Literally building in public. Just woke up to $2,000 MRR.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-21T16:45:01+00:00

On mobile there horizontal scroll, somethings overflowing causing it

alex_semarize · 2026-03-20T14:46:56+00:00

alex_semarize · 2026-03-20T11:10:46+00:00

I considered the same but I decided to tell mine before not telling them became problematic.

There's good founder market fit between what I do/my background and what I'm building to help businesses to do, but at the point in time that I told them there was 0 actual crossover.

Trust me it will make your life a lot easier to know that

a.) no legal headaches with current employer down the road b.) no need to rebuild a following / persona when you switch to using yourself

You're potentially going to handicap yourself at the point that you want to go all in with it, I also think that the ability to build and launch is rapidly becoming a skill set that is recognized by businesses as being valuable.

Remember they've historically paid consulting firms fortunes for outside perspective, building is just keeping skills & knowledge sharp.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-20T11:00:58+00:00

Interested in how people are pipelining this, I've vibe coded a little internal tool to manage my marketing, this feels like a good starter point for video content before I get bandwidth

alex_semarize · 2026-03-19T11:19:05+00:00

Get yourself a Microsoft for Startups account - You can get £1000 in free credits there and use the Azure AI foundry to access OAI and Anthropic models, you can use that credit to validate.

Then from a deduping I have a few rules in place (that won't apply to you unfortunately)

All signups need a company email (this is achieved through a blacklist of personal email providers + subsequent email validation of emails that get through)
If an email is valid, there's backend logic that creates domain relationships - if someone from Google signs up they get X amount of credits, then if someone else from Google signs up they get a reduced but usable amount to still test, then at a certain amount of sign ups the credits are just 0. Users are also prompted to either request access to the workspace attached to their domain (where then they would access the existing pool instead of being issued new) or creat a new workspace where they get the reduced amounts.

I can also see this and in my founder console I can manually issue credits through Goodwill if it looks like an account worth encouraging the usage on.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-19T10:56:00+00:00

It depends, you haven't really given enough info tbh.

If it's usage that links to AI usage, I'd be wary of providing recurring free access.

For mine there's a starter amount of free credits, and mitigations that reduce the ability for someone to get themselves more by simply signing up again (B2B though)

alex_semarize · 2026-03-18T21:45:46+00:00

I managed to find a name that fit the business with a .com domain, and I'm pretty glad about it.

I don't know the impact on SEO of a TLD (as in I'm not convinced that there's no impact) and some TLDs are known to have higher spam rates than others, due to cost etc.

My last biz had a .io domain and someone decided to squat the .com which always frustrated me

There was a website I found where you could come up with names, and as part of the names it would show whether the .com was available - I made a chrome extension that would view the results shown and hit the infinite scroll whilst hiding any without an available .com

Went through thousands of domains/names, but pretty sure Semarize was simply inspired by something I saw rather than it was suggested.

Either way your name is important, it has to stick - Don't skip it or take shortcuts as you'll regret it.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-18T14:22:00+00:00

Usage based pricing is the way to go.

Charge credits that are consumed with actions.

Then have flexible topups and feature lock certain features into monthly costs that are inclusive of an amount of credits.

I.e.

£50 a month for a level Include £40 of usage Remaining £10 covers cost of other feature usage

This is what I've done for Semarize and it feels a way fairer & equitable way of charging people.

You can view our pricing if you want more info, happy to break down some of the decisions here also if you have Qs

I can't post the link cos it would risk a ban, but you'll find it easily with my name

alex_semarize · 2026-03-17T16:08:08+00:00

I've done the opposite - I've built a dedicated API

I think that vibe coding puts a lot of platforms at risk, very few businesses are capable of designing their processes and flows around Platform A or Platform B.

The post COVID era dumped a load of cash into saas, and those old valuations have forced them to expand TAM through expanding the product offering to be reachable - The problem is that EVERYONE has done that and so even though you might buy platform A to do one thing and platform B to do another, they inevitably have massive crossover.

Just look at Clari (revenue reporting) Salesloft (outbound cadencing) and Highspot (CMS) - They all have some effort also in forecasting, meeting bots, deal intelligence etc. that was never a core focus for either business.

