So, I was told that this could be between five and 55 minutes long, quite a range, and that I could yap and go on whatever side tangent I wanted, and it'll be fine. So, I'm just prepping you and giving you some explanation for why this is the way it is. Uh, so my name is Dax. I work on a project called Open Code. It is one of the most used coding agents out there. Uh, it's fully open source, works with any model. Um, every other company likes to say we have the smartest coding agent. Well, we've got the hottest coding agent. You go take a look at it. It's a great experience. Uh, awesome UX, totally themeable, personalizable, fun fun project to use.

Uh, that's all the shilling I'm going to do for now. Um, but let's get into the meat of this talk. So, what I want to talk about today is why AI is not going to make you a winner. Um, we're at an AI conference. There's a ton of AI content out there. It's all anyone's ever talking about these days. You got lots of people saying that this is the future. It changes everything. The way like software development is going to change. Software development is not going to exist. You've got all these crazy proclamations about how suddenly everything is different and if you hop on, you're going to be able to get the benefits.

Um, and some of that is, you know, there's some truth to that to some degree, but I want to focus on the stuff that hasn't changed, the stuff that AI is not going to help you with. Uh, the things that are critical to make a successful product that people use, these things haven't changed. They're not going to change anytime soon. And to be honest, AI has not really helped us with them.

So, I'm going to talk about things in terms of funnel. If you think about I'm making a product, I've got users that I want to start using my product. They start from knowing nothing about you to hearing about you to trying your product to liking it to then like fully converting. Uh if we think about that journey, there are critical moments. I'm going to identify three critical moments that you need to focus on.

And it's this has been true since for I mean my whole career. It hasn't changed. It's the things that I think about every single day that I struggle with. uh despite all the experience I have, it's still very very challenging and the AI stuff really hasn't done much for me. So, let's yeah, let's get started with the first one.

So, the absolute top of the funnel is marketing. And I'm going to say off the bat that what I'm about to say, you're going to feel a ton of resistance to. So, I'm going to preface that off the bat cuz I remember when I felt that way. Uh and it took a lot of effort in getting over like my own psychology uh to do this part. Well, um,

the idea behind marketing is simple. You have someone that's going about their day. They got their problems. They got their worries. They're focused on their life. They do not give a about you or what you're doing. You have to figure out how to get them to stop in their tracks, drop everything else that they have, and look at you and think about you and look into what you're offering them. This is a really, really high bar to clear. Um, and I think when I talk about it in this way, the reason people feel resistance is because most of us aren't good at this.

You know, it's a skill like anything else, you are not going to be amazing at it from day one. It's way outside your comfort zone. Unfortunately, a lot of people's reactions to that truth is that they feel like they shouldn't have to deal with this problem.

Uh, there's a lot of thoughts like, "Hey, if my product is good enough, it'll sell itself. Um, I don't need to do marketing. I don't need to do things that are gimmicky. You know, I'm above that. The truth is, there's people that make products that are better than anything you're ever going to do in your whole life. Like the absolute best products out there, they still have to think about this problem.

So, if they're not too good to think about, hey, how do I get people's attention? Neither are you. Neither am I. Like, we all just just got to do it. So, I might as well start to get good at it. Um, the way that I like to think about it is

you need to do things that have a shot at being shared. So, if you think about standard marketing, people will write a blog post about a new feature or they'll hire an influencer to like talk about the new feature or just kind of the things that pretty much anyone can do. Uh, you know, everyone just buys billboards these days for some reason. The thing with these efforts are they make sense, you know, you're like telling people about the thing you built, but there's basically zero chance that somebody sees that and they're like, "Oh yeah, I got to show my friends this blog post about this 76 feature, this product release, right? No one's getting excited about that. They're probably going to scroll right past."

I mean, you know what people are like these days. You're all on TikTok. I know your attention spans are just basically deteriorating into nothing. Uh, no one can focus on something that's boring. Um, so none of these things really count as top level marketing. They're not stopping someone who doesn't know about you to start thinking about you.

Uh, the key here is to come up with something that someone's going to see and they're going to think it's so crazy or so funny or so uh, deep or so, you know, it it strikes a chord where they're like, I got to show this to my friends, to my co-workers. uh can you believe that they did this? You know, you want to elicit that type of uh emotion from someone.

