they draw the bugs away but only for certain things other things will draw brugs that actually like vegetable that’s planted there even better, right? So I said, and what?[31:40–31:52] David Hirschfield: And this is all I know about garden is these topics. So I said, okay, now create a table for each bed for each season to show us what.[31:52–32:03] David Hirschfield: And this took me about eight, nine, ten minutes to do, partly because it was a lot slower back then and because I kept asking more and more questions, right? And it was done after ten minutes.[32:03–32:15] David Hirschfield: She had just hung up with her sister, and I said, here, take a look at this. Is this what you’re talking about? Her mouth fell open, and she turned her head and looked at me like, you’ve got to be kidding me.[32:15–32:37] David Hirschfield: And, of course, ever since then, she’s like, she wants to ask Chet, she could do everything, right? This is the thing. It’s so seductive, if that’s even the right word. But it just, once you start to realize what you can do with it and how you can do it, then you start to realize this is like your best friend and business coach and advisor that happens to know everything about everything.[32:39–32:49] Eric Walenza: What tools are you, are you still using ChatGPT as your primary tool when you’re thinking about this, not coding specifically, but project management, thinking through problems?[32:49–32:52] Eric Walenza: Are there other tools that you found more useful for specific types of challenges?[32:52–33:24] David Hirschfield: just, it’s my first go-to. If I don’t get the answer I want, then I go to Claude or I go to Perplexity. You know, those are probably the three. I go to Gemini sometimes, but for the most part, I’ll just ask because it’s an app on my phone. It’s just consumable. For most of the time, I’m getting a lot of what I need out of it, but not always, right? Sometimes I need something more in-depth and more structured or whatever. And I can pull that out, chat GPT, but it’ll just be more available in some of the other platforms.[33:24–33:36] David Hirschfield: Or if I need more of a research topic, then I go to perplexity. It’s just really good at that. It just organizes everything from a research thinking perspective, right? This is just conversational stuff.[33:36–33:55] David Hirschfield: If we’re building something that’s going to use a large language model or it’s going to be a RAG model, which means that we build our own AI machine learning database and we use that to inform a large language model, rich, augmented, I can never remember what G stands for.[33:56–34:10] David Hirschfield: But that’s what a RAG model is. Like for our estimator product and for our niche analysis product, those are both RAG-style models of AI tools that we’re building.[34:10–34:22] David Hirschfield: But for just the daily asking questions, It’s just whatever tool is most readily available and consumable, depending on the level of. And sometimes I ask all three or all four.[34:23–34:34] David Hirschfield: If it’s something that’s really important, I’ll take the result of one and say, here’s the question I asked and here’s a response that I got for this thing. And do you feel it’s complete?[34:35–34:41] David Hirschfield: It’s correct. How would you expand on this? So it just, you know, I go back and forth between the tools all the time.[34:42–34:53] Eric Walenza: So what you’ve described here is kind of a decision-making use case, right? And when I talk to our clients often, those are the things that are the more challenging, right? Because the front-end interface is pretty easy, right?[34:53–35:03] Eric Walenza: There’s great applications now. Also, if it’s like content generation or something, you’re kind of using something off the shelf. Those are more standardized, so it’s easier to find a product that can do what you want.[35:03–35:24] Eric Walenza: But when it comes to decision-making for corporates, you have kind of unique data sets. you have unique types of decisions that you’re making. What is your sense, maybe not just of today, but of the future, that are we in a position where everybody’s going to be building rag models with proprietary data for this? Or do you see like niche products coming out for each,[35:24–35:38] David Hirschfield: you know, kind of vertical, horizontal decision? That’s a really good question. But even with the tools right today, decision-making in corporate environment, considering all the different data, It’s just a matter of how you get the data into the model.[35:39–36:02] David Hirschfield: And you may get a report that’s giving you insights that has a lot of details. So if you export that and load it into one of these models, into the large language models, then have it do some assessment of the data and some of the assessment of the insights that you got back from your, like maybe you’ve got a predictive analysis tool that you’re using, and take the report from the predictive analysis tool and load it into there.[36:02–36:15] David Hirschfield: And then just start asking questions about the validity of this prediction. Are there other patterns that I’m missing? These tools, just the readily available stuff right now is really, really useful when you start to get creative in terms of how you use it.[36:15–36:32] David Hirschfield: And, yeah, I think there will be RAG models being produced that are very niche-specific because then it will just make it really consumable and really quick for that decision-maker to surface important insights and help them make decisions faster.[36:32–36:59] David Hirschfield: But it’s not that hard to do right now. And then with all the workflow automation capabilities that are available today, with tools available, you can just wire up the ability to pull all that data into your own, not a RAG model but an input model using Notebook LM or something like that and load all the data in automatically into some of these tools with very little effort from a coding perspective[37:00–37:13] Eric Walenza: David, just one more question from my side. Maybe Peter has some things that we haven’t touched on yet, but I’m sitting here in Shanghai, China today, and so top of mind for me is also the geopolitical aspect of AI.[37:14–37:18] Eric Walenza: Oh, wow. We don’t need to get into export controls and so forth.[37:18–37:22] David Hirschfield: No, I just had somebody else ask me that same question. That’s why I’m laughing.[37:22–37:33] Eric Walenza: But this is a challenge, right? Not just for China. I think for the EU, for example, right? So do we have to have different tech stacks, different functionality for different markets based on their regulations?[37:34–37:48] Eric Walenza: How much complexity is there today? Is it just kind of China, maybe Russia, Iran, a couple other countries, and the rest of the world? or do you really have to start looking at the EU and treating that differently from the U.S. in terms of how you’re architecting?[37:49–38:04] David Hirschfield: That really depends on who you are as a company and what your exposure to these various countries are, right? If you have a global footprint, so you’re in the U.S. and you’re probably just let’s talk about the U.S. and Europe, right?[38:04–38:18] David Hirschfield: Because different privacy requirements in Europe, which are pretty strict. and the U.S. is getting stricter, but nowhere near as strict as the, and nowhere near as much compliance around privacy as you need for the EU.[38:19–38:31] David Hirschfield: So you have, that’s something that you have to consider when you’re architecting a solution, if it’s going to have a bit, that’s more of a data set problem as opposed to an AI problem.[38:31–38:45] David Hirschfield: At least I think so, because whatever AI you’re using in that environment, you’re using some, you’re probably not building your own large language model. You are probably building your own RAG dataset to inform it, though.[38:45–39:09] David Hirschfield: So whatever large language model has already got to be, it’s got to already be compliant for you to have access to that data in that environment. And it’s got to be SOC 2, Level 2 compliant, and it’s got to be restrictive in terms of where that, what data can be seen by the large language model that isn’t specific to just your own little walled-off garden of that data.[39:09–39:26] David Hirschfield: And these are all architectural things that you have to consider. But for companies with big global footprints, they already have a lot of this factored, at least I think so, from a data management perspective to make sure that they’re staying compliant from a privacy perspective.[39:27–39:28] David Hirschfield: Peter, what’s your experience in this?[39:29–39:42] Peter: I think that’s still a big question mark. I’m currently running a project as well, which is globally spent. And this is not a topic at all because there is no answer to it, honestly.[39:43–39:54] Peter: I mean, every company is taking a different turn there, I guess. But the one I’m working with right now, it’s rather a big question mark still. And there’s no move in that direction at all.[39:54–40:09] David Hirschfield: Is it a big question from the perspective of how do we protect the data or how much data can we expose to the LLM or which one?[40:10–40:21] Peter: I would say it’s the fundamental question. The fear is still there of what would be the impact. We haven’t gone into any details there even.[40:21–40:35] Peter: And it’s a multinational company. Right, okay. They have a lot of science data, so it’s a science company, and they’re very, very careful in exposing their secrets.[40:36–41:03] David Hirschfield: Yeah, their intellectual property. Intellectual property, yeah. So that’s a tough one, yeah. I don’t really — I try not to spend too much time thinking about the geopolitical kind of landscape when it comes to AI because AI is evolving way faster than any legislation is even pretending to do anything about it.[41:04–41:15] Peter: Yeah. For them, the biggest challenge is actually not the difference between the U.S. and the EU. It’s more between U.S. and Asia, China now.[41:16–41:17] Peter: It’s a big topic.[41:18–41:31] David Hirschfield: In terms of exposure of their intellectual property? Yeah. Yeah, that’s different. I thought you meant in terms of just privacy and, like, customer data and things like that as opposed to intellectual property.[41:31–41:36] Peter: This all leads to the result of not adopting anything right now.[41:37–41:42] David Hirschfield: Right. And so they’re just staying away from AI at the moment? Yeah, they’re looking at the wave.[41:43–41:45] Peter: Yeah. Yeah, they’re looking at the wave.[41:45–41:49] David Hirschfield: They’re watching. They’re looking at the wave. And it’s getting bigger and bigger.[41:51–42:05] Peter: Yeah. I get a question. So I do a lot of development as well. So what is the key component, the key tool that you would say gives you the biggest competitive advantage in your business that you use on the delivery side?[42:07–42:36] David Hirschfield: I don’t know. There’s not any one tool that gives us the — well, what I — okay. What gives us the competitive advantage is when I show people evidence of what it means to be an exceptional software development team, because we produce a lot of artifacts in the process of doing all the things I was talking about that other software development teams don’t do, and their internal teams don’t typically do, because it’s hard to do it.[42:36–42:50] David Hirschfield: And you don’t just decide one day you’re going to produce all this stuff. If you evolve it over a long period of time and you have a couple of key people that just constantly drive this forward. So it’s that is what our competitive advantage is.[42:50–43:01] David Hirschfield: That’s why I found that people really connect with it when I show them this and they go, yeah, we don’t do that. Or no, we’ve never seen anybody do estimates quite as detailed as that.[43:01–43:23] David Hirschfield: Or the way that you track all the information about a project so that your status reports are so rich. of information. Other companies don’t do that. And so I get that enough, and I thought, why don’t I lead with this? Because it seems to be what people really care about. And so that’s why I put the banner of our website, Hyper Exceptional Software Development Team.[43:24–43:49] David Hirschfield: There isn’t a single tool. I’d be surprised if anybody could point to a tool today that is giving them that competitive edge unless it’s in a specific niche and maybe a specific rag tool that they’re using to accomplish something that was really hard to accomplish previously. But then that won’t last for very long as the world evolves. So I’ll ask you the same question.[43:49–43:54] David Hirschfield: What tools have you seen that give you that big competitive advantage?[43:54–44:19] Peter: yeah competitive advantage i’m mostly managing managing large projects and or also delivering but to be honest it helps with bugs finding bugs you know it’s you you basically paste a lot of code in there you just hit enter and oh wow there’s the solution which would have taken sometimes weeks or days before.[44:20–44:41] Peter: Oh my gosh, that’s the one big gain. And then it’s getting all the essentials out of a lot of information. And it goes so far, a very hands-on case would be, let’s say there is a meeting cross-continent involving China, India, Australia, U.S., and someone in the U.K.[44:41–44:50] Peter: and 15 people, two hours, three hours. Well, you can summarize everything from that meeting within a minute.[44:51–45:13] David Hirschfield: You can summarize it. You can pull out insights. You can ask all kinds of questions of things that happened in the meeting. You can combine that with documents that were discussed in the meeting to enrich the — I mean, and it takes seconds to produce that and then have it give you a plan going forward.[45:13–45:23] David Hirschfield: And so the one tool, like what you said, though, about the code and how powerful that is, that’s a capability that is available in many tools now, right?[45:24–45:55] David Hirschfield: Pasting code in something and having it give you, figure out the best way, you know, how do you refactor this code. Over a year ago, a year and a half ago, one of my developers, when we were still, you know, kind of getting our arms around what we could do with this, He took a query that was a stored procedure that was 50 or 60 lines that was pretty inefficient that had been written and asked, this was ChatGVT back before it got as good as it is now,[45:55–46:07] David Hirschfield: and asked it to refactor that one stored procedure to run more efficiently. And it came back with 20 lines of code from the 50 or 60 it had, and it worked the first time in this case.[46:07–46:21] David Hirschfield: And it ran like four or five times faster. Now, for anybody expert at stored procedures, doesn’t matter. It would have taken them, somebody who was a real expert would have taken many hours.[46:21–46:40] David Hirschfield: But just a good developer might have taken a couple days of writing and testing and writing and testing and trying to come up with a better way of approaching it and thinking about how the efficiency from a database perspective of how the queries are being called in what order and, you know, what are the indexes and everything else.[46:41–47:03] David Hirschfield: And then, you know, he didn’t do this, but he could have asked, how should I re-index the database or restructure the database so that it will perform even faster, so things like that. But that’s going back to what you were saying, and that change he was capable of quite a while ago, doing simple refactoring like that and often getting it right as long as it wasn’t too big or too complex.[47:04–47:07] David Hirschfield: Yeah, it’s hard to put your finger at any one thing.[47:08–47:21] Eric Walenza: Okay, but this is a good conclusion today that it’s not about finding the magic tool. There’s going to be a lot of good tools out there. It’s really about building the processes and the mindset, right, to use these.[47:21–47:23] Eric Walenza: That’s where the competitive advantage comes in.[47:23–47:59] David Hirschfield: The last comment is probably the most important tool I learned to use in terms of function is I forget what something’s called. and in a few seconds I’ll get the name of that thing by giving it the most cryptic description of what it is I’m looking for and somehow it knows oh are you talking about this and I and sometimes I’ll say no it’s not that but it looks like that but it’s for this purpose they go oh and then they tell me or the name of a movie or the and I’m able to get it every single time with[47:59–48:09] David Hirschfield: very little effort. So that’s probably the most important tool I get out of large language models. Everybody thinks I’m so smart because I remember these things and I don’t remember any of it.[48:10–48:19] Eric Walenza: Great. Guys, with that, I suggest we wrap up. David, thank you for taking the time to walk us through your thought process for how you’re adopting AI today. I appreciate it.[48:19–48:23] David Hirschfield: Yeah, thank you. And I really appreciate being on your show. Thanks, guys.[48:24–48:24] Peter: Thank you, David.[48:29–48:46] Podcast Host: Thanks for tuning in to another edition of the Industrial IoT Spotlight. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at IoT1HQ and to check out our database of case studies on IoT1.com.[48:46–48:59] Podcast Host: If you have unique insight or a project deployment story to share, we’d love to feature you on a future edition. Write us at eric.walenza at IoT1.com.[48:59–49:08] Podcast Host: Thank you.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Catching the AI Wave: Staying Ahead in a Rapidly Evolving Tech Landscape was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Marketer of the Day Podcast: Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS…](https://tekyz.com/marketer-of-the-day-podcast-craft-the-perfect-launch-strategy-for-software-development-and-saas-37e69007175e/) - Marketer of the Day Podcast: Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS with David HirschfeldFeatured Image: Marketer of the Day Podcast — Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy with David Hirschfeldhttps://medium.com/media/82bc596f5ac34aa9063ce3060d53e562/hrefThe startup world has stories of brilliant ideas that never took off. But what if there were a way to dramatically increase your chances of success? David Hirschfeld, a seasoned software veteran with over 30 years of experience, has cracked the code. He’s discovered a common thread that separates the winners from the losers, and it’s all about flipping the traditional startup script on its head.Key insights:Launch First Approach: Startups should prioritize market validation through sales and marketing before product development to avoid wasted resources.Product-Market Fit: Ensuring demand for a product early on is crucial for success, and pre-launch sales are a strong indicator of this.Data Over Positive Thinking: Successful entrepreneurs focus on data-driven decision-making rather than relying on optimistic self-belief.Testing Assumptions: Business ideas should be tested systematically, akin to a clinical trial, to avoid blind adherence to unproven assumptions.Feedback Loops: Obtaining honest, actionable feedback from potential customers is essential to refining the product and approach.[0:07–0:19] Robert: Hey, welcome back to the podcast. David Hirschfeld is here from Tekyz. That’s T-E-K-Y-Z dot com. And David has seen some things. He’s seen some things happen in the startup world, in the software world.[0:19–0:44] Robert: And he is going to share with us that common trait that’s shared by companies that are successful and it’s missing from the companies that have failed. He has something called the launch first method, but he also just has some guidance in general for software companies, fast companies, startups who want to have a greater chance of success to navigate all the strategic steps and moves that need to be taken.[0:44–0:45] Robert: So, David, glad to be speaking with you.[0:46–1:05] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thank you, Robert, for having me on the show. And I love talking about startups, even though sometimes it’s a very sad story. But there’s hope. and that’s if you just sort of flip your perspective a little bit, then all of a sudden you can turn it into something that really makes sense and you can build a business around it.[1:06–1:23] Robert: And that’s exciting, right? I mean, it is sad when there’s always a risk of failure, but if you can pivot, if you can adjust, if you can do things in the right way, that’s where you want to be at. And so what is your, I mean, as far as what you’ve learned and what you’re passionate about talking about, what’s currently on your mind?[1:23–1:44] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So I’ve worked, I started Tekyz 17 years ago, and I’ve been in the software world for over 30 years. And I had my own startup in the logistics route distribution inventory management and grew that to 800 customers in 22 countries and ended up selling it to a publicly traded firm.[1:44–1:55] David Hirschfeld: So I have that experience of having a successful exit. I understand what that whole life cycle is like. That was an eight-year journey for me and a partner.[1:56–2:24] David Hirschfeld: And we built up a company, we sold it, and then what I realized is what I thought made it successful were not the things that made it successful. And it took me working with lots of other startups and watching them fail in the manner of Tekyz being the tech team and the software development company for these startups that made me start to realize what the common patterns are between these companies that fail versus the very few that are successful.[2:24–2:41] David Hirschfeld: And it’s almost always the same thing. It’s that they lack product market fit. They’re building something they believe the market wants and they believe customers will buy, and then they invest hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars into this product over several years, and nobody’s buying it.[2:42–2:53] David Hirschfeld: They either don’t know how to speak to the market, message their product in a way that people will go, ah, that’s what I need, that solves my problem, or they just don’t have product made.[2:53–3:11] David Hirschfeld: It’s the wrong product for the market they’re trying to sell to. And the reason they don’t have product market fit and they don’t realize it until they’ve spent all this money and made this huge personal investment is because they wait way too long to try to sell their product.[3:11–3:31] David Hirschfeld: because the only way you know you’ve got a product market fit is somebody’s writing you a check for your product or paying a monthly subscription or the fact that they download it for trials, unless you’re some massive social network, then that doesn’t mean anything related to product market fit because they may not pay for it once you decide you’re going to turn on the pricing engine.[3:32–3:45] David Hirschfeld: So what we did was we came up with this methodology called Launch First. The idea is launch the business and launch your marketing and sales engine before you build the product, right?https://medium.com/media/140d985682b46a2b54ecdc607ad1a650/href[3:45–4:03] David Hirschfeld: It makes no sense, right? It sounds like it’s backwards. How do you do that? But actually, you can do that. You just need some kind of a prototype that looks like the product that you’re intending to build, and it behaves like the product you’re intending to build so that when you show somebody, they get the vision.[4:03–4:14] David Hirschfeld: It’s not just design mock-ups that you can click through, but it’s more than that. It’s not an MVP, which is not because MVPs are too small in terms of your vision and functionality for people to buy into it.[4:15–4:30] David Hirschfeld: It’s the vision, but it’s not real software, but it looks like it’s real software. Or in the case of like cars, Elon Musk did this with the Roadster when he came up with a prototype Roadster that didn’t go anywhere.[4:30–4:55] David Hirschfeld: It couldn’t drive, but it looked like a real Roadster, and it was going to be this fabulous electric car. And he pre-sold lots of them. And so there was no question he had a product market fit, and he knew how to position it in front of developers, and he used that money to both fund the development of his cars and also prove to investors that he has traction and that people want this, and so he could raise money.[4:56–5:11] David Hirschfeld: So what we do is we create that prototype. We go out. We go through this very exhaustive niche analysis process to find that, or who’s that one early adopter niche, and what’s the top maybe two or three problems that you are going to be solving for them with your product.[5:13–5:40] David Hirschfeld: And we don’t want two niches. We want to know all the niches, but we need to figure out which of all those niches is the one that’s going to make you successful in the very early days. Then we build a marketing stack and build the messaging and go out to those individuals and do individual demos to them or we do webinars, whatever the right way to reach that particular target audience.[5:40–6:10] David Hirschfeld: And if the value that you’re offering is high enough, it has to be pretty high value because you don’t have your product yet, then it’s — and that might be a lifetime license if they pay for 18 months of the subscription fee in advance or in the case of, like, clinical trial software, which we’ve done prelaunch sales for really expensive medical clinical trial software for $250,000 a pop for a prelaunch purchase.Infographic: Product Launch Mind Map[6:10–6:43] David Hirschfeld: There it was free implementation because usually the implementation cost for setting up clinical trial software is more than the cost of the software. Or whatever that high-value offer you’re making, if the value is high enough and the cost to them because of the problem you’re solving is big enough and their perception of that problem is significant enough that they really feel they need it, they need that problem solved, they will buy and they’ll buy in enough numbers before you even have a product to prove that you’ve got product market fit.[6:43–6:54] David Hirschfeld: And we set that line at 3 to 1 ratio. 3 to 1 in terms of lifetime value of a customer over your cost of acquisition to acquire that customer.[6:56–7:07] David Hirschfeld: And you’ve sold enough of these so you know it wasn’t a fluke one or two sales. And then we keep selling. Why not? Now we’ve got a marketing and sales engine running.[7:08–7:21] David Hirschfeld: That’s why we call it launch first. You’ve launched your business before you actually built the product. And we start the development, tell people that the first version won’t have all these features. It’ll be there in two or three months or four months, depending on what that first version needs to look like.[7:23–7:40] David Hirschfeld: And you just use that money to fund development And now if you want to raise money you have a very different position when you talking to investors because you showing revenue and traction and you don even have a product yet So this is what Launch First is about Very nice And I like a lot of what in[7:40–7:50] Robert: here because you’re giving me flashbacks to all these like points in life when like I made a software like that once or twice. I sent in like the book proposal before the book was ready.[7:51–8:04] Robert: There’s all these times when you sort of, it seems a little like risky and out of order, but then the way you laid it out, like it makes a lot of sense because it seems like the wrong, like the kind of counterintuitively wrong way of going about it, right?[8:04–8:20] Robert: People, they make the product, they make the features, and then they go and try to figure out the people later. They try to figure out the marketing later, and then the product’s way over here and the person’s way over there. And so I like your way of doing this because you start the sales first, you talk to people first, You beat up the idea first.[8:20–8:32] Robert: You figure out marketing messaging and you figure out the people. And like what stuck with me a lot when you said there was if your startup is failing, either your product doesn’t properly speak to the people or it’s the wrong product.[8:32–8:44] Robert: And it’s like how will you figure any of that stuff out unless you put it out there and see what the real results are. And so this is an exciting system you figured out here. And so you’ve been at this for decades, had all these adventures.[8:44–8:49] Robert: What do you feel like talking about as far as a fun case study success story?[8:49–9:02] David Hirschfeld: Let me see. There are a bunch. But I can talk about when we first started Launch First because we tested this with four different products, four different clients over a couple years.Dive into Our Seamless UI Experience! Fill Out Our Quick Form Now and See the Magic Unfold![9:03–9:17] David Hirschfeld: One of them was a real estate investment portfolio management system platform that we had designed, but we hadn’t started developing yet. And we did prelaunch sales to real estate investors in this particular ecosystem.[9:17–9:28] David Hirschfeld: And we sold in six first 60 days. The client sold 23 licenses for generated 70,000 in sales. And that was the kickoff for the development of this product.[9:29–9:40] David Hirschfeld: Another one was in aerospace parts distributors. This was software that was going to manage the. What’s it?[9:40–9:59] David Hirschfeld: the parentage of products. So in aerospace, every single part has to have a certificate. And if that part’s an assembly of other parts, then you have to have all the certificates for all the parts that go into it and its own certificate and on and on and on until you have the 747 or a jumbo jet of some kind, right?[9:59–10:11] David Hirschfeld: And there was no system in place to track these things. So this client, we built a really cool prototype, which was just very animated mock-ups.[10:11–10:26] David Hirschfeld: It looked like a finished product. It showed the whole vision. And when we demoed it to people, and we did three demos and sold all three of them for $15,000 each in the space of like a week and a half, which is clear that product and market fit.[10:27–10:44] David Hirschfeld: And people say lifetime license. I would never do that. Well, why not? Because you might be giving away an immeasurable fraction of a percent of your market to raise the same amount of money that you would by giving 10 or 15 or 20 or 25% equity away to an investor.[10:45–10:57] David Hirschfeld: And when you give that customer, they’re invested in the product. So when they’re testing, when you finally have the first version of it, you’re proving product solution fit.[10:57–11:09] David Hirschfeld: Now you’re not building an MVP for product market fit anymore. You’re doing it for product solution fit. And for those of you who don’t know the difference, product market fit means you’ve got a product and you’ve shown that you’ve got demand and people will pay for it.[11:09–11:22] David Hirschfeld: Product solution fit is that when somebody starts to use your product, they start to engage with it and it’s solving the problem and the user experience satisfies them enough where they’ll continue to use it and build their usage around it.[11:22–11:41] David Hirschfeld: That’s product solution fit. And sometimes you can have product market fit, but then when they get the product, they just won’t use it. So that’s what you should be building your MVP for. And since you have all these beta customers and they’ve spent this money on it, they’re invested to really test the product the way that they need it.[11:41–11:57] David Hirschfeld: And these are buyers, not looky loser wannabes. People that do lots of free betas get lots of feedback if people are engaging with the product to some degree, but the feedback they’re getting isn’t the feedback they need for product market fit.[11:57–12:07] David Hirschfeld: it’s not going to help them sell the product most of the time. It’s going to help them with product solution fit for the particular people that are in trial, which may or may not be buyers.[12:07–12:21] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t know that until they’ve written you a check. So anyway, so this is — so one thing I will talk about because it requires founders — it’s a scary thing to ask people for money for a product you haven’t even built yet.[12:21–12:35] David Hirschfeld: A lot of founders, like, they have trouble stopping the development and saying, my MVP is complete enough and it’s not going to embarrass me. I’m not going to get, you know, the wrong, give the wrong impression to the market because it doesn’t have all these features in it yet.[12:35–12:49] David Hirschfeld: And so they keep going and going and going. I call that failure to pull the trigger syndrome. You know, they’re just not willing to, and it’s a huge mistake. So you have to face your fears that this product may fail.[12:49–13:03] David Hirschfeld: And you face it really early and you face, And if you do it this way with like launch first kind of approach, you can find out that you’re not going to have product market fit and pivot quickly because you’re getting feedback why people aren’t buying it.Infographic: Strategies for Launching Your Software Development Successfully[13:03–13:15] David Hirschfeld: And you’re not having to turn a big ship. It’s not a developed software product. It’s a prototype. It’s a marketing message. And you can play with both of those and in two weeks retest again.[13:15–13:27] David Hirschfeld: And two weeks later retest three or four times in the space of a couple months. You can pivot three or four different times. And if you’ve built your software, you cannot pivot that quickly.[13:27–13:37] David Hirschfeld: It’s a much longer, very costly process to pivot. And your momentum is there, so you probably don’t pivot as much as you necessarily need to. But here, it’s very easy.[13:37–13:48] David Hirschfeld: You can be very flexible, pivot very quickly. And if after three or four attempts, you’re still not product market fit, you’re not even close, people just really aren’t buying it, then you can say, fine. I failed fast and cheap.[13:48–14:15] David Hirschfeld: this is the wrong product or the wrong market or just the wrong timing or whatever it is. I’ve learned something and I can move on. And I, my investment was really limited in my time, personal energy and personal investment was, was only this big, not, you know, my, like my whole life, you know, five, six, seven years in a marriage and, you know, bankruptcy and, you know, the things I’ve seen many, many times, which I really hate watching.[14:15–14:47] Robert: it’s no fun for anybody involved right and it’s um i’m sure there’s some amount of regret that happens when uh say a founder like makes these too big of leaps and they’re just like it’s like there’s it’s ego driven it’s pig-headedness it’s like well i’ll show them i’ll make my idea work versus if you make like these shorter jumps and then you pivot based on what people want it’s like in hindsight or from the big picture it’s a more it’s a better recipe for success rather than just saying, hey, I’ll charge through, I’ll make it work no matter what.[14:47–15:07] Robert: And so these are some exciting ideas you have here, especially where you can be nimble early on and be making these changes to your software and your marketing before all these other pieces are set in stone And so you have this like launch method right where now you can apply what you learned and what doesn’t work and what does work.[15:07–15:13] Robert: Do you have anything to speak of about as far as, like, the present, like, who is using your system now?[15:14–15:32] David Hirschfeld: Well, actually, I want to go back to what you just said before I talk about that, because one of the biggest problems, biggest things that founders do, and, you know, we’ve all been taught you have to have this aura of positive thinking, right?[15:32–15:42] David Hirschfeld: You have to drive forward. You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe in your product. And these are all actually recipes for disaster. And I don’t remember where this came from.[15:42–16:06] David Hirschfeld: Somewhere in the 60s there was a book that was published on the power of positive thinking, and then this took off as a mantra and it’s become a culture. But if you look, there’s been studies done on really successful CEOs, like very large numbers of CEOs, and the ones with the most success and have done the best building, they are risk-averse, they are afraid, they are anxious people.[16:06–16:17] David Hirschfeld: They are not power of positive thinking. They are contingency planners. They think of everything that could cause them to fail, everything, right? They spend all their time thinking, oh, God, if the market shifts here, I may fail.[16:18–16:28] David Hirschfeld: If a competitor comes in with this kind of feature, we might fail. This is what they spend all their energy on. And so they come up with risk mitigation strategies for every one of these things.[16:28–16:43] David Hirschfeld: And when you talk to one of these CEOs, Michael Dell or any, you know, if you go back in time to the people that built these huge companies from a very simple beginning, right, and you ask them, how were you able to do it?[16:44–17:03] David Hirschfeld: They say, well, I was in the right place at the right time, and I was lucky. But the truth is that no matter what happened, they were ready for it. No matter what came across, whatever wasn’t expected to happen by most people, they had thought about what would happen and how to deal with it if it did.[17:03–17:14] David Hirschfeld: And so they just had a playbook on what to do no matter what the market does, what competitors do, what customers do. They were highly anxious people.[17:15–17:30] David Hirschfeld: I’m not saying that I want everybody to start taking Xanax and, you know, and become really anxious. But what I am saying is, you know, most of us as entrepreneurs, when we want to start something, we have this vision of what we want to do.[17:30–17:51] David Hirschfeld: We believe we understand a problem and we want to solve it and we fall in love with our product. and we put on the black robe, right, and we start preaching, you know, religion about why this product’s going to be great. And what I’m saying is if you really want to be successful, throw the black robe away, put on the white coat, and become a clinician and think of everything as a test.[17:54–18:05] David Hirschfeld: Recognize everything you’re assuming and figure out how you can prove the assumption or or prove that it’s wrong and assume your assumptions are probably not right.[18:05–18:27] David Hirschfeld: So don’t go into believing the assumptions are right. Anytime you’re believing in yourself, you’re setting yourselves up for potential risk and failure. Anytime you’re recognizing all the ways that you might fail and find ways of testing to see if there’s a path, then you are basically following the same path as these hugely successful CEOs have followed.[18:27–18:57] Robert: that’s a great insight and it tells me that we need some amount of mental flexibility i mean i don’t know about you but like i’ve butted heads with people over the years when i’m like hey what about this scenario and then the response is oh don’t worry about it don’t stress out i’m like i’m not letting it guide my emotions or my actions i’m just like thinking through some different scenario and say this thing is like eight percent likely then it only deserves eight percent of my time but i’m still like considering i’m still debugging the system as it were exactly[18:57–19:13] David Hirschfeld: That’s exactly right. Yeah. So, you know, there’s people can start companies today. There’s so many opportunities with AI and assuming that we’re talking about software companies.[19:13–19:26] David Hirschfeld: Right. But regardless of what it is, there’s so many opportunities. You know, I remember a long time ago reading an article about who makes the most successful McDonald’s franchisers.[19:27–19:43] David Hirschfeld: And it was farmers, farmers that left their farm and started to become franchisers. And the reason that farmers made the best franchisers is because they follow prescribed successful methods.[19:43–20:03] David Hirschfeld: They don’t try to invent anything. They try to be really good at each step of the process. and the fact that McDonald’s documented actually every single thing, it was very easy for somebody with that kind of mindset to create a McDonald’s franchise and blow it up and be very successful and build more and more franchises.[20:04–20:17] David Hirschfeld: So the idea being that they’re not successful because they’re risk takers, because they believe that they’re going to be successful as a franchisor, but because they follow very prescribed success methods and grow their businesses.[20:18–20:33] David Hirschfeld: It’s not you. So you can do that. Let’s say you do have an idea. You think it’s a great idea. Now, is this an idea you have any connection with personally? And what I mean by that is, are you somebody who just thinks they know how to fix social media, right?[20:33–20:45] David Hirschfeld: Because you know what you hate about social media and everybody’s going to love this. Or are you somebody that’s in some kind of industry and there’s something that you struggle with on a daily basis in your role in that industry?[20:45–20:58] David Hirschfeld: And you know that you’re just like other people in this industry who are all struggling with the exact same thing. And you have some reach to that community through networking or whatever of people that are like you having the same struggle.[20:59–21:12] David Hirschfeld: And you can easily quantify the impact that this problem has on you and the value of solving that problem. And you want to and you think I can create a product to solve this problem. That is a recipe for success.[21:12–21:23] David Hirschfeld: You know, that your chances of being successful then are grounded. And what you may be solving may be something huge. It may not be from a market opportunity perspective.[21:23–21:40] David Hirschfeld: It may be limited from a market opportunity perspective, but there’s still a market for it. Those are like gold to me. You know, the person who starts a business, starts a software company and turns it in after two years has got a million dollars ARR.[21:40–21:57] David Hirschfeld: and after another two years has 5 million ARR. You know, it’s not the hockey stick. It’s not the unicorn. But they are cash-flowing really well. They’ve got an asset now worth many times what they’re cash-flowing, and they’ve built something that’s resilient and successful.[21:58–22:13] David Hirschfeld: And, like, I want to work with those people, you know, hundreds of them, because it’s fun to watch those businesses grow. The ones that go to a billion dollars, like, overnight, Those are the flutes, and there’s 999 that tried to do that that failed.[22:14–22:34] David Hirschfeld: But the ones that fit that other model, you’ve got a much higher chance of being successful if you’re in that model, and then you can do it again and again and again right Or just build that one company and just keep expanding it and taking advantage of bigger markets and other products and capture customers[22:35–22:46] Robert: It’s reproducible, right? And it seems like it’s based on numbers and based on empathy and based on a step-by-step strategy. Instead of saying, hey, I know how to fix social media.[22:46–22:56] Robert: Only I can fix it. Versus saying, like, hey, I see a real problem. I see who will use it. I see how I’ll kind of stack the deck in my favor. I’ll see the ways this could go wrong.[22:56–23:11] Robert: I’ll see what my step-by-step is. I mean, that’s a less risky way of going about it, right? That’s a more, like, logical step-by-step sequence. And so since we’re getting near the end of our time here, tell us about what someone can do if this excites them.[23:11–23:19] Robert: If they’re interested in the launch-first method or in Tekyz, what’s the next step after listening to our conversation, and where should they go?[23:19–23:31] David Hirschfeld: Okay, great. I appreciate that. And even before I go there, I want to make one book recommendation. It’s called The Mom Test. It’s the best. I’ve read a lot of business books, but it’s the best business book I’ve read.[23:31–23:42] David Hirschfeld: If you’re in any kind of startup mode at any stage, whether you’re a startup or that’s starting to scale or you’re at the idea stage, you need to read this.[23:42–23:54] David Hirschfeld: So the idea is, and it’s philosophically very similar to the things I talked about. It’s just much deeper and better laid out than the way I describe what I do from the testing perspective.[23:55–24:08] David Hirschfeld: And he goes a little farther in terms of the fact that you don’t, let’s say you have a good relationship with your mother. That’s sort of critical for this scenario. And you go to her and you say, I want to start this pizza software company that delivers pizza.[24:08–24:20] David Hirschfeld: And she’s going to go, oh, that’s such a great idea. And you’re so smart. I know you’ll make it successful, right? That’s what your mother is saying you have a good relationship with her. That’s what she’s going to say. So the question is, let’s say you come up with an idea.Click here to explore innovative AI development and fill out our quick form to start transforming your business![24:20–24:33] David Hirschfeld: How would you ask questions from somebody like your mother and actually get honest, valuable feedback that will help you make decisions about whether this is the right product and the right approach and things like that?[24:33–24:43] David Hirschfeld: That’s why it’s called The Mom Test. Anyway, I recommend everybody get that book. So if you want to reach me at www.tekyz.com.[24:44–24:54] David Hirschfeld: That’s my website, TEKYZ. and david@tekyz.com is my email. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name, which you have right here.[24:54–24:57] David Hirschfeld: I’ll move so that you can see it in black, right?[24:57–25:01] Robert: I don’t know if that’ll show up on the final recording, so let’s just tell them how to spell it.[25:01–25:15] David Hirschfeld: Okay, all right. Last name is David. Last name is H-I-R-S-C-H-F-E-L-D. Just look me up on LinkedIn, and I should pop up.[25:15–25:26] David Hirschfeld: And if you want to learn about the launch first method specifically, when you go to Tekyz at the very top of the page, you’ll see a logo for launch first. Click on that, and that takes you to a page that talks just about launch first.[25:27–25:42] Robert: Very cool. So tekyz.com, T-E-K-Y-Z.com, David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn. And there’s definitely some value here, David, in the idea of software architecture and, like, falling in love with the layout of it.[25:42–25:56] Robert: Like when I was a teenager, I would go to the bookstore and like read through some of these books. And remember like Joel on software. Sometimes it’s fun. Even when you’re mentioning about like the airline industry, it’s fun to say like, well, hey, here’s some big ideas.[25:56–26:09] Robert: Here’s a real problem. Here’s where people are really stuck in this niche, in this space. Here’s where after all these decades of the farming industry being here, here’s the software that they don’t have that they need.[26:09–26:21] Robert: So there’s something cool about somebody following you and just tapping into the philosophization of software and how to make it work, how to find that product market fit, how to find that solution fit.[26:21–26:32] Robert: It’s really cool and exciting once you dig deep into it. And that’s how people should dig into David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn and T-E-K-Y-Z.com.[26:32–26:44] Robert: And as we’re about to check out those next steps, those resources, and look into the launch first method on tekyz.com, it’s time to put you on the spot a little bit here, David, and try to stump you somewhat.[26:44–26:52] Robert: Ask for a fun quote or lesson that has served you in life and business that you can pass on to us. So what comes to mind as far as a quote or lesson?[26:52–26:53] : Okay.[26:53–27:06] David Hirschfeld: So this one is tied to a story that I learned a long time ago about making assumptions. I say, don’t cut the ends off the ham.[27:07–27:18] David Hirschfeld: And when people say, what do you mean don’t cut the ends off the ham? I say, well, okay, because then I have to tell the story about the Christmas ham. Do I have enough time?[27:18–27:19] David Hirschfeld: It’s like a two-minute story.[27:20–27:24] Robert: Yeah, let’s fit it in. I’ve heard it, but everyone has a unique way of saying it.[27:24–27:37] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, let’s do it. So Sally is seven years old, and she’s helping her mom in the kitchen. And she’s just now old enough to actually participate. And so her mom’s teaching her how to, you know, prepare the ham.[27:38–27:50] David Hirschfeld: And she cuts the ends off the ham, puts it in the pan, and sticks it in the oven. And Sally says, why do you cut the ends off the ham? He says, because it just makes it taste better. She says, why would that make it taste better? She says, well, because I’m not really sure.[27:51–28:03] David Hirschfeld: But Grandma’s in the other room, and she taught me to cook it this way. I know her ham’s always come out great. So Sally goes into the living room and says, Grandma, why do we cut the ends off the ham? And Grandma says, because it makes the ham taste better.[28:04–28:16] David Hirschfeld: And she says, well, why would that make it taste better? She says, well, I don’t know. I just know we make the best hams. But why don’t you call your great-grandmother? She’s at my sister’s place in New York.[28:16–28:37] David Hirschfeld: So she gets on the phone. They all gather on the phone. And Sally says, great-grandma, why do you cut the ends off the Christmas hand? She says, because my oven’s too small. and so anytime you believe in what you’re doing or somebody says we’ve always done it this way I always say don’t cut the ends off the ham which of course starts the story and then they have to[28:37–29:10] Robert: think about it and it’s worth rethinking these like why does my roku remote not have a power off button why does my iphone not have any buttons at all because they tried a new way of doing it and it worked and people loved it and that’s what matters and so as we’re considering that thinking about that, go to tekyz.com, that’s tekyz.com, and look up David Hirschfeld on LinkedIn. He puts out some excellent content on Medium, so go and see what he’s posting about as far as what it takes[29:10–29:24] Robert: to get a hyper-exceptional development team figured out, running great, to be AI first, to have a startup and a SaaS business that’s a success, not one of these many failures, A lot of ways to go wrong, a few ways to go right.[29:24–29:35] Robert: And it can be fun, exciting, and adventurous if we have that right mindset, which David can help us do. So, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. David Hirschfeld, wonderful speaking with you. Thanks.[29:35–29:41] David Hirschfeld: And let me make one shameless plug, depending on when this gets published. I’m hosting a new podcast called Scaling Smarter.[29:43–29:48] Robert: Very nice. So, Scaling Smarter Podcast. Give it five stars. Listen to every episode. Yeah.[29:48–29:53] David Hirschfeld: Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, David. And the same here for Market of the Day. Of course.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Marketer of the Day Podcast: Craft the Perfect Launch Strategy for Software Development and SaaS… was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Sell Before You Build for Faster Product-Market Fit](https://tekyz.com/sell-before-you-build-for-faster-product-market-fit-bfb66cd1884e/) - Featured Image: Sell Before You Build for Faster Product -Market Fithttps://medium.com/media/b8f9f434decd51228c72bdf55615e5dc/hrefThis podcast episode of UX Leadership by Design features Mark Baldino, co-founder of Fuzzy Math, interviewing David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Tekyz. The discussion centers around Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” methodology, a process designed to help startups achieve product-market fit by validating revenue potential before significant development investment.David Hirschfeld’s experience with successful and failed startups and his work with over 90 other startups informed the creation of this methodology.UX Leadership by Design: De-risking Startups with the Launch First MethodologyThis podcast episode of UX Leadership by Design features Mark Baldino interviewing David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Tekyz, a custom software development company. The discussion centers around Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” methodology, a process designed to help startups achieve product-market fit by validating revenue potential before significant investment in development. David’s experience with successful and failed startups and his work with over 90 other startups informed the creation of this methodology.Hirschfeld’s Background and the Genesis of Launch FirstDavid’s career began in enterprise software, where he founded a successful logistics software company he later sold. His second startup, however, failed, leading him to reflect on the key differences between success and failure. He founded Tekyz in 2007 and developed the Launch First methodology by observing patterns in his clients’ ventures. He realized the primary reason for startup failure was waiting too long to prove revenue and product-market fit.Defining Product-Market FitHirschfeld defines product-market fit as achieving a customer lifetime value at least three times the customer acquisition cost, in a predictable and repeatable manner. This involves estimating lifetime value and considering factors like lifetime licenses, which can provide upfront revenue and committed beta users. He argues that raising money through traditional methods dilutes equity without necessarily contributing to business growth or product-market fit, while pre-launch sales build a sales and marketing engine, generate revenue, and secure committed customers.The Launch First ProcessThe Launch First methodology prioritizes proving revenue potential before building a full product. The process begins with:1. Niche Analysis: Identifying the ideal target niche through a metrics-driven approach. This involves analyzing the cost and perceived impact of the problem the software addresses across various niches. The goal is to find a niche with high cost and perceived impact, indicating a strong need and willingness to pay.2. High-Fidelity Prototype: Developing a highly realistic, interactive prototype that simulates the software’s functionality. This allows potential customers to visualize the solution without requiring a fully functional MVP.These two steps often occur in parallel. Once the niche and prototype are defined, the process continues with:3. Validation Interviews: Interview stakeholders in the target niche to validate the assumptions made during the niche analysis and refine the product’s focus.4. Pre-Launch Sales: Creating a marketing funnel and outreach program to generate leads and conduct demos, ultimately securing pre-launch sales. This provides crucial evidence of product-market fit and generates revenue before significant development investment.Determining Price and Addressing Founder MindsetHirschfeld recommends determining price by directly asking potential customers during validation interviews. He also emphasizes the importance of shifting founders from a “black robe monk” mindset, driven by unwavering belief in their vision, to a “white coat scientist” mindset, focused on testing assumptions and adapting based on data.Pivoting and Failing FastThe Launch First methodology encourages failing fast and cheap. If the metrics aren’t positive during validation interviews or pre-launch sales, it’s a signal to re-evaluate the niche or even the product itself. This allows for significant pivots early in the process, minimizing wasted development effort.Key TakeawaysThe Launch First methodology offers a structured, metrics-driven approach to de-risking startups by validating revenue potential before substantial development investment. It emphasizes the importance of niche analysis, high-fidelity prototypes, validation interviews, and pre-launch sales. By focusing on data and customer feedback, Launch First helps founders make informed decisions, pivot quickly when necessary, and ultimately increase their chances of success.Transcript[0:02–0:13] Mark Baldino: Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I’m Mark Baldino, your host. I’m also a co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer-grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools.[0:14–0:28] Mark Baldino: Today, I speak with David Hirschfeld, who is the founder and CEO at Tekyz, which is a custom software development company. Prior to that, David started two software companies and has advised over 90 along the way.[0:28–0:44] Mark Baldino: And during that time, he’s developed a very specific methodology. And we break down this methodology during our conversation, but it’s all about product market fit. And David has seen enough folks fail because they don’t validate the revenue potential of their product.[0:44–1:08] Mark Baldino: They focus on ICP and pitch decks, and then they actually build out their full MVP, and then they try to sell it. And this process is really around de-risking, getting to failure faster and cheaper, but following a metric-driven approach that helps clarify the root problem that your software, your organization is solving and paints kind of a realistic picture through high-fidelity prototypes and then gets people to sign up as customers early on.[1:08–1:18] Mark Baldino: It sort of flips the script a bit. And so it’s kind of a really fascinating conversation whether you’re a founder, you’re working on a product team, you’re a startup, or maybe launching the next version of your SaaS product.[1:18–1:32] Mark Baldino: I think the methodology could kind of assist all of you. So please enjoy the episode. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to send them my way. And then, as always, please like and share as you see fit.[1:33–1:39] Mark Baldino: And thanks, as always, for listening. David, welcome to the podcast.[1:41–1:43] David Hirschfeld: Thanks, Mark. Really happy to be here. Yeah.[1:44–2:04] Mark Baldino: Yeah, no, excited and looking forward to our conversation here. I would love for you to just start by giving a bit of a background on yourself. I know you have kind of an interesting background and kind of what led you to, you know, your sort of current engagement and leadership at Tekyz.[2:04–2:24] David Hirschfeld: Sure. I started out in the software industry and enterprise. They’re almost not quite 40 years ago. with working for Computer Associates and Texas Instruments, and then I became a consultant and ran projects in Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Public Service.[2:24–2:45] David Hirschfeld: So I had a lot of enterprise experience in my early days. Then I started a software company in the early 90s in logistics, route distribution, inventory management, sort of pre-ERP, and grew that company to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000.[2:46–3:09] David Hirschfeld: So now I think I know what I’m doing as far as startup scale. I was VP of products for the acquiring company for several years and then left and went and tried to start my own company and did not follow the same playbook that I did with the first company just because it was kind of a different product, different company, and not realizing the things I did that made me successful the first time.[3:09–3:23] David Hirschfeld: And the second one failed. So I have the experience on both sides, right, the failure and success. So from the ashes of that, I started Tekyz, my current company, in 2007, 18 years ago.[3:23–3:35] David Hirschfeld: Tekyz is a custom software development company, and we have worked with over 90 startups during that time, a couple of them very successful, but the vast majority failed.[3:35–3:38] David Hirschfeld: which is what led me to create the launch first methodology.[3:39–3:49] Mark Baldino: Was the launch, we’ll get into that in a second, the launch first methodology. Was that built on the ashes of the failure? I mean, did you, if you don’t mind talking about that, the differences in it?[3:49–3:49] David Hirschfeld: Not at all.[3:50–3:55] Mark Baldino: Was that like lessons learned that you then applied in this methodology?[3:55–4:13] David Hirschfeld: I knew some of the things that I did wrong in the second startup. I didn’t know all of them. And I didn’t understand the key things that I did wrong in terms of how I approached it until I had worked with probably 60 or 70 startups that I watched fail and succeed.[4:13–4:25] David Hirschfeld: The few that succeeded had very consistent similarities, but the vast majority that failed all failed from my perspective for the same reason.[4:25–4:35] David Hirschfeld: And then I started to realize why I failed the first time. And that’s waiting way too long to prove revenue, prove product market fit. So, yeah.[4:35–4:46] David Hirschfeld: So it wasn’t because of my failure as much as it was just seeing the synchronicity between all these other failures and the differences between the few successes.[4:47–5:01] Mark Baldino: As a professional services owner myself, what made you want to join RRanks after running startups? What made you want to get into the consulting side of the world and actually helping other people with their businesses?[5:03–5:20] David Hirschfeld: Well, we were really good at building software. This is something that I knew I had a particular interest and skill set at, understanding not only how to assemble systems, but also how to create products that would get engagement.[5:20–5:33] David Hirschfeld: Because even though I failed the second time, we did get really good engagement on the product. I just didn’t start charging for it. I went the route of trying to raise money, and I spent way too long trying to do that instead of generating revenue for my customers.[5:34–5:45] David Hirschfeld: So anyway, so that was something I knew I could do and do really well, and there was a real need and demand for it at the time.[5:45–5:52] David Hirschfeld: So it was just sort of like low friction brought me into becoming a service provider and building a software development company.[5:52–6:02] Mark Baldino: Do you still have the itch of getting back in and owning and running a company that’s a software company, or do you feel like consulting is very important?[6:02–6:22] David Hirschfeld: I didn’t. That’s a really good question. I didn’t at first. It was like a lot of founders that fail. I was like, oh, God, I’m not doing that again. But that didn’t last for very long. And then it wasn’t long before I took a partnership with one of my clients in the healthcare industry, a company called Anzu.[6:22–6:34] David Hirschfeld: And then I continued to think about products. In fact, right now, this year, we’re going to be releasing a couple products, not Anzu, but Tekyzville, SAS products.[6:34–6:44] David Hirschfeld: because of the AI revolution and the ability to identify and automate certain discrete workflows that have huge value.[6:45–6:54] David Hirschfeld: So we’re going to be creating some SaaS products that we’re going to be releasing this year. So I want to get back into the software world because I really like owning a product.[6:54–7:09] Mark Baldino: That’s awesome. I want to dig in on this because it’s like in the back of my mind, there’s always been products. We don’t do development, right? We’re just design. So it’s like there’s that whole other side of the world that’s like you get involved in.[7:09–7:21] Mark Baldino: But do you have to make changes in the structure of your consulting? This is maybe too in the weeds for some folks. But have you had to make changes in the structure of your business to actually transition it from a consulting business to a product business?[7:23–7:37] David Hirschfeld: Ultimately, there’ll be some changes, especially as the products start to take off. But no, not really. because we have a development team and our development team does a lot of support for existing customers.[7:37–7:50] David Hirschfeld: It’s not just building a startup product, but it’s also being the outsourcing technology group for that company. So that won’t be very different other than they’ll be our own products internally.[7:50–7:59] David Hirschfeld: And then of course, the marketing, the sales, that will be different than what we do for the service side.[7:59–8:02] Mark Baldino: Okay. And your clients are the same, right?[8:04–8:05] David Hirschfeld: In what respect?[8:06–8:22] Mark Baldino: The things that you’re going to automate, those discrete services that are, some humans are doing now, your clients need, I’m thinking you’re doing it as part of what Tekyz is offering in your service offering, and you’re going to take some of those and automate them.[8:22–8:29] Mark Baldino: And therefore, like the people you sell, your consulting services might be the same people that you sell the SaaS service. But I made a leap there without actually asking.[8:29–8:39] David Hirschfeld: Actually, a little bit different. A little bit different. The consulting services we’re selling to existing companies that need software development, not selling to software development teams.[8:40–9:06] David Hirschfeld: So some of the products we’re developing will be targeting software development teams, other firms like mine. Some of them, one of the products that we’re building a workflow around will be for marketing agencies because the company that I use to help me with marketing is the one that identified this workflow that needs to be automated. And there aren’t good products out there that do this. So we’re just going to automate it and then we’re going to jointly market that product.[9:08–9:42] David Hirschfeld: And one of them is related to Launch First to help start the niche analysis piece, which is a very fatiguing process. There are several products. And then one of them is because I started doing podcasting with the idea that I would start to develop a referral network of other people like me and like the people that interview me or that I interview in my podcast. And there’s not a really good low-hanging fruit kind of referral partner network for managing referrals out there. And so we started building that. That one, this week, we’ll have our MVP ready,[9:42–9:53] David Hirschfeld: which we’re building an MVP for ourselves because I need the product, right, for the referral partners as opposed to doing a peer launch first approach.[9:53–10:12] David Hirschfeld: And then I can start to add the people that are adding as referral partners to the system and then they get a login so they can give referrals or see what the state of the referrals and how much they accrued in terms of referral fees. And then, of course, they go, well, I could use this for my referral[10:12–10:26] Mark Baldino: partners, and it’s sort of a natural. All right. In the space, I might be a target user. Feel free to meet some alpha, beta folks. Let me know. It’s a good transition because you talked a little bit about how you’re launching this maybe a little bit slightly differently.[10:26–10:41] Mark Baldino: You’re doing your MVP internally. But I’d love to talk more about sort of the launch first framework and methodology. And where I’d like to start is like a little bit of a primer on when you say product market fit, what does that mean?[10:42–11:01] David Hirschfeld: Okay. All right. So product market fit, from my perspective, is a pretty straightforward equation. It means that whatever it costs me to acquire a customer in terms of sales and marketing costs, that lifetime value of that customer is at least worth three times what that cost is.[11:01–11:12] David Hirschfeld: And that I can do that in a predictable, repeatable way so that I can scale. Scale at least in terms of that niche that I’m marketing to where I’ve proven product market fit.[11:12–11:25] David Hirschfeld: That’s product market fit. You know you have it because people are paying you money for your product. If you can’t get people to pay you money for your product in enough numbers where you can get to that 3 to 1 ratio, then you don’t have product market fit yet.[11:26–11:34] Mark Baldino: More than just will you pay for this. It’s will you pay for this in a long enough term that I’m going to get 3x back on the cost it takes to acquire you.[11:34–11:46] David Hirschfeld: Right. And some of that you have to estimate because you don’t always know what the lifetime value is early on. But depending on how you do launch first, you might be able to nail that down even in the initial sale.[11:46–11:59] David Hirschfeld: Because a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times we’ll do lifetime licenses as part of the launch first sales approach, which people go lifetime licenses. I’m never going to do that because then I don’t get any more revenue from that client, which is not necessarily the case.[11:59–12:16] David Hirschfeld: Because once you have a client, a customer using your software, you have the ability for upsells in the future when you have new capabilities to upsell them or new services. But more than that, if you think about what most people do, and that’s they create an MVP and a pitch deck and try to raise money.[12:17–12:38] David Hirschfeld: And when they’re raising money, maybe $250,000 to $500,000 are giving anywhere from 10% to 25% of their equity away in that initial raise. When you sell lifetime licenses and all the work you do to raise that money, none of that does anything to grow your business or to move you on the path of being able to generate revenue and have product market good.[12:38–12:49] David Hirschfeld: Seems like it does, but it doesn’t. Whereas when you’re doing launch first, you’re marketing to your customers, right? So you’ve got a sales and marketing engine that you’ve developed. You are successfully closing business, so you’re generating revenue.[12:50–13:02] David Hirschfeld: And the people that are buying in, whether it’s a classic prelaunch or whether there are different models of prelaunch sales, you now have a very committed beta customer because they’ve paid money for your product.[13:02–13:14] David Hirschfeld: And you’re generating the same amount of revenue that you would from raising from a seed investor. And usually you’re giving away an immeasurable fraction of a percent of your market, not 20% equity.[13:15–13:21] Mark Baldino: So one of your core recommendations for your clients in Launch First is that they do lifetime membership?[13:21–13:38] David Hirschfeld: No, it’s really dependent on the business model. Okay. Right, right. So it depends on the product. If it’s like a subscription-based product where they’re paying like a yearly subscription or monthly subscription, then lifetime licenses often make a lot of sense.[13:39–13:58] David Hirschfeld: Because you can come out with new features later on that they’re paying for and they’re paying subscription fees for those at some point in the future. But the thing about getting these customers, aside from it helps you generate revenue and offset development costs from customers, is that now you get people using your product and you’re working on product solution fit.[13:59–14:13] David Hirschfeld: not product market fit. MVP should not be for product market fit to validate it, which is what most people use an MVP for. It should be for product solution fit for validating that. And for people that don’t know what that is, the difference, product market fit means people are buying your product.[14:13–14:28] David Hirschfeld: Product solution fit means now people are using your product. Whether that’s something they would buy or not, are they now using it to get the value out of the product in a way that keeps them as a customer, right, engages them so they stay a customer?[14:29–14:36] David Hirschfeld: and that it’s not falling short in significant ways that opens up the opportunity for competitors to take them away.[14:36–14:40] Mark Baldino: Is your recommendation that they do product market fit to get to the MVP?[14:41–14:51] David Hirschfeld: Product market fit to prove they’ve got sale or they’ve got a saleable product, right? And that there is actually a business there. Because a lot of people build a product where there really is no business.[14:51–14:57] David Hirschfeld: They don’t realize it until they’ve made a huge investment in the product only to find out nobody wants to buy it.[14:57–15:09] Mark Baldino: It kind of merged these two things and think of them as the same and maybe even do the MVP first. As you said, I got this great deck or I have this prototype. Now I want to go see if I can either raise funds, which is a little different, but can I grow revenue out of this?[15:09–15:19] Mark Baldino: And you’re, as you alluded to earlier, directly stated, people are going too far without confirming that there’s a revenue potential here.[15:19–15:31] Mark Baldino: Exactly. Is it safe to say that’s the single biggest mistake you saw in the first 60 startups and maybe your experience? So what is the process to avoid that issue look like?[15:31–15:44] David Hirschfeld: You start getting people to buy your product before you build it. So and the way we do that is we build what I call a high fidelity prototype, which is a very animated set of mockups.[15:44–15:57] David Hirschfeld: It’s much more features and function than you see in an MVP, but there’s no software there. But when you demo it, it looks like real software. And that’s a critical success factor in doing prelaunch sales.[15:58–16:08] David Hirschfeld: Because when you’re doing a demo to somebody, if they see something that just looks like click-through mock-ups, their first question is, how do I know you can build this?[16:09–16:22] David Hirschfeld: And if you get that question, they’re not going to buy it. If you build a realistic enough demo out of the mock-ups so that when you demo it, they cannot tell the difference between that and real software, then that question never happens.[16:22–16:33] David Hirschfeld: Even though you don’t lie to them, you tell them it’s a prototype and that what they’re seeing, the first version of the software won’t be out for three to four months and won’t have all these features.[16:33–16:47] David Hirschfeld: They don’t hear that. You know, their brain makes up a story that, oh, well, this month they must be in development, have just finished testing, but the software looks great. And, you know, you never, I never suggest anybody ever lie to anybody.[16:47–16:56] David Hirschfeld: But you want them to see something. You want them to see exactly how this software is going to operate and behave when they get it because that’s what they’re buying.[16:56–17:14] Mark Baldino: So step one is this very realistic, high-fidelity, clickable, interactive at some level, concept car prototype. And then how do you go from that to, hey, person A, person B, would you actually pay for this or would you give me money for it?[17:14–17:26] David Hirschfeld: Well, I want to go step one is actually doing the niche analysis. And often we’ll do that in parallel with doing the design and development of this prototype. But it’s really important.[17:27–17:47] David Hirschfeld: So all founders have one job when they’re starting a new product or business. It’s the number one job, and none of them understand this. Neither did I for a long time. And that is if you think about where you’re starting from, you’ve got this product that you believe will solve the problem in some industry or for people in whatever that is.[17:47–18:00] David Hirschfeld: You’re solving a problem. And there’s a lot of different niches that you can market this product to because usually the problem has some kind of broad base of people struggling with it, but in different ways from different niches, right?[18:00–18:15] David Hirschfeld: And then when you think about the problem or problems you’re solving and you think about it from the perspective of each of these niches, it boils — you can get deeper into what the real root level problem is from the perspective of these stakeholders.[18:15–18:40] David Hirschfeld: And that’s a critical success factor is knowing the root level problem. And, you know, you’re at the root level problem when somebody is, when you can say to somebody or when somebody says to you, I hate this problem or I’m afraid if I don’t solve this problem that, you know, that this will happen and that will cause me some kind of personal, you know, negative thing.[18:40–19:14] David Hirschfeld: thing like my career will never advance I’m going to lose competitive position in the market you know I’m going to lose all my restauranteurs are my my patrons it’s going to my advertising costs are going to double because to try to overcome those bad ratings whatever the thing is it has to boil down to my life is where will be worse because I don’t solve this problem for this reason that’s a root level problem and usually you’ve got about 10 or anywhere from 8 to 15 different root level problems when you start to really distill it out from the standpoint of a stakeholder.[19:14–19:42] David Hirschfeld: So as a founder, you have one job when you’re starting a company, and that is only one of those niches can you market to. So which one of those niches do you pick out of the 10 or 15 or 20 niches that you’ve identified? And which is the top one or two or at most three root level problems that you’re going to address initially? Right. And so what we do is we have a metrics driven methodology for figuring this out.[19:42–20:05] David Hirschfeld: Because that also informs, once you know who that is and what those root level problems are, that informs how you’re going to do the outreach to speak to those people, how you’re going to demo the product in terms of the language and where you’re going to focus even if the thing you demoing has the two roadmap and all the features but you going to make that demo very focused on their problems the ones they need solved[20:06–20:24] Mark Baldino: So a founder or organization, they have a lot of niches. You help them select one, and then you do niche analysis. You do this sort of deep dive into what’s the root cause, or what’s the cause of this problem until you get to the bottom, which is a root cause.[20:24–20:40] Mark Baldino: And I understand that that’s an acute pain that somebody can clarify. And they can not only say this is a problem, they can talk about where it’s bubbling up in their lives and what it’s going to cost them, either dollars or emotionally, whatever it is.[20:41–20:49] Mark Baldino: They can quantify that pain to you. And then you feel like, okay, I have a root cause or maybe I have two or three. Am I understanding that? Did I reframe it?[20:49–21:06] David Hirschfeld: Sort of. Sort of. So you got the gist of it, but the difference is you’re not picking the niche. The niche picks itself from the metrics that you gather in doing this analysis because you don’t want to pick a niche.[21:06–21:20] David Hirschfeld: You want the numbers to say this is an ideal niche for early adopter and doing sales. And you know they’re the ideal niche because whichever problems are the most significant to them, there’s two things we measure.[21:20–21:33] David Hirschfeld: One is cost. How much does each of those root problems cost each stakeholder in each of these different niches? And the second number we grab is what is the perceived impact? That’s that fear, right?[21:34–21:47] David Hirschfeld: What is that perception, how much this problem impacts them personally? And both numbers have to be high. And the reason for that is you might have a really high cost with one of these intersections.[21:47–22:15] David Hirschfeld: these intersections, so think of this as a spreadsheet. With each intersection of the spreadsheet problem on the left and niches on the top, each one is a measure. And you might have a really high cost, but you’re talking to a stakeholder who’s the decision maker, who’s in an industry where this problem is endemic in the industry and everybody deals with it and I’m not going to get, you know, this is just not important to me to fix it right now because my life isn’t going to change if we do.[22:15–22:29] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah, we’re going to save a lot of money, but that’s not my big motivation today, right? My motivation is competitive pressures or this or that, or I won’t get management support to make that change because nobody cares, right?[22:29–22:39] David Hirschfeld: Everybody is like they want their focus on something else. That’s low perceived impact. So that’s not a good one because you can’t get their attention when you start marketing.[22:39–22:53] David Hirschfeld: They’re going, who cares about that, right? When you flip it the other way around, you’ve got a high perceived impact. I hate that. That drives me nuts, that problem. But then you measure the cost and it’s really low. So you can’t charge them very much for it, even though you can get their attention and they’re going to want to buy it.[22:54–23:06] David Hirschfeld: But there’s not enough of them and the amount you’re getting for it isn’t enough. So that’s not a good target for early adopters. So you’re looking for where both those numbers are really high for their top two problems, three at the most, right?[23:06–23:12] David Hirschfeld: And then there’s other things we do to then validate that really is the right early adopter[23:12–23:13] : niche. Okay.[23:13–23:24] Mark Baldino: So it’s that high cost, high fear, high impact. Right. And when you find that alignment across the niches, a niche is going to come to the top and say, this is the one you should focus on.[23:25–23:25] David Hirschfeld: Exactly.[23:26–23:30] Mark Baldino: Do you feel, and you’ve done this for 90 plus startups.[23:30–23:43] David Hirschfeld: No, I figured out this after having watched, you know, most of those startups fail. Okay. Yeah, I’ve done this probably for about like five startups at this point.[23:43–23:52] David Hirschfeld: Okay. of which three of them were successful. Okay. Yeah, getting sales and getting the product market fit before we started developing their software, yeah.[23:52–24:04] Mark Baldino: So founders are peculiar folks. You and I both founded companies. You founded a few of different types. I’ll speak for myself. At times, I like to have all the answers.[24:05–24:18] Mark Baldino: I feel like I know where the direction of my company is, and I kind of drive from that perspective. I set the vision, and we’re going to march towards it, right? And I think a lot of founders share that. And that’s, I think what some people perceive is make founders very successful.[24:18–24:29] Mark Baldino: It’d be hard to change founders’ minds. Do you find, as you started to implement the launch first sort of methodology, that that’s been easier? Are you helping founders get out of their way?[24:30–24:33] Mark Baldino: Is it helping, like, shift founders’ mindsets?[24:33–24:44] David Hirschfeld: It helps, yes. But you can’t, like, you can’t fix somebody that’s got a personality flaw. And I’m not suggesting that my founders have personality flaws, but you know what I’m saying, right?[24:44–24:56] David Hirschfeld: It’s very hard. The problem is most founders believe in they have a vision. They believe in themselves. They believe in their vision and those which is fine as a starting point.[24:56–25:15] David Hirschfeld: But those are if you don’t get out of it, if you don’t abandon that concept, then those are code words for I’m going to fail. So founders that are consistently successful understand that their beliefs are nothing more than that, that their assumptions, that they have to measure them, they have to validate them.[25:15–25:27] David Hirschfeld: And if they can’t validate them, then they need to adjust to something that is provable and validatable. So what I always say as a founder, most founders come in wearing the black robe.[25:27–25:50] David Hirschfeld: They have black robe syndrome, right? They believe in their vision. And they’re sure if they just work hard enough and stay focused and true to their path, they’ll be successful. And I gently peel that black robe off of some of them and then try to wrap them in a white coat and turn them into clinicians where they are setting up tests and measuring the results of the things and understanding what’s an assumption and what’s proven.[25:51–25:58] Mark Baldino: It’s a great metaphor, shifting them from the black robe magician to the white robe scientist.[25:59–26:08] David Hirschfeld: And very clearly. The black robe monk. Monk. Yeah, not magician, monk. Yeah, right. Believer, you know, religious leader, right? They believe.[26:08–26:15] Mark Baldino: Yes, yes. Black robe monk to the white coat scientist is a very powerful, very powerful.[26:15–26:15] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, right.[26:15–26:26] Mark Baldino: I asked this question earlier, and then you backed into the niche analysis and kind of said you could develop the prototype. And so it sounds like those two are going to work in concert. Yeah, they do.[26:26–26:32] Mark Baldino: What are the next few steps or maybe step along the way in the framework?[26:32–26:46] David Hirschfeld: So once we’re sure we’ve got the right niche and there’s more steps involved to validate that, there are assumptions that are made during that process, but there’s a constant outreach whenever you’re making an assumption that’s based on really unknowns.[26:47–27:08] David Hirschfeld: So then you do outreach to stakeholders in that niche to verify what they’re struggling with. And then at the end of that niche analysis process, we do an interview process, not discovery interview, but a validation interview, because now we’ve built a model for who we’re marketing to, why we’re marketing, how much we should charge, what their value proposition, all that stuff, the language we should use.[27:09–27:23] David Hirschfeld: And then we go and do 15 to 20 interviews to stakeholders in that niche to validate this process, to validate that our assumptions were correct. We’re building the prototype usually in this process because usually we don’t make an entire change of the product.[27:23–27:34] David Hirschfeld: It would be a rare case where the product completely changes because of these interviews. And then we’ll have subtle changes in other areas, what we’re focusing on, emphasizing and deemphasizing, other things that we realize nobody cares about.[27:35–27:54] David Hirschfeld: But for the most part, it’s still the same product, right? So we’re building the prototype, and we’re not building just for those stakeholders. is we’re building out the big vision. Because basically when you do the demo to somebody, you’re saying, you know, talk about their problems and how this addresses their problems and look what else you’re getting.[27:54–28:05] David Hirschfeld: Because you can see the big vision of the product. And then create a marketing funnel and an automated outreach program to get people to come to either your one-on-one demos or to webinars.[28:06–28:16] David Hirschfeld: And then put together presentations for demoing the product with some high value offer to them. If they buy in early, they’re going to get this.[28:17–28:36] David Hirschfeld: So, right, then they’re going to spend this kind of money to buy in early, but then they’re going to get all this for it. And if it’s a product, if you’re solving a big enough problem that has a big enough cost and a big enough perceived impact and you give them a big enough value up front, then you can sell in enough numbers, and this is clear proof that you got product market fit.[28:37–28:51] Mark Baldino: How are you helping them determine the cost? Like, to me, one of the key components of product market fit is, like, how much? So, yes, there’s a big enough problem. Someone’s going to be willing to pay for it. We have a product in front of us, this prototype, that we think solves for those issues.[28:51–28:58] Mark Baldino: We’ve kind of walked you through it. But how do you help them determine, like, the actual price somebody might be willing to pay for this?[28:58–29:23] David Hirschfeld: Well, in that validation interview, we ask them. Like, we come up with this is how much it costs. So if we were, you know, this problem is costing you this much. So if we charge this portion of that much, you know, whatever that is, factored over whatever period of time, you say this is what we’re planning on charging for the product, the different kind of licensing, how does that — do you think that people would pay for that, right?[29:23–29:31] David Hirschfeld: Or you ask them how much would you pay for this product. It depends on who the client is and what the situation is. And then you’re setting up marketing formal.[29:32–29:32] Mark Baldino: Right.[29:32–29:45] David Hirschfeld: Right. And that’s sort of at the end of this validation interview where you’re because you said, here’s a problem that we understand people like you have. And they say, yes, oh, yeah, that problem’s really big.[29:45–29:56] David Hirschfeld: And here’s how I calculated cost of that problem. Oh, yeah, it’s that much or more. And then you say, OK, this is what we were thinking would solve that problem.[29:56–30:20] David Hirschfeld: Would that solve that problem for you You know yes that would be fantastic I need that right away this is what we were thinking of charging for that Oh people will pay for that No problem You can probably charge more. You know, we’re looking for about 30% of the interviewee, the people we interview to give us that kind of strong affinity. And if you’re getting that, then, you know, those will probably be your first customers. Right. You’re starting to, as you said, you’re starting to build[30:20–30:36] Mark Baldino: that funnel and get your early adopters. When do you, because, so two things. One is sometimes product and engineering design sometimes fear this, like we’re going to go out and demo something that’s not real, and then we have to deliver on it.[30:36–30:46] Mark Baldino: I mean, it sounds like you’re giving a little bit of a runway, but like how do you, let’s say you’re getting positive feedback. Like when do you advise your clients, like, hey, you should actually start putting the MVP together and this is like your.[30:46–30:58] David Hirschfeld: Oh, as soon as we’ve proven you’ve got product market fit, right? Which is so that you can continue to sell this pre-launch at a predictable closing rate.[30:58–31:18] David Hirschfeld: Right. You might need three sales. You might need 10 or 15 sales, depending on the product and the cost and all that. And then you know at that point it’s time to start working on the MVP. And you can continue to sell, do the pre-launch sale, while you’re building the MVP to basically acquire more funds from customers and a larger pool of beta customers.[31:18–31:21] Mark Baldino: And it sounds, you mentioned this before, it sounds metrics-driven throughout.[31:22–31:27] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, if you’re not proving it, you know, if you’re not measuring and proving, then there’s no point in doing it.[31:28–31:39] Mark Baldino: If they get through halfway through the process and, like, they’re not, it’s not vetting out in the validation interviews, I mean, do you recommend people go back to the niche analysis and, like, find a new niche?[31:39–31:44] Mark Baldino: Or is it, like, sometimes you say we’re not, this is not a good idea and also say it nicely.[31:44–32:16] David Hirschfeld: Oh, no, that’s possible, too. But usually, I mean, usually what we bubble chart those two numbers, the cost and the perceived impact, we bubble chart them. There’s usually two or three niches that float up into the upper right. One usually looks like it’s the clear winner, and sometimes it is, and other times there’s other factors that drop that niche out of a good early adopter niche. Like, for example, maybe the stakeholder are CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies in a particular industry, and it’s a small market.[32:16–32:27] David Hirschfeld: They’re very expensive to reach, and the sales cycle’s really long. That would drop — those are all factors that might drop that niche lower than another niche where the sales cycle’s much shorter, much easier to reach those people.[32:27–32:51] David Hirschfeld: Cost to reach them is much less expensive. Things like that. So willingness to make a quick decision, you know, other things like that. So if we get to the validation interviews because one seemed like the clear winner, but it turns out we’re not getting that affinity from those people, then we drop that niche and we go to the next one, which we’ve already done that deep dive on to understand, you know, where they sit in the niche.[32:51–33:04] David Hirschfeld: And one of those top three, usually in the top two or three, one of those is going to give you that high affinity. If nobody is, you’re not even close, then or let’s say you do get that affinity, but then you go to launch first and nobody’s buying it.[33:04–33:20] David Hirschfeld: You can’t seem to get any sales. Then you might want to ask yourself, maybe this is I should fail fast and cheap. Think of it like this is the wrong time for this product in this market. There’s other factors at play that I did not consider or I wasn’t honest with myself in this process.