You scroll through your feed right now, and the
noise is just deafening. Oh, it's everywhere.
Right. Everyone is shouting about this magic
button of AI automation. They claim they have
50 AI agents doing all their work to tell you
they're just sitting on a beach somewhere making
millions. Right, just completely hands off. Exactly.
Yeah. But let's be honest, most of that is a
lie. It really is. It's a complete fabrication.
I mean, it's a modern gold rush fantasy, right?
And it's built on top of fundamentally broken
architecture. Welcome to today's Deep Dive. We
are cutting through all that slop today. Yes,
we are. Because our mission is to explore the
five real rules for building with AI. And we
want to ground this entire conversation in reality.
Which is so necessary right now. It really is.
So we're looking at the story of Max Brodeur
-Urbis, he's the CEO of Gumloop, and he took
the hard road. He raised 50 million dollars.
He built an incredibly tight team of just 15
people. That's the crazy part, just 15. Right.
And they process 4 million automated workflows
every single day. And he didn't achieve that
scale by pressing some magic button. He did it
by deeply understanding the foundational logic
of the work itself. I want to start by dismantling
that social media myth we mentioned. You see
these course bros online constantly. Oh, the
course bros. They promise you can build a $10
million company over the weekend. Right, just
by buying their PDF. Exactly. They show you a
flashy screen with dozens of autonomous agents
supposedly talking to each other, and they tell
you to just copy and paste their workflow and
wait for the money to roll in. Max actually coined
a great term for this whole phenomenon. He calls
it a slot machine. A slot machine. I like that.
It's perfect, right? Because the reality is these
massive multi -agent systems are incredibly fragile.
Right. I mean, they look wildly impressive on
a highly edited YouTube tutorial. Sure. But in
the real world, they break the second a minor
variable changes. So why do these complex multi
-agent systems break down so easily in the real
world? Because without a foundational understanding
of the underlying steps, you can't guide the
AI. When variables change, it just panics. You
can't successfully automate a process you don't
actually understand. Exactly. It's like cooking,
right? AI automation is simply a tool to make
a smart person faster. It cannot mask a lack
of underlying knowledge. If you don't know how
to cook, buying a faster, hotter stove isn't
going to help you make a five -star meal. You're
just going to burn the food much faster. You'll
just end up with a burnt mess in record time.
Precisely. You have to know the recipe before
you turn up the heat. That creates a massive
problem for the user, doesn't it? How so? Well,
if they can't rely on a massive 50 -agent system
to just do the thinking for them, how are they
supposed to even start building this out? Because
Max talks about this concept of throwing yourself
into the ether. Yeah, throwing yourself into
the ether. It's about recognizing your specific
window of opportunity. There are periods in your
life with extremely low liability. Maybe you
don't have a mortgage yet. Right. Maybe you don't
have kids. That is the time to take massive,
uncomfortable risks you just have to start building.
I still wrestle with waiting for the perfect
idea myself. Oh, we all do. It's human nature.
It feels so much safer to just sit back and plan.
to build a massive roadmap rather than put something
flawed out there. The urge to plan is incredibly
seductive. People hide behind it all the time.
They write these 50 -page business plans outlining
every possible scenario, but that's essentially
just procrastination in disguise. Right. The
market doesn't care about your beautifully formatted
document. I get that, but if business plans are
out, What does a valid first step actually look
like? It's just building a simple workflow that
saves you 10 minutes a day and then putting it
in front of a real person. Start small, save
10 minutes, and test it with real users immediately.
Exactly. It's the only reliable way to gather
actual data. Everything else is just you guessing
in a vacuum. Right. And when you jump into the
ether like that, building rapidly without a massive
safety net, you are going to fail. Oh, 100%.
You will fail. But the framing here is fascinating
because failure isn't this terrible accident.
You're actively hunting for failure. Max's early
journey illustrates this perfectly, actually.
He didn't... just casually stumble into a $50
million idea on his first try. Right. In a very
compressed time frame, he built a ton of tools
that completely bombed. Wow. Yeah. He built software
for video games. He built tools to stop web scams.
He built bot detection systems. And he was building
these fast, sometimes in just a single week,
right? He had to. Because when nobody bought
them, he needed to move on immediately. Right.
He proved himself wrong as quickly as humanly
possible. Rapid failure is highly efficient.
It saves you from wasting six grueling months
polishing a terrible idea that no one even asked
for. Exactly. Which is how he eventually found
the actual pain point. He was spending time in
Discord groups dedicated to tools like Auto GPT.
Let's clarify that term real quick for you listening.
