Builder's Growth Lab

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.

What does it take to build an AI product that clinicians actually trust? We invite Synth.ai CEO Steven Steerman to break down how his team turns hours of psychological report writing into minutes, while navigating the hard realities of HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, and the fragile trust that keeps practitioners coming back. Steven shares the inside story of a venture studio spin-out, the early MVP stitched together on foundation models, and the evolution to specialized pipelines that route scans, handwriting, and docx through the right OCR and LLM stack. The tech is smart, but the lesson is sharper: purpose-built beats general when the workflow is high stakes.

We dive into the part few founders talk about openly: compliance as product. From business associate obligations to breach notification and international requirements, Steven explains how they are accelerating audits without compromising sensitive mental health data. He also gets candid about the tradeoffs that keep him up at night, pushing features to win new customers versus deepening polish to retain trust, all with a lean team and a real burn rate. His north star is disarmingly simple: deliver a magic moment in the first 60 seconds, then keep the experience consistent after week ten.

On go-to-market, we unpack a surprise: paid ads that finally work. The winning angles are honest and human, write reports in minutes, stop filling tables, get weekends back, paired with tight creative that speaks to small-practice psychologists who buy like consumers. We also address the elephant in the room: LLMs as both competitor and substitute. If a savvy clinician can wire prompts in ChatGPT, Synth must be more compliant, more convenient, and unmistakably tailored to the clinical workflow.

We close by zooming out. AI wrappers on rented land face platform risk, especially as big labs watch popular use cases. The counter is to own the workflow, build domain-specific pipelines, and invest in brand, community, and narrative, now the real moats. If you care about AI in healthcare, product-market fit, and the delicate craft of trust in the age of compliance, this is your playbook. If you enjoyed the episode, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review. What part of the build would you double down on next?

Names matter because they set expectations, and expectations drive momentum. We open with a playful roast of our working title and turn it into a real exercise in clarity.  Why a simple, memorable name can act like a launch ramp instead of a speed bump. From there, we bring in Ryan Carson, a three-time founder who helped a million people learn to code, to talk about the biggest shift he’s seen: AI as a new kind of compute that lets tiny teams ship at enterprise scale.

Ryan breaks down the emerging tool spectrum with uncommon clarity. If you want to prototype without touching code, prosumer tools will get you moving. If you want to build durable products, you’ll need a power tool that meets you where you code. That’s where AMP comes in, opinionated by design, fast by default, and armed with the Oracle, a specialized agent that helps you break out of doom loops when you’re facing gnarly problems like the Google Ads API. We dig into what that feels like day to day: fewer friction points, smarter escalation, and a workflow that mirrors how great senior engineers operate.

Community threads everything together. Ryan argues that as agents get better, our need for human spaces actually grows. Build Crew is built for that - tool-agnostic, open to anyone coding with agents, and activated by live sessions, shareable threads, leaderboards, and badges that reward useful contributions. We also tackle the human-only question head-on: some work will stay embodied and personal, while high-friction knowledge services become agent-augmented. The opportunity for founders is to choose a narrow problem, ship something imperfect quickly, and use community to turn small wins into sustained momentum.

Want to build faster with agents and stay grounded with real humans? Tap play, then join Build Crew at www.buildcrew.team & try AMP for free at ampcode.com/free. If this conversation sparked an idea, subscribe, share it with a builder who needs the push, and leave a review telling us which agent use case you’ll ship next.

We run a live branding workshop to evolve our show from a technical niche to a hub for builders who want customers. We align on audience, mission, naming strategy, and a visual system that supports clarity, distribution, and growth.

• shifting focus from code-heavy identity to traction for indie builders
• two-second test for who it is for and what it does
• how brand, SEO, and paid work together
• why confusing taglines kill conversion
• choosing a name with SEO and trademark in mind
• deciding whether to include AI in the name
• defining core audience and promised transformation
• tone traits: honest, practical, a little fun
• mood boards for dark base with bold color accents
• competitor references and how we differentiate
• next steps: shortlist names, tagline, mini brand guide

A new chapter begins as Mallory joins the crew as a co host and sharpens our focus on the brand, community, and content moves that actually compound for AI startups. We swap stories about stamina and setbacks, from API approval limbo to error loops and locker-room fatigue and why recovery is a growth habit, not a luxury. Then we dive into one of the cleanest startup playbooks we’ve heard in a while with hackathon winner and builder extraordinaire, Sukhpal Saini, the winner of the Lovable Hackathon.

Sukh walks us through a ruthless validation loop: find domain-specific problems with insiders, price the pain ($10 vs $1,000 vs $10,000), pitch two options, and collect real dollars before you write code. He shares how he’s built 36 products, why many “good tools” are bad businesses, and how engineers can learn to sell with a simple 30-minute call structure—rapport, discovery, permissioned demo, objections, and an immediate close. No vague pipelines. No “let’s circle back.” Just clear steps that lead to decisions.

Enjoy the convo, share it with a builder who needs a nudge, and subscribe for more honest playbooks on AI branding, customer acquisition , and growth. Got a validation win or war story? Drop us a note and leave a review, your insights fuel what we explore next.