We hit record and talked about what's actually on our minds this week: our canceled Breckenridge trip that makes our heart hurt, building CampaignPilots in public and what we're learning from sharing the journey, NFL bets we missed (and why we're still thinking about them), Sunday scaries as founders, how we actually approach networking without being cringe, and the mental health side of building that nobody wants to talk about on LinkedIn. No structure, no script.  

Just three founders being honest about what it's really like right now.

https://buildersgrowthlab.ai/

Jon Cheney, Chief AI Officer and CEO of GenAIPI, joins the show to break down how he scaled from solo consultant to an 8-person AI services firm and what AI founders can steal from his playbook. We dig into his framework for customer acquisition in the critical first 60 days, how he landed free media coverage by pitching local news stations, and why building relationships with journalists beats paid ads. Jon also shares his take on AI agents going autonomous by 2026, why he thinks concerns about an AI bubble are overblown, and the one thing most founders get wrong: jumping into AI tools before they have a plan. If you're shipping an AI product and struggling to get traction, this episode is packed with tactical, immediately useful advice.

https://genaipi.org/

Jon's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joncheney/

Guest: Silvia Oviedo Lopez, Former Pinterest & Canva Leader, Now Building Stealth AI Startup

Silvia spent two decades scaling Pinterest to 450 million users and leading AI-powered content discovery at Canva. Now she's building a stealth AI startup and just published her 2026 trend report.

We dive into why the big consumer AI breakthrough still hasn't landed, where the real whitespace is for founders, and how B2C/B2B boundaries are collapsing. Silvia breaks down what AI-native operations actually look like, the difference between AI that helps us think versus AI that just automates tasks, and why craft is the new scarcity.

She shares the real growth levers that worked at Pinterest, how community can become a moat, whether founders should still care about Google SEO or focus on AI answer engines, and what "unicorn hires" look like in 2026.

We also explore leadership through what Silvia calls "The Emotional Recession." Why are founders burnt out from holding ambiguity, not doing too much? How do you balance speed with thoughtfulness? What should you look for in investors when operators are becoming the new power players?

Packed with tactical insights from someone who's scaled global platforms and is doing it again in stealth mode.

https://buildersgrowthlab.ai/

In this episode, Mallory Loar pulls back the curtain on her fundraising journey: raising nearly $800K for her app.

She breaks down how she leveraged her network to get in front of angel investors, why early-stage investors bet on founders over ideas, and the brutal truth about fundraising as a female founder in tech (spoiler: less than 3% of VC funding goes to women-led startups).

What you'll learn:

• How to raise capital before building anything (and when you actually should)
• The difference between pitching angels vs. VCs, and why speed matters
• How to build an investor pipeline and tailor your pitch to each person's background
• The harsh feedback loop of fundraising and how to stay resilient through rejections
• Why bootstrapping as long as possible often beats raising too early
• Gender bias in VC funding and what it takes to overcome it

Plus: The hosts dive into the rise of "vibe coding" tools in 2025, why talking to a human will become a premium experience, and predictions for OpenAI acquisitions in the year ahead.

Perfect for AI founders wondering if (and when) they should raise money, and how to actually do it without traction.

For more info subscribe to our newsletter:

https://buildersgrowthlab.ai/

We chat where we started and where we're going/what's next for 2026. 

Katie Dunn closed $10B in real estate deals before becoming a full-time angel investor. She's invested in 30 companies, helped founders raise $27M+, and focuses on underrepresented founders in CPG and tech. In this episode, she breaks down what separates fundable founders from everyone else and the biggest mistakes AI founders make when pitching.

What We Cover:

• What actually gets founders funded vs what doesn't
• "Founder-market fit" for AI builders making agents and wrappers
• How to tell if an investor is serious or wasting your time
• Step-by-step: getting your first $100K in funding
• Should AI founders raise right now?
• Pitch deck red flags that make investors pass
• When to bootstrap vs raise capital

Tune in for that and more!

