The AI Launch Playbook - Build Communities, Not Just Products (w/ Tim Haldorsson) | DN #15

Hi, and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today, you're joining me for a chat with Tim. Tim is a founder focused on AI at Web3. Hi, Tim. Lovely to have you. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I look forward to a great chat. I love people that build things, and I'm always interested how people ended up being founder. How did that journey go for you? So I moved to Portugal eight years ago. And at the beginning, I was actually working for Google here to have like their marketing support in Portugal. And then what happened was I was starting freelancing on the side. So that was about eight years ago. And then after some time, then the freelancing kind of grew and grew and I got more clients on the freelancing side. And at the end of it, it kind of turned into two jobs. I was like freelancer and then I was working full time at the other job. And then I was like, maybe it's time now to test the role of like launching a company. And then quite quickly it took off. I got in one person, then I got in another person and then kind of like scaled it. And then over the last seven years, which has been a wild journey in both in the, initially in the crypto space and then lately now in the AI space on just building great teams that execute and that and how to grow and and bootstrap different companies. So I think maybe that's like started off as a freelancer consultant and then grew it into first an agency and now in a studio in the AI space. Very interesting. And how did growth go? You probably said you started as a freelancer. How many people are you today? So today we're 30, about 30 people working full time. We have an office in Lisbon with around 15 people working from the Lisbon office and then we have a small office in South Africa and then a few people across Europe that we're working with. Interesting and I think you're focused very strongly on the digital space. Which topics drew you in and what do you find interesting? And so initially, like, I've always been like a tech, I love tech, like all different types of tech. And, and initially, like I got into crypto a bit before that almost, almost nine. Yeah, like 2017, I got into like the crypto, the fintech space. And I've always been like the person that I like, I always buy like different gadgets, and I'm always into everything tech and want to test it and explore it. So then afterwards, it kind of like quite naturally was like, those were the types of companies I like to work with and help with their growth campaigns, PR and everything. So kind of tech kind of like was the perfect fit for what I like to do myself and what I like to do, basically. And I think you did a lot of marketing, especially in the Web3 space early and now for other spaces. And maybe you could say what is really different and what is very helpful, what can be adapted from that time that you spent in that space? Yeah. So when it comes to marketing and growth, it comes down to, especially in the Web3 space or AI space, of course, it's always like software or digital products. So everything comes down to like the same, let's say storytelling or the same, I don't the same digital way of doing marketing. One thing that we've been doing, especially over the last last couple of years, has been focused around like IRL events. We host a lot of afterworks, both in the Web3 space, but also in the AI space. So a lot of it is very similar and a lot of it is like slightly unique in the in the ai space because then it's more like it's it's more like you have like a software like a sus product or more subscriptions while crypto is more speculative and a little bit more uh in that direction yeah that is quite quite interesting and i think sadly the the crypto space has gotten a really bad name these days well it started very i think on very solid, strong ideas. A lot of the latest things have not gone really well. What I think is also now becoming more important and I think we can learn a lot there from what happened in Web3 or how it was done in Web3 is community building. So creating a brand, creating a community around your SaaS product. How important do you think that is and how would something like that be approached what can be done yeah you can see like that the the ai space has kind of taken over x or former twitter and you can see like a lot of the similar community building and the community style has been kind of like what what made the biggest ai labs grow very very fast so if because you can see like that a lot of it aligns around like um in the crypto space it aligned around like being investors in something but in in the ai space it more aligns around being the user of certain models certain tools certain agents um but it all comes down to the same thing which is like can you get people to to be part of like a community a group which is the most powerful powerful marketing and i think one thing that stands out especially in the ai space what we easy is like doing things in the real world is something I personally am a big fan of like because it it adds like more depth into the community so let's say like this you like in in in different um in different events across the world like in they have some big AI events in Paris then you can have like a community event where you can kind of like bring let's say a hundred people from your together in a venue, you have like an after work or something. So I think that is something that's become even more important as everything in AI is just happening on X and so quickly. So I think that that's a way to really stand out. I also, I think this is really an interesting phenomenon. I've been in machine learning before it became LLMs and before GPT 3.5 and 