Writing this from O’Hare, a little fatter and definitely broker
Hi there,
Quick thing before I cozy up with you and give you a long story long..
Our free AI video workshop is Thursday, August 27 — My StoryPro members only. So if you’re wanting to come, this month would be a great month to test us out!
Vee and I are going to show you what actually works for making video with AI right now (and what flopped spectacularly this weekend while I tested it). Come see us!
Okay now let’s get to the good stuff…
I’m writing this from O’Hare, a little fatter and definitely broker than when I last came through this airport a month ago. (truly I cannot get over how expensive the States has become but even I’m bored of that rant so I won’t go there again.)
Heading back to Lisbon and being that we have an absurd level of time before our flight takes off (my husband would literally be at the airport 15 hours before a flight if it were up to him), I’m in full contemplation mode as I think about leaving my home country (again) on a one-way ticket.
This newsletter isn’t a comparative analysis as I sort of did that a few weeks ago, but let’s chat about SOME THINGS.
First off, the US may be expensive as hell but my Lord is it “better” for business momentum.
I’m the anti-European who loves Europe, tries to be European in theory, and doesn’t actually feel European at heart. I love to work – the work I do in particular – which puts me at odds with a lot of my fellow Lisboans.
I can think of nothing more dull than living a true life of Euro Aperol Spritz Lunch Leisure. There I said it.
Now please don’t take this for me not loving to Aperol Spritz Lunch Leisure (as if)…
…but work culture is entirely different where I live.
A lot for the better (like overall health and wellbeing which is great) but a lot not for the better if you’re into startup momentum. (which is where I’m at at this moment in time.)
Oh and since 60% of the expat (but really I like to call us immigrants) scene are people “who sold their tech company and faux retired to Portugal” I am also at odds with that.
Firmly in my feral founder era over here still learning all the acronyms.
Can someone sit me down for the 89th time and explain to me like I’m 4 what the difference is between SOM and TAM and why so many “money people” are so obsessed with it.
And excuse me while I go get a ridiculously overpriced airport beverage if we’re veering into CAC and LTV territory.
Who was in charge of this naming convention by the way?
I’ve never hustled so much in my professional life and this is coming from someone who started a video company in NYC.
But back to this trip.
This past month I had a run of meetings – none of them set ahead of my travels which also proves my point about the US just being the KPop of business mojo – and many shed some serious light on what I am seeing occur in the AI space and just business in general.
So pull up your chair and yes in fact I will grab another RIDICULOUSLY PRICED AIRPORT beverage and let’s get into it.
What I’m noticing: Nobody actually wants the whole internet.
For a while, it didn’t look great for tools like mine (and I had many people say that to me…especially as we saw Claude do a quantum leap earlier this year but there there girl… I always knew you were different.)
Why pay for a specific storytelling tool when ChatGPT and Claude can do… well all of it?
And for the record Claude and ChatGPT can do ALL OF IT and that was pretty baller…until it wasn’t.
I’m actually experiencing this fizzle out effect in real time with the companies I’m meeting with.
Leaders who have to make actual AI infrastructure decisions aren’t impressed by “everything” anymore. If anything, it’s becoming a turnoff and people who probably wouldn’t have met with me even six months ago, are now interested in piloting with a self-contained Point of View Storytelling tool.
The one that I was told would be cannibalized by Open AI from a few naysayers in my world.
But I’m sorry, why did we all think tapping into a general system with no point of view would give us anything other than average output? And why did we think that was THE MOVE?!
The corporate people I’m speaking to aren’t interested in prompting Claude with the same skill that all their competitors are also using.
When everything is available to everyone, breadth is worthless and depth becomes the whole game.
They want someone or something who has a point of view and it took whatever **gestures to THIS is for the last 3 years.. to finally trigger these realizations for a lot of companies.
The leaders I met with this past month – from the financial, biopharma and entertainment industries – appreciate domain expertise in ways they hadn’t considered at the start of this AI madness but now a (oh wow you were a professional storyteller and now have an AI storytelling tool?) is a different entry point than, “I built a skill that is based off of a Chat GPT prompt that is now a product that all your competitors are also using.”
Your taste, discernment and industry knowledge has never been more lethal in this AI world.
Don’t be afraid to go after something because “Chat will eat you up.” It won’t…as long as you’re not just another generic wrapper.
And coming off one of our best months yet, I’m proof that this is true.
(And if you’re inside a company and you don’t want to overhaul your whole AI stack but you DO want AI that makes your people more human… let’s chat.)
