Lenny's Podcast · Jul 17The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code. | Dan Shipper (Every)
Runs a daily newsletter with about 100,000 subscribers, four to five apps on one bundled subscription, and a consulting arm that earned about $1 million last year. It has 15 people, engineers who write no code by hand, and raised a $700K pre-seed plus up to $2M from Reid Hoffman and Starting Line.
Tips
- Hire an AI operations lead to automate everyone's repetitive work▶ 30:22Katie Parrott, a former Animalz content marketer and ghostwriter, started with editorial and now builds prompts and workflows for the whole team.
- Customize AI training to each team's exact prompts and situations▶ 1:11:11Dan's rough split: 10% of staff are curious, 10% will never touch it, 80% will do it if shown how for their job. The consulting arm did about $1 million last year.
- Practice compounding engineering: make each unit of work ease the next▶ 42:12Two engineers plus many Claude Code instances built Cora, which had 2,500 active users and millions of emails flowing through it during private beta.
- Turn repeated feedback into prompts so people never repeat a mistake▶ 49:45A new writer, Alex Duffy, made a year's worth of progress in two months by recording every coaching session into a prompt.
- Spot expensive services AI can cheapen, then unbundle them into apps▶ 57:45Cora (an AI email chief of staff), Sparkle (file cleaner), Spiral (content automation) and Monologue came out of this. Monologue passed the test when everyone inside Every started using it.
- Raise a small, drawable seed commitment to keep control and freedom▶ 1:05:25Cora cost about $300K all in, including salaries, because two engineers with AI did what would have taken about 20 people.
- Learn to code even if AI writes the code▶ 54:08One engineer spent a couple of days studying a third-party library's internals before directing Claude Code.
- Build your company around the work you secretly want to do▶ 1:30:40Three years in the business was flat. After he made writing central and drew on writer-founders like Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky, it worked better.
- Build GPT wrappers for needs you meet early at the AI edge▶ 1:01:52Every has a daily newsletter of about 100,000 subscribers, and its apps are bundled into one subscription.
