I’ve spent the last decade deep in the trenches with early-stage CPG brands. Here’s what some of the founders and operators I’ve worked with closely had to say:

Started building apps now for my life management using Grokbot. I have built a custom budgeting app, weekly meal planning, a local newsletter/event guide and exercise tracker. Any other ideas?

If my car breaks down, I take it to the mechanic. If it regularly breaks down even after maintenance I’d assume my mechanic doesn’t know what he’s doing. If everyone around me had cars constantly breaking down in spite of regular upkeep & maintenance from many different mechanics, I’d assume mechanics at large don’t know what they’re doing and are some kind of scam. If everyone I knew that was regularly going to mechanics were intentionally putting diesel in unleaded tanks, driving on flat tires, ramming into walls etc because their mechanics told them to do these things - I would assume the mechanics were actually nefarious and creating problems they can solve to maintain their revenue streams. This also applies to therapists.

Most people go after the easy targets when criticizing higher education (anthropology, art history, sociology, etc) but aside from wasted potential and resources these are fairly innocuous. And most of those coming from these degrees end up getting some quick experience in sales, project coordination etc. and are fine. The two actual insidious degrees no one discusses - the ones actually doing active harm to the broader culture - are psychology & economics. These need to be the poster children of higher ed rot.

I’m not here to simp for social media. And Lord knows it needs no advocacy. But it is (probably by a wide margin) the most overly criticized thing that has ever existed. No one sings its praises. Everyone criticizes it any chance they can. Screen-time doesn’t lie.

The cap table is the soul of the business. How you structure your cap table will define everything. Proceed with extreme intention.

Why do all these tech nerds claim we’re going to be sitting around making art once AI becomes sentient and automates away work. I don’t want to make watercolor paintings I want to build businesses.

Join me in posting auto-posted scheduled AI slop on LinkedIn and help contribute to its demise. We can do this together.

Most people owe their parents grandchildren. It’s an actual obligation & responsibility you can shirk or shoulder. Up to you.

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I'd recommend building the entire infrastructure for your grokbots outside of the platform. The rules, profile descriptions, SOPs & operating guidelines can be in google drive or notion they all reference. All data capture & analysis should be in external workbooks. Artifacts exported and stored. Change logs on every single one of these items for decisions, pivots, updates. You should make it a goal that if you decided to update to a new agent infrastructure with Claude, OpenAI or whatever... it would be as simple as pointing the new LLM at your internal database and you'd be back online within hours.

I am surrounded by incredible people. Im mind blown daily at the creativity and intelligence of the people I know. It’s humbling really.

Time is getting weird.

Just had a call with a client who was quoted $5k for building 3 custom landers as part of an upcoming product launch. I could whip up 30 custom landers with Grok Bot <> @replohq by end of day, as a background task to my regular work. The world is changing.

As a skilled & experienced CPG operator with deep knowledge across marketing, Ops & Finance (and expert level support in my weak areas: creative + supply chain & product) I estimate @varosticks will take about 300 working hours to go from zero to raise, to funding to launch.. across all areas & over 7 months - spread across myself, Trevor & @KieranFoyCPG.