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:

- 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

- What Launch First methodology prioritizes sales before building products

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stages 1,2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

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/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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,

mine too. I'm dying to find the name.

Okay, Kickstarter, something.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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 david@tekyz.com

and and if you search for me on LinkedIn, you can find me

pretty easily, brilliant.

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.