Ep 104 – Adam Nathan, Blaze.ai – AI for Agencies
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Featuring: Adam Nathan, Blaze.ai
In episode 104, I sit down with Adam Nathan, the CEO and co-founder of Blaze.ai, the AI-powered marketing tool that’s making big waves—especially for small teams. Adam and I get into his wild journey of scaling Blaze to over $10 million in revenue in just 15 months with a lean team of 25. We talk about how AI is no longer just for the big guys—it’s helping small businesses, solopreneurs, and yes, even agencies, punch way above their weight.
We also explore some of the trickier topics like AI’s ethical impact, the looming question of government oversight, and even the ecological footprint of AI technology. Adam shares some powerful stories from real users—including how one guy was finally able to take a vacation after 13 years because Blaze gave him time back. Whether you’re excited or anxious about AI, this conversation is packed with useful insights—and a refreshing take on where the future of marketing might be heading.
Key Bytes
• Adam Nathan's entrepreneurial background influenced the creation of Blaze.
• Blaze serves as a virtual marketer for small businesses.
• AI helps small businesses produce high-quality content efficiently.
• Many small businesses were previously doing little to no marketing.
• AI allows small businesses to compete with larger companies.
• The impact of AI on marketing is largely positive for small businesses.
• Agencies can scale their client base using AI tools like Blaze.
• Ethical considerations around AI usage are important for agencies.
• Government oversight should focus on outputs rather than inputs.
• The ecological impact of AI may decrease as technology advances.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Blaze and Adam Nathan's Journey
03:00 The Need for AI in Marketing
06:02 Blaze's Rapid Growth and Team Structure
08:54 AI's Impact on Small Businesses vs. Large Corporations
11:54 The Role of AI in Marketing and Content Creation
14:48 Ethics and Disclosure in AI Usage
17:57 The Future of Work and AI's Role
20:59 Government Oversight and Ecological Impact of AI
24:05 Final Thoughts and Rapid Fire Questions
Adam Nathan is the CEO and co-founder of Blaze, the #1 marketing AI tool for teams of one.
Get Blaze CEO Adam Nathan's cheat codes to building and growing a $150M company in your inbox every week with Startup Tycoon. Powered by Adam's experience shipping product to millions, raising $46M, and hyperscaling to $7M+ in revenue in 15 months with only 25 people.
Learn about Blaze.ai or subscribe to Startup Tycoon.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.385)
Welcome to Agency Bikes, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. This week, I am thrilled to welcome Adam Nathan. He's the CEO, co-founder of Blaze, the number one marketing AI tool built for teams. Adam is no stranger to building and scaling companies. He shipped products to millions, raised over 46 million and grew Blaze to 7 million in revenue in just 15 months with a lean team of only 25 people. He also shares his
Playbook for Success through Startup Tycoon, which we'll talk about, where he drops weekly cheat codes on how to build and grow a $150 million company. I'm pumped to dive into your journey and kind of hear what we're talking about with AI and how it can help agencies and marketing teams and the lessons that you've learned along the way through the rapid growth. So thanks for joining me.
Adam Nathan (00:51.222)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:52.915)
Yeah. So what was the impetus to launch Blaze based on your entrepreneurial journey and what you've been up to?
Adam Nathan (01:01.196)
Yeah, well, I'm from New York City originally born and raised. I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My brother also started a business. Our grandfather ran an insurance company and we grew up around parents who run a small business together. My parents are in the outerwear industry. They sell coats and hats and stuff I have for my whole life. And they did it basically out of our apartment. My mom's an accountant. My dad interacted with clients. And so growing up, you know, we my brother and I were around them as they built this thing from nothing.
nothing to something that paid for our life, my college education, and as successful as they were at kind of
growing their business in the brick and mortar world, they've also struggled to translate that success into the online world. They still don't have a website. They don't use email to communicate with their customers. They DM me on Instagram, but they don't, I think, use Instagram to grow awareness or impressions or leads for their business. And my brother and I, throughout our childhood, and especially now in our adulthood, since we both work in tech,
would always exhort her parents to build a website or post pictures of their goods. And it's just so easy for us to do. And we would just say, hey, it'll take you a couple of minutes. We can do it for you. It's so easy. But the reality is it's not easy for a lot of folks who aren't professional marketers to figure out how to grow from the internet. We've always had tools, or not always, but for the last 10 years, we've had tools like Squarespace that could help you build a website, or Instagram, or Buffer that can help you manage content,
MailChimp for sending emails, but actually figuring out what a good post is that could engage people, or a good website that converts visits into leads, or a good email that people open and click on. That knowledge was really the domain of professional marketers who are full-time living in cities like San Francisco and New York. And the reality of most small business owners is that they're great at growing their business, but they're not marketers. They don't have the skills, they don't have the time, they don't have the money.
