12:52Higgsfield AI · Tutorial
The Laziest Way To Make Money With AI
How one AI agent built a product, five content formats, and a deployed waitlist in a single afternoon for $121 — and returned 6x.
June 1stThe argument in one line.
Being a creator is the single greatest unfair advantage an entrepreneur can have, because distribution lets you validate products by showing them and sell at the idea stage before spending a dollar on inventory.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A creator with an existing audience who wants to launch a physical or digital product and is unsure how to validate it without burning money on inventory.
- A solo founder or operator drowning in the gap between getting paid and actually fulfilling, who needs a model for the first hires and first systems.
- Anyone using AI chatbots for content who keeps getting mediocre output and suspects they are prompting them for the wrong job.
- A creator-operator trying to run a personal brand and a separate product brand at the same time without one cannibalizing the other.
- A high-output creator worried about burnout, AI lifestyle creep, and losing the parts of the craft they actually love.
SKIP IF…
- You want a step-by-step prompt-engineering tutorial with copy-paste templates; this is a strategy and mindset conversation, not a prompt library.
- You are looking for a hard ROI breakdown or specific revenue numbers beyond the headline launch figures.
- You have no audience yet and want pure top-of-funnel growth tactics rather than how to monetize one you already have.
The full version, fast.
Cat Goetze argues that a creator's audience is an unfair entrepreneurial advantage: instead of asking people what they want, you show them a working prototype and let pre-orders validate the idea, which is how her Physical Phones brand did $120K in three days. The hard part is never ideas, it is fulfilling the promise, so she built customer trust through weekly live calls and radically honest email updates, hired for adaptability over resumes, and ran a separate brand page so the product could outgrow her face. On AI, her core move is using Claude not to generate work she can already do but to expose her blind spots, ask her clarifying questions before acting, and run operational tasks like crawling nine months of Slack into a self-refreshing Notion deal tracker, while guarding scripts, captions, and human communication as things she will never hand off.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostJun Yuh
01:00guestCat Goetze (AskCatGPT)
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 02:00
01 · Cold open + flowers
The $120K-in-three-days hook lands first, then Jun opens by praising Cat as a creator who could one day do a nine-figure exit.
02:00 – 04:05
02 · What building in public means
Cat defines building in public as taking the audience on a full story arc from the moment you decide to try, mishaps included, not just at the finished product.
04:05 – 08:57
03 · Where Physical Phones came from
Don't ask, show: Cat warns against polling for ideas, recounts her five-year quest to use her phone less, and prototypes a Bluetooth landline as the validation she takes to her audience.
08:57 – 14:03
04 · The pressure behind a $100K launch
The same phone flopped at 10 views in 2023 and did $120K in pre-sales in 2025; with only an assistant, Cat realizes you must assume it'll work and be ready when it does.
14:03 – 18:45
05 · Sourcing, 3PLs and first hires
Working backwards from pre-orders, Cat calls her network, then hires a fulfillment project manager and a hardware product expert, hiring for adaptability over a fixed job description.
18:45 – 23:40
06 · Separating the brand from the business
Cat keeps Physical Phones inside her universe but on its own page so the product can be discovered without her; 'Operation Flood the Zone' means three videos a day for seven weeks.
23:40 – 28:40
07 · Customer trust, cat calls and email updates
During the long wait before phones shipped, Cat ran weekly Instagram 'cat calls' on a real ringing line plus radically honest weekly emails; people forgive delays, not silence.
28:40 – 33:38
08 · Ideating content that converts
Cat sells from a place of honesty and scarcity that's actually true, leads off vibes more than formula, and insists the best creator founders sell products that look good on camera.
33:38 – 40:14
09 · Starting on camera at age 13
A snow-day camcorder and 'Getzy News at Ten' kicked off a lifelong love of being in front of and behind the camera; today's algorithms do the audience-finding for you.
40:14 – 48:02
10 · Taking intentional phone breaks
Cat protects two to three weekly hours with no screens, a pen, and a window to stay aligned with her gut, and uses her own physical phone to stay off the rectangle of sadness.
48:02 – 56:42
11 · Using AI to expose your blind spots
Jun shares his Whisper brain-dump brand guide and his blind-spot prompt that reframed 'creator' messaging; Cat reframes AI as a tool to expose weaknesses, plus meta-prompting and maxing credits.
56:42 – 1:05:07
12 · AI on the operations side
Show don't tell: Cat uses connectors to crawl nine months of Slack into a self-refreshing Notion deal tracker, and names scripts, captions, and human communication as things she'll never offload.
1:05:07 – 1:09:44
13 · How creating changed her personally
Cat reveals her deepest insecurity about not going into tech after Stanford, and how the 'AI expert' label forced her to see that her creative non-tech path became her greatest asset.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Don't ask your audience what they want; show them a working prototype and let pre-orders be the validation, because people can't visualize what doesn't exist yet.
- The same physical-phone idea flopped at 10 views in 2023 and did $120K in pre-sales in three days in 2025; the product didn't change, the audience did.
- Being a creator is the most unfair advantage an entrepreneur can have, because distribution is the moat most founders spend years trying to build.
- Ideas are never the bottleneck for a working creator; time to make all the things you already want to make is the real constraint.
- Hire for adaptability and willingness to learn on the spot, not a tidy job description, because in a fast launch you can't even define the role yet.
- Sell products that look good on camera; a strong visual hook like a landline ringing while an iPhone lights up does the selling for you.
- Run your personal brand and your product brand as one universe but separate pages, so the product can be discovered without you and grown by people who aren't you.
- When you can't fulfill fast, over-communicate: people forgive delays and snafus, they don't forgive silence and being ghosted.
- Use AI to produce what you literally cannot do yourself, not to replicate work you already know how to do well.
- Ask the model to show you your blind spots and assumptions; you are asking it to expose your weaknesses, which is hard to ask a human.
- Tell the model to ask you clarifying questions before it starts a task, and the result is almost always better than sending it off blind.
- Running out of your monthly AI credits is a good litmus test that you're asking hard enough questions; if you never run out, you're not pushing it.
- Once a week, try to make AI do something you're pretty sure it can't; either you learn its edge or you discover a new use case.
- Connectors and MCP integrations turn a chatbot into an operator: crawl nine months of Slack, build a Notion deal tracker, and set it to self-refresh daily at 9am.
- Protect a short list of things you'll never offload to AI; for Cat that's scripts, captions, and any human-toned communication with her team or audience.
- Spend two to three hours a week with no screens, a blank page, and a window, so you don't follow inertia into a place you never meant to go.
- Your gut is a quiet compass when things are right and pokes you from the inside when they're wrong; the longer you suppress it, the more disastrous the correction.
- You are always an expert to someone a few steps behind you, so you can build in public before you've 'made it.'
Show the prototype, then let AI find what you can't see.
WHAT TO LEARN
An audience lets you validate by showing a working prototype instead of asking, and AI earns its keep only when it exposes the blind spots you can't reach yourself.
02What building in public means
- Go to the camera the moment you decide to try something, not when it's finished, so the audience gets a full arc with the mishaps included.
- The conflict, failures, and mistakes are the drama that turns something merely happening into an actual story people follow.
03Where Physical Phones came from
- Don't poll your audience for product ideas; people often can't visualize what they want, so show them a working version and let their reaction validate it.
- The strongest products come from a real personal insight, like wanting a landline to use your phone less, not from a market survey.
04The pressure behind a $100K launch
- The same idea can flop and then win later; what changes is the audience and timing, not the product, so revisit old experiments.
- Sometimes you strike oil, so assume the launch could work and be operationally ready for what fulfilling it actually demands.
05Sourcing, 3PLs and first hires
- Start by calling everyone in your network who has done a piece of it before; the questions you ask reveal what you didn't even know you didn't know.
- Hire for cultural alignment, pace, and willingness to learn on the spot rather than a fixed job description you can't even write yet.
06Separating the brand from the business
- Keep your product inside your content universe but on its own page so it can be discovered without you and grown by people who aren't you.
- Not using your existing distribution to launch a business wastes the single biggest advantage you have as a creator.
07Customer trust, cat calls and email updates
- Over-communicate during long waits with weekly updates so honest that customers might unsubscribe from hearing too much rather than wonder where their order is.
- Share the snafus, delays, and new samples openly, because people forgive problems but never forgive being ghosted.
08Ideating content that converts
- Sell from real scarcity and honesty, bringing people in at the idea stage so you don't risk inventory before demand is proven.
- Favor products that look good on camera; a built-in visual hook does the selling, so push even manufacturers to make it more demonstrable.
09Starting on camera at age 13
- Do the smallest, simplest version of the thing first; your first piece of content can be shot on a phone, not in a studio.
- Modern recommendation algorithms find your audience for you, so stop optimizing keywords and hashtags and just make something genuinely good.
10Taking intentional phone breaks
- Protect a few weekly hours with no screens, a blank page, and a window so you don't follow inertia into a direction you never chose.
- Your gut is a quiet compass that pokes you when things go wrong, and the longer you suppress it the more disastrous the eventual correction.
11Using AI to expose your blind spots
- Aim AI at what you genuinely can't do, asking it to surface your assumptions and blind spots instead of reproducing work you already do well.
- Use meta-prompting so the model questions you before generating, and treat running out of credits as proof you're asking hard enough questions.
12AI on the operations side
- Use connectors to let AI act inside your real tools, like crawling nine months of Slack into a self-refreshing Notion deal tracker that updates daily.
- Keep a clear list of things you'll never offload to AI, such as scripts, captions, and any communication that needs a human tone of voice.
13How creating changed her personally
- The skill set you were shamed for not having can become your greatest asset; staying creative while learning to speak tech is exactly what made the AI-expert niche hers.
- Make content from the things you struggle with; content creation can be the most demanding and rewarding personal-development practice you have.
Terms worth knowing.
- Building in public
- Sharing a product or business from the moment you decide to try it rather than waiting for a finished result, including the failures and mishaps, so the audience experiences a full story arc with a beginning, middle, and end.
