In this enlightening episode, David Hirschfeld, Founder and CEO of Tekyz Inc, shares how AI transforms entrepreneurship for non-tech and tech founders. If you struggle with leveraging AI or validating business ideas, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What Launch First methodology prioritizes sales before building products
– Why AI simplifies market research and planning for stage 1 non-tech founders
– How to use AI to ask the right questions for business success
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder and throughout history, there have been technologies that have changed almost everything about our daily life. But this change process used to take 100 years, and now it seems to be happening every 100 Days, AI is changing everything, and today we’re going to explore whether we’ve seen the age of the non tech founder, and if you’ve started a business or are thinking about it, you’re going to want to listen in to find out how AI is about to change your world, if it hasn’t already, and here to explain not only what’s happening, but how you can use it to your advantage is the one and only David Hirschfeld, a 35 year software development veteran. And David’s career spans leadership roles at tech giants like computer associates, Texas, instruments, Intel, Motorola, before launching his first startup, which grew to 800 customers across 22 countries and was successfully sold in the year 2000 David emerged as a strategic advisor specializing in AI driven workflow transformation for scale ups and in the design and development of startups. He developed the launch first method, a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding. He’s here with us today, David, I kind of have two parts to this conversation that I want to focus on. And I want to start off with what would traditionally be considered non tech businesses, so coaches, consultants like myself, hair cutting, lawn mowing, the kind of many blue collar industries, traditionally non technical. How are you seeing the AI kind of revolution, if you will, transforming entrepreneurship and and why should they see it, this as an opportunity rather than a threat?
David Hirschfeld
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show, and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience about these types of issues. So AI, what’s going on right now, and it’s and it’s evolving so fast, is this AI revolution that we’re having? And non technical founders, let’s say if you’re low like if, let’s say you’re a heating and air conditioning company. Because a friend of mine owns a heating and air conditioning company, and he was struggling with what to do during the off season, because his business is in in Phoenix, and so they have a huge summer season, right? And they just can’t, they can’t install systems fast enough, but during the winter, nobody’s buying air conditioning. So he wasn’t sure what the best things to do. And so we did a little jam session with with chat GPT, basically having it put together a marketing campaign and sales approach for what to do in the off season. It was a multi stepped plan that had that basically also had all the detail associated with it and and at the end of it, this was a 30 minute little session I did with him. He had a plan all printed out on exactly what he was going to do, many things he hadn’t thought about. So this is a very easy consumable, accessible to anybody, kind of capability that AI gives us that was not available to us in the past. I mean, you would have had to do a ton of research and hunted through the internet trying to find what other people have done and coalesced all that information into some kind of plan, and that would have taken days or weeks, and maybe it required some consulting, and now you can do it in just a few minutes with a chat GPT tool and and knowing how to ask the right questions.
Scott Ritzheimer
Stunning, stunning. We’re going to get to those in our audience are more tech driven founders, but before we get there, one of the challenges for non tech founders is they aren’t software developers, and I think you’d appreciate this. They don’t really think like software developers, either. And so because of that, it can feel intimidating to get started, and then even once we get started, you brought this up, we don’t necessarily ask the right questions or move in the right direction. So how can, how can folks think about how to leverage AI in their business so that they start off on the right foot?
David Hirschfeld
Well, that’s maybe one of the best things about AI is you can just a ask AI that question, and it will give you guidance on how to do it. And there’s so much capability and tools available in with and all you need is just an interface to something like chat GPT or Claude or your favorite AI chat tool. You. And just start asking it, and don’t assume you have to know the question. Just ask it. What question should I be asking? Here’s what I want to accomplish. Or where should I start with this? Here’s what I want to accomplish. Or I don’t even know what I should be wanting to accomplish. What’s realistic? What do you Where should I start with this whole thing? You don’t have to really know a lot. You just have to kind of channel your inner five year old and not be afraid to ask questions. And yeah, if you can get past that, you’re gonna make a lot of progress, really fast.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so cool, because, you know, if you asked a printing press how to use a printing press, it probably wouldn’t have gone very well for you. But just a huge, a huge testament to the amount of change that we’re facing right now. So you have this methodology called your launch first methodology, and I’m wondering if you could just unpack this for us, because I know it’s, it’s centered on tech startups, and I want to dive into that a little bit. But one of the things that just struck a chord with me was how true the principles were in other industries as well. So starting in the context of your work, working with tech companies, how does launch first work? What’s the methodology and why is it so effective?