What I’m noticing: Trust is not a throwaway line. A legacy brand is betting billions on it.
We hung out with our best friends at a lake last week in WI and the husband is overseeing a new product at a global bank that we all know.
A banking tool going head-to-head with the nimble fintechs built for the modern, mostly-online founder. (My StoryPro wouldn’t have been served by this bank. Until now.)
And I asked him, “Why are you getting into this space? How can you compete with Mercury?” (a popular online banking platform in the startup world and one where I assume an old-school brand… that is NOT tech native would not want to go head-to-head with..)
“Easily, “ he said between us sipping Spotted Cows and hoovering a basketball court of cheese (remember I told you I am returning a little fatter.)
“We have 150 years of trust and credibility and people actually DO care about that.”
He then went on to site the absolute demise of Silicon Valley Bank -the former darling of the startup banking world – which I admittedly had forgotten about.
Huh…
In another year I’d roll my eyes at a billion dollar company trying to wade into “cool tech land” but now with trust being at an absolute low and anyone being able to build anything… a banking tool that is backed by a brand that is legit, albeit “Old” is maybe the comfort blanket move.
Will it work?
I genuinely don’t know as it’s not rolled out yet but trust alone is a differentiator worth competing on and if you have it, protect it like it’s the whole business.
Because right now, it might be.
What I’m noticing: It is extremely rare to have the domain experts also be the builders.
Here is what AI cannot do, no matter how good it gets.
It’s been trained on everything ever published. Everything.
And it still can’t form an opinion from lived experience.
It can’t feel the thing.
It can’t feel YOUR thing.
It’ll pattern-match a story all day and drop your life into a flawless hero’s journey, but it was never in the room where your story happened.
Yeah…so what?
So that’s the exact thing that makes a story gut-level.
The tingle.
The “OMG, me too.”
ChatGPT and Claude are built to smooth out the randomness, the spontaneity, the specific weird human moment that makes something worth reading in the first place.
That gap is where domain experts live. And if you’ve got that in your lane, building AI is a smart move, because I think we’re about to swing hard away from the generalists.
I got reminded of this Tuesday, on a call with a member named Melanie I’d never met.
She signed up for My StoryPro last year, starting a new chapter, needing to pull twenty years of work into stories she could actually tell.
But she never really got into the tool or the workshops -she already had a Claude account – and “cancel My StoryPro” was on her to-do list this month.
But then she figured she’d actually play around with it before she cancelled.
That same day she booked a 20 minute feedback call with me, available to all who sign up for My StoryPro.
Her first words to me, pulled from our Granola transcript: “I don’t know how you and V have done it. It is so… quite phenomenal. It’s already moved me forward on a few things. I’m not going anywhere.”
This is what happens when the domain expert is also building the intention behind the tool.
Because once she used it, she felt the difference between something built by people who lived it and aims to understand the nuance vs the other tools that overlook by design your humanness.
It’s a great time to know a lot of $hit about your lane/industry and go put it into a tech product. Especially if you already have built-in trust. Just saying.
OK about to board this redeye (is there anything worse?!) But before I leave a few quick things:
Workshop — Thursday, August 27. Free for My StoryPro members.
This is the AI video one I teased last week.
And full disclosure I don’t have it all figured out yet.
I’m spending this whole weekend in the weeds… testing the AI editing tools, trying different storytelling formats and finding out what actually makes good video (using AI) and what’s a waste of a Saturday.
Then Thursday Vee and I are going to show you what we learned. And what didn’t really work.
In the past, storytelling using video and AI was pretty bad, but I’ve had a few promising projects that made me think it was worth even doing this show-and-tell workshop.
A couple more things and then I’m actually shutting down:
I’ll be back in San Francisco in early September for some exciting meetings but please reply if you’re in that area and I can set a fun hang like I did in Chicago.
And finally, it felt really nice being back in the US and it reminded me I do need to make more time to be feral over there.
I’ve got a probably-delusional level of belief in what Vee and I are building, and somewhere underneath it a full Napoleon complex about it.
Because Dear JESUS the industry cannot afford two more women bowing out of the AI lane. It just can’t. It’s scary out here folks.
There are already too few of us in these rooms deciding what gets built and whose voice makes it into the product.
Ok Peace out Chicago!!
Can’t wait to deflate and sweat out sodium immediately upon landing on European soil.
XO
Patrice
P.S. My StoryPro is about to start connecting to the tools you already live in — Google Drive first. You don’t use your AI in silos, and we don’t want to be one. More soon and we’re so pumped about this!