[33:20–33:32] Mark Baldino: I appreciate you saying that last part about failure and fail fast and cheat because I think sometimes people hear metrics driven and you can convince yourself that the metrics are saying one thing.[33:32–33:43] Mark Baldino: But there should be points along the way, and I’m sure there are. It sounds like there are, where the metrics might be telling you to reevaluate and go back two steps and rethink. Or maybe this is a failure and that’s okay and there’s a learning in it.[33:43–33:54] Mark Baldino: Because I think sometimes when people, I don’t know if it’s natural inclination, like you start on a path and it’s like we’re going through this till we burn through our life savings or all of our runway and all the capital.[33:54–34:02] Mark Baldino: I think part of the idea here is you’re actually helping them make smarter financial decisions and figure those out earlier in advance.[34:03–34:20] David Hirschfeld: And hopefully if they do are going down the wrong road, it’ll be obvious and they can pivot early, you know, make really big pivots early because there’s no software they have to rewrite. Right. And and redoing the prototype design is like a fraction of the effort that it takes to do the same thing to the software that you’ve completed.[34:20–34:32] David Hirschfeld: So I’m really encouraging when the numbers aren’t coming out right. There should be some kind of evidence what would be the right target in terms of product and problem and things like that.[34:32–34:44] David Hirschfeld: And then shift. And, you know, at some point, you’ll either realize that there’s just not no here here or that you’ve figured out a formula that’s going to work. And now it gives you an anchor to build a business around.[34:44–34:55] Mark Baldino: It’s been absolutely fascinating. And I appreciate that you’ve laid out a framework. It’s, to me, it’s very logical and it makes a lot of sense. It’s not filled with a lot of buzzwords.[34:55–35:09] Mark Baldino: So I’m really enjoying it. If you would indulge me as we wrap up a little bit, to go a little bit meta, which is to think about like, you probably did niche analysis on your customers and you came up with, this is the group of people that I want to serve.[35:09–35:19] Mark Baldino: And this is their root cause. This is sort of the root cause. Like, what’s the root cause that Launch First and that Tekyz is solving for these startups?[35:20–35:20] : Okay.[35:21–35:33] David Hirschfeld: So it’s really simple, I think. And that is to, if you can’t generate revenue from your product, then don’t bother building it.[35:34–35:47] David Hirschfeld: And since you can generate, and by the way, there are lots of examples in the world of people that did pre-launch sales. I’ll give you a really, really famous one, Elon Musk, with his electric sports car.[35:47–35:59] David Hirschfeld: Do you remember that? His very first version of a Tesla electric sports car, it was a prototype. It didn’t exist. And he raised gobs of money on that, right, before he had a name.[36:00–36:11] David Hirschfeld: So prelaunch sale, just typical prelaunch sale. There are many software examples of this, too. So it’s not as uncommon as it sounds like. There’s also different ways of running a pre-launch.[36:12–36:27] David Hirschfeld: One of them is called a concierge launch. Other people call it a Fred Flintstone launch. So if you know who Fred Flintstone is, for people to, yeah, right, you know, caveman, but he drives a car, but there’s no motor in the car.[36:27–37:00] David Hirschfeld: He has to spin his feet under the car, right, because there’s no engine. So we call that a concierge launch. Basically, you’re selling the vision, but then you start to deliver the service immediately with cobbled together workflows and services and some manual effort because it’s a blend of technology and service that you’re selling. And sometimes people can’t wait. They’re not going to buy something three or four months in advance because they need it now, and that’s what they’re paying for. So we do a concierge launch, which, by the way, are my favorite because you really learn how to run your business right away. But you might not have been able to sell the service[37:00–37:16] David Hirschfeld: without the software to demo so they can see what they’re buying into. That’s one way to launch. Another one is the classic pre-launch where they don’t buy — they’re buying something and nothing will be available for three to four months until the first version of the MVP is up.[37:18–37:34] David Hirschfeld: So back to your question, for launch first, any — it’s SaaS, B2B SaaS startups. It was the target for us because B2B SaaS startups fail in massive numbers, and they fail for the same reason.[37:34–37:45] David Hirschfeld: Well, according to studies, there’s two reasons why they fail in terms of one’s 48%, 2%, and one’s 38%, and I don’t remember which is which. One is they run on money.[37:45–37:59] David Hirschfeld: Two is they lack product market fit. And depending on the study you’ve seen, it’s one or the other which is above or below, right? So that’s, you know, 84, 82, 88, 82 percent, according to the studies.[37:59–38:13] David Hirschfeld: But that fail for those reasons. But I suggest that the reason they fail running out of money most of the time is because they lack product market fit. So I think that number for product market fit is much bigger than that.[38:13–38:33] David Hirschfeld: And the reason I say that is you may have run out of money and you are generating revenue, but you’re not generating enough revenue and you haven’t figured out your market well enough to have enough profit in there that you can reinvest back into your business without, you know, taking loans or, and so you’re just, you might have revenue, but you have no profit.[38:34–38:36] David Hirschfeld: So you don’t have product and market fit if that’s the case.[38:36–38:42] Mark Baldino: So you’re helping them de-risk the process, either if they’ve started and you can back up a few steps or before they get rolling.[38:43–39:00] David Hirschfeld: De-risk and speed it up. If you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail in three, four, five months with this, not in three, four or five years, assuming that you believe the result. I’ve had people get through it and still want to build their MVP because they’re sure if they have the product, now it’s going to sell and it doesn’t pan out.[39:00–39:07] David Hirschfeld: So, right. There are probably rare cases where it would, but 90% of them, yeah.[39:07–39:20] Mark Baldino: As you said, some of those folks are — maybe they haven’t taken off the black robe and been quite the scientists because you do need to listen to the metrics and kind of check the process. So, well, like I said, David, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.[39:21–39:34] Mark Baldino: I’ve been in the background thinking of like, oh, how can I do this just as a consulting service? How can I do some niche analysis and ensure I’m doing product market fit? And I’m sure the listeners here will be enjoying it as well.[39:34–39:36] Mark Baldino: So I just want to say thank you very much for your time today.[39:36–39:37] : Much appreciated.[39:37–39:41] David Hirschfeld: Well, thanks, Mark. I love talking about this and your questions were really spot on.[39:42–39:52] Mark Baldino: Right on. Well, I will include your contact information when we post this. Folks, if you’re in need of product market fit and want to try out the launch first framework and methodology, reach out to David.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Sell Before You Build for Faster Product-Market Fit was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Episode 8: David Hirschfeld — Founder and CEO of Tekyz](https://tekyz.com/episode-8-david-hirschfeld-founder-and-ceo-of-tekyz-0d39c792300e/) - Featured Image: Episode 8 — David Hirschfeld — Founder and CEO of TekyzEpisode 8: David Hirschfeld — Founder and CEO of Tekyzhttps://medium.com/media/dc44353e1d7a7966787e6119ce1e7d5d/hrefTimestamps:[2:50] Going on 18 years, is your business where you expected it to be? And what was the big plan back in the day?[7:20] The product market fit, can you get into detail about what that means as many people don’t know what this means[11:00] The process of discovering what your customer needs and wants, founder that are focused on the problem[18:30] You want to be the next Facebook?[20:10] What have you been doing to change from just growing by using referrals?[22:40] How is that working out?[25:25] What are the issues that you see coming up on the horizon[28:55] What are the two other products you’re building?[34:30]Who’s the ugly baby of the new products?[40:45} What are the categories that people come to you for?https://medium.com/media/4f42a54f94aed7575645a4c7266de6fc/hrefIntroduction: Are You Tired of the Startup Rollercoaster?Building a business can feel like a constant cycle of boom and bust, soaring high on initial success only to crash and burn when a major client leaves or the market shifts. This is the story of David Hirschfield, CEO and founder of Tekyz, a software development company. For 18 years, David has navigated the ups and downs of the tech world, experiencing both triumphant exits and painful failures. His journey offers invaluable lessons for any entrepreneur seeking sustainable, predictable growth. Join us as we explore David’s insights on the importance of product-market fit, problem-focused development, and the power of strategic partnerships.The Crucial Role of Product-Market FitDavid emphasizes the importance of product-market fit, particularly for B2B SaaS companies. He defines it with an explicit formula: selling enough product at a high enough price with a high enough closing ratio to achieve a 3:1 ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. This profitability allows for reinvestment and fuels sustainable growth without constant fundraising. David highlights the common pitfall of founders clinging to their vision without rigorously testing and measuring their product’s viability in the market. He encourages founders to adopt a “clinician” mindset, focusing on understanding customer problems rather than falling in love with their solutions.The Power of Problem-Focused DevelopmentDavid stresses that successful founders love the problem, not the product. He advocates for deep customer engagement, urging founders to understand the perceived impact and the actual cost of the situation they are trying to solve. This involves talking to numerous potential customers, identifying their pain points, and understanding how those problems affect them personally and financially. Focusing on the issue makes the solution a natural outcome, increasing the likelihood of product-market fit and long-term success.Building a Sustainable Pipeline: Beyond ReferralsWhile referrals can be valuable, David learned that relying solely on personal connections limits scalability. After experimenting with costly marketing campaigns, he discovered the power of strategic referral partnerships. He defines a successful referral partner as generating three to four qualified projects annually. To cultivate these partnerships, David embraced podcasting, interviewing, and being interviewed to build his brand and connect with potential partners. This approach has yielded promising results, generating a steady stream of qualified leads and laying the foundation for predictable growth.From Service to Product: Creating Your Secret SauceDavid’s latest venture involves developing internal products to address his business challenges, including a referral partner portal, a niche analysis methodology, and an AI-powered project estimation tool. These “secret sauce” products not only streamline his operations but also have the potential to become standalone SaaS offerings, creating new revenue streams and further solidifying his company’s position in the market.Embrace the Problem, Build the Solution, Scale SmartlyDavid’s journey offers a compelling roadmap for sustainable business growth. Entrepreneurs can escape the boom-and-bust cycle and build thriving businesses by prioritizing problem-focused development, rigorously measuring product-market fit, and cultivating strategic partnerships. His story reminds us that true success lies not in clinging to a vision but in understanding and addressing our customers' real-world problems.Transcript[0:29–0:56] Rebecca: Hi and welcome to in the business coach’s chair. Throughout this podcast, I’ll be interviewing business owners, business leaders and anybody involved in business at all and taking them through a short business coaching session. We’ll uncover what their deepest fears are, what their greatest desires are and work out how to sort those out for them.[0:56–1:07] Rebecca: So sit back in your own comfortable chair, relax and learn about what’s happening in the minds of business owners everywhere.[1:10–1:18] Rebecca: Hello and welcome to In the Business Coaches Chair. Today I have David Hirschfield. Hello, David. How are you today?[1:18–1:20] David: I’m doing great. How about you, Rebecca?[1:20–1:34] Rebecca: I’m really well, thank you. Very well indeed. David, you’re the CEO, founder, creator, president What title do you give yourself of your tech company?[1:35–1:40] David: Yeah, CEO and founder That works for me Cool[1:40–1:45] Rebecca: And is the pronunciation Tekyz or Tekyz? Tekyz[1:45–1:57] David: Yeah, like a bunch of Tekyz sitting around the table I got this URL 18 years ago when you could still get a URL with five characters.[1:58–2:04] David: And Tekyz spelled T-E-C-H-I-E-S was taken. So I got this one.[2:05–2:13] Rebecca: Oh, well done. Good for you. Good for you. And you’re not just CEO of this company. You’ve got a couple of other businesses as well, haven’t you?[2:14–2:25] David: I do. I do. I mean, this is really my focus. Okay. I’m partnered in a couple other businesses who all started out as clients of mine.[2:27–2:39] David: And I’m also an investor, a shareholder in a couple. I don’t make a habit of doing that because that complicates the relationship when you’re a provider.[2:39–2:50] David: but there is occasions where it to me it just seems like too good an opportunity and not to be a part of it because I could see that they’re on a really a rocket ship from a growth[2:50–3:17] Rebecca: perspective so you know I jump in just occasionally that makes sense so the concept for today is about solving problems in your business or looking at your business perhaps from a different angle I like to go with the flow I’ve no idea where this is heading So we’ll just wing it if that’s okay with you?[3:18–3:20] David: Sure, absolutely Good[3:20–3:29] Rebecca: And the other thing is If something comes out that you think Oh no, I actually don’t want to share that with the world We’ll cut it out, okay?[3:29–3:36] David: Okay, sure That’s probably not the case I’m pretty transparent But if that does happen, I will let you know[3:36–3:44] Rebecca: Okay, cool. All right then. Good. So, you’ve been running the business for 18 years?[3:45–3:48] David: Yeah, we’re going on 18 this year.[3:49–3:52] Rebecca: Cool. Is it where you expected it to be?[3:54–4:09] David: It’s not where I expected it to be. Well, and technology has changed so much, which my whole business is technology, right? But no, it’s not exactly where I expected it to be.[4:09–4:20] Rebecca: Okay. Is that, you know, 18 years ago, what was the big idea? What was the big plan or was there no big idea or big plan?[4:21–4:52] David: Well, 18 years ago, let me go back a little bit farther. I came from enterprise software. and then I started my first software company in the early 90s so like I said I go back a ways with a partner of mine in logistics distribution inventory management and despite every effort on both our parts we grew it anyway to 800[4:52–5:23] David: customers in 22 countries and exited with the sale to a publicly traded firm in 2000 so that was a success and then I started another software and I was VP of products for them for several years until I left and cast out and did another startup in the automotive industry business to business network for automotive wholesalers and that one failed not because the product wasn’t successful because I was getting traction don’t you? Yeah you do[5:23–5:33] David: you know very quickly by how people are reacting to your offer or not needed an investor, and I waited too long, and the business just ran, and money couldn’t justify.[5:34–5:46] David: So I had one successful startup. I had one failure, partly because I didn’t recognize what it was that made me successful the first time, right?[5:46–5:59] David: And I still didn’t really understand what made me successful, what made me fail the second time that I could have easily avoided. So then I started Tekyz as a software development company.[5:59–6:13] David: with the idea that we can work with startups and existing companies that are scaling up and help them automate workflows or build SaaS applications, you know, like that.[6:13–6:24] David: With the idea that it was Web 2.0 was just a beginning buzzword at the time. Of course, everything has changed since then. Yeah. And we’ve done really well.[6:24–6:50] David: We’ve had some great clients along the way, wildly successful clients, but the vast majority, especially with the startups, fail. So, and in the process of watching so many of them fail because I’ve worked with over 90 startups during that time, I recognize now what are the patterns for startups that are successful and the mindset, and what are the ones, why do they fail?[6:50–6:58] David: And it’s always for the same reason. They just wait too long to validate that they have product market fit.[6:59–7:09] Rebecca: That’s fascinating. That’s really fascinating. I am just going to unplug my microphone and my headphones because I’ve realized that’s the problem. Give me.[7:13–7:15] Rebecca: That’s better. Right.[7:15–7:15] David: Okay.[7:16–7:29] Rebecca: All right. So that’s really interesting. And because it’s in the business coaches chat, I want to unpack that because we have lots of entrepreneurs who listen to this as well as coaches.[7:29–7:40] Rebecca: Sure. So that product market fit, a lot of people don’t understand what that means specifically. Can you get into detail about that, David?[7:40–7:55] David: Yeah. And there’s a very, well, let’s say you’re a SaaS company, right? A B2B SaaS company, which is probably our sweet spot. It’s not the only thing that we do in terms of software development, but that would be our sweet spot, especially with startups.[7:57–8:20] David: So if you’re a B2B SaaS company, there’s sort of a golden formula, and that is you can sell enough product at a high enough price at a high enough closing ratio that when you compare lifetime value of your customer to the cost of acquiring each customer, you have a three-to-one ratio or higher.[8:21–8:34] David: So that there’s enough profit in that equation that you can accelerate your business and growth by investing it back in and still have enough money to pay the salary in place, things like that, right?[8:35–8:46] David: Right. So without having to raise money. Or you have enough proof of profitability that going out and raising money is an attractive offer.[8:47–9:00] David: You can make attractive offer without giving away all your equity. And that’s a repeatable number that if you just put more energy in the system, you will grow in a predictable way your customers faster.[9:00–9:23] Rebecca: Okay. I love the precise nature of that three-to-one formula. and I suspect there are a lot of business owners out there who have been scrabbling around trying to find this product market fit that seems mysterious and you’ve just given it huge clarity.[9:25–9:27] Rebecca: It’s very straightforward, isn’t it?[9:28–10:00] David: It’s very measurable. Yeah. And it’s not always very straightforward. how to get there, but it’s very measurable. And the problem is with, I find with founders, founders come in with a vision and a belief system, both of which the vision is good. The belief system is bad. So, you know, having vision means you, you believe that you can see where things are heading and what the possibilities are, but the belief system that you are, that you[10:00–10:35] David: believe that will come true is where founders that are unsuccessful often are stuck in these belief systems. So what does that mean? A founder wears a black robe when they start a company because they have this religious fervor about the success of it, right? And when I’m effective working with founders, I gently peel that black robe off and try to wrap them in a white coat and turn them into clinicians because they have to be able to test and measure. Founders that love[10:35–10:56] David: their product and believe in their vision often fail. The ones I find who are consistently successful love the problem and want to spend all their time with the customer understanding their problem. And the product is nothing more than just a natural conclusion of the mitigation of that problem, but it’s not the thing they love.[10:57–11:14] Rebecca: Okay. Right. Okay. Again, really interesting. The process for the discovering that issue that you’re solving for your customer can only come from getting close to your customer, can’t it?[11:14–11:23] Rebecca: You can’t imagine it. You can’t make it up. You have to really understand your customer, which means you have to talk to them.[11:24–11:51] David: Right. You have to talk to them often and many different ones, right? You may even be a customer yourself. So a lot of founders also who are more likely to be successful, it’s not limited to them, but it really increases the odds, are those that are in an industry where they’re in a position in that industry where they’re struggling with a particular problem, if not every day, at least weekly.[11:51–12:03] David: It’s a top-of-mind problem, not yearly. And they can easily articulate how much that problem impacts them personally from a perception perspective.[12:04–12:33] David: That’s one measure. And from a cost perspective which is a completely independent measure Those are not the same And I can explain why it matters that you understand both those numbers because what you want is because you can have one high and the other low Somebody can believe a problem has a huge impact on them personally, and they would do anything to get rid of it except pay a lot of money because the cost is very low, but it’s actually costing them when you measure it.[12:33–12:50] David: On the other hand, you may have somebody with a really high cost to a particular problem, and they understand that the cost is really high, but their personal impact from it is very low because everybody in their industry has been dealing with the same problem forever.[12:51–13:02] David: If they’re inside a bigger company, management is just not going to really support me doing anything about it. Nobody really cares. So that’s a low perceived impact, even though the cost is really high.[13:02–13:27] David: so as a founder your job with all the niches you can market to and all of the root problem statements that you can tease out from your product which niche is the one that has the one or two of the problems you’re solving at the highest perceived impact and the highest cost then you can get their attention and you can charge enough to for the[13:27–13:32] Rebecca: product okay I’m with you and how do you apply the principles to your business now?[13:33–13:45] David: Well, so, okay, you know, cobbler’s, kids’ shoes, right? Yeah. So, and in my business, I’m a service-based business, right?[13:45–13:59] David: So I’m, it’s a little different in a service-based business because product market fit is basically whenever I find a customer who has a project they need done, that’s who’s my client.[13:59–14:14] David: So for us, product market fit is being exceptional in terms of how we deliver, how we develop, how we track our level of transparency, how we build design prototypes.[14:15–14:33] David: Those are things that we strive to be exceptional at. And what that means is that when a group is exceptional at what they do, they have evidence in terms of the artifacts that are produced that other companies who are not exceptional don’t produce.[14:34–14:47] David: And so I never expect anybody to believe me when I say we’re an exceptional team. I say, let me show you what exceptional teams do and what they produce from an evidence perspective, and you can make your own decision.[14:47–15:04] David: You know, I’ll tell you we’re exceptional, but you make up your own mind whether we are or not. And so for us, that creates product market fit with somebody looking to engage a software team because they want the things that exceptional companies produce.[15:04–15:36] David: When I show them, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that becomes the standard that they compare against when they’re talking with other companies and other companies don’t do that. So my business problem has always been how to build a consistent pipeline of potential clients and projects so that I can scale in a predictable way so that I can scale my business,[15:36–15:52] David: which I think recently I have found a way of doing that. But I have spent a fortune over the last three or four years in particular because all my business came from referrals up until three or four years ago.[15:52–16:12] David: I mean, it still does. But you can’t really scale that way if it’s just on your personal relationships and referrals and nothing else. So you can maintain a steady state and even grow to a certain degree, which we have done as effectively as you can, but there’s no scaling for that.[16:13–16:20] David: So that has been my problem for several years. I’m finding — yeah, go ahead.[16:20–16:24] Rebecca: Sorry to interrupt, but have you created a product then, David?[16:26–16:42] David: Well, we are actually creating a few products that we are building for internal use. Again, we’re that profile that I just described of a company who is struggling.[16:43–16:58] David: Oh, back to that. So somebody in a company, it may be their company, they may be a stakeholder employee in somebody else’s company, but they’re struggling with this problem that is top of mind, that has a high perceived impact and a high cost.[16:58–17:13] David: And they can easily articulate why it personally impacts them, how they feel threatened by this problem. And they can articulate the cost of what this problem is actually costing them financially or the business.[17:14–17:29] David: And then they’re part of an industry with people doing exactly what they do that have the struggling with the exact same problem that they’re struggling with. and they have reach to that community of people that are in that same position.[17:30–17:57] David: Those three formulas set somebody up to potentially be successful. It reduces the risk dramatically if they’re coming at it from that position. Then they have to make sure that they take off the black robe, put the white coat on, and go out and talk with all the other people like them and find out what the nuances and differences is from all their perspectives and, you know, and the perceived impact and the cost equations, and that’s where they should spend their time.[17:59–18:17] David: The problem mitigation becomes obvious when you do that. The software just becomes the natural evolution of that process instead of it being this thing where you are going to be the next Facebook and you spend a million dollars and can’t get, you know, 50 people to use your platform.[18:18–18:18] David: Yeah. Right?[18:19–18:32] Rebecca: I see lots of those. I do too. And I’m like, I was listening to the interview Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan. He’s like three billion people use his platform every week.[18:32–18:40] Rebecca: Like, good luck with creating something to commit with that. I mean, that’s like a big conversation.[18:41–18:56] David: There’s one that just recently, a big one that just recently failed. not my client, but I know somebody who was a senior person in their marketing, in the marketing world for this company, a company called Almanac, which was a competitor to Notion.[18:56–19:17] David: Oh, yeah. And, yeah, four years ago, I think, maybe, they received $20 million in funding. Okay. And went crazy in staff and development team and, you know, did what your classic startup that just has all of a sudden a lot of money and doesn’t have good governance.[19:18–19:28] David: Yeah. And, you know, everybody had the, what are they called, seats, whatever Herman seats. I can’t think of the name now. It just slipped my mind.[19:29–19:40] David: The expensive, you know, chairs at their desks and, yeah, and the beautiful office. And they grew to 80 employees really fast. And that was, you know, they started doing layoffs two years ago.[19:40–19:51] David: and now finally four or five years, six years after they started, they’re closing their doors. And I don’t know that they’re even being acquired.[19:51–20:03] David: Did they shift into a different product? I think they shifted into another product, which is now sort of a different startup. But anyway, this is so common, right? Because they aren’t focused on the problem.[20:03–20:24] David: They’re focused. They had believed that they had this cool solution that just everybody would love and use without having a very clear customer and problem statement. So anyway, founders that are focused on the problem are way more consistently successful than those that are focused on the solution.[20:25–20:36] Rebecca: And how — so the past three or four years you’ve been developing your business to get to this point where it’s no longer relying on referrals. So what have you been doing?[20:36–20:36] Rebecca: What have you done?[20:37–20:55] David: Well, it’s not that it’s not relying on referrals anymore. I sort of gave up on trying to find a different way to bring in business. So instead I embraced, but it took me a few years of spending a lot of money in marketing to realize that that’s not going to work.[20:55–21:09] David: And I didn’t want to build a big sales team until I was sure I had a repeatable way to put highly qualified potential clients in front of salespeople and scale that.[21:10–21:23] David: And so what I finally realized I had to do was I have to create referral partners, people that are in the flow of that stream of potential business.[21:23–21:54] David: and a successful referral partner in my mind is somebody who can refer three to four qualified projects a year to my company that’s a right that’s an active referral partner uh it doesn’t need to be a hundred it does but it’s more than just one in a year and then the problem is who are those people and how do i establish the relationship with them and that’s and that’s when I finally about four months ago[21:54–22:06] David: embraced podcasting. And so both interviewing and being interviewed. As well as of course the brand building, right?[22:07–22:38] David: Yeah. So it’s a blend of all of it. But this is, I believe it is starting to really show promise as the way around it. Then of course I have somebody that’s helping me with marketing who’s really good, who’s helping me build the brand, both in the podcast and with Justin general, and working on Top of Mind campaign for all of the referral partners that we have now engaged as a result of this exercise,[22:38–22:41] David: the podcasting, both being interviewed and my own podcast.[22:42–22:45] Rebecca: Perfect, perfect. And how’s it working out?[22:45–22:57] David: Well, it’s only been four months. Okay. I’ve been in not even four months, probably three months. Okay. My podcast is nascent.[22:57–23:14] David: I’ve only done a couple interviews. It’s called Scaling Smarter. Okay. I’ve only done a couple interviews so far on that one, and I haven’t published them yet. But I’ve been on 32 interviews, I think, during that period of time.[23:14–23:32] David: We’ve done a really good job marketing me for the interviews. And I’m going to be, by February or March, I’ll be starting, I’ll be setting up the podcasting for my director of operations, who’s in India.[23:33–23:44] David: She’s worked for me for 11 years, and she’s exceptional. And so she’ll be doing, we have a company in India called Tekyz Tech. And she’ll be focusing on the East Asia market.[23:44–24:04] David: with her podcast reach. So, um, but this is something I think has legs, right? Because, uh, um, um, I, uh, in the process of doing this, I’ve already signed up 11 referral partners, I think today, um, just from the podcasting.[24:05–24:38] David: And I’ve received four or five qualified, maybe six qualified really well qualified referrals in that period of time. And so I can see the scaling and growing quite quickly now It definitely working if it continues to work at this pace And if the referral partners are consistently active over a period of time a percentage of them So if I sign 10 people, I expect one or two to become an active referral partner.[24:39–24:50] David: Right. And there’s no pressure, but there’s a lot of value to them to want to refer projects if they come across projects. Some of them will be super referrers and some never refer anybody.[24:50–25:04] David: Right. And hopefully it blends out to 15 to 20 percent of them will refer three to four projects a year. By the end of the year, that would be sending me eight to 10 qualified referrals a month.[25:05–25:19] David: Yeah. Maybe maybe double that, which would be huge because if they’re qualified, which means they have a budget and they have a project. and they need to start, then we’ll close 80% of those.[25:19–25:33] Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, undoubtedly. You’ve got rid of all the barriers to entry if they’re qualified in that way. Okay, so that sounds like you’re solving one of the key business issues that you have had.[25:34–25:46] Rebecca: Let’s see, you know, how that turns out for you. It sounds like you’re on the right track. What are the issues that you see coming up on the horizon then?[25:47–25:48] Rebecca: Anything? Nothing?[25:50–26:16] David: Well, balancing. Okay. So we’re building three products internally. One is a referral partner portal because there is nothing out there that I have found that makes it easy to manage and track referral partners for this type of, you know, for the type of business that we have, right?[26:16–26:27] David: There are expensive products that are channel partner related, which is not what we’re doing, right? There are many of those, and they’re expensive. They’re focused on enterprise midsize companies.[26:27–26:47] David: But for just managing your referral partner network and being able to report commissions earned so that there’s a place, the referral partners can both add a referral optionally as well as see what the state of that referral is and the state of all the referrals.[26:48–27:04] David: There really isn’t much out there that I have found. I’ve done a bit of hunting for it. So we’re building our own referral partner portal, which we need ourselves. And then it’ll turn into a SaaS product for all the people that become our referral partners.[27:04–27:16] David: It starts to become its own network because many of them will want to have their own referral partner network. So it falls into that. We have a problem. We know what the cost is and the value and the personal impact.[27:16–27:27] David: And we’ll be speaking to referral partners constantly about this product. So we really write naturally in front of the problem all the time. Yeah.[27:27–27:38] David: And we will, as soon as we’ve got this product, I’m not doing pre-launch sales. So with Launch First, what we do is we go out and we do pre-launch sales with the concept.[27:38–27:52] David: That’s how we prove product market fit, by getting people to actually buy a pay us for that product before we even start development. Usually the design is done, but we haven’t started development.[27:52–28:13] David: And if we can’t get those sales from who we believe are ideal clients, even though we’re offering them a killer opportunity to get in early, then there’s probably a problem either with who we picked as our early adopter or the product messaging or maybe we’re building something that the world doesn’t need yet.[28:13–28:34] David: And we can try pivoting two or three times very quickly and easily at that stage because we haven’t built the product yet. and if we can’t it’s then it’s fair to say that maybe we just, this is the wrong product for the wrong time in the wrong market and we fail fast and cheap, which failing fast and cheap should be the goal, right?[28:34–28:38] David: I’m going to make this fail fast and cheap or it’s going to be successful.[28:39–28:41] Rebecca: Yeah, and you know pretty damn quickly, don’t you?[28:42–28:47] David: Yeah, you do. You know very quickly by how people are reacting to your offer.[28:47–28:52] Rebecca: Or not. The lack of reaction that tells you.[28:52–28:53] David: Or the lack of reaction.[28:53–29:00] Rebecca: Yeah, definitely. So you mentioned balance there. So there’s that on the go. What else? Two other things, I think you said?[29:00–29:11] David: Well, two other products we’re building. So we have the referral partner portal, which we’re building. We have the launch first niche analysis methodology.[29:11–29:37] David: And the niche analysis is the hardest part of that whole methodology because it’s tedious and it’s metrics driven. it requires founders to spend a very concentrated amount of time understanding all the, first of all, who are all the potential niches they can market to, what are all the root-level problem statements that they tease out from their product.[29:37–29:50] David: A root-level problem statement is basically if you say, here’s our problem statement, and you ask, why does that matter two or three times, then you’re going to get down to the root problem statement.[29:50–30:02] David: When does it get to the point, well, because if I don’t fix that problem, it’s going to do this to me. And that’s right, and it will prevent me from being able to achieve whatever.[30:02–30:19] David: The root problem statement has to end with something like that, or you haven’t gotten there yet. So if you just say we’re — if the root problem — most of the time when people do problem statements, they don’t. They don’t really understand it, and they provide a benefit that they’re trying to — that they believe the product will accomplish.[30:19–30:20] Rebecca: Yeah, okay.[30:20–30:31] David: Instead of the problem itself. Yeah, right. Then they get past that, and then they give you a problem statement, which is very high level and generic that nobody cares about. Yeah, yeah.[30:31–30:46] David: Like a survey app, for example, for a client that we were working with who had a pitch deck, and one of the problem statements was businesses don’t have the information they need when they need it.[30:46–31:18] David: okay that’s very generic and it’s true and everybody knows this so who cares whatever right yeah okay and it took a few whys to get down to what the root level problem was but you have to stand in the stakeholder’s shoes is struggling with this in the context of their business to be able to articulate that root level problem okay for example i’m a corporate manager and I’ve got like maybe a director in my company and I’ve got 10[31:18–31:53] David: managers reporting to me and each one of them have 10 people in the team so there’s 110 people total and on one of my teams I’ve got people that are really unhappy and they start leaving the company and I don’t know they’re unhappy until they leave the company and they post a one star review about our company and now we’re going to have to spend that much more money on marketing and advertising and recruitment to replace that person. We’ve lost their corporate IP because it walks out with them[31:53–32:20] David: if we don’t have playbooks implemented everywhere. And we have to spend more money now to find good recruitments than we would have before that person posted on the job boards what a crappy company we are. And it’s all because I just didn’t, and I am going to lose my job or be demoted, or there’s no chance of ever being promoted again if I don’t figure out how to fix this problem.[32:20–32:47] David: That’s the right, the root level problem for that person. But if I’m a restaurateur, that root level problem sounds a lot different, even though it’s the same thing. Unhappy customer because bad weight service, leave a one-star review. My reputation as a restaurateur goes, Right. So root level problems are critical because if you want to make somebody lean forward when you’re reaching out to them, they’ve got to feel like you understand the problem they’re struggling with.[32:47–32:50] Rebecca: Yeah, you really do. What’s your third product, project?[32:51–33:03] David: So the third product is estimating projects. So we do, like I talked about being exceptional, one of the things that we’re really exceptional at is estimating projects.[33:04–33:28] David: Okay. in terms of the level of detail and depth that we go into and the accuracy. And so once we’re in process with a client for years, we’ll estimate, like our largest client last year, estimates versus actuals, because we track both, we had a 5.6 variance from the estimates versus the actuals.[33:28–33:40] David: Most software development companies are around 30% variance with existing customers. and 200% to 300% variance with, you know, brand new estimates.[33:41–33:44] Rebecca: That’s called making it go along, that is, David. Yeah.[33:45–33:59] David: So, you know, but we estimate really accurate, but it’s an expensive process to spend that time to do that. And so we’re building an AI model for basically mimicking our estimation process because we’re really accurate.[34:00–34:12] David: Right. and then that’s for us internally, which we’re going to then turn into a SaaS product, right? And that one we’ll do pre-launch sales using our prototype.[34:12–34:28] David: Prototype will be ugly, but it will work and prove the concept. And we have a design prototype that’s beautiful but won’t be out for a while. So we’ll do launch first with this product, which once we’ve got the first version of it available, which is soon.[34:28–34:40] Rebecca: and out of the three let’s call them your little I don’t know projects that you’re nurturing your three children that you’re nurturing here which one’s your favourite[34:40–35:01] David: none of them well none of them are my favourite yet because I haven’t seen because we don’t have the working models of them yet to automate the process that we’re doing but the one I need the most immediately is the referral partner portal.[35:01–35:18] David: Okay. Because now we’re tracking all in spreadsheets at the moment, you know, in my CRM, but that’s not a good way to track it and on spreadsheets. And I can see that getting to be a bigger management problem, and it doesn’t give my referral partners any visibility.[35:18–35:19] David: Okay. Right.[35:19–35:25] Rebecca: So I’m going to ask that question a different way around. Is there anyone out of the three that are the ugly baby?[35:26–35:27] David: That are what? The ugly baby?[35:27–35:28] Rebecca: Maybe, yeah.[35:32–35:46] David: Probably launch first only because it’s really difficult to do this. It requires a more sophisticated AI model to do it because every single startup is different.[35:46–35:58] David: And so you’ve got to have enough data related to that startup that it can — because there’s a scoring matrix. that there’s a couple scoring matrices, one for that perceived impact and one for the cost.[35:58–36:22] David: And then we take those two things and then bubble chart them based on the top problem statements by niche. But the scoring is hard because you may have 20 niches and 15 problem statements, which gives you 300 intersections in your matrix.[36:22–36:39] David: And you need to have enough distribution in the scoring of those things between 1 and 300 that when you bubble chart it the obvious early adopters potential early adopters float to the upper right of that bubble chart Alright cool Alright so and you[36:39–36:46] Rebecca: got, David, you got the deal out of the three. Which one’s the one that you go, do you know what, that’s the one that’s going to fly?[36:48–37:07] David: I think a referral partner report, I know the it’s called Estimize, Estimize will, but it won’t take off in the same way because there’s no natural referral network for people to share with other development companies the tool, right?[37:08–37:18] David: Except within their own companies and other people in their companies using it. But I think there might be also, they don’t want to tell anybody about it, how they’re able to produce these really good assets.[37:19–37:33] David: So where the referral partner portal is a natural, you know, has a natural networking effect to it. And so I believe that one has the best chance, you know, of really taking off.[37:33–37:39] David: And plus, we also need it the quickest because, you know, for managing our own stuff.[37:40–37:40] : Yeah.[37:40–37:49] Rebecca: So that’s kind of brought it more into balance in terms of the only one. Aí a pessoa vai ficar em casa, sabe aí?[37:50–38:22] David: O trabalho é o que eu vou fazer. partners ask when it’s going to come out because they need it for their own networks perfect so you’ve already got waitlist i’ve already got a waitlist and and corroboration um on the need for people to want to use it and then we can offer deals to them that if you provide one qualified referral a quarter then you can then you can use it subscription free you know for your own network[38:22–38:45] Rebecca: Amazing. Yeah, when we’re working with clients, we call that the secret source. So the business gets so good at doing that particular part of the business that it ends up being a separate product, sometimes a separate limited company, LLC, Inc, whatever, and its own profit center.[38:45–38:54] Rebecca: sometimes in exceptional cases that secret sauce business ends up being bigger and more successful than the original business[38:54–39:18] David: yeah I can see that I don’t believe it because that just gets in the way of following being a clinician but I can already see the traction for this and how strong that traction is and how easy it is to start to attract people outside the network to the product, I have no idea because we haven’t tested that yet.[39:20–39:39] David: Or who the early adopter, ideal adopter is and we’ll have to go through launch first to kind of try to figure that out and test that. Which is all part of our plan to do all that. But right now the big plan is getting that first version, that referral partner portal out, which I think will be in the next few weeks.[39:40–39:45] David: An early a version that we can start to use and track for our own virtual partners.[39:46–39:53] Rebecca: Yeah, that’s really exciting. And like you say, you absolutely will be able to measure that. It will be crystal clear.[39:54–40:08] David: Yes. It will be crystal clear. And even if it’s not, even if we can’t forecast, predict that it’s going to start to generate much revenue on its own over the next six months or a year, we need it for ourselves.[40:08–40:17] David: Yeah. Yeah. So so the motivation to build it and the investment in it is required for the growth of my business to manage the growth of my business.[40:17–40:30] Rebecca: Which circles back really nicely to one of your original statements about producing something that solves a problem that you personally have. Yes. Beautiful.[40:30–40:33] David: Well, it seems like it’s my the model that I always talk about.[40:33–40:40] Rebecca: It really does. It really does, definitely. Congratulations on that one. Well, I hope we’ll see.[40:42–40:51] David: Once we hit, you know, a million AR, then I’ll feel like I can pat myself on the back. Until then, it’s just, it looks like it has a lot of promise, right?[40:51–40:55] Rebecca: Yeah, it really does. David, is there anything you want to ask me?[40:56–41:06] David: Oh, yeah. So, like, what are some of the types of problems that people bring to you that you work out in your show? Because I’m really curious what that sounds like.[41:07–41:19] David: And I’d be happy to talk about the ones I have, you know, that we could work out. You just caught me at one of those times where I feel like I’m on a path where right now it’s not about problems.[41:19–41:20] David: It’s about execution.[41:21–41:52] Rebecca: Perfect. Yeah, there are different phases in a business. the category is that people come to us for fall under revenue not enough sticky revenue or not profitable revenue people don’t have the right people in the right roles doing the right things, no succession plan and a strategy really unclear as to where they’re heading long term usually they’ve usually got a one year plan but beyond that they’re a bit like no idea[41:52–42:27] Rebecca: where we’re taking this thing and sometimes there is a strategy but it sits in the founder’s owner’s head which is useless because nobody else knows what’s going on and we solve those problems usually with looking at the culture so we start with culture first what’s your purpose, vision, values are you living, breathing those things because that, if you are then that informs all the other pieces of the jigsaw and if you’re not then that’s where we come in and go right well let’s sort out the bits that[42:27–43:04] Rebecca: are really lacking and then we’ll tweak the bits that you’re doing okay on at the moment and it usually well certainly in all the clients I’ve ever worked with it ignites that passion that enthusiasm that engagement that you need from everybody in the business to work towards this common goal and helps them understand you know for what purpose they’re doing this and which gets them through the hard times and the easy times so yeah it’s um that that’s it[43:04–43:17] Rebecca: so your balance piece uh to me fell into the category of of strategy from the way you described it, which the babies do you pick to work on primarily?[43:17–43:21] Rebecca: And you’ve answered that. Great. You’re good to go. Yeah.[43:22–43:52] David: And that’s been the hardest thing for me was to figure out where to prioritize, especially with the internal product development, until I started to see this referral network building and starting to see I’m getting referrals from the partners and that I’m able to refer some things to the partners, right? Because it’s kind of a, you know, I want it to be a, you know, where we’re feeding each other to the degree that that’s possible. And so that’s,[43:53–44:05] David: that over the last, literally over the last three or four weeks has crystallized my priorities, what we need first and why, and how it’ll add value to the business in the right way.[44:05–44:20] David: Because I expect over the next year, or my goal is over the next year to 18 months, that we become an equivalent product company and service company, not just a service company.[44:21–44:32] Rebecca: Perfect. That is the golden goose right there, David. And that’s, yeah. Yeah. Whenever I’ve worked with service businesses, it’s what’s your product, what’s your product, what’s your product?[44:33–45:00] Rebecca: Right. that’s where you’re going to get the growth as you rightly said right at the beginning the service will get you so far and if you’re lucky and you acquire or you expand or you suddenly get a series of huge contracts or whatever you can scale that but it’s so hard to do nice one good I’m really intrigued to see you in a year’s time David[45:00–45:02] David: yeah me too I’m really intrigued to see[45:02–45:16] Rebecca: me in a year’s time as well yeah that’s amazing thank you so much i really appreciate i’m going to finish with one last question if your business personality or a character either who would it be[45:16–45:22] David: or how would you describe it i’m not sure i understood the question if my what if my business[45:22–45:39] Rebecca: had a personality or characteristics or was a character you know famous not famous fictional either describe the characteristics of the business or describe the person or thing that it might be?[45:43–45:56] David: Okay, I need to think about that. Let me see. Personality that my character would be, I’m trying to think of a character that is translucent.[45:57–46:08] David: That’s probably not the right thing. or I don’t have a good answer for you.[46:08–46:23] David: I’m going to spend a lot of time on this. All right. And I may send you a little audio recording. Here it is after the recording that you can add it or a Zoom, a Loom recording or something.[46:23–46:32] David: Okay, cool. because I don’t have I can’t think of who that would be today I’m going to ask a supplementary[46:32–46:32] Rebecca: question[46:32–46:35] David: you know what it’s Phoenix[46:35–46:38] Rebecca: okay cool it’s Phoenix[46:38–46:58] David: because I have several times had a lot of my or more than 70 or 80% of my revenue coming from one large client that happens as some of these clients just grow really fast, and then we’re trying to keep up with them.[46:59–47:13] David: And sometimes because we do such a good job, they get acquired, and then they’re using the acquisitions development team, and we’re helping them transition, not because we failed, but because we’re really successful.[47:14–47:25] David: And then we lose the whole revenue stream within a few months. And we have to basically pick ourselves up from the ashes. I have to do that several times.[47:26–47:40] David: Right. And I’ve never borrowed money from anybody except during COVID when the SBA loans were so cheap. Right. Yeah. I did that just to put it in the coffers.[47:40–47:51] David: But I’ve never borrowed money. I’ve never had a, you know, it’s all been me. Right. And bootstrapped and had no trouble keeping cash flow and keeping the company going even during those periods.[47:51–48:02] David: periods. So, Phoenix, I think. I don’t want to be a phoenix anymore. Now I just want my feathers to get bright and grow.[48:03–48:04] Rebecca: You want to be an eagle.[48:05–48:08] David: Right. Okay. Phoenix to an eagle. I love that. Phoenix to an eagle. I love that.[48:09–48:16] Rebecca: Love it. Great. Amazing. Thank you so much. I wish you all the luck in the world. Thank you.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Episode 8: David Hirschfeld — Founder and CEO of Tekyz was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [The Hard-Easy Way: A Veteran Founder’s Guide to Startup Validation](https://tekyz.com/the-hard-easy-way-a-veteran-founders-guide-to-startup-validation-852f1ea4aed2/) - Featured Image: The Hard-Easy Way — A Veteran Founder’s Guide to Startup Validationhttps://medium.com/media/6ec029158c6e744779b0a813941484ce/hrefThis episode features a discussion between Todd, the podcast host, and David, CEO of Tekyz, about the critical elements for startup success. The discussion focuses on customer validation, developing Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), and integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern business practices. The conversation emphasizes the importance of early and thorough customer discovery to achieve product-market fit and explores how new technologies are changing the landscape for startups.David’s Background and the Genesis of Launch FirstDavid recounts his extensive background in technology, starting with enterprise sales and project management at companies like Intel and Texas Instruments. He then transitioned into entrepreneurship, launching his first startup in the early 90s, which he successfully sold in 2000. This experience and subsequent work with numerous startups at Tekyz led him to develop Launch First, a methodology focused on validating product-market fit before extensive development. He observed that most startups fail because they delay testing the market and securing revenue, often spending up to two years building a product nobody wants to buy.The Importance of Customer Discovery and Niche IdentificationDavid stresses that the primary job of a startup founder is to identify their early adopter niche and understand their top two or three root-level problems. These problems should have a high perceived impact and cost to the customer. He advises founders to adopt a clinical, hypothesis-driven approach, shedding the “black robe” of unwavering belief in their vision and instead wearing the “white coat” of a scientist seeking to disprove their assumptions. He explains that the Launch First methodology involves identifying potential niches, teasing out root-level problem statements, and mapping each problem's impact and cost to each niche. This process helps to determine the most promising niches to target.Pre-Selling Validation and the “Mom Test”The discussion shifts to pre-selling validation to prove product-market fit before development. David highlights the limitations of beta agreements, noting that people often make commitments they don’t follow through on. He recommends the book “The Mom Test” as essential reading for founders, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the customer’s problems rather than pitching solutions. Launch First uses Figma prototypes to simulate a fully functional product, which is then demoed to potential customers with the understanding that it’s a prototype and the actual product will take months to develop. The goal is to secure advanced sales from committed customers, generate revenue to fund development, and validate the market. “If you’ve found the right early adopter where they’ve got a — the cost of this problem is big enough to them that they know they’re going to get this product when it comes out and they feel threatened by this so you can easily reach that stakeholder and you offer them a big enough opportunity up front…is that if you have those two things in place, then you can sell enough of your product in advance…to prove that you’ve got product market fit and to generate revenue to help you fund development.”Leveraging No-Code Tools and AI for MVP DevelopmentTodd points out that no-code tools and AI have made it easier and cheaper to build lightweight MVPs. He asks if David is seeing more clients who have already validated their concepts with these tools and are seeking to develop robust, scalable versions. David acknowledges this trend and notes that Tekyz is retooling its approach to incorporate these tools into the Launch First process. Todd shares his experience using Flutter Flow, BuildShift, and Supabase to create reusable code components, shortening the time to market. David agrees, mentioning tools like Bolt and Replit, and discusses Tekyz’s internal efforts to build AI models for microservices and UI generation.The Future of App Development: AI Agents and Workflow AutomationThe conversation turns to the future of app development, focusing on AI agents and workflow automation. David predicts everything will be built around agentic workflows and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models. He shares that Tekyz is exploring the creation of AI agents for microservices building and workflow orchestration. Todd emphasizes the importance of workflow automation. He shares an example of how he automated a friend’s time-consuming business process, reducing the preparation time for a weekly meeting from seven hours to 15 minutes. David discusses his approach to creating playbooks for marketing activities, using AI to document and automate the processes.Adapting to Rapid Technological ChangeTodd commends David’s ability to adapt to rapid technological changes, noting that many people get stuck and fail to innovate. David responds that it’s essential to maintain a childlike curiosity and not be afraid to experiment. He acknowledges the difficulty of predicting the future of technology but emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adaptation.Key TakeawaysThe discussion underscores the importance of rigorous customer discovery and validation before investing heavily in product development. It highlights the value of pre-selling to secure early revenue and validate product-market fit. The conversation also explores how no-code tools and AI transform startups worldwide, enabling faster and cheaper MVP development. Finally, the speakers emphasize the importance of workflow automation and continuous adaptation to technological change.[0:12–0:17] David: welcome david to the podcast i appreciate you making some time yeah todd thank you for having me on the podcast i’m looking forward to the conversation well good well um i’m kind of[0:17–0:35] Todd: interested to hear a little bit about your background as a starting point i mean uh i was doing a little research and uh you’ve got kind of a pretty impressive background over the last 30 years from, you know, like multiple, I think you started off in physics, if I’m correct, and then ended up in sales and then multiple, you know, different software companies.[0:35–0:45] Todd: And now you’re a current CEO of a company. So, you know, I think there’s a lot to unpack in this and I’m pretty excited about it. So why don’t we just start with a little bit about your background and how did you end up where you’re at today?[0:46–1:08] David: Yeah, sure. So I started out over 35 years ago, actually, in enterprise, in sales initially, in then in doing project management and software development for I was Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Public Service, and I was employed with Texas Instruments, and that’s when I started my first startup.[1:08–1:26] David: I did it in conjunction with a partner who was also at Texas Instruments, and that was in the early 90s. And despite every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing it anyway, 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it to a publicly traded firm out of Toronto in 2000.[1:27–1:42] David: So, of course, I thought I knew what I was doing for startups and what made that successful, which I really did. I did a lot of the right things, but more by accident, and I didn’t realize that until I had worked with a lot of other startups later on.[1:42–1:52] David: I was VP of products for the acquiring company for three years, then cast out, again, on my own left there, and started Tekyz, my current company, in 2007.[1:53–2:06] David: So I’m coming up on 18 years when I started that company. And we started out with Web 2.0 development. This is custom software for startups and mid-sized companies.[2:08–2:11] David: Can you hang on a second? I didn’t think they were going to knock on my door to bring in the food.[2:12–2:14] Todd: Okay, no problem. We can cut this out. Oh, thank you.[2:16–2:16] : Thank you.[2:17–2:43] David: Okay, I got it. No problem. Sit there and wait until we’re done. Anyway, so, you know, and it’s always been important to me from a software development perspective to always push the envelope in terms of being in modern technology, but also in terms of how we build our systems, accountability in the teams.[2:43–2:56] David: And there’s all kinds of things we do from what I call an exceptional perspective that a lot of software development companies just don’t do because it’s hard work and it takes a long time to evolve the systems and the culture and everything else.[2:56–3:11] David: So part of that is staying in front of technology. So as a result, of course, we keep moving and moving and moving and moving as technology shifts, trying to always provide modern platforms for any of our clients.[3:11–3:28] David: and now everything’s all AI on the, you know, development front. But during that time, regardless of what technology stack we used, regardless of how we did it, we worked with a lot of startups during that period from the time we started Tekyz until now.[3:29–3:46] David: And it was a real lesson for me how not to start a company. Over 80 startups during that period. and a few of them were really successful, but the vast majority of them failed.[3:46–4:03] David: And they all failed, in my opinion, for the same reason. They lacked product market fit. They didn’t, and the reason they lacked product market fit, well, there are several reasons, but the primary thing is they waited way too long to test the market by asking their customers to give them money.[4:03–4:18] David: they would do free trials and extended free trials and build out their products. And, you know, very often it’s about two years before they actually are in a position to start to market their product and try to get revenue, and they find out that nobody wants to buy it.[4:19–4:35] David: They can’t sell enough of it for a high enough closing ratio that they can get to what I call the viability barrier, which is a three-to-one ratio between lifetime value of a customer versus the cost of that getting that customer.[4:36–4:57] David: And they usually weren’t even close. So then they’d have to pivot, and pivoting is super costly when you’ve already built your product. And it was a frantic process because they then thought they knew, but, of course, they didn’t go back and do the real hard work, which is what I call there’s a hard, easy way to do this and an easy, hard way to do this.[4:57–5:12] David: The hard, easy way is you do that customer discovery and you do it the right way because there’s a lot of ways to do customer discovery, and there’s a right way and a wrong way. There are more wrong ways than there are right ways.[5:12–5:23] David: But once you really do that customer discovery, then you go and test your assumptions and you validate that your customer discovery was correct. So anyway, so that’s my background.[5:23–5:38] David: This is kind of what led me to develop Launch First, that plus how we do our software prototyping during design. Those two things are the reason why Launch First was something that just naturally evolved in this process.[5:40–5:53] Todd: So that’s interesting, and I think it lines with kind of what we see, too. I think that lots of people don’t — they think they do customer discovery, and they really don’t get down to brass tacks to the point where — I think they ask a lot of leading questions.[5:53–6:06] Todd: They don’t really understand kind of what is going to change in the behavior. Are people really going to pay you for it? Maybe not understanding competitive analysis, too, like where is their white space? Is there a good beachhead niche you can actually start with?[6:06–6:21] Todd: And so maybe help me unpack some of that, because I think that’s probably the starting point of this, is if you get this right, then lots of things get a lot easier. But like you said, if you get this wrong, you build and you spend a bunch of time, that’s a pretty expensive thing to go back and redo.[6:22–6:32] David: Right. So this gets into the philosophy of what your perspective should be if you’re starting, if you’re doing a startup.[6:33–6:56] David: So most of the people that come to me and want to build their apps if they’re startups, and we do a lot of startups also for existing companies that are looking to take some workflow that they have and turn it into a product, or they’re testing a new market, And those startups have usually a much higher chance of being successful because they do a lot of testing of their market first.[6:56–7:07] David: And I’ll explain what I mean by testing the market. But a lot of startups come to me, and they’ve got the black robe on. And they have this vision, which you need to have vision if you’re a startup, right?[7:07–7:30] David: But they believe in their vision, which is the kiss of death for a startup founder, is the belief system that they build around this vision. And so I coach them to take the black robe off and throw it in the fireplace and put the white coat on and turn into a clinician where you have hypothesis and you’re trying to prove your hypothesis wrong along the way.[7:30–7:44] David: So that you become very clinical and analytical in the process of determining what the value of what the problems are, who the niches that you should be focused on, and how you arrive at those conclusions.[7:45–8:19] David: So I always say there’s one job a software founder has or any startup founder has when they are starting their company before they do anything else. One job, and that is figure out who is your early adopter niche and what are the top two or three problems at most at a root level problem, not a high level generic problem, but at a root level that they need solved that have two components to it, That problem niche intersection has two things.[8:20–8:30] David: It has a high perception of this problem needs to be solved, right? That’s not a real thing, but it’s a perception from the stakeholder. They perceive this as a problem.[8:30–8:42] David: They feel it’s going to affect their career or whatever it is, but it’s a survival-level kind of root-level problem, and it costs the most because those two numbers are independent of each other.[8:42–8:54] David: Somebody can perceive that there’s a big problem because they’re getting downward pressure from management or for whatever reason and they need the problem solved, but the actual cost of that problem is low.[8:56–9:12] David: Whereas you can have problems that are really expensive, but the perception for the need to fix that problem is not high. They don’t feel it impacts them because maybe they’re in an industry where everybody struggles with this problem and it’s endemic, and so, you know, we’re just like everybody else.[9:13–9:28] David: So what you need is to find that niche that has that top one or two or maybe three of those root problems that you are solving with what you’re planning on doing that have both high impact, perception impact, and high cost.[9:28–9:39] David: That’s the number one job that founders have, but they don’t know that, and nobody tells them that, and it’s not obvious that that’s what their job is. And so that’s what launch first.[9:39–9:46] David: The first thing we do is basically focus on discovering that, not discovering but uncovering that.[9:48–9:55] Todd: And would you maybe walk me through how hard it is for founders to, A, wrap their head around it and then execute on it?[9:56–10:14] David: Okay, right. It’s easy for them to wrap their head around this idea when I show them. Like, oh, you’re right. We absolutely need to do that. It’s really hard for them to execute on it because it’s tedious, and it takes grit to get through it and to do it deeply enough.[10:16–10:26] David: The way we do it, the way that Launch First does it, is we come up with all the various niches. We tease out all the niches. I have a methodology for how you define a niche, and we tease them all out.[10:26–10:38] David: and there’s usually anywhere from 10 to 30 niches that you could potentially target with your product over time. And then we tease out all those root-level problem statements. So they may say we’re solving these two or three problems.[10:38–10:50] David: Usually those are generic problem statements that they think they’re solving. But when you stand in the shoes of that niche, what about, you know, why does that problem matter to that stakeholder in that niche?[10:50–11:03] David: And you do that why two or three or four times. you get deep enough where you get to the root level problem for that stakeholder in that niche where they feel threatened by that problem. And that’s how you have to articulate the problem statements.[11:03–11:16] David: And so when you do that and those problem statements start to distill out to more like 10 or 15 problem statements, not two or three. And then we create a grid with this, and then we map every cell in the grid.[11:16–11:29] David: We say, okay, what’s the impact of this problem statement to this niche from a scoring perspective? And then we do the same thing from cost. What’s the cost that this particular stakeholder has with this problem statement?[11:29–11:45] David: And then we bubble chart the whole thing. And when we do this, it makes it really clear that there’s two or three or four niches that float up into the upper right where their top two or three problems have the highest impact and the highest cost.[11:45–11:59] David: And then we focus our deep dive exercise on just those three or four niches. to figure out which ones do we promote to the top, which ones do we demote for things like it’s costly to reach stakeholders.[12:00–12:23] David: They don’t have decision-making. The ones that decide on the product don’t have budget and they have to get it approved. The sales cycle is too long things like that right Sure Or you know because you want somebody who can make a decision and purchase product because LaunchForce is all about doing pre sales as a way of proving product market before we even start developing the software.[12:24–12:36] Todd: Well, that’s good. I mean, we have a similar approach, and I think kind of maybe where you’re going is we actually make the founders get a beta agreement, so they usually either use Flutter Flow or Figma or something to actually prototype what they’re actually going to do.[12:36–12:49] Todd: So as a clickable demo, they’ll go back to those stakeholders that they’ve identified in their niche and basically get them to sign a beta agreement that says, at the very least, you’re basically going to use this product and beta test it for us and give us feedback.[12:50–13:01] Todd: And if they can’t get more than 50% or 60% of the original people that they interviewed to sign that, we know that we haven’t gotten the value proposition strong enough for them to even do a beta test.[13:01–13:15] Todd: And so before we even write a lick of code, we’re kind of on the same boat, which kind of sounds like maybe talk to me about your kind of pre-selling validation because I’m sure it’s got a similar concept where you’re really trying to make sure there’s a demand for what you build before you do it.[13:16–13:27] David: Well, yes, and I think the beta agreements, if you get a high enough percentage of people willing to beta, that gives you a really strong signal that there’s demand for this product.[13:28–13:40] David: The problem with betas is people will say a lot of things that they are not actually making a financial commitment to something, that they won’t follow through. There’s a wonderful book.[13:40–13:53] David: It’s my favorite business book of all time. It’s called The Mom Test. Oh, yeah. You’re familiar with it, right? I am. And every single founder should read this at the very beginning of their journey.[13:55–14:07] David: You were going to say something? Nope. Nope. Continue. Oh, okay. You froze for a second. That’s why I was asking. where basically the idea is that you’re focused on the problem, right?[14:07–14:29] David: You’re not focused on the solution, but you just talk about the problem, and you talk with customers about the problems they’re struggling with and what they’ve done historically about those problems and how much does that problem cost you and why is that problem a problem and what other problems had you not thought about that they struggle with that are related to the problems that you’re talking about and on and on and on, right?[14:29–14:49] David: And that way you’re getting truth from a customer because they are talking about themselves. They’re not talking about your thing. They’re talking about their thing. So what we do is focus on the problem, build a prototype using Figma if Figma will satisfy the requirement.[14:49–15:07] David: And what I mean by that is the prototype has to be fully animated in such a way so it looks like you’ve actually built the product. in terms of on-screen behavior and workflows and pop-up messages because you’re going to demo that like you’re demoing a real product.[15:07–15:18] David: You never lie to a customer. You always tell them this is a prototype. The first version won’t have all these features, and it won’t be out for three to four months if you’re doing a classic pre-launch sale.[15:19–15:44] David: Or you say, we’re going to provide you with this service, but the software won’t be available for three to four months, but you can start using the service immediately, and you’ll cobble together some workflows and, you know, WordPress and Google Sheets and automate some workflows with App Scripts or whatever you need to do so that you can start to manage the business of a certain number of customers, but you get them to buy it in advance.[15:45–16:20] David: So if — and the idea is if you’ve found the right early adopter where they’ve got a — the cost of this problem is big enough to them that they know they’re going to get this product when it comes out and they feel threatened by this so you can easily reach that stakeholder and you offer them a big enough opportunity up front in terms of a lifetime license or free implementation like in the case of clinical trial software where implementation costs cost more than the software typically or whatever the high-value opportunity is that triggers that client to feel like[16:20–16:41] David: they don’t want to miss out on this opportunity. is that if you have those two things in place, then you can sell enough of your product in advance and be generating revenue from people you know are going to be very committed, invested customers to prove that you’ve got product market fit and to generate revenue to help you fund development.[16:42–16:56] David: And you can usually, if you’re successful in the pre-launch, generate as much money or more from pre-launch sales from an intestinal fractional percent of your market versus giving away 10%, 15%, 20% to a seed investor.[16:57–17:17] David: And the work you do to try to get that money from a seed investor does zero to move your business forward, whereas everything you’re doing in Launch First is moving your business forward in terms of growing your customers and building a sales and marketing engine and figuring out how to speak to customers so that they’re your closing business.[17:17–17:24] Todd: What percentage of your clients actually get to that point where they’re basically generating that amount of money before you write a lick of code?[17:27–17:41] David: So we had, well, the clients that get all the way through this, the niche analysis piece, there’s a high percentage of them that will get there. Or they fail fast and fast.[17:41–17:43] Todd: Yeah, which is perfect, too. Right. Exactly what you want.[17:43–17:55] David: Right. We do several. Exactly. Right. So I try to convince my clients if they’re not getting there, let’s pivot two or three times because we’re dealing with a high-fidelity prototype and a marketing stack, right?[17:55–18:11] David: And those are easy things to pivot as compared to software. And if they still can’t get past it after two or three months and they’re not getting close to what I call that viability barrier, that three-to-one ratio, then I try to say, look, it’s a reasonable thing for you to consider.[18:11–18:22] David: You fail fast and cheap. We don’t want to invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in building this big, sophisticated system if you don’t have a market that’s going to buy it. Right.[18:23–18:38] David: So, but, yeah, a decent percentage of them. I don’t have actual metrics, so I can’t tell you exactly. That’s interesting. But when we originally tested this, we did this with four different clients when we tested this model a few years back.[18:39–18:45] David: And three of them were successful. and got to that point really pretty easily. Board 1 didn’t.[18:46–19:01] Todd: So what’s interesting to me is there’s kind of an other trend on this, too, and I think both kind of the no-code and then some of the AI tools have made building a lightweight, non-scalable version of this so much easier and so much cheaper.[19:01–19:22] Todd: So less than, you know, in some cases $5,000, $10,000. You basically can piece something together to prove out your concept, go to an early adopter, maybe get your first, if it’s a B2C, maybe get your first couple thousand people on it, realize you have a business, and then you go back to basically rewriting an enterprise or a more scalable version of it.[19:23–19:40] Todd: And I’m curious, do people come to you with some of that already starting to, they’ve figured some of that out, and they’ve trialed that super cheap, and now they’re coming to you and saying, build me a robust, scalable version of this, because I found the niche and I think, you know, and I’ve spent less than $10,000 to do it.[19:41–20:01] David: Yeah. And so, yeah, and this is possible now, right? There were a couple tools you could do this to some degree and not necessarily create something that would really be all that appealing and attractive but would work and you could at least see that the workflow had enough value that you could start to sell it.[20:02–20:12] David: But now all of a sudden, really, in the last three or four months, really in the last month or two, this has really opened up a lot. In fact, this is something we’re completely retooling.[20:12–20:23] David: I haven’t had people do that on their own and then come back to me and say, let’s build a robust version because everything we’ve built in the past was always scalable day one.[20:23–20:35] David: It’s just sort of built into our DNA. You know, but that’s going to change for this, specifically for this proof of product market fit, right?[20:35–20:49] David: Because with a product, you’ll be able to basically get a product on the market that can satisfy a certain number of customers, right? And satisfy a certain level of sophistication in the workflows and things like that.[20:50–21:07] David: Really, they’re just like you said. So it’s funny because I’m wrestling with the right way to approach that right now, exactly what you just said. What are the right tools to use, how to leverage it, and to make this a part of the launch first offer instead of just doing the design prototype.[21:09–21:40] Todd: Yeah, and so I’ll just tell you what we’ve been thinking about in trying to pilot with some of our customers. you know we’ve been trying to use Flutter Flow and saying instead of using Figma can you actually use Flutter Flow and actually you know write the code and the entrepreneur in general most of our entrepreneurs that come to us they’re not technical they’re not sales guys they’re generally product people so they’re in general they’re fine like doing some design work and then we’ve been looking at build shift for a lot of the business logic so basically doing a clean segmentation[21:40–21:59] Todd: to make sure the business logic is not put into the UI and is a clean layer, and then Supabase on the database side, Postgres. And basically what we’re finding is once they kind of upgrade through that, there is a fair amount of reusable code that basically the next party can take a look at and really leverage to not start again, but basically leverage it.[21:59–22:16] Todd: The second piece to it that we’ve been kind of saying is how do we basically reuse a number of those things so that you’re not, you know, authentication, password reset, Stripe integration, A lot of that stuff almost every one of these guys has, or we have Marketplace, or we have B2C, or we have screens for B2B.[22:16–22:26] Todd: Like, there’s a bunch of reusable components even in that strategy that you can go do that basically shortens this time frame to get them to market. And I don’t know if any of that resonates with you.[22:26–22:36] David: Oh, I completely, exactly the same sort of thing. In fact, there’s also tools like Bolt and Replit. I don’t know if you’ve played with either of those.[22:36–22:37] Todd: Yep, I’ve played with both of those.[22:37–23:04] David: And they’re improving very quickly in terms of what they could do a month ago versus what they can do now. So, in fact, I’m using Replit right now to build a referral portal for our own internal use because we have a lot of referral partners, and we need a portal for them to be able to use, and we need a portal to be able to track it and all that.[23:04–23:13] David: And so, you know, building it in days using a tool like that. And it looks nice, too, on top of all that.[23:14–23:23] Todd: How do you think about reusable code from that standpoint, though? Do you think that a lot of these tools, that if you build them in there, there’s some leverage as you build the scalable version?[23:24–23:36] David: I think the UI, for sure. We’re also, like, things that we’re doing internally is building a, you know, We have several AI models that we’re building internally for our own use right now.[23:36–23:51] David: One of them is it’s still at early stage, but this is something we feel really strong about. It’s an AI model for building microservices, which, of course, with all the communications layers and everything in place, because we do everything in microservices.[23:52–24:17] David: Like I said, it’s sort of built into our DNA. But it doesn’t make sense to always be building them over and over again or copying and pasting code. So this is something where we can generate them based on the business rules for this particular service and its need for being able to be provisioned and orchestrated in, like, a scalable environment like Lambda or Cloud Run or whatever.[24:18–24:36] David: And using possibly you know I starting to consider maybe using Replit for generate building the UI for us because it creates all those UI components for you and it does it pretty fast, and it does a decent job of it, and then just plug that into our own stack.[24:36–24:50] Todd: Yeah. Yeah. How do you, I guess, you know, one of the things that’s kind of hard to think about is, like, especially in your world, these things are changing so quickly. how do you think about building kind of modular components of this when you know maybe that’s not the tool?[24:51–25:05] Todd: You know, like a lot of this is API-driven, so you can pick different models. You can basically specify different models. But even from an architecture standpoint, how do you think about leveraging these tools in a way that, like, six months, a year from now, you can swap these things out to whatever’s the latest and greatest for you?[25:06–25:19] David: Yeah, and that’s tough, right? Because how do you predict the future? Yeah, right. I mean, right now, if you talk about a year out, that’s really hard to predict. There are certain things I think are predictable three to five years out.[25:19–25:30] David: A few things are predictable, like the end of, I don’t know, I keep saying this, but the end of multi-level parking structures. That’s three to five years away. There will be a tipping point.[25:30–25:46] David: They’ll be completely empty because of self-driving vehicles and Waymo and Tesla. and people will stop buying cars because it just costs too much and it’s too unsafe.[25:46–25:47] Todd: It’s not a good return on the investment.[25:47–26:05] David: Right, exactly. And there will be a tipping point where it’s not like Uber where you have to wait 5, 10, 15 minutes. It’ll be like you’ll have a car in a minute because it may be parked in somebody’s, you know, somebody in your neighborhood has a car that they own a car and they’re not using it and it leaves their parking lot when you need it, right?[26:05–26:17] David: So, by the way, if you’re invested in multi-level parking structures, sell them now. Get the heck out. And people don’t believe these tipping points can happen that fast.[26:18–26:32] David: I’ve seen it happen that fast. Massive tipping points that happen. Anyway, so some things, back to your question because I’m rambling now. Some things I think like that are predictable, at least I believe they are.[26:32–26:44] David: Other things like how are we going to be building apps in a year from now are not as predictable, other than I know everything is going to be agentic workflows built around RAG models, right?[26:44–26:57] David: So this is kind of all the — this is our orientation these days. And we’re thinking what agents should we be building right now? Like one of the agents is our microservices builder.[26:57–27:15] David: what other agents should we be creating right now, maybe a workflow orchestrator that’s an agent as opposed to a workflow orchestrator software, where right now with workflows, you configure them by dragging different components and connecting them and putting in logic.[27:16–27:28] David: There’s a tool, but now there’s AI tools that will build those for you, like with Make and Zapier, and you can say, this is what I want this workflow to do, and it kind of like wires it up and it gets it right sometimes.[27:29–27:32] David: But in a month, it’ll get it right a lot more often.[27:33–27:52] Todd: Do you think there’s a shift in your business from going from these horizontal LLMs to things that are a little bit more vertically focused, or do you think that’s still a ways away? I mean, they’re Swiss Army Knives, and I think what a lot of enterprises are finding is they’re good for a lot of general stuff, but the domain expertise in these businesses needs to go way deeper.[27:52–28:06] Todd: And so dumping more domain expertise into these that are specific and then optimized for their usage, A, is much cheaper and then much more valuable to their business, and they get rid of a bunch of stuff that’s not valuable to their business.[28:07–28:24] David: Right, right. And I think you look at something like notebook LLM, right, or notebook LLM, which is sort of that, right? Take your expertise and you upload it to notebook.lm and now you’ve literally embedded all this expertise into this tool that can do all kinds of stuff.[28:24–28:44] David: It can create a discussion, which is wild. I remember when that came out, I was blown away by that. And an amazing number of podcasts started publishing these episodes, which, of course, I think they’ve stopped because they realize that they’re going to get dinged from a consumability perspective.[28:44–28:55] Todd: I would even lean into that one further. I think my workflow for just producing these podcasts has probably dropped from something that’s probably four to six hours to down to a couple of hours, or maybe an hour now, right?[28:55–29:07] Todd: Where it’s like I use the notebook LM. I take stuff from YouTube. I take the podcast. I take some articles that maybe you’ve written, some social media. I put it all in there and start asking some questions about, hey, this is what I’m looking for.[29:07–29:21] Todd: What does David have that’s interesting for my clientele or the people that listen? and then help me build a podcast script that really kind of facilitates that. And, you know, like, again, that would have taken me hours to do, and now it’s taking me less than an hour.[29:22–29:32] David: Yeah, and, in fact, the message that I got from you that talked about what you wanted to talk about was really impressive. So, you know, congratulations for figuring out how to use these tools.[29:32–29:51] David: This is what everybody should be doing. This is what people that are not adopting AI right now just don’t realize how they think that it’s just a big learning curve or, again, whether we’re talking about startups or existing companies, we’ve talked about enterprise.[29:51–30:08] David: But there’s just a lot of resistance to this, and they don’t realize that these tools will teach you how to use them. You don’t have to know how to use them. You just open it up and you ask it a question and it starts a conversation and pretty soon you’re starting to feel pretty comfortable with the tool.[30:09–30:19] Todd: Yeah, I think it is a different engagement model, though, not just because of text or anything, but I think so many people that I’ve seen start using it like Google and then they say, oh, this is disappointing.[30:20–30:34] Todd: Or they get their first hallucination and it’s not right and they’re like, oh, this is terrible. I think you really have to dedicate some time to trying to figure out ways to use it and really stretch the bounds of what it can’t do.[30:35–30:46] Todd: And I think then it’s incredible, right? I remember I dropped a bunch of stuff in. We were doing a trip to southern Utah. My kids go to college in Salt Lake, and we were doing a trip afterwards, and I just listed, I don’t know, 15 different places we were going to go.[30:46–30:57] Todd: And I said, just give me an itinerary. I want to be gone for two and a half weeks. Tell me how long. I like hiking, biking. And it just blew it out for me. And, you know, how long that would have taken me to put together. And here’s the trails to go see.[30:58–31:08] Todd: Here’s the biking to go see. Here’s a spot to go do. Spend two days here. This is longer. Oh, you don’t want to drive any more than 100 miles in a day? Fine. We’ll take care of that. And you’re like, holy smokes.[31:09–31:30] David: Yeah, I know. It’s amazing. So when I first, when ChatGVT came out, right, a couple years ago, and I was, even before that, I was talking about OpenAI the year before and what it was capable of doing, you know, in the two version or whatever it was back then.[31:32–31:50] David: And then ChatGPT comes out, and all of a sudden it’s so consumable. Yeah, it’s hallucinating like crazy, and, you know, there was a lot of stuff that really needed to be fixed, but it got fixed pretty fast from my perspective because it rarely hallucinates that I can tell now.[31:52–32:03] David: But it came out. I was talking about this with my wife a lot, And she went, yeah, you know, it sounds really interesting. I don’t know that I’d ever use it. Anyway, so three months later, four months later, this is still pretty new, right?[32:03–32:18] David: Chachi Pigi’s only been out for months. We’re in the backyard. We just bought a house. And she asked me, we’re talking about, because we had moved from Scottsdale to San Diego, and we’re looking in our backyard thinking she wants to do gardening because she loves to do vegetable gardening.[32:18–32:31] David: She wants to grow all our own vegetables. She says, how many beds do you think I’m going to need for our backyard? four-by-four beds to feed us. We’re not vegetarians, but we eat a lot of vegetables. And then her sister called right then.