David Hirschfeld
Okay, so, so the launch first basically shifts the model for a tech startup at the very earliest stage. So the typical model is, you design your product, you create a minimum viable product, we call them MVPs, and you create a pitch deck, and you go and raise money. And this has been the sort of the standard way of thinking about a software startup, or SaaS software startup for the last 20 years or so. And the problem with that is you have to make a huge investment on something before you ever prove that you have product market fit. Product Market Fit means that people will buy your product at a high enough price, at a high enough closing ratio that you can be profitable. And you don’t know that until you start selling it and but when you build your MVP, make this huge, very often hundreds of 1000s of dollar investment before you ever get any sales, and you’re trying to raise money convincing potential investors that you have something worthwhile to invest in, but you don’t have any proof. So what launch first says is this is kind of not the right way to approach this instead, why don’t you go out and and start selling first? That’s why it’s called Launch first. Launch your sales and marketing engine before you build the product. And people go, Well, how do you do that? Well, there are lots of examples of successful companies that launched this way, I’ll give you probably the most famous one, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk started Tesla by creating a prototype of his sports car and went out and sold several 1000 of those without a working model of anything. He just had a prototype. So what we do? Right? Right? So he didn’t have to prove anybody that it really worked. He had just all the proof from a science perspective, perspective on how he was going to make this work, and a physical prototype so people could see what they were buying into and and people thought, well, this is worth taking a chance on. This is just too cool. So they did. So they bought, and he bought, sold enough of them that he proved that he could be have a profitable business. You can do the same thing with a software company, or you can do the same thing with a lot of different types of companies. If it’s a unique product that you’re selling that you’re creating for sale, whether it’s technology or a physical product. And people do this with physical products. Often they’ll create a prototype of the product they’re going to produce. In fact, the crowdsourcing world like, what’s that startup website where people put their products out there and then do pre sales before they’ve ever even manufactured the product. Now, it just slipped my mind the name,
Scott Ritzheimer
Mine too. I’m dying to find the name. Okay, Kickstarter, something.
David Hirschfeld
Okay, thank you. Kickstarter, right? That’s all. That’s exactly what that is. It’s selling before you build and most of the products there, in fact, I bought one many years ago on Kickstarter that had, they had not it was two years before they came out with the product, but I brought it, bought it in advance, because I thought it was really cool. So this is the idea. And then once you’ve proven that you can sell it and that there’s enough business, you have product market fit, then you build the product.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, here’s what I love about that, and this applies to every every kind of business, is no one buys products because you think they’re great, right? And no one makes a product that they don’t think is great. To some extent, you know that there can be changes to it, but just because you think. Something is a good idea doesn’t mean that it is. And just because you can build that good idea doesn’t mean you’ve solved the biggest problem that’s in front of you, and that is, Will people buy that idea? And so the thing that we teach here at scale architects is the number one thing you have to do as a startup, one is stop being one but but the way that you do that is by finding a profitable, sustainable market. And so I love this about the methodology that it takes it and puts it in the right order, saying, Hey, you have to solve the sales problem first. Because if you do, then you can design to meet that promise, right? Then you can actually work on on something that has been validated. And it’s not necessarily an an easier strategy, at least it hasn’t been until some of the technological changes, but it is a much surer strategy. It’s fascinating. I love, I love the example.
David Hirschfeld
Well, yeah, that brings that brings up that brings up a whole aspect about what you’re doing when you’re starting a company, excuse me, Barbie. So if you’re solving something because you have a good idea, or if you’re trying to start a business because you think you have a good idea, you’re probably going to fail. You know, founders come to me all the time saying, you know, I’ve got this great idea. I think it’s going to be wildly successful. It might even be a unicorn. People are gonna, you know, this is all code words for I’m gonna fail. And when founders focus on the problem, they love the problem, not the product. If they’re in love with the product, they’re already in the going in the wrong direction. But if they’re in love with the problem, and they spend all their time talking to code time talking to customers about their problems, never talk about your product. Just talk about your the problems that customers are struggling with, and quantify it. How much does this problem personally impact you? How much does this problem actually cost you? Because those two numbers are not necessarily aligned with each other. What have you tried done to try to mitigate this problem in the past? How many other people in your company are affected by this problem, or in your industry, this is a common problem. Is there products out there that can address this problem? Why aren’t you using it? Have you tried it in the past? These are the kinds of things you spend all your time talking about this, and then there’s an the natural conclusion will be something to mitigate the problem, which is the thing you create, yeah, not the thing to be in love with. Just stay in love with the problem, and you’ll find a path to success in a much higher percentage of the time.
