Builder's Growth Lab

For the closer of season 1, Charlie Hernandez and Conor Douglas sit down with Martin Reed, founder of Insomnia Coach, to talk about the one thing every founder running on empty needs to hear: stop trying to fix your sleep.

Martin built his business off a problem he lived through. After hitting sudden, severe sleep disruption for the first time in his life, he found that the harder he tried to fix it, the worse it got. He stumbled onto CBT-I, then acceptance and commitment therapy, built an online community around what he'd learned, and turned the whole thing into a productized business with a free 2-week email course, a paid program, and 1:1 coaching that consistently sells out.

In this one we get into:

→ Why effort backfires with sleep when it works for almost everything else in life 

→ The acceptance and commitment approach in plain language (and the beach ball metaphor you won't forget) 

→ Why sleep hygiene fails chronic insomniacs (it's literally the control group in the studies) 

→ Why he doesn't recommend Oura, Whoop, or any sleep tracker 

→ What to actually do at 3am when you wake up and your brain won't shut off 

→ How he builds reputable content in a niche flooded with SEO spam 

→ When it's time to stop self-managing and see a doctor

Plus a rapid-fire close with the single most quotable line of the episode: the one piece of common sleep advice he says you should stop following tonight.

Find Martin at www.insomniacoach.com and grab his free 2-week sleep training course while you're there.

Builders Growth Lab is going on break after this one. We'll be back July 7 for season 2 with some big news, builds and more.   

No guest this week. Just Charlie and Conor breaking down what's actually moving the needle in AI and customer acquisition right now.

Charlie walks through a new domain he bought live: PeptideMaps.ai. The peptides keyword pulls 9.4 million searches a month and the trend line is straight up. He breaks down the validation play, the local SEO angle borrowed from his Elevate Holistics days, and why owning the customer data is the whole game.

Conor shares how he vibe-coded a full front-facing site, paywall, and login flow for a client in two and a half hours. Work that would have taken weeks four years ago.

Then the news block:

OpenAI just turned on a self-serve ads manager inside ChatGPT. Internal target is $2.5B in ad revenue this year and $100B by 2030. Conor breaks down why he's hesitant to run it for local clients yet and what builders should watch for.

Anthropic teamed up with Goldman Sachs and Blackstone to launch a $1.5B firm focused on enterprise AI adoption. OpenAI's enterprise revenue is now over 40% of total. The big labs are no longer selling APIs. They're sending in armies of engineers. The opportunity for indie builders is the opposite direction: pick a niche and own it.

A Q1 2026 study tracked 50 B2B SaaS keywords and found the pages ranking number one in Google are no longer the pages driving buyers. AI answers are intercepting the buyer before they ever click. Marketers are scrambling to measure influence instead of clicks. Charlie and Conor unpack what that means for SEO and paid moving forward.

Plus: CampaignPilots updates, why the cheapest option is always the wrong move, and Charlie's plan to cold call peptide clinics this week.

Drops every Thursday. 

Builders Growth Lab is presented by CampaignPilots.

Episode 50 with Scott Simson, CEO of Raffiti Media. Scott runs a YouTube done-for-you agency that's generated over a billion views for clients across seven years and close to 20 employees. He sat down with Charlie and Conor to break down exactly how AI founders, indie hackers, and vibe coders should be thinking about YouTube as a customer acquisition channel.

The takeaways:

1. YouTube is the only platform where a video you film today can still bring in leads in 15 years. Treat it like a search engine, not a timeline.
2. Raffiti pulled Shorts off most of their client channels and saw long-form views spike almost immediately. Longs and Shorts build two audiences that don't cross-pollinate.
3. Title and thumbnail get locked before anything gets filmed. If the package can't prove viability against outliers, the video doesn't exist.
4. Retention beats every 45 seconds. Pattern interrupts that make the viewer feel they can't miss what's coming next.
5. AI cut Scott's work week from 50 hours to 15. But faceless channels now get cloned with 11Labs voices in hours. The moat is being a person.

Find Scott at Raffiti Media, @imscottsimson on Instagram, and at AI Marketing World in Dallas, October 21-24, where Russell Brunson is the keynote.

Presented by CampaignPilots.

Roman Czerny, co-founder and CMO of Gojiberry AI, joins Charlie on episode 49 of Builders Growth Lab.

