E17: Building and Growing a Tech Startup with Writing.io’s Kevin Fleming

In this episode, multiple startup founder Kevin Fleming talks about ways to mitigate the risks involved in being reliant on one platform, how to run a successful email marketing campaign, and how the business and tech world will change in 2023.

• Building a search engine to challenge Google.
• The drawbacks of ChatGPT and OpenAI’s models.
• How to monetize a website by building an audience.
• How to mitigate the risks involved in being too reliant on one platform.
• How to run a successful email marketing campaign.
• Building startups and tech companies.
• How business and tech markets are going to change in 2023.
• The future of electric vehicles.

• Walnut St Labs
• DuckDuckGo
• OpenAI
• My First Million Podcast
• Writing.io
• ConvertKit
• NerdWallet
• Contena
• Miss Excel
• Warmup Inbox
• E5: From Dog Walking to Multi-Million Dollar Exit with Mike Benson
• Mailgun
• Curotec

• LinkedIn

• Brian Dainis on Linktree

• 12:22 – “So you first use VR and you’re like this is unbelievable I’m never going to play a game on a 2D screen again, this is going to put all of those, they’re going to be gone, then about 3 months go by and you’re back to playing games on your television or on a 2D screen and I think that’s because it’s super magical, to begin with but as time goes by you start to discover things that are actually better in 2D or better at least for now and I think with a lot of these AI models when you first use them or if you spend just a couple minutes using them which most people do because they see a link on Twitter or something and go click and put a prompt in and go oh my god it can write this whole essay but as you use them more or at least as we’ve used them more I think that you start to see through some of the magic.”
• 41:12 – “People built their whole business around a certain platform that they don’t control and then when that platform changes or that company makes a change you can lose your whole business overnight so and again that’s kind of what you see happening with YouTube creators and they’re so beholden by the algorithm and everything now.”
• 53:25 – “Just writing emails to people is such a great way to get your first customers and that’s what we’ve done time and time again and it works and I think people for some reason they’re always chasing, I can understand why because that’s what you read about all the time like how to market on Snapchat, how to market on Instagram blablabla but just writing a couple of emails to the right people can have an amazing effect.”
• 1:10:27 – “We’ve had essentially free money for a decade now when you’re borrowing money at 4 percent and everything’s growing at 10 percent, you’re making 6 percent a year on nothing so I think it was really easy to see a good return regardless of where you invested your money because there was free money and now that that’s being as you pointed out to do a venture deal now it makes a lot less sense where you can plow it into a fund where you’re going to get a 10 percent or could go higher, could be 15 percent return on something that’s backed by real collateral.”
• 1:15:54 – “And the self-driving, we all love to get in a car with a 15 and a half or a 16-year-old and put them at the wheel and let them drive for the first time that’s always the most relaxing calm wonderful experience and that appears to be what Tesla has built with their self-driving, now I’m sure over time it will get better but again I just see this tidal wave of competition coming in and it will be very interesting to see what happens. If they actually pull it off think about it truck drivers are gone, taxi and uber are gone, the last mile is gone, all these businesses possibly over a trillion dollars of market capitalization just turn into a fraction of that where you’re just producing vehicles and these vehicles just become autonomous systems.”