The as simple as that bar is, you know, it's very easy to tell whether something's going to clear that bar or not. It's extremely hard to come up with ideas that do clear that bar. Um so that's the challenge. You got to be creative. You got to come up with ideas that work. Uh and you're going to miss a lot. It's just like swinging at products. You're aiming for a hit. You're going to swing a lot and a lot of times you're going to miss. That's true of marketing as well. Don't bother taking shots that never have a chance of being a hit, right? That's just a waste of time.

Um, it's okay to try nine times on something embarrassing or crazy and doesn't work, but that one that hits, it's going to be seen by a million people and your target audience is going to be in that group or connected to that group. Uh, and if you repeat this over and over, that compounds, you get better at it. Top level marketing, amazing. The reason AI doesn't help here is it's all about creativity. I have not had a single good idea come out of AI. Even [snorts] when I use it as like a brainstorming partner, it like just gets super corny. Uh just it just can't come with anything that's cool. Like it you can't do cool. Uh and top level marketing is about is about cool. And that sounds like an innate thing, but it is a skill that that you can learn.

Okay. So now that you have someone that is interested in what you're doing, you got their attention. The next thing to figure out is how to get them to the aha moment. So, if you think about great products, there's a moment where you've had a certain interaction with the product where it clicked for you. You got what it was about. You were sold on it. Uh, and you're like, "This is awesome." And even if it wasn't for you, you might think, "This isn't for me, but this is cool enough that if I know someone that it is for, I'm going to recommend it to them." So, that is the aha moment.

You need to figure out what is the singular aha moment in your product and eliminate friction ruthlessly to get someone to that aha moment as fast as possible. So the challenges here are you might feel like oh there's a lot of good features in my app. You know I want them to know about features A B C. You you have to be brutal. You kind of have to like you know kill your children here. You have to pick the one that matters the most and deprioritize everything else and look at every single step that it's going to take for someone to get there and cut it.

When I use products, like when someone sends me like, oh, like I'm building this thing, let me try it. The feeling like I get this crazy amount of pain cuz I see all the steps that it takes before I even get to the point where I even understand what the heck they're doing. Uh, and I know that at each point they're losing 10% of their people, 20% of their people. And I know that the percentage of people making it to the end are so small before we can even talk about whether, hey, is the thing you're building that useful?

Uh, this is another thing that almost no companies get, right? Like, think about when you're signing up for something, they ask such stupid up front before you even know if you want the thing. They're like, "How big is your company? Like, how many employees do you have? What's your title?" like who cares about any of this? You got to cut all of that out to get people to the moment that that you care about. And if you're able to do this, that's how you build a product that, you know, really starts to take off, uh, really starts to grow itself.

All that work you did for the top level marketing, if only like 3% of people are getting to the aha moment, uh, you know, that that's a total waste. The the hard part, the other hard part is like maybe you don't even have an aha moment. Um, that makes you think a lot about, hey, what am I even building? What am I doing? Is is this is this worth the effort and pain of trying to build something. Uh, and I think it's worth

looking at some of the most successful products of all time. Uh, some of them have some like crazy crazy aha moments, right? You think about chat GPT, which is the most successful product, I would say, consumer product ever that has existed in in our lifetime. uh they give you an input box where you can type anything and you're going to get like a humanlike interaction as a response. Like literally anything in the world you can type. That's like an insane aha moment, right? The moment you see that, like the dumbest person in the world can use that, they can be like, "Yeah, this is awesome. I get it." Uh it's very very very compelling.

Uh on the social media side, right? You have something like Facebook. uh you have a crush and you can like send a poke to your crush where you're like kind of flirting but it's deniable. Instant aha moment like you are sold on this product. You're going to keep using it. Um so those are like very extreme examples but every product should have a singular moment where you're like this is the reason I exist. This is the reason why we're doing all of this. Uh people that experience it should get it.

Um, again, the reason why AI doesn't help with any of this is, again, it goes back to creativity and really understanding this space. Uh, spend a lot of time thinking about it, [clears throat] like gaining clarity, like thinking about positioning, uh, thinking about what you're doing unique that nobody else is doing. All very, very hard. You know, just cuz we have AI that we can talk to, it's not suddenly going to turn you into a winner at making like, you know, amazing aha moments. the people that are good at that very very few people in the world are going to keep doing that and keep crushing the rest of us. Uh so again another thing that we have no choice but to try to get good at.