Adam Nathan (03:00.888)
They're wearing 10 different hats from paying the bills to serving customers to coming up with new ideas and marketing marketing that really works is a full time job. And so there's always been this catch 22 for small businesses that they need to do great marketing to grow, but they don't have the time or money or skills to do so. And that was the reality until AI. And so what we built with Blaze is essentially a virtual marketer that creates a strategic plan for you around how to your business, then automatically generates and schedules and posts and analyzes content can learn from the content. So it actually improves.
over time. And our goal is to help our customers basically grow impressions and leads and sales. of the hundreds of thousands of customers we have, those that basically stay with the product for three months or longer have seen their revenues or sales grow 3X or more, which is really cool to see because ultimately Blaze for a lot of folks is replacing a person and sometimes replacing an agency. We actually have a lot of agencies that use Blaze as well to grow their revenue. But just like a human, if the
product doesn't actually produce results, you wouldn't hire that person for a long time. And it's been really cool to see AI level the playing field for a lot of small teams where now just because they're small doesn't mean they can't be great.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:15.509)
Super cool. is, just I guess, specifically speaking about Blaze, is it tailored better for B2B, D2C, I mean, or is it great across the board, B2B, et cetera?
Adam Nathan (04:30.892)
Yeah, so we specialize in social media content, includes images and videos for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. So that's, you know, short form, long form video, text posts, text images, that kind of thing. So all social media content, blogs and SEO, newsletters and outbound and ads are really kind of the four marketing workflows that Blaze can execute for you. I think
Probably the biggest of those use cases is around organic social media content or taking that content and putting money behind it via an ad. That's kind of our top use case. Blogs and SEO are a second, and outbound emails and newsletters are a third.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:16.021)
Interesting, okay, so you kind of thought this up out of a need for mom and dad or Luddites, they don't need a website, but they do need a website and in their mind, they're gonna sell to people they know, like, and trust that walk into the store. So there was a need that arose, we're gonna develop a product, you're now how far into it are you? Two years?
Adam Nathan (05:33.71)
Less than that. We launched in October 2023, so probably 17 months. Yeah, almost at the end, 16 months or so, probably technically. And so it's been a year and a year and a third. And yeah, we've just seen pretty explosive growth since we launched. In that time, we've gone from zero dollars in revenue to I think over $10 million in revenue today. So, you know, we're growing.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:38.015)
Wow, okay.
Adam Nathan (06:02.766)
40 % or so month over month, which in any business is, most businesses can't even support that kind of growth, especially at the scale that we're at now. have millions and millions of users who are on the product every day. And our team is small. have 25 people on the team right now. So it's been quite a wild ride in the last year and a half.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:22.033)
sick. Those 25 team members include engineers, developers, AI programmers, etc.
Adam Nathan (06:29.74)
Yeah, we have, I think, we have one designer, I'm the product manager. We have 10 engineers and I think five marketers and some other folks that help out, but yeah, it includes everybody.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:44.275)
Very cool. So I'm to ask you a line of questioning. Not to, I don't even know how to phrase it. I don't want to put any negative shade on what you're building, but I want to talk about the impact of AI in the marketing advertising industry as a whole. And I'll preface it with, I use an AI tool every single day. My fiance just used ChatGPT for the first time yesterday and her mind.
One question turned into like two or three prompts. And so her mind was blown and I was like, yay, finally welcome old lady. And she's 10 years younger than me. So the point is it is not, it's not a topic that can be avoided. It's not a tool that can be ignored. Um, but there's some concerns behind it. So you, and you even mentioned this is a tool that would have typically been used, you know, uh, the things that it's doing would have typically been done by a marketing team or an agency. Now a robot use that word loosely is replacing it.
