AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

College didn’t get expensive. It got unnecessary for anyone who wants to make real money in the next 10 years.Because the future isn’t “learn more.” It’s learn fast, get licensed, get paid.America has about 700,000 registered apprentices. That’s roughly 0.4% of the workforce. Basically… nobody.Meanwhile we’ve got over a million electrician jobs open, licensed workers retiring, and data centers sucking power like a black hole.So the government did what it always does.It didn’t “incentivize” apprenticeships. It basically said:“If you want the juicy tax credits on big renewable energy projects… you need apprentices on the job.”Andy Seth saw the mess up close. The tools were trash. The bureaucracy was thicker than a Denver winter.So during COVID, he taught himself to build software, apprenticed under a real dev, and built apprentix.io.Then he did the scary founder move. He niched down hard.And it worked.He hit $1M ARR with zero W2 employees. SaaS margins. Seven-day sales cycles.Not because he “hustled harder.”Because he found the hidden lever: businesses don’t buy training. They buy revenue and compliance that doesn’t ruin their life.Founder idea: stop building better education.Build less paperwork.Every regulated industry has a compliance bottleneck begging to be turned into a software ATM.If your product disappeared tomorrow, would your customers miss the value… or would they miss the relief?If you’re a founder obsessed with leverage, niche strategy, and finding markets where demand is literally written into law, you’re going to want the full breakdown.If you like founder stories with receipts and real numbers, get on the newsletter at aiforfounders.co.It’s the closest thing to business school that won’t charge you rent. aiforfounders.co.Your next unfair advantage might be one email away. Go subscribe: aiforfounders.co.If this made you think, leave a review like you’re rating a rollercoaster you survived… and include one word: again.Founders, quick reality check: being great at what you do isn’t the bottleneck.Being known is the bottleneck.And the fastest way to become known, trusted, and repeatedly referenced is still the same: go on podcasts.Kitcaster helps founders get booked on shows your customers already listen to.Not random podcasts. Not your aunt’s mindfulness hour.The shows where buyers hang out, where deals start as conversations, and where credibility compounds.Podcasts do what ads can’t.They make you sound like the person who’s already won.You get 30 minutes to explain your thinking, tell the real story, and build trust at human speed.And if you’re thinking, “I don’t have time to pitch shows,” perfect.Kitcaster handles the targeting, outreach, booking, and coordination so you just show up and perform.If you want inbound leads that don’t feel like pulling teeth, go to kitcaster.com and get booked.https://apprentix.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyseth/https://aiforfounders.co/ ⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Business owners, I already know you hate taxes.Not the “ugh, paperwork” kind of hate. I mean the kind of hate where you’d rather get dental work at a gas station than explain your P&L.And here’s the part that should scare you a little: taxes aren’t just expensive. They’re sneaky. Most founders don’t overpay on purpose.They overpay because they’re too busy.And even worse, half of you are sitting there thinking, “I hope my tax person is doing it right.” Hope is not a strategy when the IRS is involved. Believe me, I know. I’ve been audited twice.So listen, there’s finally a tool that makes this easy. It’s called deduction.com.And yes, I’m shilling for it because it’s awesome. The founder, Sai, is a buddy of mine. He’s a Denver guy. Well, he’s British, but he’s here now, so we’re claiming him.For $500, Deduction.com’s agent will complete and file your return, and there’s a human reviewing it and signing it. And right now, Sai is onboarding every single customer himself.You can say you knew him when.At that price, and I’m being dead serious, I’d have them run it just to double-check your tax preparer. Because if you catch one mistake, one missed deduction, one “oops”… it pays for itself instantly.Here’s the real question though: if taxes are the biggest bill you pay every year, why are you treating them like an afterthought?So go check out deduction.com and stop donating extra money to the government like it’s a charity.It ain’t.And tell Sai I said what’s up.https://deduction.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/saayuj/https://aiforfounders.co/ ⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Hot take: Healthcare doesn’t have a diagnosis problem. It has a time problem. And that time problem is quietly ruining lives.Most patients get 13 minutes with a doctor. That’s barely enough time to describe symptoms, let alone find the real cause. So you get pills, not answers. Not because doctors don’t care, but because the system doesn’t allow them to.Haresh Patel learned this the hard way. He spent 12 years building a company, burned about $30 million, and still only won after years of pivots. His takeaway is painful and useful: building the tech is the easy part. The hard part is knowing who you serve, how you make money, and why your product should exist.So this time he did something most founders won’t. He stopped building and spent two years just listening to doctors, patients, and anyone living in the gaps of modern medicine.Founder use case: steal this method. Before you build your MVP, build your “13-minute advantage.” Create a system that turns messy records, wearable data, and life context into a clean story a human expert can use fast. AI isn’t here to replace doctors. It’s here to give them their brain back.Deep question: What problem in your life or business keeps “coming back” because you’re treating symptoms instead of digging for the pearl under the mattress?If you want the full breakdown on building in healthcare, validating before coding, and why rookie thinking beats resume thinking, this is for founders, operators, and anyone obsessed with solving real problems.Three quick things: Go to aiforfounders.co and subscribe so your brain stays ahead of your calendar. Steal one idea per week and pretend it was your own, I won’t tell. If you’re building something big, you’re going to need a bigger mind, start there.And if you like the show, leave a review. Write: “I came for the strategy, stayed for the uncomfortable truth.”https://www.linkedin.com/in/hareshpatel/https://hareshpatel.ai/https://aiforfounders.co/⁠⁠https://codestory.cohttps://warmstart.ai ⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