[32:31–32:42] David: And so she gets on a call with her sister for like 10 minutes, talking about the backyard and the move and all that. So I’m there. I pull out chat GPT on my phone, and I ask her that question.[32:42–32:53] David: I say, we live in Vista, California, so considering the microclimate where we live, how many beds would we need considering we’re also not vegetarians? vegetarians were both in our early 60s.[32:54–33:16] David: And so Chachapiti says, okay, given your age and all these things, it says you probably need 10 4x4 beds or whatever the number was. I don’t remember. I said, okay, so in each bed, how should we plan, what should we plant considering that we want to have companion vegetables in the plant, but certain things don’t like to grow in the same bed as an onion.[33:17–33:29] David: Right? And so then it gives us a planting plan. And I said, okay, now do that for succession planting for all the seasons because when you harvest something, you have to make sure what you put in there is compatible with what was going in there before.[33:29–33:44] David: And so then it does that. And I said, what companion flowers should we put in each? Because you want certain types of flowers in each bed because they draw away the insects that would go to those. But other flowers will draw insects in and they go, oh, I like that vegetable, and leave the flower, right?[33:44–33:56] David: So you’d have to put the right flowers in it. So I’m asking it all these questions. And it was answering it all for me. I said, okay, create a table by bed by season for all these things.[33:56–34:08] David: And so it did a beautiful job, right? She gets off the phone with her sister. It was like 10 minutes. And I said, what about this? I said, remember I’ve been talking about Chachipiti while I was talking with her about gardening, and this is what it came up with.[34:09–34:15] David: And she went, she turned her head. She was looking at me, looking at me. She couldn’t believe it.[34:16–34:20] Todd: How much time do you think that would take you to do, right, and to get it right? That’s crazy.[34:20–34:29] David: Well, she even said, she said, it would have taken me days to come up with this, and everything I can see, it looks correct.[34:29–34:32] Todd: And you were talking to your sister for 10 minutes, and we got it taken care of.[34:32–34:45] David: Right. So that’s about as practical as it gets, right? And what I try to tell people is don’t ask a question that you want an answer to if you’re getting used to using this.[34:45–34:48] David: ask it what questions should you ask.[34:48–34:50] Todd: You should ask it. Right. To learn something.[34:50–35:01] David: If you’re trying to get this kind of a result out of it, right? What questions should I be asking? And if it doesn’t give you the right questions, say, yeah, those aren’t the things I’m interested in.[35:01–35:14] David: I’m more interested in this, so what questions should I? And then you’ll start a conversation. Then you can say, yeah, those are good questions. How about you start answering those questions? And then you can just start talking to it like anybody else.[35:14–35:26] David: I ask please and thank you. I’ve been doing that from the beginning. I thought the please just because I feel like the value that I’m getting from it is so high. I wanted to be nice, not that I needed to be.[35:27–35:39] David: And the thank you was because I wanted to give it confirmation when it was getting things right because I figured it could only help it. And I didn’t have any evidence of that before. It turns out now later on that it’s true.[35:39–35:50] David: It actually gives you better responses. And plus, if AI ends up taking over the world, I wanted to remember him. You want to be nice to it. You’re overlords. No, you’re safe.[35:50–35:52] David: I’ll protect you. The rest is ever gone.[35:52–35:52] Todd: Exactly.[35:53–35:53] David: You’re good.[35:55–36:08] Todd: That’s good. Well, let’s continue in this line because this is one that I guess I’ve been kind of wrestling with a little bit is, you know, you’re starting to see some things with, like, computer vision and stuff, which Claude is doing.[36:08–36:39] Todd: It seems pretty clunky. It’s not really ready for prime time At least in my opinion quite yet But like where do you see Some of these like it’s one thing to have these Agents and they kind of a lot of them Are kind of standalone right where it’s You ask it a question and it will give you an output But we haven’t really connected it very easily With workflow right whether it’s Belling equations if then if it meets This criteria do something else the conditional logic That I think is really what going to unlock this Who are players that you think like I mean Zapier and stuff is there but like I mean and I don know[36:39–36:47] Todd: Make is a really good one. What is it? Make is really smart. Yeah, I’ve looked at it. Yeah. Okay. But is, like, Microsoft or anybody else really building, like, an enterprise?[36:49–36:55] David: Yeah, Microsoft. I’m trying to think of their something flow. What’s Microsoft’s called? They definitely have.[36:55–37:02] Todd: I can’t remember. I just read an article that was talking a little bit about what they’re doing. They’re starting in this direction, but I was just curious if you’ve had any first-hand experiences with any of them.[37:03–37:25] David: I mean, workflow automation to me is everything, right? I agree. Right. The biggest benefits I’m able to achieve for people that are struggling with a workflow, and I’ve got a lot of examples of this where I’ve automated workflows for people in the past, are dramatic in terms of the impact that they can have.[37:25–37:36] David: Like a friend of mine runs a really big business network, and every Tuesday morning he has a meeting of about 70 different people, but he has 1,500 members.[37:37–37:48] David: And it took him all day long. This was several years ago. It took him all day long, like seven hours, to get ready for his Tuesday meeting because he’s pulling the information from different places.[37:48–37:59] David: 30% of the people are new. They’re guests in there. He’s got to bring the members up. He’s got to organize the order that he’s going to announce people because he announces everybody.[37:59–38:12] David: Everybody speaks. And it took him like seven hours, and if he got any kind of distraction, partly because he’s getting calls while he’s trying to do all this. So I said, let me automate that for you.[38:12–38:48] David: and when we when we did this and this was just sort of a hobby personal project I did for him because he’s a friend when we did this he said okay we said you can automate that and I said yeah I think so so let’s do it and he said okay and he says here’s we go through the whole workflow he shows me exactly what he does and I said okay give me a couple weeks as I’m running a software company and I’ll do this in my part time but give me a couple weeks I’ll use Google Sheets and write some app scripts in the background to automate this and connect in using the API from your ticketing system.[38:49–38:59] David: Anyway, so he did. Come back two weeks later, and I showed it to him. He said, oh, that won’t work. And I said, why not? He said, because it doesn’t handle these two conditions. I said, well, you didn’t tell me about those two conditions. Exactly.[39:00–39:02] David: Let’s go ahead. Right. This is just typical, right?[39:03–39:05] Todd: Requirements. Requirements, requirements.[39:05–39:19] David: Right, exactly. So we went back, and I thought I asked him every question, But this is like you were talking about corporate business intelligence inside your company, right, domain expertise.[39:19–39:33] David: You know, this was just part of his DNA. He had been doing this now for many years every Monday. And so there was so many little nuances. Anyway, every two weeks they’d come back and they would then realize why it wouldn’t support his business because it was missing this case or that scenario.[39:33–39:47] David: or, you know, you can’t put people in when their email is whatever it was. It was all these little nuances that he didn’t tell me about, and it was not something I could easily predict because it was so specialized to what he does.[39:48–40:10] David: So after about three months, every two or three weeks, we’d get back together when I’d have a few hours to work on it here and there. And then finally we got it to where it looked like it was doing it all. So we ran it in parallel with his normal process for one week, and it ran it perfectly, and then he started using it himself and ran across a couple more of these little glitches over the next month or two, which I took care of pretty easily.[40:11–40:25] David: And now he’s been using it every single Monday for the last four years, four, four and a half years now. And it takes him 15 minutes to do his Monday instead of seven hours. And whenever we talk, he says, you know, I’m still using that program you wrote.[40:25–40:59] David: and he’s got a big and this is typical when you really dig into work automating a very manually intensive person intensive workflow and we’re about to do the same thing with his podcasting network because he has a radio station and a big podcasting network and I told him I’m going to be starting my own podcast soon and so that sort of conversation he said well I’m kind of not sure I want to tell you this but we have a few members that send me their podcasts when they do them, and I distribute it in my network.[40:59–41:12] David: And I said, weren’t you sure you wanted to tell me? He says, yeah, it’s just a lot of work. And I wasn’t sure I was going to keep this going because of how much time it takes me. But, you know, these are really great members, and that’s why I’ve continued to do it.[41:12–41:23] David: And I said, this sounds really familiar. Why don’t we get together? But now it’s not going to take me three months to do this. It’s going to take me hours probably to do it.[41:23–41:41] David: spread across several days as we go back and forth, and he remembers what he didn’t remember each time, right? Maybe a week, week and a half instead of three months, and probably four or five hours of my time, and I’ll be able to automate the whole flow for all the distribution, publishing, and outreach.[41:41–41:49] David: So I love workflow automation because this is where businesses really, really save money and make money.[41:49–42:04] Todd: Yeah, and I think that’s where this starts, right? Just take out all the stuff that was bubble gum and tribal knowledge, or somebody like your friend basically has all this tribal knowledge from doing it, and if you can basically turn that into an automated workflow, then that’s great.[42:04–42:14] Todd: That guy can go on vacation, or he can take us 15 minutes on a Monday to get it knocked out. And then if he’s not there and he turns it over to his son or daughter, then great. They’ve got a process to go do that.[42:14–42:18] Todd: And so I do think that’s kind of the entry level where a lot of this starts to happen.[42:18–42:43] David: I want to add one thing to this because this is something I’m grappling with right now. So we’re building playbooks for how we operate in our business, in particular on the marketing side now that I’m starting a podcast, in the podcasting side, in the marketing, the interviews, and when I go on an interview like this, that sort of thing, right, and the communications with people like you.[42:43–42:54] David: And this is all, you know, I was doing it myself for a little while until I felt like I had kind of a consistent process. And then I got my VA to start to do this for me.[42:54–43:09] David: And now she’s got it, so I’m going to have her document the playbook on all the nuances, basically like any workflow, right? There’s all the things you do regularly, and then there’s all the nuances that are the exceptions that you have to cover.[43:10–43:20] David: And so she’s going to do that. But I want these playbooks to be — I want to use AI to then be able to document the playbooks as best I can.[43:21–43:39] David: To a certain degree, that’s a little difficult because you still have to describe all these cases, right? But then I want AI to then say how can we automate this process, the outreach and everything else, and then start to build the work — automate these workflows.[43:41–44:09] David: This is kind of, I’m starting to kind of come up with my own internal methodology for how we take something that’s amorphous like this marketing activity that has regular steps and nuances for all these exceptions and turn that into playbooks and then take the playbooks and use AI to then automate the playbook for wherever it can be automated and do it in steps.[44:09–44:21] David: Because you can’t do it all at once, right? You do it all at once, you end up with a mess. It’s got to be done in steps that are kind of controllable and that are testable, that you know that it’s being done all correctly.[44:22–44:37] Todd: It’s funny. Like, it sounds like we think a little bit like, I mean, I always like using, like, something like Lucidchart or something just to outline the process, right? So if we can agree on kind of what the process looks like and there’s a flow and there’s decisions and then you’re like, okay, here are all the variations that I have, okay, that’s pretty cheap to figure that out.[44:37–44:55] Todd: And then basically if you want to take the next steps into how do I automate some of this, at least you’ve got that framework to start with. And that’s even what we’re talking about is let’s make sure that’s all documented because the tool over time could change, but the workflow is probably not going to change because once you nail down the workflow, it’s just applying it to the next tool.[44:55–45:12] David: Right, exactly. I totally agree. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. So you’re doing basically a workflow. I’m doing playbooks, which is the same thing. And it’ll probably have the workflows in it, you know, in terms of flow charts and all that in the playbook.[45:12–45:22] David: I just want a place where somebody can go and I’ve got a new person coming because you need this to scale, right? So I want to add another person because maybe we’re doing twice as much.[45:22–45:33] David: I’ve got more people doing podcasting and we need more support. And so I can just hire somebody, they give them the playbook, and then we have a playbook about how to train them, right?[45:33–45:43] David: how to get them trained so that they’re doing these things. Or we’ve got what parts are automated, what parts have to be addressed by them individually, and then we can, you know, continue to scale and roll this out.[45:45–46:08] Todd: Well, I might leave it there. I think, David, maybe, I mean, you’re a little bit older than I am, but not much. It’s just interesting the time, you know, like I probably got in computers early 80s, and you think about all the changes technology-wise that we see, and I’m appreciative of you basically trying to use all these different tools and stitch all this stuff together to leverage them and figure it out.[46:08–46:19] Todd: I mean, I think we probably all knew a lot of peers that maybe got stuck somewhere and didn’t continue to poke and innovate and challenge. And it’s just cool to have a conversation and see where you’re going.[46:20–46:29] Todd: The AI component of it wasn’t in our agenda, but it seemed like a good meat to the topic and something we both had some in common too. So I appreciate that.[46:29–46:47] David: Yeah, and, you know, it used to be a lot easier to predict where the fuck was going. And now it’s not. It’s like impossible, especially in the technology world, you know, in terms of how the technology is going to affect technology.[46:47–47:02] David: But as far as you’re, you know, I mean, you know, I always say to people, because they still come to me to help them work through PC-related issues, right, My friends and family and, you know, sorry to bug you, David, but I’m struggling.[47:02–47:13] David: Got a question. That I’ve never seen before, right? But I — so I always tell them, and they ask me, how can you do — how can you figure that out? I said, well, you know, I channel my inner five-year-old.[47:14–47:28] David: Exactly. That’s how I — because I just pretend — I don’t know what I don’t know, so I’m not afraid of any button on the screen. Failure. I just buy everything. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So if you don’t have that mindset, you’re in the wrong business with how fast technology is moving.[47:29–47:40] Todd: Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s kind of a fun time. So I’ll wrap it up here, though. But, David, I really appreciate you sharing your insight. I think we have a lot of short kind of core values on how startups really need to get going.[47:40–47:51] Todd: I mean, I think, like, just the customer research, the validation before you spend a ton of money, like that just really resonates with me. I think so many businesses fail because of that.[47:51–48:06] Todd: And then it’s exciting to see how these tools to build kind of MVPs, you know, first versions of it are just getting cheaper and quicker to market to validate those assumptions. And then, you know, like companies like yours where they can basically then build for scale going forward.[48:06–48:11] Todd: So it’s an interesting time, and I appreciate you spending some time to share your insights and wisdom.[48:12–48:19] David: Yeah, and I really appreciate the questions and the conversation. We’re definitely aligned in a lot of these ways. So thank you for having me on your show.[48:20–48:32] Todd: Yeah, well, thank you. If you enjoyed the podcast today, please just take a moment to rate it or comment on it for us.[48:32–48:39] Todd: This feedback really helps us, and it helps us get the word out to helping other entrepreneurs and founders. Thank you.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.The Hard-Easy Way: A Veteran Founder’s Guide to Startup Validation was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [From Concepts to Code: The Tekyz Approach to Software Development with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/from-concepts-to-code-the-tekyz-approach-to-software-development-with-david-hirschfeld-3a45e87686da/) - Featured Image: From Concepts to Code — The Tekyz Approach to Software Developmenthttps://medium.com/media/29aceed013217588288a052775c3f98c/hrefThis podcast episode features Ryan Ferris interviewing David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, a software development company. The discussion centers around Hirschfeld’s extensive experience with startups, his company’s approach to software development, and his “Launch First” methodology, which challenges traditional startup practices. He challenges the conventional MVP approach, emphasizing early validation, revenue generation, and the power of AI-driven efficiency. Learn how Hirschfeld’s strategies help startups succeed faster and wiser.The Value Maker Podcast: A Conversation with David HirschfeldThis podcast episode features Ryan Ferris interviewing David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, a software development company. The discussion centers around Hirschfeld’s extensive experience with startups, his company’s unique approach to software development, and his “Launch First” methodology, which challenges traditional startup practices.From Mainframes to StartupsHirschfeld’s journey began in the late 1980s with IBM mainframe sales. He transitioned into software development after realizing he could create more effective client presentations. This led to roles at Texas Instruments, where he ran projects for major corporations like Intel and Motorola. He then co-founded a logistics startup, growing it to 800 customers in 22 countries before selling it in 2000. This experience and observing the successes and failures of over 90 startups through Tekyz informed his understanding of what drives startup success.The Tekyz Approach: Transparency and TrustTekyz primarily works with non-technical founders, often serving as their outsourced development team for extended periods. Hirschfeld emphasizes their commitment to transparency and trust, highlighting their practice of attaching detailed timesheets to every invoice. This meticulous tracking, he argues, eliminates potential trust issues and allows clients to focus on the value being delivered. Tekyz also avoids working with competing clients to maintain trust and avoid conflicts of interest.The Launch First Methodology: Pre-Launch Sales over MVPsHirschfeld introduces his “Launch First” methodology, prioritizing pre-launch sales over the traditional Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. He advocates for creating highly polished animated design prototypes that convincingly showcase the product’s functionality. These prototypes are then used to secure early buy-in from customers through attractive offers like lifetime licenses. This approach, he argues, generates early revenue, validates product-market fit, and allows for quick and inexpensive pivots if necessary. He criticizes the common practice of free betas and delayed sales efforts, often leading to wasted time and resources.Identifying the Early AdopterA crucial element of “Launch First” is identifying the ideal early adopter. Hirschfeld emphasizes the importance of initially focusing on a single niche and understanding the specific problems that resonate with them. He recommends a metrics-driven approach involving scoring problem statements based on their perceived impact and actual cost to the stakeholder. This process helps identify the niche with the highest potential for early adoption and informs the product’s value proposition and messaging.The Impact of AI on Software DevelopmentThe conversation shifts to the impact of AI on software development. Hirschfeld discusses his company’s increasing use of AI tools like Cursor, ChatGPT, and OpenAI 4.0 to accelerate growth. He shares an example of building a referral partner portal using AI, estimating a dramatic reduction in development time. While acknowledging the challenges of UI generation, he expresses optimism about the potential of AI to reshape software development teams and project approaches.Key TakeawaysThis podcast episode provided valuable insights into David Hirschfeld’s entrepreneurial journey and his unique approach to software development. The discussion highlighted the importance of transparency, trust, and a metrics-driven approach to building successful startups. Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” methodology, emphasizing pre-launch sales and early adopter identification, offers a compelling alternative to traditional startup practices. Finally, his experiences with AI-powered development tools suggest a significant shift in the future of software development.Transcript[0:00–0:15] Ryan Ferris: Welcome to the Value Maker Podcast. My name is Ryan Ferris. I’m your host, supporter of Heather Bicknell. As we meet with the people that make the digital workspace work, it’s about the technology, it’s about improving people’s work experience and finding the return on value.[0:16–0:27] Ryan Ferris: Thanks for joining us on the show. Please like and subscribe and share with your colleagues. It helps us grow the podcast and we appreciate any help you can give us. David, it’s the Value Maker Podcast. You want to introduce yourself, please?[0:27–0:37] David Hirschfeld: Yes, hi, I’m David Hirschfeld. I founded Tekyz, my current company, almost 18 years ago. We do software development.[0:37–0:39] David Hirschfeld: Would you like me to go into my history?[0:40–0:44] Ryan Ferris: Yeah, tell me a little bit about what you guys do in your history.[0:44–1:05] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how I came to where I am now. So I started out literally in the late 80s in the software world doing IBM mainframe sales and then ended up teaching myself development because it always took me too long to get a systems engineer scheduled for a presentation.[1:06–1:29] David Hirschfeld: And they weren’t as good as I felt they should be, so they weren’t really connecting with clients. So I ended up teaching myself the products and doing all my own demos. Then I ended up getting hired at Texas Instruments, and I did the same thing there with their big case, which is computer-aided systems engineering products for several years, doing all my own demos and building prototypes.[1:30–1:46] David Hirschfeld: And then I ended up running projects for leading Texas Instruments and ran projects for big companies like Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Public Service, until I started my own startup in the early 90s, logistics, route distribution, inventory management.[1:47–2:00] David Hirschfeld: And I did that while I was running projects for these other companies for a few years until our company grew to where my partner and I had to go full-time because we had a bunch of employees and grew it despite every effort.[2:00–2:18] David Hirschfeld: And despite every effort on both of ours, we grew it to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000 to a publicly traded Toronto firm. And I was VP of products for that company for the next several years until I left there, cast about for a couple of years, and then started Tekyz.[2:19–2:29] David Hirschfeld: We’ve worked with a lot of different size companies in a lot of different industries, but primarily there’s been a lot of startups, over 90 startups during those last 18 years.[2:30–2:41] David Hirschfeld: And I thought I knew what made startups successful because I had a successful one. And I actually was probably more lucked in anything else in that first one because there were many startups I thought should be successful that failed.[2:42–2:57] David Hirschfeld: And a couple, one in particular, my most successful that I didn’t think would make it. And I started to learn the patterns of why the few that were successful were successful and why the vast majority that failed, why they failed.[2:57–2:59] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, that’s led me to where I am now.[3:00–3:10] Ryan Ferris: So a couple questions. So funnily enough, I was trying to pronounce Tekyz a few times because Tekyz for me in South African means sneakers.[3:11–3:12] David Hirschfeld: Oh, that’s funny.[3:12–3:16] Ryan Ferris: And it’s T-E-K-K-I-E-S. Okay.[3:16–3:26] David Hirschfeld: And then obviously, in the U.S., Tekyz typically means a bunch of people that are technical sitting around talking about. Right.[3:26–3:26] David Hirschfeld: Yeah.[3:27–3:38] Ryan Ferris: And that’s what I thought you were trying to get with the combination of letters. So that was the first thing. The other thing that I was interested in is you’ve come together with this methodology, Launch First.[3:39–4:06] Ryan Ferris: And obviously, we’re in your history with some of the stuff you mentioned already. what I was trying to wonder about was did you always envision being at this point sort of if you look back to where you started out did you always think you’d be involved in startups and building software quickly or was it basically a you kept falling into the same pattern and then you recognized the pattern and you went oh actually this is the pattern[4:06–4:18] David Hirschfeld: a little of both so I knew I was just going to do custom software projects when we started Tekyz because that’s what it was all about. I figured along the way I would also do some of my own startups.[4:19–4:32] David Hirschfeld: Okay, yeah. Right. But the startup community has always been really interesting to me. I mean, I started out in enterprise, right, but I find startup community a lot more interesting.[4:32–4:43] David Hirschfeld: When they’re really trying to solve a problem that’s close to them, as opposed to I’ve got a cool idea for the next social network. Those aren’t as interesting to me. I know those are going to fail.[4:43–4:57] David Hirschfeld: and one in a thousand of those will find a path to revenue. But when somebody’s trying to solve a real-world problem, especially when it’s a sophisticated problem, a complex problem to solve, that really kind of gets my energy going.[4:57–5:16] David Hirschfeld: And it doesn’t really matter even the industry that it’s in because it’s the problem-solving process, whether it’s a workflow automation issue or whether it’s a fuzzy logic issue or whether it’s a whatever it is, I know that it brings value to the stakeholders in that industry in a way that they didn’t have that value before.[5:17–5:29] Ryan Ferris: And are you guys getting involved in augmenting a team? Are you taking over from a team or are you just being a net new, we’ll do this thing to prove it works for you as a resource project?[5:30–5:48] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, so we’re technically working with non-technical founders, sometimes technical founders, but usually non-technical founders who either are creating something new or they’ve built something and launched it, but now they really need a bigger, more galvanized team to do it.[5:48–6:06] David Hirschfeld: They might have had one developer working on it before, and they really need a team because, you know, there’s a lot of pitfalls that you have if you don’t have all the different people involved with their unique expertise, you know, the idea of team, of running projects.[6:06–6:17] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, so — but, yeah, so we are usually the outsourced team, if you want to think of it like that. And very often we remain that for that client for many years.[6:18–6:29] Ryan Ferris: Okay. That was another question. Do you try and share it over to, you know, sort of help them? Do you deliver an MVP? They might raise some money, then they bring their own team in, and you hand it over, or do you just carry on?[6:29–6:41] David Hirschfeld: It depends on the client’s needs. It depends on the investor’s requirements if they need to bring things in-house, right? But, I mean, we want to continue on, all right?[6:41–6:57] David Hirschfeld: We get very invested, personally invested in these projects. We have an awful lot of intellectual property around the product. I mean, we never, like one of the rules we have is we’ll never take on two clients that are competitive in any way with each other.[6:57–7:29] David Hirschfeld: so if we’re working with one client even if they’re small and some big client comes along but it’s a clear competitor to the small client we just walk away from that because it’s too much of a conflict of interest and that rarely ever happens it has happened a couple times and we had to say no to projects for that reason but we don’t want to be in a position where now our clients aren’t going to trust us because we’re going to but they’re telling us, they’re going to find out that we’re working on something else that’s in a competitive[7:29–7:54] David Hirschfeld: situation with them. And then we have to say, no, no, no, we’ve got a Chinese wall between us. And that becomes a trust issue. Anything that creates a potential trust issue with our clients, we just don’t go there. I’ll give you an example for that. And this is something most software companies don’t do. When we started out, we used to do only fixed price.[7:54–8:09] David Hirschfeld: and we stopped doing mostly fixed price. We still do, but we do much, it’s a small percentage of our projects because it’s restrictive for our clients because then we have to hold the scope based on what we’re bidding.[8:09–8:21] David Hirschfeld: The clients never understand all of the requirements that they actually need until we really dig into the design of the product. So then we went to time and materials and we had a blended rate.[8:21–8:31] David Hirschfeld: and then clients were uncomfortable with the blended rate when we got to the end of the project and most of the work was testing in QA and they felt like they were paying too much for that.[8:31–8:42] David Hirschfeld: And even though they paid a lot less for the front, it didn’t matter, right? So I said, okay, fine. So then we started doing individual rates for the specialty of the person who was on the project, right?[8:42–8:57] David Hirschfeld: And then they said, that’s great, but why did this person work 180 hours this month? That seems like an awful lot of hours. What did they do? And it was like, then we have to go. And I said, okay, forget that. So we are really meticulous about timesheets, about tracking that.[8:58–9:13] David Hirschfeld: And we do it in a lot. We have a lot of automation, so it doesn’t put a burden on the developers. But we get every single day, we know what they worked on at a high level, you know, as well as at the detail because our project tracking, they’re updating it.[9:13–9:46] David Hirschfeld: And we attach those timesheets to every invoice every month for every client. We’re the only company I know that does that. I’m sure we’re not the only one, but it’s a level of transparency, and I did that because I don’t want that client to have a trust issue with me because there’s no reason to, and we’re meticulous about what we do, and procedures and protocols and tracking, which is also kind of you can see that when we show clients how we do status reports, our weekly status reports.[9:46–9:57] David Hirschfeld: the level of detail is way beyond what you see in most shops. I just don’t want there ever to be a question about are they doing their job? Am I being billed for the work they’re doing?[9:57–10:02] David Hirschfeld: You know, those sorts of things. So I don’t like the way that feels. Yeah. Pardon me?[10:03–10:11] Ryan Ferris: It’s the wrong focus. I mean, if everyone’s focusing about that, then you’re not focusing on are you getting value for what you’re doing? You’re delivering what it should be doing.[10:11–10:35] David Hirschfeld: Right. And I talk with a lot of other people that run software development firms. Most of them just sort of skirt those issues. They figure, you know, a client will ask that, and they’ll just sort of skirt the issue instead of — because it’s a lot of — it takes a lot of discipline and protocol and culture to be able to track things in that detailed manner every single week, every single day, every single month.[10:36–10:50] David Hirschfeld: So, you know, and if you go to my website, at the very top, it’s kind of my marquee, is hyper-exceptional software development team. But I don’t expect anybody to believe me because I say that, right?[10:50–11:02] David Hirschfeld: So I have, if you’re really an exceptional team, then you have all this evidence that are just artifacts you produce naturally because you’re doing things at an exceptional level that typical software teams don’t do.[11:03–11:31] David Hirschfeld: The way we do estimates, the way we, and I’m not, you know, I feel now I’m pitching myself and it wasn’t why I wanted to be interviewed by you, But it’s important because I think, you know, whether you’re a startup thinking about creating a new product or whether you’re an existing company looking at it really kind of changing the nature of your team or you’re trying to build a product and you’re struggling with a team, those are some of our favorite projects.[11:31–11:44] David Hirschfeld: And you realize that it’s taken way too long. It’s not going to get any better. it really matters that if, let’s say you do switch to another team, that it’s a dramatic shift, right, from what you’re experiencing.[11:45–11:51] David Hirschfeld: And so that’s partly why it’s some of our favorite projects because people realize really quickly the difference.[11:52–12:06] Ryan Ferris: Yeah, and look, you know, part of this is to pitch yourself. You know, it’s the value you bring to your customers. And I think, you know, I mean, I do have a friend who runs a dev shop, but they do also have meticulous timesheeting and it’s by the line and all the rest.[12:06–12:26] Ryan Ferris: In fact, sometimes you would be frustrated with the change. Like, I’ve spent so much time building a timesheet management system, I shouldn have sold this as a product you know because it becomes such a thing But I think you know as we move down this route of automation more and more intelligent automation you know generated code and all the rest of it, that’s even more sophisticated than it was 10, 20 years ago.[12:26–12:39] Ryan Ferris: Oh, yeah. Understanding the metrics around what we’re actually saving and being able to exponentially do, people can’t grasp. If you’ve never coded, people can’t grasp.[12:39–12:49] Ryan Ferris: If you’ve never coded. Right, yeah. They never understood that sometimes to fix a problem that you’ve coded could take three days or could take five minutes. Right. Because of whatever.[12:51–12:51] Ryan Ferris: And as we start generating…[12:51–12:55] David Hirschfeld: That’s just the nature of the problem, right, that you’re fixing.[12:55–13:05] Ryan Ferris: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you could have a timing issue between, you know, two APIs that are calling each other and there’s a thing and you’ve got to factor it in and you’ve got to handle retries and whatever.[13:05–13:19] Ryan Ferris: I mean, that could be… I’m sorry. But the thing that I think will happen is as we start generating more and more code that’s going to talk to more and more other things that have been generated, you’re almost going to be obfuscated by what’s been done.[13:20–13:30] Ryan Ferris: And the time to troubleshoot that and to figure that out, it will be important, too, to know why you’re spending so much time fixing the problem. Right. So I think being meticulous is important.[13:30–13:45] Ryan Ferris: I think it’s an important part of the fundamentals. Oh, yeah. It’s critical. And looking at your launch first methodology, and I’m primarily looking at some of the diagrams, and I love your animations, by the way.[13:45–13:48] Ryan Ferris: Thank you. I think that’s awesome. What did you do those in?[13:49–13:56] David Hirschfeld: Those are animated vector graphics. I think they were done in Flash, but they’re Lottie files is what we created.[13:56–14:01] Ryan Ferris: Oh, they’re Lotties. Okay, yeah. Yeah, they’re Lotties, yeah. Yeah, I love them. Not Flash.[14:01–14:14] David Hirschfeld: I mean, Fire, Flash. I’m going back like 15 years now. Yeah, right. Yeah, but they’re Lottie files, so they’re animated vector graphics.[14:14–14:21] Ryan Ferris: Okay, no, they’re brilliant. I mean, I can actually have them on my side screen and just watch them. Like a fish swimming in an aquarium.[14:22–14:22] David Hirschfeld: Oh, thank you.[14:23–14:34] Ryan Ferris: Anyway, so the thing that I love about your diagrams is you’ve got this flow of time, which would be based on ideation, you know, whatever it is. But then you’ve got the barrier of viability.[14:35–14:46] Ryan Ferris: And it’s very similar to what I have with the value methodology that we use, which is probably very similar, where there’s always going to be these balancing points or levers to what you’re doing.[14:47–14:58] Ryan Ferris: And at some point you’ve crossed that barrier that it’s ready for it to show its value. So if one-to-one was — it cost you one and it delivered one, then that’s not going to be a good return on your project.[14:58–15:05] Ryan Ferris: That’s a failure. That’s a failure. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because you always want the return to be a little bit higher, you know, 2X, 5X, whatever it is.[15:05–15:13] David Hirschfeld: We use 3X as sort of the golden rule. You need to be a three-to-one cost of acquisition versus lifetime value.[15:13–15:18] Ryan Ferris: Yes. And your lifetime value, what do you normally put that as?[15:20–15:34] David Hirschfeld: I mean, that’s part of the calculation. It depends on the product, the customer. And then you’re doing estimates on what that lifetime value would be when you get a customer, right? It may be short initially just because you don’t have product solution fit, even if you’ve got product market fit, right?[15:34–15:45] David Hirschfeld: But you can usually estimate what that lifetime value is for a customer within a reasonable range. And so when you get the customer, how much did it cost you to get them?[15:45–15:53] David Hirschfeld: And if you don’t have a three-to-one ratio, you don’t have enough energy, enough profit to be able to then put energy back into the system to scale. Yes.[15:54–16:18] Ryan Ferris: Okay, yeah. That’s awesome because that’s the whole loop, the feedback loop thing. So when I looked at this and I looked at sort of the way you change things, so you’ve got your revenue bar at the bottom, and you’ve got your expenses going up and your risk at the top, because I think a lot about this is risk mitigation.[16:19–16:32] Ryan Ferris: How are you educating your customer? your customer being the software founder yeah so maybe your customer is how do you start the conversation that they get to trust you[16:32–16:55] David Hirschfeld: ok so it’s usually not a trust issue usually just because I’ve been doing this a long time people recognize not that I know how I’m going to be the right way to launch their business but that they’re at least that I have a valid position from which to that I’m coming.[16:55–17:07] David Hirschfeld: Well, let me, let me say it a different way. Most founders, when they come to me with the rare exception are wearing the black robe, right? They have a vision. They’ve got this product idea.[17:08–17:21] David Hirschfeld: There was probably started out with a problem that they were trying to solve. Right. And then they created this, this automation or product concept that they know is going to solve that problem. And they believe that everybody’s going to need it.[17:22–17:34] David Hirschfeld: and want it, right? And that’s like the kiss of death for a founder. So I gently peel that black robe off, right? Because it’s basically right now it’s a religion.[17:34–17:45] David Hirschfeld: They believe it. There’s no proof. And I slowly kind of wrap them in a white coat and say, you’re now a clinician. You know, if you believe it, then you need to prove it.[17:45–18:00] David Hirschfeld: And whatever assumptions you’ve made are nothing more than assumptions until you have metrics and validation and enough metrics and validation that you can predict that it’s predictable as you’re out in the market and you grow.[18:00–18:20] David Hirschfeld: So, and the only way you can prove that you’ve got product market fit and product market fit means people want to buy you, pay you for your product at that three, at least at that three to one ratio or higher, then the only way you can prove that is that you’re selling your product to customers and they’re paying you money.[18:21–18:42] David Hirschfeld: And the biggest mistake founders make is that they wait way too long to ask customers to pay them money. Usually they’ll get their MVP done in six months to a year, you know, depending on the level of sophistication of the product and their ability to stay focused on delivery of that product.[18:42–19:14] David Hirschfeld: and then they put it out for free betas, which I’m not a fan of free betas. And then they’re getting feedback, very often misleading feedback, because these are not invested customers, and they’re making changes and making shifts trying to get to product solution fit before they have product market fit, and they spend another year, year and a half, sometimes anywhere from 18 months to three years before they actually are ready to drive a stake in the ground and do a formal process of launch and marketing, which is crazy.[19:14–19:24] David Hirschfeld: And that’s when they find out they have no idea who their customer is. People aren’t buying it. They don’t know how to message. It’s the wrong product.[19:25–19:35] David Hirschfeld: It has the wrong features. The value proposition isn’t — they can’t articulate it in a way that anybody cares. And now they’re in panic mode because they’ve spent all this money, all this time.[19:35–19:46] David Hirschfeld: They’ve got this big roadmap of features, but nobody’s paying for the product now. and they’re trying to pivot and figure out the right message, and then this is another one, two, three years slog down the hill until they fail.[19:47–20:00] David Hirschfeld: And I’ve seen this happen over and over and over and over again. And they could have easily figured this out three, four months into this by doing a prelaunch sale model, which is what Launch First did.[20:00–20:14] David Hirschfeld: So Launch First, we say forget MVPs. MVPs are once you’re sure you know who your customer is and that they’ll buy it, then you can build your MVP.[20:15–20:37] David Hirschfeld: Before that, you need to have a really elaborated animated design that looks like a real product that you can put in front of customers and ask them to buy in early. And if they won’t buy in early, and you do that by offering them some kind of high-value proposition, And if you’re solving a big enough problem that costs enough to that customer that they know when this product comes out, they’re going to have to get it.[20:38–20:50] David Hirschfeld: And you’ve shown them a demo that’s realistic enough that it looks like you’ve already built the product, even though it’s just a very animated design mock-up, because you don’t want them to ask the question, how do I know you can build this?[20:51–21:06] David Hirschfeld: And if the prototype, the design prototype you’re showing them is realistic enough, that question never happens. So then the question is, can you offer them a high enough value opportunity to buy in early and the cost of the problem you’re solving is big enough?[21:07–21:18] David Hirschfeld: If not, you’re not going to probably sell the product when it comes out. So you do things like lifetime licenses. You know, people go lifetime license, then I won’t ever get any more money from that customer.[21:18–21:30] David Hirschfeld: Well, yeah, you probably will. But let’s say you’re selling lifetime licenses for some big high-value B2B thing. and you’re charging $1,500 for it.[21:30–21:50] David Hirschfeld: And you can sell 100 of these, right, because the value proposition is so big. You raised $150,000, which would fund your development, and you’re giving away an immeasurable fraction of a percent of your market, typically, right, instead of 10%, 15%, 20% equity to an investor.[21:51–22:06] David Hirschfeld: And all that time you spend trying to recruit that investor, not any of that moves your business forward. Whereas these pre-launch sales, you’re basically launching a sales and marketing engine around your business and learning how to sell it, learning how to talk to customers.[22:06–22:17] David Hirschfeld: And if nobody’s buying it, you pivot quick and cheap because you’re getting feedback why nobody wants it, right? You’re not hitting the right market, the right product. You’re not going after the right high-value opportunity.[22:17–22:28] David Hirschfeld: And you can pivot two or three or four times in the space of, you know, a few months. and if you still can’t find any way to revenue, then you can say to yourself, I fail fast and cheap.[22:29–22:43] David Hirschfeld: And for anybody who’s a startup founder, they should pray for fast and cheap failure if they can’t find a path to success because the alternative is incredibly expensive and a big portion of your life gets tossed.[22:45–23:13] Ryan Ferris: Yeah, I’m nodding because this is exactly what I’ve gone through with value. we’ve built a product we’re at that point now where we still quite haven’t closed the loop on a few things and I was thinking about lifetime licenses I was thinking well let’s let me go and give it away for whatever the number is for lifetime and I do think you will get paid by those same customers in the future because they’re buying the core product and you can keep adding on stuff it’s how HubSpot works to a large extent[23:13–23:28] David Hirschfeld: but even if they don’t you’re still generating revenue and now you’re getting customers using it who are invested in the product. And so you can focus on product solution fit at that point if they’re buying it.[23:29–23:30] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah.[23:32–23:34] Ryan Ferris: It’s a fantastic way to do it.[23:35–23:50] David Hirschfeld: Now, one of the key success factors of this is that you nail down who that early adopter is and what’s the one or two or three at most problems that you’re solving for them.[23:51–24:06] David Hirschfeld: And because the early adopter, if you think about it, when you’re building a product, usually you have all this broad number of niches that you can market it to. Yeah. But you can’t market to, you know, 15 or 20 different niches when you’re new, right?[24:06–24:20] David Hirschfeld: You can market to one. And this is another huge mistake that a lot of startups make is they try to — they’re too broad. And so I spend a lot of time with founders on what is the root problems that you’re solving.[24:21–24:50] David Hirschfeld: And before we do that, we have to say, who are all the niches that you can market to? And if you sitting in that stakeholder standing in that stakeholder shoes what is how do you articulate the problem so that they feel threatened by it All right It not just yeah I have trouble with this issue but because I have trouble with this issue, it’s causing me this and I’m, and that may affect my career or my, my, or I’ll lose the competitors or whatever, whoever the stakeholder is.[24:51–25:01] David Hirschfeld: What is this? How did, why did they feel threatened by that problem? So you have to ask that question. Why does this matter? Like three times, four times to get to the root level. And why does that matter?[25:01–25:15] David Hirschfeld: Because they won’t pay attention to you if they don’t think you understand what they’re struggling with, right, what really keeps them up at night. But if you nail that really well, then they’ll lean forward and they’ll say, I hate that.[25:16–25:27] David Hirschfeld: Can you actually fix that for me, right? And now you’ve got their attention. And once you’ve got that, then the solution should just be the natural mitigation of that, you know, the problem mitigation.[25:28–25:42] David Hirschfeld: So who is that? And how you figure this out is a founder, not a founder, a stakeholder that’s struggling with a problem has, there’s two factors that you need to measure.[25:42–25:56] David Hirschfeld: One is how much do they feel that problem impacts them personally, right? That is like they feel threatened. What’s that actual threat? And the second one is how much does that problem actually cost them?[25:56–26:27] David Hirschfeld: those are independent numbers because you can have somebody with a really big cost but everybody in our industry deals with that same problem you know my boss isn’t going to care if i try to solve that because it just doesn’t matter and even if i show him these numbers it’s going to go that’s not that’s not as important as growing our business or whatever right big cost but no personal no perceived impact or low perceived impact and the opposite is possible god i hate that it drives me nuts I waste so much of my day on that.[26:27–26:41] David Hirschfeld: But then when you quantify the value, it’s like, yeah, but it’s only costing me, you know, I can’t really justify much money to buy it. And so you can’t charge much. So what you’re looking for is both those numbers are really high for the root level problems that person’s struggling with.[26:41–26:53] David Hirschfeld: And when you find that, then you know how to talk to them about the problem. You know how to charge for it. You know how to explain the value proposition, right? And you know how to reach them, who that person is.[26:53–26:57] David Hirschfeld: when you got that, that’s when you test yeah[26:57–27:11] Ryan Ferris: I totally get it because the way that I would normally cost for that would be take a third of that price that you come up with and that’s roughly your indicator indicator price maybe a third[27:11–27:24] David Hirschfeld: maybe a fifth, maybe a tenth it’s like it’s the number that gets that person to start to go, huh I don’t know that this is really good at right It’s whatever that number is, right?[27:25–27:25] : Yeah.[27:27–27:28] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, exactly.[27:29–27:38] Ryan Ferris: And I guess the question is those one to three things that you mentioned, the one to three problems, how do you determine — you might have ten problems on the list.[27:38–28:12] David Hirschfeld: Right. Well, you usually do ten to 12 to 13 problems on your list because of all the different niches that you might market this to, right? So you do a scoring. Okay. So, like, a lot of methodologies have this concept of discovery interviews, but it’s siloed and subjective. So, like, you put your interview questions together, right, and then you have a discovery session, right, where you go out and you call people that — and usually it’s not very niche-specific. And so you’re calling people across niches,[28:12–28:44] David Hirschfeld: and you’re getting mixed feedback and very often being taken in the wrong direction in terms of trying to figure out what matters. Also, you’re not focusing on their problems in these discovery interviews. You’re focusing on some problems and your solution. So what I say is that whole concept throughout the window, you got to figure out who the niches are. Once you do that, you figure out all the root problems. Then some of these you may know, some of the niches you may know really well because you may have worked in those niches, right? Others you don’t know[28:44–29:17] David Hirschfeld: anything about. The ones you know, you can kind of score. And I have a whole scoring methodology for how we do this. It’s all metrics driven. You score each of the problem statements for that niche, you know, in terms of impact. One sheet is impact only. And then, but if there’s a niche that you’re not that familiar with, or maybe a little familiar, but not completely, then you call one or two stakeholders in that niche and you ask them about the problems. You focus on the problems. What are the problems that you struggle with? Here’s some problems that we’ve identified[29:17–29:50] David Hirschfeld: in your industry. How much do you perceive that those impact you on each of the problems? Are there other problems that we missed related to this, right? And it’s niche specific. So, right, just one or two is all you need in that niche. So, you end up doing a lot of iterative discovery. You do that on impact and you do that on a separate sheet where we just do cost, same thing. And then you bubble chart those things together. You take the top three problems from a cost perspective for each niche, and they’re not the same problem. And then you go to[29:50–30:08] David Hirschfeld: the score sheet and pull those problems and sum up the score on that side. And now you’re going to get a bubble chart that takes each niche and floats it up to the upper right or lower left or different places in a four-slice quadrant. The ones in the upper right are your likely early adopters.[30:08–30:20] David Hirschfeld: and then we do deep dives on the top two or three to figure out which one really is because there may be reasons why one that floats way up to the upper right is a bad early adopter.[30:20–30:30] David Hirschfeld: Like might be CEOs of Fortune 500, you know, the sales cycle is really long, the cost to reach them is super high, you know, that drops them out as an early adopter, things like that.[30:30–30:34] David Hirschfeld: And others, they get promoted higher. So, yeah.[30:35–30:48] Ryan Ferris: I love it. It’s very similar to what I do with value. And even to the point of quadrants, although we’ve gone from four to six quadrants now, but that’s just because we found there was a need for a middle one or a middle column.[30:49–31:08] Ryan Ferris: And what I love about what you’re doing is you’re prioritizing, and you’re getting the sequence right inherently because you can start seeing where there’s weight. And it’s moving away from opinion to evidence-based decisions, which is always hard because everyone has an opinion, but no one really wants to trust the evidence.[31:08–31:13] Ryan Ferris: Right But you can get around that when you have more of it[31:13–31:32] David Hirschfeld: It’s much easier to trust the evidence When you’re documenting the metrics And then you can chart this And then all of a sudden it’s like Oh, I wasn’t really thinking that was the niche That we should be going after But now it’s starting to make a lot more sense Yeah[31:32–31:42] Ryan Ferris: And what sort of capture methods do you do for this? Is this, do you have your own tools you guys have built, or are you using tools in the industry?[31:42–31:54] David Hirschfeld: This is the hardest part because this is a very tedious process for founders to go through. They don’t want to. They want to get to the product because that’s, and they think if they build it, it’ll be easier to sell, and it just doesn’t work like that.[31:55–32:09] David Hirschfeld: So, right. I mean, and we know there’s so many examples of this in, like, in the B2B SaaS, I do this. You either do the sales in a webinar manner or a one-to-one manner, depending on your reach and the value.[32:09–32:23] David Hirschfeld: Because these can be very expensive pre-launch sales. Or, you know, it could be like, let’s say, in a clinical trial. This is one of the ones we’ve done, clinical trial software, where these were $250,000 pre-launch sales.[32:24–32:39] David Hirschfeld: And they would get free implementation, which usually costs half a million dollars. for, and so to them that was a huge value, and it was a new pharmaceutical product for a small boutique pharmaceutical maker, that sort of thing.[32:39–32:59] David Hirschfeld: We sold two licenses at $250,000 each. Pre-launch, there was no software yet, but we had a design prototype that was just killer. So they thought they knew what they were going to get, and they didn’t need the software for like nine months, but they had to make those commitments early, because that’s how clinical trials work.[32:59–33:14] David Hirschfeld: And then another one was real estate investment portfolio manager product, which we sold 23 licenses in 60 days and generated $68,000 in those 68.[33:14–33:28] David Hirschfeld: And now we had 23 clients. One of those sales was like $21,000. I had a company that was creating a hedge fund. They hadn’t created it yet, but they were creating a hedge fund that was going to be buying up all these apartment units, and they bought into it.[33:28–33:55] David Hirschfeld: So, and again, we’re giving away literally an immeasurable fraction of a percent of the market. So it’s great, and we’re bringing revenue forward. A third one was for aerospace parts distributors maintaining the history of products in assemblies, and those assemblies become products in other assemblies, and you have to have all these certification certificates all the way from a nut all the way up to a 747.[33:55–34:09] David Hirschfeld: You know, so there’s millions of these certificates, and the parentage of these certificates has to be maintained. And it’s a big deal, and it’s very hard to do, and there was no system to do this previously.[34:09–34:31] David Hirschfeld: And sometimes something would happen, like there would be a fuel leak in an F-15, and because there was a shipment that didn’t have all the certificates, the history of certificates, they literally had to spend like $100 million to pull the fuel systems out of like 30 of these F-15s.[34:31–34:45] David Hirschfeld: That’s the kind of impact that this kind of thing. And that’s a big one. Some are very, very small. But anyway, so we sold this system, three of them. We did three demos, sold all three for $15,000 each.[34:46–34:56] David Hirschfeld: And so, I mean, it can be anything, right? Yeah. It depends on the — if it’s a mass product, then crowdfunding kind of approach like Kickstarters and things like that is better.[34:57–35:21] David Hirschfeld: If it’s a really inexpensive product and you’re trying to get mass market adoption, prove that there’s a mass market for it. But for high-value SaaS products, then this is like the only way to — and I can’t tell you how many of the 90-plus clients that I’ve worked with failed because they were two years in before they tried doing any real serious sales.[35:24–35:43] Ryan Ferris: Yeah, no, I can imagine. I mean, you know, because then you’re doing desperate sales, and that never goes well with a customer. Just a couple of questions. Let’s go back to the start of two things. So your approach with your customers, are you guys using your own frameworks that you’ve built to build this quickly flow in?[35:43–35:51] Ryan Ferris: or are you starting everything pretty much fresh so you’re not diluting or sharing IP from other projects across different customers?[35:52–36:07] David Hirschfeld: We don’t share IP from other customers. We reuse common components, right, that we might build and enhance in a customer, but they’re not IP of any kind. But for the most part, we’re building most everything from scratch.[36:07–36:22] David Hirschfeld: We have components that we’ve built that are common that we just built out and created a lot of flexibility in them, and we reuse those. In particular, like in authentication, permission management, role-based roles and permissions, all that stuff.[36:22–36:45] David Hirschfeld: You know, these are things that are fairly large efforts, but we’ve built them many times. And so we have really good componentry around this. So it doesn’t, you know, we can snap them in and customize them for particular clients and tenant management for distributed systems that distribute role and management down and level.[36:46–36:58] David Hirschfeld: Like I a corporation and I have distributors and my distributors have distributors and each one wants their own portal and it just kind of right where it kind of rolling downhill Those sorts of things.[36:58–36:59] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, those frameworks.[37:00–37:07] Ryan Ferris: So, what are your thoughts on the sort of low-code, no-code world? You’ve got your bubble, then units, those guys.[37:10–37:21] David Hirschfeld: There’s a product that we use. It’s an offshore product called Continio that we have used in a few projects, and it’s really pretty amazing, and you can build anything with it.[37:21–37:45] David Hirschfeld: So it’s not like Bubble where you’re really kind of limited in the kind of framework and design and functionality. You can build anything with it. But with now, and we’ve done a few projects with that, which we really like, But we’re finding that with AI now, you know, the need for the low-code stuff is much less required than it was.[37:46–38:10] David Hirschfeld: So we’ve been doing a lot. This has been a big thing for us in the last six months, and in particular in the last few weeks, is using AI to help us develop systems in code. And then now we’ve been benchmarking the difference in terms of when we use AI and how we do it and documenting from a protocol perspective as a team how we accomplish this and generate the code.[38:10–38:24] David Hirschfeld: And the benchmarks we’re getting are pretty amazing. So one of the things that we’re building a bunch of products internally right now. One of them is the niche analysis tool I was talking about because founders get really fatigued doing that.[38:25–38:38] David Hirschfeld: So we’re building an AI model for doing that niche analysis and basically building up the scoring same methodology, but just where AI is deriving all this for you in a feedback iterative process.[38:40–38:55] David Hirschfeld: We’re building and we’re using AI to develop that system, and it will be an AI system. Also, another one, which is kind of funny, is because I’m out in the market, I have a lot of referral partners, right?[38:55–39:14] David Hirschfeld: That’s one of the reasons why I started podcasting was to basically find people in my world that I can refer projects to, that can refer projects to me, and then managing and tracking all the referral partners and the referral fees that they generate and all that becomes a pain.[39:14–39:34] David Hirschfeld: It’s fine with five, three or four or five, but when you have 10 or 15 or 20, then all of a sudden it’s really hard because you don’t want somebody to refer a project to you and you forget who referred the project, or you don’t remember what the agreement was, or you’re not accruing referral fees once that client starts to become a paying client, right?[39:34–39:48] David Hirschfeld: So we’re building a referral partner portal. It’s not an AI model, but we’re using AI to build the tool. I mean, we’re using Cogen AI tools to build it, and from scratch, all of it.[39:48–40:06] David Hirschfeld: They add the UI, the back end, and we require that it’s built in a very scalable manner. So everything is containerized and microservices and serverless, which is how we build all our systems so that you can, you know, when we launch an MVP, it scales day one.[40:06–40:21] David Hirschfeld: We didn’t used to do that because the overhead was too much, but now it’s just part of our DNA. But we’re building all that from AI, and it’s amazing how quickly we’re able to assemble this product and build it.[40:22–40:35] David Hirschfeld: So we’re benchmarking this, and now I’m having to go to all my clients and update all of our estimates to our clients in terms of what it’s going to — some of the ones that we have proposals out to. I never had the benchmark, so I was always very conservative before.[40:36–40:41] David Hirschfeld: I knew we were getting benefits, but I couldn’t really quantify it. Now we can quantify it. It’s been pretty striking.[40:42–40:47] Ryan Ferris: So give me a feel. Is it 10 times faster? Is it 5 times faster? 100 times faster?[40:47–41:14] David Hirschfeld: Okay, okay, okay. So with this app, and we’re still working out some of the bugs in the workflow and how this is done, in particular on the UI side, although we’re getting much better at how we control that and get AI to basically do the — I don’t know that we’re getting as much of a benefit on the UI part, in terms of just creating the screens and designs, is we have a really, really exceptional designer who’s very fast.[41:15–41:39] David Hirschfeld: If that weren’t the case, then, yeah, we’re getting fantastic. Then we’d be getting great benefits. But on the back end side, so we developed the, for our MVP, we developed all of the server code, all the business rules and back end code in this serverless microservices containerized architecture, probably six days of effort.[41:39–41:53] David Hirschfeld: The front end is probably taking us three or four days just because we’re fighting with the UI generation tools. In fact, that one I took over on myself because I want this UI to look a certain way.[41:53–42:10] David Hirschfeld: And then it’ll take another day, day and a half to basically implement all the APIs for the front end to the back end. So we expect, we started this mid-last week, we expect on Monday we’ll have an MVP to start to test, Monday or Tuesday.[42:11–42:23] David Hirschfeld: Wow. I mean, it’s like, what? Yeah, and it’s not a super sophisticated application, but it’s not a simple one either. I mean, it has a decent amount of functionality in the MVP. I can add referral partners.[42:23–42:37] David Hirschfeld: I can add referrals. They can log in. They get their own dashboard. They can add referrals. They can see the status of the referrals as we update the status. They can see how much has been accrued, and then they can become a referral partner.[42:38–42:58] David Hirschfeld: We don’t have — this won’t include the SaaS front end to it yet, but they can become a referral. I think they can sign up for their own account, and now they’re building their own referral partner network as well, right, and maybe giving referrals to some other account admin, right, so it can kind of grow on itself.[42:59–43:01] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, so we’ll have — But now — And the reason — Yeah.[43:02–43:03] Ryan Ferris: Yeah, I’m just curious.[43:03–43:10] David Hirschfeld: The reason I did this, I couldn’t find a good product on the market that did this that wasn’t built for, like, big channel partners.[43:11–43:11] : Yeah.[43:11–43:23] Ryan Ferris: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I mean, because go back to the sort of AI thing. Are you using a well-known product, like a Copilot, for example, a March Copilot, or have you guys gone and built your own one using the libraries?[43:24–43:43] David Hirschfeld: We’re using Cursor, which is an editor, a really good editor, that allows you to embed AI. You know, you have the AI tools, and the AI tools have the context of your application, so you can ask it questions and ask it to build something on top of something else, and it knows what that thing is.[43:44–43:54] David Hirschfeld: Okay. Right? It’s really good. We use ChatGPT for generating a lot of the code, or we use OpenAI’s 4.0, you know, in cursor.[43:55–44:09] David Hirschfeld: We do use both. We were using a product called Veo for generating the React front end, but it’s hard to guide. So I’m using Bolt, which is an application builder that’s UI.[44:09–44:23] David Hirschfeld: I’ve used Bolt and another one called Replit, R-E-P-L-I-T, to try to build the entire app myself, just AI 100%, you know, build this app that does this functionality and then guide it through the process.[44:23–44:37] David Hirschfeld: And there they write crappy code. and they get stuck in these mental loops that you can’t like, you know, it was working and now breaks, and it has the same error message on eight iterations.[44:37–44:47] David Hirschfeld: You’re trying to fix it, and it won’t fix it. It’s just too frustrating. Plus, the code is terrible that they do. But Bolt does a nice job creating the UI.[44:48–45:01] David Hirschfeld: So I’m using Bolt to basically create a click-through UI, and it will build the whole application, but I’m telling it, do not put any logic in it, just create the screens and the navigation.[45:02–45:16] David Hirschfeld: And it’s creating a nice UI. It still takes a bit of guiding along and fixing, and then it starts to get off track. So then I’ve got to go do a cut and paste of something I want it to look like this, and I’d say make that look like this, and then it’ll start to get it right.[45:17–45:26] David Hirschfeld: But, you know, I’m redoing the UI because we were trying to do it all with this VO product, VO.dev, by the way, V0.dev.[45:26–45:27] : Yeah.[45:27–45:39] David Hirschfeld: And my developer was getting really frustrated using it, so I said, let me just take this on. So I took it on yesterday. I’ll be done with the UI probably today and give it back to him.[45:39–45:55] David Hirschfeld: Then I’m going to take that UI, try to get it, Figma, one of the Figma AI tools to generate it in Figma. Then I can take the Figma and put that in the V-O tool, and it will build the React front end, the total React front end that matched that Figma perfectly.[45:56–46:07] David Hirschfeld: So this is kind of the process. And probably three, four days to get a completely React front end UI that’s well-designed, that supports all the functionality we want.[46:07–46:19] David Hirschfeld: That plus the back end plus wiring the two together and pushing it into production. and also, you know, serverless using Lambda functions or Cloud Functions or whatever your serverless brand is.[46:19–46:38] David Hirschfeld: This is — anyway, that was eye-opening for me that we can — we’re going to actually get a production application out. Then we’ll do the SaaS front-end, which will probably take another, you know, week because then you’ve got roles and permissions, sign-up and payment processing, but not a month, a week, right?[46:38–46:52] David Hirschfeld: Now we have total control. This is our app. There’s nothing unknown about what we want to accomplish. It’s not AI in terms of having any kind of, like, AI intelligence that we’re trying to get a workflow in.[46:52–47:03] David Hirschfeld: It’s very nuts and bolts referral partner management. But it’s a really pretty application. It’s got dashboard widgets and all the functionality you would expect it to have at a very basic level.[47:04–47:23] David Hirschfeld: Later, I’ll integrate it with QuickBooks so that as we start to get payments from clients and it automatically feeds, you know, sends that payment transaction to the thing and then calculates fees so that with notifications to the referral partner, right, all the stuff that you would want in an app like that.[47:23–47:38] Ryan Ferris: So we built value in Bubble and I wasn’t impressed in how we built it, et cetera, so we’re rebuilding it now. And a lot of the tools you’ve mentioned, the guy that I’m talking to is using a lot of them, and I’m very curious to see how it would go.[47:39–47:50] Ryan Ferris: And maybe we can do this as a part two conversation. Oh, I’d love to. Sorry, I mean, because I’ve got enough for the first part. Because the part two for me is, you know, how do you see your teams changing?[47:50–47:55] Ryan Ferris: How do you see your project approach changing now that you’ve got the same ability?[47:56–48:05] David Hirschfeld: Dramatically. Dramatically. So the whole team structure is going to change dramatically. Yeah. Yeah. That would be a very good discussion, yeah. Yeah.[48:05–48:11] Ryan Ferris: So if you don’t mind, we’ll just put this up if you want to just let people know how to get a hold of you. Oh, yeah.[48:11–48:23] David Hirschfeld: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. You can get me at Tekyz.com. If you’re watching the video, you can see Tekyz spelled over my head. If you’re listening to the podcast, then it’s T-E-K-Y-Z, Tekyz.com.[48:24–48:43] David Hirschfeld: So you go there. You can get a hold of me by doing the contact us or reach me, david at Tekyz.com. Though, please don’t put the email in the podcast links, but anybody listening to this that made it to the end, please email me directly at david at techuse.com.[48:43–48:48] Ryan Ferris: Will do. Perfect. Thanks so much. Great. Thanks, David. I look forward to chatting with you again.[48:49–48:50] David Hirschfeld: Thank you, Ryan.[48:50–49:03] Ryan Ferris: I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to our episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it with your friends and colleagues. Help us grow our network. Please also check out our website at www.value.work and our product that’s on there.[49:03–49:05] Ryan Ferris: It’s something we’ve worked really hard on and we hope to benefit too.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.From Concepts to Code: The Tekyz Approach to Software Development with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Master the 100-Foot AI Wave: How to Get Paid for Your Business Idea Before Building It](https://tekyz.com/master-the-100-foot-ai-wave-how-to-get-paid-for-your-business-idea-before-building-it-68034f2aefb4/) - Featured Image: Master the 100-Foot AI Wave — How to Get Paid for Your Business Idea Before Building Ithttps://medium.com/media/111e63eb8add6f5445c3880a89f3c437/hrefThis episode of the Localization Fireside Chat features Robin and David Hirschfeld, who discuss software development strategies for startups and established companies, the integration of AI in development processes, and effective methods for commercialization and revenue generation. The conversation aims to provide insights for entrepreneurs and businesses leveraging technology and AI to solve problems and scale their operations.David Hirschfeld’s Background and Tekyz’s FocusDavid Hirschfeld is a software industry veteran with over 35 years of experience. He founded and sold a logistics software company and started Tekyz in 2007. Tekyz focuses on AI development for startups and scale-ups across various industries like healthcare and finance. David emphasizes Tekyz’ commitment to exceptionalism in their team’s operations and customer interactions.Identifying and Solving Key ProblemsDavid emphasizes the importance of identifying a problem that impacts potential customers daily or weekly. He stresses that the problem should have a high perceived impact and a significant financial cost. According to David, “It has to be a high impact problem from a perception perspective and a high cost problem”. He suggests that focusing on such problems provides a solid foundation for a successful startup by streamlining the path to product-market fit.Unique Solutions vs. Feature EnhancementsThe discussion explores whether a solution needs to be an entirely new software or if it can be a feature within existing software. David suggests that solving a discrete problem with high value and impact is ideal. He notes that new technologies like AI can solve problems previously considered unsolvable. He also highlights the importance of identifying the niche with the highest perceived impact and cost associated with the problem.Commercialization and Revenue GenerationDavid challenges the conventional approach of creating an MVP, pitching to investors, and seeking funding. He argues that this VC-centric model has a low success rate. Instead, he advocates for pre-launch sales to generate revenue and validate product-market fit. He states, "go out and get your customers to invest in you by doing these pre-launch sales because you can generate as much money as you would from seed investment”. This approach allows businesses to secure funding directly from customers, proving demand before significant development costs are incurred.Uniqueness vs. Differentiation in the MarketThe conversation addresses the need for uniqueness versus differentiation in a crowded market. David suggests creating a product similar to existing ones is viable if it offers unique features, targets a different market segment, or employs a novel marketing approach. He provides examples like playbook software and referral partner portals, where simplified or niche-focused solutions can find success.Tekyz’ Operations and AI IntegrationDavid describes Tekyz as a boutique software development shop with a remote team of 30–40 people. He emphasizes their focus on exceptionalism and transparency in project management. The discussion shifts to AI’s role in software development, with David explaining Tekyz’ involvement in agentic workflows, where multiple AI agents collaborate on different aspects of development. He notes that while AI is not yet capable of fully autonomous system building, it significantly enhances productivity in test plan creation, debugging, and code generation.Addressing Concerns About Offshore DevelopmentDavid addresses the common concerns about offshore development, mainly cost and quality. He cautions against being solely driven by low prices, often leading to poor outcomes. He advises focusing on the development team’s operational processes, transparency, and ability to provide detailed project information. According to David, “It doesn’t matter where the team is, it matters how they operate”.Goals for 2025 and AI ChaosDavid outlines Tekyz’ goals for 2025, including launching three internal SaaS products and expanding their referral partner program. He aims to increase automation in their workflow to achieve a 60–80% AI or automation level, enabling the team to scale and serve more clients. He also touches on the concept of “AI chaos,” emphasizing the importance of focusing on workflow automation and identifying bottlenecks in business processes before implementing AI solutions.Referral Partner ProgramDavid explains Tekyz’ referral partner program, offering 10% of the total invoice value for the first 12 months of a referred client’s engagement. He positions this as a cost-effective alternative to traditional sales and marketing efforts.The discussion highlights the importance of identifying high-impact problems, validating solutions through pre-launch sales, and strategically integrating AI to enhance productivity and scale operations. David’s insights provide a practical guide for entrepreneurs and businesses navigating the complexities of software development and AI adoption.[0:01–0:28] Robin: Hey, good afternoon, everybody. This is Robin and you from the localization fireside chat. And today we are recording episode 96 and coming to you on January 20th from Toronto, Ontario, we’re currently to temperature with the wind factor minus 20 degrees Celsius. And everything is white outside. Today, I wouldn’t dare come out of the house. So cold, it will freeze everything.[0:28–0:59] Robin: So today’s an exciting episode. I’m happy to be recording today’s episode with my good friend, David Hirschfeld. And David is coming to us, I guess from Vista, California, which I’m hoping that you’re not affected by all what’s going on with the fires and everything in California we’re praying for you guys. And we’re sending some support from Canada here. So I hope everything is fine. I hope they put all that stuff down. Before we get into it, David, if you don’t mind, tell us a little[0:59–1:09] Robin: bit about yourself, introduce your audience to who you are. And I’m happy to be meeting you today. First time face to face and we’re recording it at the same time. Here we go. All right. Thanks,[1:09–1:44] David Hirschfeld: Robin. And thanks for having me on the show. And I don’t want to tell you what the weather is like here because I think of Vista as part of San Diego County. So it’s San Diego, California, basically the weather that we and thank you for asking about the fire. My son and granddaughter who lived fairly close to the fire came down and spent the last week with us while the air quality was so bad. They’re home and their areas safe, but they were four or five miles from the fire when it was at its closest point to them. And it’s what and it’s a tragedy. And thank you,[1:44–2:19] David Hirschfeld: Canada for all the help that you’ve provided for Los Angeles. There’s never enough of it when there’s a tragedy and a disaster at this level. And so my background, I’ve been in the software industry since for over 35 years started out in enterprise and started my own logistics inventory route distribution software company and despite every effort on my part, it ended up growing anyway to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000 to publicly traded for. So that was my first[2:19–2:53] David Hirschfeld: experience with the startup after having been in enterprise for several years. Then I was VP of products for the acquiring company for the next several years until I left and then eventually started Tekyz and my current company in 2007. So that was almost 18 years when I started Tekyz and we do just some software development for startups and scaleups and all types of companies in a lot of different industries, healthcare, finance. And I’ve worked with a lot of startups over[2:53–2:59] David Hirschfeld: the 17 years. And now almost everything I do is focused around. Well, great. Well, nice to meet you[2:59–3:32] Robin: and for our audience, you know, on this channel, we talk a lot about AI. We talk a lot about the impact of AI and the technology in general, not just on the language business, but on any industry to be specific in general. And today’s conversation, it’s very timely because of all the changes that’s happening in our industry, all of the buzz that we hear about new application coming up, new software coming up, new startups coming up in our industry, trying to take advantage of what’s going on with the technology challenges, solving problems, using technology, using AI, etc.[3:32–4:06] Robin: And David’s company, which intrigued me for this conversation, could be a help for some of the entrepreneurs out there that they’re looking up to put a software together to solve the problem, to start a company or to perhaps develop something internally. And I can’t get, you know, I can’t wait to get dig into a deeper here with David and try to understand how does this actually work. But there is a huge demand because we all have a strain of an entrepreneurial ship in us as individuals, even though we’re employees by companies. As David mentioned, he startedUnlock explosive growth for your business with Tekyz's AI/ML—discover the secret to innovation today![4:06–4:21] Robin: his career on the enterprise side and ended up being an entrepreneur on his side. So everybody had that thought in their mind, right? What if I created a software or if I created an app or if I created something to solve a problem? But I don’t know where to start from. I don’t know how to begin.[4:21–4:37] Robin: I don’t know. I don’t have a software expertise. Some people don’t have software expertise. David, why don’t we solve all this problem here by you telling us how Tekyz work and what brought Tekyz to the birth, if you will, to fruition when you first started. Why Tekyz?[4:37–4:57] David Hirschfeld: Why did you come up with that? So I had another startup just before Tekyz that was in the automotive industry and that one failed. Anybody who hasn’t had a failed startup is either the one in a million or hasn’t really started, tried to start anything.[4:58–5:35] David Hirschfeld: So, and I say that a little bit tongue in cheek. Some people have a very specific type of business that they’re trying to pursue and they know the industry well or they get involved in an industry that they don’t know, but it sounds interesting to them. And then they just muck and grind for years and you’re and and he got a living. And there are a lot of those. I’m talking much more about the software startup that are looking to grow something into a company, not necessarily Unicorn. And I can talk a lot about the mindset of a startup founder and the philosophies behind[5:35–6:06] David Hirschfeld: startups because I’ve spent I’ve worked with close to 90 startups in the last 17 years, not counting my own startups. And the reason why my startup fail is the same reason that I watch so many others fail and I waited way too long to try to generate revenue from it. I actually had customers that were signing up for it. And I figured I needed to raise money to then be able to accelerate and fund it. And I was they were all on a free version of this software. And I was I had[6:06–6:39] David Hirschfeld: fear around. This was almost 20 years ago. This was my second software startup. I had a fear around starting to charge for it was a business to business network for auto wholesalers and basically trading cars between each other and being able to source cars. And I had it was a product that was needed. It was needed for a decade afterwards. But I ran out of money and resources to be able to continue to pursue that business, which is when I started Tekyz. And I started Tekyz as a[6:39–7:12] David Hirschfeld: custom software shop because I know how to build software for myself as well as for other people. And at the and it was easy to find business to get started. It took me a long time to build a really competent business where you know our focus is on really exceptionalism in terms of our team operates how we work with customers. And I have all kinds of evidence what exceptional teams do. But but it wasn’t difficult for me to start that company and find business to be[7:12–7:43] David Hirschfeld: in from a startup perspective because I knew the industry. I knew how to deliver. You know, I had all the basics already, which brings me to answer the probably the question you had, which is how does somebody that doesn’t really know how to go about this start. So and well, it’s just talking software primarily since that’s my world. But let’s say you work in an industry where you struggle with a problem in your industry on a regular basis. And that’s important.[7:43–8:18] David Hirschfeld: It’s got to be like on a weekly basis or daily basis. If it’s a yearly basis, that’s very difficult to stay top of mind with your respective customers and it’s you have to have a huge value proposition for businesses like that to find find a putting a foothold in the market. But it’s got to be a problem you’re struggling with on a daily or weekly basis or at least on a weekly. And it has to be a big enough problem where you can say why it personally impacts you from a perception perspective and also[8:18–8:48] David Hirschfeld: separately how much it impacts you financially from a cost perspective. And those are independent numbers. As you can have some problems that have a huge financial impact for one person in an industry, but it’s an industry where everybody deals with that same problem and it’s endemic in the industry and go, yeah, but we all do a problem. We’re all struggling with who always have, you know, and so the personal impact is almost nothing and your ability to get somebody’s attention[8:48–8:59] David Hirschfeld: because you talk it to them about that problem is very low. So and you can’t and it’s very difficult to sell a product when it’s difficult to get somebody’s attention about the problems they’re struggling with.[8:59–9:33] David Hirschfeld: But it has to be a high impact problem from a perception perspective and a high cost problem. And if you’re that person and you struggle with that type of problem, you can articulate those things and you have reach in your industry to other people that are doing the same kind of thing you’re doing that are struggling with the exact same problem you’re struggling with. That is a foundation for a potentially successful startup because getting to the point where you have product market fit is such a shorter straight line than if you just have what you think is a cool idea[9:33–9:41] David Hirschfeld: for the next Facebook or the next Instagram or something like that then your risk factor goes[9:41–10:15] Robin: up through the roof. Of course, no, when we talk about the idea itself that somebody comes up with but what’s the difference in your opinion between a creative creating a unique or coming up with a unique idea to solve a, as you mentioned in a, I love your definition, you know, your problem, the problem that you define as a problem, it has to be bigger than just a singular problem, it has to be, you know, a broad problem and not necessarily people have learned to live with the problem and you’re trying to get them off the, off the wagon sort of speak because it would beInfographic: How AI Can Fuel Your Startup Growth[10:15–10:32] Robin: harder to do that. Commercialization of the product becomes a little bit of a difficulty for you. So once you define the problem that unique problem and you created a unique solution for it, is it necessarily to have an entire software created or can it be a feature in a software?[10:33–10:38] Robin: Where do you draw the line or how do you advise on it?[10:39–11:12] David Hirschfeld: Okay, so, excuse me, if it’s first of all, it can be very discreet problem. If the value is high and the impact is high, then that is the best kind of problem to solve because you’re solving for one thing and your audience has a magnetic affinity to needing a solution for that problem, that’s like the best, those are hard to find, but they do happen often. When new technologies come along like AI, all of a sudden, ability to solve problems you didn’t think really could be solved[11:13–11:48] David Hirschfeld: before because you’ve been, assumed you’d always have to live with these problems and now, there’s ways to solve them. Now, there’s lots of discreet problems that you can solve, implementing some AI solution to it, but they can do things that you couldn’t do without the tremendous cost enough. So, having something discreet is important. Focusing on just one or two problems is really important. And when I say problems, I don’t mean at a high level, but I mean at a very root level, because as a founder, you have one job and all founders have this one job[11:48–12:22] David Hirschfeld: to start with. Nobody ever tells founders this and they don’t realize it, but it’s the number one job they have at the very beginning and that’s out of all the niche, you’ve got this thing you want to solve, right? This problem. And of all the niches that you can market to and all of the root level problem statement state, you can derive from that one problem and I can explain in another podcast what a root problem statement is because that’s a whole thing. You have to figure out which of all those niches, only one niche that has the highest perceived impact in the highest cost,[12:22–13:00] David Hirschfeld: those two things combined for the one or two of those root problem statements that they’re struggling with out of all the other niches. And that is your number one job because once you’ve got that, then building that initial MVP product becomes much simpler. You know how to speak to that niche about the problem because you know exactly what the problem is and what’s going to get them to lean forward and go, I hate that, and you make it stop. You know how much to charge because you know what it costs them. And you can do what we call launch first approach and go out to that client[13:00–13:34] David Hirschfeld: with maybe some click through mockups or force-fiscated kind of what I call a high fidelity prototype that looks like a real software product but isn’t and go out and do pre-launch sales. Because and you can do that if you offer them a high enough value, a high enough value in terms of what they’re going to get if they buy in now versus waiting until the products on the market. And if the problem’s big enough and it costs them enough and the value is high enough, they will buy in enough numbers. Even before you start building your product that you can prove you’ve got product methods but and that is what you have to do.[13:35–13:45] Robin: And correct me if I’m wrong. Is this an answer to commercialization and cash flow generation between starting an idea and how fast can I get money in the bank from this idea?[13:46–13:50] Robin: Because if you don’t then you’re risking failure by running out of money on it.