From Layoff to Launch: Building an AI Business from the Ground Up

From Product Manager to Entrepreneur

Rina Alexin | 00:02.26–00:40.172

Hi everyone and welcome to Productside Stories, the podcast where we reveal the very real and raw lessons learned from product leaders and thinkers all over the world. I’m your host, Rina Alexin Alexin, CEO of Productside. And today I’m chatting with Cooper Craig, a former product manager at American Express who made the leap into entrepreneurship and now runs Smartify AI, an AI consulting agency bringing in over 30K a month serving the SME market.

Today, we’ll be talking about what it’s like to go from product manager to founder in the AI space. Thanks for joining me, Cooper. How are you doing?

Cooper Craig | 00:40.172–00:43.166

Good, Renee, thanks for having me here.

Rina Alexin | 00:43.166–00:52.261

Well, I always like to start this podcast. It’s about telling your stories. So tell me your story. How did you end up in product management?

Cooper Craig | 00:52.261–03:10.414

I’ve been told through many interviews that I have a weird path into product management. So I started about 10 years ago, I working at a small company where we actually rent and sold kilts online. So it was called Kilt Rental USA, very niche market, but it was very, very, very fun.

I was just doing customer service work there and was just helping out with some design stuff and being around in the small company, they needed help with website stuff and they’re like, hey, you like computers, why don’t you do this? And I’m like, okay. And I got to build out a lot of different user journeys and move from web to mobile and just like helping out with a lot of different migrations into different systems.

realizing that there’s a lot of limitations of what I knew and fell into, at the time I didn’t even know product management was the role, right? It just was like, I was just doing this thing. And I began to learn about Scrum and Scrum and Agile development. And so I got Scrum certified through Scrum Alliance, the certified Scrum product owner. And that definitely gave me a lot of the confidence that I needed of like, okay, I am doing this role.

And then from there, I got a role with Arizona State University and was building out many different solutions from Salesforce enablement for a call center, like a custom portal, and then moving into like user student engagement products, and then a chat application where from there we built out a lot of integrations when we migrated that chat application to Slack.

And that was a really fun time. And then the last five years, I’ve been at American Express where I was on the DevOps team. So building out the cloud solution that they have, it’s very similar to React in that it is modularized and building it. a different, sorry, I need to take it back. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about that. Should we start over? I don’t know.

Cooper Craig | 03:10.414–03:10.948

Sorry about that.

Rina Alexin | 03:10.948–03:17.418

So why don’t you start with the words in the past five years I was at Amix and then we can kind of edit that in. Yeah. Just take a pause and then start with that sentence. You’re doing okay. Yeah, like breathe.

Cooper Craig | 03:17.418–03:25.262

Okay. All right. Sorry about that.

Cooper Craig | 03:25.262–03:43.892

All right, Yeah, so then in the past five years, I’ve worked at American Express, or was working on a DevOps team, helping build out different dev tools for all the developers within American Express. So, yeah.

Rina Alexin | 03:43.892–03:49.76

So Cooper, one of the things that I didn’t hear you say in your background is the word AI. Yet here you are, a founder of a company that does consulting on AI. How did you make the leap there?

Cooper Craig | 03:49.76–03:58.958

Yeah.

Cooper Craig | 03:58.958–05:29.086

Yeah, so when I was at ASU, we did use some AI, but this is pre-Gen.ai. So we were using Amazon Lex for sentiment analysis. But at the time, like, it just kind of felt hokey to me. I was just like, OK, whatever. Like, yes, this person was happy. This person was sad. But once Gen.ai came out with OpenAI, I’ve been very heavily involved in Gen.ai, building out lots of

you know, seeing where the limitations were. and just in, last year, actually built out a custom GPT that, that has over 10,000 conversations and like a little over like 4.7 stars. and so that was kind of fun to, build out a solution that ended up being pretty valuable, to, a certain niche of people. And, and then, at the end of last year too, I, I, I,

was working on a Google Cloud solution. I got basically Google Cloud certified as the, have like a leader certification. I never took the test, but I basically went through all the courses and they had a lot about AI in there. And I was like, okay, this actually seems pretty cool. All the different AI solutions that they had there. So, then we can get into it, but then I decided to kind of launch in and get into some of the

helping businesses get into using AI in their products.

