Episode Details

This episode we're joined by Stu Green, a product designer, agency founder, and serial app builder who's sold not one but two successful SaaS products.

We dig into the realities of building your own product versus running an agency, the role AI plays in modern product development, and whether the flood of AI-built apps is a threat or an opportunity for professionals.

Plus, we check out Bleet, an app that turns your meeting transcripts into social media content, and Paul shares how AI-powered personas are changing the way he approaches user research.

App of the Week: Bleet

You know you should be posting on LinkedIn. You've told yourself that every week for the past 6 months. But then you sit down, stare at the blank post box, and realize you have absolutely no idea what to write about. So you close the tab and promise yourself you'll do it tomorrow. You won't.

Bleet is an app built by Stu Green (and collaborator Nick) that solves this by mining the conversations you're already having. It takes your meeting recordings and transcripts, extracts the key topics using AI, and helps you turn them into social media posts. And the thing that sets it apart from just asking ChatGPT to write something for you is that it pulls your actual words and phrases from the conversation, piecing them together into posts that genuinely sound like you rather than generic AI slop.

How It Works

You connect your meeting recordings or transcripts (or even just speak a thought into the app), and Bleet will surface a list of topics you covered. From there, you pick the ones you want to post about and hit "create." You can dial in how much creative liberty the AI takes, from near-verbatim to lightly polished.

So you sit down for 10 minutes once a week, pick a handful of topics, schedule them up, and you're done. A single meeting can generate enough content for almost a week of daily posts.

What About Client Confidentiality?

The number one concern people raise is about sharing sensitive client information. Bleet strips out client names, specific people, and identifiable details. It focuses on the general topic and the ideas discussed, not the specifics of who said what in which meeting. And of course, you review everything before it goes anywhere, so if something feels too close to the bone, you just skip it or edit it.

Topic of the Week: Building Products vs. Running Agencies

Stu Green has lived both lives. He's run agencies, built products from scratch, and sold 2 SaaS businesses. So what's the difference between building for clients and building for yourself? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Start by Solving Your Own Problem

Both of Stu's successful apps, a project management tool and HourStack (a time management app), started the same way: he needed something that didn't exist. The project management tool grew out of running his own consultancy. HourStack came from juggling small children and fragmented work hours, and wanting a way to visualize and stack little blocks of productive time.

If you're genuinely your own best customer, there's a good chance others like you exist. And if even 2 or 5 or 10 of them show up, you've got the start of something real.

The Myth of "I One-Shotted This"

AI has made it dramatically easier to build apps, but Stu is refreshingly honest about the gap between a demo and a product. Sure, he cloned entire apps in a single prompt and it looked great. But behind that impressive facade? Hours of iteration, hosting setup, video infrastructure, S3 servers, and a stack of decisions that require real product-building experience.

The people posting "I built this in one shot" on X are technically telling the truth, but they're sho