What feedback have you had or how do you see this impacting teams or agencies as a whole just from a personnel standpoint?
Adam Nathan (07:51.282)
Well, I would differentiate between how AI is impacting large teams like enterprises, corporations, big companies, and how it's impacting small teams. I think for large companies, the story with AI is largely around reducing resources, cutting costs, saving time. And I think there's a lot of fear in large companies about that. Obviously it sells newspapers or gets clicks to read stories like, will AI take my job?
And I think that's the pitch to large companies is yeah, you can have AI automate certain functions like customer service or some parts of marketing or some parts of sales.
But with small businesses, which is where we really focus, we serve entrepreneurs, founders, agencies, freelancers, creatives, mom and pop shops on Main Street, manufacturing companies, educators, podcasters. The story is actually much more positive. AI is allowing our customers to do way more than they could do before.
I'd say a third of our customers before Blaze were doing nothing. They weren't posting on social media, they didn't have a website, they weren't running ads, and so the alternative wasn't like a human, it was nothing. And then another third were doing some stuff but it wasn't working. They were posting photos of their grandkids or...
Sunset or the American flag on Instagram. They weren't talking about what their company does who it's for why it's better You know, they weren't doing any kind of effective marketing and so it's like going to the gym But like not knowing what you're doing there walking and walking out and of course being you know surprised when you get no results a third of our customers we're doing we're making progress, just don't have enough resources time or money to really scale and so You know for all of our customers blaze is helping them
Adam Nathan (09:40.216)
produce high quality content in a fraction of the time that actually produces more impressions and leads and revenue. And I talk to two to three customers every day. The stories of the impact of AI on them are amazing. haven't actually, of course I'm talking to some of our best customers, but I haven't heard of any negative downsides for small businesses.
I talked to a guy in North Carolina a week ago who took his wife on vacation for the first time in 13 years because of the time he got back from Blaze. I talked to a mom in Indiana, an agency owner actually, who has seen her revenue 5X because she's spending her time now actually interfacing with clients or bringing in new ones instead of just spending days writing Instagram posts. I talked to a photographer in Pennsylvania, wedding photographer who has seen her revenue increase 10X because number
one, she's actually able to spend her time photographing weddings instead of writing content, and two, the marketing she does is much better than what she was doing before because she's not a professional marketer.
I hear this aversion of the story over and over again and the benefits are threefold. Blaze saves a ton of people a ton of time because great marketing comes from not just like figuring out a hundred unique things to say. It comes from saying one thing a hundred times. Great marketing is telling the market who you are and why they should pick you over and over and over again. And a lot of it's actually pretty boring to do. It's not just time consuming, but it's mundane. And Blaze is like the best marketer you've ever hired and that it can work 24 seven. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get bored.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:06.004)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Nathan (11:12.79)
complain, it just does what you ask it to do all the time while you sleep. So saves people a lot of time, it produces better content than anyone can do. I use Blaze for my Twitter posts, my LinkedIn posts, my newsletter, and I'm always surprised, even though I think I'm a good communicator, how much better it is than me at a...
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:16.053)
the
Adam Nathan (11:32.518)
at producing post, it sounds like me. And of course, it's not just fast, but it's often as good or better than what I think I would have written. And then it's effective. It actually leads to more outcomes. And so I'm not just saying all this is, of course, I'm biased in saying and believing that AI is a good thing. don't, you know, I think...
I do not believe the prognostications that AI is going lead to a world where no one works or where we're all drowning in this sea of mediocre content that we can't differentiate from. If you look at any major wave of technology, there's always been people out there that are like, well, now that we have computers or phones, we're not going to work anymore. We're going to go to a two-day work week. And the reality is, if you look at the amount of hours people have worked, it's been on a steady rise since the 1950s, basically since the start of the modern age of technologization.
What I think AI is doing is automating or eliminating lower end tasks so that humans can focus on the things that only we can do. People value that which is scarce and creativity is I think the scarcest quantity of all. And the way AI works, it looks at the past to predict the present. It can look at all your data, all your posts to write a new post for you, but it can't predict the future. Only humans can kind of see around the curve and think of what could be.