- Physical Phones
- Cat Goetze's hardware brand selling Bluetooth landline phones that pair to your cell phone, created to help people spend less time staring at a screen. Its first launch did $120K in pre-sales in three days.
- Pre-order validation
- Proving demand by collecting actual pre-orders or wait-list signups for a product that doesn't exist yet, rather than relying on a poll, so you only commit to inventory after people have paid.
- Operation Flood the Zone
- Cat's seven-week sprint posting three videos a day, roughly 7x her normal output, to drive sales during the holiday launch window of her phones.
- Cat Calls
- Weekly Friday Instagram lives where customers could dial a real phone number, a physical phone would ring, and Cat would answer on speaker to give live production updates and take questions.
- 3PL
- Third-party logistics provider; a warehouse that stores and ships your products to customers on your behalf instead of you fulfilling orders yourself.
- Meta prompting
- Instructing an AI model to question you and ask clarifying questions before it generates anything, so it surfaces your assumptions on the spot instead of you having to challenge its output afterward.
- Connectors / MCP integrations
- Hooks that let an AI model read and act inside the tools you already use, such as Slack, Gmail, Calendar, or Notion, turning a chatbot into something that can run real operational tasks across your stack.
- AI lifestyle creep
- Cat's term for gradually offloading more and more of your workflow to AI until you've handed away parts of the craft you actually enjoy and that define your voice.
- Cringe mountain
- The discomfort and fear of posting early, imperfect content; the idea is that it feels cringey only until you push through and keep going, after which nobody is cringing anymore.
Things they pointed at.
57:20toolClaude (Anthropic)
57:40toolClaude connectors / MCP integrations
57:50toolSlack connector
58:00toolNotion connector
48:20toolChatGPT
48:30toolWhisper voice transcription
57:20toolOpus model (Claude)
57:30toolBolt
57:30toolReplit
41:00productBrick (phone-blocking device)
32:40product4AM Beauty (Jade, co-founder)
52:40channelGary Vaynerchuk (featured Cat's caption writing in his book)
04:00productPhysical Phones (Cat's hardware brand)
04:00productAskCatGPT / Creator College
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“We posted that first video and did a $120,000 in presales in three days.”
00:13
“In the year of our Lord 2026, being a creator is the most unfair advantage that you can possibly have as an entrepreneur.”
07:50
“A lot of times you have to show people what they want, and then they look at it and they go, that is awesome.”
27:20
“What people don't like is when you go silent, when you ghost them.”
33:00
“The best creator entrepreneurs sell products that look good on camera.”
42:20
“I think we underestimate the damage that the little rectangle of sadness does to us on a regular basis.”
47:00
“My goal is to get you to produce something that I literally can't do.”
51:20
“If you're not running out of credits, then you're probably not asking it interesting enough questions.”
58:40
“Crawl through nine months worth of messages, organize them into a database, and include the status of where we left off.”
1:06:00
“What ended up being my greatest insecurity turned into being actually a great asset.”
Where the conversation goes.
02:00 – 08:57denseBuilding in public and audience validation
08:57 – 18:45denseThe $120K launch and the pressure of fulfillment
18:45 – 23:40steadyHiring, sourcing, and brand separation
23:40 – 28:40denseCustomer trust and communication systems
28:40 – 40:14denseContent ideation, formats, and selling on camera
40:14 – 48:02steadyPhone breaks, alignment, and avoiding burnout
48:02 – 56:42denseUsing AI to find blind spots and meta-prompting
56:42 – 1:05:07denseAI for operations and what to never offload
1:05:07 – 1:09:44steadyPersonal evolution and the insecurity behind the AI-expert label
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00We posted that first video and did a $120,000 in presales in three days. Being a creator is the most unfair advantage that you can possibly have as an entrepreneur.
00:09You may know her as AskKatchyBT, an AI expert, likely been dominating your explore pages. She's generated a million dollars in less than one year.
00:18Where did physical phones even come from? I was on this five year long journey to spend less time on my phone. How hard could it possibly be to make a Bluetooth landline phone?
00:27Has content creation changed or evolved you personally? Being an AI expert has made me come face to face with some of my deepest and longest held insecurities about How are you using AI in the business side of things?
00:43But from an operational standpoint It's one thing for me to get up there and be like, yeah, I really think you should use this, thumbs up. But it's another to be like, flip the camera around. I'm gonna show you what Claude is doing on my laptop right now.
00:55I would say a couple of things that have really unlocked a lot has been
01:00First and foremost, I just have to give you your flowers before we do anything else. Because, Kat, I genuinely think you're one of my favorite creators, and it's because from the outside, a lot of people tend to just label you as the AI expert. And I saw that when I was doing my research, all these people were just titling you that way.
01:16But I've been following you for a while, and I think you're actually so brilliant in many different ways from a creative component, but also from a founder led component. And you've been able to mesh this incredibly well, and in such a short period of time, you've had this massive success.
01:30Now I know that's an accumulation of a lot of skills that you've developed over a long period of time, but first and foremost, giving your flowers. And I just wanna say that this moment in time, I have a list internally of creators that I think in ten years from now, if they elected to, could they do a $100,000,000 exit?
01:46Right? Like, at the greatest scale, could a creator like this do it? And I think that that type of persona is gonna be the ones that last.
01:52And, you're you're, like, right on the top of that list. I'm super excited for this conversation. Oh my gosh.
01:56That is such high praise coming from you, June. Thank you so much. That's very kind, and I feel the same way about you.
02:01I appreciate you. And the the thing that you've done so exceptionally well, which is my first question, it's around building in public. And we hear this word get thrown out left and right, but I think that people are getting the wrong, I would say, premise on it a lot of times.
02:16Mhmm. And there's a difference between creatives that are doing this effectively well where it's actually leading to sales in the back end. I wanna ask you first and foremost, what does building in public mean to you?
02:26Yeah. I mean, I think the the simplest definition of it is simply that instead of going to the camera when you have your finished product, whether that's literally a finished physical product or a finished business or a finished product idea, what have you, you're actually going to the camera as soon as you decide that it's something that you wanna try, and you take the audience along for the entire journey, including, very importantly, all of the mishaps and the failures and the mistakes along the way because that kind of conflict is drama, and that's what gets us excited and and turns it from just something happening into an actual story.
02:58So, um, to me, I think great building in public means you're taking your audience on a journey. There's a full arc. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.
03:06And that goes for launching a product. It goes for starting a business. And I think the best creator founders find a way to take that building story and make it feel like a full arc.
03:16The idea of validation with your audience, the one that you've worked so hard to build, the ones that you're ultimately gonna sell to, is often a step that most creators overlook.
03:25Right? The idea that you already have this audience that you've built trust with, just ask them. Right?
03:30Ask them what is it that they're struggling with? What do they ultimately want? Yeah.
03:33And I mistakenly didn't do that in the very beginning, so I thought that a fashion company would be the coolest thing that I could do, and I just thought that everyone would be enjoying it. And I remember when I first asked my audience, I was a little butthurt about it because I said, would you want a fashion company?
03:46And they're like, no. So the yes and no percentages, I actually had quite a big no on my story poll.
03:51Interesting. But then as I started to speak to them, that's when they gave me the idea of the first business, which was simply a PDF guide, right, to help them study better.
03:59And so the idea of validation is imperative. I'm curious to hear from you because I've been watching this unfold in real time. Where did physical phones even come from?
04:06Yeah. Well, validation is tricky too because a lot of times people don't know what they want. And so I kind of wanna warn creator entrepreneurs against just going out and saying like, tell me what you want because people don't I think a lot of times you have to show people what they want, and then they look at it and they go, that is awesome.
04:23So I never asked my audience, hey. If I made, like, a Bluetooth landline phone, would you buy one? No.
04:27What I did do is I had the personal insight of, like, I really wish I could have a landline phone because, where this all came from is I was on this five year long journey to spend less time on my phone.
04:40I'd gotten to a point where I realized that the colors on my phone were more beautiful than the colors in real life and had realized that, like, this is a major problem that needs to change. So I was already getting off the apps and kind of, you know, spending less time, not bringing it with me every time I go to the grocery store or the gym.
04:53And the landline idea came to mind. I was like, I really wish I could go back in time and just have a landline again.
04:59Like, that would be the way to do it. Looked into getting a landline. You gotta get another phone number.
05:05You gotta have this weird plug in the wall in your house that not all apartments have nowadays. And it's like another $100 a month to the phone company that you're already paying that much money to. So I was like, okay.
05:15This is me, like, coming in with my kind of baseline mentality that I approach every idea or challenge with, which is like, how hard could it possibly be to make a Bluetooth landline phone? Because I already have a phone, so connecting it shouldn't actually be that hard.
05:30I have a tech background. Now I have no hardware engineering experience,
05:35but I know how a Bluetooth speaker works. Like, how much more difficult could it possibly be? So I go online and I buy the parts and I make the prototype, and then that is the validation that I take to my audience, is I show them a video of me using it and it working.
05:48And then, to me, that is what the true validation looks like, not to mention, you know, actual preorders and and getting on a wait list. No doubt. There's validation and multiple steps, it's and phenomenal that you're speaking to it because there's a general consensus from, let's say, story polls where you can just ask, especially if you have a bigger audience that tends to help in that regard.
06:05But you're right that a lot of people, if they're not given direction and they don't see it, it's hard for them to visualize it. So then the next layer to that in my head is the content that you curate Mhmm. And not forcing it.
06:15Right? So for me, when I was thinking about what product do I, let's say, go out for, it wasn't necessarily, like, just the story post, but the content, which ones were actually performing the best based on a specific topic or pain point in mind. Yeah.
06:26And what's fascinating that I've heard about your story is that you actually talked about a physical phone, like a landline, more than just one time. So you actually did it initially
06:34at a different response to what had happened more recently. Can you speak to that? Yeah.
06:38Totally. So the first ever prototype of the physical phone, which was, again, just a landline phone that I stuck a Bluetooth antenna in and built the prototype myself in my apartment, was back in 2023.
06:48This was over a year before I ever posted a catchy PT video. And at this point, I was off of social media. I had no followers.