So the last part of this funnel is the retention side. So let's say you've gotten the attention of someone. You managed to get them to the aha moment. They like what you're doing. They're now like using your product. How do you retain them for life? Like how do you get a customer forever? Uh if you aren't getting customers forever, you're just leaking people through and you're going to hit a ceiling on your business and it's not going to be fun. Like it's it's annoying when you grow on one side but you're leaking on the other side. You really want to get people for life. So that number of customers you're serving is compounding over time.

Um retention is interesting because you have to think about it kind of differently than the last two phases because it's all about power users, right? It's all about someone that's using your product for a while that's pushing the limits of what they can do with it. They want things to be more configurable. Uh they want more advanced features. You have uh teams using it. You have larger enterprises using it. They have very specific needs. How do you build things that support all of that without sacrificing all the stuff we did in the first two phases of keeping things simple, having a very streamlined initial first experience? Uh it's hard to juggle both of these both of these things.

uh we've kind of been forced to think about this because we have been doing open source work uh for me personally it's been like five or six years now. Um open source products are interesting because they are used by both like a random indiv individual hobbyists that just want something that they can use uh that's simple and free and whatever. Uh but also open source projects are some of the best choices for like mega enterprise companies, right? These giant companies uh typically want to run everything themselves. They want to host everything themselves. They're very sensitive about uh data going anywhere else. Uh so open source projects have this requirement of supporting both like the really simple case and both the really advanced case.

Uh the way we go about this is there's kind of this there's like this I would say misconception that products can either be simple or they can be capable and they'll say like oh we're like Apple we're building a simple experience but what they're usually doing is just building an incapable experience and they're saying that oh we're like Apple cuz it's the simple experience. There's actually no trade-off between these two things. You can build both a simple and capable experience.

Uh the way to do this, it's just it's just more work up front, right? You think about a feature you want to build that uh makes a lot of sense for users. Instead of building the feature, you kind of have to build primitives that can be assembled into that feature. So you think about the primitive layers first, make them uh pretty wide scoping, u make them really advanced, really powerful. Then you take those primitives and assemble your simple experience that 99% of people experience.

Uh the what the nice thing about doing it in this order is when they get more complex, you can give them more direct access to these underlying primitives. They can get more advanced. They can flex and bend your product and hopefully they never need to outgrow it, right? Because the key here is you don't want to build a product that people outgrow. uh because you're effectively serving as a funnel for someone else's product, whatever they whatever they outgrow into.

Uh so I really like building things where think about like everything we ever want to do and build a set of primitives that can eventually do those things and assemble our product using those primitives. Uh this is another area where AI does not really help me because it's like so hard, right? the building and trying to build these set of primitives is how you even figure out what primitives to need primitives you need and what you're trying to do.

uh that exploration process like sure you can like again chat with AI brainstorm but this isn't the type of thing that like you to even like communicate to AI what you want to do you have to understand it really well yourself and that's a task a task is to understand what you're trying to do really really well uh so this is a again a very critical part of making a successful product um

AI is not going to suddenly make you amazing at it just it you just can't it takes a lot of work, time, energy, uh, until your brain can wrap its head around the space you're working to design the right set of primitives that can kind of scale to to all these situations.

All right, so the last thing I'll leave you all with is if you go and try out Open Code, uh, and you go through the full process that I just talked about, you're going to find a lot to criticize. You're going to be like, he's not following his own advice here, here, and here. And the reason that's happening is even though I can understand all this stuff and to the degree where I can talk about it and articulate it, it's just hard. It's very hard to follow this advice. It's simple to understand, I think. But executing it well daytoday, there's no getting around the fact that it's enormously difficult and it takes so much out of a person, a team to line everything up to get it all working perfectly right.

Uh AI is amazing and lets us do all kinds of things that we couldn't do before. Does not save us from that day-to-day pain uh in trying to make something that's great. So yeah, I wanted to do a talk that was about AI, but kind of I'm tired of people feeling like suddenly the tables are going to turn and things are going to be easier. They're not easier. My life is just as hard as it's ever been. It's just as hard as it's ever been to do something amazing. But it's also where all the fun comes from, where all the purpose comes from. And people are worried about like, oh, people are going to like not have any purpose with with AI. Uh, no, that's not going to be a problem because, you know, things are just as hard as as they ever were. So, I hope that inspires you, scares you, I don't know, makes you sad, makes you happy. I don't know how you're going to feel about this, but that's all I have. Thanks for thanks for listening.