4. And there's always been a small group of researchers who were very active on X, were exchanging on technical topics very actively and discussing all these things. And this has just become really, really big. So this is, I think, just the evolution of a subculture into mainstream. But what I also find, and it's very interesting, I've lately got an invite to Café Cursor, for example. So Cursor has locals in different cities hosting meetups. And I find that very interesting because this is something I would have kind of situated in the Web3 space. And now the big AI companies are borrowing this community building. What's your take on this and how is it also in Lisbon regarding this? Yeah. So Cafe Cursor, they actually have one coming up here in Lisbon soon as well. and so we have hosted quite a lot of events at our office in Lisbon so we have like after work we have one coming up with Claude as well and then we have had a few in the past with different AI tools or AI labs so I definitely see that as like one part because usually when you have an IRL event or something like that maybe you have a hundred people coming in person but then you probably have like a hundred thousand people seeing the same content online so it's like you do something person but then the the let's say the ripple effect or the waves on across like x or across linkedin across socials it's like a hundred x or even a thousand x more exposure from it so so it's definitely something you see the big ai labs doubling down on and anthropic are going all in on like their ambassadors and then we have some other ones of the big labs that are also doubling down on different types of community events and meetups and kind of like taking that approach. It's also interesting that you say you do a lot at your company. How did you start that? And why did you start hosting? And what was the main driver behind it? Is it more customer driven so that the customer asked you to do it? Is it for customer acquisition? What's the focus behind it? Yeah. So initially it was just, you know, So when you run an agency, then right now in the world, you can see how quickly everything with AI is moving. And you see on X, like everybody's talking about like the future agency would be one person with 100 agents out there. And internally, I was like, oh, my God, this is moving so quickly. I want our team and everybody to like master it. So initially, we just started with like on the Thursdays after work, we had that internal our team. And I was like, okay, so this Thursday, everybody in Lisbon, you need to come to our office. We are going to host a builder evening. So we started like two and then we do it till seven. So initially it was just our own team that we're building for like a couple of hours after work. And it was so fun. So then we started to invite some partners to it. We don't really have any like customers that comes out of it. So it has more been just, we want to see who the coolest builders are. And then we invite like other builders in Lisbon and then it kind of grew and grew. And now we have our latest ones. We have like maybe a hundred people coming to our office. And then we have a few hundred people that apply. So we can just curate and see like, we just want to have the best builders coming to our events. So it's quite interesting to see. And then we want to see, we often do like demos. So people can come and let's say five people do five minutes demos each diving into their workflows or to their, like how they structured their agents or how they built it or how they customized it. So we had quite a few of them and then we asked them to submit before so that they can come like with really good demos. And it has been like, I've learned a lot from them. So it was mostly like that part we want to learn and build with fellow AI builders here in Lisbon. That sounds really awesome. And if you now were talking to like an early stage founder who says, okay, I want saying community is really something I need around my product. How would somebody start? What's the first steps to do? Yeah. I think one thing like, Like I've been thinking a lot about like in the AI world, if you're a founder, what comes first and what you should prioritize first? Like, because there's different schools of thought here. And should you go all in on product first or should you go all in on community first? When do you need to go in what direction? I think right now when it's so easy to build a product, a key thing is to focus on building distribution and a community first. And then you have that as like an audience that you can co-build your product together with your community, kind of. Like you have a few testers that can help you to give early on feedback. So I think early on, the key is to focus on community first and like you have a product idea and then focus on community. It could be like X spaces where you have like different events there. You can host local, like to get together, like in your city, if you're in a big city in Europe, or even a small city, you put up an event on meetup.com or on Luma. And then you just say, hey, AI after work with builders, you will instantly get like 20, 30 builders in your city to come together. And then you can just like brainstorm and pitch some ideas to them. So the key would be to find like a good way to find 20, 30 builders that you want to have, like in a part of your product journey and focus on giving value to them and getting them involved. afterwards you can focus on like the product roadmap because it also shifts so quickly right nowadays it's quite like how quickly like a product roadmap can can shift yeah i i think it's an it's a really interesting take right but then it's really and you kind of answered it already first you can also just join a meetup