Scott Ritzheimer
That is an unbelievably true point. Unbelievably true. I’ve got one more question from a tech perspective here, and that is for for we’re going to go non tech for just a second again. So for non tech founders, it’s kind of easy to think of something like a landscaping company is not benefiting from Ai other than maybe some market research or or in it. Not nothing to take away from that, but it’s more than that. So what are, what are some of the ways that you’re seeing more traditional industries leveraging AI for either rapid prototyping, for for reduced development costs? What are they building to get an advantage?
David Hirschfeld
Well, for sure, in the marketing aspect, marketing automation, AI is really helping everybody in this respect, and it’s very early. So if you haven’t looked for ways of accelerating your marketing through AI, there are tools that are coming out all the time to help you do this. Automating workflows any place where you have a manual process involved that’s costly in terms of time or because you have to hire people to do it, most of that stuff can be replaced now with some kind of automation tool, a lot of it driven by AI, but there’s all kinds of creative things that AI does, like like writing proposals, putting together plans, you know, project plans, things like that. It can be done so much faster and easier and often a lot more accurately using AI, not that you don’t have involvement in the process, but that it just facilitates and streamlines a lot of this. I’ll give you an anecdotal example that my wife used recently. We’re in the matter of fact, we’re in the middle of this big landscaping project right now, and the biggest motivation is she wants to grow all of our own food. She loves gardening and and so we’ve got these eight large beds that we had to redesign our backyard so that we could put these beds out here, so she could spend all their time. And she wanted to figure out, Okay, how many beds do I need, and how am I going to plan and schedule the planting? And so she had a conversation with chat GPT said, we live in this part of the country, and I want to grow all our own food. How many beds do we need? And we’re primarily we eat mostly plant based stuff. And so came up with a number, and said, Okay, I how do I plan what to grow? I want to be able to have food harvest all year round. And we live in San Diego area, so we can actually grow all of our own food all year round. And it came up with a planting schedule. I said, What about companion planting, which means that it’s in a in a bed. You don’t want to plant certain things that will conflict with each other, because neither will grow well, right? So you put companion plants in there. And so it said, these are, here’s eight beds. And and it numbered the beds and created a table, and said, what should go in each of the beds? And I said, what about what about companion flowers? Because you you want to line the bed with certain types of flowers that will draw the bugs away from that particular type vegetable, for example. And so it gave us that planting schedule. And then I said, What about she said, What about succession planting, so that when you harvest something out of a bed and you plant the next thing in there, it has to be compatible with what was in there before, and so and so it basically for all all the seasons. It created a schedule of what plants go into each of the beds, what flowers plant with it and what follows it, season by season, fascinating, and like a 3040, minute conversation, and she had what would have taken her days of work and research to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Amazing, amazing. David, there’s a question that I have and ask them, I ask all my guests, I’m interested to see what you have to say. And the question is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What? What’s that one thing you want everybody watching and listening today to remember?
David Hirschfeld
Well, the biggest thing is, the biggest secret that shouldn’t be a secret is you can sell your product before you build it, and so go out and test the market by selling, because if nobody wants to buy the thing that you’re talking about building, then there’s probably a problem with the problem with the product or your message or your approach. And just keep testing different versions and angles of it and and asking them why, what problems they’re struggling with. And eventually you’ll either nail the right thing or realize this is not a good idea to start this business. Which part of launch first is fail fast and cheap, right? If you’re going to fail fail fast and cheap, because that’s not how most people fail. They fail in large numbers, but it’s usually very long, takes a long time and costs a fortune. So I’d much rather see people fail really quickly if they’re going to fail and and move on with their lives.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. So for folks listening and who would like help, especially through this launch first program, where can they find more out about what the program is, what it entails. And how can I get connected with you?
David Hirschfeld
Okay, you can find me at tekyz.com spelled T, E, k, y, z.com, and just go to the contact us page. Or if you made it all the way to the end of the this episode, you can email me directly at [email protected] and and if you search for me on LinkedIn, you can find me pretty easily, brilliant.
Scott Ritzheimer
David, thanks for being on the shows a privilege and honor. Having you here today, I really appreciate it. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact David Hirschfeld
David Hirschfeld is a 35-year software development veteran. David’s career spans leadership roles at tech giants like Computer Associates, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Motorola before launching his first startup—which grew to 800 customers across 22 countries and was successfully sold in 2000. David has emerged as a strategic advisor specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation for scaleups and in the design & development of startups. He developed the Launch 1st Method—a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding.
Want to learn more about David Hirschfeld’s work at Tekyz Inc? Check out his website at https://tekyz.com/