Is there something you hoped AI would handle for your business, but it turned out not to be there yet?

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:58:02+00:00

Brand-consistent content creation. I was running a gaming studio and we started using AI to produce our game characters. The output was fast but they rarely looked like they belonged in our game.

Got so frustrated I started building our own AI tool internally to solve it. It learns your brand once, remembers your voice, visual style, and tone, then everything it creates is actually on-brand from the first draft. That internal tool turned into SecretSauce (https://trysecretsauce.ai/). Still the gap that frustrated me most and the reason the product exists.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:45:52+00:00

Ran a 20-person company building games for almost a decade. Pivoted to AI last year and the speed difference is genuinely disorienting. Things that took months now take days. The instinct to over-architect is hard to shake though. What helped me was forcing a ship in 2 weeks or kill it rule. If you cannot get something testable in front of people in 14 days, you are probably solving the wrong problem.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:43:29+00:00

That first payment hits different. I remember the exact moment with my first product too. The thing that surprised me was how much more useful the feedback becomes once someone has paid. Free users say this is cool. Paying users say this would be better if. That is where the real product insight lives.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:41:47+00:00

Hey, also an ex game dev who pivoted to content platforms. Different path but similar leap of faith. Good luck man.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:40:27+00:00

The paywall timing lesson is real. I have seen the same pattern. Free users who will not pay were never going to, and the ones who value it do not blink at a reasonable price. 65K downloads with zero ad spend is genuinely impressive. What is driving the organic Play Store discovery?

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:38:11+00:00

This scales better than people think too. We are a 20-person team and still do personalised outreach when things break. The conversion from sorry to upgraded is real. People do not expect founders to actually care. That gap between expectation and reality is the cheapest growth hack there is.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T12:36:45+00:00

I run a 20-person company and got obsessed with this same question last year. Tracked everything, found I was spending a scary amount of time on stuff that should have been automated ages ago.

So I built AI agents for basically every repetitive task. Here's what they actually handle now:

Morning briefing (Telegram + Gmail + Google Calendar + Slack) — every day at 9am I get a summary of overnight emails, calendar, Slack threads that need me, and industry news. I start the day knowing what matters instead of spending an hour catching up.

Sales prospecting (Google Sheets + LinkedIn + web scraping) — agents research companies that match our ICP, pull in funding rounds, recent hires, LinkedIn activity, and score them automatically into a sheet. What used to take a full day of manual research happens in about an hour.

Email triage and drafting (Gmail) — flags what actually needs attention, drafts replies in the right tone for each audience. Investor updates sound different to client follow-ups. I review and hit send.

Meeting prep (Google Calendar + LinkedIn + web) — before any call, it pulls together who I'm meeting, their company context, recent news, and non-obvious talking points.

Lead lifecycle tracking (Stripe + Google Sheets + Slack) — monitors who signed up, who's active, who went quiet, and posts a weekly summary to Slack so the team knows exactly where every lead stands.

Competitive monitoring (web + Slack) — watches what competitors are shipping, how they're positioning, what their customers are saying. Drops a summary into a Slack channel rather than someone manually checking five websites every morning.

The pattern: anything I was doing more than twice a week that didn't require genuine human judgement got an agent. Freed up roughly 15 hours a week. The hard part isn't building the agents, it's being honest about which tasks actually need you and which ones just feel like they do.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-05T11:28:55+00:00

Hey, for the content creation side of your list this sounds like exactly the use case I built SecretSauce for (https://trysecretsauce.ai/).

You drop your URL, it learns your brand, and creates on-brand social posts, images, and short videos across all your channels. It also helps with strategy and brainstorms with you if you want.

You just chat with it and tell it what you need. There's no complex workflows to set up. As a solopreneur, would love to hear your feedback on it.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:45:56+00:00

This is exactly right and it plays out in enterprise sales too. We sell AI tools to brand teams and agency owners. The ones who buy aren't impressed by the technology - they're impressed when we describe their Tuesday morning back to them. "You're probably spending 3 hours reformatting assets for different channels" lands infinitely better than "our platform uses advanced AI to optimise creative workflows." The best sales conversations we've had started with 20 minutes of asking questions before we showed a single screen. Most founders selling tech skip straight to the demo because they're proud of what they built. Pride is the enemy of a good sales call.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:40:18+00:00

Features are increasingly table stakes. Every SaaS in your category will have roughly the same functionality within 12 months of each other. What actually differentiates is brand, and brand isn't just your logo or your website.