[13:52–14:23] David Hirschfeld: Right right right so a lot of software companies think they have to create an MVP and a pitch and then find investors. Right this is the pattern that VCs have been voicing on us for decades now and they want that because they want as many pitch decks coming to them as possible. Right and the typical and then not making this up, I verified this with I’ve read articles about this, I’ve talked to VCs and they’ve confirmed that 3000 pitch decks will result in 30 companies that[14:23–14:58] David Hirschfeld: are invested of which the read of five of them will find a path to profitability. The others fail. This is VC funded companies. Right so your chance of getting VC funding is so small and it’s just but that’s and everybody says okay I can’t get VC’s yet so I’m going to go have get angels. It’s pretty small for getting angels as if you’ve got friends and family that believe in you and want to invest in you. That’s the best way to get started but even better than that is go out and get your customers to invest in you by doing these pre-launch sales because[14:58–15:15] David Hirschfeld: you can generate as much money as you would from seed investment, you can generate as much money from pre-launch sales and everything you do to do the to get ready for a pre-launch sale is something you would have to do anyway to move your business forward. Nothing you do when you’re trying to raise[15:15–15:49] Robin: money from a VC actually moves your business. Right now how important in your opinion is for the idea of a product or a software to be you know everybody wants to be like the only software in the world that can solve this particular problem but I’m just taking our industry as an example you know I want to say when I first entered the industry 20 years ago there was maybe one software for the industry it’s called Trados at the time made by Capitico on SDL. Now there’s like 20 oh maybe 20 I don’t know[15:49–16:22] Robin: everybody makes their own tm like well it translation management software and everybody now have their own there are like the top you know it’s like long list of TMS is out there and the industry hasn’t like I mean yeah I mean the number of words transit in the industry is growing but still around you know 60 billion dollar industry it’s not that big of an industry globally but how you know it just asking as a general question taken what I know about our industry how important is either A being unique or creating another product or services it says yeah I’m like the other guy but[16:22–16:56] David Hirschfeld: I’ve got a couple features they’re different yeah that’s and you would probably do that because you’re somebody that works in the industry and you recognize that this company’s not doing it very well or they’re missing opportunity or they’re charging too much and they’re or they’re only focused on enterprise but all these small SMBs need the same service for whatever that is right mm-hmm or you think or you have a way of marketing it through partners and channels that is different and so therefore that’s totally viable um a totally viable if you you don’t want to[16:56–17:27] David Hirschfeld: basically produce a product where you’ve got a dominant competitor that’s inexpensive that has a great system yeah you probably don’t want to necessarily go after that list of markets so big that you can get a foothold in that market early on and one example of that could be playbooks like I’ll just give you an example there’s a great market for playbook software playbooks are the idea that you figure out a process within your business and now you document that what you call[17:27–17:59] David Hirschfeld: a playbook so that you can scale that way when somebody new comes in instead of completely relying on staff to train them even if you do they have something they can refer to that has all of the scenarios and nuances for that job right or for that workflow in the form of a playbook all right there’s some companies out there one that’s really very doing really well that’s is called train train you will but that is a wide open market or because there aren’t really consumable[17:59–18:35] David Hirschfeld: products out there that make it really easy to document and capture playbooks and be able to then surface that playbook in the context of some process in your own company right yeah so if that’s an example coming up with your own version of something or I’ll give you one which I’m working on right now which surprised me and that’s referral partner portal so there’s all kinds of partner management software out there but they’re primarily focused on channel partners and big enterprise and there’s just not and or I’m trying to build a partner network where they[18:35–19:10] David Hirschfeld: make money off of of surfacing referral partners for you but not making it simple to just out of referral partner manage what the the contractual relationship is and track the revenue as it accrues the partner can log in and get their own right it’s not this is something we’re just building right now for ourselves that it turns out everybody we’re talking to wants as well so I wasn’t even thinking of creating a SaaS company out of that I was just building it for we do a lot of internal software development improving our automation like for example patient process another one that[19:10–19:34] David Hirschfeld: will probably turn into a SaaS process but it’s solving problems that are really close to you much easier for you to take that and then elaborate and the reason we did that is I couldn’t find us for a partner portal software out there that was simple consumable and expensive that I could just start using and adding my referral partner still. So basically you’re from a logical point of[19:34–19:50] Robin: you from a business point of view in developing these ideas you’re fine with an idea that says you know I’m taking something that exists in the market already and I’m adding a couple of features to solve another problem that the main software provider probably if you want to call them that[19:50–20:24] David Hirschfeld: was not able to or did not address it properly or simplifying like in my case this is just a really simplified referral partner portal that isn’t meant to manage complex channel partner relationships right which is what all the other ones are out there doing there I is simple something simple something consumable for a different market that may do the same some of the same things but just is focused on something much more simple right in terms of its problem statement then it’s all maybe tell us[20:24–20:29] Robin: a little bit about Tekyz your company what is it located how many employees what do you focus on[20:30–21:02] David Hirschfeld: okay so Tekyz we’re what you would call probably a boutique software development shop we range 30 to 40 people um at half of those people are full time on my team and the other half we bring in as we’re scaling up or down on projects the thing about look I’m located in San Diego but our entire team is remote in many different countries both from a cost management perspective and also from a building to recruit really good talent one thing that and and one thing and I’ve made many many trips[21:02–21:32] David Hirschfeld: overseas building my teams this is not like I throw it over to some team that’s offshore and hope for the best and I and our clients especially what I call recovery projects where they’ve been working with us software development companies when they are referred to us because they’ve been struggling for a year two or three they immediately recognize differences are some of what I some of my favorite projects because they’re just love working with us anyway I’m in San Diego and like I said my team[21:32–21:50] David Hirschfeld: is spread all over the place but if you’re interested in talking to us ask me for what the evidence that we have what it means to be exceptional not just a competent team but really exceptional and I’ll show you because shouldn’t take my work for it or anybody else’s work yeah you[21:50–22:04] Robin: could see the evidence yeah absolutely you seem to be passionate about it David which you know that’s a good indication of somebody that believes in the product you have to drink your own kool-aid sometimes in this world and you seem to have done that very well yeah I thank you very much[22:04–22:22] David Hirschfeld: yeah plus we’re constantly automating everything internally and we never feel like we’re good enough so we’re always pushing the edge on us internally much more than other companies which again I can show you what I mean and I think you’ll agree hey if it’s speaking of that the improvement side[22:22–22:53] Robin: on a tech side where do you you know with this whole world is going bananas I hear reports from CES in Vegas is everything was about AI in that in that in that conference that’s the for those for the audience that’s the consumer electronic show that takes place in Vegas on early January every year I hear this year has been all about AI robotic this and technology that and etc so the traditional form of software development you know you’re coding etc how does AI[22:53–23:05] Robin: play a role in what you do and are you involved in development of AI application I don’t know if we can still call them application they’re calling them agent now so I don’t know if you’re[23:05–23:39] David Hirschfeld: involved in it what should take on that yeah we’ve been dealing with what are called agentic workflows where you actually have multiple agents communicating with AI agents and they communicate with each other based on their specialty for example in software development you might have an AI agent that’s a project manager and one that’s a developer one that’s a database architect one that’s a QA tester and each of these agents are communicating with each other throughout the development lifecycle of a function module and entire application so we’ve been involved in this[23:39–24:11] David Hirschfeld: agentic workflow and building agentic workflows for about nine months now when an agentic workflows are much newer and earlier longer than that actually we’re automating everything internally using AI and using that to automate code generation as well the degree that we can do that in a competent responsible way and what I mean by that is if we just leave it to AI to try to build the systems it isn’t quite there yet I believe with this new release of with open AI that’s coming out earlyInfographic: Essential Strategies for Launching Your Software Successfully[24:11–24:44] David Hirschfeld: February 03 full version of 03 it may be there be able to really competently assemble systems together using agentic it was a certain degree it’s I think we’re still another year away at least from being able to really build competently forces in a way where we have feedback and management of the process requirements and the whole thing we’re building internal tools with AI like for we are our estimation processes pristine accurate and incredibly detailed in how we do it but[24:44–25:14] David Hirschfeld: it’s also really expensive we do it for every project that we do very often on our own dime when we’re doing an estimate for a client but that’s one of the things that helps us win projects because our estimates are so much more detailed and broken down and module based than our competitors so we’re building an AI model to mimic how we do our estimation process we’re building one for launch first that does all the niche analysis for us and niche analysis problem statements and the[25:14–25:46] David Hirschfeld: metrics system system of the methodology I’m I’m using AI to build the referral partner portal but it’s so we’re we’re using it everywhere we can and we have weekly meetings with an AI roundup weekly with the whole team talk about how have you how did you use AI last week in a new way or how are you where as a place you think you might be able to push it in a new way this week where is it in our workflow on and so AI is literally everything because it’s so hard to predict where we’re[25:46–26:17] David Hirschfeld: going to be in a year from now so I feel like as a development team instead of getting to ride the three foot waves or five foot waves are that yeah I live in San Diego so I have to use a surfing metaphor or that 10 foot wave we’re a we’re you know exceptional team so we’re in the 10 foot waves regularly instead of and here’s this 100 foot wave that’s coming we can all see it and so instead of sitting there just staring at it letting it just literally wash you over like a title wave we’re[26:17–26:39] David Hirschfeld: paddling we’ve paddled out to it we’ve stood up on our board in this 10 foot wave we’re at the very tip of our board trying to stay ahead of that rest and that’s where we are that’s how I love your analogy yeah thanks obviously you’re a surfer yeah no I I thought I am really good at falling off a surfboard I used to do it for an entire week every time before we moved to San Diego[26:39–26:45] Robin: well I’ll tell you my first experience was surfing in Hawaii and it’s just I’ll save that for[26:45–26:51] David Hirschfeld: another podcast it’s hilarious you’ll say that you’re going to save it but really hope everybody[26:51–27:08] Robin: forgets that I hope everybody forgets that question for you when you are using AI in that capacity as you explained earlier from a you know I’m assuming it’s for productivity gain in your in your own development process my my correct in what has been the impact on the productivity quality[27:08–27:16] David Hirschfeld: consistency of course yeah for everything yeah and have you seen like a dramatic shift in the impact[27:16–27:24] Robin: on your productivity the quality consistency etc all the measurement yes we have seen I should[27:24–28:00] David Hirschfeld: say we’ve seen shifts it’s getting right to the point where I can start to say these are dramatic but it’s a lot of the time I shouldn’t say that yes we have seen dramatic shifts in certain areas my god like in creating tests plans and test scripts and writing and doing a user system we’ve seen a huge shift in some of the debugging and the generating of code what we’ve seen points we see huge shifts in other places where we’re dealing with stuff that just very sophisticated and very difficult to articulate the AI what we want how we want it done because[28:00–28:33] David Hirschfeld: the AI is not quite there for that then it shift hasn’t been as big but it’s a clear it’s a building like I said it’s 100 foot wave and we’re on the tip of it we’re looking at building AI agents less agentec workflow AI agents for each step in our development life cycle even like our month our daily stand-up meetings which they where you software developers out there is a a term in agile you have this daily stand-up where you talk about you say this is what I completed[28:33–29:02] David Hirschfeld: yesterday this is what I’m planning on working today and here’s dependencies I have everybody in each little project team does this and it’s supposed to take 15 minutes but very often it extends to an hour and waste a lot of people’s time and so we’re automating this we’re going to have AI agent for doing that AI updating people’s Jared tickets with whether with the status of it and how much time they’ve they put into it that you know the previous day and do this on a[29:03–29:37] Robin: so many things right yeah yeah and and you know on the journey to autonomous I guess everybody’s got that conversation going on right now from an AI perspective not there obviously people are measuring things by percentages just give the audience some you know where are you know in terms of percentage of involvement of a human and technology like when it comes to AI do you say you are 80% human 20% AI can you probably write that’s probably right 80% human[29:38–30:09] David Hirschfeld: 20% AI maybe 70 30 but I see this as a tipping point we’re very getting close to the tipping point where we’ll be able to my goal is for the same size team to have a scale of 10 times as many clients for example and be able to service them at the same level of exceptionalism we do now or better without having to add anymore people and everybody on my team just becomes that much more[30:09–30:23] David Hirschfeld: that much more expert in terms of the projects and we need to be less the code junk the code jockey or the automation the qa automation script jockey or and all of that right yes right so[30:23–30:49] Robin: right try something called the bolt dot a new I guess on uh I was just like trying to get a refresher on what’s going on in my coding ability and I was able to create a website like in no time and not just not just a simple website it was a website what I would consider a little bit more problematic for automation you know like payment modules and all that stuff integration with API’s of those kinds of thing and it spits out the code perfectly I’m sure you’ve heard of it[30:49–31:24] David Hirschfeld: and I’m sure you do tools like it so yeah I used it and when and when I tried to build a database application with it it ran into some pretty significant problems then there’s another one out they’re called replet r-e-d-l-i-d and it was able to do that with the database applications really you know very confident way but they all run into loops where they get stuck in certain spots and then they can’t get out of their thinking loop in terms of how to and you might have the same bug in 20 iterations and I mean that the same bug every time and then maybe it gets past it maybe[31:24–31:57] David Hirschfeld: it doesn’t and then you’ll have to figure out how to redirect it so it starts thinking in a different way so that it looks at a different part of the app or consider and that requires some technical skill to understand what it should be doing versus what it’s doing or get into the code and just fix it yourself but yeah I’ve been using replet more recently I haven’t tried but I used both two and F three months ago really ran into significant problems with the database I haven’t tried it again since that’s when somebody on a podcast said well we had just tried replet it was pretty cool[31:57–32:30] David Hirschfeld: try that and I said okay I’ll do that and then and found it to be quite good and it’s and the code gets all get hub so I’ve got a version repository for the cup it has a very nice galing model when you deploy it it’s a serverless kind of environment so you only get charge for actual usage and it’s pretty inexpensive yeah I’m very impressed with these tools yeah we do a certain degree we want microservices architecture which is what we build all of our applications with for client[32:30–32:50] David Hirschfeld: you want it to be microservices and all service-based and all message-based and all the things that you want the modern architecture it’s you’re not going to get there with those tools not yet and no just if you want to build something basic I’m assuming yeah right yeah I’m maybe even a little bit more than basic but yeah it just yeah depends on the type but you know there’s certain types of[32:50–33:23] Robin: applications they’re really good for yeah David the elephant in the room so here he comes you know for developed for customer eventually your customers eventually hopefully who are located here in North America you know one of the big question that they run through their mind when they hear about development company that’s based in North America is the cost and you see so a lot of those idea or business people who have like idea entrepreneurs they want to create something or develop something first thing they look into is they look offshore and they go offshore trying to develop[33:23–33:29] Robin: these ideas can you speak to a little bit to you know the advantages disadvantages to that and[33:29–34:05] David Hirschfeld: where does it Tekyz ranks okay so the word offshore has a really negative connotation because most people think of offshore as the typical India or Pakistan and I say typical because there are a really exceptional team in India and Pakistan I assume if I don’t work in Pakistan I did early on I don’t anymore but and so what happens is you’ll always get the same quote originally if you have a project you go to a typical company offshore or the anywhere offshore even near[34:05–34:38] David Hirschfeld: shore they’ll say we’ll have it done in three months and it’ll cost this amount which seems very low or reasonable I would run from those because it’ll be 18 months and you still won’t have something that even if it was a fixed price it sometimes they’ll keep charging more forward and sometimes they’ll still be stuck in that fixed price 18 months you don’t have any you’re not any closer to a product in some cases you won’t even have something yet that they’ve given you the tech I have seen even that then you have companies who are in the US that are[34:40–35:12] David Hirschfeld: not any better than those teams or that are really exceptional teams and you’ll get quotes that are really range a lot so you might get a quote that’s $10,000 for that project and they’ll say three months you might get a quote that is $750,000 for the same project from a US-based firm they may be a really good firm and really the truth is somewhere on the lower side of on the lower side of the middle of that probably $75 to $150,000 if you’re working with a really good[35:12–35:46] David Hirschfeld: team due to a version that people would start that is typically the case so with us and we take over projects from US-based firms the biggest customers came from one of the largest West developers that focuses on healthcare and that client who we’ve had for about two years would be probably one of our strongest references in terms of the difference it doesn’t matter where the team is it matters how they operate that when you talk to anybody ask them how do you run[35:46–36:17] David Hirschfeld: your project what makes you exceptional how do you do your estimates how do you build your how do you do your design and prototype ask them these questions how do you build and how does transparency working organization when you ask those questions a lot of times they won’t be able to answer them all or they’ll have very poor answers or weak supporting information but they should be able to show you incredibly detailed information for any of those questions on how they do it on a regular[36:17–36:25] David Hirschfeld: basis and how they track all the detail in the project so in your opinion just focus on the outcome[36:25–36:39] Robin: basically rather than don’t get too excited about low prices don’t get excited no actually be very concerned about low prices in everything I guess no one is low prices are you know a signal[36:39–37:10] David Hirschfeld: that something is off here yeah but if you’re off here it is a dramatic impact right because you let’s say you get a quote for 30 or 30,000 or 35,000 they say if MVP will be done in three months and you’re six months in and you and you either every time you touch the thing it breaks or you don’t have anything to show for the six months and they’re saying it’s going to be another three months and then another three months just run you need to don’t sit there wondering if this will[37:10–37:43] David Hirschfeld: ever get better because it won’t you won’t if they were good it would be in three months if they weren’t done they’d be very close and you would have already been testing most of the functionality and they would work and they would be fixing bugs what they you find with and you wouldn’t be creating a whole new stream of bugs every time they fix one I’m three new ones that weren’t there before just run from these companies absolutely and if you’re in the middle of that switch you need to find a really competent company it won’t ever get better I talk to people I tell them that it[37:43–37:49] David Hirschfeld: just doesn’t ever get better that’s one way of experiencing is what you can expect to experience[37:49–38:03] Robin: forever and it might get worse no I know we’re just starting the near here it’s only 20 days in January 1st so what’s your goal for 2025 what’s for 2025 hope and desire for Tekyz and yourself[38:03–38:38] David Hirschfeld: personally so we’re working on three products right now internally internally that we’re going to turn into SaaS but I’d like to have all those products launched by probably the somewhere between q1 and q2 during that time theory it probably a couple of them will be launched this quarter and and then one of them may not be launched until in q2 as SaaS products and then we’ll start to grow that I have a very lucrative referral partner program which is what made me start this whole thing for our partners and so what I’m hoping is to assign[38:38–39:09] David Hirschfeld: a lot of referral partners and cultivate a handful of those to be really active active to me is like one really qualified prospect a quarter from a referral partner that would be a highly active one because with their highly qualified prospect 80 eight out of 10 of those once get into an evaluation process will go forward with the product so that’s my goal and also to automate everything in our workflow as possible at least get to that I think by the end of this year will be at[39:09–39:19] David Hirschfeld: 60 to 80 percent you know AI or automation 40 percent 30 to 40 percent human and so that we can[39:19–39:30] Robin: expand and scale so you’ve got a lofty goals for 2025 I hope you achieve all of them right so I hope that at least you get your SaaS projects up and running and start making some money out of those[39:31–39:42] David Hirschfeld: what what you hear from other people as far as their goals go is probably you probably ask that question about goals for the year right with everybody so what are some of the goals that you hear[39:42–40:13] Robin: so some goals I hear is you know integrating AI into the process you know a lot of people talk about integrating AI more into the process now I know AI has been talked to for 2024 and parts of the 2020 speak quite heavily and people are on board no you know they went through these shock first and adopt adoption later and now there seem to be rolling in with it so 2025 is going to be a year of transformation for many people in terms of the tech technology the process around technology[40:13–40:23] Robin: how they do work because technology got to influence it so I hear a lot of people talking about the main goal being implementing AI and taking full advantage of it in their business[40:24–40:57] David Hirschfeld: well one thing that maybe this will resonate with some people is I call it AI chaos because where do you implement it how do you approach it and it should be more about workflow automation as opposed right it’s transforming the workflows from manual process or from a semi digital process with manual intervention that is tedious and slow to workflow automation and if you look at your business from the standpoint of bottlenecks in terms of where is my business crippled for growth you know things[40:57–41:31] David Hirschfeld: flow into a certain thing in my aspect of my business and at that point if I take on more business that’s going to that part of my business is going to probably be the reason why we are not servicing our customers properly and focus on that area until that channel opens up by workflow automation and as soon as you do then all that flow will flow into some other aspect of your business or the upper upside of your business will all of a sudden not be feeding it fast enough because your capacity has grown so much so where in that party of business do you need to focus so thatUnlock explosive growth for your business with Tekyz AI development services and watch your success soar![41:31–41:55] David Hirschfeld: you can fill up that channel you know basically your workflow channel and if you do that then it becomes very discrete and very obvious what you need where you want to focus that workflow automation and then think okay is this just simple workflow automation or is this something that AI will really facilitate and very often it’s a blend of both and you know the second thing that people[41:55–42:27] Robin: talk about a lot and they don’t talk about it they talk about it when they don’t talk about it is revenue for 2025 people are trying to do whatever they can to and I’m reading in the subtext here to increase the revenue to create you know which is very important for me like to understand a little bit better about maybe you don’t have the time maybe you can give us a bit of a small explanation on your partner referral program where you know that could be helpful as well for those who are seeking to figure out a way beyond how you’re in you know an army of salespeople how[42:27–43:03] David Hirschfeld: to do and generate organic sales right okay so one way for me to basically get the word out is to do podcasting I’ve got my new podcast called scaling smarter that we just published the first republished of episodes where I’m interviewed this past weekend and then I’m also interviewing people which I’d also like to invite you Robin you appreciate that starter show and so it’ll be a blend of both and then I’m building up referral partners so the way that[43:03–43:34] David Hirschfeld: works is that somebody who is involved in the software industry whether it’s in the startup industry or whether it’s in existing company they have with existing companies SMBs are enterprise and they’re as potential project work we’re not a body shop so to speak but we’re really a project team that’s just how we like to operate and we know that we can deliver in an exceptional way if we have control of the project then if somebody makes an introduction says I know a great[43:34–44:06] David Hirschfeld: team that can handle your project that’s all they have to do then part of my referral partner program is then that company has a year to sign anything with us to get going on a project and as long as it’s sometime in that 12 month period after the referral was made because you had to cut it off at some point right then that starts another clock which is 12 months of invoicing and you get 10 percent of the invoice total invoice value on the receipt of payment so if a client is you know[44:06–44:27] David Hirschfeld: $5,000 a month to $25,000 a month that would be our probably our average some are much bigger really nothing smaller than that typically so 10 percent is what we pay on the gross invoice so if it’s 15 or $20,000 a month that would be $1,500 to $2,000 a month as a referral fee for[44:27–44:38] Robin: a year 12 months of that for our audience this is very interesting because what David just mentioned right now if you want to be part of the referral program I’m assuming to reach your up to you David[44:38–44:59] David Hirschfeld: right yes and then yes I’m part of the referral program and you might ask why we pay that much and I figured that’s how much it would cost us to actually generate that business through sales and marketing directly about 10 percent so of that first year’s invoice so yeah reach out to me directly Tekyz’s has spelled tekyzReady to take your startup to the next level? Connect with David Hirschfeld through his LinkedIn or Tekyz website.He offers free consultations to assess your needs and provide a detailed cost estimate for your software development project. Don’t let the fear of failure stop you — embrace the Launch First approach and start your startup confidently!David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.🌊 Master the 100-Foot AI Wave: How to Get Paid for Your Business Idea Before Building It 🚀 was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [How to Launch Your Software Company Pre-Development, Fund with Revenue, and Skip Investor Search](https://tekyz.com/how-to-launch-your-software-company-pre-development-fund-with-revenue-and-skip-investor-search-b05753a5bdbe/) - Featured Image: How to Launch Your Software Company Pre-Development, Fund with Revenue, and Skip Investor Searchhttps://medium.com/media/68cce3ced24c6cc5143e9ac4a5baba2b/hrefIn this episode of Grow & Learn, host Zorina Dimitrova talks with David Hirschfeld about his innovative Launch 1st methodology. This approach empowers startups to launch their software ventures without relying on external funding. David draws on his extensive 35-year career to emphasize the critical role of early product-market fit validation. He advocates for using high-fidelity design prototypes and pre-launch sales as essential strategies in this process. The discussion covers how Launch 1st minimizes risk, accelerates pivots, and ensures financial efficiency by generating revenue before full-scale development. David also emphasizes the importance of niche analysis, strategic marketing, and legal considerations for startup success.Tired of endless fundraising?Launching a software company traditionally involves a grueling fundraising process. Imagine bypassing traditional development processes entirely and launching directly into the market, allowing you to start generating revenue even before your product is built. The Launch 1st methodology, crafted by David Hirschfeld—a software veteran with over 35 years of industry experience—embodies a powerful promise. In this episode of the Grow & Learn podcast, David discusses his unique method for reducing risks in software startups and gaining early market validation.What is Launch 1st?Launch First isn’t about building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Instead, it focuses on creating a high-fidelity prototype that looks and acts like the finished product. This prototype vividly highlights the complete vision of your software, featuring a comprehensive two-year roadmap of functionalities brought to life through dynamic animations and realistic data interactions. This allows you to demonstrate the full potential of your software without investing in costly development upfront.Validating Your Market Before You BuildThe core of Launch First is pre-launch sales. Armed with your high-fidelity prototype, you go directly to your target market, specifically focusing on identifying early adopters. This requires a detailed analysis to identify customers facing significant problems that they believe are impactful. This allows you to tailor your messaging and demonstrate the value proposition effectively. By securing pre-launch sales, you validate market demand and generate revenue to fuel development.Pivoting Without PainOne of the most significant advantages of Launch First is the ability to pivot quickly and cheaply. If your initial pre-launch sales efforts don’t meet expectations, you can easily adjust your messaging, workflows, or the prototype within weeks. This iterative method helps you improve your product and achieve product-market fit before making significant development investments, unlike traditional MVP approaches where changes can be expensive and slow.The Benefits of Launching First.Launch First offers several compelling benefits for software startups:No need for initial investment: Generate revenue before building your product.Faster time to market: Start selling within months, not years.Reduced risk: Validate market demand and avoid costly development mistakes.Stronger investor pitch: Demonstrate traction and revenue growth to attract investors later.Fail fast and cheap: If your product isn’t viable, you’ll know early on without significant economic loss.A Smarter Way to LaunchThe Launch 1st methodology provides a new way to start software companies. Startups can skip traditional fundraising by focusing on pre-launch sales and high-quality prototypes. This approach helps them validate their market and generate revenue before incurring expensive development costs. This de-risked approach allows for faster time to market, increased flexibility, and a higher chance of success.[0:05–0:28] Zorina Dimitrova: Hi, I’m Zorina Dimitrova and welcome to the Grow & Learn podcast. Here I host thought leaders on business growth, transformation, leadership and succeeding in life and business with a human focus. At Grow & Learn, we are the only ones offering uniquely customized solutions to business needs using a cutting-edge AI business growth assessment tool and a global network of top-tier experts to craft and execute strategies that drive impactful results.[0:28–0:56] Zorina Dimitrova: If you’re ready to grow smarter, book a call today at growandlearn.org and let’s transform your business together. Enjoy this episode. I’m welcoming my first guest for 2025, David Hirschfeld. We’re going to be speaking about launching software companies without the need for investment, launching them successfully, how to circumvent all the pitfalls on the way to success for growing a startup.[0:56–1:01] Zorina Dimitrova: Welcome, David. Very glad to have you as my first guest this year.[1:02–1:05] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thank you for having me, Zarin. I’m really excited to speak with you.[1:05–1:23] Zorina Dimitrova: My pleasure. I’m very interested in the methodology you’ve developed as a part of your product and hearing your story of how you got there. So, would you like sharing a bit about you, how you came up with Launch First and what it is actually?[1:24–1:37] David Hirschfeld: Sure. I’ll give you a little background. So without getting into a whole history lesson here, I’ve been involved with software development now for 35-plus years.Infographic: Key Statistics — Supporting Revenue-Based Launching[1:38–1:49] David Hirschfeld: Started out in the enterprise with Texas Instruments and Computer Associates, and then did project management work at Intel, Motorola, Allied Signal, Arizona Public Service.[1:49–2:01] David Hirschfeld: And so I was very enterprise-oriented in the early part of my career. And then in the early 90s, started my first software company with an associate from Texas Instruments.[2:01–2:13] David Hirschfeld: And it was in logistics route distribution and inventory management. And our idea was to pick a small niche in that industry and to create software.[2:13–2:26] David Hirschfeld: It wasn’t with the idea that we were going to build a big software company. We just wanted to sort of get our feet wet with a software product. And Windows 3.1 had just come out. It was the first version of Windows that was really usable.[2:26–2:41] David Hirschfeld: And so we built a Windows product in that industry. And despite every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing the company anyway to 800 customers in 22 countries over the next eight years and sold it to a publicly traded firm.[2:41–2:56] David Hirschfeld: So I had a successful exit. And so now I’m thinking I know what it takes to start a software company. I was VP of products for the acquiring company for the next several years until I left there and then started Tekyz a couple years later.Unlock your business potential today with Tekyz — your gateway to high-performance mobile apps![2:57–3:11] David Hirschfeld: And with Tekyz, we worked with a lot of startup companies, over close to 90 startups now. The problem with startups is most of them fail because they lack product market fit.[3:11–3:28] David Hirschfeld: and the reasons I was successful in my first venture were not the reasons I thought I was successful and I didn’t realize that until I’d worked with several dozen software companies and watched them fail for reasons that I would not have expected.[3:30–3:43] David Hirschfeld: Most of them just wait way too long to start to try to sell their product and get revenue from customers and there’s no way to validate product market fit without getting financial, without customers paying it.[3:44–4:00] David Hirschfeld: You can’t rely on people saying, I’d use your software if it was out, because you don’t know if they really would when it comes to actually having to write a check to use your software until you have a product that people are starting to pay for.[4:00–4:30] David Hirschfeld: so I came up with launch first as a way of preventing my potential customers from failing by and and what we do is we create these really sophisticated designs that are animated and look like finished product but they’re not they’re just animated designs so we go to the market with these designs, and we also go through a very extensive niche analysis process to figure out who that[4:30–4:44] David Hirschfeld: early adopter is. And then we build a marketing stack based on how we expect to be able to sell the product, and then we create a high-value opportunity to buy into this product early.[4:44–4:58] David Hirschfeld: And if you’re solving a big enough problem that the customer feels it impacts them a lot and it costs them a lot. Those are two independent numbers that we validate during the niche analysis process.[4:59–5:11] David Hirschfeld: And you’re giving them a big enough value offer up front that they’re afraid they’ll miss out on it if they don’t buy in now and they know they’re going to buy the software once it is available.[5:11–5:35] David Hirschfeld: Then you can sell it even before you start building the product in enough numbers to get what I pass what I call a viability barrier. and a viability barrier is that you’re selling enough product at a high enough closing ratio for a high enough price that you can track a three-to-one ratio between your lifetime value of that customer versus what it costs to acquire that customer.[5:36–5:50] David Hirschfeld: That’s sort of the golden ratio for SaaS companies, three-to-one. And you need that margin because to scale, you have to have enough margin in there to be able to reinvest back into your company.[5:51–6:03] David Hirschfeld: So the cool thing about Launch First is once you find that, well, a couple of cool things. One is let’s say you don’t get to that three-to-one ratio the first time you go out and you try to do your pre-launch sales.[6:03–6:36] David Hirschfeld: Well, we pivot, and pivoting is a two- or three-week process when you’re talking about a design prototype and a marketing stack, changing your messaging, changing some of the workflows based on feedback back that you’re getting when you’re trying to sell it for the reasons that people aren’t buying it yet. We can pivot two or three or four times in the space of a couple months. Once you build your product, pivoting is costly and painful. And doing a really significant pivot, there’s a lot of[6:36–6:48] David Hirschfeld: momentum against doing that because of the cost. And you’re in panic mode usually by the time you start pivoting in a startup once you’ve built your product. But with Launch First, it’s not like that.[6:49–7:04] David Hirschfeld: We can pivot quickly and retest the market with different messaging, different workflows, different demonstration. And once we find that magic balance and we’re starting to sell at that rate that we need, that’s the trigger to start building the product.[7:05–7:07] David Hirschfeld: And you don’t stop selling. Yeah, go ahead.[7:07–7:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Would you allow me to backtrack a little bit and maybe reiterate what exactly you’re doing? I absolutely get it, but maybe to just make it clearer for the audience that kind of didn’t quite catch it.[7:24–7:38] Zorina Dimitrova: So what you developed is a process through which you can take companies to market or rather work with a minimum viable product before they have actually designed their software product.[7:38–7:41] Zorina Dimitrova: You’re working only with task companies, software companies.[7:41–7:53] David Hirschfeld: Yes, but not a minimum viable product. The minimum viable product means, no, because that you have to build. Yeah, right. You’re building the software, and that’s costly and risky.[7:54–8:06] David Hirschfeld: We’re not building an MVP. We’re creating a design prototype that looks and acts like the real product, not just a click-through mock-up. It’s beyond that, but it’s not the product.[8:07–8:20] David Hirschfeld: And it shows the full vision of your product, not an MVP. Part of the problem with trying to sell your MVP is it’s so limited in functionality that people struggle to want to buy it because it doesn’t have enough features yet.[8:21–8:29] David Hirschfeld: What we’re building is a design prototype that looks like you’ve already implemented the full two-year roadmap of your product.[8:29–8:41] Zorina Dimitrova: And by a design prototype, just to clarify once again, you mean simply like a movie. You show them basically what it would look like if they enter, then use the software app or whatever they’re using.[8:41–9:12] David Hirschfeld: Yes, sort of, except that you’re actually demoing it. If you clicking through it the behavior on screen is like the real product with data and drop lists The navigation the animation all of it looks like you built the product And this is a critical success factor for doing prelaunch sales because the one question you don’t want to get when you’re showing somebody something that you’re planning on building is how do I know you can build this?[9:13–9:37] David Hirschfeld: Right. And if your product looks like just click-through mock-ups, that’s the first question you’ll get. But if you build it, what’s called a high-fidelity prototype, where it looks like a real product already, then even though you tell them this isn’t the real product and the first version may not have all these features and it’ll be three months out, people will make up a story in their minds because that doesn’t fit with what they’re saying.[9:37–9:51] David Hirschfeld: They’ll think, oh, they must have developed it, but they’re in QA, just testing it now or finishing a few features, even though you never say any of that. You tell them the truth, but they don’t hear it because it looks so real.[9:52–10:08] Zorina Dimitrova: How do you ensure that the software is built within the predefined deadline or timeframe? because usually the software, I know from experience and also talking to a lot of people, that there are a lot of promises in the software developing world.[10:08–10:13] Zorina Dimitrova: It’s going to be done by that and that deadline, and it takes a year longer to develop.[10:13–10:33] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this has — and that’s really the right question to ask, to be honest with you. So if you go to Tekyz.com, you’ll see right at the top of the homepage, above the fold, it’ll say hyper-exceptional software development team.[10:35–10:45] David Hirschfeld: That’s what we actually do is build software. But we’re not just the software development team. We’re really exceptional software development team. I say hyper-exceptional.[10:45–11:08] David Hirschfeld: And I don’t just say that, but I always say to people, when somebody tells you they’re good at something, ask them for evidence. What does that mean? And we have all kinds of evidence about how we track projects, how we transparency, the level of detail when we do estimates, the accuracy of our estimates in terms of showing estimates versus actuals in our status reports.[11:10–11:21] David Hirschfeld: And we’re within 10% of our estimates. that’s our goal is to always stay within 10% above or below. We don’t want to be any more above or below.[11:21–11:35] David Hirschfeld: We don’t want to be 30% ahead because that means that we’re just sandbagging in the estimates. We don’t want to be behind because that just means that we didn’t consider all the functionality or the estimate wasn’t detailed enough.[11:36–12:00] David Hirschfeld: It didn’t have enough knowledge in it. So we’re really good at it. And it’s funny because I talk with a lot of other software development companies, CEOs of other companies that do software development, and we talk about estimates, and very often I’ll hear, yeah, yeah, we always do pretty detailed estimates, and I ask them if they’d like to see how we do it, and they always say yes.[12:00–12:11] David Hirschfeld: And then I show them how we do our estimates and what they look like, and they go, oh, no, we don’t do estimates like that. That takes way too much work and too expensive to get to that level. But we always do.[12:12–12:17] David Hirschfeld: That’s one example. The way we run our status meetings.[12:18–12:32] Zorina Dimitrova: So basically, with launch first, you have combined the software company with the business advisory model. So you’re in a way ensuring that the startup is succeeding.[12:32–12:35] Zorina Dimitrova: So it’s like a mixture of a few businesses.[12:35–13:09] David Hirschfeld: some people have called it a de-risking approach to starting a software company because what we’re doing is we’re mitigating most of the risks and giving the founder a much higher chance of being successful and in the case where they can’t find that path to that viability barrier, past the viability barrier, they’re just not able to do it, maybe it’s the wrong product or the wrong market at the wrong time,[13:09–13:17] David Hirschfeld: then they can say, which every software company that failed wishes they could say this, they failed fast and cheap.[13:18–13:18] : I see.[13:19–13:31] Zorina Dimitrova: Instead of, yeah. Talking about cheap, I don’t know what the average investment is, generally speaking, for a startup in a software company.[13:31–13:42] Zorina Dimitrova: but I know that your costs, or not your costs, but the costs the startup should expect are somewhere around 80K.[13:43–13:45] David Hirschfeld: At a minimum. At a minimum.[13:45–13:58] Zorina Dimitrova: Okay. 80K. How does it pay off for them? And is it comparable to the initial costs they would have? Were they to raise money or proceed in a different way?[13:59–14:15] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, so that’s a good question. And when I say 80K is a minimum, I’m talking about getting a solid MVP out to market. That may not be a version that you can sell yet because what most people do is they’ll put out their MVP.[14:17–14:29] David Hirschfeld: They’ll do free betas. They usually wait way too long to get the MVP out, and they keep adding features to it. But once the MVP is out, they rarely start charging for the software on the MVP.[14:29–14:43] David Hirschfeld: They usually are doing free betas to get feedback from their customers, and their customers are giving them feedback, and these are customers that haven’t paid for the software yet. And it’s hard to get people to use your free MVP because they’re not invested in the software.[14:44–14:55] David Hirschfeld: And there’s all kinds of problems with this approach. And very often that might be anywhere from 6 to 12 months to get the MVP out. This is typical. Not that it can happen faster, but typical.[14:55–15:07] David Hirschfeld: Sometimes it’s even longer. And then it’s another year, usually with releases, you know, going back and forth with releases and feedback from customers before you feel the product’s got enough functionality.[15:07–15:37] David Hirschfeld: Now you can start to charge for it. And that’s usually when they find out that people don’t want to buy it, two years after they’ve started. And now they’re in panic mode. So with doing with launch first, instead of waiting two years to start to sell your product and find out nobody wants to buy it, within three months, we’re out there marketing the product and very often starting to sell the product successfully and generating revenue.[15:37–16:03] David Hirschfeld: And one of the things I try to convince people of is give a very high-value purchase opportunity. That might be a lifetime license, or it might be free implementation in the case of something like a CRM or an ERP product or a clinical trial software, you know, bigger software products where the implementation costs are more than the actual software itself.[16:03–16:15] David Hirschfeld: or whatever the high-value trigger is that the buyer would perceive as being high enough value that it’s worth them taking a risk on something that isn’t built yet.[16:16–16:33] David Hirschfeld: And by doing this, you can generate as much or more money from a fraction, a measurable fraction of percent of your market versus giving away 10%, 15%, 20% to investors.[16:33–16:46] David Hirschfeld: And all the work you’re doing to sell these customers is all work you’re doing to build your business, designing the product, building your marketing engine, creating the sales and marketing message.[16:46–16:57] David Hirschfeld: These are all things you have to do to build your business. Nothing you do to raise money is helping you build your business, creating pitch decks, going out and trying to get in front of investors and selling, right?[16:57–17:18] David Hirschfeld: And then assuming you’re successful and you start selling your product now, which is the trigger to start building it, now if you do want to accelerate your growth and development, having a conversation by raising money, having conversation with investors is completely different because you can show traction, market traction.[17:18–17:24] David Hirschfeld: You can show growing revenue, and you don’t even have a product on the market yet. Yeah.[17:24–17:24] : Yeah.[17:25–17:31] Zorina Dimitrova: How long does it take for the customer to get their product using this approach, for the final customer?[17:32–17:40] David Hirschfeld: I usually tell people, figure, three months from the time we start. Yeah, well, to get to where we start to market, yeah.[17:41–17:53] Zorina Dimitrova: No no I think the final developed product that the end customer of your customers is purchasing until the product is developed[17:53–18:05] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So are we talking about the MVP? Because there’s no such thing as a final product if you sell something that’s successful. That’s the beginning once you put it on the market.[18:05–18:07] Zorina Dimitrova: Well, what you’ve agreed to sell them to begin with.[18:08–18:22] David Hirschfeld: Right. So we’ll talk about MVPs. So it depends on the market. It very much is very dependent on the market and the product and the level of sophistication. Typical product was probably four months to get an MVP done.[18:23–18:33] David Hirschfeld: Anywhere from three to six months, I’ll say. Just, like I said, depends on level of sophistication. Some take nine to ten months to get an MVP done.[18:34–18:44] David Hirschfeld: Some can be done in two and a half months. But that would be — that’s the typical — and there are some that are even longer than that, but these are really big, sophisticated products that have a lot of R&D involved.[18:46–18:58] David Hirschfeld: Now, one of our favorite projects — again, this has to do with being an exceptional company as opposed to just a regular software development company — what I call recovery projects.[18:58–19:13] David Hirschfeld: These are projects from customers who have been working at building their product very often because they were promised that the first version would be available in three months, and now it’s 18 months later.[19:13–19:26] David Hirschfeld: They still don’t have anything to show, and what they do have is so buggy that they don’t trust it. I call those recovery projects. And sometimes we can just take the project with the code base that’s there and work forward.[19:26–19:44] David Hirschfeld: Most of the time we have to start over. And we always do a full assessment with a very detailed report on the quality of the code and the architecture of the application and things like that so that the user can make an informed decision if they want to go forward with that.[19:44–20:00] David Hirschfeld: But that’s very common. When you’re dealing with a typical software development company, it’s very hard to nail down when you’ll actually have something that you can start to give to customers that won’t embarrass you.[20:01–20:11] David Hirschfeld: With us, when we put an estimate together, the estimates are accurate. But we spend a lot of time putting these estimates together, and those estimates don’t cost our customers anything.[20:11–20:17] Zorina Dimitrova: Yeah. What is your success rate with helping startups launch software companies?[20:19–20:36] David Hirschfeld: So what we’ve done with Launch First? Launch One First, yeah. With Launch First, right. With Launch First, with our first four projects that we did, three of them were successful, which is a really high percentage.[20:36–20:47] David Hirschfeld: I’m not suggesting that we’re going to have 75% success rate with it. I figure it’ll be somewhere between 25% and 30% when we have a larger number pool of this.[20:47–21:02] David Hirschfeld: But with our first four, one was a product that was for aerospace parts distributors, and this was a product that managed the certification certificates.[21:02–21:12] David Hirschfeld: It’s every part that goes into an airplane or aerospace has to have a certificate that says this part, when it was made, what it was made of.[21:12–21:26] David Hirschfeld: And if it’s an assembly of other parts, every one of those parts that went into it has to have its certificate with the new certificate. And so you can see this becomes a complicated process to manage.[21:26–21:40] David Hirschfeld: And so this product was for that specific process. We did three demos to three parts distributors and sold all three of those demos for $15,000 each.[21:41–21:56] David Hirschfeld: So in a space of a few weeks, raised $45,000 in prelaunch sales. For a real estate investment portfolio management product, we sold in two months, we sold 23 licenses for $68,000.[21:56–22:10] David Hirschfeld: and these are not promises, but these are actual checks that we’re receiving for people buying in. And a third one was for clinical trial software product.[22:10–22:22] David Hirschfeld: And we did two demos, sold both the licenses for $250,000 each. So raised $500,000 from two clinical trials.[22:22–22:48] David Hirschfeld: and the fourth one was for housing, subsidized housing for Native Americans and that one we started right after the pandemic started and there was no way to get a hold of anybody, any Native American tribal authorities because the pandemic had shut everything down and so that one failed.[22:48–22:55] David Hirschfeld: so that gives you an idea of the types of projects that are very successful with this[22:55–23:08] Zorina Dimitrova: is there someone you or a company you you would say I cannot help you I cannot work with this type of company with this type of setting is there yeah[23:08–23:26] David Hirschfeld: there are so one would be product like a public social network where anything that your business model is based on critical mass of users, that’s not going to work with Launch First.[23:26–23:49] David Hirschfeld: That might work in a crowdfunding scenario. Or if you have a product that you’re marketing to the public in general and it’s a very low subscription fee, for example, that’s not going to work with launch first.[23:49–24:05] David Hirschfeld: If you don’t have a high-value potential target customer. So even in those cases, you might be going after, like, organizations where they’re going to buy it on behalf of a large number of users.[24:05–24:19] David Hirschfeld: That would be a target that you could use to go after. Business networks where you’ve got a buyer and a seller, they can work really well if these are high-value buyers and sellers.[24:19–24:27] David Hirschfeld: But if it’s, again, if it’s more of a mass market buyer and seller market, like if it’s Fiverr or something like that, Launch First would not work for that.[24:27–24:34] Zorina Dimitrova: So you would say it’s more adaptable to B2B types of businesses?[24:34–24:36] David Hirschfeld: It’s ideal for B2B. Yes.[24:38–24:48] Zorina Dimitrova: Okay. So while you were speaking, it got me thinking about the legal aspect of not meeting the expectations of the customer contract.[24:48–24:58] Zorina Dimitrova: So in case the product could not be developed for whatever reason, it fails. And the final customer doesn’t get their, you know, whatever they paid for.[24:58–25:02] Zorina Dimitrova: What are the legal implications for the startups? And are you accounting for these?[25:03–25:17] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. So I tell people that when they start to create sales, one of the things they have to do is provide a guarantee to the customer that a first version, an MVP, will be available by a certain date.[25:18–25:29] David Hirschfeld: You know, maybe, say, if you were expecting the product to be ready in four months, then you maybe, say, six months. And there’s a couple different ways of doing a launch.[25:30–25:57] David Hirschfeld: One is the classic pre-launch sale like what we’re talking about, where you’re selling a product, but the first version won’t be out for several months. Another way is what’s called the concierge launch, where you’re selling them on the concept, but they can start to take advantage of the service because it’s more of a service-oriented system that has a sophisticated software that manages it.[25:57–26:19] David Hirschfeld: And now you cobble together some workflows and resources, WordPress and Google Apps Scripts and maybe Google Spreadsheets or whatever you need, whatever the different pieces that you need to start to provide the service and you manually manage the service and start to give them the service within a few weeks of the purchase.[26:20–27:00] David Hirschfeld: And then you can handle a certain number of customers this way while you’re building the system. And really, it’s a great way to launch. We run into a number of projects where people are doing this as a way of validating basically doing launch first as a way of validating their service and learning how to run their business from a service perspective before building the software I got several customers like that It’s a very successful way of doing it, where one is in certified providers for certain types of education,[27:00–27:27] David Hirschfeld: where she’s gone to service organizations, you know, educational organizations that would be needing these service providers and just using paper forms and a little bit of automation and pre-selling the service to those organizations and manually managing the certified providers and providing them and now building the software for this.[27:27–27:45] David Hirschfeld: So that’s an example. And that’s a great way to launch, a better way to launch even than just pre-launch sales. But to answer your question, you just have to be willing to commit to getting it to them by a certain time and the ability to refund them if you, for some reason, can’t.[27:46–27:57] David Hirschfeld: Like if you realize that you, in the really rare case, you came up with some kind of software concept, you realize it’s just not possible to do it. I mean, this is super rare.[27:57–28:04] David Hirschfeld: but you realize while you’re building it, you can’t do it. Now you have to be willing to refund all your customers that you’ve done the pre-line sales to.[28:06–28:06] : I see.[28:07–28:13] David Hirschfeld: That’s pretty uncommon. We haven’t had to do that yet with anybody. So it’s not likely.[28:13–28:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. How do you help customers market their, what is it called again, not minimum viable product but high-fidelity prototype?[28:24–28:41] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah. High-fidelity prototype. So it starts with our niche analysis process because one of the secrets to this whole thing is identifying who is the early adopter.[28:41–28:52] David Hirschfeld: What’s the early adopter niche? Who is the stakeholder in that niche with the high-value problem and the high-perceived impact of that problem?[28:52–29:07] David Hirschfeld: These are two distinct numbers that we measure. and the reason they’re distinct is you could have somebody that perceives the problem as huge and they hate it and they want to get rid of it, but the cost to them is really very low.[29:07–29:25] David Hirschfeld: So you can’t charge them very much for this thing, even though they want to get rid of the problem. Whereas you have other users that have a really high cost to a problem that they struggle with, but they just feel that they don’t feel very impacted by it because everybody in their industry struggles with this.[29:25–29:42] David Hirschfeld: This is a known quantity, you know, why I’m not really motivated to do anything about it unless you can now you have to sell me on why I should be motivated. So we look for both those numbers, high motivation and high cost, because then we can easily get their attention.[29:43–29:58] David Hirschfeld: Because as soon as you talk about the problem, they go, I hate that. And they’ll lean forward and say, can you fix that for me? And the cost is high, so you can charge them a lot for it. So once you find those two things, now you know who the early adopter is.[29:58–30:17] David Hirschfeld: And how do you find it out? You like the early adopter. It’s part of our methodology. It’s one of the things I created out of a frustration I had working with marketing companies who always say, well, give me your ideal customer profile.[30:17–30:29] David Hirschfeld: when I would say this is a startup. They don’t know who their ideal customer profile is yet, except in rare cases. They think they have some idea, but there are many different niches they can market to, so which one should they focus on?[30:30–30:40] David Hirschfeld: Because the tighter you can make the niche, the smaller you can make it, the more you can charge and the higher the closing ratio because you’ve got that high impact and that high cost.[30:40–30:43] David Hirschfeld: So this is part of the methodology I created.[30:44–30:45] : Fantastic.[30:45–30:55] Zorina Dimitrova: so how can people get to know a little bit more about the product or maybe get a consultation with you[30:55–31:15] David Hirschfeld: sure go to Tekyz.com and if you’re watching this video you can see Tekyz spelled above my head if you’re not it’s T-E-K-Y-Z that’s how you spell Tekyz so Tekyz.com you’ll learn about my software development company.[31:16–31:36] David Hirschfeld: And if you want to learn about Launch First, at the top of the page, you’ll see a menu for Launch First, click that, and that takes you to the Launch First page, which then tells you all about what we’ve just been talking about in a little bit more detail with some cool animation and things on the page and a video that describes what I just talked about.Interactive Infographic: 10 True-False Statements About Startups[31:37–31:50] David Hirschfeld: And there’s a bunch of people that I have presented this to over time that talk about what they think about. And these are very well-known startup coaches and accelerators.[31:52–31:52] : Fantastic.[31:53–32:02] Zorina Dimitrova: Thank you so much, David. Anything else you would like to share so that, you know, we get a full picture? Anything we’ve missed? Oh, yeah.[32:02–32:13] David Hirschfeld: And I’m just starting my new podcast. It should be out next week called Scaling Smarter. So please look for me there.[32:15–32:31] David Hirschfeld: And, you know, and, yes, the last thing I’ll say is if you’ve got an idea for a project or you are struggling with an existing developer trying to get your project out, it doesn’t cost you anything to reach out to me.[32:31–32:43] David Hirschfeld: and we’ll do an evaluation, pull together requirements in quite a bit of detail, and generate an estimate for you, and there’s no obligation and no cost to you to do this.[32:43–33:01] David Hirschfeld: And like I said, this is a lot of work for us, but we just feel like this is a service that everybody needs. And we figure that we’ll just make you so overwhelmed by what we’re capable of doing that you’re going to want to work with us if that’s where you are.[33:01–33:02] David Hirschfeld: in your business.[33:03–33:08] Zorina Dimitrova: So how can people book a call with you? Through the website? Yeah, yeah.[33:08–33:15] David Hirschfeld: Go to the website or reach out to me. David at Tekyz.com. Tekyz, again, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z.[33:17–33:23] Zorina Dimitrova: Fantastic. David, thank you so much. Scaling to… What was it called? Scaling Smarter.[33:24–33:25] David Hirschfeld: Scaling Smarter.Unlock your SaaS potential with Tekyz — let’s chat and revolutionize your business today![33:26–33:30] Zorina Dimitrova: Scaling Smarter. What are you going to be talking about on Scaling Smarter?[33:30–33:58] David Hirschfeld: On Scaling Smarter, we’re going to be talking with startups and scale-ups and talking to them about how they’ve used AI and automation to help scale their business. And alternatively, where they’re struggling, where they’ve been stuck in their business and doing a little podcast brainstorming about how to get past it.[33:58–34:14] Zorina Dimitrova: fantastic I’ll also put the link or at least the name of the podcast in the description to this video and audio David it was a pleasure I learned a lot it all makes a lot of sense to me thank you so much[34:14–34:18] David Hirschfeld: thank you for having me Zarina I really enjoyed the conversation[34:18–34:32] Zorina Dimitrova: thank you for listening to Grow and Learn we hope that you found our podcast informative, engaging and inspiring our mission is to help you keep growing and learning and we hope that our conversations and insights have provided you with practical advice and useful perspectives.[34:32–35:04] Zorina Dimitrova: If you’re looking for personalized support and guidance to help you achieve your personal or professional growth objectives, I offer a range of services to help. As a trusted management partner and mentor, I work with businesses in the process of transformation, looking for new streams of business, as well as M&A. With an extensive professional network of experts and mentors, I can bring on board the right person or team based on the specific needs of the company I’m working with. To learn more about the services I offer and how I can help you achieve your goals,[35:04–35:25] Zorina Dimitrova: please visit my website at growandlearn.org. You can also reach out to me via email or social media. I’d love to hear from you. And if you enjoyed this episode of Grow and Learn, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review. Your feedback is important to us and it helps us to continue to create content that is relevant and valuable to our listeners.[35:26–35:31] Zorina Dimitrova: Thanks again for listening, and we look forward to sharing more insights and perspectives with you in the future.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.How to Launch Your Software Company Pre-Development, Fund with Revenue, and Skip Investor Search was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [How to Solve Real Problems and Build Winning Products with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/how-to-solve-real-problems-and-build-winning-products-with-david-hirschfeld-a03651e5bd2c/) - Featured Image: How to Solve Real Problems and Build Winning Products with David Hirschfeldhttps://medium.com/media/84ad01f049cf14c340d4b0a15988d22b/hrefDavid Hirschfeld joins An Hour of Innovation to discuss identifying real problems, addressing market gaps, and fostering innovation. He emphasizes focusing on quantifiable problems rather than anecdotal experiences and validating ideas through prototypes and pre-launch sales. He highlights the advantages of industry insiders in spotting gaps and suggests using AI-driven tools for product development. David examines how to balance current needs with future trends, encourages organizational innovation, and uses AI to enhance workflow automation and marketing for startups. He encourages a data-driven, experimental mindset and invites listeners to connect for guidance while promoting his upcoming podcast, Scaling Smarter.TakeawaysFocus on solving real problems that are at the top of your mind.Understanding the financial impact of a problem is crucial.Validate your idea before building a product.Use prototypes to demonstrate potential solutions.Identify your early adopter niche for better success rates.AI and workflow automation are hot trends in innovation.Market gaps can be identified through industry experience.Prelaunch sales can validate product viability.Future-proofing products require an understanding of industry trends.Learning from past experiences is key to coaching others.There is still time for businesses to adapt to AI.Measuring impact is crucial for validating ideas.Innovation centers can foster a culture of creativity.AI tools can significantly speed up product development.Conversational AI can enhance analysis and discovery.Video content creation is a growing trend in AI.Workflow automation tools are revolutionizing marketing.Staying innovative requires a child-like curiosity.Keeping a list of gaps can help identify opportunities.https://medium.com/media/49d0019fa054b6f12a92057300c698d8/hrefChapters00:00 Intro02:09 Figuring out the real problems04:48 Validating ideas before building products07:19 Example where focusing on the right problem led to big success12:05 Current trends in innovation and AI14:21 Process for spotting gaps in the market23:55 Solving today’s problems with planning for future market needs27:00 The Adoption Curve of AI in Business30:29 How to encourage the culture of innovation34:05 AI as a Development Tool41:49 Trends in AI for Startups47:29 Staying Innovative in a Rapidly Changing World[0:01–0:13] David Hirschfeld: Most people go the easy, hard way. They start to design and build their product. And even though you’re investing a lot of money, it’s still easy because it’s fun. You’re getting to live out your vision. Look at me. I’m a founder. And then you go to market and you find out nobody wants to buy.[0:20–0:34] Witt Lershen: Welcome. This is an Hour of Innovation podcast, and I’m your host, Witt Lershen. David Hirschfeld joins me today to explore how to focus on solving real problems, dealing a gap when building a product, and establishing the culture of innovation.[0:35–0:37] Witt Lershen: Welcome, David. Thank you for joining me today.[0:38–0:40] David Hirschfeld: And thank you for having me on your show, Vitaly.[0:41–0:48] Witt Lershen: Yeah, absolutely. So, before we jump to the topics, can you tell us a little bit about your background and the work that you do?[0:49–1:01] David Hirschfeld: Sure. Yeah. Background, I’ve been in software development for well over 30 years, really actually over 35 years. I really want to date myself. And I started out in enterprise.[1:02–1:13] David Hirschfeld: I had my own startup in the early 90s in logistics route distribution, inventory management, and grew it to, despite every effort on my part, I ended up growing it anyway.[1:13–1:26] David Hirschfeld: to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it to a publicly traded firm in 2000. And then was VP of products for them for the next several years until I left and started Tekyz, my current company, 17 years ago.[1:27–1:43] David Hirschfeld: Tekyz is, we focus on startups and scale-ups. Building software, doing workflow automation over the last several years, a lot of it’s been focused on artificial intelligence and leveraging that both.[1:43–1:57] David Hirschfeld: to improve business workflows as well as products in the AI area. So this is what we do, and who we are is the competent, super exceptional team.[1:57–2:05] David Hirschfeld: And I don’t say that cavalierly. I always tell people, ask me for evidence, because I can show you the evidence of what makes a team exceptional.[2:06–2:18] Witt Lershen: Yeah, that’s great. All right. So let’s start with problem solving and how can one figure out which problem to solve?[2:19–2:32] David Hirschfeld: Okay. That’s a good one. So because people come to us with a lot of different types of problems that they want to solve. Some are problems they believe need to be solved, but they don’t have any real evidence.[2:33–2:59] David Hirschfeld: They just feel it’s something that they can improve on. Maybe it’s in social media. Maybe it’s in mobile app something, but whatever it is. And then those are very difficult for those people to then launch and find an actual path to success because they don’t have any, you know, their experience is just as a user, and it’s anecdotal in terms of wouldn’t it be nice if it did this instead of that.[2:59–3:21] David Hirschfeld: the clients that come to us that have a really high percentage of success, or at least a higher percentage of success, are people that come from an industry, they work in an industry, and they’re struggling with a problem in that industry on a daily or weekly basis, not once a year because it’s not top of mind.[3:21–3:39] David Hirschfeld: You have to be top of mind for people to think of your product every day or every week, right? So it’s something that they’re struggling with all the time. and they can easily articulate what it costs them financially because of this problem and how much it personally impacts them because of this problem.[3:39–3:52] David Hirschfeld: And those are two very different numbers. But you would think if it’s personally impacting you at a high level, then it’s going to cost a lot, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it costs a lot, but you don’t perceive it as impacting you.[3:52–4:07] David Hirschfeld: And other times you have this perception like this is killing me and it actually doesn’t cost very much when you look at it. So in one case, you can get their attention, but you can’t charge them anything. And in the other case, you could charge them a lot if you could get their attention, but nobody’s listening because they don’t care.Interactive Guide: The Ultimate Guide to Product Design[4:07–4:25] David Hirschfeld: So you need both those things to be high. Now, in that case, that person who works in a business where they’re struggling, they can articulate the cost and articulate the impact, then are they in an industry full of people just like them struggling with the same problem they’re struggling with?[4:25–4:37] David Hirschfeld: And do they have reach to that community? And if they have all those ingredients, then the chances of them being able to launch a successful startup go up dramatically.[4:38–4:46] David Hirschfeld: So that’s how you know how to find a problem that you want to solve because you’re struggling with it and you want it to stop.[4:47–5:05] Witt Lershen: Yeah, and then some people may have a feeling or perception that this is what’s going on, And probably there are some ways to test it out, to double check. So what to do in these situations rather than just start building something cool that personally affects you?[5:05–5:07] Witt Lershen: Any recommendations there?[5:08–5:23] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, in fact, we spend a lot of time with founders on this. You know, a lot of people want to build this because they know that it’s needed and it costs a lot and it impacts them and it’ll fix their problem, it’ll fix other people’s problems.[5:24–5:40] David Hirschfeld: But you need to know which is your early adopter niche before you get started. And you need to know, because you’re probably solving several different problems with your product, which is the number one or two problems that they’re solving that have the biggest impact and the biggest cost.[5:40–5:58] David Hirschfeld: And I call this going about it the hard, easy way. It’s hard because you have to spend a lot of time basically building these metrics so that you can build a metrics-based system that scores this and makes it really clear who that early adopter is and what you should focus on first, which is hard.[5:58–6:12] David Hirschfeld: Most founders don’t do this. Then everything else is so much easier. That’s why I call it the hard, easy way. Most people go the easy, hard way. They start to design and build their product, and even though you’re investing a lot of money, it’s still easy because it’s fun.[6:12–6:32] David Hirschfeld: You’re getting to live out your vision. Look at me. I’m a founder. And then you go to market, and you find out nobody wants to buy. and you don’t have product market fit, or you’ve got the wrong messaging to the wrong person, it’s the wrong time for this particular product for reasons that you could have probably easily figured out if you did the hard stuff up front instead of the easy stuff.[6:33–6:53] David Hirschfeld: So this is what I always say to founders. Don’t start building it. And the way you can validate you’ve got product market fit after you’ve done all this niche analysis is go out to the market with some prototype version that is just mock-ups but is very realistic looking and do pre-launch sales.[6:54–7:18] David Hirschfeld: Because if you’ve got a really high cost problem and it’s a high impact to that person and you’ve got the right niche and you offer them a high enough value opportunity to buy in early, then you can sell in enough numbers early on that you can prove you’ve got a viable business and generate some income from future customers instead of just trying to get money from investors.[7:19–7:28] Witt Lershen: Do you have any examples from your experience maybe that you can share of somebody finding a problem and going big afterwards?[7:28–7:43] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. So this is before I figured out the launch first methodology, which is what I’ve been talking about. about 11, 12 years ago, a client came to me who had all these ingredients.[7:43–7:53] David Hirschfeld: And at the time, I did not quite understand what the ingredients were that makes a startup, you know, consistently makes them successful, maybe 13 years ago.[7:53–8:16] David Hirschfeld: And he was a producer, choreographer on Broadway. So he and he, they build what’s called a stage bible, or they used to, where basically they have every single position of actors and all of the stage props, and they have every 30 seconds is a page.[8:16–8:30] David Hirschfeld: And they build up this, what they call the stage Bible, until they have thousands of pages that represent the playoff. And that’s on one side. On the other side of that page is the score or the script that they’re saying at that time.[8:30–8:42] David Hirschfeld: So he said this is a big production cost, you know, an effort before we start to actually produce the play. So he wanted to turn this into an iPad app, right?[8:42–8:55] David Hirschfeld: He is a choreographer producer. He has an institute called Open Jar Institute where he teaches choreographers and producers how to produce plays.[8:56–9:08] David Hirschfeld: So he had reach to the industry. I had all the ingredients. I didn’t realize at the time yet that those were all the ingredients. And he knew how much it cost him to do this and how, right?[9:08–9:22] David Hirschfeld: But I was thinking, okay, he’s a Broadway producer. He’s going to be marketing this to Broadway plays, and he wants to sell this as an iPad app when the iPad app was new. iPad was new, and he wants to sell it on the App Store for $199.[9:22–9:35] David Hirschfeld: And back then, you know, the idea of somebody’s going to download an app and pay $199 for it seemed like, okay, this is not an inexpensive app to build. And so I told him, I said, I’m not sure you’ll be able to recoup your investment.[9:36–9:48] David Hirschfeld: And he said, well, if you don’t want to build this, I’ll find somebody who will. And I said, no, no, no, I’ll build it. I just like to be honest. That was honest. That was misguided honesty at the time.[9:48–9:58] David Hirschfeld: He turned out to be one of my most successful customers. Over the last probably seven or eight years now, every single play on Broadway is produced by, it’s called Stage Right Software.Unlock efficiency and speed with Tekyz — Get started with DevOps and IoT today![10:01–10:25] David Hirschfeld: And he had all kinds of customers already lined up before he ever started developing this. He had all the cruise lines use it for all of their production performances, universities, high schools, Olympic opening games, the Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics, Tony Awards, the Emmy Awards, all produced with this app.[10:26–10:38] David Hirschfeld: In fact, Tim Cook, when he announced the worldwide announcement of the iPad Air, he said, before I announce this, let’s look at how the iPad has changed our lives.[10:38–10:56] David Hirschfeld: And there was a video montage with six apps, and his app was one of the apps in this video montage. And I tried to talk him out of doing it. So I’ve learned a lot since he even did a he even did a TED talk where he talked about don’t let anybody squash your dreams.[10:56–11:07] David Hirschfeld: And he talked about this incident of being tried to talk out. He didn’t use my name or my company’s name. We laughed about it afterwards. But I have since learned what makes right.[11:07–11:24] David Hirschfeld: So when I’m when I’m coaching people, I’m not coaching them out of hubris or out of because I’m the know it all and I know best. I’m coaching them because I’ve made all these mistakes, and I’ve learned after working with so many startups what works and likely what doesn’t.[11:24–11:37] David Hirschfeld: But I’m always recognizing that you as a client may be unique in some intangible way that’s going to make you successful, and I don’t see it. So I recognize that.[11:38–11:41] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, that’s a great example. That’s a good example, by the way, yeah.[11:41–11:55] Witt Lershen: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good example. and especially that you would think that this is a very specific problem and a very specific, like, small industry, right? But then apparently it becomes big and everybody uses it and it’s great.[11:55–12:02] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, even Hollywood, they use it for movie productions and shows and things like that. I mean, I had no idea.[12:04–12:17] Witt Lershen: Well, that’s great. Do you see any industries more hot, if you will, for innovative products these days or everybody on the same level pretty much?[12:17–12:32] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, every single industry. So right now, because of workflow automation and AI, so anything that has a voice AI component to it is really hot.[12:32–12:49] David Hirschfeld: or a intelligent chat component to it where it’s hot. That’s even not as hot as it was. Well, actually, it’s really hot because the early adopters are already on, and now the big masses are starting to get on.[12:51–13:15] David Hirschfeld: Marcom, marketing communication products, so things that will help create content and then publish that content for you and distribute it in a smart way that calendared This is really hot stuff Health care anything in health care now that helps make health care more consumable to users is really hot.[13:16–13:28] David Hirschfeld: Insurance that helps people understand what their health insurance is and onboards them or makes it very consumable so you know how to make choices. This is really hot.[13:28–13:48] David Hirschfeld: I mean, pretty much everything is hot. Yeah. Just automatically filling out, taking an order from a customer and comparing it against the PO in your system and reconciling the differences and sending out the notifications automatically if there’s a decision.[13:49–14:00] David Hirschfeld: Everything is hot these days. Yeah. When it comes to AI, workflow automation, these are all hot things yeah[14:00–14:33] Witt Lershen: I attended DC Startup Week I live in DC area so they organize it every year and pretty much everybody spoke about AI and generative AI specifically in all sorts of industries and I’m just trying to like validate my own ideas with this so let’s talk about market gaps and And also specifically talk about the process to identify the gap and jump into it and maybe do something about it.[14:33–14:58] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So, again, with the gap, how you find it, if you’re just an entrepreneur trying to figure out where there’s a gap in any industry because you want to start something, that’s not a good place necessarily to be unless you have a lot of cash to burn because it takes a lot of research to really understand an industry or you live in that industry.[14:59–15:10] David Hirschfeld: So people that are in an industry probably already know what gaps they have in the industry. I’ll give you an example for us, okay? We’ve got several projects right now internal that we’re building.[15:11–15:25] David Hirschfeld: One of them is a referral partner portal that’s just really consumable, easy for somebody like me to use as I meet people that I will refer projects to me because we have a very lucrative referral program.[15:25–15:54] David Hirschfeld: And so we need to track the agreement and what the referral fees are. I need to give them a place where they can log in and share referrals with me, or they can at least log in and see the state of the clients that they’ve referred to me, which ones have a proposal, which ones have contracted, how much they’ve earned in referral fees over a period of time, and when that client is expired in terms of being able to earn more referral fees, right?[15:55–16:10] David Hirschfeld: So they need that ability. I need the ability where I can easily track all this stuff. And then a lot of my clients also have their own referral network, so I want to give them the ability to subscribe to this application.[16:10–16:24] David Hirschfeld: or if they’re giving me referrals, I give it to them for free. They can now start to add their own referrals, right? And everybody gets their own login. So this is like one example. It’s a big gap because there isn’t simple products out there that do this well.[16:24–16:57] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a gap I found. We’re building it for us. I’ve talked with lots of my referral partners. Every one of them seems to want to use the product. Another example. When I was talking about being a hyper-exceptional team, one of the things we do better than most people, actually, all the other development shops I’ve talked to over the last 10 years, we do estimates really, really detailed and accurately. And we’ve developed methodology around doing these estimates that our clients love and that because we want to[16:57–17:09] David Hirschfeld: be accurate and we want to be detailed. But it’s a very expensive process for us to produce these estimates. So we’re building an AI model specifically that will mimic our process.[17:09–17:36] David Hirschfeld: We don’t want it to change the way we do it because we do a really good job. We just want it to mimic that and make it easy for us and maybe improve what we’re doing by identifying gaps that we might have missed in a particular estimate. And we’ve been working on this for several months and we’ll have something out probably in the next couple of weeks, at least for internal use. I’ve talked with a lot of development teams. Turns out all these development The shops have the same problem with the time it takes them to produce estimates.[17:36–17:47] David Hirschfeld: Most of them don’t do a very good job with estimates. So when we show them what we do, they’re all like, I want that. So we’re going to turn that into a SaaS product. Anyway, this is what I mean by identifying gaps.[17:48–18:00] David Hirschfeld: I understand, as a software development firm, the gaps that we struggle with. And the third one that we’re also working on, since I’m talking about it, is launch first, the niche analysis process.[18:00–18:22] David Hirschfeld: that is really difficult to get through it all the way because there’s an awful lot of research and metrics that you’re capturing so that you can produce a report that shows clearly who your early adopter needs to be and then go out and survey those early adopters to confirm that you were honest in all of your analysis process.[18:22–18:33] David Hirschfeld: and so we’re building an AI model for that because we don’t want that to be so tedious and difficult to get through.[18:33–18:36] David Hirschfeld: We want to make it the easy, easy way instead of the hard, easy way.[18:37–18:48] Witt Lershen: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So you basically need, well, it helps if you’re within the industry and you’re identifying something that’s missing and you have a resource to build it also.[18:49–19:01] Witt Lershen: So then I guess we talked about this in the problem solving. In terms of validating this, you again go through the same steps basically, right? You have to create some prototype, talk to people if it’s viable.[19:02–19:07] Witt Lershen: Otherwise, you just use it for yourself because you build it for your own needs, like in your case, for example.[19:07–19:31] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. So in our case, we actually are building this because we need it. There’s even another one. I won’t keep going into it, but for your developers out there, We’re building a Scrum Master tool that does your stand-up for you automatically so you don’t have to waste everybody’s time every morning in all these stand-up meetings because it’s all already summarized and pulled together.[19:31–19:43] David Hirschfeld: And then it’ll do other Scrum Master functions because we need that internally too. And it helps the developers because it automatically updates Jira for things that we’re missing.[19:43–20:09] David Hirschfeld: So the idea is we need these anyway. We’re building them internally. Once we know that they’re working for us really well, then we’ll go out and start to market this to potential clients to see that there’s a real opportunity to sell this in a bigger way before we build all the SaaS functionality around it for people to just sign up and recurring payment and all that.[20:11–20:34] David Hirschfeld: So that’s a pre-launch sale approach, except these we’re building, like the launch first one, we have to prove we can do that in an effective way. I wouldn’t want to go out and pre-launch sell something that I wasn’t 100% sure I could build an effective tool in a reasonable amount of time to accomplish that, even though I’m sure I could get sales.[20:34–20:44] David Hirschfeld: So we want to build our AI model that proves we do this properly before we build out the rest of the UI. and then before we start selling it.[20:44–21:02] David Hirschfeld: We’ll start selling it before we build out the rest of the UI. So all of these will have a prelaunch sales step involved, but because they’re more complex projects, we’re going to build our own internal version first to make sure we’ve got something that works really well and we’re getting the value out of it.