06:55I had no presence. I was, again, really trying to spend less time on my phone, and getting off social media was a big part of that. And so I'd made, like, a really like, a super skeletal Shopify store and was like, f it.
07:08Let me just post a video and see what happens. Um, so I had my buddy come over, refilmed a quick video, and he posted it. Absolutely nothing happened.
07:15I think we maybe got, like, 10 views or something on TikTok, but that was fine. I was like, okay.
07:21That's you know, I I if I had a dime for every time I've just, like, tried a random experiment, I would be a very rich woman. Like, I truly am just constantly trying things. So I had, like, no I took no personal offense to this.
07:34But to your point, it wasn't until a couple of years later, about nine months into doing Catch EPT, when I said, you know, I still have that old physical phone. Like, I bet my audience now would be interested.
07:47And sure enough, that was the second time, and we posted that first video and did a $120,000 in presales in three days. So that's when I knew.
07:56I was like, oh, I think we have something here. And, also, oh, what an unbelievable outsized advantage it is to be a creator as an entrepreneur.
08:05I mean, in the year of our Lord 2026, being an on being a creator is the most unfair advantage that you can possibly have as an entrepreneur.
08:12It's why anytime someone tells me I wanna be an entrepreneur, I'm like, great. Let's talk about how to make you a creator. If you really want that, like, that's the best path I can possibly recommend.
08:21It's a phenomenal point. Distribution is moat.
08:24I I believe the ability for you now to have access to so many people. The iterative feedback is imperative too. Right?
08:30It's not just the initial idea, but it is what do you guys actually want? And when you build in public, you get that. You understand what is it that alright.
08:38Maybe I thought of a design, but you guys are asking me for something different. And preorder is very smart in doing that because you obviously don't commit to something specifically, and now you can actually engineer it to be fitting of it. I'm curious.
08:48In that approach, did you have an idea for what that's going to specifically look like? But then once you did launch it, that people wanted something different and you made the changes for it. So in terms of the actual physical hardware and the aesthetic of what the product looked like, we actually did commit to the visual aesthetic when we did our preorders.
09:05We launched with five SKUs,
09:08and we had to work backwards after we started getting preorders from them and go to the factories and say, okay. We just sold a thousand of these, so who can make these?
09:18Like, literally, we were working backwards. And, you know, for some of the models, it was a, you know, walk in the park because they already had a similar mold and manufacturing. It wasn't that big of a deal.
09:26Other ones, they were like, that phone's really small. It's gonna be hard for us to get all the electrical components to fit into that tiny of a package. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, well, I have a $100,000 of people's money burning a hole in my pocket, so please figure it out.
09:39Thank you.
09:40Literally. It it's the behind the scenes of what it takes to be a creator operator. And, again, that's what I admire about you so much.
09:46It wasn't as if you just sat there with a $100,000, and you're like, alright. Cool. My job is done.
09:50It's like, I actually gotta fulfill upon this promise if I wanna have longevity here. Oh, god. Yeah.
09:54People don't realize how much pressure it can actually be on your shoulders. So take me back to that moment. You have a $100,000.
10:00It's easy to celebrate it, but how does it actually go? Oh, I was not celebrating.
10:05There was no part of that that felt like a celebration because what I knew was if I don't actually now figure this out Yeah. Which by the way, I'm completely alone. The my entire team at this point, I've been doing this for nine months, being a content creator for nine months.
10:18I just had switched over to being a full time content creator maybe four months before this. My only team member was my assistant. Unbelievable.
10:24Who is a total Swiss army knife, mind you. But still, it's just the two of us. And so I'm sitting here feeling genuinely sick to my stomach about, like because the whole plan, June like, the reason why I did the preorder and the waitlist thing was because I go, if 15 people from my audience order a phone, this is gonna make such great content.
10:42I'll buy all the parts from Amazon, film myself making them more of these prototypes, and I'll head over to the local post office, and I'll ship them out to the 15 people over The US who want them.
10:52In no world was I you know, it's like and this is what I've had to learn is like, okay, Catherine. Sometimes you have to assume it's gonna work. And if it works, you need to be prepared for what that looks like.
11:03It's easy to go into it and be like, what are the odds? But sometimes you you will strike oil. And I think the the more reps you do, the more you get into it, the better it goes.
11:11So August through December 2025 was a very stressful time for me. And I think now, speaking of building in public, what I'm building in public and learning right now is, like, how do I change from this mode of I'm gonna do everything?
11:25Or, like, still be at the helm and I'm just gonna delegate small pieces to other people to genuinely finding partners from the get so that I'm not the one constantly
11:36having to orchestrate and figure everything out myself. Because that, I think, is a very fast path to burnout. I wish that everyone that's listening to this right now could repeat exactly what you've just said.
11:45Because that learning curve, if they could save themselves time, I would imagine that that's a big part of it. Meaning, it's good in the beginning to wear all the hats, and it's good to actually understand the process. But as a creator, a lot of us, right, have been doing content creation by ourselves.
12:00As in the ideation, the filming, the editing, the posting, it's us that owns that process. We've never had people to delegate that to, many of us when we're first starting out, especially if you only had an assistant on your staff. It's very difficult.
12:12Then for the very first time, as this gets hard, you're also thinking immediately in your breaks, you're wired that way. Like, I'll figure it out.
12:19Like, let me go and do that. And that was the exact same way. So Mhmm.
12:22I mean, I didn't start off with a physical product. You're ridiculous. It's know.
12:25I picked the most difficult thing. Not just physical product, mind you, but, like, electronics. Like yeah.
12:31Anyways, I'm sorry. Keep going. No.
12:32Don't worry. So I I first started off with this guide, and then I made the decision to do a physical book. Mhmm.
12:37So I did a physical book that we were very grateful that did well, but people didn't see the behind the scenes of trying to source those materials and actually putting together those prototypes and the amount of revisions and iterations that we had to do. It was unbelievably
12:51stressful. You guys have no idea how much thought goes into like, down to every button. I'm sure on the books, you're, like, looking at, like, the binding size and the stitching.
13:01Like, the things you would literally never think about, it's all customizable. It's all you know, you would know better than I do, but it's it's so, so hard. I I look forward to doing software and digital products.
13:12Kat,
13:13the amount of meetings that I was in about paper types Fuck. I didn't even know that was a thing.
13:19I didn't even know that you had multiple different paper types, and people think that customization is a good thing. But when you're the one making all of those decisions and you're concerned about the detail of each, and you have to think about, like, alright, is my audience gonna like this? Am I gonna like it personally?
13:34Because you don't wanna actually develop something that you're not gonna personally use. Right? And so when you're in that process, right, and and again, now we're a bit better off as in we have teams behind us, and we're gonna learn to delegate them.
13:44We'll get to it. But in that moment, because a lot of people listening to this, I bet, are gonna be exactly in our shoes, which was Mhmm. You have to just figure it out.
13:51Right? You're you're there, but it's not like you can just give up in the moment and be like, I'm gonna refund you the $100,000. Like, no.
13:55I I wanna make it happen. Yeah. So what did you actively do to sort your distribution, to be able to even sort the sourcing for it?
14:02Where did you start?
14:03I mean, the very first thing that I did was I called people that I knew who had done similar things before. We're talking, like, I called my brother because my brother did an ecommerce thing one summer.
14:16You know, I called my buddy who, like, maybe worked at a three PL once, I think. Like and and for people who don't know, that's a a third party logistics center. They ship out your products when you order something.
14:26It doesn't come from me. It comes from a warehouse in Texas or whatever. So, like, you know, just literally reaching out into my network and just asking a billion questions.
14:35And in those questions, you learn what you don't even know. Like, you you there's things you don't know that you don't know.
14:42But the real unlock definitely came from when I started to hire people onto the team, people who had done this before, people with a bit of experience. Um, and, you know, the first thing was we needed a project manager who just understood ecommerce and understood fulfillment and how to get stuff out of Asia and into The US to distribute it out to people.
15:00That was the first one. Second person we brought on was a product expert. It was somebody who's worked on hardware and software products and could help refine it and and get it working really, really well.
15:09Of course, involved in all of that as well was finding a logistics partner and an actual manufacturer who could produce the things that we had asked for. And the the whole arc of getting samples out of Asia and giving feedback with the language barrier and everything was, like, a whole learning experience in in and of itself.
15:27Again, these aren't, like, socks or t shirts. You know what I mean? They're, like, very complicated pieces of electronic hardware.
15:34So, yeah, learned a lot. The hardest part too is
15:39they're expensive, and that's something that people don't realize when they're not actually doing it. As in you get the $100,000 influx, right, but it's the immediate of now I'm spending it and all the money is going out.
15:50It's like, I have to make sure that these are good decisions. Yeah. When you were in that moment of, I need to hire these individuals, I've been through the exact same process, what was your filtration process for, okay.
16:00This is the right person to bring on for physical phones? I mean, hiring is without a doubt the hardest part of running a business. I
16:07still to this day I mean, I shouldn't even say still as if I've been doing it for twenty five years. Um, but I I think I was like, as a high achieving person who likes to go really fast Yeah. I'm like, I've done this six times now.
16:19Why am I not perfect? Like, why am I not an expert? Um, it's so hard.
16:24People, human beings are finicky and we're wonderful and weird and and and delightful, but we're strange and we're complicated and emotional. And, like, things are it's just it's it's very hard. So I think, you know, the hiring decisions that I've made in the past and what I will continue to try to do in the future is, you know, first of all, they have to be culturally aligned.
16:41They have to be willing to run, especially in this kind of a situation. I mean, it was very clear.
16:46It was like, we have to ship out 7,000 phones or whatever it is by Christmas. And by the way, we don't have 7,000 phones right now.
16:53So, like, we got a lot of stuff to get through. Um, so, you know, looking for that, like, willingness to move at a certain pace. And then I think just, uh, an adaptability.
17:03That was the other thing is I struggled to put together a job description because I didn't even know what I needed them to do. All I knew was I needed someone who was down to roll up their sleeves and help me, you know, bring what they already knew.
17:14But also, if we woke up one day and I was like, hey. We need to make some updates to the Shopify site and you've never used Shopify before, guess what you're learning today?
