ScaleStudio: The new tool putting our principles into practice

**Chris Saad** (0:00)
Hey, Chris, guess what? What happened?

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:02)
We are out of money. You're listening to The Startup Podcast.

**Chris Saad** (0:08)
This is an educational episode. Hey, I'm Chris.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:12)
And I'm Yaniv. It takes a lot of money to make a podcast like The Startup Podcast. And unfortunately, what that means is unless a white night comes along, this is going to be the last episode of The Startup Podcast for now, and maybe, maybe even forever. But we really hope not. And of course, if you're listening, Chris, and you're like, I would love to sponsor The Startup Podcast. We're still looking for that white night who can maybe make this very much not the last episode. But if it is the last one, we have an absolute banger for you and a very appropriate way to end over 300 episodes of The Startup Podcast.

**Chris Saad** (0:48)
Yeah, it's been 300 episodes, so thereabouts. And we've been talking about the general principles, philosophies, frameworks and mental models you need to build a great product, a great product strategy, a great business. It's sometimes easy to hear these things and not quite know how to apply them to your everyday or you forget or you have a reversion to the mean. And so, Yaniv, I've taken a lot of these hard-won principles that I've built over a career of some 30 years and all of these episodes we've been talking and built a product, build a product that you can use to build incredible product strategies and products. So we'll talk all about that, walk you right through and explain how it works, and maybe, just maybe, it might save your butt as you build your product and your business moving forward.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (1:33)
That's right, Chris. Who needs a podcast when you can have a product? All right, let's just get into this before I start to cry.

**Chris Saad** (1:39)
Over the years, I've been thinking about, I'm a product guy, how do I turn my advisory work into a product? How do I scale it? How do I help more founders? How do I think about the recurring patterns, the recurring problems, and turn this into something that people can self-serve and help more founders around the world? And so I've been noodling on this, and I've been trying to figure it out. And it always feels like, look, there's enough podcasts, there's enough books, there's enough products out there that help you with product management. Really the problem has been a human gap, a taste, a judgment, asking the right questions. But recently, I feel like I've made more progress in figuring that out. And AI obviously helps a lot because there's an element of taste and judgment in there if you can prompt it and craft it and harness it properly.
And so I think I'm getting close to that, I've built a product called Scale Studio, which is still in beta, it's still early and I'm still eager for feedback. But the idea is that it helps you develop a strategy document from beginning to end from the early inkling of a problem, all the way to the roadmap and even the positioning statements in sequence. And unlike most AI where it's highly differential and easy to tramline, this AI has very much got my thought process in it, and it's extremely opinionated and has very specific guardrails and it forces you through a very specific process. It's not an open-ended planning tool, it's an opinionated strategy development tool.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (3:05)
God help us all. I can't wait to see how it works. So yeah, I think we're going to be sharing your screen and you're actually going to take us through an example of how this app works.

**Chris Saad** (3:17)
Yeah, let's do it. Well, once you log in, you get the Scale Studio homepage. Always want to make this one look a little bit better, but we're getting there. Across the top, there is various ways of creating a new strategy, and then of course underneath is the strategies you've already created. So you can start from scratch, you can start from a problem statement, you can start from some existing documents to inspire a strategy, or an actual strategy that you wanted to import verbosely and do little translation to, and there are some pre-baked templates. Now, some of the AI of it all can take up to an hour to fully generate your strategy for you top to bottom with just a few clicks. So we won't go from absolute scratch today, but let's look at one of the pre-baked ones, the Uber style rideshare strategy. So you just click on this and it'll load up a pre-baked strategy.