probably and talk to people but i think like starting starting out, building a community or growing an audience or something. It's not easy. It's a journey. It takes time. And I'm just thinking loudly, I wonder if, I mean, these days it's really easy to launch something. So maybe you can just launch something, talk about it, see if it resonates and use it to build a community. You could also try to produce some content, launch a newsletter, share, just share something, try to build thought leadership in a certain space. What do you think? You could also just organize a meetup, as you said, but what do you think is easiest to do? And what has the most value long term, if you look at the different options? So I remember when I started off early on, I pitched, like I was writing a lot of thought leadership for leading publications and i i had like some ideas early on and then i was just sent it in as like as a guest post or like a guest article that's a quite powerful way to build up a brand um if i would start from from the beginning like a few super easy things it's like almost all the biggest ai labs got their own certifications you can have like anthropic open ai all of them have like their own courses that you can do online where you then get like certified saying that you're an claude code certified builder or something like so i would start like if you want to build an ai go into all of the biggest ai labs and take their courses i think that's the very good way to start like they have free academies that are takes like a few hours to just do them so that you get like some ideas of understanding what's happening Then afterwards, like send in some guest posts to good publications. There you can focus on like more open ended like questions like here is where AI is heading or like more like more things that are toward leadership or building up that part. Then you start posting them on X and on LinkedIn probably. Join local meetups in your city and start networking with them and see like, hey, can I take you out for a coffee or something? and then kind of like start building that part and then over time like the most valuable things will be your personal brand because that's also what's standing out in the age of um in the age of ai because it's so easy to create and you see so much content all over the place and then what stands out is like who wrote that content or like who's the person behind it yeah i think this this This is also interesting, right? I think two years ago, three years ago now, it was clear that you would have written it or maybe Ghostwriter. These days it's very different because we have all these autonomous agents or LLMs that can produce content at a very high quality, I would say from a writing style, I would say that LLMs are at least as good as I am. I wrote a PhD a few years ago. I would consider myself somebody who spent a lot of time getting into writing. And I can say that the quality of the finally formulated text, for example, if I gave an LLM bullet points and I had me write a text and the LLM write the text. I would not be better. So this is really interesting, but, but the truth is they are just really good at writing texts and it's super hard to beat it. Yeah. You even saw, uh, New York times did a study. I think it was, they had, they did with 80, a little bit more than 80,000 readers on their website. They showed them two articles. So one was an AI article that AI written and the other one was a human written article and then they did a blind test with 80 000 people on their platform and the majority preferred the AI content the AI article got a higher rating than the human written content and that was with 80 plus 80 000 people on on new york times so it's getting quite very very good um like easy things like if you have written a lot in the past And I think that this is like on X, if you're on X or on LinkedIn, you can build a skill on Claude with every single post that you have done in the past. And then you can have that like as a brainstorming partner. Like, so for example, I have done on X, I think I've done 32,000 posts by hand. I don't write with AI. And then afterwards I downloaded the whole history of 32,000 posts that I've done. and then I uploaded it as a skill on Claude. And then you can kind of like get your writing style to be your brainstorming partner where you kind of like brainstorm together with it. So it's super powerful and how if you have the right skills or you have written a lot in the past that it gets so much more like concise and aligned with your style so quickly. And as I said, especially for longer, like i think x is also special in a sense that you write very short texts so it's a lot more about intuition people don't really care that much about spelling mistakes about like perfection of wording is not as important i would say as elsewhere so like you can be very scrappy and it will not hurt your your tweet at all that's very different if you write a long form article of any Like the moment you step out of the short form content, getting from having the content that goes into something to having a final long document is a very painful process for a human, I would say. At least it is for me. It's not fun. And it's incredibly easy to get it at high quality for an LLM. So I wouldn't vote to not use LLMs for that because I just think it's so much better to be honest, following from content. As long as you have the ideas in your mind and you want it written out, probably these days you're better off. How is it with video? What's your experience? How fast is video progressing in that space? Yeah. So I think Eleven Labs is the leaders. um they built some really cool cool tools and there's many different ones out there um i've been testing a few of them um especially for some