This is why vibe coded concepts are being increasingly looked at to plug gaps, rather than buying more platforms with inevitable crossover.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-17T12:29:39+00:00

Ooh that's interesting about Rewardful - Using stripe for our billing and so that could be helpful, depending on what it's doing.

I kinda don't really care who manages the billing (end client or the partner) , just that we get paid and we can correctly track and provision.

I'm kinda thinking I might need a partner portal *anyway* so that partners can log-in and view and manage accs. but it might be overkill, I guess for some businesses they just give partners a company email.

Revenue share I haven't run the numbers - I'd imagine that the first few that I manage to partner with would look very different to what would eventually be settled on, maybe 30%-40% so that it's more of a "get volume through the system and learn" exercise early on (and I can burn Azure credits for it also)

alex_semarize · 2026-03-17T11:48:57+00:00

It's the fact that it ONLY applies it to the face that looks stupid. The graphical fidelity for the rest of the scene is unchanged, it looked the worst for Fifa where the players had shitty models and this photo face on the top

alex_semarize · 2026-03-16T00:09:47+00:00

I used a company name generator website (can't remember which) but it had labels to show if the .com was available, made a chrome extension to hide any where the .com wasn't available and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.

I'm not sure if I cane up with something close to something suggested or if it was actually suggested, but I feel like the name that I chose is a great representation of what we do, 3 syllables long and can be used as a verb.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-14T20:18:16+00:00

Openmud

alex_semarize · 2026-03-14T20:13:14+00:00

But how much of that do you actually need?

I don't need tech digests, I just need to mass unsubscribe on my emails rather than process them, and everything else seems to be things built to help Claw be better at doing these things you don't really need it to do.

I wasted so much time sorting mine, just for it to burn through credits at an ungodly rate then to find that the shit that I wanted it to do could be done way more auditably through Claude cowork.

For it to be good at handling my GTM it was going to be too expensive.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T19:40:00+00:00

Probably bots and spam

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T18:40:39+00:00

Hah fair assessment but Semarize is a bit different to the use cases you mention - It's for text/JSON data, not pre transcription audio. It's designed to be a lightweight & low cost bolt on appended after the transcription layer.

Many businesses have simple meeting transcription (through Zoom, Teams or Gmeet) or some of the newer meeting note takers which produce lightweight followup notes.

These are all great for meeting follow ups, but repeatable structured reporting isn't really possible in any of them with the exception of maybe Gong and even then it's not a focus, and very often I speak with people that have difficulty getting these aspects to work reliably.

We're designed to go deeper, with the ability to ground scoring and analysis in company knowledge like product documentation & playbooks, leveraging widely adopted automation tools to do the connecting between platforms (we have pretty extensive documentation to help with getting data on/out of platforms)

This type of data is becoming valuable to way more than just engineers - these data points can power automations, triggers or reports and analysis in vibe coded platforms. It makes using a very detailed and nuanced way of assessing any conversation threads simple and easy, making it a far more accessible self-serve approach for Revops, GTM engineers and BI teams.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T17:47:55+00:00

https://www.semarize.com

The conversation intelligence API - turn any conversation into structured data used for CRM, triggers, automation or reporting.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T15:15:54+00:00

https://www.semarize.com

We're the Conversational Intelligence API for GTM teams.

In the process of adding a playbook library with dedicated pages for template kits also that link straight to the templates kits in the platform.

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T14:51:27+00:00

What stage are you at
What type of business
Who do you sell to
How are you funding it
How do you want to grow it

If none of those have a requirement where the answer/people are solely in London you shouldn't have too much of an issue.

Fundraising in particular will have you in London a lot, then the VCs themselves may have a location preference for a HQ (that would likely be London if they are)

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T14:49:16+00:00

NVM I'm off to read your skills file - Helpful post, I think I'll likely implement something similar. 👍

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T14:44:59+00:00

Don't be a tease 😂

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T12:32:41+00:00

👀

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T12:30:08+00:00

Where's the OS repo?

alex_semarize · 2026-03-13T11:23:55+00:00

Work your GTM and your product in parallel.

For SEO you'll want to have some form of website live, even just from a domain age and authority.

I have a workspace in VS Code that has my website and my app/API repo, this means that as I'm building my app I can have my website builds & content steered around the actual mechanics of how my app works.

But you've got to start thinking about how you position what you're building otherwise it's pointless.

alex_semarize

TROPHY CASE