[21:02–21:09] David Hirschfeld: Then we’ll go out and do prelaunch sales. Then we’ll build out the client SaaS version of it.[21:09–21:32] Witt Lershen: Yeah, so for somebody who already has a business and they’re building something for themselves, that makes total sense. But, for example, if some developer sitting out there or product manager or some person basically sitting there and feeling that they need some tools in their job, do you think the same approach will work for them if they identify something like that?[21:33–21:45] David Hirschfeld: In some cases, yeah. In some cases it will. In other cases, they may not be able to use it internally, but they know it’s needed. And so in their industry or some other.[21:46–22:07] David Hirschfeld: And in that case, what we do is we go through a design prototyping exercise, which is a small fraction of what it costs to build the same thing. And when we finish with this design prototype, you’ve got not an MVP, because MVP is only — if your concept is this big, an MVP is only going to be this amount.[22:08–22:32] David Hirschfeld: And it’s hard to sell people to pay for your MVP, which is why so many people do free beta tests, which I am not a proponent of. So instead, what we do is we do a design prototype that looks like the real application, but it’s not the real application, and it shows the app that it’ll be once it’s mature, not just an MVP.[22:32–22:43] David Hirschfeld: So you’re seeing like the two-year roadmap, and you can demo the two-year roadmap to potential clients. And as far as they’re concerned, you’ve already built this, even though you’re telling them this is just a high-fidelity prototype.[22:43–22:58] David Hirschfeld: The actual version of this app, the first version, won’t have all these features and won’t be out for at least three to six months, but they don’t hear that. So they see this thing that looks real and behaves real even on screen functionality behaves like a real app.[22:58–23:09] David Hirschfeld: And so they never ask you the question, how do I know you can build this? If you’re showing them just click through mock-ups, that’s the first question you get. They feel like they’re taking a big risk.[23:10–23:20] David Hirschfeld: But if they see something that looks like you’ve already built it, then in their minds they’re saying you must be in, that was probably not the right symbol, but you must be in QA.[23:20–23:31] David Hirschfeld: You’ve already built it. Maybe you’re just testing and filling in a few extra features, even though you tell them, you know, you’re always honest, right? So you tell them this is a high-fidelity prototype. It’s not the actual app.[23:32–23:49] David Hirschfeld: And the first app won’t even have all these features in it, first version. They still don’t hear that. And then they’re willing to invest in this if you give them a good enough offer and if they know the cost of the problem this is solving is big enough that they’re going to have to get this when it comes out.[23:49–23:52] David Hirschfeld: You can be very successful in pre-launch sales.[23:53–24:10] Witt Lershen: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great idea. That’s a great approach, yeah. So then this is what the problem is today and the gap is today. But then what’s the balance, I guess, or what’s even the reason to look for future market needs, for example?[24:10–24:21] Witt Lershen: Like you’re trying to identify maybe potentially something in the future that may be an opportunity. How to go about this? Which way is easier, basically? Focus on the problem today?[24:21–24:42] David Hirschfeld: Oh, I see what you’re saying. So are you saying one or the other, or are you saying, let’s say, I’m building my app and how do I future-proof it, or how do I design it and plan it so that in two years from now it’s going to even be more viable than it is today?[24:43–24:54] Witt Lershen: Basically, yes, because sometimes when you solve for problems today, it may go away with a new technology or something. Rather, you should focus on something in the future, right?Infographic: Understanding Product Sales Trends Through Statistics[24:54–25:02] Witt Lershen: So what I’m saying, I’m asking is, do you go about the same, with the same approach about it, or how to balance it, basically?[25:04–25:18] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So, like, let’s talk about the referral partner portal. Will that go away in a few years? Probably not. So people need to keep track of their referrals in an easy way.[25:18–25:47] David Hirschfeld: that’s an easy one and even with AI and everything else maybe people start there’ll be ways of just assembling your own products like that really fast but it won’t probably be worth what the subscription fee eliminate the subscription fee for you to do that and that would probably only be for people that are pretty technical even in a year or two or three so that product I think has life A project estimation?[25:48–25:58] David Hirschfeld: Is it possible that people will be able to duplicate our estimation process just using a conversational chat in two or three years? Yeah, probably.[25:58–26:25] David Hirschfeld: But by then we see the direction it going and figure out how to enrich it in ways that will continue to provide the value with the product assuming that it gets a lot of traction initially like I expect Launch first the niche analysis piece will that be necessary in two years or three years with conversational AI and asking it to nail down your niche based on your given problems?[26:26–26:40] David Hirschfeld: Yes, it’ll still be required. It won’t, but the pieces of it that won’t happen easily and conclusively by just chatting AI, then we’ll just continue to expand on those things.[26:41–27:00] David Hirschfeld: So, and plus, industries just don’t change usually that fast. There are cases where they do, but usually you don’t hit a tipping point where all of a sudden an entire channel for an industry just disappears overnight, right?[27:00–27:22] David Hirschfeld: It takes time because you have the early adopters and then you have the, you know, the mass of customers. And I’ll give you an example. One of my friends does a lot of keynote speeches on AI, mostly focused on large enterprise businesses, not to their technical teams, but to their CEOs.[27:22–27:34] David Hirschfeld: And no matter what industry, he says he goes to almost 100%, he does this. And he said nothing about what he’s talking about would impress me.[27:34–27:47] David Hirschfeld: It’s all stuff I’ve been hearing for a while and I already know, and I would think everybody knows, but everybody in that audience is like, I had no idea. They’re just like, and not even sure whether it’s something that they should even really focus on yet or not.[27:48–28:17] David Hirschfeld: Right. And we’re thinking to ourselves, are you kidding me? You’re going to be out of business if you don’t. But they’re just not thinking like that. So there’s a lot of — there is still time for, you know, building something where you have a need, even if you think AI may start to eliminate the need for that, as long as it’s not a fad, as long as you’re not doing some new type of NFT, you know, for ticket sales to art concerts, you know, I don’t know, right?[28:17–28:32] David Hirschfeld: And that’s — as long as it’s not faddish, but it’s an actual business problem, you’re going to have a reasonable life and the ability to pivot as technology continues to create new opportunities to add more value to the product.[28:33–28:45] Witt Lershen: Yeah. The reason I ask this question is because I hear from people saying, well, somebody probably have a tool for this problem. I just don’t know it or I just need to find it. Or it’s too much of a hassle to worry about this.[28:45–28:57] Witt Lershen: Maybe today I need to focus on something more futuristic or in the future. You know, I’m trying to clarify for people who ask that question.[28:57–29:11] David Hirschfeld: Well, here’s the answer to that. Do you want to wear the black robe or do you want to wear the white clinician robe when you’re starting out your startup?[29:11–29:29] David Hirschfeld: And I always say don’t wear the black robe. The black robe means that you’ve got this belief that people need this thing, right? And so now you’re going out there and you’re educating the world on this new thing that you’re creating because it’s for the future, but nobody realizes that they need it yet, right?[29:29–29:40] David Hirschfeld: Or maybe they realize this is pretty cool, but they can’t quantify the value very easily. And so now you’re working very hard to convince them to buy this thing. That’s the black robe.[29:40–29:51] David Hirschfeld: Or you can put on the white coat and be a clinician and say, I can measure the impact. I can measure the cost. I can measure the market size. I understand the demand.[29:51–30:03] David Hirschfeld: I know what they’ll pay, and I can build on that. And you can always start to build the black robe stuff later on top of your white coat product, right?[30:03–30:14] David Hirschfeld: So that’s like a lot of founders come to me and say, I have this great idea for an app, and I know everybody’s going to want it. And I go, okay, great. How do you know everybody’s going to want it?[30:14–30:27] David Hirschfeld: and I slowly, gently try to peel off that black robe and I slowly get them comfortable wearing a white coat and turn it into a science experiment, right, where they’re measuring everything.[30:28–30:29] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah.[30:30–30:30] : Yeah.[30:30–30:48] Witt Lershen: So then my next question will be, so we have these people sitting in organizations, developers, product people, testers, whoever, and they have a bunch of ideas, But sometimes organization doesn’t let them do stuff or bring it up or whatever.[30:49–30:56] Witt Lershen: What’s your recommendation to leaders maybe or team leads? How to encourage the culture of innovation?[30:57–31:22] David Hirschfeld: That’s a really interesting question. So, like, you know, some companies have what they’re called innovation centers or centers of innovation, where they actually are promoting their employees to innovate new things, and they reward their employees for coming up with new ideas and new concepts and give them approval to pursue it.[31:22–31:41] David Hirschfeld: It’s not most companies don’t do that, but there are companies where this is a big cultural thing. So introducing this idea of an innovation center, depending on the size of your company and how forward-thinking the C-level people are or V-level people are.[31:42–31:57] David Hirschfeld: For those that don’t have that, then it’s a matter of is somebody above you going to feel at risk if you’re suggesting making changes to the way things operate?[31:57–32:11] David Hirschfeld: Do they feel like, you know, because if they are, you may be in a position where you just have entrenched management that doesn’t want things to change because they feel like it’s going to risk their position.[32:11–32:25] David Hirschfeld: And that’s a really hard thing to get around unless you can find a sponsor, some kind of sponsor in the organization, either parallel with that manager or who’s above that manager that can support it.[32:25–32:49] David Hirschfeld: The other thing you want to do is, again, put your white coat on and really measure the value of this change in your organization before you go promoting it and put together a proposal that has proof and value and reduced cost and increased revenue and time saved and whatever the things are that you can quantify in a believable way.[32:49–33:00] David Hirschfeld: and then if you’ve got the manager who’s worried about their position in the company, give it to them to then they can take credit for it.[33:01–33:14] David Hirschfeld: If your goal is to just make the improvement, you don’t care who takes credit for it, then just come up with enough proof that somebody else can get the value out of it and then you can start to get things done that way.[33:14–33:20] David Hirschfeld: There’s no simple answer to this. It depends on your company and where you are and what the culture is.[33:21–33:40] Witt Lershen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it depends. Startups may be easier. Big organizations may be not that much. But then when you look at somebody like Apple, for example, who innovates all the time, you can only wonder how your leader will take it.[33:40–33:53] David Hirschfeld: Apple, Google, Microsoft, these cultures are so bred into their DNA of the company. like Hewlett-Packard or any of the big tech companies, TikTok.[33:54–34:04] David Hirschfeld: They’re all pushing the envelope on innovation. So anybody that comes along and wants to innovate something, they welcome it. But that’s not most companies.[34:05–34:16] Witt Lershen: Yeah. Another question I have for you is about AI, and not about how people use it for their products, but how AI helps building products.[34:16–34:18] Witt Lershen: examples of that.[34:19–34:37] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, so right now, remember I told you about the referral partner portal? These types of things I normally have my team doing, anything significant like that, but I decided to do an experiment on my own and use one of the tools.[34:37–34:57] David Hirschfeld: It’s also I like to have hobby projects because I don’t get to code very often, and it’s my favorite thing to do, but it’s something I rarely ever get to do. And the reason is because my job is to build my business so that everybody on my team is enabled to do really interesting projects and grow in their own skill set.[34:57–35:15] David Hirschfeld: And I’m indulging, and they’re all better developers than I am, right? It’s been a long time. I’m really, I’m always involved in all the architecture discussions and planning because I have a much broader mindset than them just because of my experience and the nature of what I do.[35:15–35:29] David Hirschfeld: where I am in my company, but if I’m going to have somebody write code, it’s never going to be me if it’s for a client. It’s right because, or rarely, I should say, because there’s somebody else that’s much better at it than I am at this point.[35:30–35:40] David Hirschfeld: But I’ve been talking about building applications using some of the new AI tools, and my team is using it, but not as much as I want them to.[35:40–35:52] David Hirschfeld: So I’m kind of pushing the envelope, decided to actually, I tried a couple different tools where I’m building the entire app using AI, but it’s writing code. It’s not assembling components or anything.[35:52–36:04] David Hirschfeld: It’s actually writing code. And this first one I’m doing is — well, actually, I’m doing a couple different ones. One is to replace the SaaS product that I use, that we currently use.[36:04–36:17] David Hirschfeld: We’re spending $50 a month. I thought it would be a good exercise to replace the SaaS product that’s sort of a utility that runs in the background. and another one is this partner portal, referral partner portal.[36:17–36:42] David Hirschfeld: And I’m 70% or 80% of the way through building the app, and I’ve got 35, 40 hours into it. It’s not how we would architect the app in the future, but to launch it and get the functionality and it looks great, it doesn’t need to be architected the way we would architect it for a client, which is scalable microservices.[36:43–36:59] David Hirschfeld: I can worry about all that later once people start to really subscribe to it. In the meantime, I can prove that we can get something out inexpensively and quickly, like in an MVP situation for clients, and save them a lot of money and shorten the cycle to get a product on the market.[37:00–37:07] Witt Lershen: So it’s like a co-pilot that you’re using, basically?[37:07–37:22] David Hirschfeld: No, it’s even more than Copilot. There’s a couple products out there. One’s called Bolt. I wouldn’t use these tools if you don’t have any technical skills because you run into all kinds of problems with them because they’re definitely not bulletproof and you have to know how to navigate around that.[37:23–37:36] David Hirschfeld: One’s called Bolt. And then another one which I tried after that, I was actually interviewed by a CTO in another podcast. And we were talking about this on the show and he suggested I try another product called Replit.[37:37–37:54] David Hirschfeld: and that’s the one I’ve been using to build this with. It’s really pretty amazing. It’s not there yet where I can just do it all without running into problems. It gets into thought loops where I can’t seem to resolve a problem that it runs into, but it’s pretty darn good for where it’s at.[37:54–37:59] David Hirschfeld: I mean, it’s way farther ahead than I thought things were, and it didn’t exist three or four months ago.[38:00–38:11] Witt Lershen: Yeah. So this is tools for developers. Are there any tools for, like, doing discovery, for example, doing analysis that AI is helping us with?[38:12–38:24] David Hirschfeld: So let’s say, I mean, those, just the conversational AI, ChatGPT, Cloud, Replit, Gemini, you know, all these products are really good for helping you with analysis.[38:25–38:35] David Hirschfeld: And one of the things I always try to tell people is, is don’t just ask it the question with the, hoping to get the answer you want, ask it what questions you should be asking, given a context.[38:36–38:49] David Hirschfeld: And what roles should it be considering while it’s developing this answer? And how is a better way to word this prompt if this is the result I want?[38:49–39:00] David Hirschfeld: And do those sorts of things first because it will really inform how to approach it. And then you can, once it’s, sometimes it’ll come up with a list of the things you should be considering.[39:00–39:27] David Hirschfeld: And it said, okay, go ahead and write my prompt considering those things. and then it’ll write a really intelligent prompt and then take the prompt and say, okay now go ahead and execute on this prompt and then it will start to produce the kind of analysis that is really quite rich I always say it a conversation and don assume you know what the right questions are to ask That’s pretty cool.[39:27–39:39] Witt Lershen: You’re actually having, whatever, GenerateFi tool to write you a prompt and then use the same prompt to go further in the process.[39:39–39:52] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, and I don’t even have it write the prompt yet. I say, this is what I want to accomplish. I said, what questions should I ask? What roles should this be thought from?[39:53–40:09] David Hirschfeld: You know, QA person should look at it, project manager, whatever the roles are. So, okay, knowing all that, write a really detailed prompt that will produce the kind of answer in ChatGPT.[40:09–40:21] David Hirschfeld: that would produce the best answer, and it’ll write a very elaborate prompt, and it’ll structure it and organize it in a really good way. And now I say, okay, now go ahead and execute the prompt.[40:22–40:32] David Hirschfeld: And then it’s amazing how much better that is, doing it like that, than just asking the question right up front without any of that. You get a way better answer. Yeah.[40:32–40:34] Witt Lershen: Yeah, that’s a good approach. I have to remember this.[40:35–40:36] : Right.[40:36–40:36] David Hirschfeld: Yeah.[40:36–41:03] Witt Lershen: I listened to somebody who’s a little bit of an expert in AI and prompting and he was suggesting like talk to it like to a child and we don’t want to tell child all the answers we want to tell child to use you know their brains to figure out stuff so use the same approach to the AI and keep asking questions like is this right? Can you do better?[41:03–41:07] Witt Lershen: and things like that and at the end it will zone, it’s how to buy.[41:07–41:36] David Hirschfeld: You can also kind of dual LLMs. So you ask the prompt, get the prompt, and you ask ChatGPT, and then you ask the same question with Quad, for example, and then you take the response from both of them and feed that back into the other and say, how does this response, what do you think of this response which came from another LLM, compare that against your response, and are there gaps, and then it will start to get even better.[41:37–41:37] : Yeah.[41:38–41:48] Witt Lershen: Yeah, that’s a good idea. I sometimes use multiple ones to ask the same thing, and they give me sometimes different approaches. Yeah. Okay.[41:48–42:00] Witt Lershen: So, let’s talk about trends in AI that startups can leverage in their products. Do you see anything in this front? You mentioned a couple of things in the beginning.[42:00–42:01] Witt Lershen: Can we come back to that?[42:01–42:06] David Hirschfeld: Do you remember what those were? Because that was like a year ago.Ignite your growth with AI — Revolutionise your development with Tekyz today![42:08–42:16] Witt Lershen: You mentioned voice, for example. With content creation.[42:17–42:48] David Hirschfeld: Voice, video. Like if you look at a lot of the tools that we use, often like, I don’t know if you use Miro or if you’re using like some of the board tools for project and they all have an AI component in them now and look for that AI component. They usually look like a little star someplace and you click it and you give it a prompt and say create a flow chart for me or[42:48–43:22] David Hirschfeld: build a mind map for me, you know, for this content or so that kind of stuff is very hot now those are in existing tools as opposed to what are trends video is a big trend now in fact we’re going to be just starting a project where we’re taking video that people were building basically building these 20 step slideshows that were animated and turning them[43:22–43:36] David Hirschfeld: into video with voice and music, which is what they were doing, and they did it for brand, specific brands for onboarding, and we’re going to be building an AI model that generates the whole thing for them.[43:37–43:51] David Hirschfeld: This is very — and it will reduce their onboarding time with their big customers, which are these huge companies, from 90 to 120 days down to two to three weeks.[43:51–44:08] David Hirschfeld: and they don’t start generating revenue until the onboarding is finished. So this compresses that onboarding cycle to when they can start to generate revenue from new clients. Dramatically compresses it and reduces their cost to get to that point dramatically.[44:08–44:38] David Hirschfeld: So that’s a big deal. Anything workflow automation-wise, I’ll give you an example. like in marketing communications. There are some tools now that are professing to be able to generate your content of all types, social media posts, long-form blogs, like all packaged into a single product, and do the SEO research and the trending research on the topics that it should be pushing.[44:38–45:06] David Hirschfeld: Then, and it uses a hundred, some of the tools I’ve seen use, like dozens and dozens of data sources as well as LLMs to produce meaningful, appropriate information, and then they create a schedule, a posting schedule for all the content and automate the posting, all wrapped into a single package.[45:07–45:20] David Hirschfeld: That’s workflow automation, like, at its best. I have not tested these tools. I just learned about a couple of them in the last few days. My digital marketing person is now digging in deeply.[45:20–45:31] David Hirschfeld: I didn’t want to approach these tools myself because it’s not my expertise, the digital marketing side. So if I’m trying to fill these gaps, I don’t know what they do on a daily.[45:31–45:53] David Hirschfeld: I kind of understand it, but there are a lot of companies in the Marcom space, and there’s lots of people working on this right now. the one thing that I’d like to see from that, again, another workflow thing, and I thought about doing this, but I decided not to because we have so much on our plate already, right?[45:53–46:25] David Hirschfeld: And that is to be able to go out and use like a LinkedIn search and then crawl the profiles of each person that come up as like an ideal customer profile, take a look at their posts, then find related content off the web for that company and for their posts, any kind of activity to identify potential clients that are at that point where they’re going to need to start to look for development company to do projects.[46:25–46:46] David Hirschfeld: And then based on all of that information that is collected, create an automated drip campaign that reaches out to them on LinkedIn, on email, right? And then so when they get an email, it sounds like something they’d want to respond to because I read your article or I listened to your podcast on this topic.[46:46–47:00] David Hirschfeld: And I heard you mention that you’re thinking about starting a new project and whatever it is, right? And I wanted to let you know that I found that really interesting and I’d like to maybe engage you in a conversation.[47:00–47:11] David Hirschfeld: then you’re going to have this huge volume of people that want to talk to you instead of being annoyed by outreach that’s just canned and repetitive.[47:12–47:25] David Hirschfeld: So that would be a product. I had thought about for the last nine months or so starting a project on that, but we have so much going on. So if somebody maybe in your audience wants to run with that one, give me a call.[47:26–47:45] Witt Lershen: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So we’re coming to an end here. And I have a couple of things as a parting questions for you. Number one is, how do you personally stay innovative? And the second part, what advice would you give to people to stay innovative?[47:45–48:01] David Hirschfeld: Okay, so I’m going to say, number one, just kind of keep a, not a journal, I don’t want to get to that formal, but a list of ideas, gaps that you identify in your business or in life.[48:02–48:28] David Hirschfeld: I mean, real gaps that where you can easily say, I know this cost me this much and I can quantify what that cost is. and it personally impacts me in a severe way where I’m threatened, my job is threatened, my ability to promote is threatened, my ability to grow my business is threatened, I’m going to lose customers, whatever, that you can quantify the personal fear, why it creates fear in you, this gap.[48:29–48:48] David Hirschfeld: If it’s just a gap and it doesn’t create fear, the problem is it’s very hard to get attention of potential, your target customer if they’re not worried about this thing because they hear somebody talking about it in a way that resonates with them and they lean forward and they go, I hate that.[48:49–49:00] David Hirschfeld: Can you make this pain stop? And that’s where you want to be because then you can get attention of a large number of people. So just keep a list of these things that you identify.[49:00–49:12] David Hirschfeld: That’s number one. Number two is channel your inner five-year-old. Always channel your inner five-year-old. You know, I have everybody I know comes to me to help them with their PC problems and their phone problems and, you know, their Mac problems.[49:13–49:28] David Hirschfeld: I don’t have a Mac, but I’ve had a Mac way in the past, and I know how to kind of figure things out, right, or their iPad or their server or whatever, right? And maybe something I haven’t looked at in a long time or I may have no experience with it, but I can usually figure it out because I just press every button.[49:29–49:39] David Hirschfeld: I channel my inner five-year-old, right? I don’t assume that it’s this or it’s that. I just like, okay, I see this. This is what you want to do. You can’t do this.[49:40–49:53] David Hirschfeld: Then I just start clicking around on everything until I start to get a feel for the pattern that will make this, fix this, fill this gap. It’s the same with really with designing a software product.[49:53–50:08] David Hirschfeld: You know, this taking all this loose information that I’ve compiled over, you know, the last almost 40 years for all of these different business contexts and problem solving journeys that we’ve been on.[50:08–50:19] David Hirschfeld: And without then trying to channel any one of them, pieces just start to fall into place when clients are talking to me about issues. And I have and I just say, what have you tried this?[50:19–50:30] David Hirschfeld: What about that? And I don’t worry about whether I think it’s the right thing or the appropriate thing. I just, you know, does this feel like something that would be fun to kind of explore with the client?[50:30–50:42] David Hirschfeld: And then I just bring it up and they’ll tell me, you know, we’ve thought about that or that’s not or that doesn’t work in our industry. OK, how about this? You know, and I just come back with the next kind of like a kid that never stops asking you, are we there yet?[50:42–50:47] David Hirschfeld: You know, what time is it? What’s the, you know, why, why, why?[50:48–50:51] Witt Lershen: Yeah, yeah. that’s how to stay innovative[50:51–50:52] David Hirschfeld: I think[50:52–51:01] Witt Lershen: yeah that’s great well thank you very much David for your time it’s been really a pleasure and interesting conversation I appreciate the time[51:01–51:24] David Hirschfeld: yeah thank you Vitaly and can I share with people how they might get in touch with me yeah of course yeah thank you so if you want to talk to me and there’s no cost to it if you want to explore an idea or you’re struggling with an existing development company and you want some feedback about it, whatever it is, feel free to give me a call.[51:25–51:37] David Hirschfeld: If nothing else, I might be able to just give you some direction so that you know how to move forward if you’re stuck. You can reach me at david.Tekyz.com.[51:37–51:48] David Hirschfeld: My company is Tekyz, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. So T-E-K-Y-Z.com, and you can reach me at david at tekyz.com. You can find me on LinkedIn.[51:48–52:01] David Hirschfeld: I’m all over LinkedIn. And I’ve got a podcast starting in the next week or two called Scaling Smarter. So I invite you to come listen. And I’m definitely going to have you on, Vitaly.[52:02–52:04] Witt Lershen: Okay, great. Looking forward to it.[52:05–52:05] David Hirschfeld: Thank you.[52:06–52:09] Witt Lershen: I really appreciate it. Thank you. We’ll stay in touch. Thank you.[52:09–52:11] David Hirschfeld: Definitely. Bye.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.How to Solve Real Problems and Build Winning Products with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Exploring AI in Software Development and Marketing](https://tekyz.com/exploring-ai-in-software-development-and-marketing-01109ba79297/) - Featured Image: Exploring AI — Software Development and MarketingAI is revolutionizing software development and marketing, with tools like Replit enhancing code development and AI-driven project estimation improving accuracy. David Hirschfeld emphasizes adopting a “clinician mindset” to test assumptions and refine product-market fit. In marketing, AI helps analyze customer data, personalize outreach, and optimize messaging. The healthcare sector is leveraging AI for virtual nurses, medical record analysis, and patient monitoring. Looking ahead, AI-driven personalization will reshape customer engagement.https://medium.com/media/735e8fd2839a8315920097aa9ddea7c8/hrefAI in Software Development and MarketingKey Points:Development Tools: AI tools like Replit help streamline code development by automating tasks.Startup Strategy: Startups should adopt a “clinician mindset” to refine product-market fit and personalise marketing.Healthcare: An “AI nurse” uses wearables to improve patient care, while AI analyses medical records for performance assessment.Marketing Personalisation: AI will increasingly tailor marketing messages based on customer online behaviour.AI’s Impact on Software Development: Current Tools and Future PredictionsDue to its AI-driven code development features, David favors Replit for building prototypes and software solutions. He recognizes that AI can't fully replace developers yet, but expects significant improvements in these tools as they evolve. He uses a surfing metaphor to show how AI transforms the professional landscape, stating that individuals must "paddle out hard" to keep up with the significant changes AI brings. AI is now used in code editors to assess, refine, and spot code vulnerabilities and automate documentation and project planning. His company is also developing an AI model to improve the accuracy and speed of project estimations.Interactive Report: AI Adoption in Marketing for 2025AI-Driven Marketing Strategies for StartupsThe discussion shifts to how marketers can leverage AI in product development, particularly for startups. David highlights that startups should adopt a “clinician mindset” to test their product assumptions and target market effectively. He states that AI can significantly enhance identifying the ideal customer profile by analyzing niches, scoring issues, and creating launch plans. AI helps startups gather information, extract insights, and formulate initial ideas about various niches, enabling them to refine their messaging and develop more effective MVPs. The goal is to create marketing outreach that feels personalized and relevant to each customer.Innovative AI Applications in HealthcareDavid shares examples of how his company implements AI in customer projects, particularly in the healthcare sector. An example is an "AI nurse" that monitors patients' wearable devices and reaches out to them when it detects unusual conditions. This AI nurse can engage in natural conversations, access medical history, schedule appointments, and even escalate emergencies. Another project aims to use AI to analyze medical records and evaluate healthcare professionals' performance, offering insights into efficiency, risk assessment, and patient care quality. These examples highlight the potential of AI to improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes.Personalization and the Future of AI MarketingThe conversation concludes with a discussion on the potential of AI to personalize marketing touchpoints. David imagines a future where AI analyzes a potential customer's online presence to create personalized marketing messages that address their needs and challenges. He also suggests the possibility of AI-powered voice assistants that can engage in sensitive and appropriate customer conversations.The discussion underscores the transformative potential of AI in both software development and marketing. AI is transforming how businesses function and engage with customers through tools for code development, personalized marketing, and innovative healthcare applications. Professionals must embrace AI, update their skills to stay competitive, and take advantage of its opportunities.[0:08–0:16] AI Voice: Welcome to AI Marketing, a podcast for sales and marketing professionals that want to increase their sales, leads, and conversions through the use of artificial intelligence solutions. And now, here’s your host, Mark Ferdinand.[0:20–0:29] Mark Fidelman: Wait until you see today’s episode, or should I say listen to today’s episode. We have a very special guest.[0:29–0:40] Mark Fidelman: His name is David Hirschfeld. We’re going to talk about AI in software development. Obviously, we’ll have quite a few marketing angles there. My name is Mark Fidelman.[0:40–0:47] Mark Fidelman: I’m your host of the AI Marketing Podcast. So let’s jump into this. David, could you briefly introduce yourself?[0:48–0:59] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, hi, and thanks, Mark, for having me on your show. I’m David Hirschfeld. I’ve been a software developer and a startup entrepreneur for over 35 years.Transform your business with Tekyz’s AI/ML solutions — start your development today![1:01–1:24] David Hirschfeld: And launching a software startup or scaling a software startup, you know, marketing is such a critical piece to that. And there’s a big difference, in my mind, marketing when you’re at the nascent trying to figure out how you’re going to launch a product versus you’re now figured out product market fit and who your ideal customer profile is, and now you’re scaling it.[1:24–1:34] David Hirschfeld: So that’s, you know, we build software. That’s what we do. And marketing is a big part of what we do. So that’s who I am.[1:34–1:45] Mark Fidelman: All right. Well, you know, I ask everybody this question, David. I’ll give you a little bit of prep on it, but tell us what your favorite AI tool is currently and why.[1:46–1:58] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So I’m using a tool called Replit for building prototypes and some point solution software stuff.[1:58–2:10] David Hirschfeld: It is a 100% AI-driven code development tool. I almost am reluctant to talk about it because I don’t want to replace myself, not yet, or my team.[2:12–2:23] David Hirschfeld: And it’s not good enough to do that yet. It’s actually still a ways from there, but it’s good enough to actually build stuff where three months ago, four months ago, nothing was good enough to do that at all.[2:23–2:36] David Hirschfeld: It just shows how fast things are evolving. And with the new release coming out of O3, I’m expecting an order of magnitude improvement on a lot of these things.[2:36–2:48] David Hirschfeld: So right now, that’s my favorite AI tool. I use so many AI tools. It’s hard to say what my favorite is. It depends on what I’m trying to accomplish at any one time, right?[2:48–2:49] David Hirschfeld: Well, yeah.[2:49–3:02] Mark Fidelman: I mean, I’ve got like 10, but, you know, I always have a favorite that I’m using currently at the time. So it’s good to hear about that one. And I’m sure a lot of marketers could find that useful if they’re prototyping.[3:02–3:05] Mark Fidelman: Is it a prototyping tool? Is that what I understand it to be?[3:05–3:13] David Hirschfeld: It’s actually a — you can build production applications to a limited degree with it. That’s what it’s for, is for generating code.[3:13–3:13] Mark Fidelman: It’s off for, right?[3:14–3:17] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, screens and database and functionality, the whole thing.[3:18–3:33] Mark Fidelman: Wow, wow. You know it’s only a matter of time before you’re doing and the AI marketing is doing what I’m doing. But I just think these are just new tools that we could use to do even more crazy, innovative, exceptional things for people.[3:33–3:44] David Hirschfeld: Right. They actually, you know, they create as much opportunity as anything else, right? As long as you’re flexible and willing to — so I kind of think of it like this.[3:44–3:59] David Hirschfeld: I live in the San Diego area, so I always use the surfing metaphor, right? You know, if you’re a beginner, you’re learning how to stand up on a board. When you become competent, then you’re consistently in the three- and five-foot waves.[3:59–4:13] David Hirschfeld: If you’re really exceptional at what you do, you’re surfing the 10-foot, really thick, fast waves, right? And that’s where a really exceptional team, marketing, development, whatever, that’s kind of what they’re doing.[4:13–4:27] David Hirschfeld: They’re standing on their boards, getting in the curl on these really big, scary waves. Well, there’s this 100-foot wave coming at all of us right now. You can see it out there. You know, you’re already starting to feel it lift your board up, and you’ve got one of two choices.[4:27–4:42] David Hirschfeld: You either have to paddle out into it, get up and stand up in the wave, and get on the very tip of your board and try to stay ahead of that crest. So you see this. There’s a 100-foot wave, and it’s coming at us, and nobody’s going to be able to slow this down.[4:42–5:05] David Hirschfeld: It’s just going to keep picking up speed as it gets closer. So you have one of two choices. You either sit there and wait for it to come, and it’s just going to wipe you away, as any 100-foot wave would do, or you paddle out really hard, paddle out to it, get up and stand up on your board in this wave, and get on the very tip of your board and just try to stay ahead of the crest of this wave.[5:06–5:13] David Hirschfeld: That’s how I see this change in everybody’s work and professional life because of AI.[5:13–5:34] Mark Fidelman: Okay. All right. Well, let’s jump into the main part of our program, which is talking about AI and software developments. So tell us, we’ve heard about this tool that you just mentioned, but let’s now bring it into full focus in terms of your overall approach using AI in software development.[5:34–5:40] Mark Fidelman: Where are we today? And then as a follow-up, where is this headed? What’s it going to look like in two years?[5:40–6:01] David Hirschfeld: Two years Oh God You know I don have I not I have to put on my wizard hat and a crystal ball for two years I didn used to have to do that I used to be able to predict it pretty solidly until a few years ago Yeah it going fast Yeah, it’s happening really fast.[6:01–6:12] David Hirschfeld: I do have some future predictions. We can talk about that later. But right now, we’re using it and it’s integrated into our code editors.[6:12–6:29] David Hirschfeld: It helps us evaluate the code that we’ve written, helps us refactor that code, which is a fancy way of saying rewrite it to make it more efficient. It helps identify vulnerabilities in our code to prevent hacking.[6:29–6:39] David Hirschfeld: And we do this in our code a lot, right? We write a lot of documentation now using AI and organize our planning with AI. There’s just a lot.[6:39–6:55] David Hirschfeld: It’s coming into a lot of different aspects of our workflow. For us, one of the things that we do really well is how we estimate projects, and we’re building an AI model for that.[6:55–7:10] David Hirschfeld: So that will actually even improve on how we estimate projects and also make the estimations happen a lot faster and more accurately. So that’s an example of some of the things that AI is impacting us right now.Interactive Report: AI Adoption in Marketing for 2025[7:12–7:31] Mark Fidelman: Wow. Okay. So, but how are you or how would marketers be using AI in product development? Let’s say they’re a product marketing manager and they’re putting the specifications and they want to build, you know, an application that solves their customers’ problems.[7:32–7:36] Mark Fidelman: Walk us through how a startup would do that with your approach.[7:37–7:52] David Hirschfeld: Okay. So the hardest thing, give a little context, the hardest thing for startups to do, well, the hardest thing for them to do is to get into a manager mindset or a clinician mindset.[7:52–8:13] David Hirschfeld: You know, startups are startups usually because somebody has a vision and they believe in their vision. And so — but the startups that are really successful are successful at basically removing that black robe and that belief in their product and putting on a white coat and being clinicians and testing every assumption they have.[8:14–8:48] David Hirschfeld: So one of the things that — so every founder, their first job when they’re starting — when they’re planning a product or planning to put a product in the market is to figure out, out of all the various niches that they might be able to market that product to and all of the problem statements that that product solves, which niche has the top one or two problems that have the highest perceived impact from the stakeholders that are going to buy that product and independently have the highest cost because of that impact.[8:49–9:04] David Hirschfeld: And figuring out who that is, there’s ways of doing it. It’s a very tedious process. Marketing companies historically are not as good at that as they are at once you understand who your ideal customer profile is and then a building on top of that.[9:05–9:35] David Hirschfeld: So doing that initial analytic work is really hard to do. It requires being in front of a lot of customers and consolidating and distilling out a lot of information from a lot of different sources and doing interviews to continually test your assumptions, not like a formal discovery interview process, but a continual iterative interview process focusing on who you’re speaking with in terms of what niche they’re in and if they’re a stakeholder in that niche,[9:35–10:10] David Hirschfeld: what position perspective do they come from because it’s going to be different in different niches, even for the same product. So AI is a huge value force multiplier here because with AI, it can help you figure out what that basically put together a whole planning regimen for you in terms of how to attack this, collect a lot of information and find sources for you, distill that information, and produce some initial assumptions for you in terms of the various different niches[10:10–10:20] David Hirschfeld: and scoring these different problems in terms of which ones are higher for which niches to determine where you should go. That’s the first thing.[10:20–10:30] David Hirschfeld: Then once you figure out who that early adopter niche is and who the stakeholder is and what the sales cycle is and the market size and all that, AI can help you put together a launch plan.[10:32–10:43] David Hirschfeld: In fact, I just saw a video from a marketing product manager that went through a whole AI workflow doing exactly what I just talked about, and it was really impressive.[10:43–10:46] Mark Fidelman: Could you send me that link, and we’ll put it in the show notes?[10:47–10:50] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, if you remind me, send me an email afterwards to remind me.[10:50–10:51] Mark Fidelman: Yeah, I will.[10:51–10:59] David Hirschfeld: Because by the time we finish this discussion, and we’ll have probably talked about half a dozen other things and I’ll forget. All right. Yeah.[11:00–11:18] Mark Fidelman: Okay. Absolutely. Yeah, so you’re using AI not just to create the applications but to build in some sort of a marketing launch plan and to go and look at your target audience and what they’re saying and what they’re talking about so that you build a better product or MVP up front, it sounds like.[11:19–11:39] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah. Well, the idea is whether the MVP is better or not, It’s going to sell better because it’s so much better targeted. The messaging is better. The idea, you know, who to speak to, how to speak to them in a way that they lean forward because they recognize you understand what they’re struggling with and you have a way to fix it.[11:40–12:03] David Hirschfeld: And, yes, it’s just better in so many ways. The actual product we building may or may not be better hopefully it better but definitely we can get it done faster than we could previously and we can validate the quality with less effort than we did previously But we still have a lot to do a lot of the hard work.[12:03–12:19] David Hirschfeld: It’s not automating all of that yet, but it really makes a big difference in the analysis and planning and organizing stage of things, both in development and marketing, you know, every part of that launch lifecycle.[12:20–12:20] David Hirschfeld: Okay.[12:20–12:43] Mark Fidelman: And so when you’re building this software application, you’re using AI, you’re using it in a traditional way for sure. Is there any kind of AI applications that you’re embedding into the software that you’re creating in order to infuse AI into the software development of the platform or application that you’re creating.[12:43–12:45] Mark Fidelman: Again, I’m not a programmer. Right.[12:46–12:57] David Hirschfeld: So are you asking from how we’re using it in terms of accelerating the programming or are you asking it in terms of using, implementing AI in our customer projects?[12:57–13:14] Mark Fidelman: Yeah, because implementing AI is part of their customer application. Let’s just say you’re building eBay today. You know, you infuse it with AI either to create better bidding strategies or to help people find things better or, you know, whatever it is.[13:14–13:16] Mark Fidelman: Is that something that you’re doing as well?[13:17–13:20] David Hirschfeld: Every single project we’re involved with, yeah.[13:20–13:26] Mark Fidelman: And what are the more innovative ones that you’ve seen without revealing their names unless you’re able to?[13:26–13:43] David Hirschfeld: One of our clients is in health care, and their focus is to bring health care support to vulnerable populations, like people on Medicaid and indigent people and things like that.[13:43–13:54] David Hirschfeld: And one way they’re doing that is by creating an AI nurse that can call the patient. They can monitor their wearable devices like a watch.[13:54–14:09] David Hirschfeld: Wow. And then when there’s any kind of outlier conditions, call the patient to check in with them to say, hey, I noticed your heart. And it’s like talking to a real nurse. It’s not like talking to, you know, you can interrupt them and they say, I’m sorry, what were you saying?[14:10–14:15] David Hirschfeld: Oh, you’re right. And it’s literally a conversation. So that’s an example.[14:15–14:21] Mark Fidelman: Is it anything like ChatGPT voice? I mean, that thing is pretty incredible.[14:21–14:47] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, it’s very much like that, except that this nurse knows your medical history and knows everything about health care, you know, related to you. So and can schedule appointments with your doctor and can connect you, that person, with somebody in an emergency situation or determine, you know, triage that this is something that needs to be escalated immediately.[14:49–14:59] David Hirschfeld: That’s one use case for this nurse. There’s so many. That client just raised $5 million, as you can imagine. They’re on a rocket ship right now.[14:59–15:13] Mark Fidelman: Well, I love that approach, especially the monitoring, you know, whether it’s your watch or your ring or whatever it is that you have. And I’m hoping more of these inputs are introduced into the home and on the individual as much as possible.[15:14–15:29] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, me too. How nice would that be if you’re going to see a doctor for the first time and you just tap on the app and you say, Claire, would you please send my new doctor my medical history?[15:29–15:32] David Hirschfeld: And she says, sure. What’s his fax number?[15:33–15:39] Mark Fidelman: Yeah, well, hopefully you’re not using faxes, but how about they just know it already? How about they just know it already because it’s there?[15:39–15:50] David Hirschfeld: The reason I said that is because I was connecting with a new doctor who we need to get my medical records to this doctor, and they said, make sure to give them our fax number.[15:50–15:55] David Hirschfeld: This was just this week. I said, pardon me, facts. Did you really say facts?[15:55–16:04] Mark Fidelman: And that’s the only reason I said facts. I don’t think I’d be using that, doctor. That’s just me. I mean, what other tools are that antiquated?[16:06–16:26] David Hirschfeld: It’s weird. You know, when it comes to health care professionals, people with a lot of experience have certain intuition about your health condition, if they’re really good, which you don’t have when you’re only 10 years experience, but you develop it over another 20 or 30, even though they still think fax is the way to get the medical records.[16:26–16:36] David Hirschfeld: They can walk in the room, look at you, you know, they get a scent of something, and they can see a certain color on your skin, and they immediately blink.[16:36–16:40] David Hirschfeld: They know something needs to be addressed that you might not have known yourself.[16:40–16:57] Mark Fidelman: I think that is very true. I’d also say that the older these professionals get, according to my research, and what I’ve seen is the more they get lazy and they’re not doing as much for you that they should, whether it’s follow-up or, you know, really taking the time to understand what you have in a more –[16:57–17:02] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, there’s definitely that. There’s no question. But not with everybody, right?[17:02–17:10] Mark Fidelman: But that makes the case for AI because if you have an AI helping that doctor, they could be incredibly effective.[17:10–17:23] David Hirschfeld: Oh, that’s another AI project. And it happens to also be in health care with a client where they basically do reviews of medical records from health care organizations.[17:24–17:56] David Hirschfeld: So, you know, a doctor has their progress notes with all their patients. And so they’ll take a random sample of those, you know, the medical history of the various patients from that doctor, And then they use AI to then do an initial review of how that doctor has assessed that patient health over a period of time and then grades it on various different factors scores it in terms of efficiency and risk assessment[17:56–18:19] David Hirschfeld: and efficacy from a patient care perspective and things like that, and then sends it to an actual doctor who is virtually available, but it’s a real doctor who then reviews the initial review, reviews the summary of all of these records, which is also an AI activity, and then does their own independent scoring.[18:19–18:30] David Hirschfeld: So that’s — and with the idea that these healthcare organizations need to know how well their healthcare professionals are effectively treating patients.Transform your business with Tekyz’s AI solutions. Contact us today to get started![18:30–18:41] David Hirschfeld: It’s not always obvious just from looking at how things are being built. But it’s very obvious if you read all these notes, and the medical history of one patient might be 70 pages.[18:41–18:48] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a daunting task if you don’t have something like AI to be able to absorb all that information and make sense of it.[18:49–19:03] Mark Fidelman: Yeah, I mean, in my case, I’ve been to so many different types of doctors and institutions that there’s no way they’re looking at all of that in aggregate. So hopefully the AI can pull all that information in from a variety of sources.[19:03–19:06] Mark Fidelman: Because I’m not sure because of HIPAA laws they’re sharing that stuff, are they?[19:07–19:32] David Hirschfeld: Well, they can share it with each other without — They know about each other. Right, exactly. So it’s still up to the patient to know who they’ve seen in the past so that they can have that healthcare professional get their medical history or to have a primary care doctor, even if that changes over time, that keeps track of their medical history from all the different doctors they’ve been to, right?[19:32–19:44] David Hirschfeld: That’s what your primary care doctor should be doing if they’re good and if you’ve given them access to previous health care history. But it’s not a good — we don’t have a good system.[19:44–19:53] David Hirschfeld: HIPAA was a big mistake the way they did HIPAA. So that’s a whole other podcast with this probably a host, right? All right.[19:53–20:11] Mark Fidelman: Well, we have to wrap things up, but I want to go back to what you guys do and fill in some of the blanks specifically around AI or AI product marketing that you guys do and focus on that we all should know about as marketers.[20:12–20:40] David Hirschfeld: Well, to me, the most exciting part of product marketing regarding in terms of what AI is doing is giving us the ability now to personalize every touchpoint with a prospective customer, right, even on mass marketing with the idea that everybody who’s in your target market has some kind of social footprint someplace.[20:40–21:08] David Hirschfeld: You know, there’s some history that’s available somewhere about them that lets you learn enough about who they are and what they struggle with and what matters to them that as you’re marketing a product, you can create outreach touch points that make that person feel like you really know who they are, which, of course, causes them to then click on the thing and react to the thing because you’re speaking directly to them and you’re speaking to everybody individually.[21:08–21:22] David Hirschfeld: You know that — did you have a teacher when you were in lower elementary or higher elementary that if they felt like they were — you were the only student because they really understood you and they were — everything they taught was focused on you?[21:23–21:33] David Hirschfeld: Most people have had that kind of experience maybe once in some grade in their life. Yeah. AI has the ability to make all of your marketing outreach feel that way.[21:34–21:36] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. To me, that’s really exciting.[21:37–21:51] Mark Fidelman: I agree. I agree. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show and taking us in directions we normally don’t go, but it’s fascinating to me, especially on the health care side. So where can people reach you?[21:51–22:10] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Oh, and the final thing on that is imagine if you had AI marketing outreach that was a voice like this nurse, right? But it was really sensitive and appropriate and, you know, somebody you actually might want to talk to when you pick up the phone.[22:10–22:22] David Hirschfeld: Anyway, they can reach. So let’s talk about me. Enough about me. Let’s talk about me. They can reach me at david at Tekyz.com. That’s my company is Tekyz.com.[22:23–22:41] David Hirschfeld: Tekyz is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. so you can reach me from my email or find me on LinkedIn David Hirschfeld I’m easy to find on LinkedIn or search for Tekyz on LinkedIn Mark I really appreciate it[22:41–22:58] Mark Fidelman: I appreciate you being on the show and as a reminder please share this podcast with people that are interested in AI marketing specifically or in this case have a development project that they’re looking to develop using AI.[22:58–23:17] Mark Fidelman: I’m sure it cuts down the cost and improves the sales. I could just see it knowing how advanced AI is becoming and will become. So with that, I appreciate you again and look forward to talking to you in the future about your next level of AI and software development.[23:18–23:20] Mark Fidelman: So thanks again.[23:20–23:21] David Hirschfeld: Thank you, Mark.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld’s LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Exploring AI in Software Development and Marketing was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Talking Future Custom AI Software with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/talking-future-custom-ai-software-with-david-hirschfeld-ad5a3f424ac9/) - Featured Image: Talking Future Custom AI Software with David HirschfeldIn this episode, Adam, CIO of NIDIS, chats with David Hirschfeld, founder of Tekyz, about the transformative impact of AI on software development and the future of work. With over 35 years of experience, David shares insights on adopting AI-driven strategies, the importance of agentic workflows, and transitioning developers from coders to strategic AI guides. He highlights real-world AI applications, such as an AI-powered nurse reducing healthcare costs, and emphasizes the need for continuous learning to stay ahead.https://medium.com/media/3b31888d69315852bfcba32b5cf868ef/hrefThe AI Tsunami is Here — Are You Ready to Surf?The world of software development is changing at warp speed, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. What was innovative yesterday is obsolete today. CIO and co-founder of NIDIS, Adam and David Hirschfeld of Techies, discuss how AI is not just a trend but a fundamental shift that developers must embrace to stay relevant. Are you ready to paddle out and ride the AI wave, or will you be swept away?RAG Models and Agentic Workflows: The New Frontier of AI DevelopmentDavid Hirschfeld explains how the landscape has shifted from needing multiple machine learning models to leveraging large language models (LLMs) with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) →. RAG models, combined with agentic workflows, are becoming essential for creating sophisticated and specialized AI solutions →.RAG vs. Fine-tuning: Techies uses both RAG and fine-tuning, depending on the project’s complexity. Fine-tuning has limitations in expertise, while RAG models offer greater control over the LLM’s knowledge and parameters.Agentic Workflows: Agentic workflows are becoming easier to implement and are crucial for automating complex tasks.Internal Tooling: Techies are building tools to facilitate agentic workflows, emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement and automation.From Coders to AI Guides: Rethinking the Role of the DeveloperThe traditional role of a coder is evolving. Developers must shift their mindset from writing code to guiding and building AI tools. As Adam puts it, it’s about hiring people more intelligent than yourself.Automating the Mundane: The focus should be on automating repetitive tasks to free up developers for critical thinking and creative problem-solving.Building Scalable Microservices: Techies builds everything in microservices to ensure scalability and adaptability, even for MVPs. They are even exploring AI models for generating microservices.The Stand-up Agent: Techies are developing an AI-powered “stand-up agent” to automate daily stand-up meetings, freeing up valuable time for developers. This agent will analyze JIRA tickets, emails, and other data to provide a concise summary of progress, dependencies, and roadblocks.AI in Action: Proactive Healthcare with AI NursesDavid shares a compelling example of AI in healthcare: an AI-powered chat and voice nurse developed for Drive Health. This “Nurse Lara” proactively contacts Medicaid patients to ensure they take their medications and manage their health.Proactive Healthcare: The AI nurse can make thousands of calls simultaneously, providing personalized support and guidance to patients.Addressing Healthcare Disparities: This technology can help bridge the gap in healthcare access and improve outcomes for underserved populations.Real-world Impact: The AI nurse is already living and making a difference in patient care.The Double-Edged Sword: AI’s Potential Downsides and How to Mitigate ThemWhile AI offers immense potential, it also presents challenges. Adam raises concerns about the potential for technology to “dumb down” society and erode critical thinking skills.The Crutch vs. the Tool: It’s crucial to use AI to enhance our abilities, not as a crutch that replaces them.Combating Addiction: Be mindful of the addictive nature of social media and online games and set boundaries to protect your time and focus.Embrace and Adapt: The key is to embrace AI and adapt to the changing landscape while remaining mindful of its potential downsides.Staying Ahead of the AI CurveThe AI revolution is here, transforming software development and many other industries. Developers can stay ahead of the curve by embracing RAG models, agentic workflows, and a new mindset focused on guiding AI. While it’s essential to be aware of the potential downsides of AI, the opportunities for innovation and efficiency are too great to ignore. As David Hirschfeld aptly puts it, we need to “paddle out to it and get up on your board into the curl of that wave, and you stand in the very tip of your board trying to stay ahead of it so it’s not crashing over you”.Chapters00:00 Intro00:47 Career beginnings and embracing AI over the years07:02 Clients and businesses Tekyz caters to09:32 Using AI for development15:02 Reinventing operations for development19:17 Tekyz recent projects26:54 Learn more about Tekyz28:53 Gardening and how AI will save us much time33:10 Recent AI developments35:50 Technology’s Impact on Intelligence40:27 A hundred-foot wave coming at ushttps://medium.com/media/8adcd561d076f06fe792469b7acfde66/href[0:00–0:11] Adam: Hey everybody, welcome back to the NIDIS Anarchy Series.[0:11–0:23] Adam: I’m your host, Adam, CIO and co-founder of NIDIS. And today I am here with David Hirschfeld of Tekyz. And I’m really excited to have you because we’ve already been having a conversation up this point just about AI and where the world is.[0:23–0:32] Adam: So I can already tell you, this is going to be a fun one. So David, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate your time and really looking forward to hear more about kind of what you’re doing in the realm of AI and ML.[0:33–0:46] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, and thanks, Adam. I really appreciate you having me on the show. And, yeah, we had to literally stop, you know, the conversation, the pre-conversation, because we could have gone on for like an hour and then never done the show.[0:46–0:58] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah, and I’ve been in software for 35-plus years, and I’ve worked with tons of startups. For the last 17 years, I’ve had my company, Tekyz, we do custom software development.[0:58–1:13] David Hirschfeld: So I’ve worked with lots of startups and lots of scale-ups. And what I’ve found now since AI has basically, you know, landed, because AI has been around for a while.[1:13–1:28] David Hirschfeld: And I was playing around with TensorFlow when TensorFlow first came out. I think it was 2013 or something like, you know, in that time frame. When that was released, I started building machine learning models that way.[1:28–1:40] David Hirschfeld: Oh, wow. It wasn’t any major heavy commercial thing, but I just was learning, you know, it fascinated me. Right, quite real, but figuring it out. Yeah, it was consumable neural networks at that point, right?[1:41–1:44] : And it was more than just the neural networks.[1:45–2:00] David Hirschfeld: But then, of course, things evolved really fast after that. And then this concept of the large language models came out, you know, I don’t know exactly when that was, 2017 or 18, but nobody knew about this, right?[2:00–2:16] David Hirschfeld: But that was when they first started to experiment with getting natural language out of this. And then I read an article in Scientific America about a year, nine months or a year before ChatGPT came out.[2:16–2:27] David Hirschfeld: and the article was written by OpenAI about OpenAI. And that really woke me up about how much the state of the art has evolved.[2:27–2:50] David Hirschfeld: And so we started kind of embracing it at that point. And then, of course, ChatGPT comes out, and now AI is consumable by everybody. And the thing that was so dramatic to me about this movement is that, You have one AI that basically turns everything into words and language.[2:51–3:01] David Hirschfeld: So it turns video, it turns any kind of pattern recognition, images, music. Everything becomes a language.[3:01–3:21] David Hirschfeld: And so you’ve got this one model that actually can interpret and produce content in all of these different media, all looking at everything as just a word and making the next prediction of that word, you know, translating it all into a language.[3:23–3:43] David Hirschfeld: So instead of having to have all these different ML models, machine learning models, which was prior to that, Now you don’t really. You have RAG augmented models, right, where you’re still informing the large language model, like an OpenAI or a Cloud or whatever you’re using.[3:43–3:52] David Hirschfeld: You’re informing it with this vector database that you’ve built around content that’s specialized in the thing that you wanted to focus on. But you’re still –[3:52–3:55] Adam: For your clients, do you focus more on the RAG side or fine-tuning?[3:58–4:16] David Hirschfeld: It’s both. You’re right. I don’t know that I focus on one or the other. It depends on what the problem statement is. So, I mean, if we can do it with fine-tuning, we’ll do that. But if it’s a more sophisticated specialty, then we’re going to build a rag model for it.[4:16–4:42] David Hirschfeld: Because, you know, fine-tuning has a certain level of limitation in terms of how expert you can make the fine-tuning model. So with a RAG model, you can really control how it’s informing the LLM and restrict the LLM in terms of what it’s going to talk about and its level of expertise and build a lot more parameters around it.[4:42–4:53] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah, it’s a blend of both. And then, of course, the big thing for us is not only RAG, but also the agentic workflow. Because they’re using agentic workflows.[4:54–5:04] David Hirschfeld: Oh, yeah, yeah. And we’ve been using them and developing expertise around that over the last year, really. Okay.[5:05–5:09] David Hirschfeld: But really, especially in the last few months because it’s becoming so much easier.[5:10–5:20] Adam: And are you using any systems like Crew AI or open source systems, or have you developed your own for developing agents? How do you introduce agentic models into your LLMs for clients?[5:20–5:42] David Hirschfeld: well we were building our own honestly I can’t tell you what tools that we’re using for the for the agentic workflows because my developers are using it implemented I don’t remember what the current but we are definitely using tools to help us[5:42–5:45] Adam: you’re following business rule number one hire people smarter than yourself[5:45–5:58] David Hirschfeld: I mean oh that is my mantra too if they’re not smarter than me, I’m not going to hire them. And if somebody that works for me is hiring somebody, they better be smarter than them. Or don’t waste your time.Propel your business forward with Tekyz innovative solutions. Start your journey today![5:58–6:08] David Hirschfeld: Because otherwise, you end up having to profit yourself and support them. Right, exactly. You can’t relinquish control and know who you’re going to actually…[6:08–6:22] David Hirschfeld: So my job, if I’m building my teams correctly, is to sweep things out of the way of all these people that are so much better than me at what they’re doing. Right? And just keep the impediments out of the way and also build scaffolding for them.[6:22–6:56] David Hirschfeld: So all the automation, automated systems internally, procedures and protocols, so that they can be critical thinkers and be creative and build, but still do it in a way so we can still deal with all of our compliance requirements and standardization and all sleep at night because things that are being built are secure, secure, the vulnerability is controlled, right, and that we’re accountable for everything we’re doing so we can communicate easily about where we are and where we’re going with customers[6:56–7:01] David Hirschfeld: on a daily, weekly basis. So that’s my job. It used to be my job.[7:02–7:08] Adam: Yeah, go ahead. So for Tekyz, what’s kind of your main business? Like what’s your main kind of client and business that you go after?[7:08–7:37] David Hirschfeld: My main business is basically doing custom software development for startups and scale-ups. And some of these are what I call recovery projects where we’ll take it over from another development company where they might have started with a company that was inexpensive, but then they realize that they struggle to get things done.[7:37–7:50] David Hirschfeld: And, you know, something that was supposed to be three months and a year and a half later, they still have something very buggy and it’s not done. And we love those projects because people recognize how different we are from who they’ve worked with in the past.[7:51–8:06] David Hirschfeld: In fact, if you go to my website, you’ll see at the top it says Hyper Exceptional Software Development Team. That’s literally the branding statement at the top of it. And when I talk to somebody, I say, you know, I don’t expect you to believe that we’re exceptional.[8:06–8:20] David Hirschfeld: I expect you to ask me for evidence what we do that’s exceptional. And I love to show people because we do things that are — there are a small number of teams that do these things consistently like we do.[8:20–8:42] David Hirschfeld: There are other teams, but there’s just a few. The reason there’s not a lot is because it’s hard to build all the systems in place, to develop the culture, to create the automation, to support the process, and to develop your own set of skills internally about how you continually improve and deliver.[8:42–8:52] David Hirschfeld: Like, for example, because that’s a lot of words again. Like, when we do project estimates, we break those project estimates down into a tremendous amount of detail.[8:53–9:14] David Hirschfeld: And we do this on our own dime when it’s a new customer, and it’s a lot of work. And when I talk with other development firms, because I like to network with other development firms because I get insights from them, and if I can help and coach them, I’m happy to coach them in terms of building culture and teams.[9:14–9:25] David Hirschfeld: And they say, yeah, yeah, we do a really good job on estimating, too. And they say, tell me about your estimating. And I said, let me just show you. And then I show them, and then they always say, oh, no, we’re not.[9:25–9:32] David Hirschfeld: Our estimates are nothing like yours because we want to be accurate in our estimates.[9:32–9:38] Adam: Do you encourage your staff to use AI during development, with development, like to augment it?[9:38–9:52] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, well, yes, we are doing that more and more. In fact, I have a big team meeting next week where I’m going to start to really lean on the team to get outside the box in terms of how they’re using AI.[9:53–10:01] David Hirschfeld: We’ve had several of these meetings. this one’s going to be even more so just because the state of the art is moving so darn fast.[10:02–10:12] Adam: It’s crazy. It’s like as soon as you think you’ve got some new tool comes out this is amazing, it’s mind-blowing, it’s going to change the world and then two weeks later it’s obsolete because something else came out that replaced it.[10:14–10:23] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. Right. Yeah. In that exact example, what you just said I played, I was three weeks ago, a tool called Bolt three or four weeks ago I’d come out.[10:23–10:25] Adam: Actually, I just did a demo on that tool.[10:27–10:38] David Hirschfeld: Okay, right. And I was playing with it, and I thought, wow, this is amazing. But, you know, there’s points which it just really struggles, you know, as you’re trying to get things, especially when I added a dictionary behind it, right?[10:38–10:48] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. And then I was in a podcast interview with another CTO. I was telling him about Bolt and how just, like, this is the world is changing really fast.[10:48–11:00] David Hirschfeld: And he said, yeah, have you tried Replit? R-E-P-L.I-P-L. Replit, yeah. And he said, well, actually, try that. You know, I think that’s what I’ve been using, and I think it’s better than Bolt.[11:00–11:24] David Hirschfeld: And he hadn’t used Bolt much, but I said, okay, fine. So I had spent like four or five hours on Bolt building trying to build a simple application you know with a database that had a database behind it and all that and it was running into a lot of problems So then I went over to Replit and I said okay I just start over it and see what it like with Replit And oh my God this tool is way better So now Bolt may be just as good now.[11:24–11:28] David Hirschfeld: That was already three weeks ago, which is like dog years and working time.[11:28–11:36] Adam: Have you played with Windsurf or Cursor, the IDEs? The what? Say that again? Windsurf or Cursor, have you played with either of those IDEs?[11:37–11:48] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. I haven’t. My team is a cursor pretty solidly for doing development. But I really want them to stop thinking of themselves as coders.[11:50–12:04] David Hirschfeld: Right. That’s not going to go away, right? But they need to stop thinking like that. They need to start thinking like they need to figure out how to be brilliant about guiding AI tools and building AI tools.[12:04–12:14] David Hirschfeld: Like, for example, we want to build — one of our projects is to build a — we have several different internal projects with AI right now.[12:15–12:30] David Hirschfeld: One is that estimation process where we’ve been working on this for months to build a RAG model that mimics our estimation process and actually improves on it. And then we’ll turn that into a SaaS product because everybody I show it to, they all say, I need that.[12:30–12:53] David Hirschfeld: we’ve got a niche analysis tool a niche analysis methodology for startups that are in the very earliest phases but it’s a very tedious process very metrics driven and so we’re building an AI model for that on the coding side where was I going with this?[12:53–12:53] David Hirschfeld: cursor?[12:56–13:00] Adam: they’re not engineers anymore Oh, right. Don’t think like a developer.[13:01–13:12] David Hirschfeld: Right. So one of the things that there’s a few things we — you know, we always try to automate everything internally so that we can just focus on the things where, you know, their expertise is really needed.[13:13–13:28] David Hirschfeld: So with — so one of the things is we build everything to be scalable. It’s part of our DNA. We’ve really pushed the envelope on this so that everybody — it’s kind of like doing compliance.[13:29–13:41] David Hirschfeld: Everybody has to understand how they can be in compliance, whether it’s SOC 2 or whether it’s HIPAA or whatever it is. And there has to be a culture around that so that it just is a natural thing that’s done.[13:41–13:52] David Hirschfeld: And the tools have to be in place to make it as easy as possible because nobody wants to do those activities, right? The same thing with automation, with automating different steps in our process.[13:52–14:16] David Hirschfeld: One of those things is in our DNA we build everything in microservices, right, so that we can be generalized. And that way we can easily build things that will run in a Lambda or cloud-run environment if it’s a function that’s going to have a really wild, high, low demand, right, that the client can figure that.[14:16–14:26] David Hirschfeld: And that’s just natural for us now. But it was not easy to get there, you know, getting away from building components and everything being independent and being service-based.[14:27–14:43] David Hirschfeld: But now we do it even on our MVPs. Well, at least we used to. I think that’s going to change really quick. So one of the things that we’re going to be doing is building an AI model for generating microservices instead of us building these microservices.[14:43–14:53] David Hirschfeld: Because there’s all lots of things that they always do the same that’s fairly common. and then the business rules are different and when they’re going to communicate and what the interface is. So how are you building these custom models?[14:56–15:11] David Hirschfeld: Let’s have another show in three weeks and I can back it out. Okay. No problem. The other one is that we’re, this just came up because we’re starting to think, how do we reinvent ourselves?[15:12–15:24] David Hirschfeld: And the way we do it is we start thinking in terms of the agents that we need, that we need to be able to communicate with that will do things for us. So another one of these is stand-up agent.[15:25–15:36] David Hirschfeld: So every day we have our stand-ups, right, in our different teams. And if they’re super efficiently run, then they take 10, 15 minutes to get through.[15:36–15:57] David Hirschfeld: But it’s hard to run them really efficiently because people feel like it’s a waste of time if they don’t get to talk about, if they don’t get to address the thing that, or if they didn’t complete their list of all the things they did yesterday and what they’re going to work on today and what their dependencies are, then the Scrum Master is saying, okay, well, you know, it wasn’t their dependency.[15:57–16:12] David Hirschfeld: You didn’t mention that. Is that still the dependency? You know, so it’s a lot of team time, right? And it’s a good opportunity for everybody to get together, but it’s not valuable time for them to talk with each other from that.[16:12–16:35] David Hirschfeld: So we’re thinking, why don’t we build a scrum agent? Or is that a daily stand-up agent that goes out and looks at what the stand-up was for yesterday for each person, looks at all their JIRA tickets, looks at the emails, and sees any additional conversation that happened that may not have gotten documented, and then consolidates it all into what I did yesterday, what I’m working on next.Infographic: How Artificial Intelligence Works — 6 Simple steps to Master AI[16:36–16:47] David Hirschfeld: Here’s my dependencies, new dependencies or existing dependencies. Here’s the dependencies that have been addressed. And then it’s an event, and it’s presented to the person.[16:48–17:00] David Hirschfeld: How are they reading through the e-mails? Because our e-mails are all in Tekyz domain, so we can build this to do that, and then they have to accept that it can see their e-mails.[17:01–17:05] David Hirschfeld: Oh, I got you. We haven’t built this yet. This is something that just came up this week. I love this idea.[17:05–17:16] Adam: Because everyone hates stand-up. Especially from, like, a developer engineer. It’s like, oh, hey, I’m going to sit in this call for the next half hour, sometimes an hour. I don’t know how a stand-up can go over half hour.[17:16–17:26] Adam: It’s crazy. But it’s like you’re really just listening to everyone else tell one person what they’re doing and what’s going on. And then you get to your point. You’re like, yes, I have no roadblocks. I’m working on ticket number 1234.[17:27–17:34] Adam: Yep, I’m still making progress. That’s about it, thanks. It’s like there goes a half hour of the morning when I could be working on something.[17:34–17:34] David Hirschfeld: I know.[17:34–17:37] Adam: And then someone asks you a question like, blah, blah, blah, blah.[17:37–17:38] David Hirschfeld: And you’re afraid not to do it.[17:38–17:43] Adam: What do you think about that? And you’re like, I wasn’t listening, but you don’t want to say that. I know.[17:43–17:44] David Hirschfeld: Exactly.[17:44–17:50] Adam: And the PM can just get a list. Like, hey, look, here’s everything. First thing in the morning. You don’t even have to interrupt everybody.[17:51–18:04] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. So, but I still think that contact with the rest of the team is important. So, I want to take, so if we can get this to work, this is going to be kind of a high priority initiative probably in January.[18:04–18:20] David Hirschfeld: if we can get this to work really well. And then, of course, it’ll show you, then in those stand-ups, it’s going to say here’s all the other people with their daily stand-ups that are working on things that have some kind of dependency or impact with you.[18:20–18:27] David Hirschfeld: And so you just look at those, and then you just check off, yes, yes, that’s all correct. No, that’s not correct. You miss a dependency.[18:28–18:31] Adam: You’re more like an attestation. You’re identity-governancing your stand-ups.[18:32–18:48] David Hirschfeld: Five minutes before the stand-up. Then we get into the stand-up and we have an AI stand-up because I don’t want to have this dumb stand-up stuff anymore. We’ve been doing it forever. I don’t want to miss it because you need that, but it doesn’t need to be done in that modality.[18:48–19:00] David Hirschfeld: So instead we’ll have an AI stand-up. Okay, what are you doing to push our AI agenda? What new things are you — how are you using AI in development? What are you doing that’s new that you didn’t do yesterday?[19:00–19:16] David Hirschfeld: What are you planning on doing that maybe you haven’t had time to start yet, but you’re going to do it, right? And why haven’t you, if you haven’t? Maybe there’s a client initiative that’s preventing you from being able to even look at anything new because you’ve got a critical deliverable.[19:16–19:17] David Hirschfeld: And that’s fine.[19:18–19:25] Adam: What’s one of the cool AI things you’re developing for clients? Like what’s kind of stuff you’ve kind of already done and put out there?[19:26–19:38] David Hirschfeld: So we have a client in healthcare. and they basically have created an AI voice, AI chat and voice nurse.[19:39–19:56] David Hirschfeld: Oh, wow. And their clients are hospital systems, state Medicaid. I mean, this is not like a personal nurse. It could be, but that’s not their market. And the big business model here, and I can say who they are, are the companies drive health.[19:56–20:29] David Hirschfeld: I like to promote them because I just think what they’re doing is great so let’s say somebody’s on Medicaid in fact they have a contract with one of the states I don’t want to say who the state is because that’s they’re just in the beginning implementing that but for a state Medicaid so the state has Medicaid right and the problem with people that are on Medicaid is they’re more in the survival mode because they don’t have a lot of money they’re probably working a couple jobs[20:29–20:56] David Hirschfeld: or they’re older and they don’t have enough retirement money so they’re on Medicaid and they’re probably not very focused on their health needs the way that people that are better well healed typically are so they go to the clinic when they’re sick they get a prescription of something they don’t fill the prescription or if they fill it they don’t take the prescription.[20:57–21:07] David Hirschfeld: And there’s no way for Medicaid to monitor this. But what happens is then some severe thing happens as a result of them not taking care of their health properly. And now they’re in[21:07–21:09] : the emergency room driving health care[21:09–21:20] David Hirschfeld: costs up for this day dramatically. So this nurse is going to basically say, did you feel you were calling you that day or the next day? Hi, John.[21:21–21:31] David Hirschfeld: This is your mom. This is Nurse Lara. is this John? Yeah, this is John. What can I do for you?[21:31–21:43] David Hirschfeld: And you can talk to this nurse just like a normal person and say, well, I saw that you got prescribed medication yesterday. I want to make sure that you filled that prescription.[21:44–21:56] David Hirschfeld: Maybe they’re in a system where Nurse Claire doesn’t have access to the system, although she does have access to a lot of it. She may say, I see you filled your prescription yesterday. Good job on taking care of your health.[21:56–22:01] David Hirschfeld: You want to make sure you’re taking your meds. You’re supposed to take them three times a day.[22:01–22:05] Adam: Do you have reminders like, hey, do you want me to send you a text every time you’re supposed to take care of your biotic?[22:05–22:16] David Hirschfeld: That’s cool. Right. Did you take your med this morning? Yes. No, I didn’t. You know, okay, well, you really should, and here’s why. Because if you don’t, it could cause you to be a lot of sick. That’s pretty smart.[22:16–22:35] David Hirschfeld: Let me explain more about this condition right and then say would you like me to actually send you a text reminder or give you a call when it time for you to take your meds And then if I do then I need you to promise me that you respond Let me know that you did or not so that I can kind of keep track of it and help you be healthier.[22:36–22:49] David Hirschfeld: Right? And then they go, I’m not, you know, I don’t know. You know, it’s hard for me to take my meds. I have a lot of trouble remembering. Plus, I just, you know, I’m going into bankruptcy or whatever. And she’ll start to talk with them.[22:49–23:20] David Hirschfeld: Oh, it’s hard to hear that. sounds terrible. Tell me more about, you know, and you can now have somebody to talk to. So, yeah, that’s an example. Or somebody leaving the emergency, leaving a hospital stay and going into long-term care, like somebody had a really bad accident, you know, and they go into a long-term care facility. And that transition process, which is typically done by nurses or medical assistants, which they are so understaffed in hospitals to do this stuff, right, to make that phone call.[23:20–23:30] David Hirschfeld: Now, when Nurse Claire calls them, say, hi, I know you’re transitioning from the hospital, and I just want to help make this process easier for you. Do you have a few minutes?[23:31–23:35] David Hirschfeld: Right, and then they can ask her anything about the transition. She’ll know everything about their health.[23:35–23:37] Adam: Is this live now? Are people using it?[23:38–23:49] David Hirschfeld: This is live now, yeah. That’s awesome. It’s new. It is very new, but it is live now. That’s very cool. I love the idea of proactive health. Now there’s — it can make 1,000 calls, right, at the same time.[23:50–24:03] David Hirschfeld: Nurse Clara can be on all these calls all at the same time, whereas the hospital may have two or three people dedicated, and they don’t get to those people, and they leave, and then those people are calling the hospital with questions because they don’t know what’s going on, things like that.[24:03–24:27] David Hirschfeld: So this is like — it’s so obvious how valuable this is, right? Right. And there’s a million things like this that people can conceptualize and start to execute on, like even the things that we’re doing, you know, for software development, like the stand-up, right?[24:27–24:30] David Hirschfeld: Right. Stand-up. Yeah. I think that’s awesome.[24:30–24:52] Adam: I think that’s very — I love the idea of proactive health care. I love the idea of making monotonous things way more efficient. I think that’s where AI is really going to excel. And just overall world of where we’re moving to is greater efficiency, more proactiveness in anything, not just healthcare, but it’s like being able to be more forward about stuff because it gives you more time.[24:52–25:06] Adam: It’s like it’s the magic time giver. It can turn something where it normally takes you four weeks to do something and now you’re done in four hours. It gives you all that time back. So I think I love where AI is going in these realms.[25:06–25:07] Adam: so I’m pretty excited.[25:08–25:13] David Hirschfeld: And there’s no stopping it. No, absolutely not. Good or bad.[25:13–25:26] Adam: I also think there’s going to be a bad side to this. Yeah. But I think there’s no way around it. So you better figure out how to make the best of it.[25:26–25:31] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. And ask it please. And thank you. I know.[25:32–25:35] Adam: Start being nice to the AI bots now, so this is where you’re on the good graces later.[25:35–25:51] David Hirschfeld: Well, there’s two reasons to do that in my mind. One is because you actually get better answers from it when you ask it nicely. There’s been studies. I’ve been doing that from the beginning just because I’m so grateful for this, for something that was hard for me to do before.[25:51–26:13] David Hirschfeld: It’s so easy for me to get it. I was just, you know, I’m on it all the time, just conversationally, trying to debunk or debug something or figure out how to change settings in a particular application so that now I can have my VA published for me on my behalf and it doesn’t show her avatar picture in Medium.[26:13–26:39] David Hirschfeld: It shows mine. You know, I was literally just doing that before this call. and it’s not making it effortless but and so I say thank you because I want it to know that it gave me the right answer right it’s just feedback but it turns out there’s apparently some studies that have shown that you actually get better results if you’re articulate and you’re nice especially if you’re nice[26:39–26:45] Adam: and if you give it rewards like I’ll give you more money I’ll give you extra credit to give it rewards it tends to do better as well which is weird[26:45–26:54] David Hirschfeld: I haven’t tried the rewards thing The other reason to me is that when AI does take over the world and starts doing bad things, it remembers you.[26:55–27:06] Adam: So let me ask you, so if people want to get a hold of you to do and talk about how custom AI software development can work for their company, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you to get info and just next steps?[27:07–27:37] David Hirschfeld: Okay, yeah, so Tekyz.com. So you can, David at Tekyz.com, you can email me. Tekyz is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z for people listening to the podcast for people that are maybe looking at the video you can see it above my head right so just reach out to me or look me up David Hirschfeld H-I-R-S-C-H F-E-L-D I think it’s D Hirschfeld or DM Hirschfeld I don’t remember on LinkedIn[27:37–27:41] David Hirschfeld: you think I know that right but I come right up[27:41–27:42] : David Hirschfeld[27:42–27:49] David Hirschfeld: because I’m active on LinkedIn. Or search Tekyz, T-E-K-Y-Z on LinkedIn.[27:49–28:05] Adam: Well, dude, I’m really excited for what you’re doing. You’re the first person I’ve talked to that’s actively developing cool stuff with AI in a forward approach. It’s very refreshing to hear, and I definitely want to take you up on that offer to talk to you three weeks from now when you’ve got that stuff coming up.[28:05–28:10] Adam: I’m really curious how you’re building up those models, and I’d like to talk to you a little bit more about it at a later time.[28:10–28:16] David Hirschfeld: Okay. I am so surprised you said that, that I’m the first person that you talk to. You know what it is?[28:17–28:27] Adam: I’m just now starting to try to talk to more people working in the field. I’ve really been just talking to myself for most of the time just because it’s easier just to quick turn the mic on. I’ve got a half hour I can record something.