like animations which is because i remember i i i tried to do those like when i think it was three years ago when first those like when you could clone your face or you could clone like different things i remember i tried that out quite early and now i tested it quite recently and it's almost identical to a person it's incredible like how how those like the cloning tools and and that have been working with humans for creating like ads or for creating like animations it's quite um it's it's quite incredible what it can do I think almost everybody in the design are using AI in different parts. I don't think we're there where AI has the full taste of a human, but AI can still do what the junior intern would do and all of the preparation, and then you do the final edits of it to add the human touch to it and the human taste to it so i think it's it it can replace a lot of like junior and a lot of like the entry work like the but i think you still like need to edit it as a human to to make to give it a taste and then and the end of things but you see on x like almost every day different new labs and studios are publishing incredible um ads and videos that are all a generated that is like you're like this would have cost like millions two years to create this one with a Hollywood style production studio two million to create the video and now it's just a few prompts in an agent. And it seems to be I've been thinking about this a lot lately and currently I feel a lot like these LLMs or AI in general is just a very large amplifier like people who were very good before can just be 10x more productive. They will still be very critical, as you said, with taste, and look a lot for quality and try to get really good results. And I think that the gap just gets a lot larger between average or people who are not so much into it, maybe then they don't use it as much. And like the people who are really outstanding already, For them, it's just a significant amplifier. So I feel the gap just gets larger. It's like you multiply everybody by a factor of 10. But like the worst people obviously still don't reach the level of the best beforehand, even with Z. And the best people are the most that are able to use it the most just can amplify themselves so much. What's your thought on that? So I actually back in 2023, so when when ChatGDP first came out, I went all in on it. And we actually launched like an academy that was focused on like marketing with ChatGDP back then. But back then we were too early. And it was like, it wasn't ready for prime time, the AI content, because it still came across as like slop and it was a little bit too early. And then I think I've had late last year, beginning of this year, I was like, hallelujah. It was some moment like I saw something and I was like, this is 10 times as good as any, what a human would have done. And over the last year, I've had like so many all hands internally within our team, which is like every single person needs to be AI native and AI first. Because otherwise we are going to be outcompeted by another team that are all AI native and AI first. And it kind of becomes like that. Like if you, you're not competing against AI, but you're competing against other people with AI. and if you and then on a personal level i feel like it's it's the it's the wave that you can't afford to to miss as a founder or as a as a leader in a company because if you miss it then you kind of are almost permanently going to be behind because the gap is just getting wider and wider and it's going to turn into probably like a bit more of a winner takes a larger share the pie which is a scary thought but it's also the the best creators and the best the best writer can create so much more so it will be like a higher standard of like of all creations and all ads and all campaigns as well so but it's a scary thing and you don't you don't want to be on the on the on the on the beach sitting and waiting waiting out this way like you want to be in the middle of the wave and or being in the front of the wave and kind of like getting there because otherwise it's a scary thought to be left behind in the AI wave. Yeah and I think especially in the professional service space it's clear that this amplification is also true for companies if you look at for example in consulting I was in consulting a few years ago and if I look at it it's very clear that the really large consultancy firms and they were a bit heavy on this and they have the money to build the internal tooling to leverage this 100%. Like if you're McKinsey or BCG or somebody like that, you will build internal tooling, you will amplify or get rid of the juniors and you will take larger market shares because smaller companies just cannot compete with your internal tooling. And you will basically get a lot better while the other ones will fight to be in that space at all. And then you have something, I've seen it on X lately. It was, I think, Ambri Kapati posted about it, that the large scale difference seems to be that the people who are very good already, they are now using cloud code and they are completely AI built. And there are a lot of people who aren't really. They've used GPT 3.5 on OpenAI in the free tier, but it was okayish. And they didn't get the same effect that these people like me or you get that use these tools every day, who use the latest models and who are in the front. And there the gap just gets larger. And I think that's not only true on a personal level. I think that's also true on a business level. Like the people that are AI-pilled and that are pushing the topic do the same in the companies that they are at. And the other ones are falling behind. And I think this will, as you said, I think that will lead, especially in the professional service sector, to a