17:22Shopify.
17:23You know? And I need people who are gonna say, like, okay. I'm down.
17:26I'm excited about the challenge as opposed to being like, actually, that's not my job description. If that's the attitude, it's there's absolutely no spot for you on this team. I I wish you the best of luck, but there's just we're moving too fast for that.
17:37It's funny. Our experiences are different as in the products that we're selling, but I felt the exact same way in regards to the hiring component. Really?
17:43And it's the hardest part to actually sort in terms of the long term because we're both that mindset. Right? And that's what's very cool about you.
17:50You're not here for the short term moment. It's like, I wanna make sure that if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it right. That means that culturally, you have to be aligned to all those things that you mentioned.
17:57So the reason why I'm setting this picture up for everyone else is because you being a creator operator, I know how tough that actually is. Mhmm. Because what's happening is behind the scenes, you have the pressure of delivering around you said 7,000 phones that you had to that's freaking ridiculous.
18:12Okay. So you have that, then you have all the decisions that you're making. You also have these new hires.
18:16That means that you're doing interviews. That means you're going through the process of bringing them on. You have to ensure all these things are happening, and you still have to prioritize the content.
18:24Yeah. You still have to make sure that your own personal brand doesn't Yep. Get sacrificed in this experience.
18:29You also ended up doing a business page for physical phones as well. Mhmm. And I want you to talk about that separation.
18:35Right? You were smart enough to differentiate the two entities. How did you find that?
18:38Now that you have all the stuff in the back end, how did you even know where to start with the content, especially now with the idea that you have to promote this phone? Yeah. I mean, I I knew that when I started
18:47physical phones, like, the only way that this was going to work is that physical phones was going to have to be one of the big stories on CatchyPT happening at the same time. You weren't gonna get the same Catch EPT, which is kind of like my main page, personal page experience, without knowing that physical phones existed.
19:06These two things were going to be part of the same universe. That being said, to your point, there's a certain level of differentiation, and there's a thousand reasons for that. Chief among them is that you wanna make sure that people can also discover physical phones, in my case, as our product, without necessarily having to come through me.
19:22If there's a separate route and also now I can hire people to help grow this page and give it life with faces and names that aren't they don't look like me because they're not me, that's high leverage because now I don't need to be in two places at once. So there was an incentive to say, like, we're gonna see a lot of cat in the beginning, and then it's slowly gonna taper off.
19:41And, hopefully, one day, you're not even maybe gonna see me at all or or that much. Right? Um, so initially, yes, I was I was pumping into it all the time.
19:49And especially because we started the business, launched the business, or slipped into starting the business or whatever you wanna call it in July 2025 from, uh, the second week of November through the end of the year, um, it was about a seven week period.
20:02And I called my team, and I told them, uh, we are about to enter operation flood the zone. And operation flood the zone is I'm gonna post three videos every day during this time period for seven weeks until the end of the year. And I knew it was gonna be the hardest thing.
20:16For for anybody who doesn't post content on a regular basis, for a bit of context, I was used to posting, uh, two to three videos a week.
20:25And now I was increasing this to three videos per day. So it was literally seven x ing my output. But, you know, it was the Christmas rush, and we had all these phones coming.
20:33And my goal was
20:35I wanted to , meaning that the second all of those phones were delivered in those big 17 or 18 wheeler semi trucks coming out of the the Port Of San Pedro, that we would literally take them off the truck, slip UPS labels on them, and put them right back and send them right back out to the distribution center.
20:52And we did. We hit our goal. So we actually managed to sell through the entire first round of inventory off of the freight from from China.
21:00You've just taken my next question out of my mouth when you're talking about it, and it's so cool because I know the the thought behind it. You said that it's one thing to have a separate business page, but it's another to actually have its own phones in your world. That is so important.
21:14So what I see a lot of creators do is that they'll have this business idea, and they're like, I'm just gonna go and develop a business page, that's all I'm gonna do. I'm just gonna keep pushing it onto there. But does it work that way?
21:22Because the initial influx of the attraction to that product is because of you as the creative, so it has to be integrated into your world. How is that integration tactically for you? Well, a 100%.
21:31And it's if you're not leveraging your own existing platform, then you're giving up the biggest advantage that you have. If you have even a modicum of distribution,
21:41to not be using it to promote your business is genuinely a waste. And I would challenge anybody who's thinking about doing that and ask you, like, why? Mhmm.
21:49Like, really deeply consider why you're thinking about keeping those things so separate. And if the reason is, which I think sometimes it is of, well, I'm a little bit embarrassed because it's not finished yet, or I I just don't wanna do it when it's a 100% ready. It's like then we go back to that conversation about building in public and the fact that actually what audiences appreciate more is the scrappy, messy middle part of the process.
22:12Because guess what? We're all human, and we're all figuring it out. And no matter what, one of the best pieces of advice that I got when I was thinking about starting Catchy PT Way in the beginning was you are an expert to somebody.
22:25You know? And the example is like, you're in LA, and you're going around and you're doing auditions, and you haven't even booked a role yet. You might feel like, well, I can't possibly make a page talking about my audition process yet because I haven't booked anything.
22:37But guess what? To the kid living in their mom's house in Kansas, you already got your ass through school, made it to LA, have figured out where to live.
22:46Like, you're further along in the process than they are. So no matter what, you're always further along than someone else, and also someone's always further along than you. That's life, babe.
22:54So, you know, this is about how can you actually take people along for the part of the journey, because there's gonna be people who admire you for the stuff they haven't done yet, and for everybody else who's there with you, those are gonna be your new friends. That's your new peer group. I've noticed that, actually, most people like learning from people that feel as though they're in the peer respective standpoint.
23:13Yeah. It's not always somebody that's twenty years into the world that you're trying to get into that you wanna learn from because there is the curse of knowledge. Right?
23:19There's this level of, I don't know if I can learn from you because a lot of what you're talking about is so not relevant to my immediate experience. Yeah. But being a few steps ahead,
23:27it does allow that building in public to be so attractive to a mass audience. Now I wanna speak to something because you're talking about the fact that preorders came in, and it was months before the actual product got to them. Yeah.
23:37What were you doing in between in terms of building public? Totally. So
23:40the most important thing to me during that time period of about four to six months, depending on the model of phone, in some cases even longer, was we need to make sure that our customer communication is unbelievably good.
23:56Like, people should be unsubscribing because they're sick of hearing from us, be not, you know, wondering where their phone is. Again, I I felt the the preorder revenue that was sitting in the bank account genuinely felt like a burden.
24:08Like, I was like, we I owe these people so much. And the fact too that it's like for you to put your trust in somebody that you've never met before to just hope that they deliver on their promise of sending you a product six to nine to twelve months from now is so significant.
24:23Not only are these my early adopters, these are my biggest, biggest supporters. And so their trust means the absolute world to me more than anybody else's. And so, tactically, tactically, what we did for that was we did weekly email updates and weekly lives.
24:37So every single week on Friday, we would go live on Instagram. They were called cat calls. You could call a real phone number.
24:43A physical phone would ring, and I would pick it up, and I'd go on speakerphone because all the physical phones have speakerphone. And we'd talk live, and you could ask me any questions you could ask me. What's the status of my order?
24:52How's it going with production? You could ask me we could just chop it up and chat. You know?
24:56And and we did that. And I think that plus the email updates, which were more tactical and being like, literally, here is what's going on. And we would share everything in these email updates.
25:05I mean, we would talk about new samples that we had just received from a different factory. We would talk about delays with our freight forwarder, like, anything. Because what we found is that even if there was a snafu, like a mix up, things were gonna take longer than expected.
25:18As long as you were honest and communicative about what's going on, people actually don't mind. What people don't like is when you go silent, when you when you ghost them.
25:29And so we just did everything in our power to avoid that, which turns out isn't that hard. It just means showing up and being vocal and letting them know what's going on. Where does that come from?
25:38Everything that you do seems so tasteful and it's creative and it's fun, and that's why I think you're so phenomenal. But where does that idea even come from of doing a live weekly
25:47experience where, one, the email makes more sense because it's traditional. But the idea of you going on Instagram and doing these, was it your idea that you just boiled down to, I know what I want from my audience, and this is the best medium to do so? Yeah.
25:58I guess so.
26:00I'm trying to think back to, like, the actual moment of, like, how did it come up? I would I would hate for someone on my team to be like, no. That was my idea.
26:07But, honestly, again, I'm like, that was just just me and Maggie at that point, my assistant. So I'm like, I think, honestly, what was happening is, like, I was just brainstorming. Like, I knew I had to keep people up to date with what was going on.
26:17And at that point, I was a content native founder. Like, this is how I started this whole thing.
26:23So I knew that I wanted to continue to give updates in the form of content. Um, you know, we would also post Reels and TikTok updates and that kind of thing too, but something about the live also just felt very you know, you'd also, like, see the product working, and it's interactive. You can actually call the number on the screen and watch me pick up.
26:39You know? I did get ruthlessly prank called by some teenagers more than once, and I was like like, they really got me too. So there was it was fun.
26:46We had fun with it. You know? Give me a story of that.
26:48What do you mean someone ruthlessly got you? Okay. So there's these girls who call, and they pick up and I or I pick up the phone rather and they go, oh my god.
26:56Is is this Kat from Catchy Beeteen? I'm like, yeah. Hi.
27:00And they're like, oh my god. Like, can you please talk to my mom? She's your biggest fan.
27:05She loves you so much. Like, she would really just she would love it. And I'm like, okay.
27:09Sure. Yeah. No problem.
27:11That'd great. She goes, okay. Okay.
27:12One sec. One sec. I'm gonna get her.
27:13Her name's Donna, by the way. I'm like, okay. Cool.
27:15Oh, wait. Hello? I'm like, hi, Donna.
27:19This is Kat. Who? Uh, Kat from Kat GPT.
27:24From Kat GP what? And I like, I don't know who this woman was. It was probably, like, their school principal or something.
27:31And I it, like, slowly started to process for me that I was like, oh, this woman has no idea who I am. And meanwhile, I'm here like, I'm here as I'll talk to my fan. No problem.