[28:28–28:38] Adam: So it’s like now I’m trying to get out there and really speak with people and see what others are doing, you know, and just kind of learn, really, because, like, I’m an old school, you know, a hacker nerd. I want to know what everyone else is doing.[28:38–28:48] Adam: and I loved open source stuff. I was all about the white papers and the sharing of information because that’s how, in the end, that’s how we all grow and make everything better in the long run. Oh, absolutely, right.[28:49–28:52] Adam: So I really appreciate you coming on and telling me what you’re doing because this has been awesome.[28:53–29:03] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thanks. You asked me about — there was something you could ask me, but it was a funny story about how much AI can save time.[29:04–29:15] David Hirschfeld: Oh. So when Chatto BT was out brand new, right, two years ago, and I was telling my wife about this tool that’s just so consumable.[29:15–29:28] David Hirschfeld: I mean, it was making a lot of mistakes and hallucinating a lot back then, but there was so much value you could get from it, and you just had to be careful that you checked what you were getting back from it. Yeah, perfect. And the links and all that were not good.[29:28–29:43] David Hirschfeld: But I kept telling her, she says, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, It sounds exciting, but, you know, it wasn’t really something that would just grab her attention. Anyway, about three or four months later, we had just moved the previous May.[29:44–29:55] David Hirschfeld: We had just purchased our house in San Diego area, and we moved from Scottsdale. I know, wrong direction. Anyway, so we just purchased our house.[29:55–30:07] David Hirschfeld: We’re staying in the backyard. Again, ChatGPT is just out for a few months. She asked me, she says, you know, let’s start planning my garden because she likes to do vegetable gardening.[30:08–30:22] David Hirschfeld: Her goal is to grow all our own vegetables. And she says, how many beds do you think I need? And I said, and then I was about to say, let’s ask Chad Shippetee, but her phone rings and it’s her sister.[30:23–30:33] David Hirschfeld: And so she gets on the call with her sister for about 10 minutes or so, and they’re just talking about the backyard. So I said, okay, let me ask you how to eat tea. And, you know, how many beds do we need?[30:33–30:48] David Hirschfeld: We’re two people in our early 60s. We eat a lot of vegetables, but we’re not vegetarians. And we live in Vista, California. So consider the climate, the microclimate that we have here and the types of vegetables that would grow well here around the year.[30:48–31:00] David Hirschfeld: You know, how many beds would we need to do all our own beds? So it came up with a number, which I thought made sense. and I said, okay, now what should we plant in each of these beds considering companion planting?[31:01–31:08] David Hirschfeld: Companion planting is if you put the wrong two plants together in the same bed, one needs to one grow and the other, right.[31:08–31:10] : You have to think it’s better compatible.[31:11–31:24] David Hirschfeld: Right? And so then it came up and I said, okay, now do that for every season, you know, considering succession planting because you don’t want to put whatever, broccoli in the same soil that you just took onions out of or I don’t know.[31:24–31:27] David Hirschfeld: I’m not a gardener, so I don’t know what I just think.[31:27–31:33] Adam: Yeah, you want the nutrients, you want the soil to rebuild up a nutrient base, especially from the compost, from the decomposing ones, from the previous ones.[31:34–31:53] David Hirschfeld: Exactly, right. So you want compatible vegetables in the vet, and you want compatible succession for each season when you’re doing a new planting from what was there previously. And then you also need companion flowers, right, because you want flowers now that will grow and attract the bugs that will like flowers more.[31:53–32:03] David Hirschfeld: There’s no vegetables. But if you put the wrong flowers in, then they’ll attract bugs. But then the bugs say, oh, I like your broccoli better than the flower, and now you’ve just drawn them all. So you have to get companion flowers.[32:04–32:14] David Hirschfeld: So I asked it that. And, you know, it’s a conversation. It’s giving me all these results. And I said, okay, this looks pretty good. Go ahead and put this in a table by bed, by season.[32:15–32:25] David Hirschfeld: And it did that. And she gets off the phone, and I said, take a look at this. Is this what you were thinking? And she looked at it, and her mouth just kind of opened.[32:26–32:33] David Hirschfeld: And she looks at me and looks at that, and she says, that would have taken me days of research. It took 10 minutes, right?[32:33–32:40] Adam: And it probably wouldn’t have been right in the end, too. You’d have been with some guesses. And then you find out the hard way. And then you find out next season, okay, well, don’t do that.[32:41–32:53] David Hirschfeld: And she looked at it, and she knows gardening. She said, this is all right. It was not hallucinating in this case. That was early on. I don’t find it hallucinates much anymore. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close.[32:53–33:04] Adam: Yeah, it’s definitely way better now. And especially now that they have, like, all the LLMs, I think the major ones for sure, like the premium models, all have agentic, you know, browsers and search capabilities now.[33:04–33:11] Adam: So they’re able to get a lot, like, if it doesn’t know, it now defaults to doing some quick research on the net to find out what’s going on.[33:12–33:26] David Hirschfeld: And have you seen a new video feature in ChatGPT where you can turn your camera on while you’re having a video conversation and ask and then a little look and you can ask it to give you feedback or whatever about what it sees.[33:27–33:29] David Hirschfeld: I just learned about that.[33:29–33:43] Adam: I know like Gemini just released something similar to or the Astro Project Astro that they have the Thunder Beta I guess is similar to that That literally came out I did not know That just recently came out in the last few days last week[33:45–33:58] David Hirschfeld: Basically, if you have the app and you have the subscription, the $20 subscription, and you tap the speak-to-speak version of it, and it comes up, and it actually asks you to give me access to your camera.[33:59–34:09] David Hirschfeld: Now, you’re having a video conversation with it. And, like, so I did it really quick, and I said, what do you see here? And I went like this in front, and he says, oh, it looks like you have a dual monitor set up.[34:10–34:20] David Hirschfeld: So it’s like real-time communicating with me on whatever visually I’m. So I can be walking into the market asking you questions about the various things I’m seeing on the show.[34:20–34:37] Adam: Well, that’s why I love the idea of, like, Zuckerberg’s all in on glasses being the next device. Yes. This workflow is going to take over phones. I firmly agree, just because it has to be something that needs to have 24–7 video capability of seeing everything around it without interfering.[34:37–34:48] Adam: So it’s either going to be something you wear as a necklace, which is going to bounce around. It’s not going to have full 360 as you’re turning your head. Everyone’s used to wearing glasses, sunglasses, or something already anyway. So I think that’s just the natural progression.[34:48–34:59] Adam: And it’s something we can throw over your eyes for the augmented reality. And Google, they also just announced a big, their XR capabilities that they’re putting into place with their new Gemini 2.0 that’s doing something similar as well.[34:59–35:10] Adam: They have a Gemini 2.0 fast that can do that real-time communication with live video feed, real-time translation. So, like, as you’re listening to someone talk to you, it’s writing out the English in front of you. It’s going to be nuts.[35:10–35:37] David Hirschfeld: It’s amazing to me. I know. That technology’s been around for a while, but not in a video setting, right? Yeah. It’s been in the audio. Yeah. Yeah, and the augmented reality. So if it could do what it’s doing, but do it where it’s just putting up, like, prices, comparison, when I’m looking at it in the market, looking at different products, and, you know, and then maybe giving me a little star because this is a really good price for this item or because it knows what I eat.[35:37–35:50] David Hirschfeld: And so it’s pinging, you know, immediately finding the things I’m looking for, without me having a hunt, and then, or finding alternatives that are healthier for me, or whatever my preferences are, right?[35:51–36:01] Adam: You know what, I love the idea, but I’m also, this is where I go down the other side of this, where it scares me, because from a Tekyz side, I love new tech stuff.[36:01–36:12] Adam: I’m super into it. I always want to play with it, get hands on it. Like, oh, this is so cool. Check out these cool new things. Just like when the first, you know, smartphones came out. You know, I had Palm Pilots and stuff back in the day when those things first came out, right? And cell phones.[36:12–36:20] Adam: I had cell phones, and I didn’t have anyone to call. I had a pager back when I was a kid, and I had no friends, but I needed a pager. That’s the latest technology. So, like, I’ve always been into it.[36:21–36:23] David Hirschfeld: You just enjoy being with yourself so much. Yeah, exactly.[36:23–36:41] Adam: I page myself, funny numbers, like 80085, right? So then, but what my fear is, which I’m noticing a lot now, is I notice, like, after, I always say, like, post-COVID, but I think it just happens to be a similar time frame, is that people have just gotten dumber, I feel like, out in the world.[36:41–36:57] Adam: just generally speaking. Like driving, no one knows how to drive because everyone’s on their phone, not paying attention. People don’t know anything anymore. They don’t remember anything. Critical thinking seems to be out the window. When it comes to kids and learning, I think our education system is drastically undercutting our kids.[36:57–37:09] Adam: I have two kids in school right now. I just actually just had a talk with principal yesterday. And I think it all stems from technology, unfortunately, because for us it’s almost become a handicap. Like you don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore, right?[37:09–37:13] Adam: Like we used to know people’s phone numbers back in the day by heart because you had to if you needed to call someone.[37:13–37:13] David Hirschfeld: You had to.[37:14–37:25] Adam: Now you don’t know anyone’s phone number and you don’t care because your phone has it. But you can extrapolate that to like everything else, right? So now it’s like I don’t know how to drive somewhere. I don’t know the answer to this because it’s always I’ll just look it up on my phone.[37:25–37:34] Adam: I’ll just look it up on my phone. I have an app for that. And it’s like we’ve become so handicapped that we don’t have that critical reasoning anymore. And I think for some of us that are.[37:34–37:40] David Hirschfeld: Is it we don’t or is it we have different reasoning now? because it’s how you navigate you.[37:41–37:59] Adam: I think that dumb people have just dropped it and just completely relied on it like a crutch. I think there’s two different types of people. Those that lean into it and use it as a tool to help them offload stuff that doesn’t matter anymore so they can learn and adapt and focus on more cooler stuff, fun stuff, more in-depth things, creative things.[38:00–38:14] Adam: But then I think you have a vast majority of the population that are just potatoes. Like before, it was like, oh, you just sit in front of the couch and watch TV all day. It’s like that, but extrapolated out, where they don’t know how to do anything anymore because their phone does it for them now.[38:14–38:28] Adam: They have no critical reasoning. They don’t have any understanding because their phone does it for them. I didn’t think that crowd is going to get worse the more we inject more of this kind of AI and just auto-reasoning and functioning and agentic world behavior, and we get robots.[38:29–38:59] Adam: Like, when we have fully autonomous driving, the less we’re kind of forcing you to have to think for themselves I think is going to it’s going to be great because like I was just saying two caveats of people, the ones where it’s like they’re going to use that to lessen the burden of the dumb dumb stuff so they can focus on really cool creative independent things but then you’re going to have a large majority of people that just be like okay cool, I don’t have to think about it they just watch TV all day essentially just stare at their phone for 12 hours on TikTok, you know trying to be a superstar on Instagram[38:59–39:15] David Hirschfeld: and that’s, I mean social media is its own sort of problem right because they’re constantly, with their algorithms and how you respond to content that you’re looking at, they’re constantly putting things in front of you that just — it’s like pulling this lock machine, right?[39:15–39:32] David Hirschfeld: It just gets your alpha waves or whatever, very ways running. And then you find yourself an hour later or two hours later, it’s like you’ve just been 11 o’clock at night and you’re still scrolling on your feed and you haven’t done anything and nothing is really meaningful, but it all kind of feels good and satisfying.[39:32–39:44] David Hirschfeld: I mean, it’s pretty rare, you know, but I’ve had this experience myself, right? And I don’t stand by myself. Where’d the sun go? I know, right, it’s weird.[39:44–39:56] David Hirschfeld: And I only say that because I make it a point not to spend much time on social media just because it’s so addictive, right? Just like I don’t, and you probably half your audience are going to go, I’ll never talk to him again.[39:56–40:02] David Hirschfeld: But I’ve made it a point not to play online games because it’s just so addictive.[40:02–40:15] Adam: Yeah, I’m careful. I have an Xbox that I play. I won’t put computer games on anymore. I won’t make it that easy for me. I have to go downstairs. I have to turn everything on. Then I can play a game if I can commit the time, and my kids aren’t running around driving me nuts.[40:16–40:27] Adam: So it’s rare now. But before, yeah, if it was just on my computer and I had to turn this into a game PC, oh, man, I’d have work on the side that would just be gaming. I wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. So I purposely cannot just install them.[40:28–40:29] : Right.[40:29–40:47] David Hirschfeld: So, you know, going to the whole embrace AI thing, I look at it like this, especially being in the technology world and being a custom software developer, right? And I think of us as in the, you know, top 1% in terms of, like, being an exceptional team in terms of the things that we do.[40:47–40:58] David Hirschfeld: I don’t know what the percentage is, but there’s a small number of teams that I run across that have common language with me about, like, the level of procedures and protocols and accountability and things that we do.[40:59–41:13] David Hirschfeld: But, and we got there by constantly pushing the envelope on how can we get better? How can we get, what can we adopt? What can we automate? So, but now, so people, I’m going to, because I’m in San Diego, I’ll use a surfing metaphor.[41:14–41:27] David Hirschfeld: You know, as developers, we learn to stand up on our boards in, you know, one and two foot waves, right? And then when we start to get to be solid, you know, like even in a team environment, right, we can start surfing three to four or five foot waves, right?Accelerate Your Growth! Embrace Tekyz’s DevOps and IoT solutions[41:27–41:44] David Hirschfeld: And the exceptional teams are the ones that are, you know, comfortable paddling out to the really big waves, eight, nine, ten-foot waves and surfing those competently, right? Now we see this hundred-foot rogue wave coming at us out of nowhere, right?[41:44–41:57] David Hirschfeld: And this literally feels kind of like out of nowhere. And we’re sitting there looking at it thinking, well, what do we do? And if you just wait too long saying, what do we do, it’s just going to wipe you away, right?[41:57–41:59] : It’s not going to be needed anymore for anything.[42:00–42:11] David Hirschfeld: So the other alternative is you paddle out to it, and you get up on your board into the curl of that wave, and you stand in the very tip of your board trying to stay ahead of it so it’s not crashing over you.[42:12–42:19] David Hirschfeld: That’s how I feel where we are right now. And I try to make sure everybody in my team feel like that.[42:19–42:46] Adam: I think that’s a great analogy because it’s amazing. It can be super thrilling and exciting for those that are into large waves and for everyone else that’s you know I’m sure you’re familiar if you live by the ocean they’re familiar saying never turn your back on the ocean that’s what I feel like a lot of people with AI they have their back to AI right now because they’re just not paying attention they don’t know they just don’t have the understanding[42:46–42:56] David Hirschfeld: nobody expects it to be as fast as it’s happening yeah it’s crazy nobody realizes how fast it’s happening if they’re not paying attention Yeah, and you have to be daily.[42:56–43:07] Adam: Like, you’ve literally, there’s so much going on, I can’t even keep up with it. And all day I’m looking at what’s coming up, what’s coming up. I’m trying to play with it, and you can’t keep up anymore. It’s impossible. It’s just too much. Yeah, I know.[43:08–43:13] Adam: Exactly. Well, with that, I think that’s a great place to end for us. Okay, perfect.[43:13–43:15] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, that was a really fun conversation. Yeah.[43:17–43:28] Adam: But seriously, in three weeks or whenever you have that system built out, I’d love to talk to you again to see, like, how that’s kind of going out for you and kind of what the systems really put behind it. I think that would be great to talk about. Okay, that would be awesome.[43:28–43:38] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, I don’t know if it will be three weeks, but I mean, that was tongue-in-cheek, but like the end of January, sometime between the end of January and the end of February. Yeah, just hit me up. Really significant things to show. Yeah.[43:38–43:47] Adam: Absolutely. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it, man. I really appreciate your time. It’s really fun talking to you. I wish you the best of luck, and hey, I hope you stay ahead of that wave.[43:49–44:00] David Hirschfeld: Thanks. Oh, yeah, and check out my new podcast, Scaling Smarter. It’ll be on Apple Podcasts and, you know, the major podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.[44:01–44:01] : Nice.[44:01–44:06] Adam: Scaling Smarter. Very nice. Awesome, man. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you very much. Yeah, me too.[44:06–44:07] David Hirschfeld: I really appreciate it.[44:07–44:17] Adam: All right. Thanks. Have a good one. Bye. NIDAS has just created the first iOS app made exclusively for identity management professionals. It’s called NIDAS BreachCast, and you can download it now.[44:17–44:28] Adam: It’s amazing. We have real-time updates of all the latest breaches that are occurring, CVEs that come out real-time, really pertaining just to identity management. We have media that’s going on in this podcast.[44:28–44:40] Adam: We’re going to be bringing in a lot more others as well. And we even have a complete vendor list of all the identity management vendors and all their products so you can find out exactly where to download their software, all the documentation. And what’s even more awesome is an identity management glossary.[44:40–44:47] Adam: All those crazy words and acronyms that we can never remember, they’re all listed in there for you. No ads, just pure information to make your life simple.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Talking Future Custom AI Software with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Launch Now, Build Later: Interview with David Hirschfeld](https://tekyz.com/launch-now-build-later-interview-with-david-hirschfeld-27ceec03a2a9/) - Featured Image: The Neil Wilkins Podcast — Launch Now, Build Later: Interview with David Hirschfeldhttps://medium.com/media/1906a4d00c641e17645d9f76cb9951df/hrefDavid Hirschfeld discusses navigating the startup world, highlighting the importance of understanding market needs and the Launch First approach. He discusses the challenges startups face, the significance of identifying early adopters, and the impact of AI on the industry. David promotes a problem-solving approach instead of focusing on products first. He encourages founders to connect with potential customers early to validate their ideas and adjust as needed.The Launch First Methodology: A Step-by-Step Guide to Startup Success1. Identify Your Early Adopter Niche: Don’t Just Guess, Validate!Forget the detailed market research. David emphasizes the importance of pinpointing your ideal early adopter niche. This process requires carefully analyzing customer segments, identifying their pain points, and measuring the impact and cost of those issues.2. Build a High-Fidelity Prototype: Sell the Vision, Not the CodeCreate a prototype that highlights your product's functionality and user experience, even if incomplete. This creates an illusion of completion, builds trust, and encourages pre-launch sales.3. Launch Your Pre-Sale Campaign: Get Paid to Build Your ProductBefore you invest in development, start selling your product. Offer high-value incentives, such as lifetime licenses or pre-implementation services, to attract early adopters and generate revenue. This not only validates your product-market fit but also provides funding for development.4. Pivot Fast and Cheap: Embrace Failure as a Learning OpportunityThe Launch First methodology encourages rapid iterations and adjustments. If your pre-sale campaign doesn't reach your goals, feel free to modify your prototype, marketing strategy, or target audience. This helps you quickly and cheaply identify if a product won't succeed in the market, reducing investment risk.Conclusion: Shift Your Mindset from Product to ProblemDavid Hirschfeld’s Launch First methodology challenges the traditional startup mindset. Instead of building the perfect product, prioritize understanding your customer’s needs and validating your product-market fit. By embracing a customer-centric approach, you can increase your chances of success and avoid the pitfalls of costly development cycles.Transcript[0:06–0:37] Neil: This episode is going to be really interesting if you are on the cusp of going it alone, if you’re thinking that next big software idea might just have legs, or if you’re in a startup or early stage organization or business and it just is not working, it’s not kind of working out as you expected, then my guest today, David Hirschfeld, is going to be able to cast a lot of, I guess, sort of opportunity in your direction, a lot of clarity, and hopefully cut through some of the mystique that goes on behind this whole idea of startups. David,[0:37–0:42] David Hirschfeld: welcome to the show. Thanks, Neil, and thanks for having me on your show. I’m really looking[0:42–1:15] Neil: forward to chatting with you today. Yeah, likewise, and I think for a lot of people, this is a really kind of hot topic because I know a lot of people get a little tired of, you know, doing the big commute, they get tired of kind of working for somebody else. And there are a lot of people who are about to take the leap. And whilst, you know, these opportunities for some people come once in a lifetime, I think for a lot of us, we’ve kind of played or toyed with the idea of taking that leap of faith and actually moving to creating a startup. And,[1:15–1:36] Neil: or they have actually taken that leap and then realized it’s not as easy as you might first think. What is the state of play right now within kind of the startup field, these early stage organizations? Are they kind of feeling the pressure of the current economy and the uncertainties of political climate? How are things kind of playing out from your perspective?[1:38–2:10] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, this is probably one of the best times. Oh, well, it’s the best of times. It’s the worst of times. It’s one of the best times to consider starting a software company because it’s much faster to develop products and there’s so much excitement around AI and all of the capabilities that it brings. But it’s also the worst of times because the state of the art is accelerating so[2:10–2:43] David Hirschfeld: fast and so the idea that you can develop products quickly that is that business is or that capability is just increasing on a monthly basis in terms of what’s possible so if you have an idea for a startup in my mind you should rush to try to get started on building that product or at least on securing your customers in that market[2:43–2:50] David Hirschfeld: because the market will change fairly quickly because of all the new capabilities.[2:52–3:07] Neil: Yeah, interesting times, isn’t it, in so many ways. And I guess as soon as we start this conversation with the whole idea of speed to market, inevitably some people are going to be thinking, oh, well, that’s good, so I can cut some corners.[3:07–3:17] Neil: I don’t have to worry about the old ways of setting up a business. I can just go for it. And, oh, yeah, my life’s going to be easy. It probably isn’t as simple as that, though, is it?[3:17–3:22] Neil: A lot of the old business paradigms and methodologies have still got to apply, surely.[3:23–3:38] David Hirschfeld: They do. It’s just compressed is all, but it’s not shortcuts. So, for example, you still have that product market fit. You still have to be able to identify the early adopter niche and confirm that they’ll pay for your product.[3:39–3:52] David Hirschfeld: You still have to design and develop the product, and you have to develop one that people want to use and will continue to use once they start engaging with it. So none of that’s changed. I don’t know that any of that will ever change.[3:53–4:09] David Hirschfeld: You have to have good business practices from a financial perspective. You have to make sure that you’ve got the money to go forward with your business, and you want to have enough so that if you have to pivot, you have enough cushion to be able to make those pivots.[4:10–4:30] David Hirschfeld: And all startups have to pivot. It’s the one in a thousand, maybe, that gets it right the first time. Everybody else, including myself, don’t get it right the first time and have to figure out what the market really wants and where the real value opportunity is.Interactive Infographic: 10 True-False Statements about Startups[4:31–4:48] David Hirschfeld: That’s kind of the whole approach that I created because I’ve watched so many startups fail. So I’ve spent the last, well, 35 years in software and I’ve had my own startups that I’ve been successful with, both successes and failures.[4:49–4:59] David Hirschfeld: And then 17 years ago, I started Techies and I’ve worked with over 70 startups during that time. and a couple of them very successful, but the vast majority of them failed.[5:00–5:15] David Hirschfeld: And they all fail for the same reason. They just wait way too long to start to sell their product, to generate revenue. And as a result, they don’t know that they don’t have product market fit for way too long.[5:15–5:33] David Hirschfeld: And what they do is most startups, the classic approach is you develop, with your pitch, your design, you go out and you raise some money from, if you can, or you have your own money that you’ve saved for you from friends and family.[5:33–6:12] David Hirschfeld: Usually you’re not going to be able to raise from venture capital in the very beginning stages unless you are a Stanford grad and you’re a PhD in AI or something just very exciting to people and you have some new theory that people believe is going to become some very big thing that’s the rare case right so the majority of us all of us humans have to go out and raise money from family and friends if we’re going to raise money if we don’t have our own money to start a software company and then um uh uh then we design and then we develop the product[6:12–6:36] David Hirschfeld: and then put it out for beta testing, usually free betas because we’re trying to get feedback. And this is the classic approach. And it’s usually six months to a year for the first version, the MVP, minimum viable product, to get that out into beta and then another six months to a year, sometimes longer, before you feel like you’re ready to go to market.[6:37–6:50] David Hirschfeld: And then you start to market your product only to find out that people won’t pay for it. Even the beta testers that you had won’t pay for it. Or they’re so few paying for it that you can’t make a viable business out of it.[6:50–7:00] David Hirschfeld: And now, and the beta customers you had gave you feedback about what they wanted to see, but none of them committed to spending money with you if you made those changes.[7:00–7:01] : So they’re taking you in the wrong direction.[7:02–7:13] David Hirschfeld: This is just very classic. And 95% of software startups fall into this category. And then you have to pivot.[7:13–7:25] David Hirschfeld: And now you’ve got a product you’ve developed, which costs a lot of money, and it’s expensive to now pivot, which means rewriting parts of your product. And that’s risky because once you pivot, then you have to go out and test it again to see if people will buy it.[7:25–7:40] David Hirschfeld: So this is the three-, four-year cycle of just basically spiraling down and not having enough money to pivot enough times to finally find the product market pit before you end up just exiting the business.[7:40–8:18] David Hirschfeld: this is why I created the launch first methodology because I realized there’s a better way of doing this. It’s harder up front, but it’s much easier once you find product market fit, which you can do in three or four months instead of three or four years. What we do is, and this isn’t a new concept um i don’t think other people have formalized it but it’s based on the lean startup ideas but taking it one step further and building the marketing engine your marketing stack doing[8:18–8:52] David Hirschfeld: all the niche analysis understanding who that early adopter is what problem they need solved and what the how much they perceive that that problem impacts them and how much it costs two different numbers for that uh because of that problem how much they’re spending and so that you know if you talk to them about that problem because the perceived impact is really high they’re going to lean forward and say can you fix my problem because they really want it solved because they perceive that it really impacts them a lot and if the cost is high you know you can[8:52–9:23] David Hirschfeld: charge a lot so when you know you’ve got an early adopter that has the highest possible quotients and those two factors you know your the chances are you found your early adopter as long as they have the authority to make the decisions quickly um uh then you have your likely early adopter and we go through a whole process to nail down who that is um and also to validate that you found the right person um and once we do that we’re also at the same time building what i call a[9:23–9:33] David Hirschfeld: a high fidelity prototype, which is a very animated set of mock-ups. So when you show somebody, it looks like you’ve already built the product.[9:33–9:49] David Hirschfeld: Even though you never lie to a potential client, you always tell them this is just a prototype, the actual product won’t be available for three to four months, and the first version won’t have all these features. As long as it’s realistic enough, they just don’t hear you saying that.[9:49–10:01] David Hirschfeld: They make up a story in their head. well, they must have already developed the product and they’re just in QA. You never said that. And if they ask you, of course, you’re honest with them. No, this is not the product.[10:01–10:11] David Hirschfeld: This is what you’ll get once we’ve built it and delivered the product that will look and behave this way, exactly like this. And this still doesn’t quite sink in.[10:12–10:28] David Hirschfeld: And it’s important. It’s a critical success factor to doing this because you’re going to demo this and ask them to buy it in advance. with the idea that if they ask you the question, how do I know you can build this, then you cannot sell that person.[10:28–10:40] David Hirschfeld: And they will never ask that question if the demo you show them looks like you’ve already built it and it’s realistic enough. They just trust that they will get the product because it looks like we’ve already built it.[10:40–10:51] David Hirschfeld: So what we do is we go out to the market, we build our marketing funnel. That’s why it’s called Launch First. We do that before we develop the software. and then we go out and we start selling it.[10:51–11:17] David Hirschfeld: We offer a really high-value sales opportunity for the client, like a lifetime license if they buy, you know, 18 months of the subscription in advance or pre-implementation if it’s a big healthcare-related system where implementation is 70% of the cost of the product or whatever that particular market’s high-value perception is.[11:17–11:30] David Hirschfeld: And if the value is high enough and the problem you’re solving is big enough and costly enough, they will buy in enough numbers up front that you can prove you have a viable, that you have product market fit and you have a viable business.[11:31–11:41] David Hirschfeld: And then you take the money that you’re getting from these sales and you use that to help fund development. And then you keep selling even while you’re developing the product. Just keep selling.[11:41–11:55] David Hirschfeld: And there are different ways of launching a pre-launch sale. One would be where you say you’re not going to get the product for three to four months. Another is what I call a Fred Flintstone launch.[11:55–12:22] David Hirschfeld: For any of you who don’t know who Fred Flintstone is, just look up Fred Flintstone driving his car YouTube videos. And basically this is a cartoon of a caveman It was big in the 70s 60s and 70s And there no motor of course in the car of a caveman so he has to spin his feet like this to get it going.[12:22–12:45] David Hirschfeld: So we do what we call a French blintstone launch, which is we cobble together some workflows, and we start delivering the service immediately, you know, upon selling two or three or four clients so you know you’ve got product market, that you’re going to go that direction, and then we start running the service and servicing it manually without the aid of all the software you’re going to build.[12:46–13:04] David Hirschfeld: They’re buying into the vision of what you’re giving them with all the software and the capabilities, but you’re delivering the value of that service right up front. And there are a lot of really successful examples of this that have happened over the last 10, 15 years, big companies that have done this really successfully.[13:04–13:32] David Hirschfeld: uh so um and you’re learning how to operate your business while you’re building the software you just go at the sale slowly enough so that you can still handle the capacity until the software’s in place and can start to automate everything so that’s another way of doing a launch first type of launch anyway and the idea is let’s say nobody is buying the product in this pre-launch scenario which is taking you three months to get to, not two or three years.[13:33–13:43] David Hirschfeld: Now we pivot, which is quick and easy because we’re pivoting a prototype, not software. They can pivot. We can change the workflows.[13:43–13:58] David Hirschfeld: We can change the design in whatever way is necessary. We can change the marketing funnel because that’s simple and it’s focused on one niche, and go back out in two or three weeks and retest the scenario and do this two or three or four times.[13:58–14:21] David Hirschfeld: And if after two or three or four times, you’re still not even close to what I call the viability barrier. That’s generating enough revenue from a high enough closing ratio that you can get a roughly three to one ratio between what you project your lifetime value is versus cost of acquisition of each customer.[14:21–14:54] David Hirschfeld: if you can’t get anywhere near that you’re like a small fraction of one or no sales at all after several different attempts then it’s a healthy thing to say okay this is the wrong product for the wrong market or the wrong time or whatever it is and you fail fast and cheap and I can tell you failing fast and cheap for a product that just isn’t going to happen is like manna from heaven for anybody who’s gone through a three four five year hundreds of thousands or[14:54–15:19] David Hirschfeld: millions of dollars of investment and then fail so the failing fast and cheap is a win as long as we’ve given it every ask every possible aspect maybe spent five or six months at this and without it this huge investment of building the software so um and then it’s time to go on to whatever, now you’re free to go on to the next thing, your marriage is still intact.Transform Your Business with AI — Discover How Tekyz Can Propel Your Growth Today![15:21–15:56] David Hirschfeld: You know, all of the disaster that comes with the big failure, you’re not experiencing that other than some money and a little bit of ego, but you’re ready to take what you’ve learned, move on, and go to the next thing. So that’s the idea. But with Launch First, your chances of success are much higher because you’re doing this hard work up front. That’s what I call the hard, easy approach and you go through this very exhausted process to figure out who that early doctor niche is and do all the design and then go out and start asking for money which a lot of[15:56–16:18] David Hirschfeld: founders find difficult to do asking for money from potential customers by putting the product out there and saying okay do i have a real business or not and a lot of founders want to just extend that time frame as long as possible before they actually go out and start asking customers for money. But to me it’s like that’s the most important thing you can do.[16:19–16:22] David Hirschfeld: Just ask them for money and see if they’ll give it to you.[16:23–16:52] Neil: Yeah, and I think that’s the key thing here, isn’t it? Because I can imagine, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of this, David, is this whole thing about somebody has the next big idea, or at least they perceive they do. They get super passionate, emotionally attached to the idea, almost to the point where they can’t release it, they can’t let it go. It’s because whatever The world and the media and everybody tells me I’ve got to really believe in myself and believe in my product and strive to develop it.[16:52–17:14] Neil: And we almost kind of talk ourselves down the wrong little bunny hole here, don’t we? Whereas actually, if we went back to what you’re saying here with this launch first methodology, it is back to pure, pure marketing, really, which is understanding the customer need, knowing the pain points, developing a solution towards that rather than product first.[17:14–17:25] Neil: And that’s a really interesting angle, isn’t it, when it comes to software? Because often if, you know, you go to a layperson in the street and say to them, you know, what is the business going to be doing if they’re developing software?[17:25–17:35] Neil: Well, it’s all about the technology. But actually what you’re saying is no, the technology is almost an afterthought here. It’s very much about the need and the market.[17:36–17:38] Neil: It’s a real kind of switch of mindset, isn’t it?[17:38–18:01] David Hirschfeld: What I find is that founders, the successful founders, which they’re few and far between, the successful founders are the ones who love the problem that they’re solving, and they love being in front of potential customers learning about their problems.[18:02–18:25] David Hirschfeld: And the product, like you said, is an afterthought. I think it’s the natural conclusion of mitigating the problem. As founders who are in love with their product and believe, you know, and it’s all about the belief of what they’re building and the value it has, they fail almost every time unless they can break out of that.[18:26–18:36] David Hirschfeld: They basically create sort of their own religion in their mind, their own church, the product, right? And then, of course, once you have faith, and it’s very hard to shift somebody off that.[18:36–18:51] David Hirschfeld: So I spend a lot of time coaching founders on, you know, turn your belief into a clinical practice. You want to be very clinical in how you evaluate everything you do and focus on the problem, not on the product.[18:52–19:06] David Hirschfeld: The product is just so what? If it’s a great product or not, who cares? But if it’s solving real problems, then that’s what you care about. And so shift into the focus on the problem.[19:07–19:23] David Hirschfeld: And we do that. The methodology sort of forces that to happen because we do it. It’s a metrics-driven process. A lot of startup methodologies are very subjectively driven and very siloed.[19:23–19:35] David Hirschfeld: Every step is a step in this process. And when the step is over and you have to decide is the step complete and is the step correctly done, and that’s why I say subjective.[19:35–20:08] David Hirschfeld: And it’s siloed because once that step is done, you’re done and you move on to the next step in this process. And Launch First is not quite like that because Launch First requires a very sophisticated scoring system for each of the things that you’re doing so that you can so that you end up having a metrics that indicate which early adopt which niche is the one to focus on which is the early adopter even like discovery interviews we don’t do formal discovery interviews the way that most methodologies do[20:08–20:40] David Hirschfeld: because i find that when you do discovery interviews you’re asking um you’re asking questions of stakeholders in different niches and you’re getting different feedback and you’re not correlating it properly and very often you’re asking the wrong kinds of questions because you’re asking about your product as opposed to both asking about the problems that they’re struggling with and how did they address those problems and why are they why are those problems such a big problem or not a big problem so what we do is we break it down[20:40–21:07] David Hirschfeld: into a matrix where the across the top of the matrix is the all the different niches that uh somebody can uh potentially market their product to and and i have my own methodology for what makes a niche which i won’t go into here but um we want to know that’s really a niche right and then and some people think that they’ve got three niches end up having 30 niches when we finish the breakdown because you want them pretty tight.[21:08–21:28] David Hirschfeld: And then we go down the other axis with problem statements. And by problem statements, I mean like root level problem, the problem that when you say that problem to a specific niche, they feel like their survival is at stake.[21:28–21:49] David Hirschfeld: That’s the type of problems we’re looking for. that problem is painful and scary and they need it to disappear. And then we score that matrix, all of the intersections between the niches and all the problems to figure out who has the highest impact on one sheet and then on the second sheet, who has the highest cost.[21:50–22:08] David Hirschfeld: And again, those are separate numbers because sometimes you’ll have a really high cost, but the perceived impact is not very high to a particular problem for one niche. and the converse can be true where they perceive the impact is really high, but the cost, it turns out, is very low.[22:09–22:20] David Hirschfeld: And in the first case where the cost is high but the perception is low, it’s hard to get their attention because they don’t perceive that as being a big niche. So if you talk to them about that problem, they go, yeah, that’s a lot.[22:20–22:37] David Hirschfeld: Then everybody deals with that. It’s not a big deal. Just built into the way we deal with things. So they’re not motivated to do anything about it, even though it’s a big cost factor. The other way, the other ones are really motivated to do something about it where the perceived impact is really high, but that you can’t charge them very much because the cost is very low.[22:38–22:59] David Hirschfeld: And so that doesn’t make for a really good business foundation. So you’re looking for the niches that have the highest of those two correlations together. And then we do a lot of other things beyond that to figure out which of the top two or three niches that have those high correlations is the ideal first early adopter that you’re going to focus on.[22:59–23:11] David Hirschfeld: Because you can only focus on one niche at a time. And I often say when you’re starting a company, in the software world especially, but in any company, as a CEO, that’s your number one job.[23:11–23:23] David Hirschfeld: is who is your early adopter and how do you reach them and price your product properly. That’s the number one job of a founder, not building the product.[23:25–23:39] Neil: Is there a danger then that kind of going down this route? I mean, you’ve got a convert here, David. I mean, I am totally, totally on board with the way that you’re describing this. I mean, this is, as you say, none from heaven when it comes to pure marketing philosophy.[23:39–23:50] Neil: And I’m talking about strategic marketing, not marketing cons. And it just sounds absolutely ideal. But what happens, though, when somebody has the big dream? OK, I’m going to do this.[23:50–24:03] Neil: I think I know what the software solution is, or I think I know what I might like to be developing. And then they go down this approach. They identify the early adopter. They identify those pain points that they can solve.[24:03–24:33] Neil: but then the solution is something completely a million miles away from what they thought they were going to be developing as a business doesn’t that put them in a slightly awkward position because then do they have the choice could they then just go down the pure well I’m going to do it anyway or are you then kind of almost forced to find a way of solving that problem Because it could be a completely different mindset a completely different product or service that you identify going down this route couldn it[24:33–24:45] David Hirschfeld: It could be. Oh, yeah. And I wouldn’t say it always is, but it often is different than what they thought. And sometimes it’s wildly different, just like what you were saying.[24:45–24:59] David Hirschfeld: So the, you know, this has to do with the how healthy is your ego. So a founder with really healthy ego and recognizes that what they wanted to do wasn’t what the market needs and they ship.[25:00–25:18] David Hirschfeld: Now, sometimes if it’s a passion project and maybe it’s at the last, you know, they want to bring something to the world because they think it’s important and needed. and that’s more important than the business itself, which sometimes it is and that’s valid, then they’ll go down that path anyway.[25:18–25:28] David Hirschfeld: And then it doesn’t really matter whether they’re identifying the early adopter niche or not because they’re doing something that’s going to make the world a better place or whatever, right?[25:28–25:54] David Hirschfeld: And then people, and they can’t sell enough to be viable. Some founders are in a position where they can afford to do that. That’s the pretty rare founder, right? But most of the time, if they, and it does happen where they just don’t really want to look at the reality and they just want to go down what they think the market needs because they have, it feels good and it’s fun to build this dream, right?[25:54–26:05] David Hirschfeld: And then they fail. So that’s choices that founders get to make, right? That’s why we’re founders. You get to make the wrong choice. You’re, you know, you’re empowered to make the wrong choice.[26:05–26:19] David Hirschfeld: And if you make enough wrong choices, one of them will be right. If you have the wherewithal to survive all those wrong choices and get to the right choice, then you’ll find a path to success as well.[26:20–26:31] David Hirschfeld: And some founders, I mean, that’s how historically most founders have found their way to a successful path. They get investment. They get people excited. They’re very charismatic.[26:31–26:46] David Hirschfeld: They’re able to, once they launch their product, they’re able to draw investment in. and they are able to survive not, you know, the market shifts and their shifts in their product in the market until they find a path that they can start to build on.[26:48–26:55] David Hirschfeld: That’s just the hardest, that’s just the hard way to do it, hard and expensive way to do it though. There are easier ways to do it.[26:56–27:30] Neil: And I guess there’s a time factor as well, isn’t there? Because, you know, everybody says it and all the great, you know, business books always say that, you know, you have to be failing to really understand what success is. And, you know, I can certainly say not everything that I’ve done, you know, has proved to be, you know, fruitful or successful. So I kind of get that. And that certainly sounds like you’ve been there as well, David. But the point is, I guess, when kind of there is the option to, and you’ve used the word a couple of times already, pivot from maybe that trajectory that you believed you were going[27:30–27:41] Neil: and beyond. Pivoting, I guess, if you’ve got the right sort of infrastructure, maybe you’ve got a little bit of investment left, you’ve got a hope and you’ve still got some energy and some passion,[27:41–28:17] David Hirschfeld: pivoting could be quite a good thing, couldn’t it? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you’re not on a path, a path to build a viable business and you’ve got a product with a viable market that you’ve proven you’ve got product market that you have to pivot because you otherwise you’re you’re spending money you know you’re in the red forever um and unless you have endless financial resources then you’re going to end up one day having you know having spent it all and having to close shop[28:17–28:27] David Hirschfeld: so pivoting is a even if you find product market fit early on you still will probably end up having to make many pivots in your business.[28:28–28:42] David Hirschfeld: They just won’t necessarily be complete pivots. They may even be complete pivots if it turns out a competitor comes along once you get started and changes the market under your feet.[28:42–28:55] David Hirschfeld: That’s rare that that happens after you’ve already found a path where it’s just totally shifted out from underneath you in the early days, but it can happen. and in that case you’re going to have to pivot too.[28:56–29:14] David Hirschfeld: So pivoting is just the way of life. Even if you’re successful for a long time, markets just shift over eventually. And if you’re not, again, if you’re focused on the problem and you’ve spent a lot of time with your customer, you’ll see those shifts in advance and start to redirect your business in the right direction.[29:14–29:29] David Hirschfeld: I mean, we’ve seen this happen with Microsoft over and over again, for example. You know, in the early days of browsers, Microsoft was late to the browser market, and then they completely shifted.[29:29–29:41] David Hirschfeld: I think in the late 90s, mid or no, early 90s, there was a product called NXplorer. I can’t think of what the name of that product was. The first major browser.[29:42–29:58] David Hirschfeld: Oh, that slips my mind. Anyway, and it started to get huge traction. And then one day Microsoft realized, you know what, we’re going to be left out of the future of the Internet if we don’t shift our business.[29:58–30:08] David Hirschfeld: And they took 800 people, which was a lot of people in Microsoft at the time, took 800 people, and they all got dedicated to the browser market.[30:08–30:29] David Hirschfeld: And Microsoft Explorer came out of that and was the dominant browser until Chrome came along. Same thing has been happening with AI. Microsoft has made a big shift to really focus on AI now, as have other companies that weren’t as focused on it before.[30:30–30:40] David Hirschfeld: So because if you’re not focused on AI today, then you’re way behind the curve in terms of these big software companies. So everybody has to pivot.[30:42–30:53] David Hirschfeld: Apple, same thing with AI. So I don’t think you ever not get out of the pivot business if you’re a startup or a software company over years.[30:55–31:09] David Hirschfeld: But hopefully you can, in the early days, as you start to scale, you found a path and you’re just building on that and expanding your reach with your product without having to constantly pivot because it’s expensive to pivot.[31:11–31:25] Neil: I wanted to talk a little about AI because it’s at everybody’s front of mind right now, whether you’re in software development or any industry, everybody is aware that there’s an opportunity, but there’s also risks, we know that.[31:25–31:35] Neil: I don’t want to necessarily get into those, but I’m curious about AI startups or startups that have been kind of created off the back of some of these AI platforms.[31:36–32:10] Neil: I mean, it’s almost to the point where, and I’ll be a bit facetious here, but that anybody can do a startup based on AI today and is that going to change do you feel change the whole kind of narrative and the whole space here in every industry or do you think these basic principles of listening rather than being led by the tech are still going to apply because I think a lot of people are thinking oh well AI here in this particular application it doesn’t really matter about the market because what we’re doing is creating something completely revolutionary so therefore people are going to want it anyway[32:10–32:19] Neil: They don’t even understand they have a need. We’re just going to launch it. So it’s very much kind of tech-driven. Do you see that playing out at all?[32:19–32:34] David Hirschfeld: There are very few things where you can launch something where people don’t have any idea that they would have a need, and then you launch it, and then all of a sudden people realize how important this is.[32:35–33:10] David Hirschfeld: There are examples of that all over the place, right, before AI and with AI. you know when the iPhone came out nobody when it first came out nobody really really understood what is this thing this weird phone that has nothing on the front of it right what’s the real value option value proposition here and I was one of those in the first six months of the iPhone and then of course it dawned on me what it meant and I got one and it was like you know transformative[33:10–33:21] David Hirschfeld: But that was a product that was released with the idea that people have no idea that they actually, how much they’re going to need this until it’s out there, and then they’ll start to all understand it.[33:22–33:40] David Hirschfeld: And that was true. But those types of products are very few and far between. Chat GPT was another one of those where people had no idea how important having, you know, a best friend that knows absolutely everything and you can get that information from them at any time.[33:41–33:54] David Hirschfeld: And in very nuanced and sophisticated ways, how important that would be just in daily life until it got out and people started to use it. Just because the paradigm is so different, right?[33:54–34:27] David Hirschfeld: But those are such rare cases. Most of the AI products that are coming out that are getting traction are because they’re solving specific problems. they are creating automations and reach to a market you know to markets they’re making search engine optimization so much easier and accurate they’re you know there’s so many examples of and they’re just coming out all the time they’re helping us[34:27–35:00] David Hirschfeld: build applications. They’re helping us test applications. We’re building a couple ourselves. One is Launch First, the niche analysis, which is the hardest part of Launch First because it’s a tedious process for all the scoring. And so we’re building a Launch First AI model to basically do all that scoring for the founder in an iterative way so that they can go through that in a day instead of a month, you know,[35:00–35:13] David Hirschfeld: or they can go through it in a few hours. We’re building one of the things that we do better than any other software company that I’ve ever competed against is how we do our estimates.[35:13–35:30] David Hirschfeld: We do a very detailed module-wise breakdown of the projects that we’re going to build, you know, and literally agonizing detail. And then we put estimates to each of those modules, a high and a low, so that we know what the range of cost is going to be.[35:30–35:53] David Hirschfeld: And they’re accurate because we really strive to be accurate in what we do. But that’s the most expensive process that we have internally because it takes all our senior people and it takes a lot of time to basically do these breakdowns and then estimate each one and then do reviews to make sure that the estimates are realistic and right and complete.[35:54–36:04] David Hirschfeld: So we’re building an AI model that mimics our estimating process, and we’ll generate those, which is going to — both of these things will turn into SaaS products.[36:05–36:45] David Hirschfeld: They solve real-world problems, and they make — they create opportunity. Like in the estimation process, most software development companies, well all the ones I’ve spoken with and I’ve talked about it and shown what we’re working on they all want it the day it comes out because it’s expensive they want to be able to do a lot of proposals and have really good detailed estimates and make it look and show how professional and accurate they can be because those are the kind of people that win projects So if somebody has a particular problem and plus we have some other projects that we want[36:45–37:21] David Hirschfeld: to build internally, as well as the ones we’re doing for our clients, but they solve real-world problems. They make something that used to be very difficult much easier to accomplish, and sometimes they make it possible for you to grow your business in ways you couldn’t have done it before uh i mean they some of these products can be very transformative too so but uh but the idea that you can build something that nobody is aware that they need and then all of a sudden it becomes[37:21–37:37] David Hirschfeld: this big hit those are very few and far between i’m not saying that somebody who’s listening to this that has that kind of idea doesn’t have a real one. I’m just saying that I’ve seen many founders who believed that and failed, right?[37:37–37:49] David Hirschfeld: This is, again, belief system. And you can validate, do some early validation with people, which is what Launch First is all about, to see that they really do need it, that you can sell them on this idea.[37:50–37:58] David Hirschfeld: Because if you can’t sell them on using it, then in the Launch First model, you’re not going to sell them when the product actually comes out.[38:00–38:11] Neil: So we’ve been talking a lot about kind of solving real world problems. I mean, close your phrase there. And I think it’s just a great way of, you know, really sort of crystallizing what we are talking about here.[38:11–38:35] Neil: Is there an opportunity within the model or methodology as well to look at emerging opportunities? I’m just thinking it’s a kind of a leading question. If I was to want to create some software or maybe some AI around my target audience, and I listen to them a lot because it’s who I serve, the two key emerging themes here are personalization and automation.[38:35–38:45] Neil: So most marketers are aware they will get a lot more value from the work they do if they personalize their customers and if they alternate some of the repetitive tasks they do day to day.[38:45–39:01] Neil: So those would be two, I guess, emerging themes, particularly being highlighted by AI. Is that also an opportunity, rather than necessarily solving problems, but to keep an eye on the marketplace and look for opportunities as well?[39:01–39:05] Neil: Because that would feel like quite a positive thing to be focusing on. Would that work?[39:05–39:10] David Hirschfeld: Give me an example of what you’re talking about, because I’m not sure I understand the question exactly.[39:10–39:26] Neil: So I see an opportunity here then for a marketer who is doing maybe a lot of repetitive tasks. So if I say one of my audiences, one of my key personas who I target are marketers to be able to support them and educate them.[39:26–39:43] Neil: So if one of their key issues is they don’t have enough time or they perceive they don’t have enough time, they would then be necessarily looking at AI to maybe automate some of the things that are repetitive tasks where they don’t necessarily add as a human being a huge amount of value.[39:44–40:15] Neil: So I could be then thinking, OK, well, here’s an opportunity. It’s not a problem as such, because they could just carry on doing what they’re doing. But could I develop some software that says here’s an opportunity using AI to automate the publishing of some social media posts or to move some customer records from a sales system into a CRM or do it on an automated basis. And my lovely little software nugget of gold here is the thing that I want to develop to[40:15–40:35] Neil: sit or piggyback off this opportunity. Would that also be an approach as opposed to doing deep market research to find problems? Could I actually go to the market and say, look, here’s an opportunity that we can almost co-create together would that work okay so that that is a really good[40:35–40:57] David Hirschfeld: question because i so what i find are the the startups that have the best chance of success is when a founder is solving a problem that they’re struggling with themselves first right so i’m in an industry and i struggle and i i struggle with something and and when you say that’s not a problem because they could continue to do it the same way.[40:58–41:09] David Hirschfeld: That’s true with anything, right? It’s a problem because it limits your ability to expand beyond what you’re doing because your time is all sucked up doing all these non-high-value tasks.[41:09–41:20] David Hirschfeld: So that’s why we get virtual assistants, and that’s why we look for automated tools like Zapier and for being able to tie systems together.[41:21–41:31] David Hirschfeld: So those are problems to me. the perceived impact of those problems might be low because they’re very comfortable doing it, but it’s still a problem. The cost is very high.[41:32–41:43] David Hirschfeld: That’s one of those costs aside. Perception of impact might be low, depending on how aware they are of the fact that there’s so much opportunity they’re not going after because of all the time they’re struggling.[41:45–42:10] David Hirschfeld: So founders who, so I always say if a founder comes to me and they say, look, this is a problem I’m struggling with that I want to automate, because I know how valuable automating this will be for me, maybe because it actually is a cost center type of problem or maybe because it’s a time center kind of problem, right?[42:10–42:21] David Hirschfeld: But either way, they recognize the impact it has on their business. So that’s number one. And so they can easily articulate its value to them. And they’re part of an industry.[42:21–42:33] David Hirschfeld: Second, number two is part of industry full of people exactly like them in the same type of position and role and doing the same sort of things that are struggling with the exact same problem that they’re struggling with.[42:33–42:50] David Hirschfeld: That’s number two. Number three is they have some reach to that community of users who are people that are like them in their industry because of either because they go to conferences or they’re part of networking groups of that or whatever the reason is.[42:50–43:16] David Hirschfeld: Or they just have lots of friends in that industry because it’s the type of industry where there’s a lot of social engagement. So that’s number three. If they have those three things and there’s no product already on the market that is easily consumable to that group that would address that problem, that is a good product, right?[43:16–43:28] David Hirschfeld: There might be a really crappy product that addresses that problem, but nobody’s using it as not a very good problem. But there may be some really good products in the market that handle that.[43:28–43:49] David Hirschfeld: Like, for example, let’s say somebody wants me to build them some AI chatbot that they can use and have a multi-tenant situation where they can now implement it in each of their different clients, each with its own AI intelligence for that particular client.[43:50–44:14] David Hirschfeld: And they want to solve that problem. but there’s already a product on the market that does 90% of what they want, and it’s fairly inexpensive, and it’s really well built, that’s not a good, that would not necessarily be a good niche to start, unless you just have really broad reach into, or you have captive clients already that you can market this to.[44:15–44:47] David Hirschfeld: So you don’t have to worry about the competitive products coming around and eating away at you. and if you have all those ingredients and that isn’t that competitive product or it’s not consumable because it’s marketed to enterprise and it’s an enterprise point that just is out of reach of your market then you’re 50% of the way there already in terms of being able to prove product market fit then launch first is pretty easy to get people to start to buy into it so I think that’s[44:47–45:18] David Hirschfeld: what you’re talking about right so you’re solving your own problem because you know that other people like you are struggling with the same thing and usually most of the people you know that are doing the same thing you’re doing are all struggling there isn’t a good consumable product available or it’s so new nobody knows about it so there’s a little market research that goes into figuring out who the competitors are those are the best founders because they really[45:18–45:19] David Hirschfeld: understand the problem[45:19–45:50] Neil: yeah and I think what you’re doing here David and I think this is just so great for the audience and I’m sure there’s a lot of people kind of nodding here and saying I just need to talk to David because he kind of gets the situation that we’re in here I think it’s a lovely kind of practicality of the way you’re describing this because I think what you’re saying is very consistent but it just feels like there’s almost different colours or flavours of the same thing applying pretty much everywhere and I think that’s the beauty of this kind of model or this methodology is that it does apply to all of us[45:50–46:11] Neil: the kind of the foundation of it is so kind of you know sort of set in absolute logic but the application of it applies just with a real sensibility everywhere so I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening to this who I’m going to invite now to kind of make contact with you I mean how can people get hold of you David?[46:11–46:26] David Hirschfeld: Thank you well as you can see there’s my email in the signature, so you can email me. My LinkedIn, which I’m you can, there’ll be, I’m assuming there’ll be some links, right?[46:26–46:44] David Hirschfeld: There’ll be sure. So I’ll have my LinkedIn link there. You can go to techies.com and you can see how Techies is spelled from my email. And at the top of my page, then you’ll learn about us from a software development company. That’s our bread and butter.[46:44–47:15] David Hirschfeld: If you want to learn about Launch First, at the top of the Techies page, you’ll see a Launch First logo. Just click on that, and it’ll take you to a page that talks only about Launch First. And for anybody that is interested in starting a software company, assuming that you are ready to do this, right, or at least that you have identified your funding sources and all that, I’m happy to spend time to document your[47:15–47:37] David Hirschfeld: requirements, create a functional spec, and then build out one of these estimates that I was telling you about so that you know what it’s going to cost to get going. And then you’re free to take that, and there’s no cost for doing any of this. We spend quite a bit of time on it, but we just know this is sort of cost to sale, you know, trying to win people’s belief that we’re the company to work with.[47:37–47:51] David Hirschfeld: But you’re free to take all that and go shop to other software development companies as well. That’s not we’re giving it to you free of charge. So that’s just sort of our investment in the startup community.[47:52–48:08] Neil: Which is wonderful and I thank you on behalf of the community because I think if more providers like you and experts in your kind of position were able to do similar, the world would be such an easier and more productive and positive plays.[48:08–48:20] Neil: So, you know, I really thank you for your approach here, David. It’s refreshing. I love the fact that it’s based on, you know, solid kind of strategic marketing principles, and it just makes sense, which is what I love.[48:20–48:29] Neil: Love to hear that. So, David, thank you so much for your time and for sharing so many of the practical tips of how to do this here on the show today. Thank you.[48:29–48:43] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, I appreciate it too, Neil. And also for marketing companies, you know, if you deal with a lot of startups, please reach out to me because we love working in partnership with other marketing companies as well.[48:44–48:46] Neil: Wonderful. David, thank you again.Connect with The Neil Wilkins Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7zgDi1JFPWbSKcX0Odl4kAReady to take your startup to the next level? Connect with David Hirschfeld through his LinkedIn or Tekyz website.He provides free consultations to help you outline your needs and create a detailed cost estimate for your software development project. Don’t let the fear of failure stop you—embrace the Launch First approach and start your startup confidently!David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld's LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Launch Now, Build Later: Interview with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Find Your High-Value Problem: Why 2025’s Best AI Startups Solve Just One Thing](https://tekyz.com/find-your-high-value-problem-why-2025s-best-ai-startups-solve-just-one-thing-cf01d215d7a9/) - Featured Image: Find Your High-Value Problem — Why 2025’s Best AI Startups Solve Just One Thinghttps://medium.com/media/2b01296b8ec3d25bb1bd3aa3b706a551/hrefThis podcast episode features an interview with David Hirschfeld, CEO of Tekyz, a company specializing in AI development. The discussion centers on the challenges and opportunities of building successful AI startups in 2025. David emphasizes focusing on solutions that genuinely address customers' needs and desires.He underlines that forming cohesive and effective teams is crucial for driving innovation. He emphasizes the need to confirm product-market fit to understand market conditions that inform development investments. This systematic approach not only enhances the chances of success but also maximizes the impact of the final product.Finding the Right ProblemDavid emphasizes the importance of identifying a problem that customers face daily or weekly with a quantifiable cost. He argues that focusing on fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is crucial for understanding customer motivations.Building a Strong TeamDavid stresses the importance of building a team with a strong culture of analytical thinking and creative problem-solving. He supports in-person team building, even for remote teams, to create community and shared values.The Launch First ProcessDavid's Launch First process involves simulating the product before development, validating product-market fit through pre-launch sales, and focusing on problem-solution rather than product-market fit.Product Market Fit vs. Solution FitDavid distinguishes between product-market fit (people might buy it) and product-solution fit (people will use it). He suggests that startups prioritize ensuring their product effectively solves problems before committing to further development.Niche AnalysisDavid outlines a niche analysis process that identifies the target niche offering the most significant impact at the lowest cost for the problem addressed. This involves creating a matrix to assess the impact and cost of various issues across different niches.AI TransformationDavid emphasizes that AI transformation is about updating old software habits with what AI can do. He believes that the real power of AI lies in building a solution to one problem exceptionally well.Transcript[0:00–0:12] David Hirschfeld: Founders who are in love with their problem and in love with the customer, those are founders that find a way to become successful. The ones that are in love with their idea and their product fail in massive numbers.[0:13–0:24] David Hirschfeld: So how do you get those founders who have what they believe is a great idea and everybody’s going to want to buy this, how do you back them up and turn it into a clinical exercise?[0:26–0:28] David Hirschfeld: And that’s what Launch First is all about.[0:30–0:46] Interviewer: What’s the one problem you’re perfectly positioned to solve? Hard question, and one that demands more than just a single answer. AI startups today are like architects trying to build an entire city when they haven’t even mastered how to build a single room.[0:48–1:05] Interviewer: Every feature becomes another building, every idea another street. until a little AI chaos, we call them unexpected edge cases, flummox it all up and it starts giving back not so good answers.[1:06–1:21] Interviewer: You know, the stuff we don’t expect. Soon, these founders are stretched too thin to build anything that lasts. One problem costing money, one solution that makes their lives measurably better.[1:22–1:33] Interviewer: This week, a conversation with Techies CEO David Hirschfeld, where we try to cut through the noise and actually show you something that’s simple. But remember, simple is never easy to do.[1:34–1:49] Interviewer: As David says, founders who are in love with their problem are usually in love with the customer. Those are founders that find a way to become successful. The ones that are in love with their idea and their product fail in massive numbers.[1:50–1:50] : Why?[1:51–2:03] Interviewer: That’s worth unpacking, especially as we start seeing what AI is going to do in 2025. Before the problem, let’s jump into your FUD factor.[2:03–2:15] Interviewer: What’s your FUD factor? The one perfect problem to solve, simplify. It all comes down to something deeper than features or benefits, addressing fundamental human fears.[2:15–2:28] David Hirschfeld: What is the problem that you’re trying to solve? And why does it matter? From a perceived impact, you’re solving this problem because people perceive this as a big problem.[2:28–2:39] David Hirschfeld: And because it costs a quantifiable amount that they’ll save that money back or they’ll get that money back if you fix the problem for them. Those are two separate numbers, right?[2:40–2:50] David Hirschfeld: Perception and actual are two. And you need to know both because perception gets them to lean forward and say, can you fix that for me? And the cost is the way that you get them to spend money with you.Interactive Infographic: 9 Steps to Launch Your Startup Roadmap[2:50–3:01] David Hirschfeld: So you get, right? Because the higher the cost and the higher perceived impact, then that means you can get more people interested and you can charge more for your product. So who is that early adopter?[3:02–3:12] David Hirschfeld: Which niche has the highest perceived impact and has the highest cost for the problem you’re solving? And tease it out in terms of their survival.[3:13–3:29] David Hirschfeld: What is it about that problem that makes them scared? Right. What? Because it all comes down to fear and discomfort. If somebody is afraid and uncomfortable, they want that discomfort to go away and they want to mitigate the fear.[3:30–3:45] David Hirschfeld: Right. And and those are always problems. Right. I mean, when even if you want to go on vacation, the only thing that motivates people is to try to assuage those things. Like you want to go on a vacation because it sounds exciting because that excitement mitigates this fear of being bored and missing out.[3:45–4:14] David Hirschfeld: so everything is about I hate to say it, it’s all about fear, uncertainty, and doubt my DM really nailed this idea early on this idea of focus on fear, uncertainty, and doubt and I always thought that was just a very negative way of scaring people so you could win deals, and I started to realize it’s not just that, it’s really the primary thing that motivates everybody to do the things[4:14–4:49] Interviewer: that they do. I was interviewing Richard White of Fathom, who’s the AI note-taking service, and a great example. He’s a total product dev guy. So her first thing was hypothesis, and that we can take transcription. This is pre-AI, when his investors would even freak out if he said AI, because that wasn’t a good thing, like 2020-ish. And so he said, we can take transcription to nothing. That was the hypothesis. And the thing I love listening to him, he would then prove that obviously and now he’s proving more and more but he kept so so focused and[4:49–5:15] Interviewer: disciplined around growing not getting too crazy not trying to compete with sales people like gong is his big competitor who’s totally sales focused and is a very unique flavor he can do it but kudos to gong if you’re doing a sales specific one there’s going to be energy psychology the aggressiveness that’s going to be very different than somebody taking a note-taking at a CPA service, you know?[5:16–5:17] David Hirschfeld: Right, exactly, right, yeah.Discover how Tekyz’s AI Development services can propel your business forward. Contact us today to unleash AI innovation in your business![5:18–5:23] Interviewer: So he applied that same sort of one lean kind of focus. I know it’s like not the lean startup.[5:24–5:34] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, well, that’s the definition of lean, is basically you make a hypothesis and then you come up with an experiment to prove that the hypothesis is true.[5:34–5:48] David Hirschfeld: And when you talk about product-market fit, there’s only one measure for product-market fit, and that’s people will pay more than what it costs you to find a customer. You only know you have it when you’ve received money enough times that you know it wasn’t a fluke.[5:50–6:02] David Hirschfeld: Founders who are in love with their problem and in love with the customer, those are founders that find a way to become successful. The ones that are in love with their idea and their product fail in massive numbers.[6:03–6:15] David Hirschfeld: So how do you get those founders who have what they believe is a great idea and everybody’s going to want to buy this? How do you back them up and turn it into a clinical exercise?[6:16–6:18] David Hirschfeld: And that’s what Launch First is all about.[6:19–6:38] Interviewer: Understanding these core motivations takes more than insight. It takes a team to transform that AI understanding into action. Remember, transformation, AI transformation, is about taking our old software habits and updating them with what AI can do with us.[6:39–6:51] Interviewer: And David’s approach to building these teams reveals something unexpected. When you’re building something that matters, the foundation isn’t just your idea. It’s your team.[6:51–7:14] Interviewer: David spent nine months in India, not over a decade, not because it was trendy, but because he understood something fundamental about creating really good teams People talk about using offshore he says but they literally treat it like throwing a ball over a fence and hoping there somebody else on the other side to catch it Building in the AI age isn’t about location.[7:15–7:31] Interviewer: It’s about creating a culture of analytical thinking and creative problem solving and giving people the space to be creative with AI. Well, talk to us about your launch first process and how you put, because simple is hard to do.[7:31–7:45] Interviewer: And with your experience and with your teams, how do you sort of make things look simple, even though there’s a lot going on in the background? You know what I’m saying? I mean, to make it actually working, that’s what I mean by simplicity, not just the design, but like the functions.[7:46–7:58] David Hirschfeld: Right, and it’s not simple, right? There’s a lot of moving parts, right, that have to coordinate. There’s a lot of planning involved, and it comes down to discipline and culture.[7:59–8:11] David Hirschfeld: Basically, putting systems in place, getting everybody comfortable with the systems, and continuing to identify patterns that are efficient, putting the systems around those patterns, and getting everybody comfortable.[8:11–8:30] David Hirschfeld: Because you want to, and then automating as much of that as possible. Because the whole goal of this is to have predictability and consistency and quality and efficiency, right, without restricting everybody so that their work, you feel like they’re a cog in a machine.[8:30–8:47] David Hirschfeld: Because then you lose all the creativity. And so, you know, whether you’re documentation or an administrator, tester or developer or project manager, everybody has to be treated in such a way that everybody’s opinion has a lot of respect and that having an opinion is important.[8:48–8:58] David Hirschfeld: So, like, if I have somebody, we need this done, I don’t want them to say, OK, I’ll have that done right away. I want them to come back and say, here’s a better way to do it. Are you sure you want to do that?[8:59–9:18] David Hirschfeld: Maybe we want to wait because of these other factors. And sometimes it gets a little frustrating. I just want my team to do it. But I’ve built a team where they’re very analytical, and so often we’ll have a debate about things that are a technical approach or architectural approach or how to the order of delivery or whatever it is.[9:19–9:25] David Hirschfeld: And it always benefits the client, always benefits our business by having this kind of a culture in our business.[9:26–9:28] Interviewer: But you worked with some folks in India for many years.[9:28–10:00] David Hirschfeld: um well actually my team is yeah my team is still in india so but i make 15 trips to india between 2010 and the pandemic to build my teams in india you know people talk about using offshore but they literally it’s like throwing a ball over the fence and hoping there’s somebody there to catch it um and that it’s not how you build an exceptional team right you have to basically be part of their culture and acculturate them in your culture.[10:00–10:21] David Hirschfeld: And then, and you build, that’s how you build teams. So, and it takes a lot of travel and a lot of time changes. You know, I figured I added it up once I spent nine months in India during those, what, 11 years, 10 years, nine months total time working with my team several times a year and some years.[10:22–10:36] David Hirschfeld: But then we can build, it doesn’t matter where they are. Building an exceptional team has to do with protocols and discipline and consistency and analytical thinking and, you know, certain traits.[10:36–10:48] David Hirschfeld: And once the team forms right, then they become fiercely defensive about not polluting their team with people that don’t fit in the culture.[10:49–10:58] David Hirschfeld: So, yeah. Then they become independent. Then they grow themselves at that point. But to get there, it takes some work.[10:59–11:12] Interviewer: No, totally. And it’s funny that people use the word remote, where what you’re outlining is if you’re really going to do, especially working with a team at a level, that I get the sense that you’re really doing a lot of projects.[11:12–11:33] Interviewer: It’s not just seeing them in person, but part of the getting to know their culture, knowing how you can adapt and how they can adapt. And basically, what’s funny, the last thing you turn when it works, it’s not remote. You may not even see them. I know some people in India I haven’t even met yet that I know more about than some people I’m really local to. That’s an internet thing.[11:34–11:50] David Hirschfeld: Right. I even created a company in India, Techies Tech, Techies Tech Private Limited, and my director of development who started with me as a tester.[11:50–12:06] David Hirschfeld: And she was a clear outlier, just brilliant and never good enough at anything. So she was like, you know, in all of our off hours, just focused on just being better and smarter. And so I just kept pushing her into higher levels of responsibility.[12:06–12:22] David Hirschfeld: And she said, I’m not skilled enough to do that. And I said, well, too bad you’re doing it. And I’m here to support you, so don’t worry. And she will always rise to the occasion until she finally took over the whole development team. And now she’s my partner in that Techies Tech. We founded that just last December.[12:22–12:35] Interviewer: But even the best team needs a clear target. This is where David’s process gets real, turning ideas into testable hypotheses before writing a single line of code.[12:36–12:49] Interviewer: Here’s where we enter the simulation. This is where if you’re watching along, I don’t care if you have an AI startup, this applies to creatives, to entrepreneurs, to small businesses. Give it a shot because this high value problem isn’t limited to AI.[12:50–13:04] Interviewer: AI just helps us do it a little bit better. And here’s where most AI startups get it backwards. They build first, then search for problems to solve. David’s approach, simulate before you stimulate.[13:05–13:16] Interviewer: If you come up with a simulation of your product that’s realistic enough so people don’t ask you, how do I know you can build this? They need to trust it. That’s a critical success factor.[13:16–13:27] Interviewer: It’s about validating your market before investing in development or creating the product in the first place. But this only works if you’re solving a problem people face regularly.[13:28–13:45] Interviewer: This simulation is where you come in. Maybe you have a startup, a business, a creator building influence. What applies here applies to all of us, I think. If we’re taking a startup to 2025, I know let’s say it’s a product development, sort of like a fathom or something.[13:45–13:58] Interviewer: I mean, not a SaaS, but subscription model. Walk us through sort of like not just your process, but you’re talking to them. What are the key points and what should a startup look for in this evolving world of AI heading into 2025?[13:59–14:30] David Hirschfeld: The best startups are people that say okay I work in an industry and I struggle with this problem often like on a daily or weekly basis If I struggle every twice a year it not top of mind enough to be good for a startup problem to solve because it very difficult to get people to continue to keep the top of mind when they you know thinking of a product but if it’s something you struggle with daily or weekly then that’s a problem and you know that the[14:30–15:01] David Hirschfeld: impact to you is significant and you can easily quantify the cost because of the impact so you have both the perception and you have the cost then that is a good problem to tackle now if you’re in an industry with lots of people just like you all struggling with the same problem you’re struggling with and you know that because you go to conferences or you have some reach to that population now you’ve got the foundation of something that should be a successful startup[15:01–15:20] David Hirschfeld: because once you solve the problem unless you’re just not honest with yourself about other people struggling with the problem what the real cost of the problem was you should be able to go to all these other people and you should be and they should relate to the fact that you understand their problem and that they need it at all, right?[15:20–15:48] David Hirschfeld: And you know what the cost is. You’re offering it at a value that makes it obvious they need to do this. So, and there are rare, there are other factors that come into play that make it difficult for some of those people to make that decision because of where they are in the organization or because you’re changing a mindset and a workflow in a context where changing minds and workflows is more difficult, and some of those things can be an impact.[15:48–15:54] David Hirschfeld: But you’re 50% of the way there. You have a much, much higher chance of being successful if you have those foundational pieces in place.[15:56–16:06] Interviewer: Perhaps the most misunderstood part of building successful AI solutions, the difference between fitting a market and actually solving a problem.[16:06–16:24] Interviewer: In part four, product market fit versus solution fit, get beyond the words. David is dropping some truth bombs. The one thing that everybody misses is how to confirm product market fit before you invest your money in developing the product.[16:24–16:39] Interviewer: This is where he says the lean startup usually fails. You don’t really want to build something and find out that nobody actually wants it. But this is what 95 out of 100 startups do. The difference, product market fit, means people might buy it.[16:39–17:10] Interviewer: product solution fit means they’ll actually use it and you out you focus a lot on product market fit obviously and uh you have a number of outlines on your site of like what traditional product market fit i don’t even know what that means but in general what happened before compared to how we do product market fit now what are the common things that people should watch out we’re having Googled product market fit and studying something from McKinsey in 2004 that’s like not even[17:10–17:11] : in the same universe anymore.[17:12–17:23] David Hirschfeld: So the one thing, I love lean startup, but the one thing that it misses is how to confirm product market fit before you invest in the development of your product.[17:24–17:34] David Hirschfeld: So because you don’t really want to build something and find out nobody wants it. But this is what nine out of 10 startups do, maybe 95 out of 100.[17:34–17:46] David Hirschfeld: I mean, the percentage is so high. And then it’s just a matter of whether you have the cash reserves to pivot enough times to find product market fit, if there is one, before you run out of money and you go down.[17:47–18:00] David Hirschfeld: And I’ve worked with lots of startups where this has happened. And I’ve worked with some that have been wildly successful. So, right, but the ones that aren’t successful, they always fail for the same reason. They didn’t validate product market fit early enough.[18:00–18:11] David Hirschfeld: And there’s only one way to do it. And that’s to ask somebody to pay you money for your idea. And if they will pay you money for this product that they will eventually get, then you know you’ve got product market fit.[18:11–18:24] David Hirschfeld: You may not have product solution fit. That’s the other half of the equation. And that’s that once you give it to them, they actually start using it because it was designed in a way that actually facilitates solving the problem for them in a way they want to do it.[18:24–18:37] David Hirschfeld: But that’s what an MVP should be built for. Everybody builds it for product market fit, which is wrong. It should be built for product solution fit only. So you should already know what your product market fit is.[18:37–18:47] David Hirschfeld: So what does that mean? That means go out and build your sales and marketing engine first and go out and do prelaunch sales before you build the product.[18:48–18:59] David Hirschfeld: Because if you come up with a simulation of your product that’s realistic enough so that people don’t ask you, how do I know you can build this? That’s a critical success factor.[18:59–19:10] David Hirschfeld: So if you’ve got a good enough simulation, I call it a high-fidelity prototype. These are mock-ups that actually animate just like the real product, so it looks like you’re demoing a real product.[19:11–19:26] David Hirschfeld: So if you build that, so that’s the part you invest in, the design and the iFidelity prototype. And then you go through a niche analysis process where you figure out, okay, I’ve got all these niches I can market my product to, right?[19:26–19:45] David Hirschfeld: You’ve heard the people that said, who’s your market? They go, everybody, right? Okay, that’s a formula for failure. So because you have to figure out, okay, maybe there’s 20 or 30 niches that you could market your product to when you really break it down.[19:45–20:03] David Hirschfeld: And I have my own definition of what makes a niche. But you want these niches to be very small and tight. And then when you look at it from a niche’s perspective, what are the all the various problems at a root level that they struggle with because it’s slightly different for each niche.