trend of more consolidation. because smaller companies will get out-competed more. And if you want to stay in front, you have to be all in on it. You need to use the latest tools and stay in front, I think. And then you have an opportunity at hand. But if you don't do it sitting at the beach, I would bet, you will get bought by one of the bigger ones probably at one point in time. But you will not be able to make it on your own. That's my thought if you're not already. Yeah. No, like I know like a lot of people that are a little bit, like some people, if you're, if you're anti AI and then like, cause a lot of people are like, you saw some standards, like if you, when they were doing polling or polling on the AI favorability and it had turned like so much negative, like, so the majority of old people were very very negative to ai and then you go to x or you go to yeah x here and then everybody's super happy about ai that like the the influencers and the creators and and the founders that are all all talking with each other because for them it's like a so it it it seems like it's creating like almost like two different worlds one that is like the ai ai pilled and ai first world and then there's like the rest of the world that is a little bit unsure of of what's going to happen with AI, but being in service businesses, that's why we went all in on like building AI systems for marketing and business development teams where you can basically, you can get so much more out of talented people that are working with AI's. then is like one person has like five interns or five assistants that that that works around the clock and if you work in in claw you can set up recurring tasks that brief you every morning you can connect it with all other data sources and you can kind of build it into like you can see like the what was the jarvis in iron man like where you have like you're connected to everything and you can get all the data instantly like competitor research you can get this you can get that and And you can, like, when a person really is AI native and fully has embraced it, then it's so powerful what you can do. Because you become almost like a one-man army if done right. And when you have, like, the experience and skills to tread carefully with it. But now you can also see, like, it's scary times with, like, the latest AI models. And I saw over the last days when the US government called in all of the big banks and warned about like the impact of the latest AI models and that it's going to like shake up the... It's also a little bit scary with the leading models from the top companies. Yeah, it's always hard to say. I mean, I don't know how good they really are. I know they want to go public this year, so they have to create hype. So until the models are out, I'm always at least a little bit skeptical on what they have. If they had AGI, they wouldn't have to go public because they obviously could just print money. They would find a way. So why would they want to go public? That's always the point. So they don't have that yet. And the question is how good are the models really that they have compared to what we have today? I think for us normal people, it doesn't really matter because the models are good enough to do a lot of stuff. And that's also a question I would be very interested in. If you look at the work you are doing, how much of this work can AI agents already support that run autonomously? autonomously and where's the gap? Like where does the human step in again or what is the human part and what can be taken over by models? Yeah. So it's very different from role to role, but how I would view it and how what we see the trends are going is, so previously, let's say, if you're a marketing team or if you work with like an agency, then you have, let's say, one PR manager. one social media manager one content creator manager and maybe you have one head of marketing so you have four people or maybe five people in to have a full stack marketing team now you can do almost that with one like swiss army knife marketeer plus four agents one pr agent one social media agent one agent in all directions and then let's say you're so you take four people into one and you can produce almost the same or if not better results because you have like the with it of course it's that's where we are heading and where we almost are today uh on on the ai side there because you can one person can achieve so much more in those areas i think the key parts where like we are not with with agents is like of course relationships which is core of any service business is like you and me sitting here having like going out for like steaks for a dinner with the team in Lisbon for example we do lots of dinners with clients and so on of course those human touch points or the meetings that's kind of where Eja cannot compete or Eja cannot like Eja can enhance it a little bit by like having a voice like a recording of the meetings and so on and then you can plug that into the rest of the systems um but a lot of the the human parts like the relationship building in those parts you can't we can't really do um and then but when it comes to most of like the content outreach connections strategy then you can have like the brainstorming partner with the ai and that we already see today you can also like a lot of things that previously took too much time to do manually you can have an agent doing so for example setting up let's say you run a company and you want to have like here are 10 of our competitors can you monitor if they launch some new campaigns or if they launch some new pr if they do some interviews if they attend some events you could do that before as well but it would take like one person to spend lots of time diving into it but now you can just have like a competitor