27:40I literally wanted to die a thousand deaths after that. That was rough. I I as you were telling the story, I knew where it was going to go, and I could immediately visualize because you're doing this live.
27:48I'm doing it live. It's so, like, people watching you and you know that this is happening is absolutely hilarious. It makes for the best moments.
27:55It's so diabolical.
27:57Diabolical. Those 13 year old girls or whatever just,
28:01they got me. And to add to it, a beautiful story now that you can tell tell about the idea of physical phones even beginning. What I wanna get to is this part, because the idea of because I know this.
28:12Right? When I think about promoting content for the product, obviously, it has to be aligned to the goodwill that I wanna build with my audience that's gonna serve them. That's obvious.
28:19That's part one. But the actual idea of how do you make a post that's going to convert is not easy. It's like a different skill level that you have to develop.
28:27It's not the same as just going viral. It's the idea of, like, how do I ensure that I can convince somebody to buy this thing while also making sure it doesn't feel like I'm selling out at the same time. Yeah.
28:36So how are you ideating these content ideas? You're doing skits. You're doing talking videos.
28:39Like, where does that come from? Yeah. Well, maybe the best way to explain this is to maybe talk about the first video that I did.
28:46So this is the one that went fairly viral, I think, across platforms. It's done over five
28:51to 8,000,000 views. I don't actually remember off the top of my head. We can you guys can fact check me later on this.
28:55But, essentially, the way that I presented it to my audience, and this is just my taste. There's a 100 ways to do it, is I was like, my name's Kat. This is a prototype that I made.
29:06This is exactly how it works. I have no idea how long I'm gonna be doing this for. But if you're interested, I did put a link in my bio if you wanna preorder one.
29:14So the values that are there are very, very upfront and very honest, but it's also you drop that seed of scarcity to be like which is also coming from a place of truth.
29:24I do not have these right now. I don't know when they'll be ready, and I don't know how long I'll be doing this. Like, this is just an idea.
29:31But I think my tactic has always been this, like, bring people in at the idea stage thing, which is also not like me trying to be tricky or smart. It's like, I don't really wanna spend a lot of time and money Yeah.
29:44Buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of inventory if no one's gonna buy it. So I genuinely do wanna bring this to you at the idea phase because, god forbid, I make the wrong investment. Again, massive, you know, upside and and advantage that I have as a creator.
29:58I can just ask my audience directly first. The last thing I would add to that is just, in our case, it's the function, like, showing it actually working. I think the best creator entrepreneurs sell products that look good on camera.
30:11Yeah. You know, they have some sort of visual hook or they're interesting or they they they, you know, they just look interesting on camera. The physical phone is a it's a ringing telephone, and yet you're seeing an iPhone light up at the same time.
30:23Like, it's a strong visual hook. And I know other content creators like, um, Jade, who's the founder one of the founders of four AM Beauty. She and I, uh, had a phone call once where she was telling me that the way that they had sourced their makeup wipes was what was gonna have the most juice so that when they squeeze it on camera, it would really drip and really capture your attention.
30:43Like, they went back to their manufacturers and said, put more serum into it because, a, makes it a better product, but also because it will sell the product better. I hope Jade won't mind me sharing that story, but I just think the best creator founders, including her, is we're constantly thinking about what is going to not just be a great product, but what also will sell visually on camera.
31:02It's so brilliant. I didn't know that. That's phenomenal.
31:04The idea of you talking about visual hooks bleeds into this idea of formats in general. Right? It's one thing to be honest and crystal clear and showcase the functionality, but there is a beauty behind your content.
31:14It's engineered, I would assume, in terms of the formats. Right? You're thinking about a skit.
31:18Like, why am I doing a skit in this case? Or or why am I doing more of a raw BTS visual of that? Are you thinking of it in that regard to that point of, like, I wanna do these formats, or is it just more of this is the idea that I have?
31:29Like, how do I best envision it? Yeah. I will admit I'm perhaps a lot less
31:34strategic and engineered about this than people might think. I'm going a lot off of vibes.
31:40And when I'm creating videos, even if it's for a business purpose and I'm trying to sell phones, my default is to approach it as an artist, which is to say, what do I feel inspired to make today? In my experience, when I am creating content and it's coming from a place of what am I genuinely excited to make right now, that content always does better than the stuff that I'm just merely trying to follow formula.
32:05I've tried both. It's also, like, more fulfilling for me, so it helps me to feel the longevity and not burn out, but it actually does convert too. Like, you know, I I wish I could sit there and say that I, like, perfectly engineered the first video because I knew it was gonna go viral.
32:19I never know when the video is gonna go viral. I put a lot of effort and work into it in the hopes that it will capture people. And the more reps at that you get, obviously, you get better and better at being like, this part of the video is dragging, so I need to cut it out or pick it up or change the script or what have you.
32:34But, you know, part of my process is often that I'll actually film a video, throw it straight into the editing bay, chop it up, realize what I need to fix, and then the camera's still on the tripod. So I just go back and I do a pickup, and then I throw it right back in. That's more though for, like, the catchy p t talking head videos for physical phones, especially during operation flood the zone, we were just ripping content.
32:53I mean, there were no bad ideas because we had quota to hit. It was, like, three videos a day. Pump them out.
32:58Whatever we can come up with. You know? When we're thinking about content ideation from an artistry standpoint,
33:03I always think of intuition, and Mhmm. That requires a lot of experience. As in, when I first started, I thought I knew what good was, and trust me, I poured a lot of time and energy into that, and it didn't perform well, nor did I even feel fulfilled with it because I just didn't know anything.
33:16Mhmm. But I think your competitive advantage is the fact that you actually started creating content at the age of 13. So the idea of social media, but this scale, of course, is new, but the idea of putting yourself in front of a camera and talking to it was not completely new.
33:31Can you talk to me about the origin of this? Yeah. So first time I ever got in front of a video camera
33:36by my own volitionist, not just being like filmed for a home video, was I grew up when I was very young, we lived in the suburbs of New York City. So we're in New York, and I'm the oldest of four kids, and there was a snow day.
33:47And all the schools were closed. But we also couldn't go to the park because it's freezing outside. You know?
33:52And my poor mother, who's got, you know, like, four kids all under the age of 10, basically, had officially run out of, like, arts and crafts and puzzles and games and ideas, and was just like, I don't know, guys. You know, to keep four kids busy, she was like, here's a camcorder. Go make a movie.
34:07And me, being the oldest, was like, okay. Let's do it.
34:11So I grabbed the camcorder from her, and me and my three siblings proceeded to film the first episode of what would soon become what we called Getzy News at Ten, which is I showed you a little bit of a clip earlier. It was just like the goofiest fake news show about, you know, literally whatever, you know, eight year olds come up with.
34:28And we would run around the house and stuff. But that really kicked off for me a love of being both behind and in front of the camera. You know?
34:37At the time, I wasn't calling it that, but what I was doing in was the very early stages of editing and directing and producing and just speaking on camera as well. And so that ultimately kind of snowballed into then. You know?
34:49There was a video program in my high school that I started to get involved with, and I did some, you know, video reporting. And then in college, I had a YouTube channel. So I've kind of always been in some way, shape, or form both in front of and behind the camera in some capacity.
35:04Again, there was no strategy here. There was no way for me to know that this was gonna end up turning into something that would catapult me into an entrepreneurial career later on. TikTok.
35:14This is all pre TikTok, pre Instagram, even early I guess, not pre YouTube, but very, very early YouTube. And I was just always following what was genuinely most fun to me.
35:25And it's why I encourage people who do love the arts and who do love making movies and making TV and making content to try social media because it is the most democratized version of the art form. And the best part is nowadays, these recommendation algorithms do all of the heavy lifting for you.
35:46Meaning, if you create something even remotely good, the algorithm will figure out who out there wants to see your content. So you no longer have to think about, well, who what keywords do I need to enter, or how do I need to hashtag this to make sure it gets in front of the right audience?
36:00Just focus on making something that you think is great. And if anybody else agrees with you, these magical algorithms will go out in the world, they'll find them, and they'll bring them right to your doorstep.
36:09What do your siblings think about everything that you've been able to develop from production? You went from that production to now what you're doing today. How do they feel about it?
36:17They're very supportive. Yeah. They're my best friends.
36:19I I adore them. They're my favorite people in the whole world, and, yeah, they're they're all ex extremely supportive. And,
36:26yeah, I think they they're they're super proud of me, and I'm super proud of them too in their own respects and their own careers. Yeah. It's fascinating because even when I was growing up, the idea of content creation was not ever engineered in that way either for me.
36:38Like, I didn't think that it was gonna develop into a business. I didn't think that it would develop into even a career. It was just a skill that I saw that was potentially viable, and I just took that on.
36:48It was only over time that my family got a chance to understand it that I also got a chance to understand it too. Right? Because when you're in the midst of doing, you get so many reps.
36:55You start to actually understand the game of, like, oh, like, this feels very fulfilling when I create about these different topics, and I'm starting to actually understand, as you said it, the different formats based on, let's say, all of my experience as well. Now for those people that are listening to this that wanna take that first step and maybe they do have a creative soul inside of them, what are you recommending for them to actually get their foot in the door here and build some momentum?
37:15Honestly, my my recommendation would be, and I know it's gonna sound silly, but if you haven't already,
37:20film a video. Mhmm. You know?
37:22And make it like my I definitely have this approach, which I think I inherited from, um, going to school in in Silicon Valley, which is like, do the smallest, simplest, most basic version of the thing that you want to do.
37:35Do not overcomplicate this. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you need a big, beautiful studio in order to produce your first piece of content. The first piece of content I ever filmed was on my iPhone 16 Pro Max in the office where I had my day job at the time.
37:47You know what I mean? Like, you don't need fancy equipment to do these things. Just rip something and be willing to throw it out there even if it's, like, early and it's bad.
37:59It's so funny how many people I talk to who wanna grab coffee because they're like, you know, I I'm thinking about making content, and and I just wanna get your thoughts. And, of course, you know, for friends, I'll do it, we'll sit down. And I ask them, I say, you have a video sitting in your drafts folder right now, don't you?