And I think for a lot of our customers, they get to spend their time doing that, not just for marketing, but for all the other things in their business that they have to do.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:56.893)
Yeah, I love that you differentiate between like the large companies and industry, Bohemis and the small mom Pops, who is your target audience. I think both stand to benefit from really strong tools like this to create efficiencies. But on a smaller scale, like you mentioned, it's giving the accidental entrepreneur or the accidental photographer who I just want to take photos. I don't want to run a business.
giving them the edge that, okay, I can go do the craft that I love and I don't have to worry about the things that you still have to do to grow your business or get new clients or things like that. so, go ahead.
Adam Nathan (13:34.542)
There's a scope.
Yeah, I'd say, you know, for small businesses, there's a lot to gain and not a lot to lose. You know, they have a lot of revenue they could be making that they're not. If they didn't use Blaze, they would be doing nothing anyway. Big businesses, you know, there's intellectual property considerations. There's security considerations. You know, does the model use my data? How do we prove that? You know, there's questions about performance reviews. How do we attribute value created by the AI versus a human for promotion? So they have years of things to think through. There's a lot of existing systems and protocols that have
to be updated. And so for us, it's, think, frankly, good business to focus on consumers and SMBs because they are the early adopters of this technology. Because of the cost benefit, think enterprises will take years to figure out how to integrate this into their existing systems. so I think.
I'm skeptical actually of AI companies that focus on enterprises because unless they have a lot of money or patience, I don't think they're going to get very far. And if you look, you talked about your partner, if you look at who's picking up AI so far, it's students, it's people using AI for search like consumers, it's small businesses, it's people, regular people actually, not big businesses that are finding the most initial benefit from the technology.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:48.499)
Yeah, the adoption and integration rate at large scale is at a snail's pace. Whereas take a one, five, 10 person, 20 person agency, it's either top down led or it's the young, smart, digital native who's like, hey, look what I just did on mid journey, et cetera, et cetera. And now we're cranking out images for our pitch decks on mid journey or, you know I mean? Like using any of these other tools, it is way quicker to deliver.
Results on a smaller scale like that. So yeah, I love that. I'm part of a bunch of discussions on LinkedIn primarily where somebody will start the conversation by saying, you know, and it's usually I don't say it's from a place of arrogance, but it's usually a posturing standpoint of we never use AI for our creative work. And then you'll get people that'll chime in and the debate is we use it. We don't use it. Do we disclose it to clients from the agency standpoint? You kind of what's your stance there as far as
the disclosure of it from an agency standpoint and the ethics behind using it for full fidelity work.
Adam Nathan (15:56.142)
I get the conversation in the industry amongst agencies about how to disclose, whether to disclose, whether to use it in the first place. You know, I obviously talk to lot of agencies who do use AI, and I think the case for using it is that, especially for small agencies, business development takes a ton of time, client service takes a ton of time.
And treating clients well or bringing on new clients is often a trade off against actually executing for clients. Because as you know, it takes a lot of time to draft a month's worth of Instagram posts or write a month's worth of blog posts or write a newsletter every week. And if you don't, if it's just you running the agency or you have only a couple of folks, you can choose between serving your existing customers or bringing on new ones or even kind of quality versus scale in your business. Do you treat people well by focusing on fewer customers or do you try and scale and make some trade offs around
the experience new customers are getting.
And those are kind of untenable trade-offs that I don't think you should have to accept that it should be one or the other. And so I think we see a lot of agencies using Blaze to execute production on multiple customers, more customers, frankly, than they've ever had before. The key in Blaze being this feature we have called brand kits where you can feed Blaze a client's website. You can connect their Instagram or social accounts. You can give access to their Google Drive and Blaze will learn about that client's business, how they talk, the visual styles they post
in so that all the content is hyper-personalized. It looks and sounds like the client. And that allows agencies to basically scale up how many clients they can serve because they're not just saving time on the production, but the quality is there too. And so that's allowed a lot of small agencies to 5, 10x their client list. I think most agencies will go that way, and they'll say, hey, know,
Adam Nathan (17:46.626)
We're using AI to automate the production of your work, but there's still a lot of.
