How We Incubate and Launch New Products With AI - Ep. 40 with Danny Aziz, Brandon Gell

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Nov 27, 2024

Guest

Brandon Gell

Guest

Danny Aziz

Danny Aziz, GM of Spiral and former high-salary exec, and Brandon Gell, Head of Studio at Every, dive into their innovative AI product journey. They share how a small team launched two AI products while proving skeptics wrong about startup growth. The discussion highlights Spiral's unique capability to adapt to user writing styles and the blend of creativity and technology in entrepreneurship. Personal anecdotes about challenges faced and lessons learned provide an entertaining glimpse into building a successful media company with AI at its core.

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ANECDOTE

Spiral v2 Launch

Danny Aziz joined Every and launched Spiral v2, an AI writing tool.
It automates repetitive writing, learns your style, and creates various content formats.

ANECDOTE

Joining Every

Danny Aziz left a $200,000 salary to join Every, drawn by its unique model and content.
He felt a tension between customer needs and investor expectations at previous startups.

INSIGHT

Balancing Act

Every's model prioritizes individual freedom and creative exploration.
It balances this with the challenges of running multiple interconnected businesses.

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Over the last few months at Every, we’ve:

Launched two AI products
Acquired tens of thousands of users
Released a new incubation in private alpha

The weird thing is: We’re a media company with < 10 full-time employees, and we’re mostly bootstrapped.

That’s not how things are supposed to work in startups.

When we started our product incubation arm six months ago, many people told us it wouldn’t work: divided focus, not enough money, and the biggest one—it would be too hard to find talented people to run the products we build.

Yesterday, we proved out one of the biggest risks to our strategy: We launched a brand-new version of our AI product Spiral (https://spiral.computer) with Danny Aziz as GM—who left a $200K salary to join us.

The question is: Why? Why did he join us, and why is the model working when it “shouldn’t” be?

That’s why I invited Danny and Brandon Gell, Every’s head of Studio, on the show. We get into the details of Every’s business model, what makes our flywheel turn, where each of us sees ourselves one year from now, and what happens when you mix media, software, and AI under one roof.

This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to build a business on their own terms, and have a lot of fun while doing it.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

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Timestamps:

Introduction: 00:01:08
All about Spiral, the tool we recently launched: 00:02:15
Why Danny left a $200,000 salary to work at a bootstrapped media company: 00:04:06
How we do a lot of things well at Every: 00:10:33
What makes Every’s flywheel turn: 00:14:44
The kind of people who fit right in at Every: 00:17:11
How Every is differentiated from a standard VC-backed startup: 00:23:25
How Danny found his way into the world of startups: 00:36:11
The tech industry’s affinity for potential over experience: 00:46:43
Where each of us sees ourselves in the next one year: 00:52:38

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Danny Aziz: @DannyAziz97
Brandon Gell: @bran_don_gell
Try Spiral here: https://spiral.computer/
More about Every’s product incubation arm: https://every.to/p/introducing-every-studio