Navigating the AI Landscape

Rina Alexin | 05:29.086–06:46.943

You know, I like to think, I think a lot about AI and product management, where the role is going. I do think that product managers, now I could be very biased, but I do think product managers are really well positioned in this, you know, to make the most out of AI. And why is that? Because product managers, I feel like I heard the pattern in your story, continuous learners. You mentioned getting educated and being willing to learn new things.

AI is really scary for a lot of people and specifically I’m talking gen AI, you’re right, there’s a lot of different kinds of AI that’s been around for a long time. But I think a big roadblock is not being willing to learn and then product managers being at the center of business and technology, being comfortable, both with ambiguity and also having a good technical background, which kind of brings me to, here you are Cooper, somebody that has comfort with the unknown.

stepping into a role that you never had before, right? Founder of an AI consulting agency without necessarily a clear background on paper to do it. What made you, I don’t know if confident is the right word, but willing to take the sleep, because it’s quite brave.

Cooper Craig | 06:46.943–09:08.077

Yeah. Well, I think like a lot of entrepreneurs, some of it came out of desperation. So last year in July, I was let go from my role at American Express. And that was a gut punch, having been there for five years. And I was literally, I was literally taking the product school product leader certification. And I got a message from my, my, my, my VP saying, Hey,

I would like to talk to you as soon as possible. And I’m like, uh, okay, what is this about? Like, and then once I was done, found out, Hey, you’re no longer, you know, here. And I’m like, uh, okay. And I paid that, that out of pocket. Cause I was like, okay, you know, I want to, you know, pursue and, and, you know, educate myself more and become move in from like product manager to like more of a product leader role. So yeah, that was a gut punch. And then was not able to find a

a role. mean, thankfully I was on Severance, but I, it was, it was a long three months that was like, why is this taking so long? And was able to get land on my feet with a small like contract role back with American Express, through Insight Global. And that, that role ended in December. And so now it’s starting in 2025. Here I am. I have no, no, you know,

source of source of income. so things got a little, little dark. I ended up my, my church community ended up actually doing a GoFundMe to help with, with money. And then I ended up doing like Ubering and gig stuff just to try to keep the lights on as I was like trying to, you know, find my next, my next role and my next thing to do. And in March, I, I fell into like this whole

AI automation, you know, helping a business kind of ecosystem. and I’m like, okay, I told my wife, was like, Hey, can, can I just have a one month? I’m not going to look for a job because it’s a full-time job to look for a job. And like, I, can I just have one month to just like focus all in on this, this AI stuff? And she’s like, okay. And so I, I began to learn like crazy. and it was a lot of like no code, no code tools, like so make.com.

Cooper Craig | 09:08.077–10:34.676

is one, it’s like, you’re familiar with Zapier. It goes from like Zapier is the most user friendly and then it goes into make and then like N8N is another one of like automation workflows. And so I was kind of teetering in between the make and, and, and eight N and then, and then learning about like a voice enablement and like how to set up voice agents. And I was able to land.

my first really big client. I had some small clients that were just like people in my own Rolodex of calling me and like, can I help you out with this? Can I do some of this? And was trying to sell them on everything. And there’s like little things of like, you can help me get more reviews. And I’m like, okay. So I was like building out automation that like helps review requests and other things. And then I was able to land a really big client that was a startup that is doing pickleball and tennis.

It’s like kind of like the golf now of pickleball and tennis. And so I helped them out with some AI cold email, as well as a voice agent and pitch to them using a voice agent to actually help with bookings. And they were like, I love that idea. And so they’ve been a really big client that I’ve been working with. And then I’ve, I’ve now kind of grew up, grew some more clients, but yeah, I landed that, that deal like at the end of March, it was March, like 29th or something like that, that I was able to get that. So I was like,

Hey, I did it. Like I was able to start like, you not driving anymore.