Creative work that only humans can do and so in terms of like what your strategy is what your messaging is, know Basically what we're telling the AI to do that will still be me the human that you're hiring I will be approving and reviewing all that content. I'll be sharing it with you And so, you know that which cannot be done by a computer by technology will still be done by a human I Think this is where capitalism will end up
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:57.119)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Nathan (18:20.078)
winning where, you know, some agencies will disclose what I just said. Some won't. Some will say, Hey, hire us. If you are against AI and you want everything to be done by a human, even if it's takes a long time and it's really bespoke. Some people will prefer that. Some people will say like, Hey, I'm totally fine. If AI does my marketing, I don't care. I just want to low, you know, a low price. So I think you'll end up getting a diversity of responses to the technology and the market. They'll be segmented on the customer side by people who have different preferences in terms of.
Cost, client experience, quality, speed. And so I don't think there's only one answer here. I think there'll be different approaches and I think there can be multiple winners.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:59.637)
Yeah. I don't know if you saw the pentagram got eviscerated for using an AI tool and I don't know what tool they used. I don't think they disclosed it, but they came up with a, an icon library for a client and it was a couple hundred icons. And so they start, you know, their internal design team came up with the look and feel, and then they fed it into some robot and it spit out a few hundred icons in that look and feel and very consistent, very clean, made some tweaks to update this one, update that one.
gave it to the client and the client said, let's go in this direction, fed it back in, got a whole new creative direction. And they got eviscerated because you took away the work of an art director or two art directors. took away the work of two or three production designers, et cetera, et cetera. And the reality is, don't have, nobody knows what Pentagram charged other than Pentagram and their client. The reality is, and to your point, they got this done in like lightning speed time, hopefully at a savings to the client.
Um, and so the efficiencies that it creates are ridiculous. However, there are people that are like, dude, I'm out of work. You just had a robot create all these icons. I could have done it, you know? So I get both sides of it. I'm all for, know, can we do the work of, you know, 10 people with four people and pay people better and do, you know, uh, you know, have a better culture and better lifestyle. And, but I also get it from the other side of I'd rather employ 10 more people, you know, so.
Yeah, I'm also kind of like you. There's a million different ways to do it. Yeah.
Adam Nathan (20:29.934)
I think this is, I hadn't heard that story before, but this is, think, classic story of the internet, which is the main effect of the internet is what's called disintermediation. Essentially, it gets rid of the middle part of the value chain between the consumer and the supplier. And so you see this in music with, you know, today's Spotify, but before that Napster, you see this in e-commerce with Amazon. You know, if you wanted toilet paper before, you'd have to go to your corner store and buy the toilet paper and they would use a distributor who would use a bigger distributor who would contact someone in Asia,
and interface with the supplier. so you need all these businesses that would take a chunk of the value. And so yeah, and used that revenue to employ people also was really inefficient. And so the internet allows you now to order toilet paper and it comes straight from the supplier on a really efficient supply chain. And so you get the toilet paper faster and for less. But yeah, there's probably fewer people who are
carrying those boxes along the way, same thing with music or any creative industry, the effect of which has been there's more leverage for people who are actually creating and value artists, performers, creatives actually have more power now, make more money, they can go direct to people who want their art, but the record labels are struggling. And so I think there's a transition period and yes, some people, think often middle managers will lose their work because now you can just go direct essentially. I think,
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:48.661)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Nathan (21:52.832)
an individual designer now can create a business around their work because they can have the AI do the production, they can have the ideas, and they can use a tool like Blaze to go find customers and serve them well. So now someone who had to be employed by Pentagram before because they couldn't figure out how to attract customers now can actually go make a couple million dollars a year on their own and get the power and freedom from that too. Do I cry for middle managers? Generally no. I think...
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:18.146)
Hahaha
Adam Nathan (22:19.278)
The goal of, I think the role of government generally should be like we should be developing policies that help retrain people who are gonna be impacted by new technology. This should be true for any technology, frankly, not just AI. But yeah, think there's, with new technology, there's always changes in market structures and I don't think it's the fault of the innovation. So yes, I don't.
