hey what's up everybody so excited to give you this conversation today today i talked to joe from twos app that's t-w-o-s-a-p-p.com and twos app is this Really brilliant and super simple notes taking app with a bunch of features that are coming. But what I love about it is just the ease of use. This is pretty much a brand new company.
He raised pre-seed with Tampa Bay Ventures to the tune of $400K. He's got 20,000 current users and $3K to $4K monthly recurring revenue. Enjoy this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by KitKat. Kitcaster books your podcast interviews. So specifically, Kitcaster works with... and funded startup founders and works to book them on the world's top podcast. Now, what we know is that founders always need content and podcast interviews is just a brilliant way in a very low friction way to get.
the content itch scratched. So check out kitcaster.com today and apply if it's relevant for you. Joe how the heck are you Ryan I am so good thank you so much for having me Absolutely. Now, we're going to talk all about your company. I'm really excited about Twos, which is twosapp.com. But before we do that, let's just dive right into the, what did you call it, AI madness?
Let's get right to it. And let's start with what tools right now are you really excited about? What's really exciting to you right now in AI? You know, I don't know if this makes me an AI prude, but I just love ChatGPT. I've been a big fan of ChatGPT and I promise, you know. Especially just to give myself a little bit more credibility with all the image generation stuff and Sora improvements.
the models of that nature i was using grok the other day just trying to understand you know its competitive advantage compared to what open ai has and i i didn't see anything like i was actually relatively under-enthused by Grok. So in terms of just general data scraping and learning more about being a startup founder, I really just love the LLM-based stuff. Is there anything on your radar? No, I love that. And maybe some use cases. Did you basically replace Google search with GPT?
100%, especially for my personal life. I've always liked saying that to me, LLMs and AI is just Google with a little bit of confidence. you're able to ask it a question and then it just gives you a straight answer as compared to like, oh, well, your answer could be in one of these 50 websites. I like how, you know, LLMs are just like, no, here's exactly what you need to know about, you know, converting tablespoons to ounces.
Yeah, it's interesting. And I mean, there are so many models now. I mean, by so many, there's probably a dozen that are competitors. And it seems like, I mean, if tech is any example, it's kind of a winner takes all. There really is no second place.
They jump right to the front of the line right from the get-go, and they're seeming to do a really good job of holding that, particularly as you have incumbents like DeepSeek and folks that are like, hey, we're going to give you 90% of what you get in GPT with like one-tenth of the compute. You know, and to your point, like meta AI, no one's looking there. Grok AI, no one's looking there. So it kind of like.
at least with Meta, is open sourcing it. So I wonder how GPT is going to maintain supremacy if you can get 90% of the way there with an open platform. Especially with the $40 billion round that they just closed at a $300 billion valuation. In terms of scalability, I was reading an article this morning that emphasized despite... I think they touted $5 billion in ARR. They're still deeply underwater in terms of profitability.
The thing that I always have been so fascinated about with chat... with GPT particularly is how it just kind of popped up on the scene out of nowhere and maintained that lead you know up until this point they just kind of you know came out of nowhere and all of a sudden it just has become a integral tool for so many people, yet from a profitability standpoint, we're not getting anywhere close. So it'll be interesting to see like kind of just how this keeps up for the next couple of years.
Yeah, the profitability will be really important to watch. I mean, I did hear how Sam Altman determined the valuation on his company, which is he wrote with magic marker on a bunch of balloons, blind float himself and just started throwing darts. And the number that was left, that was their valuation. Okay. I mean, from an ecosystem standpoint, I can see. So we actually use the ChatGPT API for two.
And so when it comes to analyzing the things that people write down to provide smart suggestions, we do use the OpenAI API. And I actually think that you would love to know this. We have about 20,000 active users. Take a wild guess as to what our monthly API bill is. Wow, no kidding. And you said you have 20,000 users? 20,000 users. Now, the good news is that since we are text-based, you know, it's a Notes app in a large capacity. So the only like input and output that we have really is just...
using the LLM to categorize what people are writing down. So there isn't a whole lot of compute related to, you know, the work that we're having it do. But for each one of these requests, which are thousands a day, the idea that it's, you know, .00001 cents per, you know, per request is pretty awesome so far. Now.
going back to what we were just talking about profitability and an ecosystem wouldn't it be a shame if one day open AI or whoever it is says oh you know that was just our Amazon moment we were just decreasing the prices for 10 years. But now that we have the entire market share, we're going up and we're increasing the prices to a dollar per request. And it's like, oh, well, I can't afford.