Auto GPT is an AI that tries completing complex
tasks entirely on its own. Right. And Max noticed
a very consistent pattern of frustration in those
groups. Regular people were struggling immensely.
They didn't know how to code. They couldn't navigate
complex developer terminals. Right, it's too
technical. Exactly. But the biggest issue was
the unpredictability. the agents were entirely
too random. They would just talk in circles instead
of actually executing the work. Yeah, they'd
get stuck in these endless feedback loops. Max
realized people were desperate for reliability,
not creativity. They didn't want a chaotic robot
brainstorming ideas, so he built a system that
rigidly chained steps together. Step one, then
step two. Then step three. Exactly. It violently
removed the randomness. So why is randomness
such a massive enemy when building an automation
tool? Because users are looking for a guaranteed
result every time they push a button. Not a creative
conversation. People want a reliable engine,
not a creative conversationalist. Exactly. They
want a tractor. They don't want a poet. Mid -Rule
sponsor read goes here. So you spend time hunting
for failure, and you eventually build this reliable
engine. You chain the steps together. The next
hurdle is scaling it. And the traditional narrative
tells us that scaling is all about networking,
right? Oh, yeah. The Silicon Valley playbook.
Exactly. It's about flying to San Francisco,
shaking hands, pitching venture capitalists at
expensive dinners. But Max's reality was... The
exact opposite. He literally couldn't network,
even if he wanted to. Max was stuck in Canada.
Really? Yeah, he was actually banned from entering
the US for five years over a very minor border
issue. Wow. That sounds like a total nightmare
for a tech founder. You're locked out of the
biggest tech hub on the planet. On paper, it's
a complete career ender. While everyone else
was out having those expensive dinners, mingling
with angel investors. He was isolated. Completely
isolated. He was forced to sit alone in a small
room and just write code. But looking back, he
calls this isolation a massive gift. because
it violently eliminated all the usual startup
distractions. It forced extreme focus. He wasn't
getting high on people praising his theoretical
ideas at cocktail parties, you know? Right. He
had to let the product do all the heavy lifting.
And when you sit in a room and build a tool that
actually helps massive giants like Shopify or
Instacart, the network builds itself around you.
Whoa. Imagine scaling to four million daily tasks.
from a tiny room in Canada. Meet. It's a profound
shift in leverage. And because he had that immense
undeniable leverage, processing 4 million complex
tasks every single day, the power dynamic completely
flipped. He didn't have to go begging for seed
money. Right. The investors actually came knocking
on his door in Canada. That's how he raised the
$50 million. How exactly does a product find
its own users without a massive sales push? When
a tool undeniably fixes a severe pain point,
early users become your most aggressive sales
people. A product that truly solves real pain
will naturally sell itself. Exactly. It becomes
indispensable to their daily routine that forces
explosive organic growth. But reaching that kind
of incredible scale, hitting 4 million tasks
a day without the system collapsing, that is
mathematically impossible if you're... product
produces that fragile slop we talked about earlier.
Absolutely. You really have to use AI as an enabler.
It cannot be a crutch. This is the critical divide
in the tech industry right now. You have to ask
yourself constantly, are you AI enabled or are
you AI dependent? Let's unpack that distinction.
What does being AI -enabled actually look like
in practice? Being AI -enabled means using the
technology like a precision puzzle piece. It
scales your existing hard -earned skills. Take
a highly skilled writer, for example. They deeply
understand pacing, tone, and narrative structure.
They use AI to gather research, outline concepts,
and make their overall workflow 100 times faster.
But they strictly retain their unique voice.
Exactly. The AI is just leverage. for their expertise
and being AI dependent is the exact opposite.
It is outsourcing your brain. It's letting the
AI do absolutely everything from scratch because
you lack the underlying skill to begin with.
Right. That is how you generate that boring robotic
slop that feels entirely fake. Customers spot
the lack of soul instantly. Instantly. And the
system breaks the moment a unique request comes
in. It's the stark difference between enforcing
strict logic and just... throwing lazy prompts
at a wall. The professionals enforce strict logic.
Step one, read the raw data. Step two, extract
the three key metrics. Step three, format it
into a very specific table. That creates a reliable
core business tool. The lazy users just type
figure this out for me and write a report. And
the result is a messy, fragile nightmare that
no one wants to read. Exactly. How do you mentally
check yourself to ensure you are being enabled
rather than dependent? You should always maintain
mastery over the underlying logic. The AI should
only execute the labor. Keep control of the logic.
Let the AI handle the heavy lifting. The second
you outsource the logic, you lose the business.