The reality is, think, with this technology, unlike, you know...
think about globalization as a technology, really affected blue collar workers more. think with AI, it will affect white collar workers more, these middle manager types, I think, know, big consulting firms are gonna get eviscerated, which is fine by me. You know, big accounting firms, big law firms, like you don't need 100 lawyers to do due diligence if you can just ask Harvey to do it for you. You don't need, you know, a big marketing firm to like write content for you every day, or even a big agency if you can hire Blaze. This is, and I
think, yeah, net-net, means more value gets created in the world that goes to more people than ever before, especially in this case, the long tail of the market. So when I think about what happens with Blaze's success over years,
I think we are rewriting the rules of the economy and who gets to win in America. There's, we all pay lip service to the American dream, but the reality for a long time has been that you win in America if you have money and power and connections, even though we say it's something else. And I think finally now it will really be about your courage to better yourself, your creativity, your commitment to seeing it through. That will determine your success more than, you know, where you were born or how much money your parents had or where you went to college.
Adam Nathan (24:05.08)
And so I think like we are entering like a new era of capitalism in this country where finally the small guy can get ahead. Not to get ahead, but like win the whole game. And I think that's really exciting. And if it costs a couple of middle managers their jobs, like that's fine by me.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:25.043)
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm all for the little guy, little gal, little anybody. Give them the edge and help them win. Absolutely. Real quick, another question might kind of be a little polarizing, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you feel like there is a decent roadmap for government oversight, especially how AI as a whole is impacting, having ecological impacts?
Adam Nathan (24:52.334)
you know, I'm, I think the technology is still fairly nascent and I think it's good to have some folks thinking through the risks of the technology in this case. Yeah. The fact that it, you know, there's a non-zero chance it does lead to the end of the world, but using the technology every day can tell you how brittle it is and it's not AGI. It's not sentient. It can't control our electrical grid or anything like that. It's really hard to even get it to produce high quality content.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:21.193)
Hahaha
Adam Nathan (25:22.254)
million times a day like it's we spent countless hours just kind of tweaking it just to Help it produce something that you can post on Instagram. So if it can't do that
At least right now, you know, I'm not super worried about more complicated tasks. could get there eventually, but that's just not where we are right now. There's no reason to worry. You know, in general, I'm a fan of seeing where the technology goes, seeing what actual use cases emerge before you regulate it. In other words, regulating the outputs and not the inputs. I think if you look at data privacy on the internet, we've made a huge mistake by regulating the input. We don't know what good use cases could come from having very large sets of data. You know, we could...
in the future, essentially use them to cure cancer or fix climate change. asking everybody to basically reject cookies on their computer prevents us from even having the data that we would need to understand what use cases could come from it. So I think it's a mistake to regulate inputs. I think we should be regulating outputs, especially the downside risk of them once we figure out what they are. But I don't think that with AI we're at a point where we know, oh, yes.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:13.706)
Mm-hmm.
Adam Nathan (26:25.614)
I guess you can tell yes, marketing is going to be a use case. Customer service is going to be a use case. Legal work will be a use case. But there's still a lot to figure out there. And I think we should.
take a eyes open, but slow to act approach and kind of, as soon as we see that something's a problem, I hope regulators step in, but I worry about over-regulating too soon based on an ignorant understanding of where the technology is going and then prohibiting us from getting some of the gains from that future. Well, because we're only focused on the downside risk.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:05.875)
Yeah, no, I love that. about the impact on, you know, I don't know what the stats are, but every five queries equals a gallon of water or whatever that the ecological impact.
Adam Nathan (27:16.814)
I'm not familiar too much with the math, but what I do know is that if you look at the trajectory of models, I think
you know, Nvidia stock price, for example, was predicated on this idea that we're going to need ever more servers to generate ever more powerful models and see, you know, we're going to need to buy them from Nvidia. But if you look at what happened with DeepSeq, for example, and even what's happening at Google and OpenAI and Anthropic, the models are actually getting much cheaper to build. like on a a exponentially compounded curve, which means we need less compute than ever to do way more work. It's the reverse of what everyone thought would happen. And so I think actually
the ecological impacts will go down over time, even as usage and complexity goes up, because we will figure out more efficient ways of getting the job done. I'm not saying we as if I'm working at this companies, I think they will figure this out. It seems to be the case. it's kind of a surprise of, again, what everyone thought would be the reality. But I hope that's the case because it means that we will not need as much energy to run these servers. You know, I'm also a fan of things like nuclear power.
and alternative energy sources to produce the energy we need. you know, Sam Altman, for example, is a big investor in nuclear alongside OpenAI, I think for this very reason. I'm just generally an optimist that, you know, if we allow ourselves to innovate in this country and others, we can science our way out of a of these problems. I think the problem often comes when there's...
bad narratives that create these false narratives that create cultural blockers to innovation or regulatory blockers to innovation. That happens both here in America, on both the left and the right, in other countries as well. I think we sometimes we're our own worst enemy when it comes to solving problems, like the regulatory examples we were just talking about. But I'm an optimist that if this continues we...