[20:04–20:15] David Hirschfeld: How you would word it. Right. And you want to know from their perspective, like what is their survive? When do you get to the survival point in this? In other words, when you ask, why does somebody need the product?[20:15–20:30] David Hirschfeld: And they answer it. You go, well, why does that matter? Why does that? And you just keep asking why until they get to where because I don’t, I’m going to lose my job. We don’t fix that. Or because my career is at an end if I can’t solve this problem with losing employees.[20:30–20:49] David Hirschfeld: It’s got to be something that affects somebody at the level where their gut twists a little bit when they talk about that problem. And that’s how you know you’re at the root level of the problem. So you list all these problems out, and then you have a matrix where you say, okay, how impacted is this niche because of this problem from a perception perspective?[20:49–21:19] David Hirschfeld: Right? And then you build out this matrix. This is kind of a tedious process, but it’s how you really figure out which is the niche that has that highest Impact for the problems of struggle one or two problems that they struggling with and then you do that same matrix from a cost perspective because they may have a really high perceived impact but the actual cost is very low or vice versa right So you’re looking for where those two things, that perceived impact and that cost, are the highest possible, right?[21:19–21:55] David Hirschfeld: And you do that for the top two or three of all of those problems you identified because those are the only problems you want to focus on, and that’s the niche you can go after, right and and you can validate this in what not the discovery interview process which a lot of startup methodologies use right where the problem with that is that you’re asking the same questions from people in different niches very often and you get a lot of cross mixed information so instead you just think which of these niches do you already know pretty well and you can kind of[21:55–22:08] David Hirschfeld: fill in the matrix well, but for the ones you don’t, then you ask two or three people in each of those niches that you don’t know very well, and you ask them about, you know, are you struggling with this problem? How much does this impact you?[22:08–22:19] David Hirschfeld: How important is it to you find a way to resolve this? There was something to resolve it. How much would that improve your business? Things like that, right? Don’t tell them, I’ve got a product with this feature.[22:19–22:32] David Hirschfeld: What do you think? Because that’s a meaningless question. Anyway, you didn’t have some cost. You do that from the perception. Then you create basically a little bubble graph. And then all of a sudden, there’s two or three niches that float to the top.[22:32–22:58] David Hirschfeld: And then there’s a whole bunch of other steps we go through to validate which of those two or three niches is the ideal niche. A final interview process where we’re now validating that all the assumptions we made about the problems and about that niche are true, at least the 30% to 40% of the people there so that we know when we finish our prototype and we go out and we start to market as a pre-launch sale to those people in that Nipsa are going to probably buy.[22:59–23:13] David Hirschfeld: And if they do buy in enough numbers, now you know you have product market fit and you have revenue that you’re generating that helps you fund the development. It’s harder up front.[23:14–23:15] David Hirschfeld: It’s easier on the back side.[23:15–23:25] Interviewer: But we should be able to actually go forward and get an idea of where we’re going without being like in this ego test. And the only way we can do that is by realizing we don’t know anything.[23:26–23:39] Interviewer: Let’s go ask the customer. Let’s do that every single day. The real power of AI isn’t building everything, being the all smart everything. It’s in building a solution to one problem exceptionally well.[23:40–24:15] Interviewer: And that transformation starts with finding the high value problem. if you’re solving. So number one, find your daily problem. You want this problem to be daily or weekly. Two, test before you build. And three, build for solution fit, right? It might fit, they might pay for it, but do they want to use it repeatedly? This is one of the ways that David’s going to show us how he’s doing it. And now his own two AI apps that he’s developed from this process of launch first and taking AI, not just wrapping chat GPT called an API wrapper.[24:15–24:25] Interviewer: For those who don’t know, they just use chat GPT and act like it’s their software. He’s building his own for these two pieces and is challenged by something, even with AI,[24:25–24:33] : that even in creating it, you have to realize how fast this is moving and how someone else might come up with the same idea.[24:33–24:50] Interviewer: but a lot of it, especially with AI, I’ve never seen a place that if you identify the problem right, if you really dial in what you’re talking about with launch first, I’ve never seen cash move so quick when people actually have got it dialed in and solve like a really clear problem.[24:50–25:02] Interviewer: I know somebody will copy it and buy it and blah, blah, blah. Here, get their money, be really kind to them, actually treat them like somebody important, which they are, and they’ll pay you and they won’t go away.[25:02–25:18] Interviewer: and I’ve seen people creating these bits like on podcasts. So you upload the podcast. I don’t need it, but transcribes it, does the social. Now you’ve got pretty much everything to review, and I can tell you it will save you like five, ten hours a week, easy.[25:18–25:25] Interviewer: And it’s a very simple API reference from ChatGPP. I mean, this is not rocket science.[25:25–25:37] David Hirschfeld: Right, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit still, right, because AI is so consumable. and it’s so amorphous. It does whatever you want it to do.[25:38–25:48] David Hirschfeld: So you just have to think of a thing that has high value and is discrete, and you automate it. We’re working on a couple products right now.[25:48–26:08] David Hirschfeld: That niche analysis piece I was telling you about, we’re working on that as an AI. So it’s not just as simple as a wrapper for open AI. There’s more to it. but it’s a huge deal because that’s where founders get fatigued is doing that effort, right?[26:08–26:30] David Hirschfeld: There are diligent founders that will go through it and really do it all and it becomes such a huge value to them plus it gives them that much more evidence when they do decide they want to raise money later on in terms of their market research and the depth of what their product, the importance of their product in the market.[26:31–26:42] David Hirschfeld: So we’re doing that. And the other one, which is our most expensive development activity, is estimating projects because we do a way more detailed job than most people when we create our estimates in terms of the breakdown.[26:42–26:54] David Hirschfeld: And so we’re building an AI tool, again, more than just a wrapper around open AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s an AI tool to automate our process that basically mimics what we do. Nice.[26:54–26:55] David Hirschfeld: We’re estimating projects.[26:55–26:59] Interviewer: God, it’s such a great time to be around, isn’t it?[26:59–26:59] : It is.[26:59–27:02] Interviewer: It is. It is. But then it’s a little scary.[27:03–27:12] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. Is anybody going to need this estimator in a year? Because AI will be building everything for us. Right? I don’t know.[27:12–27:15] Interviewer: Oh, wait. Fear, uncertainty now. No, not again.[27:16–27:20] David Hirschfeld: No question. Now, I have to figure out a tool to replace that, right?[27:21–27:21] : Right.[27:21–27:29] Interviewer: Oh, David, thank you. It’s been a real blast. Hey, where can people get in touch with you after the podcast website and things like that, socials? Where can they get reach out to you?[27:29–27:46] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, thanks. You can go to my — well, LinkedIn is a good place to get me. DM Hirschfeld. You have to look at my online. But the easiest way to find me is on my website, techies.com, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z.com.[27:47–28:08] David Hirschfeld: And you can email me at david at techies.com. so yeah and I’d love to hear from people even if it’s just a fun conversation about startups or about how to transform your business with AI you know you hear about digital transformation everybody talks about that it’s really it’s AI transformation that’s the next buzzword.Key TakeawaysThis podcast episode provides valuable insights for AI startup founders, emphasizing the importance of:Focusing on solving real-world problems: Identify a problem that customers face daily or weekly and that has a quantifiable cost associated with it. →Validating product-market fit before development: Create a high-fidelity prototype that simulates the product and conduct pre-launch sales to gauge customer interest and willingness to pay. →Building for solution fit: Ensure that the product effectively solves the problem in a way that customers find valuable and usable. →Building strong teams: Foster a culture of analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, and respect for everyone’s opinion. →Hirschfeld’s “Launch First” process provides a practical framework for navigating the challenges of building successful AI startups.For an in-depth understanding of David Hirschfeld's innovative strategies for developing thriving AI startups, connect with him on LinkedIn or explore his website at https://tekyz.com. Embrace the power of AI transformation and start creating solutions that solve real problems for your customers.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Find Your High-Value Problem: Why 2025’s Best AI Startups Solve Just One Thing was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Data-Driven Podcast: Creating High-Impact Teams & Validating Niches](https://tekyz.com/data-driven-podcast-creating-high-impact-teams-validating-niches-7dc835502444/) - Featured Image: The Data-Driven Podcast — Creating High-Impact Teams & Validating Nicheshttps://medium.com/media/6a8904b477004a3c5e8c8e218e9e4a95/hrefSummaryIn this episode, David Hershfeld, CEO of Tekyz, discusses his unique Launch First methodology, which emphasizes the importance of validating product-market fit before building a product. He shares insights on niche analysis, customer engagement, and the significance of generating revenue early in the startup process. The conversation also touches on the role of exceptional teams, metrics for success, and the integration of AI in software development. David reflects on learning from failures and the iterative nature of startups, providing valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Launch First Methodology02:45 The Importance of Proving Product-Market Fit05:56 Niche Analysis and Customer Engagement08:48 Revenue Generation Before Product Development11:51 Challenges in Startup Methodologies14:48 The Role of Validation in Startup Success18:10 Lessons from Past Experiences21:03 The Future of Startup Methodologies26:44 Startup Lessons and Learning from Failure29:03 The Role of AI in Software Development32:20 Building Exceptional Teams for Quality Software36:39 Learning from Mistakes and Overcoming Obstacles39:27 Metrics for Success in Software Projects52:00 Conclusion and Key TakeawaysIntroduction to Launch First Methodology (00:00)Welcome to Data Driven. Today, Frank and Andy are joined by David Hershfeld, CEO and founder of Techies Corporation, a firm specialising in helping startups and saving troubled projects with his unique Launch First methodology. David brings us into his world of startups, where, believe it or not, he advocates for getting customers before you even build the product. He explains how Launch First combines high-fidelity prototypes, niche targeting,and a lean, marketing-first approach to de-risk software launches and prove real demand. Whether you’re an engineer-turned-entrepreneur or just curious about the art and science of startups, buckle up for an enlightening episode with insights on maximising impact and proving product-market fit with speed and precision. Let’s dive in.Well, hello and welcome to data driven the podcast where we explore the emergent fields of data science, artificial intelligence, and of course data engineering with me. As always is Andy Leonard. How’s it going Andy? Pretty good Frank. How are you doing? I’m doing well doing well. I just trained a large language model using the instruct lab methodology. So it was interesting experience. Took about 27 hours to compute.on somebody else’s hardware and somebody else’s dime. So, you know, I’m sure if I were, I actually did try to run it on my local hardware that I have. I actually have a new Mac from work, which has, it’s an M3, 128 gigs of RAM. And one of the reasons why Macs are popular in this space is they share the system memory with the GPU.So I effectively have 100, you 120 gig of GPU, which is pretty interesting. It definitely makes things a lot faster. Some of the Olamis stuff, if you run locally, is really snappy. It’s kind of nice. But again, so somebody else’s dime. So, you know, it’s always good when you get high end compute from somebody else. How about you? Yeah, I’m just peddling around here. I’ve been doing a little writing.Cool. And threatening to… I’m actually working on a series on my blog about data engineering frameworks and fabric. Nice. Fabric’s kind of new. right now, well, I have a check today and fabric’s moving at that pace where you can kind of say that. They’re adding new things daily. But all of the pieces and parts that I want to use are not quite there yet. They’re probably coming because…There’s something similar in Azure Data Factory. And you know, I have some friends on the team and I’ve let them know, hey, this problem I’m trying to solve and this what I think I need. So they’ll get to it. It’ll get there. They should have had a launch first or generate revenue first methodology, which is a good segue into our guest today is David Hirschfeld, founder and CEO of Techies Corporation.And they have what they call a launch first methodology where software founders can achieve product market fit easily and quickly without the typical risks associated with software startups. It is primarily a software development company focused on startups and they love recovery projects. You know, the projects that are in trouble and you need a special forces team to pull them out.Welcome to the show David. We can talk about that and kind of what your launch first methodology is. Sure hi Frank. Hi Andy. Thanks for having me today. No problem. So looking at your LinkedIn profile, you’ve been a. You’ve been a founder and CEO for awhile. Yeah, so so seems like you know what you’re talking about in terms of helping startups.What inspired you with this launch for? Well, first off, what is the launch first methodology and what inspired you to make it? OK, well. I’ve been doing. Working primarily with startups, but not limited to startups, but primarily with startups for the last 17 years. And I’ve had my own startups even prior to that. I started a software company and logistics.inventory management route distribution as sort of a lark in early 90s with a friend of mine. We were working at Texas Instruments and we started the software company and despite everything, every effort on both our parts, we ended up growing it anyway to to 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it in 2000. So.Of course, now I’m thinking I’m a software startup genius, right? Because I had a successful startup and but I didn’t realize what we did right and what we did wrong and how much of it was just timing. I was VP of products for the company that acquired us for the next couple of years and then cast about and started techies a few years later. Working mostly with startups and I have worked with well. Probably close to 80 startups at this point.in lots of different business domains and most of them, a few of them really successful, but most of them, the vast majority fail. And they all fail for the same reason. They just wait way too long to prove product market fit. And the only way to prove product market fit is by getting customers to pay money for your software. Because it doesn’t matter what they say about how great it is and they’ll buy it when it comes out.If you don’t get them paying for it, you don’t have any proof that they really met them. watching all these companies fail for the same reasons, it dawned on me over a period of, know, sort of how peeling the onion started to realize the things that they were missing. And the primary thing was going out and basically starting the marketing engine first before building the software product. I know that sounds kind of in reverse.but that’s the only way you know if you’ve got a product that the market wants is to go out and market it successfully. So the way we do that is we go through a really involved niche analysis process, which is also my own methodology, the way we figure out what that niche is and who the early adopters and how to speak to them, what their top two or three root level problems that they need solved are, what that value is for solving those problems.Then we create a very animated set of mockups. We call it a high fidelity prototype. It looks like a real product when you demo it, people think you’ve actually built the product. And then we basically create a simple marketing stack, go out and market the product with some high value offer like lifetime license or something that somebody will look at and say, that’s a really high value. I don’t really want to miss out on that offer.And this is a big problem. know it costs me a lot. So I know I’m going to buy this software when it comes out. So sure, why not? I’ll go ahead and buy into it. Now I’ve got to guarantee that if you don’t come out with the software in a certain period of time, you’ll give me the option to get a refund. So that’s all fair, right? And if you can sell enough product at high enough closing ratio at this point that you can prove that your lifetime value of your customer is going to be high enough to offset what your cost of acquisition is, you’ve proven you’ve got product market fit and a market. Now,and you’re generating revenue to help you fund the development of the software. And if you want to raise money, raising money is a whole lot easier because you can show demand and customer acquisition. that’s the idea, start to generate revenue first, then build a product. So this sounds like it intersects with lean marketing, lean startups, I should say. It does. It definitely borrows concepts from lean startup with the exception of you actuallystart to sell your product and generate revenue with it, which lean startup doesn’t, right? That’s the one piece I think they’re missing. A lean startup is all about testing, test, test, test, test, right? You have an assumption, don’t put any belief system to it. Go out and actually test the assumption and see if it’s true. So this just takes that to the, little bit farther, you know, with the, okay, you think there’s a market for it, let’s go out and test and see if people will spend money for the product.Red I can’t blanket on that guy’s name, but it’s called million dollar weekend. No. It sounds not exactly the same, but he would basically find a way to raise money before he bills anything. Kind of like, Hey, would you put down any offers offers? He’s the founder of APSUMO among other things. And one of these things, it’s not quite exactly. I think your approach is a little more refined. I think he’smore seat of the pants type guy, but he’ll basically send an email out to his friends. Like, would you pay X amount of dollars per month for this? If you’re interested, I’ll give you a super discount. Now give me like, you know, like one 10th that price. And then he basically raises the money. And of course, I’m sure he does math in his head to make sure he’ll break, you know, like money on the lower discount. And then, you know, if enough people sign up like, well, it, there’s definitely a market there.Do you want to transform your business with AI? Send us a message to schedule a call!Technically, he’s making money right away, right? Right. So this kind of plays off the crowdfunding model, right? So let’s say I have a market, I think it appeals to the masses, then I’m going to go after a crowdfunding model. But that doesn’t work if you’re going after a niche market, a B2B niche market, right? Because there’s not a, because they’re just not going to see your marketing. So that’s much more of a either a webinar or direct sales type of approach to do the same sort of thing.And as you know, crowdfunding works when you have a really elaborate crowdfunding campaign, right? We’ve got a demo that looks like you’ve built the product and you’re showing something really sophisticated and and you’re and making it sound big. So you do the same sort of thing with launch. First, you just do it in either a one on one or a webinar fashion and and for us the big discount is well, let’s say.Let’s say it’s going to be $99 a month subscription for an entry level, right? So if you pay two years of that subscription subscription price in advance, I’ll give you a lifetime license. And why would anybody want to give away a lifetime license? Because because you’re going to give away a an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of your market selling hundreds of lifetime licenses and generating thousands of dollars for each one.As opposed to going out and finding and giving away 10, 15, 20, 25 % equity to raise the same amount of money.Interesting. So you’re kind of Robin Peter to not Robin Peter to pay a Paul, but you kind of have you can kind of pick your poison, so to speak. Yeah, terrible analogies. Andy, help me out here, man. Those are actually what I what I love about it is, is a I’m an engineer. Okay. And Frank can back me up on this. And that means I’m lousy at accounting. And I’m meh at business. There are engineers who are great, great engineers, great at business. I’m not one of them. ButWhat I like about it is something that it sounds going to sound simple. You feel free to laugh, but it dawned on me that when I do things this time of year, like my November sale instead of Black Friday, I put everything on sale and I’ll have products that I normally get anywhere from $299 for a day of training up to $899. I’ll set it on 99 bucks and the numbers work out where I make a whole lot more money.this month than any other month of the year. And the thing that dawned on me that again, feel free to laugh is when somebody pays me for my content or my time, I’m getting paid. Right. That’s what I heard when you said that. You two year, a two year license, two year, you know, two years at the subscription rate equals a lifetime license. I love that idea and I’ve sold some products and I’m going to give you credit for that, but I’m going to try that out see if it works.Yeah. Yeah. And then if it’s something that is solving a quantifiable problem and it’s something they know they’re going to need, then they’ll buy it. and you’re not really giving much away when you think about the amount of what percentage of the market you’re, you’re losing in the process, right? Right. Because that’s preventing you from having to give any equity away in, the startup raising money. Yeah, that’s perfect.I love that idea a lot. Yeah, thanks. All right. I’m going. See you. I’m kidding. I’m just taking a minute to get some more ideas from you, David, but I’m glad we kind of cleared that up early because I do that. I’m not, I promise I’m not trying to, you know, not trying to steal anything from you. You don’t take it that way, but it’s a real world example for me because if I knew about your service, I probably would have been talking to you before now. So now others, if you’re listening, if you’re like me, an engineer,who’s maybe meh at business and marketing and all of this stuff, but a great engineer, and you just got a great idea and you wanna see how it goes, talk to David’s company, Techies, is that correct? Yeah, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. We’ll put the link in the show notes for you and I’m gonna go check it out and see what else I can learn. I appreciate that, thank you, thank you. Yeah, it’s the hardest part of…the whole methodology, because there’s a lot involved when you actually do this in a formal way. The hardest part is the niche analysis piece, because, and it’s a methodology I created that is metrics driven. A lot of the startup methodologies, and many of them are good, the biggest problem I always have with them is that they’re, each step is kind of siloed, and it’s subjective when you’ve done that step.completely and correctly, then you move on to the next step. I’ll give you an example. Some of them I think are misplaced. For example, discovery interviews. Discovery interviews, you take your idea, you break it down to all the features and the benefits and the value, and now you go out to the market and you interview potential customers on this idea ofhere’s a product I’m planning on building or I’m thinking of building and here are the features that we’re providing and this is the value we think it’s gonna get. Would this be value to you? What’s the cost to you for doing those things? And there’s a couple problems with that. One is people don’t usually wanna be honest with you when you’re asking them questions like that. Not because they’re dishonest, but just because they’re trying to help you out. They may say some instead are,positive sounding or they may not want to reveal a weakness in their business in some way or maybe they’re or maybe they really believe that this is a great idea but because they’re not doing any cost benefit analysis or they don’t have to justify the purchase right that’s right and so you get a lot of miss and you’re usually startups are asking people in lots of different niches while they’re doing this discovery interview phaseNot realizing that each niche has their own issues that are specific, so you’re not laser focusing the questions and the discovery around the problems in that niche and launch first does this really differently. There’s we break it down by by teasing out the root level problem statements across lots of different niches and we build this matrix and then we score. OK for this.Here’s all the list of problems that we have identified across all the niches. Which one apply to this niche and what’s how much is the impact to that niche for that problem? Then we score this matrix so that it starts to become obvious. Which are the top three problems that impact each niche right out of the list of all the problems on potentially solve it and then we do the same matrix again and we say, OK, what’s the true cost of each of these problems for each of these niches?What’s the perception that this is a problem and what’s the actual cost associated with the problem? And then we basically use a reporting technique to bubble chart these things and identify the ideal second, two or three top niches and the two or three problems they need solved now. That’s because it’s a high value and they perceive it as a high impact problem. And then we do deep dive, right? And in the process of doing that is you’re realizing you don’t.understand each niche and their impact, you have to go out and you just sort of randomly start doing calls to two or three stakeholders in each niche instead of a formal discovery phase. It just happens naturally. I really like that. The organic field to that is very appealing to me. Yeah. And when you’re done, you have evidence of what you should be doing because the bubble chart produces a, you know, it’s a scoring algorithm instead of it saying, I feel like I’m done.You know we can move on to the next phase of this. Then we do a deep dive to figure out which is the ideal niche and at the very end of that whole process. Then we do what we call a validator set of validating interviews. We have all of these assumptions. All of this information was collected. We’ve made a decision. We believe we understand the value. We believe we understand the messaging because we want that messaging to to touch on the what they feel is the impact of those top two or three problems. Then we go out.And we talked to 15 to 20 stakeholders in that niche and find out whether or not we captured this information correctly or not. If not, then we drop that niche and go back to the second niche that came up in our list. Because one of those top two or three or four niches, you’ll get a 30 or 40 % affinity to the validation to. They’ll say yes, that’s problem kills me. It costs even more than what you’re.saying it does because you probably didn’t factor these two things into it. I would, I think you should charge more because this is, know what you’re saying. You’re going to come out with it, but people will pay a lot. You know, that’s kind of what you’re looking for from the state when you really nail it. Yeah. Cause they know they’re not at risk. So you want to hear them say stuff like that, right? It’s, it’s very cool. And I, you know, just kind of rolling back a little into what you said earlier about how people, you know, unlessunless they’ve made a purchase. That’s how you know they like what you’ve shown them. they’re at least willing to bring it into their organization and give it a shot. They’ve spent money. And I think that’s a huge chasm crossing event when someone actually gives you money, pays you for your product. And before that, all of the reasons you listed are just so accurate. mean, people being polite.And they’re trying to be helpful. think I don’t think I’ve never encountered anybody being malicious about it. I don’t think that’s part of the, know, if they’re willing to take the time to answer an email or get on a call with you, there’s some interest, right? But there’s no guarantee you’re to close, you know, if you do that. Yeah. And very plucks down the money. It’s all exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that’s exactly.Have you guys heard of the mom test? The book the mom test I have. OK, it’s I think it’s my favorite business book of all time. It’s if you the problem with asking your mom about your new business idea is she wants to make you feel good and so she’s going to say, darling, that’s wonderful. I think you’ll be so successful, right? So you’re not going to get an honest answer from her.because she either because you have a lot of deep seated problems in your family or because she’s a loving mother and wants to take care of you. Either way, you’re in trouble. So it’s called the mom test because if you learn how to ask questions in the right way, then even your mother will give you honest answers, not realizing that she necessarily even what the answers are for. Right. And it’s just a great book. And the guysI can’t think of who the author is right now, but he’s had several very successful startups and it’s just a brilliant book. It’s a fun listen to if you like listening to books. we love audio books. That’ll come up later. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I found it. And Rob Fitzpatrick, is that his name? Yeah, that’s it. Right.Yeah, so the hardest part of launch first is the niche analysis piece because it’s tedious to do to do it properly. So that’s our one of the AI tools that we’re building right now is to basically do that niche analysis for you filling in the matrices primarily. Yeah. It sounds fascinating and I you know, I definitely definitely going to look into the product and and.may end up chatting with you more about it. I love to. Yeah, I like talking about it. Right. Well, yeah. Well, and you know, you’ve been there, done that. So and I loved your in your introduction. I loved how you talked about, know, you had this first go and it went well and you sold the company that the stats on that you’re probably more aware of them than I am the statistics on doing that the very first time out of the gate coming from, especially it’s kind of a handicap.Discover how our expertise in AI development can revolutionize your operations and elevate your business. Contact us today to get started!coming from a large corporate America institution like Texas Instruments and then jumping into that unless you’re like in marketing or something like that. It’s just, it’s a hard thing. It’s a number of obstacles you guys had to hit. And you mentioned timing. I think that’s a very astute observation and you can get everything else right. And either wait too long or like you said, don’t get out there early enough with something.and the game’s over before you even step on the field. Well, luckily, we didn’t know this industry that well. My brother-in-law was in it, which is why we thought we would build some software for him and maybe create a, not SaaS at the time, Windows 3.1 was brand new. All the products at the time were all Unix-based and expensive and green screen. So we thought, okay, maybe this will beThat’s why I say we kind of accidentally backed into the whole thing. That’s fine. This would be our first shot at at trying to do a software company just because we always wanted to do that. And and so we got a very simple product out fairly quickly and it was the first Windows product in this industry and that was and that proved that there was product market fit. Because we put some ads out.Interactive Infographic: How to Determine A Product Market Fitand people slowly started to buy it and started to pick up. Then we went to a trade show and people were lined up outside our booth at this really cheap booth. I mean, it was basically made out of PVC and we went down to Kinko’s and got a banner that was pushed out in the middle so you could see it from both sides. And we were in the back corner of this trade show.We had fire marshals telling us we had to disband people because they were blocking the aisles. Wow. Good problem to have. Yeah, right. But product market said we we knew that people wanted it. We didn’t know it was going to be like that. Yeah, right, right. But still, like, you know, it was a good kind of, you know, test the waters. And I think that, you know, even if you are in marketing, just the the. The jump from.You know, kind of a big corporate or I mean, that that’s impressive. My hat’s off to you. I don’t have a hat on right now, but I love to tell you how brilliant I am, but we really got very lucky. That’s I’m sure there was I’ll bet you there was more brilliance than you’re letting on. We interview a lot of people and, know, it’s it’s when we when we encounter folks who are being humble about it, usually it’s there’s more more to that story. So.Not that the people that aren’t being humble. OK, never mind. I think everybody we talked to is pretty humble Frank. I think well, I just just to put a nail into that literally a nail several years later. Actually, this was about nine years ago. We I’m involved with another company called Anzu. We do health care related software and products for clinical testing and my partners.plastic surgeon and we’ve been doing that for 14 years now. About nine or eight years ago, one of our patents, we decided to turn that into a social media product. And I, of course, I had a very successful startup before and I thought I, and this was going to be huge and Instagram had just come out and it was called Kludge. I just, and I did tons of.demos to people who said this would be life changing. But we didn’t go out and start to sell it and create a monetization model at all. I just thought it would take off virally. That didn’t happen. We spent a lot of money on that product in a couple of years. So that followed much more the classic startup failure process. That was before I figured out Launch First. Otherwise, I would have done it very differently.So like I said, it’s not about being brilliant. Pardon me. Well, but I mean, sometimes that’s what it takes. And classic learning from your mistake. You you realize that, you know, it’s one thing about software. I tell friends all the time that if you do software for a living, if you’re touching software, it is a very unforgiving feedback cycle that you go through. I develop.behind the Teams window here we’re using to record this. I’ve got C Sharp open, Visual Studio and a C Sharp app open and setting on a break point. And if I step through this break point a few lines, it’s gonna hit an error, you know, fall from the tri block into a catch block. It’s not gonna, you know, tell me, you know, if you’d have written it this way, or, you know, it’s not gonna be mom to me by any stretch. It’s gonna, you know, it’s gonna flash at me and say, you fail.And my favorite error message, you know, object reference, not set to an instance of an object. It’s not going to, you know, it’s not going to be all handsy and nice. It’s just going to say this didn’t work. And that’s important. And if you do this, I’ll have 50 years in this, David and may. I started with machine code, know, machine code when I was 11. And if you get to a point, if you stick around that long,where you divorce the emotion from success or failure. It’s just like, that didn’t work. And you don’t even think about it. You just go and do the next thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I hear you, you know, walking through that same path with startups. And I love it. I admire that. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. And hats off to you, 51 years doing this. thank you. Yeah. So now, now.I’ve got to ask you since if you don’t mind, I ask a question here? AI code generation and also code assessment. How are you integrating that into your practice? Right now, I’m experimenting with both. I haven’t really done anything outside of the equivalent of commercial off the shelf, the OpenAI and some of the free models. Frank,mentioned, I don’t know if it was when the recording started or not, but Frank’s tinkering with, you know, with, with the tools through his, the company he works for and the company that owns them that, that allow you to train these models in fractions of the time it was taken a year or two ago. But that’s it. have a kind of a glancing passing. There’s been a number of tools around for a while that, that were automated and they will do things likeyou know, test automation and they’ll tell you they’ll actually generate tests for you that’ll catch all of the, you know, all of the errors that you don’t think about when you’re writing the code, you’re writing the code to work. You don’t think about all of the other things you’re not thinking about. was a little bit of a tautology there, but I should get a shirt. Frank, make us a shirt. I’m not thinking about the things I’m not thinking about. I love that. That’s the quotable for the show.No, you know, I full disclosure. I worked for Red Hat and you know they are owned by IBM and they came out with this. This notion of using. It’s called lab, but basically it’s large scale line map for chatbots is basically the idea where you can give it a very small subset of data. And use synthetic data to kind of boost your input and then create.more robust models on the other side and read at all up is doing other things where you know it’s basically like GitHub copilot but for Ansible for OpenShift for you know whatever one of the things that they showed us. Let’s say year ago now so like I’m sure it’s not you know too proprietary but the notion of what if what if you had a you know a command line terminal that was also assisting you with AI right? So if you do a lot of stuff with command line.I rely way too much on copy paste, right? So I’m already kind of augmenting memory with that, but also what if it kind of assisted you with creating this type of thing? I think that’s, and also in my personal kind of, I have my own GitHub copilot that I use quite a bit. It’s very useful, right? Not because, not because I need it, but.There’s only 24 hours a day. I’m going to build more stuff if I augment myself with AI. gosh, doesn’t make sense. And plus their content creation is largely driven by automation and different fragments of AI. And you asked that question though for a reason. David, you got sorry we got. no, was good. Your no no no yeah, I have because we’re. Trying to leverage it wherever we can in our practice, right?to speed up development, to reduce the costs for founders, to improve the quality of the code. One of the things that I always stand for, and it’s really important to me is being exceptional in terms of the team, not just any one person. Because you can have an exceptional person, but if the team doesn’t work in an exceptional way, then you’re not consistently producing.The kind of quality that you can just be really proud of from release to release to release. think sports is a great example of that, right? can have one rock star and team, but if they don’t. If you don’t have everybody kind of working at the same level, more or less right, you’re not going to the championship, right? And that’s why on my website it even says, you know, hyper exceptional software development team because there are artifacts that you produce if you’re an exceptional team that you don’t produce. If you’re.A good team or you know the typical kind of team. The artifacts in terms of the level of detail, the transparency. The way that iteration is documented in, you know in agonizing kind of detail and all and the where compliance is just a natural process because it’s baked in things like that. Which.Lot of team like I had a call from a friend of mine at somebody I met at a conference recently. He’s also a developer in the Midwest. And he asked me about fix. This is a good example and he wants to be. You know exceptional, but he’s not sure the best way to go about some of these things, so he has this fixed by his body. He’s doing software for an embedded system and now he’s getting bugs from the from the client.that he has to fix and they’re saying you have to fix this because it’s part of the contract and he’s saying this wasn’t in the requirements and so he said, well, how do you deal with this? And I said, well, number one, it should you have known about that requirement and if so that you would have either asked or clarified or just naturally taking care of it. For example, if I’m doing a login screen, there has to be a forgot password link, right? They know somebody shouldn’t have to put that into the requirement.I mean, of course you’re going to detail all that stuff out if you’re a good team. At some point it’ll get into the crap anyway. So he said that I said that’s your acid test. If there’s no way you could have known that it should have done that, and that’s why the defect is there, then it’s on them. If you should have known it’s on you and that’s a negotiation between your client and and I said, how did you test it? He said what was very hard to test because it’s hardware that we don’t have access to. And I said, did you build a test harness?And he didn’t know what that was. And I yeah, right? And I said, well, how do you test APIs? He said he said, well, we usually have access to the API. So I said OK, so any application ever built in the future. This is you need to build a test artist when there’s some external application. That’s a pretty straightforward thing for experienced developers. He’s younger. He’s a really smart guy and his team seems to be pretty good, but they don’t have the experience to know.There’s this thing out there you don’t have access to it, so you simulate, right? Yeah, that’s an example of that’s not even really exceptional, but that’s a quality team. Any quality teams going to be doing that, and it’s all of those things that inequality team would be doing it if they’re doing all of those things, then now you’re reaching a level of exceptional exceptionalism. That’s kind of how we look at it. Yeah, and it’s and we’re never good enough.at it. So we’re always trying to figure out how to improve them. Yep, that’s that’s all excellent, David. And I’ve run into those situations myself. I mean, you know, over the years doing, know, doing so much software development, it’s it’s a lot like learning. mean, it is it’s learning from your mistakes and you don’t know what you don’t know. Right. That’s the hardest. You know, the hardest part is the unknown unknowns. And, you know, it’s even harder than the, you know, the unintended negative consequences.So, but that’s how you learn. And, you know, hopefully your friend will pick up on that and go with it. You know, it’s just a time thing. And again, it’s one of those mistakes where if you want, you can beat yourself up over it. But everybody’s made that mistake. Steve Jobs went through that, Wozniak did, Elon did, everybody. And it’s just, you got to be determined to not stop. know, obstacle has to be defined as something to overcome.That’s how you keep, it’s not about, to me, I don’t think it’s not about making the bajillion dollars, although that would be nice if it happens. Hasn’t happened yet. But it’s more about not letting stuff stop you. If you stay in the game long enough, you’ll win.Right. If you stay at the casino table long while that’s a terrible. No, that’s a bad example. There’s a very good, but mean, know, you’re not in the games, Frank, I’m telling you, you know, I got, I got this deal, on coffee and it clearly is not strong enough. So David’s been the perfect guest with us so far. So he’s called us on, on bad analogies and that’s all good. Things always kind of work out for the best.Yeah, right. think so. But you do definitely you should, you know, mark that coffee and never get that one again. Yeah, seriously. It’s it’s messing with your chain, man. Just put this path and put a couple of shots of espresso in the next. I feel like maybe maybe that’s what it was. It’s it’s nothing fancy like it’s McDonald’s coffee. Right. And like, if you order McDonald’s with the app, you get like a deal. And one of the deals was, you know, coffee. And I don’t think they added the espresso because I did ask for it.And it’s clearly, clearly it’s not working whether, maybe they switched it out for decaf or whatever. But. have to go buy another. Well, I mean, there are other, know, as we’re recording this, McDonald’s is recovering from an E. coli thing. maybe like, maybe, maybe coffee, like, you know, the biohazard that is decaf is not top of mind right now. Wow.So, no, this has been very useful because I think one of the things that, you obviously have a lot of data to back up your statements here, right? Because you’ve been doing this for a while. So what does that look like? What sorts of metrics do you track, right? Aside from income. Well, income’s a big one. Metrics in terms of like, you mean on projects, right? you’re about projects, you’re talking about business, startups, whatever.Yeah, when I originally asked, I startups, but I mean projects. I think I think it’s something everyone can relate to. What are the metrics there? OK, so like we track and and I don’t know of other teams that do this because it takes you have to really bake it into your system and new people that come on have to be inculcated in your processes and procedures, right? So we track, you know, we do time sheets. We try to do all of our projects on a time material basis because.fixed price is difficult to manage because then you end up spending more time managing the customer and the change controls and the requirements, although you can’t get away from it completely. So we always track everybody’s time. On a daily basis, we have time sheets and our own software that we built for tracking all this stuff, not that people should use their own software.build their own there lot of time tracking tools, but we’re meticulous about this. So everybody on the team records the time that they spend and what they spent it on every single day. And it’s not a lot of detail, but enough detail so that we know what’s going on. And then we break those down by client and by project at the end of every month when we’re doing our invoicing so that we know if we’re doing three or four projects for a client, even if there’s sort of internal projects all associated with the same app.We know where that time went and how much each person that was involved in that piece spent on it. And then we attached that along with the detailed time sheets to every invoice so that clients, because I hate being asked, you know, when we had blended rates, which was about 10 years ago, and they’d say, wait, you know, it’s blended rate, but wasn’t it all just testing this month? inexpensive people were working all month. I said, yeah, but.That makes up for it. I just said, you’re right. I’m just going to do it based on each resource will have their own billing rate and it’ll be on the invoice. And then they’d say, well, that seems like an awful lot of hours for that one person in this month. And it was like, my God, I can’t get rid of these questions. Here’s the time sheets. You can audit us now. And now I never get that question ever because clients can audit them. Right. This is aboutstepping into being exceptional. But to do that, you have to have a discipline team that’s recording everything every month and what project it was on, right? Which is not hard to do, but it’s just a daily discipline. The same thing with documentation. So right now, we have a client that I guess we were too successful with. It was a fairly large healthcare client. They got a big commitment from Google.And, and Google’s agreed to spend a million dollars on converting their software into the Google cloud, but they want them to use, but they have to use a Google premiere partner to do that. And so now it’s, we’re handing this over to a Google premiere partner. I mean, very large premiere partner. right. So we have to make the handoff. The client felt really bad. I’m an investor in their company. So I look at it clinically and this is totally the right thing to do, but.For many reasons, but. But we’re still working with them and on the product over a period of time as it transitions. We have to hand the documentation to Google right and our status reports up to the last nine months so that they can kind of follow the progress and all that. And we’ve had compliment after compliment from this really top premier team about the documentation is really good. It’s so detailed and our client was it.in front of Google was saying, know, just let you know they’re very organized. You’ll have everything you need and and then the client asked me what he should be watching for with this new Google Premier team to make sure that there aren’t any. Any issues that that might indicate that they’re not handling things as well as we did. So that was really great feedback. That’s the kind of thing like I. That’s what I want.from all my clients. That’s very cool. Yeah. Well, do you have, I know we’re coming up on time here for the interview. We want to be respectful of your time. Where can people find out more about techies and you, David? Okay. My LinkedIn, you can go to, we’ll put the link in the, right? We can put our LinkedIn in, right.And techies.com, is spelled T E K Y Z.com. And from there you can learn about launch first. If you look at the menu, you’ll see a launch first logo at the top of the page. And if you click that, that takes you over to the launch first page and you can learn about launch first and how that works. Excellent. Yeah. And another episode where we had such a great conversation, we totally forgot our canned questions. So let us know.It was too awesome. That’s what it was. was too awesome. It’s fine. Well, you guys are fun to talk to. thank you. Thank you. And this is like the low caffeine version of Frank. So you can just imagine. But this is why I look forward to robots making coffee, because it would be far less likely to skip skimp on the caffeine and the extra espresso shot. It would even tell you, hey, this is decaf. Do you sure you want it? Yeah, we’d probably get safety rails. Everyone’s talking about AI safety.Right. That’s a big one right there. This is a bit of a non sequitur, but my my nine year old, who’s one of his chores around the house is emptying the dishwasher. Say asked me the other day saying he want explaining how he wants to get a Tesla robot for Christmas. And I’m like, why? He’s like, so we can clean up the kitchen and maybe even cook for us.I like, I like you too. I’m like, that’s impressive. They’re cleaning up. My wife’s an excellent cook. So I can actually smart. I’m sorry. You were saying about wiping an excellent cook. Yeah, that’s okay. That is smart. I agree. David, finish your thought. No, that was my thought is that pretty smart for your nine year old to put that together. I was, I was impressed. I was like, cause I’m like, gee, that sounds like, cause like, you know, I was like, goes, well, I’m sure it’ll only cost a couple hundred dollars. And I’m like, I’m pretty sure it’s more than that.And I think the target price now is like between 20,000 and 30,000, which as it, it, know that sounds expensive, but you think about the getting a maid or like any kind of Butler or anything like that. If it, if it can do all the things it says it can do, which again, bit of a stretch, not that outrageous. Yeah, right. Because Butler is top on my list.Well, it would nice. It would be nice. It’d be nice to have it like, you know, make this food or, you know, empty the dishwasher. I mean, from him, it’s completely self-serving, which you don’t know. Which is the origin of all genius, right? Like is a bit self-serving, right? I always say the best programmers I’ve ever worked with are the ones that just love programming and are really lazy. They’re lazy because they don’t if they realize they have to do the same thing twice.they find some way of encapsulating that functionality. That’s it. Yeah. I call that efficiency. I mean lazy when I say efficient. Well, my wife is efficient, but she would not end detailed, but she doesn’t have that lazy quality. So she would just be just as happy doing something very detailed and doing it right and doing it over and over again, as she would to try to, you know, if it’s really boring, then she’ll say, we need to figure out a way around this.You know, but it’s more the CPA mindset versus these brilliant programmer mindset. Right. Yeah. That’s a perfect job for people who think like that. Absolutely detail oriented. Yep. Yep. That’s super cool. David, I love this conversation. I got a lot out of it and your stuff and connect with you on LinkedIn. And if nothing else, maybe we can converse from time to time in the LinkedIn chat. Just keep up with what’s going on. yeah, II’d love to, you should write a book. I don’t know if you’ve thought of that. You know, it’s come up in my mind many times and I just keep thinking, you know, a book, there’s so many books. Are people really reading all these books? Right. So, yeah. So I was thinking of a It’s crazy now, but Frank and I are both published and it, I mean, you don’t need like the published credit or anything like that on your resume. You’re doing okay. But it’s not just that. It’s, you know, being able to come up with a concept like,you know, like the mom test or something like that. And you strike me as one of those minds that, you know, could put some information wrappers around so much like startup and, and software. And, know, once you, once you combine a couple of disciplines like that, I think it was Scott Adams that said, you’re not adding, you’re multiplying at that point and value. So it sounds like you’ve got even more, you know, more in the mix than that stuff we didn’t get to unfortunately, but.I think it’s worth looking into. just, I don’t know, I’d read it. I appreciate it, thank you. I would totally listen to it. Do you do audiobooks? Yeah, audiobooks. I love audiobooks. Do you have a recommendation? Well, the mom test would be, that’s the recommendation. Mom test, okay. All right.And if you aren’t already an audible subscriber, you can get a free book on us. If you go to the data driven book dot com or the data driven book, the either the or the either we made it. We made it so the pronunciation didn’t matter. But you can check it out. You get a free book on us. We get, you know, if you sign up for a subscription, you do that. I just looked the other day and this is I’m at almost 900 audible titles. Which I know, right. And I only got an audible account in 2017.wow, that’s lot in that short of time. Frank lives in the suburbs around DC. So if he goes to the store, know, he can listen to half I have a lot of quality time. I live in Farmville, Virginia, okay? The other day it was crazy here we had six. Six people backed up at the stoplight. Pandemonium. I get half a chapter, he gets half a book. Well, I’m not going to tell you where I live. okay, that’s okay.San Diego. okay. How’s the traffic out there? It’s really not that bad. I moved here a year and a half ago from Scottsdale. The traffic was worse in Phoenix than it is here, which surprised me. Yeah. Wow. But the weather here is just spectacular. That’s what I hear about San Diego in particular. Much better than like, LA or even the Bay area. It’s just, it’s just this pristine, awesome.I actually have never been, I totally wanna go. well if you do, then you gotta let me know. Yeah, definitely, definitely, cool. I was on a Zoom, this was about five or six months ago with a whole bunch of people from around the world, and somebody was from the south of France, and he said, I’m from the south of France, I think, I don’t remember where exactly, and he said, we have the best weather in the world. And so I said, no, you have the second best weather in the world, I’m from San Diego, we have the, anyway.And so we said, let’s look it up. we looked it up online. San Diego has the most moderate climate of any major city in the world. So it’s official. And I love the South of France. When I visited there, was the only place there was like within like an hour was like, I need to retire here.Coolness. Well, awesome. we’ll make sure to include a link to your profile, your website, and a lot of cool stuff going on there. like your marketing funnel page. Very well done, by the way. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And so with that, we’ll let the nice British lady end the show. And that wraps up another insightful episode of Data Driven.Huge thanks to David Hirschfeld for sharing his experience and unique perspective on startup success through the Launch First methodology. It’s not every day you hear a founder suggest building demand before the product even exists and doing it with such precision and data-driven strategy. If you’re ready to bring your startup dreams to life or simply want to hear more from David, be sure to check out Techies Corporation and explore what they offer for ambitious founders. And remember, if you enjoyed today’s discussion,Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with your fellow data aficionados. As always, thanks for tuning in, until next time, keep being data driven.Discover how AI can revolutionize your operations and drive business growth and success. Get started today!Key Takeaways:Launch First, Build Later: Focus on generating revenue and proving product-market fit before investing heavily in development.Niche Targeting: Identify your ideal niche market and understand their specific pain points and value propositions.High-Fidelity Prototypes: Create a compelling prototype that demonstrates the value of your product without full development.Data-Driven Niche Analysis: Use metrics-driven approaches to identify the top problems and their impact within each niche.Exceptional Software Development Teams: Build a team that prioritizes quality, transparency, and continuous improvement.Ready to revolutionize your startup journey? Visit Tekyz at tekyz.com and learn more about the Launch First methodology. Connect with David on LinkedIn and join the conversation about building successful startups.Want to learn about the Data-Driven Podcast: https://link.tekyz.com/datadrivenmediumpodDavid Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Data-Driven Podcast: Creating High-Impact Teams & Validating Niches was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Lexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces…](https://tekyz.com/lexicon-by-interesting-engineering-podcast-beyond-the-pitch-deck-how-launch-1st-method-reduces-ffb1d3f81e08/) - Featured Image: Lexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces Startup RisksLexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces Startup Riskshttps://medium.com/media/e88aad719fa2f383776b53a4ec20852f/hrefSummaryIn this Business with the Boys episode, host David DeSalle and Landon Troyer engage with David Hirschfeld, a seasoned software development expert, to discuss the Launch 1st Method, a systematic approach to reducing startup risks. Hirschfeld shares insights from his extensive career, emphasizing the importance of solving problems rather than getting attached to products.The conversation explores various industry applications, including logistics and healthcare, and highlights the significance of automation and efficiency in business processes. Hirschfeld’s experiences and case studies provide valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to navigate the complexities of startup success.https://medium.com/media/c1ac526dc02bc481ca440bf8a0af6cdb/hrefChapters00:00: Introduction and Poker Banter01:40: The Role of AI in Business Efficiency05:43: David Hirschfeld’s Background and Career Journey10:53: Lessons from Exiting a Successful Company16:26: The Importance of Problem-Solving in Business21:46: Niche Focus and Cross-Domain Knowledge in Software Development24:37: AI in Healthcare: Transforming Patient Engagement27:14: Innovative Solutions for Urban Infrastructure30:15: Bottlenecks and Workflow Optimization35:54: Automating Business Processes for Efficiency41:01: The Importance of Honest Feedback in Business46:44: Building a Positive Team CultureBeyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces Startup Risks (00:00)What’s up guys, David DeSalle here, your host of the Business with the Boys podcast joined today by your favorite co-host and my friend Landon Troyer. And this introduction is the only thing between now and you're playing some poker tonight. Not playing, whooping some ass. Whooping some ass.I’ve been, I’ve been dry lately. I’ve well, I haven’t been able to play all that much and I haven’t won in a couple of times. So, you know, I got to get that when you toss your shades on so that you can’t get away anything. No, you just stone cold. no, it’s mainly just a lot of shit talking. So, you know, trying to intimidate them. Standard. I mean, I let the card stays talking. yeah. Okay. Now you’re, now you getting cocky. I want to text tonight when you’re.when you’re done either a thumbs up that you want or a thumbs down that you lost. Yeah, it’s a real big, real big $20 game, you know, so. this is serious stuff, dude. That’s if there’s five of you, that’s $100, man. Well, there’s eight of us, but you know, yeah. Whoa. Hi, Rola. Can’t afford it. Can’t afford to miss the the weekly game, you know, IRS. If you’re listening, we are talking about Monopoly money here. Absolutely. Absolutely.All right, let’s go ahead and dive in. But before we officially do big thank you to our sponsors, as always land jet. If you haven’t heard of land jet yet, go check them out. It’s basically a bougie modded out Mercedes Sprinter van that brings you around chauffeurs you around, you can have meetings in there. Landon next time I’m in Nebraska, actually, we should(01:40) The Role of AI in Business Efficiencytake the mics and hook up a podcast and do a drive-in podcast, that would be pretty sweet. I would like that a lot. That would be legit. be pretty fallen. But if you are going to a meeting, you’re going to an event, you wanna have a meeting, or you’re just driving from meeting to meeting, you can be way more productive, especially in this world of leveraging AI and becoming more efficient. Why not become more efficient that AI can’t necessarily solve?and saving some of your drive time. for that, or with that being said, I should say, reach out to rachel at landjet.com, mention business with the boys for a 10 % discount for being a loyal listener of the show. But today we have David Hirschfeld. And this is a really good episode. And we got a really, a lot of really good feedback onthe AI specific episode that we put out there and a lot of people took action on it and actually David listened to that podcast and reached out proactively. So I would invite you if you think you would be a good guest or you think that there’s someone that you know that would be a good guest, just email me at David at business with the boys with a Z David at business with the boys.com and we’re more than happy to entertain a conversation and see if you or they are a fit butThere’s a pretty interesting conversation landed and it seems like what he’s able to do really, really impacts businesses. Yeah. I mean, from my standpoint, obviously being a business owner of my world and probably a very inefficient business owner, right? With all the balls I’m always trying to keep juggling. I’m envious of guys like him that see the world like, and have the know-how to, Hey, let’s just code somesoftware and eliminate all these steps along the way. Like, yeah, that sounds great. But I’m like Ozzy Osborne trying to turn on my computer like, Sharon, come help me turn this thing. I can’t even turn the damn thing on. pretty envious of guys like him. But I could see where the need for him and his team would be incredible.For sure. So let me go ahead and properly introduce David and we will dive into the episode. So David Hirschfeld is a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on technological innovation and business growth. He’s a former physics student from UCLA and his career spans leadership roles at tech giants like computer associates, Texas Instruments, Intel and Motorola.before launching his first startup, which grew to 800 customers across 22 countries and was successfully sold to a public company in 2000. Since founding his new company, Techies Inc., in 2007, David has emerged as a strategic advisor specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation for scale-ups and the design and development of startups. Having collaborated with over 70 startups, he’s developed the launchfirst method, which is a systematic approach that minimizes risk and accelerates software company's success with reduced reliance on investor funding. His expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, and startup ecosystem dynamics. When not transforming business strategies, he enjoys woodworking, golfing, and spending time withhis four sons and their families, and he dialed in from beautiful, perfect weather in San Diego. So, with that said, let’s go ahead and dive into the episode.Ready to transform your business with cutting-edge AI development? Reach out to us today!(05:43) David Hirschfeld’s Background and Career JourneySo, David, I’d be doing myself and you a disservice if I didn’t compliment your name. So David, great name, and welcome to the show. Thank you. I thought you were going to say Hirschfeld was such a great name. Well, that’s great, too, but like I’m a little biased. I think David’s a great name. I think David’s a great name. The only reason I say Hirschfeld is because of the cartoonist in New York. I don’t know if you know, you know, he used to do all the art for the New Yorker, and anyway, yeah.There you go. Well, we appreciate you hopping on and joining the show. And it’s actually pretty cool. You know, lot of the folks that we’ve had on have either been connections of Landon or mine or referrals from previous guests. And you just had the audacity to shoot us an email and say, Hey, I listened to one of your episodes and I liked it and would love to chat and be on the show and you have not because you asked not and it’s amazing what happens when you ask. Sothank you for having the audacity to touch base and, join us today. Yeah. And I figured eventually we’d be friends. So I just make it happen a little sooner. Right. We like it. We need more of that. Well, walk us through, so you have a couple of different, companies and offerings. but you are not new to the business scene. so walk us through kind of, you know, brief upbringing. How’d you get into your professional career? Like.help us understand and set the stage as to where it all began. Okay, sure. I’m not gonna go back too far, because I don’t think people wanna hear about my high school career, but I started out in the software industry in the 80s. So I’m a bit older than most of you guys are. They had software back then? They, well, they, that’s, I don’t think they realized that’s what it was, right? Eventually somebody started to call it software and.I think the airlines are still using the software from the 80s. Anytime I peek behind the screen and I see them tapping over. I know. I thought that was weird 20 years ago that they were still doing that. And now it’s 20 years later, they still are. Anyway, in the late 80s, I was working in enterprise and doing project management for Intel and Motorola.Allied Signal Arizona Public Service as a consultant and started my own software company in the early 90s, which was an offshoot of, well, it doesn’t matter where it came from, but I started a software company because I saw somebody I knew had a need for logistics route distribution inventory management. And a guy that I worked with at Texas Instruments, we talked about starting our own software company. And so we thought we’ll do this.to begin with and we’ll see if we can’t turn a business into it and it’ll be sort of practice for us. That’s kind of what we thought. It was a niche industry. We figured we’d just sell some licenses and start to build sort of an annuity and get the hang of what it was to run and maintain a software company. And despite everything, every effort on our part, we actually did grow it into 800 customers that ran in 22 countries and we sold it in 2000.to a publicly traded firm. And I was VP of products for them for the next several years until I left and started to look for my next thing to do. And I thought I knew what made me successful, made us successful and grew the company. And I really didn’t have any idea until I started Techies. Techies is my current company and I started founded that 17 years ago. We do software development.We try to stay on the front edge of technology, but more importantly than that, we try to continually build and improve on our exceptionalism as a team in terms of how we run projects, how we’re transparent in terms of how people work together, how we, the level of tracking, how we build automation into our systems so that everybody can follow all the procedures and protocols.and be really disciplined without having to constantly be really disciplined. So we hire people that are really smart and they’re critical thinkers and they question everything and they don’t just take tasks and deliver them, but they look to see, is that the right way to do it? We wanna do it better, but they do that without it being the wild west, tracking their time, documenting things in a very specific way. So.Every project is richly documented. And I’m only saying this because we look at what’s going on now and it’s almost like the wild west again with AI. Because AI has been around a while, but large language models being consumable by everybody is really new and it is evolving so incredibly fast. So I think of it asyou know, most of us were probably, you know, mediocre surfers in three and four foot waves. And here comes a rogue wave that’s a hundred feet tall and everybody’s just staring at the wave. And we’re thinking, no, can’t stare at that wave. You have to paddle out to it and get into the curl and get on the very tip of your board and as far out on that tip as you can. So you don’t get sucked so that you’re ahead of it instead of washed away with it. So everybody in my company thinks of us standing on the tip of the board. Yeah.(10:53) Lessons from Exiting a Successful CompanySo I’ll rewind real quick. They, so you successfully exited one company already, obviously. And, correct me I’m wrong, but I would assume if you caught the eye of a publicly traded company, you probably grew that business to a pretty decent sized company. Walk us through what does that look like when you, when you kind of exited, what were you guys doing in revenue? What did you have for a number of employees and all that? Well, you know, honestly,We had thought that when we started the company, thought we were both employees at Texas Instruments at the time. We thought that we would generate a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and that was going to be success for us because we were still employed. We eventually ended up having to quit our jobs to work at our own company because it grew beyond us, right? Our ability to do it as a part-time thing.planning that or really expecting it. But we did drive it to that once we realized that we did have a niche and we did have product market fit. And that we realized that the industry needed a lot more than what we were already offering them. And so just the natural kind of growth path. It was also very early, right? When you think of today, it was very early in the software industry. was the first Windows 3.1 when Windows 3.1 was brand new.And so Windows was finally usable. That was the first version of Windows that people actually, it started to take off. And so we made a Windows product that eventually ended up being client server-based product and it just kept growing and we kept building. So we weren’t that big when we sold. We were in a very tight niche. The company that purchased us was consolidating all of these other software companies in thesoft in the snack food distribution and beverage distribution industry. So warehousing and logistics, route distribution, scheduling, all that stuff. That was what they were doing. so we all knew each other in the industry. And so when we got acquired, we were doing several million dollars in annual revenue with our business. had, we were not that big. We had about 20 employees, I think at the time when we sold it, whichwas pretty crazy when we thought we were just gonna do some part-time thing early on and it ended up growing into that. I suppose that’s also the nice part about a software company is you don’t necessarily need a lot of bodies if you get it dialed in, right? Efficiency is key. Right, exactly. Yeah, and so they made us a really good offer in options, in cash and a lot of options. And so we…decided, you know, it makes sense, let’s do this and we can then go on and do our next thing afterwards. You know, a lot of, and to me, that’s like the perfect business in terms of what you should be trying to shoot for if you want to start something. A lot of people think it’s got to be the unicorn. They’ve got to get millions in VC funding and it is a, a recipe for disaster. And because one,there’ll be one in a thousand that actually is able to do that and turn it into a unicorn. But the other 999 are all going to just be miserable, fail, lose control of their companies, you know, or go bankrupt and, you know, waste five years, six, seven years of their lives. And believe me, I’ve seen it happen over 80 times in with techies with the startups that we’ve worked with. And we’re not, we don’t work exclusively as startups, but we’ve worked with a lot of startups and that’s, and they all fail.the same reason. have this big dream, this big vision. They put on the black coat and they’re preaching the vision. And I tried, when I work with startups, I learned that that’s not how you make a successful company. So I try to rip the coat off them and say, stop believing in your product and start believing in the problem and get in front of customers and the product will just happen naturally.If you just focus on the problem, if you love the problem, you just, and you want to mitigate the problem and you like to be in front of your potential customers, then you’re going to find a path to success. You can’t help but find a path to succeed. But so few founders do that. You you need to put on the white coat and become a clinician and test everything and don’t believe anything. those, the guys that do that naturally are just, they naturally, they build their business.And they build it to two, three million after a couple of years. And then another couple of years, it’s five to 10 million, you know, and it’s not the hockey stick. It’s not the unicorn, but now they got an asset that’s worth a lot of money. And they’re generating a lot of income from it. And they’re also enjoying themselves, right? And they have, if they’re good at building teams, which we try to help them do that, then they have teams that are loyal, that love what they’re doing, that believe that they are on a mission to helpsomebody in some respect in terms of whether it’s healthcare, law enforcement or financial or real estate, they’re doing something that makes somebody’s life easier and brings value. I really like what you said about stop believing in the product and start believing in the problem. I haven’t heard it put that way before, but as I’m thinking out loud, I would.theorize, and perhaps you could confirm or deny this, but I would theorize that when someone so, you know, is attached to the product itself, they can put blinders on. Whereas if you’re attached to solving the problem, that’s where innovation comes into place. Because whatever the product is, when you first launch it, isn’t going to be what the product is a year from now, a decade from now. And if you’re doing a good job, you know, unpacking the problem behind the problem that(16:26) The Importance of Problem-Solving in Businessbirths innovation of that product as opposed to thinking that you made it. Is that fair? That’s exactly right. And the problem may not be the same problem in a year too. So there’s, I don’t remember who coined this phrase, but successful founders are willing and happy to eat their children. I know it’s a, it’s kind of a gross thought, right? But it’s how, but.The problem and the reason it’s phrased that way is because when you’ve come up with the product idea and you start to build it, you fall in love with it. And it’s, and it is really difficult to then let go of it. And, and the most successful founders don’t do that. They don’t fall in love with the product, but they are just looking at the market. They look at the problem. They’re constantly talking to customers and assessing their and pulling all the nuances out from and understanding howthese customers niche, right? Because they may, these niches sometimes blend together, but you really need to understand how one niche has a problem at a root level that’s specific to them. And so I spent a lot of time with founders on this whole thing of root problems and niches and, you know, because of- couldn’t agree more, Dave. mean, I don’t think it’s even industry agnostic or I think it is industry agnostic, right?I’ve seen in my business, see unfortunately, you know, the financial planning wealth management side, I’ve tried telling advisors, you know, especially young advisors that are getting into this business, like stop trying to sell yourself and start solving problems for clients. That’s it. If you just do that, business will find you. Like it’s crazy. It is, that’s right. It is right. It will find you.Because people, you recognize, when they hear that you understand their problem, they lean forward, right? Because they put their arm around your shoulders. Thank God somebody understands. You know, mean, metaphor. Even in David and I’s industry, right? It’s like you work with business owners. Who do entrepreneurs typically tend to have in their circles? Other business owners who have the exact same problems. So when they’re talking about, hey, you know, David Land had helped me solve this, you know, and then it’s like, hey, would you mind?making the introduction, right? So it just happens, especially like you said, you get into a niche industry like you were in, everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows who’s solving problems, who’s trying to sell product. It’s the same thing in our world, right? Yeah, it’s exactly right. And when I say founder, I don’t mean a nascent startup founder necessarily. This might be an existing business that’s launching a new product. Somebody in the business had this great idea.for product or maybe they’re taking something that has been, I’ll give you an example of a current client that actually it’s not quite a client yet but it’s going to be a client very soon. And they’re a really big coaching organization for e-commerce companies. And they work with lots of really big brands and they have, I think three over 3000 customers and they have algorithms for how toattribute sales and basically to optimize sales and optimize customers coming back and buying more of the brand and building those brands through e-commerce metrics, really metrics driven. So they have 3000 very sophisticated spreadsheets that are unique in terms of their algorithms, right? So they wanna turn this, they wanna turn this into…software so that they can manage it and also make it a SaaS product. So now they’re a founder, but they’re not a nascent founder because they have a huge business, know, tens of millions or tens of millions of dollars, maybe a month. I’m not sure what their revenue is yet. Bob know that soon, but it’s huge. They’re at large, their budgets are really big and they are launching something for the first time in terms of software. And it comes out ofthis natural. So this is one of the things when I found her comes to me and they say, we work in this industry and we struggle with this problem in our industry. And we’re not different than most of the people that do what we do in our industry who also struggle with the exact same problem that we’re struggling with. And we know that because we talk to them all the time through conferences or through networking meetings or throughwhatever the communities are. So we have reached to this community. We know they struggle. I can articulate to you what it’s costing me because of this problem, because I have a cellular understanding of it and I’m faced with it every single day. And I can tell you how much that problem bothers me from a perception perspective, because I feel like I’m going to lose.the ability to be competitive or to grow my business, or it creates a huge bottleneck. losing people because this problem causes other people to be really unhappy. And I’m afraid I’m going to lose them to competitors, right? That is the, like, that somebody says that to me, their chance of being successful just went up by like 90 % because they’re going to solve this. They know how to talk about the problem. know what the cost is. They know how to reach their market and they know who the market is.right from the very beginning. That’s not most founders, but you see a lot of really successful products that come out of things like that. As a side note, if you, not if, excuse me, when you land those folks as a client, Google neon flux Miami.(21:46) Niche Focus and Cross-Domain Knowledge in Software DevelopmentMaybe a good person for them to collaborate with we could talk more about that offline But just to put that on your radar Okay so with your software development company, do you focus on a particular niche or is it?Kind of niche agnostic, like where do you, what type of companies do you hang out with outside of the startups? Because you made mention that you’re not just working with startups, you more seasoned companies as well. So, thinking about them, what industries? That was a good example. The one I just mentioned was a really good example, right? That was law enforcement. So, I mentioned a few of these areas before. We’ve worked in lots and lots of business domains. And one of the big advantages of having worked in all these, in so many business domains is we bring all that business domain knowledge to every new project, right? Even if it’s in a new domain, but there’s things that, that cross all business domains, right? And so, but our, but you, can take advantage of things that you learned in one domain and apply that to something completely different. So we end up helping, working with the client tobrainstorm different ways of approaching problems that they would not have naturally thought of because they don’t have all this other business domain experience. So like one of our clients right now is a healthcare company. They do healthcare software and they are focusing now on AI implementation. So the idea is that there are vulnerable populations in healthcare, right? Especiallylow-income Medicaid, Medicare patients that are, and the problem with state, for states is that these, and the problem with hospitals is that it’s very hard for them, it’s very expensive for them to engage with these patients because they’re not acutely focused on their healthcare. They’re usually letting it go if they’re low-income, butthere’s a certain amount of responsibility that healthcare systems have to take care of these patients if they’re getting any kind of government funding for Medicaid and Medicare. So they might get prescriptions and not fill them. They may fill the prescription, but not take the medication. They may need to check in with their physician every so often and they don’t do things like this. And they may have problems that are acute that can be tracked based on wearable devices, like even a watch.that if somebody knew something was going on, they could reach out and intervene before this turns into a big, incredibly costly thing for the healthcare system and incredibly painful for that patient and head it off. So their product is all AI driven, both in terms of triage based on wearable devices, primarily from watches, because most everybody has a watch and they’re even(24:37) AI in Healthcare: Transforming Patient Engagementworking this out so that Medicaid in certain state that they have a contract is going to be providing watches to their Medicaid patients. Like Fitbit, that sort of thing. that when somebody has, so that they can track based on patterns that the Fitbit is tracking when there’s a potential situation developing and then an AI voice nurse calls that patient, but you wouldn’t.https://medium.com/media/7c2625bbe16f11b8c7d8315eb0374d77/hrefIt sounds just like a real person. And when you can interrupt her and she responds, sorry, what was it you were saying? And then you’re having a natural conversation with her and she is assessing whether this is something that needs to be promoted to an actual clinician or whether she needs to help you schedule an appointment or whether she needs to recall in your prescription, which is lapsed that you never filled. And she can call you then back because you haven’t been taking a prescription if it’s okay with you.I’m gonna give you a call every morning just to remind you to take your prescription. Is that okay? And then- AI healthcare, here it comes. Yeah, and if the patient’s struggling and it says, you know, I’m just really sad because I didn’t do it because I lost my daughter. And then she goes, I’m so sorry. My condolences to you. I just started having a natural kind of conversation with the person, right? So I mean, the value here is just huge.to the state because this reduces, this gets them in patients engaged. So it reduces a huge amount of costs. And it shows that that state is, from a political perspective, it shows how much the state cares about their population. But from a practical perspective, it’s both cost and health of the population. And these are people that really need a lot of help.I always thought it was just natural selection for people that didn’t want to take their medications after they were prescribed or get ahead of their healthcare, but we’ll keep them string them on. You are correct. is natural selection. It’s just that unfortunately part of that natural selection is incredibly costly to taxpayers. So this helps to mitigate that, right? What are some other, I mean, I’m thinking,Have you worked with any transportation logistics companies and if so, could you speak to what you help them with to help improve their business efficiencies or is there a different industry that may be better if you haven’t been with one of those? Well, my first company was logistics in the sense of scheduling, delivery and things like that, right? But that was a long time ago and things have changed.(27:14) Innovative Solutions for Urban Infrastructuredramatically since then. We’ve done some small projects, nothing that’s really worth a podcast episode about, but. It would be the most interesting or impactful engagement that you had with the company. Actually, but I can talk about one that we are potentially getting engaged with and it’s in Asia. this is a, and this would be for cities and states.in India in particular, where they have all these potholes. And so they have drones that they’re flying over the roads to identify where potholes exist. And not only where, but the size of the pothole and assess the amount of asphalt that’s going to take to fill the pothole and then do a whole logistics, AI model logistics on all these hundreds of thousands of millions of potholes in any particular given area.and then logistically, you know, pull that together in a logistic scheduling system for the crews that go and fix them based on priorities and location and efficiency. So that is a really, really interesting project. You can imagine how valuable something like that is, right? So David, what will you actually do or what are they engaging you and your team for on something like that? For the,for the backend. out of the software. The build out of the whole backend, right. So they’ve been doing R &D on the recognition of the potholes that they’ve had for a while. They just recently did R &D and were able to make it work for in terms of the size and depth of the pothole, because it’s hard, you’re flying over it and you have different cloud conditions. so you can’t tell the shot if it’s just the surface thing or if it goes deeper or if it’s covered with water.But now they’ve got some technology. This was hardware technology that they can, even if it’s covered with water, they can see the depth of the pothole. Can’t get too close in the slum. Somebody will reach up and snag that drone and pawn it for a couple of rooms. Okay. That pothole is really big, right? Cause there’s people living in it. So, and then it would be for building out the entire platform on the backend for logistics forcapturing all this information and then logistics and scheduling and everything else. That’s what we would be doing, right? You know, it’s fun to talk about things like that because these are basically, this is logistics workflows, right? But much simpler workflows. One of the most interesting thing when you’re dealing with workflows and really brilliant CEOs understood this early on like Michael Dell. I like to use his name because it wasFord’s article I read 20 years ago about how he built this company that’s never left me. And basically he was asked by the interviewer, what’s your secret to success? And he says, I just focus on what’s the current bottleneck. And then I put through my resources at fixing that bottleneck so it opens up. Because as soon as I opened up now, everything’s flowing through the bottleneck and then comes crashing into the next bottleneck, which we didn’t know was a bottleneck.Want to boost your business with AI development? Fill out our short form for a free consultation.(30:15) Bottlenecks and Workflow OptimizationAnd that’s all I do is I just focus on, I just go bottleneck to bottleneck and look for anything that’s slowing down the ability for us to grow and for things to move through the system faster. So, but that’s a rare person that understands how important that is. And what I mean, and there’s so many things we can do in big companies and small companies as individuals that are running things that we just get comfortable with ifwhere have a kind of an administrative operational kind of mindset. So the best, I always say the best programmers are the ones that are really brilliant and lazy. Because if they do something more than, if they have to do it twice, they know they should have figured out how to abstract that into something smarter. Because they don’t want to have to do the same thing. Somebody who’s really administration operational doesn’t mind doing the same thing over and over and over again, because there’s a comfort factor in it, right?So a guy that I know who’s a really successful entrepreneur, he’s been running this huge business network for the last 11 and a half, 12 years. And he has a radio station that’s grown out of that. And he has 200,000 listeners and big podcast network. And he’s very successful, but he has that operational kind of administrative mindset. He figures out playbooks and patterns, and then he just does them, like a machine.So, I had this idea for his business networking, for his business network, where he could make it much more consumable to the people in his network to be able to make connections. So, I came up with this app idea, and I went to him, his name’s Dave, by the way. Dave, I already like him. Right? Right, I said, about this app idea? I mean, thisyour members would just love this. He’s got 1,500 or 1,600 members now. But a lot of his members are like billionaires and who’s who in, because of his radio show, it’s really pretty impressive. But he has this, I said, know, but the problem is in the networking effects of his group, people have trouble consuming these connections and making it easy to connect with other people. And I had this idea.He says, know, and every Tuesday morning he runs a networking meeting and there’s 70 people there typically, cause he maxes it out at 70, even though he’s got 1500 members, the 70 show up every Tuesday of which 30 are usually guests. 30 are people that come in once in a while. And then the other 30 people that go every single week and everybody speaks for a minute.talks about what they do and he announces everybody. He announces them like they’re the most important person in their industry. But so I said to him, look at what this would do for your members on your Tuesday morning meetings. And he said, forget it, David. He says, no way I’m gonna do anything that’s going to add any additional work to my Mondays. And I said, but don’t you think this wouldn’t add any extra work and he wouldn’t even hear me. I said, okay, forget about this. What, tell me about your Mondays.And so he spends all day Monday. I mean, he could hire people to do this, but he just is like an administrative machine type of person. he just loves his whole business and all the connections with people and everything else, which is why he’s so successful getting all these people on his radio show every single week. And he said, it takes me seven to eight hours every Monday to get ready for my Tuesday meeting. We’ve got, because people buy tickets to it.Some of them are guests that are invited by other people. Some of them are regulars that bought a whole year’s worth of Tuesday meetings, things like that. And he has to put them in a certain order so that like two people that are real estate investors don’t speak one right after the other. And then he’s got all of the other little business things that are sprinkled in throughout the meeting. And it’s really incredibly professionally orchestrated every single week.but it takes them all day to prepare for this and pull in all the descriptions from all the different people and everything lives in different places. And I said, why don’t we automate this? This was like four years ago before AI started to like really take off. And he said, automate this, you can’t automate it. It’s just so specific to what I do. And I said, we can automate all this. And this is, don’t have to do anything sophisticated. We’ll just, you do it through Google Sheets and we’ll write some app scripts that integrate with your ticketing system andWell, he said, really, you can do that. And anyway, tells me, gives me the requirements. This is how I run, how I do, this is what I do on Monday. So I said, okay, fine. I took this on as a hobby project because he’s a friend of mine. I like to write code once in a while. I feel it’s indulgent because everybody on my team is much better at it than me at this point, but it’s fun to do. And so every once in a while I pick a little project and I work on it. So.when I had a little extra time, would work on this for two or three weeks. And I came back to him and I said, okay, David, let me show you how it works. He goes, that’s not gonna support my business. Cause it doesn’t do this, this and this. And I said, okay. Well, I didn’t know about this, this and this, now I do. So let me go back and give me a couple of weeks. When I get some time, I’ll do this, this and this, and then we’ll come back and we’ll y’all have it. And so I did. I, it’s just.Well, now it does that, but it’s not handling these circumstances, these cases. And I said, okay, well, you didn’t tell me about those cases, but now I’ve got, you know, and this went on. there anything else that you haven’t told me before? he didn’t know what he didn’t know until he tried then tell, I would get it to a certain point and then it would go, I didn’t write because it was like a cellular level understanding of the process for him, but it wasn’t something he could just write out all the details because(35:54) Automating Business Processess for EfficiencyHe couldn’t even think about everything that comes up. when those things come up, they take special cases and rules around what you do with it. Anyway, it took a few months of doing this every two or three weeks. I feel like you’re talking about me, by the way, David. this is everybody. This is me to a T. OK, yeah. This is, I mean, but he did know everything he needed to do, but he just didn’t know what it was until it was in front of him, right?We finally got it after three months and then we ran it in parallel with his process, which got the same results of what he does. And then the following week he does it and he calls me, says, David, this is amazing. I got Monday done in 15 minutes. was every single week, he spent almost eight hours on this. And now he did it in 15 minutes and he couldn’t, and he’s still, we were just talking three or four weeks ago, cause I’m starting a podcast. He’s really big in podcasting.And so I was asking what he thought about this and asking for his advice. And he said, you know, I’m kind of hesitant to tell. And he started saying, you know, I still use that program every single Monday. He says, it works like clockwork. And anyway, it’s very fun to hear that, right? I mean, it’s just a little thing sort of, it’s a big thing for him. And then he says, you know, I’m hesitant to tell you this, but.I’ll tell you, I’ve got seven other members in our group that do podcasting and share their podcasts every week with me. And then I push it through my network, which is this big distribution network that he has. And I said, hesitated to tell me? He says, well, it’s just a lot of work to do. And he starts telling me all these steps and things he does. And he says, I’ve even thought about maybe not doing anymore. So time consuming. said, David, this sounds really familiar.Why don’t we automate this? says, can you automate this? It was literally the same conversation again. So in January, we’re getting together and I’m going to do the same thing for this, but now I’m going to use AI to develop this. and I’ll be able to do it in hours compared to weeks and months. whenever you’re done with Dave, if you’re looking for a friend and a next project, will fly your ass for a week.I’ll pay for everything. just sit in my office for a week with me and say, Hey, dipshit, let’s automate XYZ. You lost them. You got to understand you lost him when you just said to someone who lives in beautiful San Diego that you fly them to Nebraska in December. We want to wait till it warms up a little bit, David. But yeah, after that, you let me know.That’s funny. All right. That’s pretty funny. Well, what’s interesting, what I like it kind of you brought us back to one of the first things you said towards the front end of the podcast where it seems like in your role, you’re not running around parading a solution to people. You’re running around identifying problems. Yeah, that’s actually a solution. So you just came full circle.Yeah, you know, it’s funny. had never actually put those two things together, but that’s exactly right. just, heard it. That’s what you are. You’re a problem solver. I’m a problem whisperer. It’s, you know, it’s like, I hear when somebody starts talking about something, it sounds like this sounds like a problem that they’re struggling with. mean, in all, all genuine sincerity, like David, I’m telling you, like it’s, it’s rough for me, like to sit here because I know there’s guys like you out there.And I know I have a problem, right? I’m fortunate to be successful to do, yeah, what I’ve been able to do. But I’m like, if I could just grab somebody like this for, like I said, a week or two, they would come in and just be able to take so much off the plate. like, I’m envious of guys like you that know how to do this.I had to my assistant come in today just to show me how to basically tag emails to make sure an email gets into the Salesforce contact. People like David and David himself are a check away. Yeah. I’m envy you don’t have. I’m really not that hard to get my attention. Well, once this end of the year tax season rolls through, I might have to, I might have to bend your ear a little bit on that.yeah, I honestly, I really enjoy doing it too. So and you guys are so gracious to, you know, let me on your podcast, I’m happy to spend some time with you and just to understand what you’re struggling with. You need to set aside a week for just that piece of it. Careful, careful what you wish for. But one of the one of the questions that we ask all of our guests is a book that’s had an impact on them.And this is certainly not like a verbal book report or anything like that, but like, why, why’d you pick it? and I actually haven’t come across this before. so I’m curious to know why you picked it. It’s called the mom test. yeah. Okay. You’re like, the best business book I’ve read, at least in this category of if you’re starting a software company or starting or creating a new(41:01) The Importance of Honest Feedback in Businessproduct and existing company. The problem we have, right? This is all belief versus focus on the problem instead of the solution, right? We like, let’s say you have this idea for business and you go to your mother and this is assuming that you have a good relationship with your mother, right? But you go to your mother and you ask her what she thinks about this idea, right? I want to start this pizza delivery software on demand thing.And she goes, that’s such a great idea. And you’re so smart. I know you’ll be successful. Right. And so you’re going, you’re getting all this pumped up support because you’re getting, you’re hearing what you want to hear. so the question is, how do you ask questions in such a way that you actually get truth and value about the thing that you want to do even from your mother. And that’s the basis of his whole approach is as a guy who’s exited several companies really successfully.And he talks about a lot of the same things I do just in a smarter way. And he has systems for how to implement at anywhere along the journey, how you validate ideas with your customer with a potential prospect without ever talking about your product or any feature of your product and get real validation and real understanding of what they, and it’s really focusing on their problem.How have they been able to solve it in the past? How have they solved it? Talk about, you know, what you’re doing today. Why don’t you use tools to solve it? Are there any available? Have you, how have you looked for them? Right. Never talking about what you’re doing or where your product anyway, it’s so well done. That’s like a book for business owner. Yeah, that’s the best book. Yeah. I think it is no matter where you are in your stage, even if you’d launch your business and you’re scaling and you’re wondering abouthow to sell, right? It’s same thing. It’s like, how do you create a sales situation where the person feels like you are helping them and you understand what they’re struggling with. So instead of being a sales person, they basically switch into a consultative relationship with somebody very, very fast, which that’s something that has that has come a little more naturally to me than it has to, than it seems to with a lot of people.is because I don’t mind telling somebody that’s a bad idea. And as soon as I tell them that, and that’s not what they wanted to hear, then I’ll find a bridge to say, but here’s another way you might want to look at it and something you could do that might work from my opinion. All of a sudden they don’t look at me like, you know, I’m trying to get anything from them anymore. They look at me like I’m somebody that might be able to help them. And I- Well, the truth in that. Yeah. And I don’t do it intentionally. It’s just how I normally talk about things with people.because I focus on the problems. A friend of mine, Justin Goodbread wrote a book called Your Baby’s Ugly. And he takes the approach of telling people that your business is actually broken. I don’t care how good you think it looks and here’s what you can do to fix it. So I just thought that that tied in well to that book recommendation. That is interesting. I didn’t know anybody else. I just figured this out one day. realized, you know, I seem…I seem to get people all of a sudden leaning forward and asking me for help when I tell them something they did not want to hear. Well, yeah, because they know you’re not in the business of kissing their ass, you’re in the business of being honest with them. I think people don’t always like what I have to say, but I think generally they know that if I’m saying it, I mean it. And right, wrong or indifferent, sometimes that’s a bad thing, right? I could probably sugarcoat things from time to time, but on the same thing, I just don’t have time for bullshit, right? It’s like, let’s go.Yeah, I even say to my customers, look, I’m not gonna ever ask you to trust me because that’s just code for I’m not trustworthy. So, I expect that you’ll trust me after we’ve been working together for a while because of how I’m gonna work, but you’ll decide when that’s the case. Yep, I love that. Yeah. Well, David, I feel like, go ahead. And as a matter of fact, it kind of leans into some of our favorite projects are when we takeover a project from somebody who’s been struggling with some other development team for a period of time. Because, you know, we’re very honest. If the system that they want us to take over is really badly done, I mean, really badly done, then we’ll just tell them, we can’t work on this, we have to rebuild it. So if you want to work with us, we’ll rebuild it, but we’re not going to try to maintain this and fix it. Because I’m not, I am,not going to do that to my team. Ask them to work on something that they hate because it’s so bad, right? And not give them the ability to do what they know they need to do with it. If it’s not that bad, but maybe the team was just really bad at estimates and they weren’t disciplined and they’re not transparent and all the things that we talk about when you’re an exceptional team, are the things that you just do naturally. Then we’ll take it over and we’ll continue to work on whatever it is they have.We do assess it and then figure out where it does need to be improved, make improvements. But why I like those projects is because those people recognize the difference between who they were working with and us very quickly. And they become our biggest fans and they start to really kind of treasure the relationship with us because they know how much value we’re bringing. So that’s why I say those are my favorite projects. I’m gonna put myself out there.so you can either publicly reject me or publicly accept. But I feel like you have a lot of knowledge to offer in general, but that last bit that you just shared, I think we may have to have you on for a part two on the things that you do inside your business, not just how you help the folks that you work with, but inside your business, because you hit on things such as you’re protecting your team’s time and energy and happiness, your…(46:44) Building a Positive Team Culturemaking sure that you’re not taking on projects that aren’t in your zone of genius that you want to hang out in. Like those business principles in and of itself, I’m willing to bet that that’s just scratching the surface as to the experience that you have. So I think we’re gonna have to have you on for a part two at some point. I’d love to, yeah, I would love, and I love to talk about those sorts of things. Perfect. Yeah, building the team culture and that sort of thing, Love it. Let’s do it again. Yeah, this was great.For folks who are listening, if they have some questions for you, they just want to simply follow along with your journey. What’s the best way for them to get in touch and where can they find you? First, shameless plug for my podcast that’s coming out soon. Scaling Smarter is going to be the name of the podcast. And I’ll give you guys a link to it so you can publish it with the podcast if you do that sort of thing.Techies.com is the website, spelled T-E-K-Y-Z. You can reach me at David at Techies.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, David Hirschfeld. H-I-R-S-E-H-F-E-L-D. I’m pretty searchable on LinkedIn. So please reach out and if you’re…interested in looking at doing a project, whether it’s a startup or something inside your organization, we’ll do the assessment of the requirements, we’ll produce functional spec document, and then we provide you an extremely detailed estimate. It’s a methodology that we use that goes in a lot deeper in the estimates than most people will do when they’re estimating a project in advance. And that’s all on our dime.and you can then use us to develop it or take that to somebody else. We just look at that as sort of as a way of building relationships to do that for anybody. Awesome. Well, David, we appreciate you and for everyone tuning in, we appreciate your time and attention. And David, I think this is the start of a good relationship between us three. So looking forward to continuing to build it. Well, I appreciate that. And it’s definitely a good start for me.Thank you guys for having me on, really gracious and really fun. Absolutely, David. you. bye. Bye.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.Lexicon by Interesting Engineering Podcast — Beyond the Pitch Deck: How Launch 1st Method Reduces… was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Health in Real-Time: The Impact of AI-Assisted Wearable Devices on Patient Experience](https://tekyz.com/health-in-real-time-the-impact-of-ai-assisted-wearable-devices-on-patient-experience-fd4359c8fb95/) - Featured Image: Health in Real-Time — The Impact of AI in Wearable Devices on Patient ExperienceAI-powered wearable devices are changing health monitoring. These advanced tools help people take charge of their health by offering proactive solutions. The market for wearable technology is expected to grow by 29.8% annually from 2023 to 2030. Wearable technology combines convenience with innovative features to improve personal health management.Key Statistics on AI in Wearable TechnologyAI algorithms in wearables can classify activities with 99.15% accuracy, improving the quality of health data collected (Source: ResearchGate).The wearable technology market has exceeded $50 billion, showing its rapid growth and importance in health management (Source: Statista).Wearable devices used in health research have a validation rate of 58.1%, proving their effectiveness as monitoring tools (Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research).What to Expect in This ArticleThis article will explore how AI-powered wearable devices are changing healthcare. It will cover:AI Wearable Devices: AI improves wearables by enhancing data analysis and patient outcomes through predictive analytics and real-time monitoring.Types of AI Wearable Devices: Learn about smartwatches, fitness trackers, and medical wearables and their uses in healthcare.Key Features and Benefits: See how these devices help manage health proactively and improve care for chronic diseases.Challenges in Implementation: Identify challenges healthcare organizations and tech startups face when using AI wearables.Future Trends and Innovations: Discover upcoming developments in wearable technology and their effects on healthcare.We will discuss the benefits and challenges of using these devices, along with practical examples in healthcare. This article will explain how AI-powered wearables change health management and impact personal health and the healthcare industry.Report: Insight into Modern Health TechnologyThe Role of AI in Wearable TechnologyWearable technology transforms healthcare through AI, which converts raw data into actionable insights. Improving data normalization and transformation from heart rate monitors and activity trackers helps AI provide healthcare professionals with accurate information for better decision-making.The capabilities of AI in wearables encompass classifying activities with remarkable accuracy, achieving 99.15% through methods like H-LSTM. This exceptional precision significantly boosts the value of accurate data, leading to improved patient outcomes and tailored health management.Wearables enabled by AI provide real-time data and individualized insights, encouraging users to participate actively in their health. This strategy is essential for people with chronic conditions, as it helps them track important health metrics and adjust their lifestyles. Furthermore, AI-enhanced wearables support remote monitoring, which is crucial for the evolution of telemedicine. Healthcare professionals can access objective data to improve remote consultations and enable early detection and timely interventions for health issues.Integrating AI into wearable technology enhances patient care and well-being and supports healthcare providers in delivering effective and cost-efficient services.https://medium.com/media/454025441434a25388b7b629e5600a77/hrefTypes of AI-Assisted Wearable DevicesThese devices, empowered by AI technologies, include fitness trackers, smartwatches, and specialized medical wearables. Their evolution is driven by the demand for personalized health insights and the growing interest in self-monitoring health parameters. The healthcare wearable AI device market is growing rapidly due to technological advancements and increasing consumer interest in health and fitness.AI technology, particularly natural language processing, is crucial for enhancing device capabilities. For example, AI algorithms can gather insightful data and forecast patient outcomes, improving clinical decision-making. Wearable technology shows promise in managing chronic diseases, fitness, and specialized health areas like fertility awareness and geriatrics, leading to new healthcare research and applications.Stay updated with the latest trends by subscribing to the Tekyz newsletter!Smartwatches and Fitness TrackersSmartwatches and fitness trackers have transformed into advanced tools, significantly contributing to the $50 billion wearable industry. These devices track various health metrics, from physical activity to sleep patterns. By providing real-time insights into user progress, they act as accountability partners, encouraging users to manage their health better.These wearables go beyond tracking heart rates and steps; they use AI to analyze health trends and predict potential risks. They also assess a range of health metrics, such as respiration rates, ECG readings, and blood glucose levels. The global wearable AI market was valued at $21.2 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29.8% from 2023 to 2030, highlighting the rising importance of smartwatches and fitness trackers in personal health management.The rise in use is due to these devices becoming more advanced, using better sensors and AI algorithms to monitor various health metrics. These wearables now track heart rates, respiration, ECG, and blood glucose levels, offering users a complete view of their health.Using AI improves the ability to predict health trends and risks. By analyzing data patterns, AI can detect early indicators of health issues, facilitating timely intervention and prevention. This predictive power can transform healthcare, moving the focus from reactive treatments to proactive measures.Furthermore, advancements in AI-enhanced wearables promote a heightened awareness of individual health and well-being. Users can use real-time data about their bodies to make informed health and lifestyle choices. The rise in self-monitoring and self-care boosts the demand for AI-integrated wearables, fueling market growth.Unleash the power of AI for Your Business. Contact us today!Medical WearablesThese devices leverage AI-driven sensors to collect and analyze vast amounts of data, assisting healthcare providers in making better-informed decisions. Continuous monitoring is especially beneficial for managing chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, as it improves treatment strategies.Incorporating wearable technology into healthcare encourages increased patient engagement by giving users instant access to their health information. This empowerment inspires them to make informed lifestyle decisions and actively participate in their health management. Wearable technology is advancing, and future devices are expected to provide enhanced features like better monitoring of blood glucose and breathing patterns, leading to significant improvements in patient care and health outcomes.Report: Exploring Remote Monitoring in HealthcareKey Features of AI-Assisted WearablesAI-assisted wearables transform user interactions by offering intuitive features like voice commands and gesture recognition for a better experience. This makes devices more user-friendly and appealing to many consumers, from tech enthusiasts to beginners. By integrating AI, these wearables can effectively process vast amounts of health-related data, delivering real-time feedback and insights. This capability allows users to receive personalized experiences like tailored exercise plans or specific health advice. These devices use intelligent algorithms to monitor health by analyzing collected data and detecting potential health problems early. Furthermore, AI’s predictive analytics can forecast patterns and behavior, promoting proactive health management and care.Real-Time Health MonitoringWearable devices lead to real-time health monitoring, allowing continuous tracking of vital signs like heart, respiratory, and blood pressure. This constant oversight significantly enhances the accuracy and timeliness of health tracking, providing users and healthcare providers with precise data. For instance, these devices can detect early signs of patient deterioration, allowing for prompt intervention and improved outcomes. This is particularly beneficial for patients managing chronic conditions, as tracking daily metrics can lead to more informed treatment plans. Advanced technologies like MET systems and new blood pressure monitors represent a move towards more manageable and accurate health monitoring tools.Predictive AnalyticsWearable devices with predictive analytics can forecast user activity patterns and suggest optimal break times based on activity levels. AI health trackers monitor vital signs and health metrics to alert users about potential health risks and prevent emergencies. Enhanced predictive analytics identify risk factors and predict health events more accurately, offering a valuable tool for healthcare organizations. For example, AI algorithms can analyze large datasets to recognize early signs of atrial fibrillation, hypertension, or COPD, enabling timely intervention. Predictive analytics facilitate the development of personalized treatment plans, boosting patient engagement and improving health outcomes.Personalized FeedbackAI and machine learning in wearable devices enable personalized health advice and early detection of potential problems. This personalization is critical because individual body signals vary widely due to lifestyle, weight, height, and activity levels. Providing tailored analyses and recommendations helps in managing personal health more effectively. Livongo is an AI system that allows users manage chronic conditions using personal insights from historical data and individual characteristics. Voice AI in wearables provides real-time coaching and reminders, assisting users to manage their health proactively. Through continuous health metrics monitoring and analysis, AI in wearables facilitates actionable feedback, encouraging adherence to health and wellness goals.https://medium.com/media/7a968662e968ff128144aa8137194a2b/hrefBenefits of AI-Assisted Wearable DevicesThese smart devices, equipped with sensors and AI capabilities, provide real-time feedback and insights to improve health management. They can quickly process large amounts of data and identify patterns that traditional methods might overlook. This enables predictive analytics, early detection of health issues, and personalized health advice, promoting proactive healthcare. Patients can access their health data and get customized exercise and diet plans, improving their quality of life and helping them make informed health decisions.Enhanced Patient EngagementAI-powered wearable technology revolutionizes patient engagement by giving individuals direct access to valuable health information. This empowerment helps patients become more aware and in control of their health journey. Wearables establish a collaborative platform where patients can seamlessly share data with healthcare providers. The steady stream of information aids shared decision-making, allowing doctors to give advice based on real-time data for context-specific and timely medical recommendations. These devices encourage immediate action by alerting users to health irregularities, reducing the chances of severe health problems. The result is heightened patient involvement in health management, supported by tangible and actionable insights.Proactive Disease ManagementWearable devices with AI capabilities are pivotal in shifting healthcare from reactive to proactive. These devices constantly monitor various health metrics, helping detect early changes that may indicate the onset of a disease. Wearables provide continuous data collection for people managing chronic conditions, allowing healthcare professionals to track and respond to deviations promptly. For example, some wearables can monitor heart rate and detect irregularities like atrial fibrillation, enabling early intervention. Such continuous monitoring devices help patients make informed health decisions, reducing the risk of complications. This proactive approach improves patient outcomes and enriches the overall healthcare experience.Improved Chronic Disease ManagementChronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, require meticulous monitoring and management. AI-powered wearables play a crucial role in facilitating this process. Livongo offers a comprehensive diabetes management solution with glucose meters that connect to cloud platforms and mobile apps. Patients benefit from personalized insights and real-time feedback, enhancing their ability to manage their condition effectively. Wearable blood pressure monitors allow users to perform clinical-level assessments efficiently and accurately in their daily lives. These technologies are essential for identifying early signs of chronic conditions, allowing healthcare providers to intervene before complications develop and enhancing disease management and patient quality of life.Cost Reduction in HealthcareAI-assisted wearable technology presents a compelling case for reducing healthcare costs. By improving diagnostic accuracy and reducing the need for costly emergency interventions, these devices help streamline healthcare delivery. Remote monitoring capabilities diminish the frequency of in-person visits and hospitalizations, leading to significant cost savings for patients and the healthcare system. Moreover, the ability of wearables to facilitate proactive health management can further decrease hospital admissions and emergency room visits. By enhancing personalized patient care and encouraging preventive practices, AI-powered wearables lower medical expenses, making healthcare more affordable and efficient.Infographic: Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) Trends and StatisticsComparative Analysis of Popular Wearable Health MonitorsWith technology constantly advancing and a wider variety of options becoming available, it’s essential to grasp the different devices out there to find the perfect match for your health needs. In this analysis, we’ll explore popular wearable health monitors, comparing their features, accuracy, and uses while offering helpful guidance for consumers. By diving into these devices, you’ll gain a better understanding of how wearable technology can make a positive impact on your health journey.Overview of Popular Wearable Health MonitorsHere are some of the standout products currently shaping the technology:Apple Watch Series 10: This latest iteration of Apple’s flagship smartwatch showcases advanced health monitoring capabilities, including improved heart rate tracking, ECG functionality, blood oxygen monitoring, and enhanced sleep tracking. The Series 10 introduces a new double-tap gesture for seamless navigation and more precise metrics for temperature sensing, which is particularly valuable for women’s health. With its deep integration with iOS devices, the Apple Watch Series 10 is a personal health assistant, providing notifications and insights that encourage proactive health management.Fitbit Charge 6: Renowned for its user-friendly interface, the Fitbit Charge 6 offers extensive health monitoring features such as heart rate variability, stress management tools, built-in GPS for outdoor activities, and advanced sleep tracking. The device encourages users to set fitness goals through its Daily Readiness Score and guided breathing exercises. Its strong community aspect promotes social sharing and competition, making fitness a more engaging experience.Garmin Venu 2: Designed with athletes in mind, the Garmin Venu 2 combines a stunning AMOLED display with a rich suite of health metrics. It measures pulse oximetry to assess blood oxygen levels and features body battery energy monitoring to help users manage their energy throughout the day. With over 25 preloaded sports apps and advanced performance metrics, this device is ideal for those looking to enhance their athletic performance while maintaining overall health.Samsung Galaxy Watch 7: The Galaxy Watch 7 stands out with its sleek design and comprehensive health metrics, including ECG, blood pressure monitoring, and body composition analysis. Its advanced sleep-tracking capabilities provide detailed insights into sleep patterns, helping users improve their sleep quality. The device’s compatibility with Android and iOS makes it accessible to a broader audience, allowing users to seamlessly integrate health tracking into their daily lives.WHOOP Strap 4.0: Unlike traditional smartwatches, the WHOOP Strap 4.0 focuses on recovery and performance metrics. It provides insights into strain levels, sleep quality, and recovery without traditional screen distractions. Users benefit from a subscription-based model that gives them access to continuous data updates and personalized coaching tips. This device is ideal for individuals who prioritize performance optimization and need insights into their training loads.Comparison of Features, Accuracy, and ApplicationsWhen considering wearable health monitors, several factors are critical in determining which device best meets individual needs:Features:Heart Rate Monitoring: All the devices listed here provide continuous heart rate tracking. However, the Apple Watch Series 10 takes it to the next level with its helpful irregular rhythm notifications and detailed insights on heart rate variability. This feature is especially valuable for anyone managing cardiovascular conditions or looking to boost their fitness levels.ECG Capability: If you’re concerned about your heart health, the ECG functionality is critical. Both the Apple Watch Series 10 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 offer dependable electrocardiograms that can detect atrial fibrillation (AF). This empowers users to actively control their cardiac health by sharing essential data with their healthcare providers.Activity Tracking: Regarding outdoor activities, the Garmin Venu 2 truly shines thanks to its built-in GPS and various activity profiles. It’s an excellent option for athletes aiming to keep a close eye on their performance metrics during different sports.2. Accuracy:A study published in JAMA Cardiology highlighted that the Apple Watch ECG feature has a sensitivity of 98% and a specificity of 99% for detecting AF (Morrison et al., 2020). This level of accuracy reinforces the device’s role as a vital tool for heart health monitoring.A comprehensive review published in Heart Rhythm found that Fitbit devices demonstrated acceptable accuracy for heart rate monitoring during exercise sessions (Wong et al., 2023). Such validation ensures users can trust these devices as reliable fitness companions.3. Applications:Each device caters to different demographics based on its design and intended use. For example, the WHOOP Strap 4.0 is perfect for performance-driven individuals who want to optimize their training regimens by focusing on recovery and sleep quality.In contrast, the Apple Watch Series 10 appeals to a broader audience by combining lifestyle features with serious health metrics. Its versatility suits anyone from casual fitness enthusiasts to more serious athletes.Revolutionize your business by harnessing the power of AI. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest trendsGuidance on Selecting the Right Wearable Health MonitorWith numerous options available, choosing the right wearable health monitor can be overwhelming. Here are tailored recommendations based on specific healthcare needs:For Fitness Enthusiasts: The Garmin Venu 2 or Fitbit Charge 6 are excellent choices if you’re passionate about fitness tracking. Both devices provide extensive workout tracking features and valuable insights into activity levels, enabling users to set and achieve fitness goals effectively.For Health Monitoring: Those requiring robust health metrics should consider the Apple Watch Series 10 or Samsung Galaxy Watch 7. Their advanced monitoring capabilities offer critical information that can assist in managing chronic conditions or general health.For Recovery Focus: If your priority lies in recovery and performance management, the WHOOP Strap 4.0 is tailored for you. It offers insights into how your body responds to training loads and sleep patterns, allowing you to optimize your recovery strategies effectively.When you understand the dynamics of wearable technology, you can make choices that genuinely fit your health goals and lifestyle.https://medium.com/media/c665f76b62ee155eeef7148e7a5f6e8a/hrefThe Role of Wearable Health Monitors in Patient Care and Fitness TrackingThese devices play a crucial role in patient care and fitness tracking by providing real-time monitoring of vital signs. This advancement fosters a proactive approach to health management, where users are informed and motivated to engage with their health proactively.The Transformative Impact of Wearable Health Monitors on Patient Care Through Continuous Monitoring and Early InterventionAI-powered wearable health monitors are revolutionizing patient care by facilitating preventive healthcare measures. They allow for continuous monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate and blood pressure, which can alert users and healthcare providers to any significant changes in health status. For instance, a wearable device that detects a sudden dip in respiratory rates can prompt immediate medical attention, potentially averting a medical crisis. These devices are invaluable for managing chronic conditions, providing health professionals with continuous data to detect deviations that might require timely intervention, thus improving patient outcomes.Transform Your Business With AI — Contact us Today!The Importance of Wearable Health Monitors in Promoting Fitness, Wellness, and a Healthy LifestyleWearable health monitors help track daily activities, recording heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels. This encourages users to set and achieve personalized fitness goals, making these devices instrumental in promoting a healthy lifestyle. For example, a smartwatch that tracks sleep duration and quality can guide users toward better sleep habits, directly impacting their overall wellness. By incorporating AI algorithms, these devices provide insights into health hazards, allowing users to mitigate risks through lifestyle adjustments. Such proactive health management is essential in reducing healthcare costs and enhancing quality of life.The Contribution of Wearable Health Monitors to Personalized Healthcare Through Data Analysis and Tailored Health RecommendationsIntegrating AI in wearable health monitors enables sophisticated data analysis, facilitating personalized healthcare. By analyzing vast datasets, these devices can detect subtle health changes that might be overlooked in traditional monitoring. For example, continuous glucose monitors can provide diabetics with real-time blood sugar levels and personalized dietary recommendations. This capability empowers patients with chronic conditions to follow treatment plans more effectively. AI enhancements in wearables also offer healthcare providers actionable insights, improving clinical decision-making and delivering tailored health strategies that focus on individual patient needs.Implementing wearable devices in healthcare highlights a shift toward more personalized and preemptive health management strategies. These wearables empower users with the tools to manage their health more effectively and enable healthcare providers to deliver more tailored and responsive care. As this technology continues to evolve, we can expect even more innovative applications that further enhance patient outcomes and overall wellness.Infographic: The Role of 5G in Ensuring Economic HealthcareChallenges in ImplementationImplementing wearable devices using AI in healthcare presents various challenges that tech startups and healthcare organizations must navigate. One prominent challenge is the complexity of creating intuitive software systems that integrate AI with healthcare services. Given the intricate nature of healthcare data, developers need extensive expertise to ensure these systems are practical and user-friendly.In addition, a significant challenge lies in ensuring data compatibility. Many healthcare organizations use legacy systems that do not easily integrate with modern electronic protected health information (ePHI) systems. This incompatibility can hinder optimizing treatment solutions tailored to individual patient needs.In addition, data governance is crucial in this implementation process. Since ePHI is sensitive, obtaining and managing consent is essential to maintain patient trust. Equally important is ensuring that AI algorithms remain transparent and unbiased, meet drug regulations, and preserve credibility in patient care.Navigating intellectual property laws poses another challenge, particularly AI and big data. Organizations must manage data privacy, regulatory adherence, and ethical safety to deploy AI compliance successfully.Subscribe to the Tekyz newsletter today!Data Privacy ConcernsData privacy is a formidable barrier when incorporating AI-driven wearable devices in healthcare. Many adults express discomfort with AI-driven healthcare, mainly over concerns about algorithm biases that could lead to poor outcomes. As wearable technology becomes more integrated into healthcare, robust measures must be in place to protect sensitive health data.Educating patients plays a critical role in alleviating these concerns. Patients should know how their data is used and the protective steps to safeguard their information.Data breaches can severely damage reputations and deter users from adopting wearable health devices. Therefore, maintaining stringent confidentiality measures is non-negotiable for health-tech companies.Interoperability IssuesThe ability of different systems and devices to work seamlessly is pivotal for wearable technology in healthcare. High interoperability enables wearable devices to integrate data efficiently from various sources, enhancing health research and insights.A lack of interoperability can obstruct effective data comparison and evaluation across different devices and health methodologies. Therefore, standardizing communication protocols and ensuring cross-compatibility with existing systems are vital to improving the interoperability of AI-powered wearables.Investment in software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) is necessary to promote smooth platform integrations. Effective data governance also needs to address interoperability challenges, supporting the incorporation of wearable devices amidst complexities around costs and data security.Device Accuracy and ReliabilityAchieving accurate and reliable data collection from wearable devices is paramount. This begins with precise sensor calibration and minimal interference to ensure data integrity. Various factors can impair data accuracy, such as incorrect device placement and user movement, highlighting the need for consistent data readings for clinical utility.Continuous data monitoring is essential for capturing comprehensive physiological information over prolonged periods. Therefore, calibration and validation processes are indispensable to maintaining high data accuracy and ensuring reliability for making informed medical decisions.Machine learning applications in healthcare rely heavily on the data provided by wearables. Thus, the trustworthiness of this data is crucial for the success of AI-powered devices in delivering accurate patient health insights.The Future of Wearable Technology in HealthcareThese advancements result in improved patient outcomes and timely medical interventions. AI-powered wearables provide crucial insights by analyzing the data collected, thus enabling healthcare providers and patients to make better-informed decisions. Preventive care is boosted as these devices alert individuals to changes in vital health metrics, promoting wellness and encouraging early intervention. Moreover, combining wearable technology with telemedicine paves the way for efficient remote care services, offering substantial benefits to patients in remote locations or those with mobility issues by supplying objective data for virtual consultations. By keeping track of their health through continuous monitoring, patients are empowered to take control of their conditions with real-time data and personalized insights at their fingertips.Integrating Wearables with Traditional HealthcareTo fully harness the potential of wearables, healthcare organizations must establish robust data governance policies that ensure the secure and compliant collection and use of wearable data. Investing in interoperable data platforms and APIs is essential to connect wearable devices with electronic health records seamlessly. Moreover, healthcare professionals require training to interpret and act on insights derived from wearable data, effectively incorporating this information into clinical workflows. Regular audits and assessments of data management practices can uncover and mitigate potential security risks in this integration process. Overall, the integration of wearable technology facilitates efficient healthcare delivery, improving patient monitoring and outcomes across various settings.AI and Machine Learning AdvancementsProgress in sensor technology, machine learning algorithms, and edge computing capabilities primarily drive AI and machine learning advancements. AI-powered wearables enhance predictive analytics, allowing for the identification of risk factors and the prediction of health events with greater accuracy and lead time. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI can identify patterns and predict potential health issues before they escalate. This technology enables wearable devices to provide real-time insights, inferences, diagnoses, and reports, thus improving patient outcomes and supporting personalized treatment plans. Continuous improvements in AI algorithms make wearable technology more practical and user-friendly, with better connectivity for seamless data sharing with healthcare providers.Long-term Impact on Doctor-Patient RelationshipsIntegrating AI and wearable technology contributes to a continuous engagement between doctors and patients, shifting from occasional visits to ongoing health management. Enhanced communication, facilitated by shared access to real-time data, allows doctors to provide context-specific advice, enhancing patient clarity and confidence in treatment plans. Through remote monitoring capabilities, doctors can track health metrics outside clinical settings, which reduces the frequency of visits for patients with chronic conditions and encourages timely medical interventions. AI algorithms, which analyze wearable data, enhance the personalization of care by identifying health patterns and predicting potential health issues, thus allowing for more targeted treatment strategies. This shift toward proactive health management, made possible by AI-driven wearables, encourages patients to engage in their health actively, fundamentally transforming the doctor-patient dynamic.By following these insights and integrating wearable devices into healthcare frameworks, founders of tech startups, CEOs in healthcare, and business owners can capitalize on this transformative wave of technology, improving patient care and operational efficiency.Accelerate Your Growth with AI – Reach Out to Us Today!ConclusionThe integration of wearable devices using AI into healthcare is changing how we monitor and manage health, offering numerous benefits for patients and healthcare providers. These devices support more personalized and timely healthcare interventions by enabling continuous monitoring and predictive analytics.The transformative potential of wearable health monitors in healthcareWearable devices are making waves in healthcare through their ability to provide continuous, real-time data. This capability is crucial in aiding healthcare providers in delivering timely and accurate treatments across various settings, such as emergency rooms and primary care clinics. The reliability of these devices has dramatically improved, with 58.1% noted for their validation in health research. They are versatile in health monitoring, with uses in predicting COVID-19 trends, managing psychological interventions, and tracking fertility. Integrating AI with wearable technology allows for proactive health monitoring by analyzing vast data sets, leading to early disease detection and personalized healthcare interventions. The projected market growth — from USD 21.2 billion in 2022 and at a robust rate of 29.8% — underscores substantial investment and interest in AI-powered health monitoring solutions.Key insights for healthcare and tech industry leaders on leveraging wearable health monitors for improved health outcomesFor healthcare and tech industry leaders, wearable technology presents opportunities to enable proactive healthcare. These devices allow for continuous monitoring of vital signs, facilitating early detection and intervention for potential health issues. Integrating AI enhances data analysis, uncovering patterns that help predict health issues before they escalate. Future technological advances promise improved biosensors that can track a broader range of biomarkers, further enhancing the capabilities of health monitors. Enhanced predictive analytics can provide healthcare organizations with the accuracy to identify risk factors and predict health events. However, addressing privacy concerns and implementing robust data governance policies are essential to leverage wearable health monitor data in healthcare systems effectively.Learn the latest trends in AI development — Subscribe to the Tekyz newsletter today!Strategies for effectively integrating wearable health monitors into healthcare practicesTo successfully use wearable health monitors in healthcare, it is vital to create explicit data management policies. These policies help ensure the secure and proper handling of data collected from wearables. Investing in systems that allow different devices to work together is necessary for connecting wearables with electronic health records, making data more useful in clinical settings. Healthcare staff should receive thorough training on understanding and using insights from wearable data to incorporate this information into their daily work and decisions. Working with wearable technology companies helps healthcare organizations stay updated on new developments, leading to better patient care. By improving predictive analytics with wearable technology, healthcare providers can spot risk factors, predict health issues, and achieve better patient outcomes while lowering costs.Wearable devices can improve patient care and make healthcare practices more efficient despite privacy and data handling concerns. Their benefits and increasing reliability make them essential for the future of healthcare delivery.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He created the Launch 1st™ methodology to prioritize revenue generation before coding starts. This empowers startups to build momentum while effectively reducing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.
- [AI Innovations in Healthcare Technology](https://tekyz.com/ai-innovations-in-healthcare-technology-6873f6cf1dfc/) - Featured Image: AI Innovations in Healthcare TechnologyImagine a world where your healthcare experience is efficient and deeply personalized. A world where artificial intelligence (AI) leads to significant changes in patient care, including real-time health monitoring and personalized treatment plans. This isn’t a distant dream — it’s the reality unfolding. AI innovations are set to transform healthcare, potentially saving the industry $150 billion a year by 2026 and significantly improving patient engagement and satisfaction.But what does this mean for you? AI-powered solutions help address the disconnect felt by 80% of patients in healthcare, ensuring their needs are recognized and met.This is not science fiction — this is the reality ushered in by AI in healthcare.Did you know AI could save the healthcare industry?$150 billion annually by 2026? These staggering savings stem from enhanced efficiencies and reduced administrative costs.About 80% of patients feel disconnected from their healthcare. AI-powered platforms aim to improve this by increasing patient engagement and adherence rates by over 30%.Challenges such as interoperability remain, with 60% of healthcare executives identifying it as a significant barrier to technology adoption.What to Expect in This ArticleThis article examines how AI transforms healthcare by improving patient care, streamlining processes, and optimizing health outcomes.Readers can expect a thorough examination of various AI applications, including:Predictive Analytics: Discover how AI algorithms forecast patient outcomes and identify at-risk individuals before complications arise.AI-Powered Virtual Health Assistants: Discover how virtual assistants enhance patient engagement and provide information during their healthcare journey.Patient Engagement: Understand how personalized communication through AI can increase patient satisfaction and adherence to treatment plans.Technology Integration: See how seamless integration of AI with existing healthcare technologies can enhance operational efficiencies.We will explore the ethical issues of using AI in healthcare, including data privacy and algorithmic bias, to help readers understand their impact. We will highlight key innovations from Tekyz that transform healthcare, highlighting successful AI projects that improve patient care.Discover how AI transforms healthcare by enhancing care, streamlining processes, and reshaping the future of medicine. Discover the exciting advancements improving patient outcomes and creating a more connected, efficient, and compassionate healthcare system.https://medium.com/media/14f6f22f011c8775eadc6841034a8c83/hrefAddressing Key Challenges in Healthcare through AIOrganizations need to improve their ability to deliver quality care while effectively managing costs. The advent of AI presents an unprecedented opportunity to tackle these issues and revolutionize healthcare delivery.This section covers four fundamental areas: cost management, quality of care, patient engagement, and technology integration. It highlights how AI solutions can enhance the healthcare experience.Captivating Insights into Cost ManagementImagine a healthcare system where financial pressures no longer dictate the quality of care. The American Hospital Association (AHA) reports an alarming trend: an average annual increase of 5% in healthcare costs. This statistic represents countless organizations struggling to provide quality care while balancing budgets.The Opportunity: Healthcare organizations can regain control over their finances by harnessing AI tools for financial forecasting and cost analysis. Imagine predictive analytics identifying areas of overspending and uncovering hidden inefficiencies.The Real-World Impact: Organizations implementing these AI-driven strategies have reported reduced operational costs by up to 15%. This newfound financial efficiency allows for reinvestment in patient care initiatives, leading to enhanced services and improved health outcomes.Want to grow your business with AI? Click here to fill out the quick form, and let’s get started on your latest AI app!Elevating Quality of CareAccording to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, preventable medical errors cause 200,000 deaths each year. This highlights the need for a high standard of patient care.This sobering reality raises an urgent question: How can we change this narrative?The Promise of AI: Imagine AI systems that monitor patient outcomes in real time. These intelligent systems can alert healthcare professionals to potential issues before they escalate into serious problems.Transformative Outcomes: By leveraging these AI solutions, healthcare providers can reduce medical errors by up to 30%. This not only enhances patient safety but also elevates the institution’s reputation, fostering trust within the community.Learn and keep up with the new AI trends in software development.Enhancing Patient EngagementAround 80% of patients feel disconnected from their healthcare, leading to missed appointments and poor treatment adherence, ultimately harming their health.Revolutionizing Engagement: What if patients were empowered through personalized communication? AI-powered platforms can analyze patient behavior and preferences, creating tailored interactions that resonate with each individual.The Results: Research indicates personalized messaging can boost patient adherence rates by over 30%. Engaging patients in their care can enhance their involvement, leading to better health outcomes and increased satisfaction.Explore how artificial intelligence transforms healthcare by improving patient care and streamlining medical practices.Streamlining Technology IntegrationThe integration of new technologies often becomes a significant roadblock for healthcare organizations. A HIMSS survey reveals that 60% of executives cite interoperability as an essential barrier.Interactive Infographic: Impact Level Assessment — New Technologies Integration in HealthcareThis situation prompts a crucial question: how can we overcome these technological hurdles?AI as a Solution: AI systems should be designed to integrate easily with current technologies and include thorough staff training.Breaking Barriers: Organizations prioritizing such integration have reported a remarkable 50% increase in technology adoption rates. This streamlines operations and enhances staff satisfaction by reducing administrative burdens, benefiting providers and patients.AI innovations can improve healthcare by tackling costs, care quality, patient involvement, and technology integration. By embracing these advancements, stakeholders can pave the way for a more efficient, effective, patient-centered healthcare system. The future of healthcare is about addressing challenges and seizing opportunities to improve the experience for everyone.III. Key AI InnovationsAI is essential for tackling current challenges in healthcare. Integrating AI technologies is pivotal in enhancing patient care, streamlining processes, and improving health outcomes.AI Innovations in HealthcareAI technologies are transforming healthcare by changing how providers interact with patients and manage care. Understanding these innovations is essential for appreciating their transformative potential.Machine Learning (ML) involves algorithms that learn from data patterns and improve over time. In healthcare, ML helps hospitals predict patient admissions using historical data, which aids in efficient resource allocation. Additionally, clinical decision support systems use ML to assist clinicians by suggesting potential diagnoses based on similar cases.Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables AI systems to understand and process human language effectively. This technology automates clinical documentation by converting spoken language into structured data, significantly reducing the administrative burden on healthcare providers. NLP improves patient interactions by using AI chatbots to chat with patients, answer their questions, and help them schedule appointments.Robotic technologies are increasingly being integrated into healthcare settings for various purposes. Surgical robots like the da Vinci Surgical System improve precision in minimally invasive surgeries, leading to faster recovery and fewer complications.Rehabilitation robots assist patients in regaining mobility post-surgery or injury, providing tailored exercises that adapt to individual progress.Case Studies of AI ApplicationsThe practical implementation of AI technologies is exemplified through various case studies that illustrate their impact on healthcare. AI technologies are revolutionizing diagnostic tools. IBM Watson for Oncology assists oncologists in analyzing large amounts of clinical data, including medical literature and patient records, to provide personalized treatment recommendations. This enhances decision-making by providing evidence-based insights tailored to specific patient needs. AI in medical imaging can detect tumors in scans more quickly and accurately than human radiologists, resulting in faster treatment.Implementing healthcare AI into clinical practice can enhance patient outcomes and streamline workflows for healthcare professionals.Predictive analytics tools are crucial in managing patient care effectively. Healthcare facilities employ predictive models to anticipate patient inflow during peak times, such as flu season. Hospitals can optimize staffing levels and resources by analyzing historical admission data and improving patient care during high-demand periods. Epic’s predictive analytics identify patients at high risk of readmission after discharge, enabling healthcare providers to prioritize follow-up care and reduce readmission rates.AI analyzes genetic data to identify disease-related mutations, allowing healthcare providers to develop personalized treatment plans tailored to individual genetic profiles. Pharmacogenomics uses AI to predict patients’ medication responses based on genetics, reducing side effects and improving treatment effectiveness.Interactive Infographic: AI Robotics in HealthcareImpact on Patient CareIntegrating these AI technologies significantly enhances patient care and overall system efficiency. AI can analyze data quickly, leading to faster diagnoses, essential for timely interventions. Early and accurate diagnosis can improve treatment outcomes, reducing the disease burden on patients and healthcare systems.AI-driven applications foster a more interactive relationship between patients and healthcare providers. Health monitoring apps track vital signs and health metrics continuously, alerting patients and providers to potential issues early. Educational chatbots help patients understand their conditions and treatment options through conversation, allowing them to engage actively in their healthcare.AI alleviates the burden on healthcare professionals by automating routine administrative tasks such as scheduling and documentation. This allows clinicians to focus more on direct patient care, which improves job satisfaction and reduces burnout. AI enhances resource management in healthcare facilities with its predictive abilities. Anticipating patient demands improves staff and equipment scheduling, reducing wait times and improving service delivery.AI diagnostic tools like IBM Watson improve treatment options by analyzing data and enabling timely interventions in critical situations. Predictive analytics is a proactive measure to manage patient care effectively by anticipating needs based on historical patterns. This approach supports healthcare facilities in optimizing their operations amid increasing demand.The rise of personalized medicine through AI signifies a shift towards more tailored healthcare solutions that consider individual genetic profiles. This enhances treatment effectiveness and supports the increasing focus on patient-centered care, which we identified as a key challenge earlier.Integrating advanced technologies into healthcare can help solve challenges and improve the quality of care for patients globally. AI innovations in healthcare enhance clinical practices, leading to more personalized, efficient, and effective patient care.https://medium.com/media/e8202e526daea2294a0118c2b9ac5f5e/hrefIV. Ethical ConsiderationsAs AI technologies become more prevalent in healthcare, it is essential to scrutinize their ethical implications. Trust is critical in the patient-provider relationship. If this trust erodes, it can result in less patient engagement and worse health outcomes. Patients are concerned about using their personal health information and AI-associated risks. Addressing these concerns is crucial for successfully integrating AI into healthcare systems.Subscribe to the Tekyz newsletter today to learn AI trendsEthical Challenges of AI in HealthcareOne of the significant ethical challenges with AI in healthcare is algorithmic bias. Research indicates that AI systems trained on datasets lacking diversity can yield biased results in diagnoses and treatment suggestions. A study in Health Affairs found that algorithms predicting patient risk were less accurate for black patients than for white patients. (Obermeyer et al., 2019). This bias can worsen inequalities, leading to poor care for disadvantaged groups and hindering equitable healthcare for everyone.Unlock AI growth for your business. Click the link below, fill out the form, and we’ll connect to discuss how we can transform your business with AI.Another critical issue is using patient data to train AI models without explicit consent. A survey by the American Medical Association found that 74% of patients worry about their health data being used in AI applications. Many patients are unaware that their health information may be used to develop algorithms for AI technologies. This lack of transparency raises ethical concerns about autonomy and informed consent. Patients may feel their privacy is at risk, making them less willing to engage with AI in healthcare. The potential for mishandling sensitive information further adds to these worries, creating a significant barrier to accepting AI technologies.Concerns about data security also loom large. A 2021 IBM Security report found that the healthcare sector had the highest average data breach cost, at $9.23 million. (IBM Security, 2021). Such breaches compromise patient privacy and can result in financial losses for healthcare organizations, further eroding trust. Health data is susceptible and vulnerable to cyberattacks, which can have severe consequences for patients and providers.Regulatory FrameworksThe rules surrounding AI use in healthcare often need to be more cohesive and sufficient. Regulations like HIPAA in the U.S. Protect patient privacy and data security but must fully address the complexities introduced by AI technologies. The National Academy of Medicine reports that regulations need updating to match AI advancements, ensuring patient protection while promoting innovation. As these technologies evolve, there is an urgent need for revised policies that specifically tackle their unique challenges. Regulations should safeguard patient data and inform patients about how their information is used in AI applications. This will help create a more transparent healthcare environment.Strategies for Ethical ImplementationTo navigate the ethical landscape surrounding AI in healthcare, several strategies can be implemented:Transparency in AI Models: Emphasizing explainable AI is essential for building trust among clinicians and patients. A UC Berkeley study found that patients' confidence in AI systems increased by 70% when they understood how the systems made decisions (Zhang et al., 2021). When healthcare providers understand how AI makes decisions, they can better explain this to patients. This transparency helps patients feel more informed and confident in their care.Patient Involvement in AI Development: Involving patients in focus groups when designing and developing AI solutions can improve outcomes. A study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that involving patients in technology development can increase user satisfaction by up to 50% (Schäfer et al., 2020). Developers can create more user-friendly products that resonate with patient expectations by seeking feedback about their needs and concerns. This collaborative approach reassures patients that their opinions matter when shaping technology that affects their lives.Implementing strong testing protocols: Evaluating AI systems for bias before deployment can significantly reduce ethical risks. A McKinsey & Company report indicates that continuous monitoring of AI systems can identify biases and inaccuracies, potentially reducing errors by up to 20% (2022). Constant monitoring should also be implemented after deployment to ensure these systems remain fair and effective across diverse populations. Healthcare providers can quickly identify and address potential biases or issues by committing to ongoing evaluation.Data Privacy and Security Measures: Implementing strict data privacy measures is essential for protecting patient information. Healthcare organizations should adopt advanced encryption techniques and regular security audits to safeguard sensitive data. A report by Accenture shows that healthcare organizations can reduce the risk of a data breach by up to 70% by investing in cybersecurity measures. Adequate data protection can alleviate patients’ privacy worries.Ethical Training for Healthcare Professionals: Providing healthcare professionals with training in AI-related ethical considerations is crucial. Understanding the implications of using AI technologies and being aware of potential biases can help clinicians make more informed decisions. Research conducted by Stanford University revealed that equipping healthcare providers with training on ethical considerations surrounding technology significantly bolstered their confidence in utilizing AI tools by an impressive 60% (Stanford University, 2020).By implementing these strategies, the healthcare sector can enhance trust in AI technologies while addressing ethical challenges. Creating an environment where patients feel secure sharing their health information is paramount. People are more likely to use AI solutions in healthcare when they trust that their data will be handled responsibly and ethically, resulting in better outcomes and increased satisfaction.V. Tekyz Projects in HealthcareTekyz has successfully implemented AI solutions across several healthcare projects, focusing on improving patient outcomes and reducing operational costs.Here are notable completed projects:RPM-One reduces unnecessary hospital visits and healthcare costs by utilizing wearable devices for real-time health monitoring, helping to address health inequities. RPM-One enables providers to monitor patients continuously, facilitating early intervention for potential health issues. Analyzing data from wearable technology allows healthcare professionals to spot trends and respond quickly, improving health management and potentially reducing long-term healthcare costs.AnzuBridge — Fast-Tracking FDA Approvals for Clinical Trials: This initiative addresses the protracted and often tedious journey of securing FDA approvals for clinical trials. AnzuBridge streamlines the process by using media to demonstrate effectiveness, resulting in quicker approvals. The project speeds up the approval of new treatments and improves patient care by reducing administrative burdens and enhancing communication with regulatory bodies.Unlock AI Trends with Tekyz today!Impact on ProcessesThe implementation of these projects has led to measurable improvements in healthcare processes:RPM-One allows for reduced wait times for interventions by providing real-time monitoring data. This proactive strategy has been proven to significantly boost patient satisfaction scores while relieving pressure on emergency services by reducing unnecessary visits. Healthcare providers can make data-driven decisions quickly, improving overall patient flow in medical facilities.AnzuBridge has reduced the average time required for FDA approvals in clinical trials by streamlining documentation and communication. This helps healthcare professionals spend more time on patient care instead of administrative tasks, resulting in better efficiency and faster access to new treatments for patients.Case StudiesRPM-One Case StudyA pilot study at a regional hospital found that using RPM-One for managing chronic conditions reduced emergency room visits by 30% among participants. Healthcare professionals noted that the real-time data allowed for timely interventions, reducing complications and increasing patient adherence to treatment plans. Surveyed patients reported higher satisfaction levels due to enhanced monitoring and support.Interactive Slide: Reduction in Emergency Room VisitsAnzuBridge Case StudyA collaborative study across various research institutions revealed that implementing AnzuBridge led to a remarkable 40% decrease in the average time required for FDA approval during clinical trials. Healthcare professionals reported that the streamlined process alleviated staffing pressures and improved team collaboration. Focusing on patient care instead of bureaucratic processes would improve trial management and speed up the delivery of new therapies.Tekyz Reviews and AccomplishmentsTekyz has been recognized for its commitment to excellence in healthcare technology. It meets all eight accreditation standards from relevant bodies and adheres to strict quality guidelines. It has maintained BBB accreditation since 2015, reflecting nine years of continuous service excellence and reliability.Future Directions of Tekyz ProjectsLooking ahead, Tekyz is exploring several promising areas to enhance healthcare delivery further:Integration with Telehealth Platforms: There is potential for developing AI solutions that seamlessly integrate with telehealth platforms. This could allow healthcare providers to monitor patients remotely and adjust treatments in real time, no matter where they are.Exploring AI for Mental Health: Another focus is using AI to develop personalized treatment plans for mental health issues. AI can analyze patient data and behaviors to help clinicians provide customized treatment plans, enhancing patient engagement and outcomes.Tekyz aims to enhance healthcare delivery through technology, improving patient outcomes and operational efficiency.VI. The Future Directions of AI in HealthcareAI's innovations in healthcare offer exciting possibilities for the future, promising to reshape patient care and health systems fundamentally. AI integration promises to significantly improve medical practices and health outcomes for individuals and communities.Emerging Trends in AI Healthcare TechnologiesIntegrating augmented reality (AR) and AI is a significant trend emerging, especially in surgical environments. This integration allows surgeons to see essential data directly in their field of vision, improving precision during procedures. Imagine a surgeon using a 3D model of a patient's body, enhanced by real-time AI analysis, to perform more accurate and less invasive surgeries. Such advancements could significantly reduce recovery times and improve surgical outcomes.We are witnessing rapid advancements in wearable technology designed to monitor health metrics continuously. Future wearables will likely utilize sophisticated AI to deliver real-time insights into an individual’s health status. These devices can monitor vital signs, identify problems, and predict health issues early, promoting proactive healthcare and a culture of wellness.Integration with Other TechnologiesThe potential for AI to enhance telemedicine services is inspiring. AI-driven patient triage systems will transform remote care by efficiently assessing patient needs and connecting them to the right healthcare resources. This capability allows for quick interventions and better use of healthcare resources, making telemedicine essential in our healthcare system.Furthermore, collaborations between AI systems and electronic health records (EHRs) will streamline data management processes. AI can automate data entry and analysis, reducing administrative tasks for healthcare providers and enhancing the accuracy and accessibility of patient records. This seamless integration will facilitate coherent care plans and strengthen communication among healthcare professionals, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes.The boom in AI-enabled medical devices is transforming healthcare through improved diagnostics and patient outcomes.Long-Term Vision for AI in HealthcareImagining a future where AI is seamlessly integrated into clinical environments unveils a transformative landscape where every facet of patient care is significantly improved. AI will assist healthcare providers with data-driven insights from diagnosis to follow-up treatments, helping them make informed decisions for each patient's needs. The marriage of technology and human expertise will create a healthcare ecosystem that is both efficient and compassionate.AI tools help patients manage their health more actively, leading to greater engagement and better adherence to treatment plans. Imagine a world where individuals receive personalized health recommendations through AI-driven platforms, fostering a proactive approach to wellness.We are on the brink of significant changes in AI's role in healthcare. The possibilities are vast, and the potential impact on patient care is profound. Embracing these advancements can lead to a healthier and more equitable future where technology enhances health outcomes for everyone.VII. ConclusionAI will be crucial in shaping the future of healthcare. We've examined new approaches and technologies that indicate a future where AI improves patient care and transforms healthcare.Recap of Key Points:Innovations Improving Patient Outcomes: AI-driven tools and algorithms are leading to more precise diagnostics, tailored treatment plans, and proactive health management, thereby significantly improving patient outcomes.Streamlining Operations: Automation and efficient data processing reduce administrative burdens and optimize resource allocation, allowing healthcare professionals to dedicate more time to patient care.Supporting Healthcare Professionals: Through advanced analytics and decision-support systems, AI equips healthcare providers with the necessary insights to make informed decisions, enhancing their ability to deliver quality care.Throughout this article, we have highlighted how Tekyz’s services in AI development can be instrumental in realizing these advancements in the healthcare sector. By leveraging Tekyz’s expertise, healthcare organizations can effectively integrate AI technologies, ensuring they remain at the forefront of innovation.As we move forward, all stakeholders — healthcare professionals, patients, administrators, and developers — need to engage in ongoing discussions about the responsible adoption of AI technologies in healthcare. Together, we can navigate this innovative technology, fostering advancements that benefit patients and providers alike.David Hirschfeld, Tekyz FounderDavid Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at info@tekyz.com.AI Innovations in Healthcare Technology was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- [Discipline: The Backbone of an Exceptional Software Development Team - Part 3 of 'Building the Dream Team: Essential Qualities of an Exceptional Software Development Team'](https://tekyz.com/discipline-the-backbone-of-an-exceptional-software-development-team-part-3-of-building-the-dream-team-essential-qualities-of-an-exceptional-software-development-team/) - Included in the article: Understanding Discipline in Software Development Building a Culture of Discipline Adherence to Coding Standards and Best Practices The Role of Code Reviews Importance of Testing and Quality Assurance Time Management and Meeting Deadlines Discipline in Agile Methodologies The Necessity of Comprehensive Documentation Continuous Integration and Deployment Discipline The Cost of Indiscipline
- [Communication: The Heartbeat of a Thriving Software Development Team - Part 2 of 'Building the Dream Team: Essential Qualities of an Exceptional Software Development Team'](https://tekyz.com/communication-the-heartbeat-of-a-thriving-software-development-team-this-is-the-2nd-in-a-series-of-articles-that-explores-what-make-a-hyper-exceptional-software-development-team/) - Included in the article: Building Trust through Transparent Communication The Power of Active Listening The Role of Feedback in Continuous Improvement The Importance of Cultural Sensitivity Communications in Remote Teams Collaborative Tools to Promote Communication Critical Thinking and its Role in Communication Conflict Resolution Overcoming Communication Barriers The Cost of Poor Communication The Final Word
- [Risk Management Revolutionized: Harnessing AI's Predictive Power to Secure Your Business](https://tekyz.com/risk-management-revolutionized-harnessing-ais-predictive-power-to-secure-your-business/) - In this dynamic digital era, where businesses operate across an intricate tapestry of interconnectivity and data-driven decisions, risk management is no longer confined to reactive measures. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), companies now wield the power to predict and mitigate potential risks with unprecedented precision. As a business leader, understanding these advancements is
- [The Intersection of AI and Emotional Intelligence in Product Design](https://tekyz.com/the-intersection-of-ai-and-emotional-intelligence-in-product-design/) - Imagine if the apps and digital tools you use every day could understand how you felt. What if they could sense when you’re frustrated and offer help or celebrate with you when you achieve something fantastic? This futuristic-sounding scenario isn’t as far off as you might think! In the world of product design, two powerful
- [Building the Dream Team:  Essential Qualities of an Exceptional Software Development Team](https://tekyz.com/building-the-dream-team-essential-qualities-of-an-exceptional-software-development-team/) - This is the first in a series of articles that discusses the key qualities of a truly exceptional software development team. This first article is an overview of the key traits that make up an exceptional team. Following articles will delve deeper into each of these traits. Included in the article: Introduction Communication: The Heartbeat
- [Product Development vs Project Development](https://tekyz.com/product-development-vs-project-development/) - Included in the article: Understanding Product Development Exploring Project Development The Role of Innovation in Product Development Project Development Methodologies Challenges in Product Development Mitigating Risks in Project Development Bringing It All Together Navigating the world of software development can sometimes feel like venturing into a dense forest without a map. It’s easy to get
- [Harnessing AI to Fulfill Client Demands in the Evolving Software Development Landscape](https://tekyz.com/harnessing-ai-to-fulfill-client-demands-in-the-evolving-software-development-landscape/) - In an era where technology evolves at breakneck speed, the demands placed on software development have swelled to phenomenal proportions. Amidst this surge, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as an avant-garde torchbearer, perfectly positioned to streamline workflows and enhance the efficiency of development teams. As we stand at the precipice of a new year, 2023,
- [The 7 mistakes that cause most startup software ventures to fail because they never achieve product-market-fit](https://tekyz.com/the-7-mistakes-that-cause-most-startup-software-ventures-to-fail-because-they-never-achieve-product-market-fit/) - In the early days of a software startup, the company is focused on developing the product. Whether the founders are engineers or developers themselves, or if they are non-technical founders with a product vision, the product is their baby and they care, often, too deeply for the features and benefits of the software they’re creating.
- [10 Warning Signs your Software Project is Headed for Disaster](https://tekyz.com/10-warning-signs-that-your-software-development-project-is-headed-for-disaster/) - Taking a software idea from inception, through design and development, ultimately resulting with a completed system can be a rewarding endeavor. The software creation process combines creativity, vision and business acumen with planning and execution, yielding something new and unique that can benefit both niches and the masses. My clients and I enjoy working together

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- [How S2 Enhanced Contract and Substitution Management for Distributors](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/workflow-automation/s2/) - How S2 Enhanced Contract and Substitution Management for Distributors Optimizing contract processing and substitution management through a robust web application. Overview Industry: Healthcare Product Pricing Optimization for DistributersChallenge: Streamline pricing, contract and substitution management for distributors buying from multiple wholesale sources..Solution: A comprehensive web application integrated with real-time file/web syncing and advanced validation mechanisms.Outcome: Enhanced
- [How OpenHouses Direct Revolutionized Open House Management](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/proptech/how-openhouses-direct-revolutionized-open-house-management/) - How OpenHouses Direct Revolutionized Open House Management Enhancing realtor safety, buyer engagement, and lead management through an innovative platform. Overview Industry: PropTech Challenge: Improve safety and streamline the management of open houses for realtors. Solution: A patented open house management system with instant verification and real-time communication. Outcome: Enhanced safety for realtors and sellers, improved
- [How M3 Transformed Mortgage Management for Homeowners and Brokers](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/proptech/how-m3-transformed-mortgage-management-for-homeowners-and-brokers/) - How M3 Transformed Mortgage Management for Homeowners and Brokers Boosting broker productivity and borrower satisfaction through a scalable mortgage management platform. Overview Industry: Financial Services Challenge: Simplify mortgage management for homeowners and brokers. Solution: A B2C2B platform connecting borrowers with mortgage brokers for better deals. Outcome: Increased lead conversion and borrower satisfaction. The Challenge Managing
- [How REIblade Revolutionized Real Estate Portfolio Management for Managers and Investors](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/proptech/how-reiblade-revolutionized-real-estate-portfolio-management-for-managers-and-investors/) - How REIblade Revolutionized Real Estate Portfolio Management for Managers and Investors Enhancing real estate asset tracking and investment management through an intuitive analytics dashboard. Overview Industry: PropTech Challenge: Streamline portfolio management for Real Estate Sponsors and investors. Solution: A comprehensive analytics platform enabling managers to track financial metrics, cash flows, and related documents across multiple
- [How a Leading Business Streamlined PO-to-Bill Matching with Automated Reconciliation](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/workflow-automation/po-to-bill/) - How a Leading Business Streamlined PO-to-Bill Matching with Automated Reconciliation Improving ERP accuracy and eliminating manual reconciliation through smart automation. Overview Industry: Enterprise Operations Challenge: Eliminate manual reconciliation between vendor Purchase Orders (POs) and customer sales orders Solution: Automated PO-to-bill matching system integrated with ERP Outcome: Significant reduction in manual corrections, errors, and operational delays
- [Streamlining Hospitality Reservations with AI](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/workflow-automation/hospitality-reservations/) - Streamlining Hospitality Reservations with AI Overview Industry: Hospitality Challenge: Automating and standardizing mass reservation processing to improve operational efficiency and reduce errors. Solution: An AI-driven intelligent system capable of extracting and integrating reservation data from reservation brokers into a centralized booking database, then automating the reservation confirmation workflow in various hotel booking platforms. Outcome: Enhanced
- [Digitizing Plant Genealogy and Compliance for Government-Regulated Agriculture](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/agritech/digitizing-plant-genealogy-and-compliance-for-government-regulated-agriculture/) - Digitizing Plant Genealogy and Compliance for Government-Regulated Agriculture Overview Industry: Agriculture Challenge: To streamline and simplify the management of plant growth and genealogy in government-regulated agricultural sectors in the USA. Solution: Development of a comprehensive platform with functionalities such as barcode scanning, plant and nutrient information management, crop stage and genealogy tracking, expense tracking, and
- [How Qtis Revolutionized Crime Investigation with Business Intelligence](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/law-enforcement-tech/how-qtis-revolutionized-crime-investigation-with-business-intelligence/) - How Qtis Revolutionized Crime Investigation with Business Intelligence Overview Industry: Law Enforcement Challenge: Poor evidence documentation and criminal connection tracking during complex drug/gang investigations results in few convictions. Solution: Implementing Quick Tracking Investigative System (Qtis), a business intelligence system, to streamline investigations and uncover evidence. Outcome: Improved efficiency in connecting suspects and gathering actionable intelligence
- [How a Clinical Trial Platform is Accelerating FDA Approvals through Real-Time Visual Evidence](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/healthtech/how-a-clinical-trial-platform-is-accelerating-fda-approvals-through-real-time-visual-evidence/) - How a Clinical Trial Platform is Accelerating FDA Approvals through Real-Time Visual Evidence Empowering research teams to capture, organize, and submit progressive visual outcomes for regulatory success. Overview Industry: Healthcare / Life Sciences Challenge: Regulatory delays and insufficient documentation in trials measuring visible patient improvements. Solution: A Clinical Trial Management Platform (CTMP) with integrated tools
- [How Remote Patient Monitoring Revolutionized Healthcare with Cutting-Edge Wearable Technology](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/healthtech/how-remote-patient-monitoring-revolutionized-healthcare-with-cutting-edge-wearable-technology/) - How Remote Patient Monitoring Revolutionized Healthcare with Cutting-Edge Wearable Technology Enhancing patient care and clinician efficiency through advanced Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solutions. Overview Industry: Healthcare Technology Challenge: Provide real-time monitoring of patients’ vital health data regardless of patients’ location. Solution: A comprehensive RPM system integrating wearable devices and mobile applications for seamless real-time data
- [How DriveHealth Is Revolutionizing Preventive Healthcare with AI-Powered Virtual Assistance](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/healthtech/how-drivehealth-is-revolutionizing-preventive-healthcare-with-ai-powered-virtual-assistance/) - How DriveHealth Is Revolutionizing Preventive Healthcare with AI-Powered Virtual Assistance Improving patient access, engagement, and provider efficiency through a voice-enabled, AI-driven health assistant. Overview Industry: Health Technology / Preventive Care Challenge: The lack of available nurses, proactive healthcare, and poor patient engagement burdens providers to address serious conditions that could have been easily prevented. Solution:
- [Health Tech](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/healthtech/) - Health Tech Healthcare demands continuity, compliance, and clarity—across patients, providers, and platforms. Tekyz builds HealthTech solutions that combine AI, cloud infrastructure, and user-centric design to support better outcomes and streamlined operations. Our platforms enable you to: Monitor patient vitals and risk indicators through real-time health data Deploy AI-powered virtual assistants for patient engagement and follow-ups
- [Case Studies](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/) - Engineering and Design That Deliver Real-World Results Tekyz builds scalable platforms that improve operations, enhance user experience, and enable data-driven decision-making. Our capabilities include AI-driven automation, real-time systems, complex system integration, and enterprise-grade architecture. Design is integral to our process. We apply user-centered principles to create intuitive, accessible interfaces that align with business goals and
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- [Prop Tech](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/proptech/) - Prop Tech Real estate is a high-stakes industry shaped by complex transactions, layered stakeholders, and strict compliance requirements. Tekyz developed PropTech platforms that replace fragmented workflows with secure, scalable systems—purpose-built for real estate professionals. Our solutions let you: Centralize investor and sponsor interactions through dedicated portals Track asset lifecycle events with real-time updates and audit
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- [Law Enforcement Tech](https://tekyz.com/case-studies/law-enforcement-tech/) - Law Enforcement Tech Public safety demands fast, accurate, and accountable systems—from the field to the courtroom. Tekyz engineers secure digital platforms that streamline operations for law enforcement agencies and first responders. Our solutions help you: Digitally manage case files, incident reports, and evidence records Enable real-time data access and updates from mobile patrol units Track
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