AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

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

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.Founders, you’re not stuck because your idea is bad. You’re stuck because your AI won’t do the last 10%… and you’re about to rage quit in slow motion.You know the moment.You’ve prompted it 47 different ways.Perplexity, ChatGPT, YouTube tutorials.Your energy leaves your body.The project dies right there on your laptop like a Victorian child.Danny Newman is building a simple fix: OnDemandHuman.com.It’s a “tap a button, get a real expert” marketplace for when vibe coding hits the wall.You’re mid-build, you request help, and you get matched in real time on Zoom with someone who actually knows the exact tool you’re using.Pay per minute. Stay in flow. Ship the thing.And here’s the founder use case that’s sneaky powerful:Use it like instant office hours for your entire startup.Not just code. Figma. Automations. Prompt systems. Sales ops.Any moment where a 15 minute nudge saves a week of stall.What would your business look like if you never lost flow… and you stopped waiting for permission to build?https://ondemandhuman.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielvincentnewman/__https://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.Every founder I know is sprinting to keep up with AI.New tools. New models. New expectations.But here’s the uncomfortable truth:AI is making technical skill cheaper by the day — and exposing something most leaders never developed.Their human edge.Today’s guest, Uma, spent 20 years inside Microsoft, climbed the ladder, played the game, and then hit a breaking point that forced a hard question:If everyone has access to the same technology, what actually makes a leader indispensable?In this conversation, we unpack how influence, visibility, communication, and emotional intelligence are becoming the real leverage points in an AI-driven world.You’ll learn:Why AI is amplifying weak leadership instead of fixing itThe “human advantage” that separates replaceable operators from irreplaceable leadersHow founders can stay relevant, trusted, and influential as automation acceleratesThis episode is for founders, operators, and execs who don’t just want to survive the AI wave — but lead it.Let’s get into it.https://thelimitlessleaders.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/uma-subramanian-limitless/__https://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

Welcome to AI for Founders, I'm Ryan Estes.Every non-technical founder hits the same wall.You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the market. You’ve even got early traction.But then comes the question that kills momentum:“Who’s going to build this?”Technical cofounder? Impossible to find.Dev agency? Expensive and slow.No-code tools? Great… until you need something real.Today’s guests are here to blow that bottleneck up.Ben and Brad are the co-founders of Woz, an AI platform designed to act like your technical cofounder — turning raw ideas into production-ready, scalable software, not demos, not toys.They met as roommates at MIT, raised $6 million, and are building what could become the operating system for non-technical founders who want to ship real products fast.In this episode, we break down:What AI can actually replace in software developmentWhere humans still matter more than everAnd how founders without engineering backgrounds can finally compete at scaleIf you’re a founder, operator, or investor wondering what building software looks like in the AI era — this one’s for you.https://withwoz.comhttps://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Mpk-woz-your-ai-technical-cofounderhttps://www.cervinventures.com/news/building-the-next-generation-of-software-why-we-invested-in-woz__https://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠

What happens when you build an AI that can spot disease years before symptoms, cut diabetes related complications by 20 percent, and slash healthcare costs, and the market still shrugs. That is the problem my guest today ran straight into.On this episode of AI for Founders, I am talking with Mariano García Valiño, four-time healthcare entrepreneur and CEO of Axenya. Axenya is an AI-powered operating system for corporate health that monitors over one hundred thousand people, runs around ninety-five million clinical inferences a month, and can intelligently route people to care across more than forty conditions, all while pushing costs from two and a half times inflation down toward inflation.If you are a founder building in AI, health tech, or any regulated, incentive-broken industry, this episode is for you. You are going to learn how Mariano redesigned his entire business model so someone actually had a financial reason to pay for prevention, how he thinks about AI as a copilot for doctors instead of a replacement, and how he keeps his sanity and creativity through writing, photography, sports, and reading while running his fourth company.If you want conversations like this distilled into founder ready experiments every week, head to aiforfounders.co and subscribe to the newsletter. https://axenya.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mgarciavalino/__https://aiforfounders.co/ https://ambient.us⁠⁠https://codestory.co⁠https://warmstart.ai ⁠⁠https://kitcaster.com/application ⁠⁠https://ryanestes.info⁠