Yeah. Aside from price, and I mean, I suppose all the competition ends up being good for you, because if they do raise the price, that just opens it wide up. So is there a different, is there an additional competitive advantage that you're going with GPT or is it just really kind of comfortability and like use? comfortability in use and just like immediate i i also do you know i i would love to hear your opinion on you know all of the fanfare surrounding like
The non-profit versus for-profit argument when it comes to open AI and Elon's gripe with them. Because truth be told, since they were first to the market... since they have a huge amount of market share and since I personally find their tool very useful, we decided to go with that API. But, you know, in terms of just their... Dr. Evil plans of the future, I can't speculate beyond just the fact that it's a good tool for now, and so we have no reason to change.
Yeah. Let's hang on this. Dr. Evil of AI, the AI future. And you kind of opened up that conversation about like open AI was. Founded as a non-profit, I think Elon went in for like 4 or 5 billion. Something like that. And then what they're doing, and I don't think the litigation has finished, is they're either transferring the company or creating a shadow company or some kind of shenanigans to make it into a for-profit company.
You know, if they're successful, this kind of business model could rewrite modern economics. Because now it's like, why not go in with where? The tax breaks to get stood up exactly and get all of the sentiment and even their name, OpenAI. And what Sam Altman said in front of Congress, I just do this because I love it. I didn't do it to get paid.
okay, that didn't really stand the test of time. We're now three months later and it's like, oh yeah, we actually are making a lot of money and we just closed a $40 billion round. Like, okay. The scale of AI is absolutely incredible. You know, now we're also thinking about the evil empire and all of the safeguards that were put in place, all the senior leadership, they've all since stepped down.
You know, it's basically Sam just running the show and we're all at his whimsy. What really scares you broadly about AI in general? You know, I think that it is, I think it does come down to sentient-ness. Like when it comes to computers, we, you know, one of my favorite jokes is that we're just, you know. soft meat bags. You know, we're just humans full of organs and we have emotions and we have biases. Computers just don't.
And so when it comes to being efficient and being cynical and being painfully smart, Computers just kind of have that upper advantage on us. So if they gain wherewithal to kind of be like, all right, well, we don't need these.
you know meat bags to continue to talk to us we can make money for ourselves we can overthrow like any software out there i've always thought about it in the perspective of if we lost internet as a you know society for one day and i mean phone computer it all just gets brick
Don't you think that there'd be, like, a pretty sincere degree of, like, you know, chaos? Like, people genuinely wouldn't know what to do. They can't even get into their office if they don't know, you know, how to get there or if their key card works. Yeah, totally. And that's even totally separate. On one side, the machines come sentient. We have to program in there that they have some kind of respect for their biological heritage. Please, Sam Altman, put that in there somewhere.
But then, yeah, to your point, it's like, you know, if we just go beyond that, it's not even like the Internet. It's like power. If we lose power, I mean, they say we're nine meals away from a revolution. You know what I mean? Like you, if your kids have missed nine meals, you're going to the park and you're getting a goose and you're cooking that goose over a trash can.
you know what i mean exactly and and so that is what scares me like i think that we've all had an experience with an llm now that's like wow that is really really good So what is stopping, you know. Just one either, you know, human who has not the best intent for the human race. and or the computer just gaining, you know, a mind of its own as to say, hey, I can, you know, I can either gain power or change the fabric of the universe just by flicking this switch.
To go on the bright side of full science fiction here. the the net positives let's say a chat gpt goes full god mode and it's sentient it's conscious it's you know a million order orders of magnitude smarter than me how do you use Now, one thing I'd like to do is to use it to investigate the root of consciousness in itself. Because it might be interesting. Right now, consciousness is a bit of, it's either woo-woo, or you just don't believe in it at all.
you know there's a certain darkness of consciousness that have or they call it the hard problem of consciousness you know which is like i know that i have a subjective experience but i can't scientifically prove it to you Now, if we know anything about science in the universe, it's that sunlight was the same way.
But now we understand that sunlight behaves as a particle, but also as a wave. And we can measure it. We can quantify it. I think the same thing exists with consciousness. We just don't have the tools to test it. so what i would ask gpt god mode is like what is the the particle of consciousness And how do you measure it, you know? It reminds me of two things. I don't know if you have ever seen the show Breaking Bad, but they have a very...
They have that very famous scene where they're trying to weigh a human body. And they're like, okay, we've gotten up to 99.8% of weight, you know, in all the organs and all of the fibers and whatever it may be. What's the last 0.2%? And she goes, the soul. I just, I love that. Like from a, you know, I love that from just a TV show and media perspective, but Hey.
you know what makes me me what makes you you it is our soul it is our consciousness and exactly like you said we can't prove it to anyone just is and you know that's where a lot of people i think look to religion to kind of answer some of those questions of life And the other thing that it reminded me of is, I don't know if you've seen, some people have made cartoons through Sora. Just saying, like, describe your existence in a, you know, four panel cartoon.