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie--dunn/ 

TikTok and Instagram: @iamkatiedunn

Business Website: https://www.themastheadstrategy.com 

Personal Website (with Angel Investments and thesis): https://www.katiedunn.com 

Digital Twins: https://www.themastheadstrategy.com/digital-twins 

Angel Investing Guide: https://www.themastheadstrategy.com/guides/p/from-curious-to-cap-table-a-starter-guide-to-angel-investing-for-women

Kondo (manages connection requests and LinkedIn DMs - link to get 1 free month): https://app.trykondo.com/referral/F88Y7X

Goodword (leveraging your network app): https://goodword.com

Fabrik (community building IRL space): https://www.joinfabrik.com/

Customer success is becoming the next major frontier for AI agents. In this episode, we sit down with Teemu Kinos, co-founder of Skene.ai, to unpack how AI agents are reshaping onboarding, retention, and expansion for modern SaaS companies.

Teemu shares how Skene helps teams deploy customer success agents that proactively guide users, surface friction, and drive activation without overwhelming human teams. We talk about why most products lose users not because of poor features, but because onboarding and time-to-value break down early. Teemu explains how AI agents can monitor behavior, personalize guidance, and intervene at the exact moments that matter.

We also dig into product-led growth in the AI era. What changes when your product can observe, learn, and adapt in real time? How should founders think about human versus agent-driven touchpoints? Teemu walks through practical use cases, early customer wins, and the metrics that actually matter when measuring success automation.

Finally, we zoom out to the bigger picture. Customer success is no longer a support function. It is becoming a core growth lever. Teemu shares lessons for founders building AI products today, including where agents add real value, where humans still win, and how to avoid over-automating trust.

If you are building a SaaS product, an AI agent, or a PLG motion that depends on retention and expansion, this episode will change how you think about growth after the signup.

Andre Albuquerque, who took Kitch from founding to Glovo acquisition in 18 months and now runs Builders Camp where he has trained over 4,000 product managers, joins the show to break down what AI founders get wrong about distribution. He shares his battle-tested frameworks including the 6 Pillars of PMF (proving that product-market fit requires marketing message, sales narrative, onboarding, support, and referrability working together, not just a good product), the three acquisition loops (viral, content, and paid), and his Cheaper-Faster-Easier model for building unstoppable products. Drawing from his experience achieving 900% organic traffic growth at Google and scaling Uniplaces to 1M+ users with a 150-person ambassador program, Andre explains how to pivot distribution without changing your product, how to audit where your GTM is breaking, and why finding your AHA metric matters more than your North Star when you are going from zero to one. This episode is packed with tactical advice for AI founders shipping agents, wrappers, and API products who have built something good but struggle to find users.

The moment yall have been waiting for.  The SEO 101 episode.  We start by talking turkey day, then get right into the SEO discussions.  Charlie talks SEO fundamentals (content/technical/backlinks) like parent/child pages, title tags and keywords.  How to do keyword research, have a clean domain and rank a new website.  Hint... new website are brutal to rank so buy (if possible) an old domain and clean it up for your own.  We end with last week in AI with app pricing fundamentals, when to raise capital for your AI company & AI platforms and their adverts.  Subscribe today!

If your dashboards are loud but your next steps are fuzzy, this one’s for you. We open with a clear look at how Campaign Pilots turns GA4, Search Console, and Google Ads into plain-English insights you can act on today—no more stitching together reports or losing hours to manual analysis. Connect your sources once, ask for what you need, and schedule weekly briefs that help you make better calls in minutes, not days.

Then we welcome Christian Peverelli, founder of Outbond, for a hands-on walkthrough of sales intelligence that actually respects your domain reputation. He shows how to build hyper-targeted lists from live data, waterfall-verify emails and phones, and run deep research agents that extract ideal customer profiles and timely signals. The magic is in the personalization at sane volumes: smaller, smarter campaigns that convert at 10–15% positive reply rates instead of the spray-and-pray one percent the industry tolerates. We also explore non-sales use cases—customer discovery, partnerships, recruiting, and fundraising—that benefit from the same rigor.

We round out the conversation with the GTM stack that’s working now: trust-building content at the top, durable SEO that favors human-first structure, and retargeting that nudges intent without noise. Community takes center stage as the retention engine—reward super fans, invite contribution, and watch UGC lower your blended CAC. And for the tool-curious, we compare Claude and GPT workflows for coding, content, and validation, plus share a shortlist for our rebrand: Builders Growth Lab.

Listen to learn how to replace reporting clutter with clarity and swap cold blasts for outreach that feels handcrafted. If you found this useful, follow the show, share it with a builder friend, and leave a quick review so more people can discover it.