AAAstorga

We built Inspect to help our teammates spend less time getting stuck and more time bringing their ideas to life. Watching what they’ve built with it has been my favorite part. Today, we get to share it with you. Can’t wait to see what you build ❤️ Sign up for early access: inspect.com/

Tomorrow!! 🚀 Ramp is obsessed about saving time and money; we are going to close that loop tomorrow for builders! AI Spend -> Token Spend Management -> Router -> ? (Tomorrow) Stay tuned!

Every 3 months, my friend @Austin_Astorga and I get together for a weekend in person to work on our “Ghost Business” 👻. We built a small product called GuestSnap, a bit randomly, after building a series of “sexy” AI products. Ironically, this was the one that actually made money lol. So far YTD we’ve done $109K in revenue. We were both definitely inspired by @levelsio. In all honestly, we barely spend time running this business day to day, we both have busy full-time jobs and busy lives. Hence the ghost biz theme. However there were still too many things that still needed us (and too many angry emails). So this past weekend we went all-in on making it truly a Ghost Business. Thanks to @thsottiaux's resets, which we saved for this weekend, we built a LOT in 2 days. A few notable things: 1 - A proper design system called Casper, so ai models can design and build on our behalf. I decided we needed a proper design system instead of a random collection of Tailwind and one-off buttons everywhere. I came across @joshpuckett's @withgraphical design system discounted at $49 (thank you!), since we are so low on time, we bought it, and customized it for GuestSnap. It’s still nowhere near where I want it to be, but the theme of this project is to just ship instead of perfecting things and never shipping. The idea behind Casper is that @Austin_Astorga, the engineer or our @bot's shouldn’t be bottlenecked by “design” (me). He should be able to ship a feature end to end with AI while keeping things consistent across the product. And yes, there will be some slop. But I can clean that up pretty quickly if needed. The bigger point is to keep teaching Casper what to do and what not to do, so there’s less to clean up over time. Also inspired by @nicbstme here, who’s been pushing the team at work to move mega fast with model-generated UI blocks etc. 2 - Customer support that only pulls us in when it needs help. A lot of our support emails are basic questions or simple tasks, like transferring an account to a different email. Necessary stuff, but we don’t have much time to keep doing it manually. So @Austin_Astorga created a bot, connected to Telegram and Gmail, running on Cloudflare workers. It has access to our repo, so it can check how the product works when someone asks “can I do X?” (you'd be surprised with how often people mail us with the most simple questions already answered in our FAQ). It also has instructions and skills for handling basic tasks like account transfers. If it doesn’t know the answer or has low confidence, it asks us in Telegram. We can just reply there and tell it how to resolve it. The goal is for those moments to become a feedback loop: use what we had to explain to improve its skills, so fewer emails need us next time. This luckily costs us pennies to run using GPT 6.1 sol. 3 - Bots working on marketing. Monthly we have spent $$ for someone to manage our Google Ads and SEO. We just didn't have the patience nor time to truly figure it out after a few failed attempts (surprisingly mega confusing and complex to set it up, at least to us). So @Austin_Astorga created a system of @bot's, one of them is heavily hooked up to our ads and analytics. The goal is to experiment with a hypothesis, try campaigns, analyze and optimize and have a feedback loop on its own. And eventually we'll give it permission to fully run our ads. I'll report back how well it all works in the next few weeks, and whether we can actually save $$. The grok bots will also be able to run string A/B/C experiments to improve our conversion rate etc. Very exciting. 4 - An invite product I also started building an e-invite product to extend what we offer and reach customers earlier in the funnel, while they’re still planning their event. This will also help acquire new customers without the acquisition costs. It is not shipped yet, I need to hand off my PR to Austin, so he can make sure the code is clean + needs a bunch of wiring to the back-end, email system, etc. etc. BUT, it’s insane to me that I could build a whole experience on par with a multi-million $ business in just a day or 2. While we were playing darts in the evening, Codex would send me videos of e2e flows where I could just reply with a voice note. Cheers. Still more to do here in this feature, but this is where having Casper already in place starts paying off. Anyways, we built much more than this, but these felt worth sharing! Aside from building together, we also hit the gym every morning, drank a beer or 2, talked shit, finances, life, goals, wins, losses, played darts (I lost 3X). And just share and learn from each other across all these things. Oh and we have started doing a DEXA scans every time we meet in-person. The first time the DEXA scan results was INCREDIBLY shocking (health-wise, I was in bad shape across the board to my surprise). Since then, we’ve luckily both made some good progress on our body fat %, lean muscle mass % etc. Now I’m actually excited to do the next scan in 3 months, hoping I'll continue making progress. All in all, I highly recommend weekends like these to anyone. I feel so hyped about the future. I wish I could do more of these type of weekends but with family life and 99 other commitments this works for now. Will try to change/improve this as well. Step by step!

Today, we announce our $25M fundraise to build the future of creative work. For all of history, what you could create was dictated by the resources accessible to you. That's why we built @trymelius, the agents lab for creatives, to tear down that constraint and let agents leverage generative models to bring all your ideas to life. So that anyone can make anything. Huge thanks to @yuris at @generalcatalyst and @verorellana02 + @reidRMC at @CRV for leading the round, and to @gefkovicz + @benmtaft at @geniusventures, @amosk1120 + @adamvalkin at @VineVenturesLP, @jakepaul + @geoffwoo at @antifund, @rauchg, @bykahlil and many more amazing investors for taking a bet on us.