You know that moment when your “vibe coded MVP” finally gets users… and then it starts breaking in ways you can’t even explain?That’s where Mike Vitez shows up.Mike’s a computer scientist who was doing machine learning and building his own big data and clustering algorithms before AI was cool. Then he launched a software company straight out of school, watched the industry evolve from “just ship code” to “ship business outcomes” and built Saturnia Design for founders who realize: building is easy now. Building the right thing is the hard part.Here’s the conflict Mike calls out.Founders protect their idea like it’s a newborn. They build in isolation. They avoid customers because it hurts to hear the truth.And then they burn months, sometimes years, on the wrong problem.Mike’s fix is brutally simple.Stop guessing.Run real user interviews.Turn the chaos into an audit with an action list.Fix the bottlenecks that block revenue first.A novel founder use case.If your product spec is literally one sentence like “We need a launchpad,” Mike’s team will workshop it into market clarity, user personas, and a testable thesis before you waste a penny building from scratch.Deep question for founders:Are you building what feels impressive… or what your customer would actually pay for even if it bruises your ego?Stick around and you’ll learn how smart founders validate fast, why UX is a revenue lever, and when you should not build at all. This is for builders with traction who need the bridge from scrappy MVP to real product.Sign up for the newsletter at aiforfounders.co if you want founder stories that punch you in the brain.Sign up at aiforfounders.co if you want the playbook behind the wins, not the highlight reel.And yeah, aiforfounders.co if you’re done guessing and ready to ship with receipts.And if the show has helped you even once, leave a review like you’re tipping your future self.https://saturniadesign.comhttps://medium.com/@saturniadesignhttps://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

In this engaging discussion, Kai Stone, founder of Stone Systems, shares his journey from working in his mom's Airbnb to creating a $297/month SaaS for contractors. He emphasizes the importance of building tech suited for a mobile-first lifestyle and the strategy of selling baseline software to establish trust before upselling services. Kai reveals his scrappy customer acquisition tactics, lessons from failures, and unique insights into unit economics. Discover his approach to customer retention and how to adapt to non-tech markets!

You raised a seed round. You sold the dream to investors. You sold the dream to your team.And now comes the part nobody budgets for… the dream might be wrong.Ali from Wednesday has seen this movie a thousand times. Founders obsess over signups, views, downloads… and then wonder why revenue is allergic to them.His move is brutal and simple: Sprint Zero.Audit the “pirate metrics” that actually matter: retention, referral, revenue.Then force a 30–45 day roadmap tied to real outcomes.Not vibes. Not vanity. Data. Customer pull.Here’s the cheat code: record your customer calls, send them to Ali’s team, and they’ll help you separate insights from noise.Because customers will say “yes”… while silently meaning “no.”He even gives retention guardrails:B2C: Day 1 = 50%, Day 7 = 25%, Day 30 = 10–15%.B2B: 20–30% retention over the first 30 days.If you miss that, you don’t need more features.You need a new direction.So here’s the founder gut-check:Are you building what makes you feel smart… or what makes customers come back when nobody’s watching?You’ll learn how to move from MVP to real PMF, how to cut your failure odds, and how to build around demand.This is for seed to Series A founders who want momentum that actually sticks.If you like founders’ playbooks without the motivational poster energy, go to aiforfounders.co.Join the newsletter and I’ll send you tactics you can steal before your next sprint planning meeting ruins your weekend.Sign up at aiforfounders.co and let’s turn your “big vision” into “customers who don’t leave.”Leave a review for the podcast like you’re tipping a bartender for a dangerously good drink.⁠https://wednesday.is⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alihafizji/⁠https://aiforfounders.co/ ⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Most startups don’t break because they lack talent.They break because the product quietly splits into parallel universes.One team ships a feature.Another ships the same feature… differently.Both are “right.”Everyone’s moving fast.No one’s moving together.Chris Strahl saw this up close and decided chaos was not a growth strategy.Before co-founding Knapsack, he watched high-performing teams drown in edge cases, forks, and silent product drift.Same company.Same roadmap.Multiple realities.The fix wasn’t more syncs.It was fewer interpretations.Knapsack became infrastructure.A single system where product, design, and engineering agree before shipping.Enterprise adoption.Thousands of users per account.Multi-x growth without burning people out.And here’s the founder lesson hiding underneath.Scaling isn’t about better judgment.It’s about building systems so judgment isn’t constantly required.So sit with this:What part of your business only works because you’re still manually resolving contradictions every day?Stick around and you’ll learn how real teams scale without fragmentation, why systems beat heroics, and how founders stop being the merge conflict.This is for founders, operators, product leaders, and anyone building past the early chaos stage.ist the URLS_https://designsystemspodcast.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisstrahlhttps://knapsack.cloudhttps://wikimediafoundation.orghttps://protectourwinters.orghttps://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.coa⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

