Kirill Zubovsky

Kirill Zubovsky built a working niche directory in 15 minutes for about $2 in AI credits.

The demo is a local service finder for emergency plumbers in Boise, Idaho, on emergencylocalservices.com. A visitor can open a business website from a listing or start a call. The project was saved and sent to production so emergencylocalservices.com would be ready to check after the episode. Open source means everybody can use the build without having to rebuild it. The work took 15 minutes and about $2 in AI credits. The same directory can go on 10 different domains, and findlocalhomeservices.com was another domain bought during the conversation.

A single finished directory can be reused across many

Kirill Zubovsky says to tell AI never to delete files. Once in a while it goes on a wild goose chase, adds 20 files you never needed, and deletes the 20 you actually wanted, so hard boundaries have to sit around the work.

For now, the more magical a directory build should be, the more work still has to go in by hand. The more that goes into a document, the better AI is at creating the directory. Eventually the documents should be split into sections, because AI is better at making one section at a time than an entire document at once. Test-driven development is worth using because then it will hopefully not fail as often as it normally fails. He has talked with a lot of friends about what h

Kirill Zubovsky says a directory built in Replit, Lovable, or Lindy can launch, and the builder will not get exactly what they want. The result is not necessarily the original need, so the practical move is to accept an imperfect first version and keep going with what is already in hand. When the build is close enough, somebody can help with the rest, and an offer to help stands.

Replit is apparently getting much better, and the tools will get better. Cursor is working on a lot, and his own projects are built on top of Cursor. A single request still does not produce a finished product, though the work is getting there. On camera the build produced a file structure for how the components wou

Kirill Zubovsky found that emailing a short script pulled from Google Analytics overwhelmed customers. A lot of people already have Google Analytics installed, and nobody knows how to use it anymore because it got so complicated.

The first pitch was to dig into a customer's Google Analytics, turn it into a little script of what they need to do, and email it so they get a quick read on the website. He tested the emails on a couple dozen people. The material was good, and people were overwhelmed with information.

The next offer is actionable items they can do to improve growth and customer retention. Forget what they already know about the analytics. Just tell them what they can do to do bet

Kirill Zubovsky's simple local agentic workflow is several AIs on his own computer that split one job and decide who handles each part. He wanted a setup he can visually manipulate, one that does exactly what he wants. Building it turned out both difficult and not difficult.

He states what he is trying to do and then says go. The AIs talk to each other locally and sort out who is responsible for what. A project manager does the writing and the directing. A senior engineer writes the plan. A junior engineer does the building. The picture he gives is to tell the computer to do stuff, go for a hike, and check in from a phone.

Systems already do similar work for Fortune 500 companies. He passe

Kirill Zubovsky says Grok voice mode reads a markdown document out loud in your ears. There is no branching yet where it can go make the document and tell you when it is ready, so the voice reply is the document itself.

In the standalone Grok app, voice mode talks, listens, and answers with the phone in a pocket. It now waits a few seconds before treating a pause as the end of a turn. If it jumps in, you can interrupt it right back and it lets you keep talking. The reverse is the real snag. Ask it to create a markdown document and it starts spelling the file out loud. A document might run six pages long. Interrupt the reading and generation stops, because it is literally spelling out what i

A big as YouTube. In 10 years, every day you'll open Smash Notes and you'll check what is new from your favorite podcasters, and your followers. Then, instead of listening to 20 hours of podcasts, you will get the gist in just a few minutes.

Why is every highlight on Smash Notes structured as a question?

First of all, if a question could be asked about a podcast segment, that means someone out there is looking for it, and by providing an answer you are adding value to that person.

Second, each segment on Smash Notes is a stand-alone piece of content that can be indexed and searched for on Google. This gives a podcast tremendous distribution power, many-times beyond traditional podcast players.

The best time to create Smash Notes for your episode is immediately after your episode is published. As a podcast author, you probably know exactly what was the most interesting about your show, and now you can highlight the best bits right away.

Before YouTube, videos had to be downloaded and consumed in big monolithic blocks, but now, pretty much every bit of video content is available in short snippets.

In the same way, every podcast on Smash Notes is chunked, divided in section, with immediately playable audio for each individual section.

Each section is usually a question that was asked on the episode, something that provides immediate value to the listeners.

For podcasters, Smash Notes is a tool to sliced their episodes into little bits that could be interesting to different audiences and then share it with people in both audio and text.

For listeners, its way to experience a lot of different podcasts at the same time without spending hours on end during it.

Being married to your co-founder could be pretty beneficial as no one else around you would support and encourage you as much as they will.

Marketplace business model demands a cheap, repeatable process, where anyone in the marketplace is able to provide more or less equal value, and no supplier has significant power to sway the customers their way. High end labor on the other hand requires one-on-one attention, and customizations.

As a result, marketplaces focus on repeatable volume, charging a small fee of a very large number of transactions.

Meanwhile a custom design agency charges a premium, works with only a few customers, but delivers high quality work.

If the product is something people actually want, they would be willing to pay you for it, sight unseen. Putting up a paywall is a great test to verify whether your product is actually needed.

When Scoutzie team first wanted to experiment with a paid service, Kirill was really unsure if it would work. Meanwhile, Jennifer put up a splash page and asked for money.

Lo and behold, someone paid $5,000 within a day. They sent money before they had any assurances that the product would work because the service was in such demand.

Raise all the money you can get. You never know what happens tomorrow. When your company is early, it's a dark horse, but once you get some traction, there are actual numbers to evaluate, and those numbers might not look so hot. It's better to have more money, even with extra dilution, than to run out of money and to shut down.

Team Scoutzie met with Anthony Armendariz early on in their respective careers, and quickly became friends. At some point, one of the leads acquired through Scoutzie hired Anthony to work on a longer project. In order to take on the new workload, Anthony partnered up with his designer wife Nataly, and from there, Funsize was born.

Before Scoutzie had an upload button, Kirill Zubovsky emailed about 500 designers, said he was building a showcase for mobile design, and asked them to join. A couple of hundred said yes. Designers sent zip files by email and he loaded the files into the database by hand. The bet was mobile, when few designers would touch phones and the web still felt like the safe skill. One designer wrote that Twitter was full of Scoutzie, that he and his wife did only mobile work, and that the portfolios were strong and international, just as Dribbble was starting to show phone design. Zubovsky recruited the users, and saw the demand, before Scoutzie could accept the files on its own.

Automating your work could be helpful if you do it right, and extremely distracting and time consuming if you do not.

Simply automating everything will be taxing on the team and potentially useless for the business. What you want to do instead is to automate from underneath yourself, one bit at a time.

Keep doing what you are normally doing and keep the business going, don't commit to any large changes. But at the same time, start removing pieces of manual work, replacing them with automation, one bit at a time.

This way you can both, automate your work in the long-run, and not miss out on current business by doing too much, too soon.

With Smash Notes, you can repurpose old podcast episodes into new sharable content. Make a few snippets and share them individually, or create highlights for the entire episodes and turn it into an insightful blog post.

Once you turn monolithic audio into moldable text, opportunities to share this text are unbound!

Roberto Gibbons Gomez of The Expeditioners told Geek at Sea that his family lives in a one-bedroom condo in Whistler, which surprises people. For them it is a castle. They had been living in an Airstream and in tents, so they do not need much room. A home, he said, is what you do in the space, not how big it is. The one-bedroom was also the practical choice: staying there covered the rent on a three-bedroom somewhere else. Host Kirill Zubovsky recorded the conversation in that condo and called it one of the happier homes he knew.