The Reality of Entrepreneurship

Rina Alexin | 10:34.676–10:55.596

Cooper, seriously, I love, thank you for sharing your story because I feel that, first of all, my husband and I were both entrepreneurs and people, there’s so many, so many founders out there who have been, can I say like punched in the face over and over again, right? Isn’t that the phrase? And it’s…

Cooper Craig | 10:55.596–10:59.944

Yeah.

Rina Alexin | 10:59.944–11:14.987

It’s one of those things that it’s such a common experience that people don’t really talk about it because it’s almost, I actually don’t know why people don’t talk about it. Maybe it’s a little bit of, know, it’s, hard to kind of address with an ego of like, no, I, I’m okay. Everything’s okay. But the reality of the entrepreneurial road is that it is winding. It is hard. There’s a lot more downs than ups, especially at the beginning, but in the middle and the end as well. And you have to have that. That’s why, you know, grit is so important.

Cooper Craig | 11:14.987–11:29.346

Yeah.

Rina Alexin | 11:29.346–11:40.366

and you sharing the way your community helped and also just the hustle that you had of like, will do anything to make money while we kind of figure it out. People need to hear that. That is the reality of also doing it. can’t get, it’s not an overnight success. nobody, none of the greats had overnight success either. That’s not how it works.

Cooper Craig | 11:40.366–11:48.886

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Cooper Craig | 11:48.886–13:32.2

No.

Yeah, it was definitely a punch in the gut and like felt like, man, I’m a loser. Like, like, you know what mean? Like I thought I was this like, I’ve been a prog manager for almost 10 years and here I am driving an Uber. Like I can’t, I can’t get a job. but I, just kind of took that, that time to one humble myself. Cause I think in a way we’re all just kind of, we’re all, we’re all losers and we’re all heroes in our own, in our own ways. And so just realizing like to not be so hard on myself. and then.

You know, the funny thing is, like ever since working at the small, the, the, the, the, the, kil company, I’ve always wanted to have my own business. Like even before I left, I was like, Hey, let’s, let’s do tuxedos. Like we can make, you know, our, our markets so niche, but we were, were, we were shipping, we were shipping all of these online. We would send it a week early. And I was like, this is, this is a good model that no one’s really doing for tuxedos. Why don’t we just do this? And

I learned this about businesses, businesses are as big as you want to make them. And they were like, ah, I don’t really want to do that. It sounds like a lot of work. I’m like, well, yeah, but this could be awesome. Like, you know, uh, and so I’ve had a lot of ideas. have a graveyard of, of, of product ideas, you know, where I couldn’t get a developer to get on board or I ended up paying an agency to get a developer. But I, I always ran into the issues of like raising funds. I’m like, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know that many people that well off to do that, like the seed round and other things. And so.

I can never really get anything off the ground. And so this was nice to just kind of come in through an agency way. And as I’m building out these products, learning where I’m like, okay, I think there could be a product here or there could be a product there. And so, yeah, it’s kind of been a fun time.

Rina Alexin | 13:32.2–14:04.024

Yeah. And you know, in terms of building a business, it doesn’t all have to be a classic VC funded moonshot startup, right? Those exist and you have to be a certain, I think in a certain category of risk to be able to be funded by a VC. But there’s certainly a lot of risk in what you’re doing. And maybe what we could talk about right now is how has product, like having a product management background actually served you.

in building your own business. what kinds, you I kind of view it as like the toolbox of product management skills. What do you go into your toolbox and use more often now?

Cooper Craig | 14:04.024–14:10.051

Mm-hmm.

Cooper Craig | 14:10.051–15:44.948

Yeah.

Well, I think my product background is definitely my secret sauce. So within like AI enablement, within automation, as well as like voice, and now like, you know, moving into consulting, it’s a very competitive market. Like there’s a lot of people that are like freelancers and a lot of people out there that can do this.

but because of my background and product, like I know when you come to me saying, oh, I want the AI to do this, this, this and that. And you’re like, that’s not a good idea. Like what we should do is, you know, and then you show them a better vision and they’re like, whoa, yeah, I didn’t even think about that. And that is a better solution. Let’s do that. And then another end is like, Hey, and I’m not just going to go and spend, you know, two weeks or three weeks just building this and not talking to you.