What if the biggest AI risk in your company isn’t hallucinations… it’s that you’re quietly turning your team into button clickers.Because right now, everyone’s “doing AI,” but most companies are just buying the same tools as their competitors and calling it strategy.Geoff Gibbins from Human Machines is obsessed with the real advantage. Not better prompts. Better collaboration between humans and AI.And here’s a novel founder use case you can steal today: an AI “collaboration coach” that watches how your team uses ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, then flags when you’re outsourcing judgment, missing the real question, or wasting time switching tools.So here’s the question for you:If you could test 300 ideas before lunch, see which ones actually work in the market, and only apply human judgment at the moments that truly matter… how would you redesign your week, your team, or your entire company?https://human-machines.comhttps://aiforfounders.cohttps://kitcaster.comhttps://corrix.aihttps://www.stjude.orghttps://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffgibbins/https://ryanestes.info/

It’s late December energy. The year’s basically over. The cookies are gone, the group chats are quiet, and this is the one moment where you’re allowed to stop shipping long enough to look back.Because 2025 was insane for AI. Every week felt like a new launch, a new model, a new panic, a new promise that this one would change everything. Faster code. Cheaper labor. Smarter agents. Louder fear. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a lot of founders quietly fell behind without realizing it.That’s why this moment matters. Not to chase headlines, but to understand what actually shifted.Ran Aroussi has been building software for 30 years, and what he’s seeing isn’t hype. It’s pressure. In 2025, delivery timelines got cut in half. Clients didn’t ask for less. They asked for more, faster. AI didn’t end projects early. It turned the same teams into factories. MVPs shipped sooner, and instead of stopping, they kept going. More features. Better architecture. Automated workflows. Less “we’ll clean this up later.”Here’s the part founders miss. The advantage isn’t the model. It’s the system around it. If your onboarding breaks at scale, if your backend can’t handle growth, if your workflows still assume humans for everything repetitive, AI just exposes the weakness faster. That’s where teams like Automaze step in, acting like a technical co-founder, rebuilding foundations while AI quietly takes over the expensive, soul-crushing work you assumed required more headcount.And looking ahead to 2026, the big question isn’t capability. It’s trust. Agents can already do more than we’re comfortable admitting. The real winners will be the founders who learn how to delegate to AI without surrendering judgment. Copilots turn into coworkers. Systems get quieter. Interfaces disappear. Output goes up. And the margin between leaders and laggards gets brutal.So here’s the question worth sitting with. If your company doubled its output overnight, would it give you freedom, or would it just raise expectations and tighten the leash?__https://automaze.io/https://aiforfounders.co/https://mxi.org/https://x.com/aroussi__https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

If you have an app idea and it is still living in Notes, you are not “early.” You are stuck.Because the new founder trap is not lack of code. It is fake momentum.Vibe coding gets you a pretty prototype fast, then the last 30% hits like a brick wall. Architecture, requirements, integrations, security, the stuff that makes you want to delete the repo and move to a cabin.Ehsan Mirdamadi built Codalio to be the “between a CTO and a tech lead” layer.You prompt in plain English, Codalio interviews you back, pulls the idea out of your head, and turns it into real requirements and technical scope.Then it generates a full app, front end and back end, around 80% to 90% of the build.The use case founders are sleeping on. Use it to build a real internal tool in a weekend. Think ops dashboard, customer intake workflow, distribution center digitization, or a data ingestion pipeline from drones or robots.Not a demo. A viable product that can actually scale.This is for founders who want speed without building a fragile spaghetti monster.You will learn how to avoid the 70% wall, how to scope like a real CTO, and how to ship something that does not collapse the moment users show up.Are you delaying your product because the idea needs more time, or because you are afraid of finding out it is real?https://codalio.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/ehsan-mirdamadi/__https://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