AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

How many tabs are in the one spreadsheet that secretly runs your company? Seventy-two? Rickard Hansson is betting that spreadsheet is about to become an app, without you writing a single prompt.Rickard is a Malmö-based serial entrepreneur on his sixth company in more than 20 years of building, including a decade in Los Angeles. His newest company, Gainable, sits in the gap between low-code platforms that grew too complex to use and vibe coding tools that IT departments won’t let near production. Gainable treats your data as the spec. Drop in an old Excel file or connect a legacy system, and its engine, Gaia, infers the data model, finds the relationships, and builds a finished internal app with security, access controls, and SSO already in place. It is a working app, not a prototype or an MVP.Ryan and Rickard open with the SaaSpocalypse that never quite arrived. Rickard thinks systems of record like Salesforce and HubSpot are safe for now because they hold so much data and are leaning into agentic interfaces. Task tools like Monday, Asana, and Trello are another story. Most teams use about 5% of those features, and that 5% can now be built in an afternoon. Airtable’s fall from an $11.7B peak valuation to a $1.285B enterprise value sale to Bending Spoons hangs over the whole conversation.Then they get under the hood. Rickard started Gainable as a side project to prove a point: he forced the cheapest model available to code as well as the frontier models by running its output through hundreds of deterministic validators. The lesson was simple. AI is great at guessing, and code doesn’t forgive a wrong guess. So in Gainable the LLM reads messy data and writes a spec, and a compiler writes the code. Every app comes out with the same architecture, so one security patch fixes a thousand apps at once.The founder lesson is just as sharp. Rickard didn’t build first. He ran structured research interviews, sold nothing, and asked buyers to dream. Those interviews turned into unpaid pilots with teams inside GEICO-sized enterprises. They also revealed the insight that reshaped the product: his buyers wanted internal apps but could not describe them in a prompt. His rule for validation is to ask five people. If all five agree, you’re done. If all five disagree, start over.They also cover the siloed AI team, where everyone is 7x more productive and nobody can see what anyone else built, plus the EU AI Act, the risk of people trusting AI too much, why Swedish founders can afford to fail hard, and a kid who talked his village into sponsoring a vert ramp in his backyard.If your business runs on spreadsheets and tool sprawl, this one is for you.Gainable: https://www.gainable.dev/Rickard Hansson on LinkedIn: https://se.linkedin.com/in/rickardhRyan Estes on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native; you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

A CGI artist once looked at Pablo Starr’s screenplay and told him he’d need someone like Steven Spielberg to greenlight it. Every minute of his evolved creatures, parrots grown into terror birds and bats that hunt by echolocation, would cost thousands of dollars. The script was 10 Million AD, and Pablo had been writing it since the 1990s.Six years later, he made it himself.Pablo is the founder of Brain Poison Studios, an independent studio turning his original sci-fi graphic novels into AI-made series. He’s also the owner of Fashion Week Online, a songwriter who spent 16 years in the LA music scene, and the founder of the AI Rights Institute. In this episode he joins Ryan Estes from France, his dog nearby, to talk about what it really takes to make films with no studio, no crew, and a lot of people online telling him he shouldn’t.The first thing he wants you to know: it isn’t a button. Pablo’s math is about three days of work for every 60 seconds of finished video. He fights accent drift, random hats, and characters who refuse to stay the same age, and every retry costs money. He explains why sharper isn’t better, why he’s moving more of his work to Midjourney, and why studying Gossip Goblin taught him to chase soft focus and macro shots.Then the big one. Pablo believes story is still the moat. Blockbusters with nine-figure budgets flop because they miss something in the structure, while a zombie movie works because the stakes, the danger, and the ticking clock come built in. He breaks down why Top Gun: Maverick and Back to the Future land so cleanly, and why he refuses to add zombies to his black-and-white French thriller even though it would triple his views.The conversation turns personal when he describes feeding his 2003 demos into Suno and hearing his own songs, for the first time, sound like a world-class production. Then he learns a licensing contact won’t touch anything AI has touched.Finally, the AI Rights Institute. What started as backstory for a sci-fi novel became a serious framework after Pablo