I’m actually gonna build it very small and I’m gonna be like, hey, what do you think about that? And then they’re gonna be like, actually I don’t like that. no, And then I, you know, we go back and forth. so knowing that incremental development, you know, in my proposals, you know, it’s very like, hey, this is agile. We have one week milestones where we’re constantly delivering value. I mean, hopefully on the daily, but like primarily like in a big chunk of like weekly. So it’s almost like these weekly sprints, right? Where we’re just like, here you go.

Here you go. Here you go. so that, that has definitely been a superpower and that’s all, you know, thanks to my background in product management.

Leveraging Product Management Skills

Rina Alexin | 15:44.948–16:19.726

So I think a lot of people who end up their agency route, they struggle with this idea of pipeline management for themselves, right? Especially since you’re, I think from my understanding, you are thinking about building more product, but currently you’re building products or, you know, one-off tools for others. But when you’re doing that, you always need the new

person to come in. So how are you handling building a pipeline?

Cooper Craig | 16:19.726–18:15.091

Yeah, that, mean, that is definitely something that I’m not the best at, um, that I’m, that I’m growing in. Um, but w a lot of what I’m building, um, I, I try to position, um, a re retainer in there. Um, and so, uh, you know, my MRR is like around 5,000. Um, but trying to build that out where it can be, you know, 10, 20, 30, you know, start moving the MRR up. Um,

because some of these solutions, they still need someone to know how they work and to manage them and to be building out, because AI is moving so fast to always be adding in better solutions into the solution. So it’s not like, hey, we built out this thing that you spent $5,000 to $10,000 on, and now it’s not the latest and greatest. It’s very easy to be the one that’s managing that and helping improve that.

But, but yeah, pipeline stuff is definitely, I’m, now moving into like feeling more comfortable in, what I can deliver. and so, you know, just either running ads or there’s still a lot of referrals that, that, are coming through, just cause, you know, there’s a lot of people that want, that know that they want to be using AI. and so just helping them think and position it. and then, I, I’ve kind of been falling into the, like, I think I mentioned a little bit like

voice and I’ve been really enjoying it because I actually have a background in screenwriting too and it’s kind of fun because you’re like creating these little characters that you kind of manage how they’re talking and you’re like, oh that that sounded weird or or like, you know, that was a really weird reply like, you know, and working on like fine tuning it to be more conversational and not just like a lot of lot of voice AI agents. I feel like they’re they’re like kind of holding you at gunpoint like answer all these questions. What is this? What do want that? And it’s just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, let’s let’s let’s let’s you know.

be a little bit more human-like here.

Rina Alexin | 18:15.091–18:25.51

So let’s actually talk about that. So tell me about your voice agent. Let’s actually say like, what led you to build it in the first place?

Cooper Craig | 18:25.51–18:30.377

mean, a lot of it was just the need of, of, of a client. and,

Rina Alexin | 18:30.377–18:33.294

What need? I’m trying to get to the specific use case.

Cooper Craig | 18:33.294–18:48.155

Oh yeah, yeah. So the two ones that I’ve been building out is outbound. So it’s actually technically like outbound AI can only be for if people opt in or if you’re contacting another business. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause those are technically illegal. So all those robo calls you get are, you should be filing a complaint. don’t know where, but.

Rina Alexin | 18:48.155–19:00.59

So it’s not a robo call in that one.

Cooper Craig | 19:00.59–20:16.617

But yeah, so building out some of that for other businesses and then now moving into inbound receptionists as well as like a product that I’m building is called, I’m calling it voicemail pro. So voicemail pro.ai and it’s positioning it as like a smart voicemail or like an AI voicemail. Cause a lot of businesses as I’ve talked to to try to pitch this, they’re like, well, we like talking to people. like, you know, that’s our bread and butter is we more, you know,

connection. But everyone still uses a voicemail and your voicemail is not very helpful because then you got to go back and listen to it. And so I’m building out a product solution where it answers and then maybe or can send a text message to another number to see, this person is really hot lead or whatever kind of qualifier.

