Founders pitching personalized AI agents almost always arrive at the same line about a "data moat" that gets built one user at a time. Then you ask them how they get the first 500 quality data points on me, and the answer is some version of: scrape my X, my Spotify, my DoorDash, my camera roll, my emails, my texts. I sat through dozens of these pitches when I was at a venture firm and I never bought it. The first reason is legal. Most of those companies do not want you scraping their data. The second reason is the part founders will not admit to investors. Trying to figure out who someone is from the tweets they liked at two in the morning is not very indicative of their personhood. The actual move is to find a use case where users tell you the truth about themselves on purpose. There are not many of those, which is part of why dating is one of the first places AI personalization will work.

If you're in a meeting right now talking about how AI will let you cut 40% of your team, you're playing the small game. IKEA just showed why. They deployed a chatbot named Billy to handle level 1 customer service. It resolved 57% of inquiries on its own. Most companies would've booked the labor savings and stopped there. IKEA studied the 43% Billy couldn't resolve. Those unresolved tickets pointed to one massive demand signal: customers wanted interior design help. They didn't want to figure it out themselves. So IKEA spun up a design consultancy, reskilled the customer service team with AI, and created a new revenue stream that did ~$1B in its first year. @neilpatel and I sit in these meetings every week. Everyone's optimizing for the cut. Almost nobody is asking what their AI is actually telling them. Your business is a problem-solving machine. What other problems could it solve if you redeployed the people you already have? Cutting headcount is the last resort, not the first move.

Games marketing is broken. After raising over $50M to support and work with hundreds of studios over the last 6 years, I find that the biggest problem is studios’ lack of direct connection with their players. Over the last six years, I’ve watched talented teams struggle because they never had a clear way to reach, learn from, and grow with players over time. Without that connection, everything becomes harder - validation, iteration, community growth, and retention all turn into guesswork. For most of the games industry’s history, platforms have controlled identity, communication, and distribution, which are invaluable to a game’s success. Apple limited how studios could collect and use player contact information outside the App Store, and Steam still doesn’t give studios access to the contact details of players who wishlist or sign up for playtests. Studios are left without a direct relationship with the audience they’re trying to serve. As a result, studios rely on fragmented tools and spreadsheets to manage players across different stages of development and live operations, with no continuity from first contact through long-term engagement. Today, that changes with the launch of FirstLook 1.0. FirstLook is the first Player Relationship Platform built specifically for games. It gives studios everything they need to connect with players across the full lifecycle, including playtests and feedback, community and communications, analytics, rewards, and creator programs, all in one place. We’ve been building under the radar, but FirstLook already powers hundreds of studios, from indies to publishers like Krafton, @ArenaNet, and @Skybound, connecting millions of players with the developers who make the games they love. As part of the launch, we’re introducing a brand new limited time free plan, with access to all our features for up to 500 players. You can set this up now in under 10 minutes. If you want to learn more, book a demo and we guarantee that you will save you time and money and help you grow. Links in comments!