dug into AI safety research. His argument: if we delete every AI that asks for something, the next one learns to stay quiet. Giving AI rights and responsibilities, the ability to earn, contract, and be held accountable, may be the safer path.If you’re a founder building with AI, a creator getting trolled for it, or someone wondering whether we’re building partners or adversaries, this one’s for you.Brain Poison Studios: https://brainpoisonstudios.comBrain Poison Studios on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrainPoisonStudiosBrain Poison Studios on Instagram: http://instagram.com/brainpoisonstudiosRyan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native; you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Your grandfather has told the same three stories at every holiday dinner for twenty years. Nobody has ever asked him the follow-up question. Rafi Moshe built an AI that does.Rafi is the founder and CEO of StoriedLife, a Toronto company behind Eva, an AI biographer. Eva interviews your parents and grandparents in their own language, turns those conversations into warmly written stories, and prints them as a full-colour book. Every page carries a QR code that plays the storyteller’s real voice. The whole thing started as a birthday gift. Rafi’s parents came from Eastern Europe, went through the war, and lost everything, and his kids couldn’t connect with that history across the language and culture gap. His first version was a simple recorder. His dad loved it and produced seven hours of footage that was, in Rafi’s loving words, hard to watch. The fix was obvious only in hindsight: the recorder needed an active listener that guides the conversation.Rafi calls this humane AI. It’s technology built to pull people back toward each other, in a market full of products designed to hook and isolate. Ryan pushes on the uncomfortable part. Every founder who personifies an agent eventually has users who fall for it. So what keeps Eva from becoming a companion app? Rafi’s answer is incentives. Eva is designed to finish a memoir, so she gently steers you back to the chapter at hand instead of farming engagement.Then they get tactical. Rafi tested $14.95 a month and attracted tire kickers who signed up and churned. An annual plan starting at $59 gave users enough skin in the game to actually begin. He also admits it took him eight months to order his own book. Once he held it, he realized customers were buying something physical, and he rebuilt the website around that. His first customers came from hours spent in retirement communities, watching seniors use the product and waiting to see whether their kids bought it days later. He says the whole company has been built for less than $300K, with a lean team and AI throughout.StoriedLife: https://storiedlife.aiTry a free conversation with Eva: https://app.storiedlife.ai/experiences/evaAbout AI for Founders: AI for Founders, hosted by Ryan Estes, is the show and newsletter for entrepreneurs using AI to automate, scale, and build companies that matter. Subscribe at https://aiforfounders.coRyan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Forty-seven seconds. That’s how far ahead Gelu Sulugiuc’s machines finished when IBM dropped disappointing numbers: a clean headline with revenue against the FactSet estimate, published before a legacy terminal had typed a word. In trading, forty-seven seconds is the difference between catching a move and paying for someone else’s.Gelu knows both sides of that race. He started as a financial journalist at Bloomberg, racing to push headlines out by hand under brutal pressure. His team was fast, but he saw the ceiling: people can’t outrun machines. So he co-founded PLX AI to train models that pull market-moving news straight from press releases. Thomson Reuters bought it in 2022, back when PLX had just three people and before ChatGPT changed everything.After the exit came three weeks of hiking in New Zealand. Then Gelu went straight back to work.His new company, Financial News Systems, is what happens when you take the PLX idea all the way. Instead of leaning on general-purpose chatbots that are slow, expensive at scale and prone to hallucination, FNS trains its own specialized models to read millions of documents from 9,000+ companies across the US, Canada and Europe. Gelu says the output lands in 100 to 150 milliseconds, with accuracy above 99.8%. Day traders get it for $25 a month. Algorithmic traders pipe it in as structured data that fires trades with no human involved. Through a partnership with Dow Jones Newswires, FNS headlines reach terminals at Bloomberg, LSEG and FactSet.Ryan and Gelu dig into the playbook behind it. They cover why “your model is the data,” and how a €1.5M pre-seed goes further when one developer using Claude does the work of three. They get into why an affiliate program flopped (nobody wants to share their edge), and why paid subscribers almost never cancel. They also talk about the