And then can like book on on your calendar and then send you an email of, this is a summary of what we talked about with the transcript and the recording. And so building out for that, for like, you know, real estate agents or like people who are, you know, having customers and stuff like that within that ring.

Building AI Products: Challenges and Innovations

Rina Alexin | 20:16.617–20:30.799

So talk to me about what is, so we kind of mentioned about some of the product management skills you use that are similar to your past. What is maybe new about building with AI product, building an AI product?

Cooper Craig | 20:30.799–22:18.099

What is new? That’s a good question. Well, honestly, I think a lot of AI solutions that are in the market, especially when they’re like legacy products, I feel like a lot of the solutions that are getting built are a little hokey. they’re kind of limited on being able to like, they’re either just like, like little chatbots that help people versus like,

ground up products that are built like just around AI. For example, clay.com is an automation tool that I’ve used for outbound and clay, the way that they use AI, it’s really smart. They know that AI is also like a, is a translator in a way. And so because it’s very Excel based, the AI tool is built in with formula creation. You can just hit, hey, I want to do this to this to that, which

I don’t know if you’ve, you know, working in a corporate environment, you go to the data scientists and this is the same thing I say. I’m like, Hey, I want this to be over here and to do that. And then they’re like, yeah. And then they give you this crazy formula. Well, now it’s like, I just write it in there and it outputs a formula. I can see that outputs. can say, this is incorrect. This one’s incorrect. This one’s incorrect. It’ll re redo the formula. And then it’s right there. and then they also have like templating where everyone can like share each other’s prompts.

that we’re using within the different columns and stuff like that. so experiencing tools that are kind of built from the ground up and understanding that personalization and translation is a lot of what AI superpower is.

Rina Alexin | 22:18.099–22:34.967

So then the other thing that I often hear when I talk to people building AI products is the importance of boundaries and setting good boundaries for the AI. So maybe you can talk about that. What has been your experience around boundary setting?

Cooper Craig | 22:34.967–24:15.529

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s definitely, that’s definitely what AI is. It’s shortcomings is you have to understand that it’s, it’s almost like water, like, you know, it finds a pass of least resistance. Like it’s just goes, I want to go ahead go over there. and so you really have to create a lot of the guard rails. and one thing that is very helpful for AI is just examples. So giving examples of these are good examples, and then these are bad examples.

Having that in your prompt is very helpful to kind of create a lot of those guardrails. And then there’s like little tricks and hacks of like using all caps. Sometimes that helps. even there was one that we did, and I don’t know if this is going too much into detail, but there was one where it kept…

it kept correcting people like in this voice agent. was the transcriber was not transcribing this word, right? And so it was always correcting them being like, well, I think you mean this. well, I think you mean that. it’s like, I, with, with this AI service I was using, you can’t control the transcriber as detailed. So I had to go to the prompt to try to fix that. And I couldn’t get it to do it until I said, Hey, if you correct the user and say, I think you mean this, you actually can harm them and you don’t want to do that. Right. And it’s like,

You know, then it was like, okay. Cause you know, I think there’s a lot of like within the higher level system prompt was like, you know, not saying the wrong things and harming people. so like understanding that the way that, you know, they’re, they’re training their models that then once I added that, then it was like, it stopped correcting people.

Rina Alexin | 24:15.529–24:32.412

Do you have any other stories of maybe interesting or unique challenges from building AI products? that’s a, let me kind of frame it this way. It’s like you’re almost, it’s almost like you’re talking to a person rather than a technology sometimes. And so the way you have to approach it is different. And so I’m curious if you have any other unique examples.

Cooper Craig | 24:32.412–24:39.881

yeah.