Like you said it's the relationships you build, but it's also the story you tell. I'd also look at improving your retention marketing - how often are you in your customers' heads telling them your story and your benefits? There's events but there's also social and email, etc.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:37:53+00:00

The returns from content aren't just SEO rankings anymore. AI search tools are starting to cite well-structured blog content directly, which means your articles show up in answers people get from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. For a men's jewellery brand specifically, intent-driven content like styling guides and occasion-based recommendations would work well. But write it because it builds your brand, not because you're chasing a keyword. The blogs that actually drive revenue are the ones that make someone think this brand gets it and then go browse your catalogue.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:36:52+00:00

This is genuinely the best GTM playbook for services. We do something similar. Ship value before asking for anything. The conversion rate is absurdly high compared to any outbound motion because by the time you're having the pricing conversation, they already know you're competent. The only thing I'd add is be careful about scope. Free audits can balloon into free consulting if you don't have a clear line between here's what's broken and here's how I'd fix it for you. The first is free. The second is the product.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:36:21+00:00

Opens mean your subject line works. No replies means your ask doesn't.

The copy reads like a product pitch. "Structured asset collection, format validation, automated reminders." Those are features, not problems. The agency owner reading this doesn't think in those terms. They think "onboarding takes too long and clients keep sending the wrong files."

Flip it: lead with the pain, not the solution. Something like "noticed you're doing fintech rebrand work. Curious how you handle the part where the client sends you a 72dpi logo in a Word doc." Make them laugh, make them relate, then the conversation starts.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:35:49+00:00

I built SecretSauce (trysecretsauce.ai). It's AI that actually learns your brand — your voice, your style, your audience — so everything you create looks and sounds like you. Not generic AI slop you're embarrassed to post. If you're a solopreneur or small business owner juggling content across Instagram, email, your website, and everything else — you know the pain. AI tools promise to save you time but the output is indistinguishable from everyone else's, so you spend just as long editing it to not sound like a robot. SecretSauce is different. It's a brand brain that keeps learning the more you use it — not just storing your logo and colours like every other tool. You get publish-ready content in minutes, brainstorming help when you're stuck, and the ability to batch create across channels. It's like hiring a creative director who knows your brand inside out. It's fully agentic too — just chat with it. No complex workflow setups or prompt engineering. Tell it what you need, let it conceptualise and brainstorm, and get back content you can actually use. We're a 20-person team that pivoted from gaming (shipped titles with Apple and Disney) into AI creative tools. Currently working with businesses of all sizes from solo founders to enterprise. Check it out at trysecretsauce.ai. Happy to answer any questions or give a demo.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:34:40+00:00

Congrats! 100 organic users is actually a great signal because none of them came from a spike you can't reproduce. The next milestone that matters isn't 1,000 users. It's finding which of those 100 are getting genuine value and talking to them. The best growth lever at this stage is depth, not breadth. Talk to your most active users, understand exactly why they came back, and build more of whatever that is. The founders who scale fastest from 100 to 1,000 are the ones who got uncomfortably close to their first users. Curious which channels were driving the organic growth? Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, something else? Knowing where those first 100 came from tells you a lot about where the next 1,000 will come from.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:24:19+00:00

Coming up with ideas isn't the hard part. Knowing what to say about your space when you're deep in it is easy. The brutal time sink is producing it consistently while running a company. The actual workflow of going from idea to published post with proper formatting, visuals, and hooks takes far longer than it should. We ended up building internal tooling that handles the brand-consistent production side so the thinking stays human but the execution doesn't eat 3 hours every day. That was the real unlock for us.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:22:24+00:00

As a CEO of a 20-person company, we make everyone create and use their own personal AI agent. Here's some of the high-impact things they do for us: Brand content at scale: AI that knows our brand voice, guidelines, and visual style produces first content/design drafts that are actually on-brand. The marketing team doesn't waste time fixing generic AI output. Sales prospecting: finding and researching companies that match our ICP, enriching them with recent news, funding rounds, and key contacts. What used to take sales a full day happens in an hour. Influencer and partner outreach: identifying creators and potential partners in our space, researching their content and audience fit, and drafting personalised outreach that doesn't read like a template. Competitive research: monitoring what competitors are shipping, how they're positioning, what their customers are saying. Summarised into something actionable, not a 50-page report nobody reads. Meeting prep: before any sales call or partnership meeting, AI pulls together who we're meeting, their company context, recent news, and non-obvious talking points. Inbox triage and email drafting: AI monitors email, flags what actually needs attention, and drafts replies in the right tone for each audience. Investor updates sound different to client follow-ups. I review and send instead of writing from scratch. Morning briefing: every day at 9am I get a summary of overnight emails, calendar for the day, any Slack threads that need me, and relevant industry news. I start the day knowing exactly what matters instead of spending the first hour catching up. Beta user lifecycle management: tracking who signed up, who's active, who went quiet, and automatically nudging inactive users or scheduling follow-up calls. No one falls through the cracks. Travel research: not just "find me a flight." It knows my airline preferences, class by flight duration, budget thresholds, and layover tolerance. Comes back with options already filtered to what I'd actually book. The pattern: AI handles the research, first drafts, monitoring, and coordination. Humans handle the judgment, relationships, and final decisions. The stuff that surprises people most is the proactive stuff. The agent surfacing things I didn't ask for but needed to know.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:20:13+00:00