38:13And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, what would it take for you to post it right now? And they're the like, the fear that just starts emanating off of them, you can tell right away.
38:22But then you ask them the core question of, like, well, why not? What exactly are you waiting for? And and there's often no other answer other than just, like, it's scary and, like, maybe low key embarrassing if it flops.
38:32But, you know, you gotta climb cringe mountain. That's kind of the whole game here is it's gonna be cringey until you make it, and then no one's gonna be cringing anymore.
38:42But I think the other thing too is, like, if you're doing this from the right place, which hopefully people who are thinking about making content and getting out into the world are, you really shouldn't be doing it for anyone other than yourself, in my opinion. I'd be curious of your take on this actually.
38:57Because obviously, it can be great to to build a business and whatnot. But, like, I think when it comes from a place of, like, personal expression and genuine excitement and curiosity and interest, like, you're doing it because filming it and and shooting it and editing it and posting it feels good and exciting and the potential of what could happen.
39:15It doesn't have to be perfect. You're not performing for anybody else. The idea of alignment is imperative.
39:21I think if any creator is going to have longevity, it has to be a priority of yours. But what I've also learned is that you evolve as a human being. So there's gonna be moments in which you feel really good and moments that you don't feel so good, and it's imperative that you have some form of, I would say, a ritual or a practice that you go to to see if you're actually aligned to the work in front of you.
39:39Because if you don't, right, you're gonna go ahead and I mean, I I find myself in these circumstances quite a bit. As in the business carries you a different way, right, and the team starts to have different expectations for you, and you just go, you just go, you just go, you just go. There's not even a time for you to be like, am I actually enjoying this thing?
39:54Right? Yes. Is there something that you're doing actively to ask yourself those questions to ensure that you're remaining aligned to the work that you do?
40:01I spend
40:02at least at least two to three hours every week completely away from Internet, from screens, laptop closed, phone away, with a blank piece of paper and a pen looking out a window.
40:15Very cool. I have to do this, June. Like, for my sanity, but also more importantly, so I don't end up waking up one day and realizing that I've just followed the inertia in a certain direction.
40:26But it's not actually where I even wanted to go in the first place. I mean, it's a lucky problem to have, you would think, but it's actually extremely traumatic to spend nine to twelve months on a project and then realize you ended up in a place that you never even meant to go.
40:41I can share a brief story on this, which is, um, in, uh, the summer of twenty twenty two, I was unceremoniously laid off from my fancy tech job.
40:49Um, and I was very disgruntled, um, and very spiteful. And at the time, I said, well, if these guys can start a startup, then so can I?
40:58You know? And so I was like, well, I'm gonna, you know, start a VC backed b to b SaaS company. Um, and and, you know, having come from Stanford, I had this idea instilled in my head that if you're gonna start a company, that's the only kind of company that exists.
41:11You know? So I was like, okay. Well, what's my, like, b two b marketplace VC backable idea?
41:16And at the time, the idea was Uber for returns. Okay?
41:20Okay. So you buy something online. You don't like it.
41:23You gotta take it back, but you don't have time to go to the store. Pay someone, comes pick it up, drop it off for you. Whatever.
41:27That was the idea. Now did I have any experience in ecommerce, reverse logistics, fulfillment, even coding and and the b to c b to b SaaS part of it.
41:38The the software experience in terms of working at a software company, yes. But all those other things, no. So there was zero founder market fit.
41:46But I was so I I just you know, I got so excited about this idea and excited about the idea of being an entrepreneur. And I had nobody in my ear telling me that there's a thousand ways that you can be a founder that are perfectly legitimate.
41:58And so I just assumed that that was the only direction to go. And it wasn't until nine months later after I had been flying back and forth from New York to San Francisco, basically on bended knee begging investors to give me money because I was running out of my life savings to live off of that I was like, what am I doing?
42:14Like, I don't actually want to be running this biz when I really thought about what it would mean for this business to be successful, I was like, this doesn't even sound exciting to me. What am I doing here?
42:24You know? And when I kinda had that come to Jesus moment, that was when I took a massive step back and was like, okay.
42:32How do I set myself up so that in the future, I'm not making it more difficult for future me to do what's right for her? And locking myself into contracts and taking on investor money and doing that stuff now makes it more difficult for future me to do what's right for her.
42:47I gotta always have that that really strong line of communication with my gut because you always know. Like, your gut actually knows.
42:57We're born with like a very lucky primordial compass inside of us that's like very quiet when things are going right. But when things are going wrong and you know it, it's like poking you from the inside. And you can suppress it for a long time, but the longer you wait, the more dramatic and disastrous it is when you finally do ultimately listen to it.
43:14And it'll manifest in, like, you know, nightmares or stomachaches, like the body keeps the score kind of stuff. What I've learned is that
43:20the sooner I can just admit whatever my gut is saying Mhmm. And and make my life look aligned with what my gut is telling me to do, the better off I am and the more the faster I approach and and accelerate that flow state. And to me, can hear my gut when I'm quiet looking out a window with a piece of paper in my hand.
43:39Being quiet and intentional with your own brain space is so important, and I've realized that. Now what's fascinating though is that us as creators, our lives are tending to be on our phones or researching or being on our computers, and it can distract us in many different ways. A personal story of mine is I used to listen to music in the shower all the time.
43:58And that was a big thing for me. Like, I got I look I used to have these specific Bluetooth speakers that I would utilize. That was a time that I looked forward to.
44:05I I enjoy music. But then over time, I start to realize to myself, I'm listening to music while I'm in the shower, but I'm also listening to music while I'm training. I'm also listening to music while I'm commuting.
44:14If I'm not doing that, I'm researching or I'm on calls or I'm creating content, and then your phone and tech can become a very, very, very big distraction more than it is a tool, and that's a balance that I've had to learn recently. Yeah. You never have time to hear your own thoughts.
44:27So how do you deal with that? Like, as a creator right now, they're in there, and they're they're so obsessed about this crafts. They're, like, on their phones trying it.
44:33Right? They're watching other creators. They're trying to engage with them.
44:36They're trying to learn. But how do you set boundaries effectively with this device? Well, I mean, listen.
44:40I think about it this way. It's like, if you wanna find a way to convince yourself that this is a good use of your time to hear your own thoughts, just remember that you will actually come out of a quiet hour long session with a piece of paper and a pen with a stronger sense of direction than if you were to just charge through and not hear your own your own thoughts for the next seven days straight.
45:00I think that that's not the only reason why you should do it. But if people are kind of charging this path of feeling like I think we live in a culture that's constantly telling us you need to be producing, you need to be productive, and maximizing every single minute out of every day.
45:13I try to fight that as much as I can in my own lived life because I'm here for a good time, not a long time. Like, I wanna actually enjoy the ride and the process of building what I'm building.
45:22You know, in the famous words of Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around for a while, you could miss it. And even in the past year and a half since Catcher Beauty started, I feel like it's moved so fast.
45:31And I've like there have been moments where I'm like, oh, I almost missed that or I have missed that. You know? And so, yeah, I think, like, getting quiet and journaling, you know, I've kept a journal since around the same time I started filming, so, like, 13 years old.
45:44So I actually have a running track record, a running list to see what the inside of my brain looked like at every age in my life. I'm embarrassed to say how much of it is just about boys. Luckily, we've gotten off that track in the last couple of years, but, you know, middle school, high school there, it got a little testy.
45:59But, you know, it's also an honest accounting of, like, these are the things that matter to you as you're young, and then, you know, you go throughout life and you get more experience and you start to know yourself a little bit better too. I've had to learn that, and I'll be fully honest. I used to convince myself that I was doing research, and I would find myself doomscrolling.
46:15That's the point blank honest truth for how I envisioned my first two, three years. I was spending way too much time on my phone, and it's easy as creators to get to get into that flow.
46:24It's cool that you're journaling and doing reflective practices. I've just recently and this isn't sponsored by any stretch of the imagination, but with the brick, I I don't know if you've seen that. Yeah.
46:33Are there any other tools that you're utilizing to curate those boundaries, or is it more of a personal routine standpoint that you're going through this? Definitely personal routine. I do, of course, have to shout out physical phones.
46:44Like, I I I'm so drinking my own Kool Aid here because my physical phone in my house genuinely keeps me off of my phone. Because it means if someone needs to reach me, I will find out because there's a two analog phones in my house that are gonna start blaring and ringing if someone really needs to talk to me. And then I pick it up and I find out it's my grandpa or my assistant, and we can get to chatting on whatever.
47:05But if it's really that important, someone will give me a call. So no phones in the bedroom. I have a white rotary physical phone on my bedside table.
47:13Very cool. And anytime someone needs to reach me or by the way, let's say I'm in bed. It's 10:30PM.
47:18I'm about to go to sleep, and I just remembered I have to text someone something before tomorrow. Don't I have to get up and go across the room. I pick it up.
47:24I press star. It activates Siri, and I say, send a text message to mom saying happy birthday or whatever it is. And then it's like, got it.
47:32Sent. I'm like, okay. Dock it.
47:33But I didn't have to look at a screen. And I think we underestimate the damage that does to us on a regular basis.
47:40You know? A 100.
47:42This just makes me feel as though the physical phone is my solution too, so I'm gonna start using it in my bed. Well, I brought you one. So Phenomenal that I'm gonna be utilizing it.
47:50Obviously, because you're known for AI, I wanna do something a little bit different, though. I wanna give a bit of a case study of my own, and I just wanna hear your opinion on how I'm utilizing it. And, obviously, it's probably music to your ears.
48:01You're gonna challenge me in all different ways. I'm excited work. I'm pumped.
48:04But I wanna walk you through a little bit of how I have been using it and how it's evolved over time. So initially, when I first started utilizing AI, it was the simple use case of, can you help me generate some ideas, or can you help me understand what formats are available to me, or can you help me script this? But the unique case there was that I knew what good was.
48:22I actually knew the outcome that I wanted, and I knew that I wasn't getting it. And so that threw me off a lot. And I thought, why is everyone talking about this new AI craze when I'm asking it to produce me content?