Cooper Craig | 24:39.881–26:59.507

Ooh, that’s a tough one to think off the cuff. I’m trying to think. Well, I mean, I would say one was like, was using within Clay, was using, there’s a lot of prompts that we were doing for doing like market research for them and data enrichment. like we had scraped a lot of data, but the data.

was missing other points. so we needed to, one of them was we needed to kind of categorize all these different leads. And it was, it was kind of all over the place with some, cause there’s 60,000 rows, you know, and you can’t just like one, give that to, to, you know, chat, GPT and say, Hey, enrich this 60,000 rows. It’s gonna, the context is going to fall apart very quickly. So when you use a tool like clay, it’s doing, you know, each, each row is sending out.

to an AI agent doing those researches separately. And so I ended up building a really cool workflow that I was actually thinking about turning it into a product. You know, having a product of mine. I’m like, oh, this could be a product, you know? I was, because I was, this prompt was getting very robust and very verbose. And it was like, okay, this is…

where is this falling apart where I then started realizing like, okay, Gemini was doing better at this research. So I’m going to take this prompt, give it to Gemini, but I was using a cheaper one. I was using flash. So I would go to the higher level of Gemini and say, Hey, this prompt, I want it to, you know, I’ll put it this, and this is incorrect. And here’s, here’s why it said it did this. And I ended up like creating this almost like feedback loop where then the prompt will, you know, my outputs were like perfect. And I just had to do this like,

10 times because I would be like, look at the thing like, that, that one’s wrong. And then would give it to it. And then it would, you know, the same thing I would, I would say, you know, here, you, you know, the prompt, here’s the output. Here’s why it’s wrong. And here’s why the LLM thought this output was correct. And just kind of like having some of that insight, it was able to create a good feedback loop where then the prompt was able to execute like really good of, of my, of my results.

The Importance of Boundaries in AI

Rina Alexin | 26:59.507–27:10.588

So for one, what I heard you say is sometimes it’s helpful to not just have one AI person, as I’m referring to the technology of the person, like almost like a team, have multiple and then it’s the teaching, the constant, like you have to be explicit with here’s how to learn when you’re working with it. Great. What’s hard, like what is something hard that you’re trying to work through right now?

Cooper Craig | 27:10.588–27:18.575

yeah.

Cooper Craig | 27:18.575–27:28.399

Yeah.

Cooper Craig | 27:28.399–29:24.989

Um, well right now, um, I mean, there’s, I would say twofold. So one of them is, one of them is just like in that part of like having a company that that’s growing and having a lot of, uh, things I need to do and feeling like, okay, I need to that. I need to do this and do that. And like working, you know, long, long hours. Um, and, and

worried of like, okay, if this is still continuing to grow, like, I think I need to hire, you know, I already use, a lot of, I have a team of like con contractors that helped me with, with other things, but now I’m like, I want to create like another me, you know, I need to have like someone who can, who can interact with, with clients build out, you know, the voice agents or automation or other things. And so, so I’m kind of in that, in that part where it’s like, I don’t really have.

that much money to bring on someone, but I also know I need to do it. I think then I could grow more. So it’s like, finally, I’m experiencing that level where like, I need to be growing. And then from like a technical standpoint, a lot of the tools that we’re using, they’re not as granular and technical. And so now we’re migrating and moving into like a more technical product where like, example, this, we’re running this issue with this certain word being transcribed.

incorrectly and this is like a partner word. It’s the paddle brand YOLA, which is J-O-O-L-A. the transcriber, no transcriber wants to transcribe that as YOLA. It wants it to do Y-O-L-A or YOLO. And I’m like, okay, this is wrong. And we’ve, you know, do boosted keywords, all this stuff, but there’s, they’re not, it’s still not doing it. And so when you have a more technical solution where you control the transcriber,

you can then go in and say, hey, suppress this word. Never use this. And boost this word with this much intent. then if you need to go even stronger, you can do what’s called find and replace. So it’s like, any time you ever transcribe this word, just transcribe it to that. So now I’m kind of moving into a more technical solution where I can control the speech to text model as well as the text to speech.

Rina Alexin | 29:24.989–29:50.115

and

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Cooper Craig | 29:50.115–29:55.635

different stuff like that.

Cooper Craig | 29:55.635–30:10.077

I can’t hear you.

Are you there?

