Ahoy my friends!

Welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy.

For new readers - welcome!

And if you have hung around for a long time - I appreciate you giving me your attention (or at least skimming) for a while now, thank you!

I’m going to do something a bit different this week and look at three apps I tested earlier on in this newsletter’s history, and check-in on where they are now:

• Summit AI coach
• Tome presentation building
• Audiopen voice note recording

I want to get jiving and give you the good stuff, so let’s make like a B-boy and break on with it 🧢⏎

-Marshy

Where are they now?

The beauty of writing this newsletter for a long time is that startups I’ve featured are no longer in existence.

Beauty is probably the wrong word.

Startups are tough.

Building an AI startup is even tougher.

Not because it’s harder to make things (spoiler alert: it’s actually easier).

But because:

• Capturing hearts and minds is harder than ever - people are more distracted, pitched to more, and have shrinking attention spans
• Building a product that people LOVE is harder than ever - the bar for good design, user experience, and what constitutes useful continues to raise; and perhaps most importantly
• There’s an ever-present risk that your company will be deleted overnight when a much bigger and more capital rich company ships a feature that does the same thing but better

Summit AI coach

Status: Dead 💀

I signed up for this on the 26th May 2023.

Like a lot of things (oh, Marshy) I was in early:

It’s comical that I was impressed that the coach could speak back to me as a pirate.

I remember it at the time being really amusing to me.

This was just 2.5 years ago (my twin boys were born a month earlier).

Do you know how UNIMPRESSIVE a feature like that is to me now?

That’s less than 1,000 days.

We know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but these kinds of insane timelines are what founders are up against.

I met Alex and onboarded, and initially was blown away by the insights I was getting, and giving detailed feedback:

A month or so passes, and the founder checks in with me again:

Then a new feature “voice mode” comes 6 months later and I review it:

I let things slip after that.

Those functions are now more than available through other prompts and software, and out of curiosity I scanned the web for reactions…

on reddit - /u/dreambeaver333​

and some ambulance chasing from Kin (originally featured in edition #30)

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Looking over what the team did (early customer discovery, lots of curiosity, building a passionate fan base) there’s nothing rampantly WRONG with how they went about building their startup.

The reality right now is that it’s really hard to build something that follows all of the above AND survives against the rate of development with bigger LLMs.

Tome

Status: Dead ☠️

For some reason - most people HATE building slides.

My friend Kris has built a whole business around building custom presentations.

Canva exists because people don’t want to learn the craft.

And Tome was an early entrant into the AI “build-for-you” game.

But couldn’t make money.

​Haris does a great write-up on them:

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This is a funny one.

There ARE people making money in this space.

Kris’s business above.

​Gamma seems to be slaying.

Our ToothfairyAI team built a custom agent that does this at scale and it integrates with Microsoft’s stack (and is $$$ to boot).

Similar to Summit - it did seem to acquire a bunch of “passionate” users - but that’s not the same thing as revenue.

In the world of hyper-growth startups, you do need to balance the raising with the gaining - and the more you raise the harder it is to gain.

Audiopen

Status: Still firing 🔥

This app has the rare honour of being one of the only AI apps (of the dozens and dozens I’ve tested) that I kept going with as a paid user.

I’ve since stopped, but it’s good to see a loyal base of users seemingly still going.

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So why did I stop using it?

I ported over to Superwhisper.

It’s very slick at capturing braindumps as I go, but with cleaner transferrence.

For example - after a sales meeting I just record everything that’s in my brain in post-call and save it to a #meeting-notes channel on my Slack.

I can also do the same with Mac and it’s very clean.

There’s nothing wrong with Audiopen, and I’m sure there’s plenty of room for both.

–

Bonus take: The long game

I’ve worked with 100s of early-stage startups.

Consulting on projects, coaching through accelerator programs, and delivering keynotes and workshops.

It’s never been easier to prototype something and that’s a good thing.

I also think the bar for creating a quality and lasting product that people love is higher than ever.

Companies are getting swallowed up, enshittification continues, and in a new legal filing - Google admits that the open web is dying.

Tech is going through a weird period and the talk of AI bubbles is valid.

Yet - there’s still no substitute for quality thinking and work.

Leaning into the new capabilities AND overlaying your experience and expertise is going to reap rewards.

There are founders like Elena and Justin at Deeligence that have technical subject matter knowledge AND make it faster for law firms to do their due diligence.

There’s another named Daryl that combines the ancient indigenous knowledge around storms, sounds, and cultivation and combines that with AI to actively increase the yield of seeded crops.

I talk to a broad range of people about AI and mostly keep my mouth shut when I hear dissent.

There’s extreme validity to what detractors are saying and I am in full agreement with a lot of it (and likely can point to more evidence against it than your layman).

The thing that keeps me enthused and why I keep pushing into this space is because it’s not binary.

Look at this Google Trends chart from the last 12 months:

It looks like agent hype is dying no?

Look at it over 5 years…

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But even this is missing the forest for the trees.

AI has been around a long time (don’t worry, hardcore nerds will tell you).

But here’s that same chart since things like this have been recorded on Google Trends:

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It’s coming for everything and you’re better off learning to work with it instead of blanket “this is bad” or “this is great" statements.

Until next time!

-Marshy

p.s. I had to shorten the newsletter this week as it kept getting bigger and bigger. A quick update on the webinars - I’m flipping them to once a month to increase the time I have to promote each one and make it better - stay tuned.

p.p.s. Got an AI challenge? Share something you’re pondering and I’ll unblock it for you as a thank you for reading to the end :)