48:32It's nowhere near the level that I need it at. So two things that I've learned, and I wanna speak to it. I'm curious to hear your opinions on them.
48:39One is the ability to understand context, and the second one is understanding my own line of thought and questioning those assumptions. So the first one in terms of context, what I've done is I use Whisper a lot now today, but basically, at that time with Chatchippity, I was just doing ginormous audio files, just ginormous.
48:55And I would spend about like an hour or forty five minutes, and I would just speak to all of the things that I think about my content. So that meant how was I speaking, like what do I like to talk about, what are some topics that have worked well for me in the past, What have I researched from other creatives? Or what do I actually know about my own skill sets that maybe I prefer different types of messages versus others because I'm more confident in it?
49:15So I basically would do these whole brain dumps, I would make sure I updated that every single week, and that kinda built this brand guide for me. So every single week, I would attach this PDF to whatever, let's say, channel. At that time, was Chat Me Tea, but now it's with project files.
49:27But ultimately, that's how I was trying to gain context. I've learned over time that's helped me a ton, not even just because of my own sake, but because I can get that brand guide and send it to my team, and the team can utilize it as well with their own projects respectively. So that's one way.
49:41The other way that I'm doing it is challenging my line of thought, and it's made me a lot of money, and I'll explain. So when I first started with Creator College and we launched it, my content promoting it used the word creator a lot. Of course, because I thought that was the ICP.
49:54Of course, I'm gonna use that terminology. But my content didn't perform as well, and because I recognized these patterns, I started to note it for myself, and I got really frustrated. Right?
50:03Because I'm like, every single time that I have to talk about this thing, nobody cares about it, and I feel like it's very defeating. Right? So then I utilized, again, Whisper at that time to try and understand, okay, where are my assumptions?
50:13I So just basically listed everything I thought about the word creator, and I was like, this is why it should work. We obviously have created college. Here's what we offer, we did all that.
50:21And then I added a prompt at the end, and I said, can you go and read this for me and help me understand assumptions or blind spots about my specific target avatar that I might be mistaken at this moment in time, and it can help me fix my line of thinking. That has completely transformed the way I view my content. So what it told me was that people don't wake up thinking they wanna become creators, and I'm like, wait.
50:41Why? Like, I'm in the world of being a creator, so everyone that I come across want to be creators. But, like, the general public, they don't wake up and think of the cost of not being online.
50:50They think about the cost of being online. They think about the fear of visibility. Right.
50:54Right? They they fear this judgment from people that they love. Judging me soon.
50:57That was Claude, actually. Yeah. It was Claude.
51:00But, ultimately, it did that, and for me, it changed everything. So then I started changing the way that I would angle towards Creative College or towards what I do in in general, which is personal branding, and I started talking about psychology. I started talking about communication.
51:13I started talking about business and mindset, and those are all angles that people are more familiarized with, and then inside of it, I'm like, personal branding is a great solution for you, and credit college skyrocketed as a result. But that's how I've been utilizing AI now to constantly challenge my own beliefs. Those are two use cases, but I'm curious if you can challenge me.
51:30What I'm I'm
51:32gonna applaud you because I think what you did that so many people miss in these conversations with, you know, these AI chatbots or asking themselves, what is AI even good for? Is you went into it assuming that you were missing something, or you went you went into it saying, my goal is not to get you to produce something that I already know how to do.
51:54My goal is to get you to produce something that I literally can't do. And so by saying, show me my blind spots, show me my assumptions, you're asking it to expose your vulnerabilities and your weaknesses, which is a hard thing to ask to another human being or a chatbot or whatever.
52:10You're asking somebody to point out what you're missing, But that is very much the kind of back and forth conversation and the mirroring of your existing thoughts that I think these tools are are really powerful at. They are just tools at the end of the day.
52:24They're taking your word salad and flipping it and turning it into world's word salad right back at you. But if at the end of the day, that reverse word salad registers something meaningful for you that you can then take and bring to your business that's productive, then I'm all for it. You know what I mean?
52:39Um, and it sounds like that's that's the exact impact that it had on you. The other one that I use all the time is ask me questions.
52:48So I'll I'll give it a I'll give it an a project or an initiative, something that I wanted to get started to cook on. And then I'll say, you know, if you have any doubts or before you get started, ask me any follow-up questions you need in order clarify my intent before you get started on this task. Um, and almost always, it will come back to me with great follow-up or clarifying questions that will indeed lead to a better result than if I had just sent it on its merry way.
53:12Is this meta prompting that you're speaking to? Oh, good. My research has come through.
53:17I'm very grateful. This is where I'm meeting, like, on on the spot to understand it. Because something that I've learned as well, and please correct me if I'm wrong about this, but something when I first started using Claude, is different from my use case with ChatGPT, is that Claude, at the period that I was using it, was actually spending my tokens quite,
53:33I would say, rapidly. Like, even within the first few hours of demanding work, it was running it out. But that meta prompting saved me a lot because Oh, interesting.
53:40Instead of me getting the generation from Claude and then challenging my own thoughts to it, which would make it recall all of that memory, instead, it just challenged me on the spot to make sure. So the prop that I was utilizing was that. It was before you generate anything for me, please question me.
53:55Yeah. And it must have been your content then that I learned that from now that I'm thinking about it. And so thank you for that.
53:59But the idea of saving tokens, is that something that also creatives should be thinking about? Because I use Claw quite a bit in my workflow for business and also with my content creation process in the way that I've just taught you about. But, you know, I have, like, the highest more premium offer for it, but before I'd had that, it was like I was running out of that.
54:15Is are there any tips around that in terms of making sure that your memory or your use case is kind of efficiently utilized? Yeah. Totally.
54:21I mean, I think
54:22what I would encourage people more is, like, if you're not on the max plan, like, Claude, for example, you should be aiming to run out of your credits. Like, running out of your credits on the pro plan or the $20 or $25 a month plan, whatever it is, is like a pretty good litmus test to show that you're, like, using it right.
54:38That's correct. Because if you're not running out of credits, then you're probably not asking it interesting enough questions. You're not pushing it to really think.
54:45You're asking it things that are too easy, or you're just not using it enough. You know, what I always encourage people to do is at least once a week.
54:53If you can once a day, try to get AI to do something that you're like, I'm pretty sure it can't do this.
54:59Perfect. That's the perfect thing you should ask for it to do. Because you wanna just basically like we all together right now as a society are kind of finding the edge of what these tools can do, and nobody knows.
55:11Like, every day, new people are discovering new use cases of like, oh, I just found out that this thing actually does work this way if you just prompt it this way or use this skill and what have you. And like, the way that people are sharing this information right now, by the way, is like on social media. There is no one guidebook, you know, and so you have to just learn by doing.
55:30So I always encourage people, if you can every day or every week try to get it to do something that you're not sure if it can actually pull off, you're gonna learn something. Either it's not gonna work, but also it might, or you might figure out that you could you didn't get it to work initially, but you had to tweak something in the process, and then you got the result you were looking for, which has now made you a better user of that tool and allows you to then share that with your community and your team.
55:53That's so cool. That completely changes my perspective on maxing out credits. I always thought that I was doing it wrong, but that's a very good sign that I was probably challenging its use cases in the early onsets.
56:03That's phenomenal.
56:04My question is is this next one of and it speaks to your brilliance. And I I don't know if you can just tell me it's intuition based, maybe it is. But when you're teaching about AI, you're also using your own use cases in your business.
56:17So it's like this mix of you're building in public while not losing out on the AI component. It's so smart. Again, I don't know if it's just like you wake up and you're like, oh, yeah.
56:24Based on my intuition, I think this is the right thing to do. But I've seen it in your content. You're always talking about how you're integrating AI as a founder, which probably makes you also a very good speaker to these problems because you're actually living that experience.
56:36How are you using AI in the business side of things? And then we talked about from the content side, but from an operational standpoint that people can take away. Yeah.
56:42Totally. Well, I'll also just say too that, like, the reason that I do that is because I'm very big on show, don't tell. Yeah.
56:48Me too. It's one thing for me to get up there and be like, yeah. I really think you should use this, thumbs up, but it's another to be like, flip the camera around.
56:56I'm gonna show you what Claudia's doing on my laptop right now as we speak or Bolt or Replit or ChatGPT or whatever it is. There's just a new level of credibility that comes with that. So I'm super, super, super, super big on show, don't tell.
57:10In terms of how we are using AI every every single day in the business, I would say a couple of things that have really unlocked a lot for me personally recently and our operations as a team has been connectors. Like, this is also can be called using MCP integrations or essentially just using your different tools that you're already using in your day to day work life, whether it's calendar or Gmail or Slack, and plugging that in with an AI model like Opus with Claude or or ChatGPT.
57:40My favorite use case that I like to talk about is, um, on the ChatGPT media side. So when we do sponsored posts and a brand comes to us and wants to work together, um, and we are able to align on a deal, that whole conversation between me and my management team who sells ads against ChatGPT content happens in a Slack channel.
57:57You can imagine how many conversations are constantly happening back and forth because they'll bring something to me when it's a little lukewarm. We're not sure. Maybe it's early stages.
58:04Other times, we're, like, all the way at the end, and we're trying to get deliverables set up. So it's just a total about all these different deals. And what I did not have, but I really wanted was a dashboard tracker of all the different prospective deals.
58:19I already had one from my team about, you know, deals that were in progress, but, like, show me the full arc of everything we've even thought about doing. And the amount of time it would take to go in and, you know, comb through all those conversations was ungodly.
58:32That was never even on the table. But I was able to use the Slack connector and the Notion connector with Claude to say, okay, Claude. This is the Slack channel where all these conversations are happening.
58:43I want you to crawl through nine months worth of messages and back and forth conversations, figure out all of the different deals that were ever proposed, organize them into a database, and include the status of where we left off on it. Did it get declined?
58:57Did we approve it? Is it just kind of, like, left out floating in the ether? How much, of course, was it for?
59:02What date was it? And attach in one of those columns a link back to the latest Slack thread so that if I wanna double up and be like, what? What was this conversation?