OK, so to maintain that level of strict logic
at a massive scale, processing millions of tasks.
You eventually need to build a team. You do.
You can't do it alone in a room forever. Right.
But standard job boards aren't going to attract
the right kind of obsessive talent for this level
of intensity. No, they won't. Max treats hiring
a lot like dating. He entirely bypassed traditional
headhunters. He didn't post generic job ads on
LinkedIn. He hired directly from his own fan
base. Wait, he hired his own users? He did. Doesn't
that risk creating an echo chamber of yes men
who just blindly praise the product? It's not
about blind praise. It's about a shared baseline
of context. He found workers inside companies
like Shopify and Instacart who were already using
Gum Loop heavily every single day. Oh, to solve
their own problems. Exactly. They knew the product's
flaws. They knew its potential. They loved the
core utility so much they were willing to leave
secure, highly paid corporate jobs to join a
tiny, risky startup. That is a fascinating strategy
because they already have deep conviction in
the mission. Unshakeable conviction. You don't
have to spend a month onboarding them or desperately
trying to explain the company vision in a slide
deck. Right. They already get it. They deeply
feel the mission in their bones. They aren't
just punching a clock for a salary. They are
actively building a tool they personally rely
on. And beyond the technical skills, Max uses
something called a hanging out test. Or does.
It sounds informal, but it is ruthless. He asks
himself one very simple question. Do I actually
want to spend all day hanging out with this person?
Right. High -stress startup environments demand
resilient positive energy. When servers crash
at 2 in the morning, you're practically living
with these people. You have to actually like
them. Why does hiring your own fans drastically
reduce the need for daily management? They already
share your urgency and deeply understand the
product's value proposition from a user's perspective.
Shared belief in the product eliminates the need
for strict micromanagement. You literally just
point them in a general direction and get out
of their way. Okay, let's bring this all back
down to earth for you listening right now. Yeah,
let's make it actionable. How can you apply this
strict logic and step -by -step methodology today
without needing to quit your job, get locked
in a room in Canada, and build a $50 million
company? Max has a very specific, actionable
playbook for getting started. Rule number one
is absolutely critical. Do not try to automate
your entire job all at once. That is the classic
trap. Yeah. People watch one tutorial and try
to replace their entire workflow by Tuesday.
Oh, yeah. It's way too overwhelming. Right. It
leads straight to total burnout and frustration.
Instead, you isolate one perfectly boring, highly
repetitive task that takes you about 20 minutes
a day. Just 20 minutes. Yeah. Maybe it is sorting
specific customer emails into folders. Maybe
it's summarizing weekly meeting transcripts or
pulling contact info from a messy spreadsheet
just isolate one tiny annoying thing. And rule
number two is using the right tools to chain
those steps together without needing to learn
how to write code. We are living in a golden
age of accessible tools. You don't need a computer
science degree anymore. You can use Notion to
organize your foundational logic and thoughts.
You can use Gamma AI to instantly build slide
presentations based on that logic. And you can
use Gumloop itself for chaining those step -by
-step workflows together. Yes. And for the really
heavy lifting, the advanced reasoning tasks,
you can tap into models like Manus AI or Kini
K 2 .5. The tools are all sitting right there,
and they're completely accessible to anyone willing
to learn the basic mechanics. So what is the
psychological benefit of starting with just a
20 minute task? Because the task is small. When
the AI makes an error, you can pinpoint the exact
failure and fix it without getting overwhelmed.
Small tasks mean incredibly quick fixes when
things inevitably go wrong. And those quick successful
fixes build your confidence. You start seeing
the matrix of how these tools actually connect.
So if we pull all of this together and look at
the entire journey. AI automation is not really
about the work magically disappearing so you
can sit on a beach drinking margaritas. Definitely
not. It's about the deeply boring, repetitive
parts of the work going away. That clears the
deck. It leaves you with the actual thinking
parts, the deeply creative parts. True success
in this space comes from understanding the fundamental
logic of your work. It comes from hunting for
failure. listening closely to your users. And
methodically building step -by -step reliability
instead of sitting around waiting for a magical
50 -agent slot machine to save you. The work
is still the work. You just have a much better,
infinitely more powerful lever now. Exactly.
So the challenge for you today is simple. Sit
down. Identify just one mind -numbing 20 -minute
task in your day. And automate it. Don't build
a 50 -page plan for it. Just do it today. If
AI perfectly handles all the boring, repetitive
tasks... What happens to those quiet, mundane
moments where our brains used to wander and accidentally
stumble into our best, most creative ideas? Are
we automating away our downtime to sex silence?