research agent that's let's say briefs you every friday with like a few pdfs around like what all of your competitors doing and your market is doing so it's it's a combination of the two like ai allows you to do a lot of things that previously took too much time but adds a lot of value and then on top of that like you can achieve much more with with with less basically when with with good custom customized agents that is built on on a track record like for example if if we have written by hand over the last six seven years as an agency 700 press releases by hand if we feed 700 press releases into a skill in claude then it can be very good because we have like a 600 track track record and then they can do a lot of it for example so it's like a like a mix of the two like you can do new things that previously was um like that are very valuable like every friday you get a brief from 10 competitors perfect you would never do that before because it's too costly or it's too this or that but now you can do it then there are other things where you can achieve much more with less so like one person become like a 10x marketeer or a 5x marketeer and i would put it in but then the human part is like the like dinners and i think those become even more important like being in person having events together catching up or across across the world so i would put it in those categories Yeah, I think this is really interesting. And I also believe, especially in the service business, the human-human relationship is extremely important when you get the project. So in the sales funnel and also in the delivery of the project, obviously, so in the finalization. And what do you think, if I were a small startup in the SaaS space, how far can I get with AI agents right now? If I work alone as a founder, when should I start reaching out to an agency? Where's like the value? Yeah. Yeah. So when it goes to solo founders, then it depends, like, are you coming out of college and this is your first business? Then it's a quite different thing compared to if you have worked for a big, let's say, consulting company or a VC firm and have like a understanding of business. so it really depends like if you're an like an early person coming into to it like in in like i usually like to say that you have to you have to learn it first before you should hire somebody to do it so like you you need to understand marketing first on on like at least a surface level so that you can kind of like understand what what you need before you hire anybody else to do it because otherwise like you don't know if it's working you don't learn from it and i think you should review like a working with an agency or a partner as and as a learning experience as well if you're just starting off and so i think early on i think if you're just starting off like i think the best and there's multiple agencies out there that have uploaded their whole skill libraries to github for free we have put out tons and tons of resources ourselves as well just for if you on on our website almost all other marketing agencies and consulting firms and like our ai studio we have so much free content online where you get just a pdf where you can dive into learning everything step by step. And on GitHub, you can see tons and tons of AI studios that have published their whole directories with all of their internal skills on GitHub for free. So I would probably start in that direction to just get things going. So find some good libraries and download those skills and just kick it off yourself and see where it goes at the beginning. I also believe a lot in learning by doing in the beginning and then bringing in other people. When you have at least done it once, like having done the zero to one once, I think is a lot of value. I think maybe to finish with Lisbon, it's one of the most active hubs and still evolving, I think a lot. And you have hosted, I think, Crypto AI conference and multiple other events in Lisbon. What do you think is special about the city and as an emerging space? So I come from Gothenburg in Sweden and I remember looking at this. So in Sweden there is 300 cloudy days a year and then it's like 50 sunny days. Lisbon is the other way around. So So it's 300 sunny days in Lisbon and 50 rainy days. So it's like, so Lisbon sits like at the center of Europe in some way, because it's very easy to fly all across Europe, all across the world. And it's like great weather, good like startups, like a lot of founders are here. I think what drew me here early on was like that like it's good vibes it's a good it's a beautiful city good food good restaurants at the like easy to get to the airport and relatively affordable it has been going up over the last couple of years but it's still relatively affordable for being a big European city and when we so we hosted an event a year and a half ago that was like AI focus we had 1400 people coming to to the event and then i think last year we hosted like 20 events in 15 or 20 something like that in in lisbon with a mix of like builder days hackathons and different types of workshops and afterworks and there's so many cool people here from from from the US, from lots of German, from Germany, from Spain, from UK, from Sweden, from all across the world. And like Lisbon is a great point in like at the center of it all. And so many tech people, tech founders that are inspiring and that are building. Yeah, sounds lovely. And I think there's a very nice closing words. Maybe if somebody wants to join one of your events, Where do they find you? Where can they sign up? You can find it on Luma. So Luma, Espresso AI, or follow me on X. I post a lot about it as well. Yeah, that's awesome, Tim. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast and my lovely listeners. See you next time.