59:10I can click on it and go back. And it did that. That was a task that took about eight to ten minutes to run.
59:15And when it was done, not only was it like this perfect afterward of everything I had wanted to see, but I then set up a daily recurring task where at 9AM every day, it goes back into the newest messages in the Slack channel, sees any updates, and then refreshes it.
59:29So no matter what, when I go to that Notion page, within a twenty four hour window, it is fully up to date with, you know, whatever the back and forth conversations are on any prospective deal. I'm learning so much right now. This is phenomenal.
59:41So you were talking about how today on social media, this is where a lot of people are learning the knowledge or the the new advanced tech that's coming out with AI. But what's brilliant about it is when you can challenge it for your own use cases, I think that's the most you'll ever learn. Right?
59:54So it's like one thing to hear the information, but to also execute it on my front. It's something that I've been daily practicing. It's like, what is the next thing that I can push this limit to?
1:00:01But there's another part to this where I have to be careful of what I really do enjoy, my own work process and flow, that I don't lose it. Yeah.
1:00:10And I'm calling this AI lifestyle creep. It might be a term that's already used, or I don't know if I just made that up on the spot, but whatever the case may be. I've noticed that.
1:00:19Like, for example, a long time ago, probably three years ago, when I first launched my physical book, Gary Vee had put me in his book. He came out with a book, and he put me in his book, and the thing that he shouted me out for was how I write my captions.
1:00:34And he was saying that it was so clever how I was writing these big story led captions and how I was promoting my product in the back end of those even if the content had nothing to do with it. And I didn't think of it that way as it was a skill, but it was something that Gary Vee announced.
1:00:46I was like, holy cow. Like, that's cool. Like, I didn't even think of it that way.
1:00:48But there's a love for caption writing even so. There's other parts of the workflow that I enjoy that I just started asking AI for because it's just quicker. Like, it was just faster.
1:00:57Right? And it was like, oh my gosh. Now that it has all these contexts, and I used to just send it all the caption that wrote in the last three months.
1:01:02I was like, oh my and it now it's my Toyota voice. That I'm starting to announce it. Hey.
1:01:06Like, can you write me a caption for this video that I don't think twice about? I just started posting it. Right?
1:01:09Yeah. But then I started to really question my own ethics or my own alignment with it as well.
1:01:15It's like, what do I wanna keep hold of and control? So my question for you is, yes, AI can do a lot, but are there things that you wanna still maintain in terms of a manual standpoint? A 100%.
1:01:24A 100%. I think and by the way, everybody should be thinking about the things that they don't wanna give up to AI, not just creatives or content creators. The best example is, like, every single time I talk to an entrepreneur who finds out that I'm a creator, they're like, I have this great SaaS product for you.
1:01:43It will scrape all of your content and it'll look at all the competitors in your niche and tell you a thousand video ideas. You've probably been pitched this a 100 times, June. And I always look at these people and I go, if you think that I have ever suffered from a lack of ideas on what to make next, then you are so willfully mistaken about what my largest pain point is.
1:02:04I am overflowing with ideas. My problem is I don't have enough time to make all the things I wanna make.
1:02:10So, yes, it's just like people underestimate what the hardest part about being content creators in my opinion. Besides the point, yes, the things that I keep for myself, it's a very long list.
1:02:20It's, you know, writing back and forth communications with my team. Honestly, I think if communications are long enough that they need to be offloaded to a chatbot, then, like, you need to work on, like, your tact and communications with your team because it shouldn't be taking that long. Writing scripts, writing captions.
1:02:38Yeah. These are all super important. Anything kind of public facing like that.
1:02:42For more tactical things, automations, email updates, those kinds of things, I I feel a little bit less pressure about it.
1:02:49Look. We wanna send out an email to everyone on physical phones knowing that the packages are on track for June. It doesn't need to have my spice and my in order to get that done.
1:02:58And so it's like, as long as the tactical information is there. But for anything that's coming from a human tone of voice, I also, like, have been now because I use these tools so much, I am cursed with an extremely strong AIBS meter where I can tell the second something is written by Chachi B.
1:03:13T. Or Claude if they haven't prompted it well. There's there's a whole spectrum in terms of, like, you straight up one shotted something out of one of these models to, like, you used it as a partner.
1:03:22I do not claim to know when every single thing was written anywhere on that spectrum, but the, like, very obvious tells on this side of the spectrum, I can spot as as I'm sure many other people can at this point, and it's exhausting. It makes me want to tune out.
1:03:37I've just noticed how mentally I start to immediately tune out of whatever I'm reading or hearing because it's video scripts too. I'll hear someone say it, and I'm just like, ugh, Ciaci Biji wrote this whole thing, you know, that I just tune out, and I don't want people to tune out of out of my content either. I love it.
1:03:53I feel like didn't talk to you for hours.
1:03:55There's so many things that I'm still in the midst of battling. I I know I wanna get it out, but there's this one final question that I must ask you because I believe that this is where we we have a lot of commonality. We love creativity.
1:04:07We are obsessed with it. It's not, again, as if we're just doing this for money's sake nor even just vanity's sake. There's that level where it's a byproduct of the work that we get to do, but in the same breath, we love it because of the personal development that comes with it.
1:04:21And that's something that I always found in myself that I was actually very insecure. I was very shy. I was very introverted in many different ways that actually challenged my way of reaching my potential.
1:04:33But content creation and personal branding has been the best personal development journey that I've ever been a part of. It's forced me to be introspective. It's forced me to find my own feelings, and my girlfriend has been a huge attribution to that, by the way.
1:04:45But content creation has made me sit there and force myself to think, alright. What is it that I'm struggling with, and where can I make content from it, which I've never done before? Potentially, a lot of people else out there in the world can attribute the same feelings to.
1:04:57My last question for you is this. Has content creation changed or evolved you personally as well, and in what ways has it helped you? I think
1:05:06being an, quote, unquote, AI expert or AI content creator has made me come face to face with some of my deepest and longest held insecurities about not having gone directly into tech after graduating from Stanford.
1:05:23Like I said, you know, I grew up making videos. I was always an artsy kid, and that was my form of self expression. Was very entrepreneurial, but very, very creative.
1:05:32And I was introduced to the idea of Silicon Valley and STEM for the first time when I moved to California at the age of 18. And very suddenly, I remember feeling the shift of, like, oh, you're not learning computer science?
1:05:47Like, you're not gonna go into tech? Like, why? What are you gonna do with that degree?
1:05:51Like, those little voices that you just hear over and over and over again. You know what? Between the ages of 18 and 22, your whole brain chemistry is changing, and I think it really left an imprint on my life.
1:06:01It's you know, we talk about now social media and being on camera as a skill. When I had my YouTube channel in college, nobody was saying that's a skill. They were saying, that girl is wasting her time.
1:06:13She's at Stanford. She should be cranking out CS credits and learning how to code and going and talking with all these VCs. But instead, she's literally bopping around filming her her and her friends dancing in fountains, like, on the weekends.
1:06:26Like, what an utter waste of time. And I don't mean to, like, position myself as, like, the victim of other random passersby comments on me. Like but I think at the time and over time, those comments have left an imprint.
1:06:37Being made to feel less than because I was took a fuzzy major and not a a techy major. And it caused me to question for the first time in my life if I was really smart and if I deserved to be at Stanford. So that kind of, like, self doubt, I think, carried with me all throughout the early stages of my career.
1:06:56Um, I went into corporate. I always had one foot in the media world, one foot in the tech world, but it never I I think even to this day, hasn't really truly fully left. So when I first started making videos about AI, you can imagine how it felt, all those feelings coming to the surface when people are like, oh, she's an AI expert.
1:07:13You know? And I'm like, wait.
1:07:15No. I'm actually not a tech person. And and if you think that I should have a machine learning engineering degree, like, I I actually don't.
1:07:22You should probably not listen to me. But people seem to really be liking this. And I think I'm helping people and, in fact, realizing that unknowingly, I had been building up a strength ever since I landed on Stanford's campus, learning how to understand these concepts without necessarily morphing into this archetype of somebody who lives and breathes and eats and sleeps all tech all the time by, like, staying in touch with my humanity and my creative side and not giving up on the artist within me while also learning to live in this world and speak their language, I had developed this skill set that not a lot of other people had.
1:07:59So when I did get back in front of the camera, I was able to talk about this new wave of technology that was all hitting us at the same time in a way that at the time no one else was talking about. And so what ended up being my greatest insecurity turned into being actually a great asset, And that's not to say it has ever, you know, a 100% gone away.
1:08:17It's something I still deal with and think through all the time. But, um, I don't think if I if I hadn't had that experience, I don't even know if I would have started CAT GPT. I think in many ways, created it because I want other people to have somebody to explain tech to them in a way that doesn't make them feel stupid the way that oftentimes my peers and being at Stanford made me feel stupid because I wasn't a CS major.
1:08:43You're incredible. There there's a level to everything that you're talking about where so I came in, I told you this before off camera, but you are genuinely one of my favorite creators to watch, and this just proved exactly why because there is an actual substance behind the work that you do and you're so there's a mix of you that's so fun and intuitive and curious and creative, but also incredibly smart, like, behind the scenes, right, whether it was the degrees or not.
1:09:07It was the idea that like, when I watch a contest, there's such an operative standpoint that makes me so confident that you're gonna keep on crushing in many different levels. So I thank you so much for your time, Kat. This was a moment for me to even find weaknesses in my own operation because I'm learning from you.
1:09:22I'm, like, thinking about it. I'm like, oh, I should be doing that. So I'm sure that we're gonna hopefully have another round two of this in the future.
1:09:27Definitely. With that being said, Cath, thank you so much for your time, and this was Creator Unplugged. Thank you so much.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open front-loads the number — $120,000 in pre-sales in three days — then names the thesis that earns it: being a creator is the most unfair advantage an entrepreneur can have. Everything that follows is Cat Goetze showing the receipts behind both claims, from a Bluetooth landline she prototyped in her apartment to the exact Claude workflows running her content and her operations.
How they asked for the click.
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