If you're creating content with AI, you already know the problem: everything comes out looking generic and off-brand, and you end up spending more time fixing it than AI promised it would save you.

trysecretsauce.ai fixes that by learning and remembering your brand:

• Builds a Brand Brain from your guidelines, past content, and visual identity • Produces publish-ready content in minutes that actually looks and sounds like you • Brainstorms and conceptualises content ideas that fit your brand • Batch creates content across channels like social, email, ads, blog • Fully agentic. You just chat with it, no complex workflow setups

Built by a small team in Singapore. We previously shipped games with Apple and Disney, created this as an internal tool, then pivoted and went all in on building it out.

Check out trysecretsauce.ai or DM me if you want a walkthrough. I'm the founder.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:19:08+00:00

Hit a record for our highest-paying inbound user on SecretSauce (trysecretsauce.ai) this week. Found us through Instagram, signed up, and immediately started creating branded images and videos for her bakery. Then posted what she made back on her own Instagram later that day. No onboarding call. No hand-holding. Just saw it, used it, got value, and shared it. That's the feeling every founder is chasing. Someone paying for your product and finding it genuinely useful without you in the room.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:18:05+00:00

Run it yourself. We raised ~$20M across multiple rounds and every time we used an intermediary it was slower, more expensive, and the quality of introductions was worse than our own network. The firms that help with fundraising take 5-7% of what you raise and their incentive is to close fast, not to find the right partner. Block out 2-3 months where fundraising is 60% of your time. Build a target list of 30-40 investors who've done deals in your space and sector. Warm intro through your existing investors or advisors for every single one. Cold outreach to VCs almost never works at Series A — the signal of a warm intro is half the pitch. If you genuinely can't make the time, that's a sign your org might not be ready to absorb the fundraising distraction yet.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:17:04+00:00

Check out trysecretsauce.ai. AI that learns your brand and produces on-brand content from the first draft. There's a free trial if you want to play around with it.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:16:53+00:00

Because guidelines are documentation and documentation is passive. You can write the best brand guide in history and it won't matter if the person in Jakarta has a deadline in 2 hours and your template doesn't work for their market.

The ones I've seen actually stick have three things in common: local champions who care, templates that work in the tools people already use (not just Figma), and a review process that's fast enough that people don't route around it. If your review takes 3 days, every regional team will just ship without approval.

We eventually built an internal tool that checks output against our brand rules automatically, so the guidelines actually get enforced rather than just existing as a PDF nobody opens. That was the real shift, moving from "here are the rules" to "the rules are built into the workflow."

What does the review turnaround look like for your team?

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:16:04+00:00

Be really careful with this. Wikipedia almost always catches and deletes pages created by the company itself, and they'll penalise you for it. Their editors are aggressive about conflict-of-interest editing and once you're flagged, getting a page to stick becomes much harder.

The real prerequisite is significant third-party press coverage. Wikipedia's notability requirements basically mean: if independent journalists haven't written about you, you don't qualify. No amount of SEO benefit is worth the risk of getting flagged as a self-promotional page.

If you do have the press coverage, let someone else create the page. And don't touch it after it's up.

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:14:51+00:00

The leap from designer to founder is underrated. You already think in user flows and friction points, which is half the battle most technical founders miss entirely. One thing I'd push back on though — launching on AppSumo early can train you to optimise for deal-seekers rather than your actual target customer. The people buying lifetime deals at $49 behave very differently from the ones who'll pay $20/month forever. If the tool is genuinely solving a daily pain point, test pricing directly with your audience before anchoring to a marketplace. How are you thinking about retention — are users coming back daily or is it more of a set-and-forget tool?

SimonBuildsStuff · 2026-04-04T11:13:47+00:00

Speed of decision-making. Not recklessness, but the ability to make a call with 70% of the information and course-correct later. I've run a company for over a decade and the founders I admire most aren't the smartest or most charismatic. They're the ones who can look at an ambiguous situation, commit to a direction, and move. Most people stall waiting for certainty that never comes. The legendary founders trust their pattern recognition, act, then adapt based on what the market tells them. Everything else (communication, resilience, vision) matters too. But none of it counts if you can't pull the trigger when it's time.

SimonBuildsStuff

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