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*"You're not competing against AI, but you're competing against other people with AI."*
In this episode of DN, Niklas sits down with AI and Web3 founder *Tim Haldorsson*, who runs a 30-person growth studio out of Lisbon, Portugal.

Tim breaks down the massive shift happening across the digital service industry, where solo operators armed with specialized AI agents are effectively replacing traditional 5-person marketing departments. He explains his exact framework for building hyper-personalized AI tools in Claude—including how he uploaded a database of 32,000 of his personal X posts and a library of 700 agency press releases to flawlessly clone his writing style. Niklas and Tim also discuss the vital importance of IRL (in real life) community building, citing how billion-dollar companies like Cursor and Anthropic are leveraging local cafe meetups to build impenetrable moats.

*In this episode:*
• *The 1-Person Marketing Department:* How a single strategist managing a PR agent, a social media agent, and a content agent can outcompete a legacy team of 5.
• *Cloning Your Brain in Claude:* Tim’s exact method of feeding 32,000 historical tweets and 700 press releases into Claude to create the ultimate custom writing skill.
• *AI vs. Human Journalists:* The shocking blind study by the New York Times where 80,000 readers rated AI-generated articles higher than human-written pieces.
• *The Offline AI Movement:* Why massive AI labs are suddenly borrowing Web3's playbook and investing heavily in IRL community events and hackathons.
• *The Widening "AI Gap":* Why consulting giants like McKinsey and ultra-adapted small teams will completely crush legacy service businesses that refuse to adopt AI.
• *Product vs. Distribution:* Why early-stage founders should actually prioritize building an audience and a community _before_ stressing over their product roadmap.
• *Lisbon's Tech Renaissance:* Why 300 days of sun and a massive influx of international builders have turned Lisbon into Europe's ultimate hub for AI and Web3.

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#DN #ArtificialIntelligence #Marketing #AIAgents #Claude #TimHaldorsson #Web3 #CommunityBuilding #Startups #Lisbon

*Timestamps:*
0:00 Intro: Niklas meets AI & Web3 founder Tim Haldorsson
1:44 From solo freelancer to running a 30-person international agency
3:32 What the AI industry is actively borrowing from Web3 marketing
7:58 Cafe Cursor & Anthropic: Why billion-dollar tech labs are pushing IRL meetups
11:43 The Founder's Dilemma: Should you focus on product or community first?
17:46 The NYT Study: Why 80,000 readers preferred AI writing over human journalists
18:53 Using 32,000 old tweets to perfectly clone your writing style in Claude
23:52 The AI Gap: Why consulting giants will crush smaller legacy agencies
28:40 The divide between the "AI-pilled" tech hub and the rest of the world
32:44 How one person + four AI agents can replace a full marketing department
34:53 Automating competitive research & building an AI skill with 700 press releases
37:45 Advice for solo founders: Free GitHub agent repositories vs. hiring an agency
40:36 Why Lisbon has explicitly become the ultimate European hub for AI builders