Adam Nathan (29:25.57)
We'll need less energy than we ever thought to produce really amazing results with AI.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:30.453)
So we shouldn't look out for the Blaze AI nuclear power plant anytime soon then. Good to know.
Adam Nathan (29:34.894)
Yeah, I mean, was great, the crazy, maybe a very specific example for us, you know, when we all started our businesses, when the first kind of application layer businesses were coming out, there was a lot of, there was a,
A common narrative amongst investors and founders that oh my god, this AI is gonna be so expensive. And we had built limits in our product where if you use too much AI, we're gonna charge you overages. Investors would ask me, how is this impacting your unit costs? It's the cost to the cost of compute essentially for us, the cost to produce AI outputs is like single digit percentages of our unit costs. It's nothing. I don't think there's been any customer who has gone over our overages. And those costs have only gone down as the models have
gotten better. it's just, you know, a substantial part of our costs are acquiring customers, serving them, hiring our team, paying for tools, but AI is actually like not even in like the top 20 cost buckets for us. it's just not. And so if you extrapolate that out over many companies, you know, I, I, I'm more skeptical about the profitability of something like open AI or Anthropic, because how are they going to make money?
you know, but I think if you look at the development of most industries, profits tend to accrue at the layer closest to the consumer. So you buy an Apple computer, you're not buying
and you're not buying the chip inside and the screen resolution and the keyboard manufacturer, like no one cares about the components. They care about the overall experience. And so I think the winners from AI, just like every other wave of innovation will be companies like Blaze because people are buying Blaze for the quality of our content, but also our brand, our customer service, our community. It's everything, being a Blaze customer says about them. And so it's almost interesting to see that so much focus on the
Adam Nathan (31:26.554)
wrong things compared to where history tells us this story is going to go.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:32.277)
Yeah, I agree. And I love that. I love that kind of framework on listen of all the costs and all the impact, the CPU usage or whatever you call it, the technical frame before it is, is the least of the concern. So I'm grateful for that frame. Thank you for explaining that to wrap up. going to throw a couple of random rapid fire questions that my customized robot spits out for me on every guest. So I have a rep, a randomizer from, from my own robot. So the first is, would you rather be 10 minutes?
late or 30 minutes early.
Adam Nathan (32:03.886)
I'm frequently 10 minutes late, so I'd rather be 30 minutes early.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:05.717)
Love it. What's a childhood hobby that you wish you never gave up?
Adam Nathan (32:12.654)
I was really into Legos and I wish I still had them around.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:17.587)
You can just go buy some man. Finally, and you might already have this, if your business, apologies for not knowing this ahead of time, but if your business had a mascot, what would it be?
Adam Nathan (32:18.989)
I could, I could.
Adam Nathan (32:30.094)
We did have a, my God, what should we call it?
I'm gonna mess up the name. We had a bird in our lifecycle emails that would congratulate people on milestones around the amount of content they produced or how much growth they got on their social media linked accounts. We had a name for it and I'm forgetting it now. So if you sign up for Blaze and you get the emails, you can DM me and tell me what it is. But it was a cute little bird that dressed up in different costumes based on the different milestones you've achieved with your growth.
It's a bird of some kind.
Steve / Agency Outsight (33:06.708)
Very cool.
Awesome. Listen, Adam, I'm grateful that we got to some time together, kind of talk through the entire, I guess, ecosystem of AI these days, the tools that are available, some of the ethics that people are digging into. We didn't get to talk about Startup Tycoon, but folks, if you're interested in Adam's startup and entrepreneurial experience, jump over to StartupTycoon.com, subscribe to his email list, check out Blaze AI. Adam, thank you again for joining me. Appreciate your time.
Adam Nathan (33:35.842)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve.