Build, sell, repeat : From venture capitalist to indie hacker

In just 6 days, Mari transformed from VC to founder by "vibe coding" her first SaaS product, PitchKit - proving that speed and intuition can trump traditional startup methodologies.

Key insights from her remarkable journey:

🔹 Embrace the "fast fashion" of software: Build quickly, ship rapidly, monetize, then move on 

🔹 Coding isn't about perfection - it's about momentum and learning 

🔹 Domain expertise matters, but curiosity matters more 

🔹 Build in public, stay authentic, and don't fear negative feedback

Her approach challenges traditional startup wisdom: No elaborate plans, just pure execution and rapid iteration.

The tech world is changing, and creators like Mari are leading the charge. 

If you are a founder, try Pitchkit, it's the only tool built like a VC thinks. https://pitchkit.net/

Connect with Mari: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariluukkainen/

Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zihan-wang-757247152/

Chapters

• 0:00 The Evolution of Digital Product Monetization
• 3:38 Introducing PitchKit: Simplifying Startup Pitches
• 7:59 The Importance of Domain Expertise in AI
• 9:03 Observational Skills and Founder's Intuition
• 13:47 The Balance of Speed and Validation in Product Development
• 21:15 The Journey from Ideation to Prototyping
• 26:39 Developing Taste in Software and Product Design
• 31:36 Marketing Strategies for Indie Hackers
• 47:15 Defensibility in Startups: The Real Challenge

Transcript

Zihan Wang (00:01)
Welcome to Zeitgeist, where I sit down with people who are building, scaling, and monetizing AI products. Today's guest is Mary Lukanen. Mary is a former venture capitalist who earlier this year opened Cursor just to try it out. And within six days, she vibe-coded her first SaaS product, Pitchkit, which is already generating real revenue. She's worn many hats, growth expert, investor, community builder,

But in this conversation, we're focusing on vibe coding and more importantly, how to monetize vibe coded products. Her way of building reminds me of something Sam Altman said, we are entering the fast fashion era of software. Mary embodies that spirit. Build quickly, ship, monetize and move on to the next. Let's get into it.

Zihan Wang (00:58)
I want to start the conversation by giving people a little bit of context of what you've been up to. So you have more than 20 years of making digital products and monetizing them. You've seen what's changed and what's not. As AI becomes more and more mainstream, what are you seeing changing the most in terms of monetizing digital products online and what stays the same?

Mari (01:23)
⁓ Well, I started late 90s when I was a kid, but I've been around for quite a long time, actually, soon 30 years, But kind of like when you follow the digital stuff and internet stuff for such a long time, everything is constantly changing. what is not stopping is just change. Like it changes. Then we can...

Definitely discuss is the change not faster or slower or something maybe in some way this. But if you go like talk to, I don't know, my mom, like she doesn't know anything about AI. So kind of like we still live in bubble also, but what is it gonna definitely change if you decide to use it and really put it in use is that.

Zihan Wang (02:02)
Mm.

Mari (02:09)
It's more accessible for non-technical people to build products, which hasn't been that trivial like before. because of that, the domain expertise or peer knowledge of something becomes more relevant than are you able to code in a way. also kind of like smaller teams can

build stuff than before. It becomes more resource effective, which is also very exciting and interesting from multiple perspectives, investing to actually building stuff. But I think it definitely disrupts the scene, but not necessarily that much that some people are thinking.

Zihan Wang (02:34)
Thank

Mari (02:55)
But you can as an individual or as a company that adapts it currently and is interested and open-minded about it, you can definitely take a lot of advantage.

Zihan Wang (03:07)
Yeah, yeah, so I want to dig into the point you mentioned about having more domain expertise becomes more and more important.

so you have a background in venture capital as well as growth, and you are now building a product called Pitch Kit, which is, I guess, coming from your experience of being a venture partner, right? So can you tell me a little bit more about, Pitch Kit and the problem it's solving?

Mari (03:38)
Yeah, so in venture capital and I used to work in status before going to the dark side of the table. Like the founders don't really realize like how much cases you check as a VC. And as a VC also like one core thing is that you well in some funds you can

do obviously the decisions alone also, but usually it's a discussion. So basically you need to convince your team that is this word of investing this case. So you need to sell it internally and that time to sell the case, to sell the idea, first of all, like you need to understand it yourself. And sometimes you'll see cases like the founders can be interesting, like, okay, this is X cool logo, X bolt, X

Zihan Wang (04:11)
.

Mm.

Mari (04:30)
I know Klarna, something like that. So it might be cool, but then you don't understand anything what they're doing. Obviously, then if you believe the founders, you should still invest in but but you you need to make like, you need to get your team to understand what they do and why this is interesting. And sometimes like, if the founders are too deep into their thing and too in love with their idea,

They are not communicating that very clearly. So basically what PitchKit is doing, it's making your pitch narrative in a way that's lazy and kind of like simple venture capital investor can actually understand it because a part of the pitches go to trust being just because you don't want to spend time on that. If you don't understand it, if it's too complex, if it's too...

Zihan Wang (05:00)
Mm.

Mari (05:25)
long something, you just scrap it because you have so much stuff on your plate anyway. So deal flow, there's always a startup that wants money, you know, so you don't, you don't want to spend a little bit like too much time on something that doesn't like really like bring the appetite up. So I think like a lot of startups kind of

lose the opportunity to even get to that table because their pitches are too complex and it's not about the deck, it's the narrative like how do you communicate, how simply do you communicate problem solution, product and solar. So that is what PitchKit will do, it will take your brainstorm or complex pitch and it will make it simple. It will make it so simple that venture capitalists are actually able to understand it.

⁓ interesting thing there is that it's basically a sauce that I built in six days as non-technical founder, which is incredible as it is. But, I haven't built kind of AI stuff before and just being able to understand during the process how that works. basically like, if a product

software is using AI. It's basically a library of prompts. So there is a file that says that to AI that you are a venture capital investor that wants to understand the startup and make it simple. And then there is a little bit more like that there is variables for different stages, like how to communicate certain things in pre-seed versus series A and so on. but it's

plain English, that how I'm guiding AI to kind of process the pitches. And it works actually pretty nicely, like the exports that I'm able to get out of there are already better than I get in my inbox ⁓ as a VC. So it actually works, but that made me realize that how much potential there is in like...

Zihan Wang (07:14)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Mari (07:31)
within the non-technical founders with some domain expertise because if you know something very well and you can put it in words somehow ⁓ to help people for instance in my domain expertise like make simple pitches or make a strategy for growing your startup which is another source that I'm going to build. You can feed that

Zihan Wang (07:41)
Mm.

Yeah.

Mari (07:59)
knowledge and domain expertise to AI and actually built a very interesting usable product. And that I find very, very interesting kind of the opportunity of people that have learned something in their career and built some kind of domain expertise are able to monetize that in very scalable way because obviously I could, what I could do now is that I could

Zihan Wang (08:07)
Yeah.

Mari (08:26)
you know, offer some sparring like manual pitch workshops or something. But I'm also able to do a sauce, is scalable, infinitely scalable.

Zihan Wang (08:35)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the cool part about SAS definitely. So the, I was reading about article and something you mentioned, well, I think you were, you were aiming to, help people find the inspirations and you were saying ideas come from paying attention. And I think this is spot on I definitely noticed like from what you just said, you pay attention a lot. Do you have like,

a system to track all your ideas?

Mari (09:03)
Not really, to be honest. I believe that a lot of really good founders have some kind of childhood trauma. Because that teaches you to, for instance, observe in this case. I consider that I'm pretty good in observing things because I have childhood traumas. So I observe.

situations and people like how they behave, do they get irritated about something, how they put their words when they describe something and I'm able to come up with follow-up questions quite easily. this is a very, very important skill because most of the founders don't really listen or are

do this thing, like they get an idea or they observe something and then they're like, okay, I want to be a founder so I will start just doing it. And then they never talk to anyone like, well, or it's very hard to kind of like push them to it. But for instance, when I was building the growth of the

Zihan Wang (09:54)
Okay.

Mari (10:05)
company before joining VC. It's the nowadays second largest home cleaning scale up in Ludiks called Fresca. And like I joined Fresca because I was Fresca's client first and I lost the service. And but then I joined and realized, okay, I've been living in this like very weird bubble of very lazy privileged startup millennials who have money to buy home cleaning and hate cleaning and have no problem outsourcing that.

But the rest of Finland doesn't really think about like this. There wasn't really a market like that. And you could get the data point from Google. So there wasn't really people Googling for home cleaning services. So then I can choose that do I stay in my conference zone and try to analyze Google Analytics data, which doesn't exist because no one is visiting our website. So it doesn't go anywhere. Or do I kind of like try to figure it out in my head?

which is also impossible because I represent the ICP that didn't have any problem with this, like this very, very niche bubble. Or do I try to find people that could use the service? So what I did was that I went to Market Square in Helsinki ⁓ to just ask random people why they are not buying home cleaning services. And I chose the place because I figured out there must be people with homes, so they could provide the service.

Zihan Wang (11:19)
Mm.

Mari (11:29)
And I think that thing kind of like related to the observing and finding patterns and pain points and more importantly emotion is when you have this discussion. So first you need to have that, I don't know, courage or

frustration or whatever to go there to do something like this and then you start getting answers and Some of the answers were actually very emotional like people were shocked that Do I look like super rich person who can afford this kind of stuff like like people were shocked that I've I had the kind of like guts to even like ask something like that, but that

itself tells you something and you need to kind of like dig deeper into that and ask, okay, I observe an emotion that is very important. And because if it doesn't bring any emotion, like it's not important. Like you either need to hate something or absolutely love something to be relevant. So I wanted to dig deeper into people that got that emotion.

And okay, the emotion is somehow related to the cost of the service and kind of image what kind of people buy that kind of service. Like I don't position myself there because I don't feel I'm rich or something. So then you ask questions like, okay, what kind of people do you imagine that are the users or buyers? What do you think it costs? And then you get the answer that

It costs like a thousand euros per month, but it doesn't. The price, kind of like what they imagine it costs, is completely wrong. So then you can take that and put that in your marketing and then suddenly your revenue is over 10 million if you do that. If you do that many times, but it's just question mark profit.

Zihan Wang (13:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Mari (13:31)
back to your original question. So I don't have any formula because I kind of somehow have it. I just do it all the time. for instance, for instance, this VC case, like I know a lot of my ex-colleagues that left VC.

Zihan Wang (13:38)
Mm.

Mm.

Mari (13:47)
during

past years because there has been a little bit turbulence in the industry itself. Why no one of them are not building something like this? Like all of them have the expertise. I don't know, but I have been very frustrated about this for years and I've been thinking about for years like how to in scalable easy way just improve the pitches because it's so easy to improve them if you start kind of like iterating them.

Zihan Wang (13:56)
Mm.

Mari (14:17)
And then I just build it. So I don't know, like, I guess it's quite easy for me to spot these things and kind of like flip it into mini like prototype ideas. And now when I can vibe code them, I can very easily just put it together and test. Like that is how, that is how I kind of like started as a kid. just built stuff which.

Zihan Wang (14:19)
Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Mari (14:45)
was very random sometimes and I put it in the internet and then I forget the whole thing for a year and then in a year when the domain was expiring I checked it out that if there's anything happening and then I killed the ones that didn't get any traction and then I continued developing the ones that did so I kind of like do that somehow naturally I guess.

Zihan Wang (15:05)
Yeah, yeah.

I think the way you do things from what I gathered is like, you're very fast. You operate in a very fast pace and you put stuff up there without overthinking them. ⁓ the impression I got and in the tech and VC world, think founders are also educated to validate their ideas and spend a lot of time in that dish. I also think that's.

Mari (15:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Zihan Wang (15:31)
that has value, a lot of value So I wonder how you balance that valuation with speed.

Mari (15:35)
Hmm.

Yeah, it definitely has value. if you're a tech founder, in a country like this, like where government gives you quite easily free money, a little bit advertising, like quite easily money to test out your idea. It's coming from the government or it's doubling down. If you get an investment and the government is getting a little bit like

Zihan Wang (15:48)
Mm.

Mari (15:59)
It creates an environment that is really good in a way, like we are chasing new Nokia's, we are still dreaming about new Nokia's. ⁓ But also sometimes it creates an environment where you get, let's say half million to develop a product. it postpones the

Zihan Wang (16:05)
So.

Mari (16:19)
place where the founders actually talk to anyone about their product. just, okay, yes, we got half a million. Now we don't have to see anyone for a year. can just develop the product because it's fun. Like this is very Finnish engineer mindset. And then year after or half year after, their product is semi ready and then they push it out and no one cares. So this happens quite a lot.

Zihan Wang (16:45)
Mm.

Mari (16:47)
So in that context, definitely validation and kind of like validation, which can be like finding people from LinkedIn that are interested and interested meaning really want to give you money because they want their problem solved. But in the other hand, like sometimes it's a little bit more tangible experience if you have

prototype, which in my opinion is the case with pipe coding that you can, you can like I built my sauce in six days, like, even even it didn't fly. And it's not like flying flying, but I haven't a lot of marketing. Maybe now I get clients because I'm in this podcast. But, but you know, it's still like only six days, like, so what?

It's not six months. It's not a year. No one gave me half million to do it and then find out no one wants it. So, and it was still valuable. Like even, even no one wouldn't be using it. And I'm making like 4,000 euros and a regular revenue currently, I guess. ⁓ I'm not tracking it that much because I don't have any VCs that I need to report. But anyway.

Zihan Wang (17:59)
Yeah.

Mari (18:07)
like you can put together and learn quite easily nowadays. So I think that kind of like decreases a little bit the need of the validation, I think there is good and bad validation because most of the founders don't know how to have the discussions with potential clients. They kind of just validate their own thought. Like they pick that

parts that kind of validate their dream and they ignore the negative ones. But, and this is also kind of like about the emotion. The negative emotion is very, very interesting and important. And most founders are super afraid of it. ⁓ But the most miserable clients for your service are sometimes the ones that you really, really want to talk to because

Zihan Wang (18:32)
Thanks.

Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

Mari (19:00)
because you don't want only kind of fanboys and girls around you saying, this is good, this is good. You need to constantly improve to stay relevant. So you need negative feedback and some founders are afraid of it and they are afraid of that negative emotions. But usually if you feel strongly negatively about something, that is worth solving.

And the best validation, and in my opinion, only validation people should care about is when you get money. Like obviously it's a different thing if you are inventing, I don't know, bricks from the air or something like deep tech. But for majority P2C apps and B2B SaaS, if the problem is worth solving, someone will pay you before you code anything.

Zihan Wang (19:54)
Hmm.

Mari (19:54)
If

Zihan Wang (19:55)
Yeah. So what I hear is that ⁓ very traditional way of

It's about shortening that prototyping phase and put it out to the market. also ⁓ during the validation phase, stay really open and stay really kind of honest with yourself, which is very hard to do. You can't be like, I just take what I wanted to hear, ⁓ remain a certain level of honesty in these discovery calls.

Mari (20:14)
Mm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Zihan Wang (20:24)
Yeah.

Mari (20:25)
And usually like, like I think a good tip is to like, ⁓ arrange the discovery somehow that you can see the reaction of the person because it's completely different. if someone is like this, Great idea. Then, then someone is like, yeah, I hate it. I hate it. It's ruining my life. Like you need to, you need to see and feel the reaction and the emotion.

Zihan Wang (20:35)
Mm.

Yeah.

Mari (20:52)
I think that's very important because then you know the level of pain that you are supposed to solve.

Zihan Wang (20:59)
Yeah, cool. Now that we have the ideation phase, the validation phase, and then the next step I usually just build it. I won't go too deep into that because I think there are tons of resources out there to teach people how to code and vibe coding. And you also offer a course, so people should check it out,

So there are good vibe coders and bad vibe coders. What do you think makes the difference?

Mari (21:18)
Yeah.

how I see it is that it's mainly a way to accelerate learning

like in my opinion more I use AI in software development more kind of like cynical I am like how brilliant it is. It's not.

It's quite stupid and simple. And even there is like new updates here and there like GPT-5, blah, blah, new more context window. So what? It's still quite stupid. It doesn't know what is good. It doesn't know what is bad. It doesn't know best practices. It's just some kind of science is just putting words together and it doesn't have taste. You need to have taste.

Zihan Wang (21:42)
Yes.

Mm.

Mari (22:07)
And

then when you have the taste and domain expertise and idea and so on, next thing you need to have is a capability to learn best practices and architecture and how it should be built and what is relevant. Because all of these like security issues,

⁓ why the AI code is not testing itself, there are all skill issues of the person prompting. Because if you prompt it to make it secure, it will make it secure. If you prompt it more detailed that you need to make a test that always when I make changes tests, payment provider or something like it, like it's able to do that, but you need to know to ask.

And if you are a non-technical founder, you don't know what questions to ask. So it's kind of like good slave and teacher, but we are not there yet for that to kind of work autonomously and build something without human help. That being said, when I started, I started learning

Zihan Wang (23:01)
Yeah.

Mari (23:17)
coding because I did code like PHP like 15 years ago, I was still doing something. So I do have a little bit technical background. But how I learned it was that I went to library and got the book and read it at home and it didn't have anything to do with internet, but there wasn't any internet coding books available. So I learned coding something like completely irrelevant, but somehow relevant, I guess. And then I put

together something with the computer at home. Then I put that into Disket because we didn't have internet connection at home because it was so expensive. But I got an access to internet in one of the only places that had internet connection, was my mom's workplace, local school. And I went there with the Disket next day and then I saw if it worked. And if it didn't, like I didn't have anyone to ask or...

nothing. I just tested it 100 times and maybe sometimes it worked and sometimes didn't. But I learned. So I come from this. currently there is tools that will explain you 100 times until you understand. And it will explain you everything. And even it doesn't have taste or it doesn't

Zihan Wang (24:33)
Yeah.

Mari (24:38)
It's not like autonomous sauce beater or anything like that. It can help you to become one and get taste if you just have a discussion with it and learn and try things out. But so everyone has that available and it doesn't even cost anything. If you start using Coursera, which I mainly use, I use that for two months without

Zihan Wang (25:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mari (25:06)
putting any money. So it's literally free. So you just start and ask questions and be curious. But the biggest blocker usually in my workshops is that people don't know even how to start. Like they don't know what's right there. Like then I say like, right, that you want to build, I don't know, website for your dog or something like super simple. And then they write it. And then they are super afraid of

Zihan Wang (25:09)
Yes.

you

Mari (25:33)
pushing enter when it asks something. And then I just stand there nodding, press enter, nothing bad happens. No one is going to die. Just do it. I don't know what it's doing. Like sometimes I like, or most of the times I have no idea what it's doing. Like for instance, related to a little bit like, certain technologies, but what is the worst thing that can happen in that kind of.

situation, like literally nothing, like no one is doing there anything that takes someone's credit card or personal data or anything. So, I just push people to press buttons and write stuff because then when you get there, you can literally learn everything. But maybe the bad ones are the ones that are just YOLO coding something, don't really care about security, don't really care about.

And they just do, but if you're like that, will probably, you know, you can do a scan website without byte coding too. So.

Zihan Wang (26:39)
Yeah. Okay. So regarding taste, is that something you can learn?

Mari (26:40)
Yeah.

I think so,

You're asking so hard questions. But very good question. ⁓ I need to think about it. I usually have answers to lot of things, but this is hard. How to develop taste? Very good question. using software and developing and taste and opinion what a good software looks like. And I think here, I'm thinking very out loud now, but

Zihan Wang (26:49)
you

Hmm.

Mari (27:11)
I think

here, this is something that I have been observing when I've been training growth hackers and growth ops people. that like, when you start doing or, or thinking about building something related to, for instance, customer acquisition to some company in my reality. I think it's very easy to think about.

For instance, I use Google all the time because I'm a human being in the internet. Most people use Google. ⁓ Still, many people don't figure out the keywords to do Google Ads or SEO. Even you use it yourself.

Zihan Wang (27:41)
Mm.

Mm.

Mari (27:52)
So I think like a lot of people aren't just using services, but not really thinking that or developing taste like is my experience good or bad? They just, I don't know. I guess they're just, I'm now satisfied. is shit. This is slow. Or maybe they don't even have any opinion. Yeah. That's why people use Microsoft Teams, guess. Yeah. They don't care.

Zihan Wang (27:52)
Thanks.

Thank you.

You get used to it and you don't see it.

Yeah, I also feel like...

Having the curiosity about how things work is not... I also don't have that for everything. you know, like we also so much of our lives, like when I go to a restaurant, I'm not necessarily when I have a delicious meal, I don't necessarily think how they prepare it. Right?

Mari (28:43)
Yeah, I think like in terms of taste, can definitely develop that with curiosity. Like I think that's a very good hypothesis. I think kind of like extra level on that is

I think it's relatively easy to develop a taste on something that exists. That this is good, this is bad, I should do this good thing. And then kind of like how this good would look like in my context. So for instance, in startups, like linear is currently like a kind of like design example that everyone is copying in a way. ⁓

Zihan Wang (29:12)
Mm.

Yeah.

Mari (29:25)
So it's quite easy to like, okay, this is now good. How this good looks good in my context. how do I, what are the components of good here that I should take to my product or my whatever. But then how to be first, I think that is very, very hard. For instance, if you think about Nokia, like this killed Nokia iPhone.

Zihan Wang (29:46)
Mmm.

Mari (29:54)
because Steve Jobs, was able to imagine the whole touch experience, which was completely new science fiction type of thing, like back then. And then the whole kind of science fiction part of like, I can access internet and do a lot of stuff, the role of phone, of phone.

is non-existent. I'm a millennial. I don't do phone calls. Like, I block all of them. I never answer. So I don't even use the phone as a phone. It's for everything else, like shitposting on X and whatever. And I hope in the future it will be for white coding. So how to imagine something that doesn't exist? Like, how should they do it or non-existent to the next level? That's hard.

Zihan Wang (30:29)
Yeah.

Mari (30:46)
and I guess needs a lot of courage, curiosity and passion to solve what is broken.

Zihan Wang (30:54)
definitely being first is very hard. think even the ability to take something good and put it in your own context is not that easy. It's so much more...

than aesthetics, you can easily copy aesthetics, but taste is so much more than that in the case of linear, it's that simplicity, it's that able to kind of try us these different workflows in a very, very elegant way. It just feels, creates an experience for the users ⁓ that is just 10 times better than Jira.

Mari (31:11)
Hmm.

Mm.

Zihan Wang (31:25)
But how exactly did they do it? If I have to think about it, can't really put it into words, to be honest. Not every indie hacker knows how to market their product. And I know for sure this is their...

Mari (31:29)
and so

That's the easy part.

Zihan Wang (31:38)
This is greatest pain point for other indie hackers who doesn't have girls' background. I know that you landed your first customers by just building in public, showing your work. Where exactly do you post and which channels work the best?

Mari (31:56)
Yeah, currently I post on LinkedIn threads and X and a little bit Reddit. But I kind of like do also traction wise things around that. having white coding workshops, I can meet founders. Talking to founders in startup places, I can meet founders that can buy my product. ⁓ I

Zihan Wang (32:18)
Mm.

Mari (32:21)
Like my nonprofit is collaborating with local schools which have startup accelerators which can buy my product and I actually have one enterprise client like this from those. So kind of like connecting the places. like I think the kind of like starting point zero is that you need to have something that people actually need and want, which is not the trivial.

Zihan Wang (32:31)
Mm.

Hmm.

Mari (32:47)
⁓ So

I think like lot of like based in the building public communities, like most of the products just look like shit and no one needs them. Like that's the thing. And that's also like majority of the startups, they look like shit and no one needs them. So even, even you like force an idea or a product on someone's throat, like not in practice, but anyway.

Zihan Wang (32:55)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Mari (33:12)
it doesn't stick because they don't need it. So kind of you need to have your, you know, like home base in order. So you need to have a product that is actually something that it solves a problem. It's, it's looks and feels nice. Good to use, you know, and, ⁓ and that this, that is harder than many, many people think. Like, like if, if it was easy, like all of us were like,

startup multimillionaires already. But that needs the ability to spot the issue, be very honest to yourself that is this good enough and kill the ideas that are not and continue the ones that might be and push it out immediately so you will get some kind of feedback. that's kind of the starting point. Nothing works if you don't have that period. When you have that,

You should have some kind of understanding, like who gets value out of it. And then you think about where to find those people and then you go there and get those people. Very, very abstract, but this is a pitch narrative iteration tool for startup founders. You have stunt. Yeah.

Zihan Wang (34:15)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, I guess

we can make it more granular. like in the case of PitchKit, you have a prototype and then you have a network of people who will benefit from this product. And after kind of approaching you in your very close network, how did you expand your audience beyond that?

Mari (34:52)
I never approached my closed network. I just posted publicly about it immediately. ⁓ Obviously it helps. I have 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, so it's specifically like closed network anymore, but obviously that helps. But if I didn't have that, or first of all, I don't have that on X and threads and Reddit, but I have still got end clients from all of those channels.

Zihan Wang (34:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mari (35:17)
by just posting. On LinkedIn founders usually have founder in their title so I would approach them. But I don't do that because I don't have to.

Zihan Wang (35:26)
Okay. So I want to zoom out a little bit. We mentioned LinkedIn. You also read your blog articles, which you very frequently read it. Right. So do you have, do you have a, like a very thought through content strategy around this

Mari (35:34)
Hmm.

I shitpost what comes to my mind.

Zihan Wang (35:47)
Yeah, let's talk about that. So you use that word a lot. A couple

of people have pointed out on your LinkedIn, I saw it recently. Why? Yeah, I definitely want to talk about Reddit because I used to do a little bit of marketing on Reddit as well. It's a very, very tricky channel. And you can easily get banned.

Mari (35:56)
That seems to resonate now. It's crazy.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Zihan Wang (36:10)
So how exactly did you first of find the relevant subs to post and what type of content do you post and like how do you do the actual promotion in a very sneaky way that doesn't invite bands from the malls?

Mari (36:29)
I'm just genuinely myself.

Zihan Wang (36:31)
in love.

Mari (36:31)
I

go to subreddits that where founders and indie builders build stuff and then I say that, hey, I built this thing. Can I have some feedback?

Zihan Wang (36:45)
⁓ you asked for feedback.

Mari (36:47)
Or like, let's not get stuck with anything. Like if you are just genuine person, like a lot of people are now asking how to get started with Reddit. Well, go there, read what people do there for at least a week and then contribute in discussion. It's the same every place.

Zihan Wang (37:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mari (37:11)
if you did the same, like not you, but like average startup founder goes to, some startup mingle pizza event. And he doesn't talk to anyone. He doesn't observe what's happening there. He doesn't give a crap like anything else than just like going like middle of the room and shouting, I have a startup.

Zihan Wang (37:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mari (37:34)
please buy my startup. They would ban him, like meaning kick him out from the room, literally, because he didn't adapt into the context what's happening there. So you need to just do that. You need to...

Zihan Wang (37:39)
Mm. Mm. Mm.

Mari (37:51)
bring value to the discussion and be kind of like a part of it.

Zihan Wang (37:56)
Mm hmm. Yeah. ⁓

Mari (37:57)
Now I could go like,

if I want to scale, could go like, I don't know, start a founder.

subreddits and just offer help. Like give me your pitch narrative. I will review it here and then I would give the review so I bring value and maybe mention that I have the app. Or then I didn't mention the app at all, but they can find it from my profile if they find me valuable.

Zihan Wang (38:29)
Yeah. Do you track what type of content works the best on Reddit?

Mari (38:36)
I just post a lot of stuff to multiple places currently and

But to be honest, I don't really even analyze that. I just post a lot of stuff. I should post on LinkedIn also. I literally posted a video of myself DJing today. What's the point? There's absolutely no point. But there actually is point because this kind of post anything that comes to your mind stuff is very typical on X. But

Currently it seems as that people are very entertained because it's not typical at all for LinkedIn. So, so I get a lot of like, ⁓ I have actually three calls with unicorn founders coming up like in, following weeks because they find my shit posting, posting fresh.

Zihan Wang (39:14)
Mm.

Mari (39:32)
And this is really bugging me because this seems to be very hard for most of the people that because I'm like, if everyone in my like, I have a nonprofit that is helping immigrants to get employed in Finland and I'm unemployed technically currently, but at the same time, I'm making more money currently than I made as a VC because I get bombarded by opportunities because I just shitpost there.

Zihan Wang (39:46)
Mm.

Mm.

Mari (40:01)
And I, I like, and I don't really like, it's just random, like whatever comes to my mind and sharing what I do. But people are entertained. They are interested in vibe coding. So kind of like, like everyone who can use computers can get some kind of professional opportunities if they just learn vibe coding a little bit and, just post.

Zihan Wang (40:16)
Yes.

Mari (40:29)
multiple times per day about that, for instance on LinkedIn or whatever channel, Reddit, X, whatever. But kind of genuine content, like by my service, by my that, by my whatever sauce, but just telling a story and entertaining people, being involved in discussion.

Zihan Wang (40:42)
Mm-hmm.

And you are bugged by the fact that a lot of people struggle with this or are not willing to do this.

Mari (40:57)
Yeah. Like what?

Zihan Wang (40:59)
Why do you think?

To me that's like, of course, this is not everybody's cup of tea, you know, like people have very different personalities. are very sometimes I'm, I'm, I am as well, like self-conscious about what I say on the internet. So it makes sense.

Mari (41:10)
Yeah.

It makes sense, but also like it's not something that you are certain type of people and you need to speak like that for the rest of your life because I was like extremely shy when I was a kid. I was very shy. I never get good grades at the kind of like in the primary school because I didn't want to speak publicly. Even I knew the answers. I never spoke because I was so shy. But

Zihan Wang (41:33)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Mari (41:49)
Like, I've learned that so I can do like public speaking and so on. especially like internet, like you're not there like publicly. It's just text in the internet, one and zeros. what is actually stopping you? Just dump it there. Like what's the worst thing that can happen? Like if some, like let's say

Zihan Wang (42:05)
You're not

you

Mari (42:17)
If some corporate boomer doesn't like my shitpost and unfollows me on LinkedIn, what am I actually losing? I'm not losing anything. I don't even want to work with them. I want to work with people who like memes and laughs. So, and they like my stuff. So I'm getting followed by exactly those people that I want in my life and do business with. So.

Zihan Wang (42:26)
Mm.

Thank

Hmm.

Mari (42:44)
I have big struggles kind of understanding this because I come from the place where like, everyone basically said that I'm doing wrong things. Like you're a girl, you don't belong on computers. Entrepreneurship is bad. You should go to work in factory.

Don't move to big city. know, everything I did was wrong. So I don't know. I guess I just don't need that validation. I guess because I never got that. So

I find very hard to kind of understand what kind of opportunities do you, are you afraid that you lose because it works in complete opposite way that if you try to

not bring any feelings or let's put it like this if someone loves you someone has to hate you like if you bring as your personal brand or as your company brand or whatever if you

Zihan Wang (43:40)
Mm.

Mari (43:50)
if you are so relevant, like for instance linear, very good example, it exists because they hate, hated Jira. So there was negative emotion that they wanted to get rid of. So often big things need some kind of, kind of like black and white, good and bad, love and hate type of thing. And

Zihan Wang (44:00)
Mm.

Mari (44:17)
Most people kind of think that I only want the love or nothing. But in reality, you really can't get love if you don't also get hate as a brand.

Zihan Wang (44:24)
Mm.

Yeah, what I what I hear is much more than business advice. It's life advice. if you are going to be judged anyways, then why not just be yourself? Be as authentic as you are and attract the people who can appreciate you. ⁓

Mari (44:46)
Yeah.

No.

Exactly.

Zihan Wang (44:55)
do you have a vision in terms of your growth and what's your plan to scale from here?

Mari (45:01)
I have absolutely no plans for my life.

Zihan Wang (45:03)
That's it?

Mari (45:04)
Yeah, that's it.

But I do have a couple of features that I'm building right now if you want to dig those out. I'm putting there a big database of VCs that you can eventually contact if you get enough points from your pitches. So, like when you have built a good pitch, then you can...

Zihan Wang (45:24)
Mm.

Mari (45:29)
do a kind of graded outreach through my software to investors that actually want to see those pitches through my software. And also like relevant ones because like another issue a lot of founders have is that they just bombard the pitches to everywhere. And then for instance, well, as a tech investor, get like vodka soda pitches and

Zihan Wang (45:42)
Yeah.

Mari (45:57)
whatever, like they don't read, they just are opportunistic, but it doesn't bring any value to anyone. So basically like it will create that it will send the pitch to only those investors that are really relevant and investing now. they are actively, they have press funds and they might have something like overlapping or missing from the portfolio. So I have scraped that also and something like that. So

Zihan Wang (46:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mari (46:23)
It will definitely bring more value with that. But currently my vision is that I want to enjoy vibe coding and maximize just building random stuff without any financial pressure or anything. I have spent four days now building role-playing character generator for my friends.

Zihan Wang (46:39)
Mm.

Mari (46:48)
which has been extremely fun and I'm not planning making any money out of it. minimizing calls because if you go to that route there is too few VCs and partners and everything but don't want calls and I don't want to call anyone. And I also need a co-founder if I go there and

Zihan Wang (46:48)
Mm.

Mari (47:15)
I don't want to work with anyone.

Zihan Wang (47:17)
Yeah, fair enough. You know, a lot of people say, by coded products have absolutely zero defensibility and will eventually become obsolete. What do you say to that?

Mari (47:30)
As six years VC, I have never seen a case that is unique.

So in my point of view, most of the startups don't have any defensibility. The defensibility is something that you build by how you build the startup. it's kind of the...

Zihan Wang (47:35)
Mmm.

See you first.

Mari (47:54)
your ability of attracting the best people and put them to execute faster and better than anyone else. That's the defensibility.

Zihan Wang (48:02)
Hmm.

Yeah, so why do VCs keep asking this question?

Mari (48:07)
Yeah, a couple of reasons. If they keep asking you that kind of questions usually like, well, then it's not clear because like...

If you have used my pitch kit, it makes it very clear what is the point. it doesn't like, defensibility is not necessarily point like, especially early stage, there is nothing to defend. Like, like, however you build it, like there's nothing to defend. It's more kind of

Zihan Wang (48:23)
Always good. ⁓

Mari (48:40)
Are you able to communicate why you from all the people and opportunities are the ones that are going to do this? And usually that doesn't have anything to do with defensibility. It's do I trust you? Do I trust your passion? Do I trust what you have achieved? How you have validated the early traction? What you have been able to do so far? How do you communicate things? Can I trust based in your communication that you are able to attract all the

opportunities to you and get all the resources to be the best. And if they ask about defensibility, most cases you didn't communicate that or they don't trust you.

Zihan Wang (49:19)
Hmm

Mari (49:20)
And they start asking a lot of questions because they just don't want to say no yet. Or they don't have a valid reason to say no. Because it's very rude to say that I don't want to invest in you. I don't want to invest in this case because of you.

Zihan Wang (49:32)
Mm.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay, a mini question. Since you're learning a lot, I feel like you are someone who learns something every day. Whose content in the industry do you follow and why do you like them?

Mari (49:47)
Mmm.

I follow mainly currently

in the developers on X.

So those are my current source of stuff. People who rapidly build stuff like me. Like there's this one guy, levels.io. For instance, that guy. Yep.

Zihan Wang (50:03)
Yeah, he is a very famous

indie hacker. One of the most successful ones as well. I think he was on Lex Friedman's podcast.

Mari (50:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, but he

has been doing this for like 15 years. Like he was the early adapter or remote working and everything like now he is popping up. like I've been following him since like over 10 years ago, he was already making like quite a good money with this like remote working websites, like his early adapter. But like interesting about him is that kind of that market is becoming mainstream.

So it's very cool that he has been able to adapt into doing completely different stuff.

Zihan Wang (50:48)
Yeah, okay cool then thank you again Mary It has been a great pleasure

Zihan Wang (50:55)
Thank you so much everyone for listening to Zeitgeist. If you like this episode, hit subscribe and drop a quick review. It really helps more people find the show. Appreciate you being here and I will catch you in the next one.