Zero to Umm...

Cody Schneider (Graphed): What It Takes to Build AI Marketing Agents That Work

Episode Stack: https://stackl.ist/4vWPzAl [https://stackl.ist/4vWPzAl] You've heard the pitch: AI agents that run your marketing, write your content, manage your ads, source your leads. It sounds like science fiction, or at minimum, like something that works for someone else's company. Cody Schneider has actually built it. In this episode, Cody, co-founder of Graphed, former growth lead at Rupa Health, and serial builder from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho — sits down with Kyle to get specific about what's real and what's hype in the AI go-to-market space. He's not philosophizing from the outside. He built a sourcing agent before breakfast the morning of this recording. Discussion topics: - Why "just give an agent a task" fails, and what agent orchestration actually looks like when it works - The AI SDR post-mortem: why those tools didn't fail because AI is bad, and what the wrong optimization metric actually costs you - How Cody thinks about "biology": whether an idea has the structure to become a real company or a good side project - The compounding go-to-market loop: layering channels, acting on signal, and why you never stop what's working - Data quality as the hidden killer of every AI analytics project (including why your Facebook ads API data is probably wrong) - Vibe coding from 0 to 80% vs. 80% to production & why that gap is where companies get stuck - What a GTM engineer actually does in 2026, and why that skillset is one of the rarest in the market right now - The future Cody is betting on: agent teams, services bought as outcomes, and what happens when the cost of intelligence approaches zero Key moments: [00:00] Board meetings with your agents [01:00] An agent Cody built before 8am and what it did [04:12] How Cody evaluates whether an idea has "biology" to be a real company [08:56] From Etsy scraping to Rupa Health: the origin story [15:48] Signal and noise — acting fast when you have it [18:00] Why AI SDRs failed (it wasn't the agents) [22:12] Software that molds to the user: the end of dropdown UIs [27:12] Vibe coding's dirty secret [33:06] Where Cody sees Graphed in six months [49:15] Cody's homework for non-technical founders right now [52:30] Kyle's live Graphed demo: Apollo, Stripe, QuickBooks, Brex, and PostHog in one afternoon

Steven Plappert - Forecastr

Episode Stack: https://stackl.ist/4tqYPeB [https://stackl.ist/4tqYPeB] Steven Plappert closed Forecastr's Series A the day before his last payroll would have cleared the bank. Six weeks later, he's sleeping eight hours a night for the first time as a founder. In this episode of Zero to Umm, Steven and I trace the full arc: failing his first company after three years, walking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, meeting his co-founder Logan Burchett by accident at a CFO shop in Louisville, and building Forecastr through six years of round-to-round survival. Key topics: * Why curiosity, a greatness obsession, and a high tolerance for volatility pointed Steven toward entrepreneurship * The FantasyHub shutdown that paid him $12,000 a year for two years — and the identity crisis that followed * 2,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail and the idea that wouldn't stop nagging him while he walked * The second-time founder playbook: why Steven never raised without a paycheck and never dropped below three months of runway * Hell Week at Christmas 2020 — four people hand-migrating 100 Google Sheets models into the new product * The Series A that died when Silicon Valley Bank did * His Iron Man suit philosophy: why Forecastr is building for a human in the loop, not against one

Thomas Peham - Otterly.ai

Episode Stack: https://stackl.ist/3QEYaYe Thomas Peham spent a decade building marketing engines for other people's companies — from a tiny PLG startup to a venture-backed company that raised $138M in funding. Then he noticed something that changed everything: ChatGPT was answering questions his clients used to win on Google, and nobody had a way to measure it. In this episode, Thomas shares the full story behind Otterly AI — from the aha moment in his car to a Product Hunt launch with no pricing, a TechCrunch feature before Christmas, and scaling to 20,000 users in a single year without taking VC money. Key topics: * Growing up in Austria with no business background and stumbling into SEO through HTML hobby projects * Building Usersnap's inbound engine from zero marketing budget to seven figures through content alone * The moment he realized AI search was going to disrupt everything he'd spent years mastering * Launching on Product Hunt with a "super scrappy" product and no pricing page * Why 15% of website traffic now comes from AI agents — and what that means for marketers * Bootstrapping a 17-person company in a category that didn't exist two years ago

Andrew Boos - Darwinian Ventures

Episode Stack: https://stackl.ist/4sSOZBB [https://stackl.ist/4sSOZBB] Andrew Boos is the founder of Darwinian Ventures, a fractional sales advisory firm that builds go-to-market teams for early-stage B2B startups. He's also quietly investing in his own clients from profit, not a fund. Before Darwinian, Andrew had a profitable exit at 24 from a startup that began as an ad exchange for China (yes, really), fell into post-exit depression nobody wanted to hear about, learned enterprise sales under a CRO with a $4.2 billion annual quota at a Sutter Hill incubation, blew his exit money trying to launch a quantitative hedge fund, and started freelancing to pay rent when law firms came knocking. We talk about why a linear path to entrepreneurship is a privilege, what happens when your North Star disappears after an exit, how he built Darwinian from a solo 1099 gig into an embedded sales team that's worked with 100+ startups, and why he's now writing small checks into companies where he can see product-market fit before the founders do.

Michael Hoy - Atlas

🔗 Episode Stack: Link on Stacklist [https://stacklist.app/stack/b2d7d217-26cd-428d-9815-09a2bb125cb7] AI is moving so fast that it's hard to know what to pay attention to and what to tune out. In this episode, Michael Hoy (co-founder and CEO of Atlas) and I dig into what it feels like to build a company during the most disorienting moment in tech most of us have ever experienced. Michael shares the full Atlas origin story, from winning Product Hunt's product of the day, week, and month, to the humbling realization that 1,200 users didn't translate into a single paying customer. We talk about why the startup advice machine creates more noise than clarity, how AI is shifting from exciting to existential, and why the founders who win are the ones who learn to trust their own signal over everyone else's opinions. We also get into Michael's vision for where Atlas is headed: a trust layer for the coming agent-to-agent economy, and why that future might be closer than most people think. Topics we cover: * Why this month felt like AI truly woke up. * Building 12 projects in a week and what that means for everyone else. * The gap between Product Hunt traction and real product-market fit. Education-based marketing that leads with curiosity, not fear. * Doing things that don't scale on purpose. * Michael's advice to founders: trust what you're feeling and shut out the noise. ----------------------------------------