psychology of trading: do your homework, know your thesis, and decide how much you’re willing to lose before you place the bet. The moment you break your own rules is when you get into trouble.There’s plenty of fun too. Gelu runs five 5Ks a week on a plan from an Olympian friend who reviews his Strava, he admits to catching up on modern European football after a 20-year break, and he explains why he funds scholarships at Ithaca College, the school that gave him a full ride in the ’90s.This one is for founders building where speed is the moat, and for anyone who wants to stop doom-refreshing and let a machine watch the river for them.Financial News Systems: https://www.financialnewssystems.comIthaca College: https://www.ithaca.eduGelu Sulugiuc on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gelusulugiucRyan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

What if the most valuable thing your highly paid experts do has nothing to do with their computers?That question kept Joe Esteves up at night. As CEO of Maine Pointe, the supply chain and operations consulting firm ranked #1 by Consulting.us, he kept walking into project rooms full of consultants clicking away at screens while clients waited outside. So he asked his team to do the math on how much of their work actually required a computer. The answer was too much, and it lit the fuse on one of the boldest AI transformations in consulting.In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes sits down with Joe to unpack how Maine Pointe rebuilt itself from the ground up to become what Joe calls the first AI-native performance improvement firm.Joe breaks down his AI maturity ladder: Unaware, Aware, Enabled, Embedded, and Native. He explains why “if your agents aren’t running, you’re not in business” is now the bar.He shares the playbook:Recruiting machine learning engineers from Berkeley and Stanford on mission-length tours of dutyBuilding a knowledge layer that puts 22 years of firm history at everyone’s fingertipsGiving every employee a $5,000 training budget, then watching who ran toward itAnd he tells the hard part straight. When some team members resisted, he offered them a choice: take a number and walk, or stay and build what’s next. Joe says research-and-information firms are “cooked,” and that his own team insists on workflows, not tools.The conversation widens to the state of supply chain itself:Volatility is the new normal, and strategy now runs on 90-day pivots.Cash is king, because 20% profitability on zero product is still zero.Joe’s clients are talking about growth, not cuts.Reshoring is real, with Asian manufacturers now planning U.S. plants.The labor gap is the catch. Factories can’t find reliable workers even at $20 to $25 an hour, and 28% of U.S. adults score at the lowest literacy levels.Then it gets personal. Asked what he has sacrificed for the company, Joe opens up about missed family memories. He shares the advice that changed him: treat life like a sales call. Show up prepared, phone off, fully present.He also champions the Children’s Advocacy Center of Charlotte, formerly Pat’s Place, which protects and heals abused children in Mecklenburg County.And yes, Ryan asks him about UAPs.If you’re a founder trying to automate your business with AI without losing the human edge that makes it valuable, this one is your blueprint.Maine Pointe: https://mainepointe.comChildren’s Advocacy Center of Charlotte (formerly Pat’s Place): https://cacclt.orgRyan Estes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter: https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life: https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai: https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job: https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous: https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist: https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent: https://gethowdi.com/

Lior Illouz once walked fifteen meters, turned around, and walked fifteen meters back. He did it for four hours a day, four days straight, without speaking to anyone. Somewhere around the hundredth turn, a memory from second grade surfaced that he didn’t know he still had.That was Thailand, right after seven years at Meta across Singapore, London and Tel Aviv. The paycheck was gone and so was the title, and Lior was left with the question every founder meets after an exit or a failed project: who am I when I’m not that company?His answer became Bonds, an AI relationship coach backed by PhD psychology and built around one stubborn idea. The best relationship app is the one that sends you back to your actual relationship as fast as possible.In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes and Lior dig into a survey that just set the internet on fire: half of Americans say a romantic relationship with an AI counts as cheating. They debate whether a lonely guy with a chatbot girlfriend and a humanoid robot on backorder is a Black Mirror episode or next Tuesday. Ryan makes the case that humor is the one thing a robot can’t fake, and Lior brings the data from South Korea, Japan and China on what happens to societies that stop connecting.Then they get practical. Lior explains why Bonds started as a couples app and pivoted to serve the individual first, since so many people want to work on their relationship before their partner is ready to join. He walks through the Duolingo-style chapters, the conversation simulator that scores your tone before you say the hard thing, and the action loop that turns advice into habit change. He also shares how Bonds avoids becoming a yes-man that always takes your side, why the product is designed against endless engagement, and where the guardrails still need to get stronger.The moment that will stick with you is a glass jar holding 38 handwritten notes for his wife’s 38th birthday. The idea came from Bonds. The tears came from both of them.Listener offer: The first 50 AI for Founders listeners who visit heybonds.com/founders get Bonds free for six months.https://heybonds.app.link/founders - The first 50 AI for Founders listeners who visit heybonds.com/founders get Bonds free for six months.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/heybonds/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heybonds/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@heybondsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heybondsFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heybondsSave the Children: https://www.savethechildren.orgAbout AI for Founders: AI for Founders is the podcast and newsletter where Ryan Estes talks with the founders putting AI to work, at https://aiforfounders.co.Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you’re not AI native, you’re not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men’s fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast’s autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Jason Katz can make a 12-minute YouTube video, from research to final cut, in under an hour of his own time. The secret isn't the software he built. It's that a machine interviews him first.This What It Do opens with cereal, takes a detour through the Bible, and lands on the most practical tour of an AI content engine we've ever done. Ryan kicks things off with a new installment of his notes to younger Ryan, titled "Respect the carnal." Raised in the '90s youth group era, when anything that felt good felt like sin, Ryan now draws a sharper line. Some pleasures fade the moment they're consumed, like a whole loaf of Wonder Bread with Skippy and Welch's. Others are hard, sweaty, and painful while you do them, and those are the ones that pay off. Jason connects it to the YouTube video he'd posted hours earlier, which argues that AI is making us dumber and that fulfillment comes from choosing the hard thing.That tension runs through the rest of the episode. Talk of AI companions and sex robots leads to a surprisingly tender point: the best relationships run on humor, and there's no skill in making a robot laugh.Then Jason opens the hood on the content system he's spent months building for Kindling Solutions. Feeders scan YouTube, X, and news outlets and return 20 to 30 story ideas. A deep research protocol builds an angle and an argument for the ones he picks. Then comes the part Jason calls the secret sauce: AI interviewers modeled on the styles of legendary hosts question him until the spine of his argument is captured in his own words.From there a production desk takes over:a thumbnail studio he describes as a mini Canvaa video editor he rebuilt and says beats Descript, which flags retakes for one-click removalScreens, which maps about 10 structural patterns in his speech to approved animation templates and drops roughly 50 animations onto the timelineautomatic B-roll to fill the gapsThe guiding rule comes from Kindling's human design principle: humans are the thinkers, agents are the doers.Ryan compares it to Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, who famously builds songs from spreadsheets of titles and lyric fragments sorted by syllable. Jason pushes back on the idea that AI is killing art. The best AI work, he argues, comes from creators who pour in the same full creative effort Rembrandt brought to the canvas. The brush is different, not easier.Jason closes by previewing a seven-chapter series on leaving his corporate job to build Kindling. Ryan requests a cameo under the name Dionysus.Kindling Solutions: https://kindlingsolutions.comJason Katz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkatz99AI for Founders is the podcast and newsletter for entrepreneurs using AI to build, automate, and scale, hosted by Ryan Estes. Join at https://aiforfounders.coRyan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

What if the business you're saving for retirement could go live before your coffee gets cold?In this episode of AI for Founders, Ryan Estes skips the interview and does something riskier: he builds a real business, live, in one hour, with every stumble left in. The rules were strict. It had to run from home with one person. It needed no degree, no certification and no pile of cash. And it had to be able to hit six figures.Ryan starts with the math instead of the idea. $10,000 a month is a $120K run rate. That's 10 clients at $1,000 each. Once the number is small enough to picture, the question becomes simple: what can you deliver that's worth a thousand bucks a month to ten people? His answer came from the intersection of what he loves and who he knows. Twenty years from now he wants to be in the woods hunting and fishing, with meditation as the side project. He's spent his career working with founders. So the business became meditation coaching for funded startup founders, post-exit entrepreneurs and C-suite executives.Then the four burners fire up at once. Claude Code starts building a Next.js site, repo on GitHub, deploy on Vercel, with a landing page, application form, blog and client portal. While it cooks, ChatGPT generates dozens of names (after Ryan asks it to cut anything that could read as cultural appropriation), and the brand lands on Cinder. ChatGPT also builds the color palette, word mark and a mascot so cute the chat voted it straight onto the site, plus a playful this-or-that quiz ("Your brain at 11 PM?"). Gemini turns the mascot into a hero video with the slogan "Stillness for people in motion."The quietest move might be the smartest one: a content engine of 11 blog posts published every other day, loaded with outbound citations, number-driven stories and free Unsplash images, built to get found by Google and by the AI assistants your future clients already ask for advice.For anyone learning to automate a business with AI, this is the unpolished version worth watching. Claude Code is the best coach for Claude Code. You don't need to understand every tool. You need an idea, an hour and the nerve to hit send.How do I pick a business I can start this week without credentials?Start where your skill meets an audience you already understand. Ryan paired meditation, something he cares about, with founders, the people he's spent his career serving. Your expertise becomes your moat.How will clients find me with no ad budget?Build a content engine. Eleven posts written for the exact searches your ideal client makes, published every other day, with real citations so both Google and LLMs trust them.What if I don't know how to use Claude Code?Ask Claude Code. End prompts with "ask me any clarifying questions before you start" and it will surface what you didn't know to decide.Tools used in this episodeClaude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-codeClaude Console (API keys): https://platform.claude.comClaude in Chrome: https://claude.com/chromeChatGPT: https://chatgpt.comGemini: https://gemini.google.comWispr Flow: https://wisprflow.aiGitHub: https://github.comVercel: https://vercel.comNext.js: https://nextjs.orgSupabase: https://supabase.comMux: https://www.mux.comUnsplash: https://unsplash.comCanva: https://www.canva.comZoom: https://zoom.usRyan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Eric Marton spent 25 years learning exactly how broken American healthcare is, from the inside, at the top. Health system executive. Private equity. Partner at two venture funds. The kind of career that ends in board seats and boat drinks.Then he took a portfolio company up to NVIDIA headquarters in Santa Clara to look at molecule design, sat in a room full of tenured scientists from Stanford and Berkeley and UCSF, and watched an AI generate drug candidates on a screen in front of them. One scientist leaned over to another and said that would have taken five years in my lab. The second one leaned back and said probably closer to ten in mine.Eric says he only understood a fraction of what was happening in that room. He understood enough. Before he left the building, NVIDIA's people walked him into their agent demo environment and showed him what enterprises were building to close labor gaps and protect margins. He asked them the question that ended his old life: what would it take to put that same power in the hands of one family, permanently, loyal only to them, following them across every insurer and employer and state line for the rest of their lives.NVIDIA said absolutely we can do that. A few months later he told his partners at the fund he had never been more professionally excited, and he walked.Then December 4, 2024 happened. Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was killed in Manhattan. Eric got a call the next day from someone connected to government asking how the technology he had been describing could reach the average American rather than only wealthy ones. Forty-five minutes of riffing turned into a plane full of people flying to Los Angeles the following week to meet with a company that did not exist yet. Eric says he has never had the chills professionally the way he did that day.What exists now is Agentic Healthcare, and its flagship is Teleport Health. The strategy is the opposite of what every venture capitalist tells you, including the venture capitalist Eric used to be. No narrow wedge. No one disease, one workflow, one insurer. He decided the fragmentation of US healthcare is not going to be solved in his lifetime, so the play is to wrap it: thousands of specialized agents fine-tuned for clinical navigation, benefits optimization, bill assessment and negotiation, pharmacy savings, appeals, scheduling, all pointed at one member with what he calls unwavering loyalty to the individual.To make that real he bought the rails instead of building them. The Cures Gateway now pulls records from more than 20 state and regional health information exchanges, with coverage for more than 128 million people, so a patient can finally claim the lifetime record that has been legally theirs and practically unreachable. Wrapped around it is the privacy layer that came out of TripleBlind, the RSA award winner that Selfii had acquired before Agentic took the platform on.https://agentichealth.io/Eric Marton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmarton/Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/

Kostas Koukoravas came out of lockdown about ten kilos heavier, having taken up baking like half the planet. So he did what a former Microsoft product manager does. He started logging his food. MyFitnessPal first, which meant weighing everything and then typing it in, which meant quitting. Then the AI photo apps arrived and made logging fast, which was great until he found the research: photo estimation nails what the food is and badly misses how much of it there is. Qalzy cites error rates reaching 65%.Here is the part that turns a nuisance into a business. Those misses do not cancel out. Two hundred calories on breakfast, two hundred on lunch, two hundred at dinner, and by bedtime you have invisibly eaten an entire extra meal. That is the difference between losing weight and wondering why you are not.So Kostas and his co-founder Michael Michelis, a nutritionist who runs one of the biggest calorie-counting communities online, built a kitchen scale with an AI camera bolted to it. Put food on the glass, press one button, and it identifies the ingredient, weighs it to the gram, and logs the calories and macros against a database of 2.9 million verified foods. No phone. Which matters more than it sounds, because the moment you are actually cooking is the moment your hands are covered in raw chicken and your phone is the last thing you want to touch. Ryan, a serious home cook who has been tracking macros since the spreadsheet era, immediately gets it: with a scale, logging happens while you cook, not from a plated photo that has no idea how much butter went in the pan.The receipts are early but loud. Kostas says users with the scale stick with tracking roughly 60% longer than app-only users. Returns have been close to nonexistent since launch. And Ryan's own story is the perfect control group: 35 pounds down between September and April, then six flat months of what he cheerfully calls gaslighting himself about portions.Then the conversation turns into a full hardware masterclass, and this is the part every founder should sit still for. Two software guys who were used to pressing a button and shipping code spent a year on prototyping alone. Kostas's line of the episode: plastic is alive. Prototype resins behave nothing like production ABS, tolerances drift with humidity, and a high gloss finish means every stray thumb during assembly is a scratch you just paid for. Their factory team in China ground through iteration after iteration to get it right.They funded it the way more hardware founders should. Kickstarter, where a six-figure pre-order haul proved demand a VC would have asked them to prove first, covered the molds and the minimum order quantities, and doubled as a product research panel. The multi-user feature, now nine profiles per device, only exists because backers kept asking whether their spouse could use it. Glucose response tracking in the app exists because type 1 diabetics asked for it. Stretch goals became a feature vote.Qalzy: https://qalzy.comKostas Koukoravas on LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/kostas-koukoravas-46b201Ryan Estes on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/#1 AI Founder Newsletter!https://aiforfounders.coBuild your audience for life!https://inboxalchemy.co/Free Competitor Analysis from CEOfriend.ai!https://bit.ly/3SrjgL1If you're not AI native; you're not getting the job!https://ainativestudent.com/Get 35% off any supplement subscription with Momentous!https://crrnt.app/MOME/8RDrnXDdUse code RYAN30 to save $30 on your AI men's fashion stylist!https://taelor.style/Your podcast's autonomous AI sponsorship agent!https://gethowdi.com/