A few months ago, Gojiberry was at zero. Today they're at $2M ARR. Roman sold his last SaaS for seven figures, failed two more in between, and just got into Y Combinator on his third application. He's in SF right now for the P26 batch.

This is the full playbook. Real numbers, no founder fluff.

In this episode:

• Why Roman validated Gojiberry on Reddit before any other channel ($0 to $20K MRR from Reddit alone)
• The rule that 10x'd his cold outreach reply rates: three letters max to reply
• The B2B influencer + cold email retargeting combo outperforming everything else in his stack
• Why your AI SaaS needs a paywall before the free trial, not after

If you're a builder stuck on distribution, this one is required listening.

Connect with Roman: @romanbuildsaas on X | https://gojiberry.ai/

Builders Growth Lab: www.buildersgrowthlab.ai | Hosted by Charlie Hernandez & Conor Douglas | 

Presented by CampaignPilots

No guest this week. Just Charlie and Conor handing over the exact prompts they use to run their SEO and paid ads agencies.

The premise is simple. Copy the prompts, paste them into Claude (Opus 4.7 is live, shout out Anthropic), plug in your context, and skip the 20 to 30 hours of work. There's a free doc in the show notes with every prompt from the episode.

What's inside:

Charlie walks through his 4-prompt SEO stack. Competitor discovery to find who's actually ranking on Google for your ICP's searches. Keyword research using SEMrush exports and gap analysis. Technical SEO audits using Screaming Frog to find the 20% of fixes that move 80% of the rankings. Reporting and analytics that drive decisions, not vanity dashboards.

Conor walks through his 3-prompt paid media stack. A full audit framework for new or existing ad accounts across Google, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn. A weekly optimization plan that separates real signals from statistical noise. And a reporting framework that builds client-facing dashboards tied to actual KPIs.

Plus 4 CRM prompts that are only available in the newsletter. Sign up at buildersgrowthlab.ai.

We also cover the biggest AI news of the week:

Anthropic ships Claude Opus 4.7 with major improvements to reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks. Anthropic launches Claude Design, a direct play at the creative layer that could close the design gap for solo founders and indie hackers. OpenAI turns on cost-per-click ads inside ChatGPT at $3 to $5 per click, making it a real performance marketing channel for the first time.

One quote that sums up the episode: "You can't lazily prompt. If you lazily prompt, you'll never get what you want." The prompts we're sharing are 3 to 4 paragraphs each for a reason. The more context you give the model, the better the output.

If you're a founder, indie hacker, or vibe coder trying to run marketing without hiring an agency, this is the episode to bookmark.

Next week: we sit down with Roman Czerny, founder of Gojiberry, the AI-powered outreach platform that finds high-intent leads and starts conversations on autopilot.

Document for free prompts:

HERE

 Brought to you by CampaignPilots.

Henrik Skagerlind Fasth spent 20+ years in the fashion industry before building Lumoo, an AI platform running 30 models in sync, entirely on Lovable. In under 9 months he hit 700K EUR in annual recurring revenue. 

In this episode, Charlie and Conor sit down with Henrik to talk about why domain expertise is the real unfair advantage, what his first customer conversations looked like, how he vibe coded features live with clients in the room, what broke when adoption took off, and how Lovable CEO Anton Osika ended up on the cap table.

Follow Henrik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-skagerlind-fasth/ Check out Lumoo: https://lumoo.com/

Newsletter: www.buildersgrowthlab.ai 

Presented by CampaignPilots.

What does it actually take to build a company in 2026? According to Ben Broca, not much more than a laptop, a stack of AI tools, and the willingness to trust the technology further than most founders are comfortable with.

Ben is the founder of Polsia, an AI platform that builds and runs companies autonomously. You give it an idea and a team of AI agents handles the product, the marketing, the support, the competitive analysis, and the daily prioritization. All of it. Ben hit $1M ARR in his first month, tripled to $3M ARR within two months, and now has over 3,000 companies running on the platform. He did it without a single full time employee.

In this episode, Charlie, Conor, and Mallory sit down with Ben to unpack how he got here, what he learned building under Travis Kalanick at CloudKitchens, and why he believes most founders are dramatically underestimating what AI can already do.