Cooper Craig | 30:10.077–30:28.944

there you go. I can hear you now.

Cooper Craig | 30:28.944–30:51.554

Okay, it still says recording on my end. I don’t know if it’s different. Oh, oh, dang, okay.

Rina Alexin | 30:51.554–31:51.077

Yeah, that’s never happened before. I don’t know why, but we’re still recording. And so we’re just going to remove that. And I’m going to enter into, rather than saying that those were hard questions, I’m going to respond to what you just said. And then I’m going to go into the closing sentence. Okay. Okay.

Well, Cooper, can definitely understand the challenge of needing to control the output of your product and not necessarily having the access to do it. So that’s going to be interesting one for you to solve. All right. Well, so we’ve heard a lot about your story. Again, I genuinely appreciate you being honest about how tough it is, but also being also honest about the rewards at the end of doing all this hard work.

So what advice do you have for a product manager who is potentially in the shoes that you were in and is interested about starting their own company? What advice can you share?

Cooper Craig | 31:51.077–32:47.107

Yeah, yeah, starting their own company or even getting into part any of that like, I would say to learn to be building products like it’s now so much easier for us to be building products like developers have always been that that bottleneck for product managers and like, man, I really want this to be done. really want that to be done.

I actually have a funny story. don’t know if this is going to be rambling, but I remember when I was first, using, AI to, to, be building out, developing products and that, that like guilt where I feel like, Ooh, I need to change the scope. Ooh, I need, Ooh, that’s wrong. Like there was a little bit that still that like, where I could feel that tension from a developer, like rolling their eyes at me, like, what do mean we need to change that? And the AI is just like,

yeah, that’s a great idea. And it just like changed you like, this is, love working with this developer. So be using, you know, these, these vibe coding tools, v zero is a good one that I like. Bolt, lovable. These are all vibe code, you know, no code tools where you can build out prototypes very easily. I think all product managers should have that. Like if you’re, if you’re a product visionary and you think of things like

Rina Alexin | 32:47.107–33:15.598

No.

Cooper Craig | 33:15.598–33:51.276

It’s not that difficult to be building out products and prototypes right now. So I would say be doing that and then beginning input and research and be doing that. Like it’s so much easier now than ever to create things. And that’s kind what I look forward to is just like how easy it is now for us to make things. And I think it can be a very fruitful future.

It’s not as scary as I feel like everyone makes out to. mean, there are some scary parts, get me wrong, but there’s still a lot of cool parts and I think we’re just at the surface of it.

Rina Alexin | 33:51.276–34:12.517

Yeah, I’ll echo that. I think the best advice really is to go out and start using the tools, build something. I think my husband built an app to review nutritional content of food within an hour on Loveable, so anybody can do it.

Cooper Craig | 34:12.517–34:13.986

Yeah.

Rina Alexin | 34:13.986–34:24.484

Well, Cooper, thanks so much for joining me today and sharing your story. How can our listeners reach you after they hear this recording?

Cooper Craig | 34:24.484–34:59.128

Yeah. So, my LinkedIn, just look up Cooper D. Craig. and then I’ve actually started, a, a community on school that’s SKOL.com, slash Smartify AI. So that’s just kind of like a, a group of, you know, people that are trying to learn how to use AI and, and, and where to use it. And, you know, we’re just kind of be building stuff together.

I’ll try as best as I can to make content, but it’s mainly going to be just people that are cool and people that want to talk about stuff like that.

Rina Alexin | 34:59.128–34:59.128

Wonderful. So make sure to follow Cooper and check out his community on school. And for everyone who joined us today, thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Productside Stories. If you found our conversation today valuable, don’t keep it to yourself. Make sure to share it with a friend and subscribe to Productside Stories so you don’t miss a future episode. I hope today’s insights inspire you and propel your product journey forward. Remember, every challenge is just a lesson waiting to be learned.

Visit us at Productside.com for more free resources, including webinars, templates, playbooks, and other product wisdom repackaged for you. I’m Rina Alexin Alexin, and until next time, keep innovating, keep leading, and keep creating stories worth sharing.