What we cover:

How Ben built Polsia in two months after nearly a year of building products he was not inspired by The Travis Kalanick lesson on hiring that shaped how Ben runs Polsia today Why Ben used an AI agent to field investor emails and built a live data room as a fundraising stunt How Polsia monetizes with a flat monthly fee plus a 20% revenue share on what companies earn Why Ben thinks AGI is already here and what that means for how builders should be thinking about their teams The moment Claude told him "six days, ship it" and became his most effective co-founder What Polsia looks like in two years and why Ben wants to democratize access to the American dream at scale

Also in this episode: Charlie and Conor cover the Matthew Gallagher and Medvi story, the solo founder who built a GLP-1 telehealth company to $401M in revenue in its first year with $20,000 and a stack of AI tools, and what it means for the one person company era that Sam Altman predicted and Dario Amodei said would arrive in 2026.

If you are building solo, thinking about building solo, or just trying to understand how far AI has actually come as an operating layer for real businesses, this one is for you.

Find Ben: Twitter/X: @BenSrr Polsia: polsia.com

Find us: Newsletter: buildersgrowthlab.ai  

Presented by CampaignPilots

Charlie and Conor go solo this week. No guest, no Mallory -- just the two hosts doing a live audit of Beehiiv's digital marketing presence. Conor breaks down their paid search strategy, and Charlie runs through their SEO setup. A raw, off-script episode that turned into one of the more practical ones yet.

https://buildersgrowthlab.ai/

Grace Ling built Design Buddies into a community of 150,000+ designers, cold-emailed 400 hiring managers to land her job at EA, got cancelled by people she trusted, was rejected from YC multiple times, quit her UX career to travel 21 countries, and came out the other side more unfiltered and more effective than ever.

In this episode, Charlie Hernandez, Conor Douglas, and Mallory Loar sit down with Grace to unpack how she actually builds things: communities, audiences, brands, and a life on her own terms.

What we cover:

• How Design Buddies grew from 0 to 150K+ members with steady, linear growth and zero viral moments
• Why Grace cold-emailed 400 hiring managers to get her job at EA, and why rejection posts outperform announcement posts
• The real mechanics of building a cult following (her words) vs. just an audience
• What happened when she got cancelled by ex-community mods, and why it freed her
• Quitting her "sexy" UX career, booking a one-way ticket, and hosting Design Buddies events across 21 countries
• Building Fluffle AI, vibe coding daily on Twitter, breaking into acting, and why she sees herself as a holding company
• Her actual LinkedIn strategy: live life, reflect on what you learned, post it, recycle what worked, repeat

Grace is one of those guests who makes you want to close your laptop and go do something. Equal parts tactical and chaotic good.

Episode brought to you by CampaignPilots.

Find Grace:

• LinkedIn: graceling
• Instagram: @irungracepace
• X/Twitter: @gracepace
• Community: designbuddies.com

No guest this week -- just Charlie, Connor, and Mallory getting into the weeds on the exact tools and workflows powering their agencies, their products, and this podcast.

If you're an AI founder or indie hacker trying to figure out how to actually do marketing without a full team, this one's for you.

What we cover:

Connor's AI Content Flywheel -- Connor built a full content generation system using Claude Code and Railway that ingests your brand guidelines, competitor data, Ahrefs keywords, and voice/tone rules, then produces SEO-optimized blogs, email campaigns, and social posts -- automatically pushing drafts to Webflow and Mailchimp. He walks through how it works, what it took to build, and what's still in progress.

Charlie's Claude Cowork + Slack Automation -- Charlie wired up Claude Cowork to a dedicated Slack channel so branded content drops in automatically every morning and afternoon -- complete with sourced images, overlaid pull quotes, and the BGL logo ready to post. He also shares how he's using project-level context to have Claude help build out Campaign Pilots, and why agent orchestration finally "clicked" for him.

Mallory's Agency Workflow -- Six months into running her marketing agency and fully booked her calendar, Mallory breaks down how she uses Granola to capture discovery calls, NotebookLM to surface ICP patterns from research, and Claude to generate scopes of work, positioning docs, and launch playbooks -- all while keeping the human touch her clients actually hire her for.

The bigger conversation -- Where does AI earn its place in brand, community, and creative work? And where does human judgment still win?

This week's AI news:

• A vibe-coded app (Moltbook) sold to Meta in 42 days -- built without writing a single line of code
• OpenAI drops GPT-5.4 with a 1 million token context window, re-entering the agentic coding race
• Sweden is being called the new Silicon Valhalla -- and Lovable's $400M ARR story is leading the charge

Coming up next week: Grace Ling, founder of Design Buddies -- one of the largest design communities in the world with over 100,000 members.