And one of my favorite ones that I've seen is like. I am a computer who makes up emotions because like human beings have emotions. So I don't know what it feels like to love. I don't know what it feels like to be angry, but I just have to make it up. So I thought that that was like a very unique paradox for like how a computer thinks about itself.
Yeah, and I know it's lying because I think there is a subjective quality of existence for... the internet and honestly for everything and this is kind of like consciousness studies classically through kind of a buddhist lens where they would say like, hey, everything has a different kind of consciousness. There is a subjective... understanding fundamentally of being a tree. Which is, you know, not as sophisticated as human consciousness.
It's more sophisticated than, let's say, a rock. And there is a qualia of consciousness that's present in all things. That's just an observation that the Buddhists have made. And I think there's something there. You know, that there is some component, which is to say that consciousness is a... Absolutely critical to reality. It's a fundamental fabric.
of reality it's just a matter of like the sophistication and the complexity of that consciousness but everything has it you know in the same way everything is subject to gravity or something like that So, you know, if GPT does go full God mode, then maybe let's say we call it qualia is the way that we experience. So humans have 100 qualia. GPT goes to a million qualia. Now they have a different subjective feeling of where it is now, or maybe their qualia now is two.
What you were saying about the rock versus the tree and the level of consciousness, I became a plant dad for the first time. And I'd be lying if I said that I don't like look at my, you know, Swiss. swiss uh cheese plant regularly and think to myself what's going on in that little head of yours like why are we not you know sprouting leaves anymore how much water do you need like so you're exactly right i i i think that on
Everyone's radar should be, will GPT and AI in general be able to fabricate consciousness or will it... maintain it in some and and how does that relate to AGI how does how does like true artificial generative intelligence then relate to the need to have like a conscious you know reality Yeah. Would it be important to us that it mimics the expression of our consciousness? Or is there a way to be like, hey, how can you explain to me, you know?
what what your realm of consciousness is and it like takes over your brain and suddenly you're in the dmt dimension and you see the spirits of your ancestors you're like oh my god your computer just pops up a little pill and it's like do you really want to know what it's like joe and you're like uh yeah i do Out of the headphone portals, just some weird mist that comes out, just like fogs you.
It's like, I thought that I was just buying a MacBook, man. Like, I didn't think that, you know, this was a 4D movie. That's great. That would be the best day of my life. I, you know, so we're bleeding into something that I would love to hear your opinion on. When it comes to Neuralink and just establishing ourselves with, you know, human beings with a computer. Are you pro again?
Any concerns like, you know, so if Elon knocked on your door and said, you know, either with a monetary consideration right now, Ryan, I'll, I'll, you know, throw the Neuralink in your head or, you know, yeah. How do you, how do you react to all? I think right now I'm going to pass. I'll wait till Neuralink 4.0. But, you know, if I didn't have, you know, capabilities of my arms and legs...
I think I would absolutely be singing a different song. Really good point. Really good point. And like blindness too. Like if somehow we can just turn that part of people's brains back on, that would be pretty immaculate. Yeah, 100%. So it's kind of like this range of ability. You know, at what point are you willing to like take a massive gamble, especially at this point where it's like Narrowlink's still pretty primitive.
But, you know, if you have a 10% increase, you know, in your opportunity or, you know, you're a real hero and you're going to be on the front lines for other people to come behind you. You know, I think it would be cool. I mean, you know, the the idea of connecting your brain to the Internet. Again, we're talking about consciousness and soul and stuff like that. That kind of scares me because it's terrifying.
Yeah, like it's circuit bound, right? Or at least that's the way I- You give up control. You give up control of your own, you know, it's very similar to what people emphasize about like an ayahuasca trip. It's like, I'm not, you know, I'm not within control of my own mind. And I think to, you know, actively, you know.
permit that into our lives is is very scary and we'll come and that's you know i think that that is kind of a high level um problem with elon as a whole is that he's just a dreamer he's such like a eye in the sky kind of guy where no matter what he dreams up, he wants to create it. But then he doesn't really consider, you know, the... overarching consequences of his actions like putting machinery into people's literal biological brains. Like it just doesn't seem safe.
Totally true. All right. I realize we've been going on for so long and I want to make sure these listeners understand twos. Joe, this has been fantastic. I want to bring you back on and have philosophical conversation. I would love to. Anytime. Let's talk about twos. And I'm super excited about twos because it's replacing an app that I use that I hate, which is Apple Notes. Let's go.
Apple Notes is just like the... worst app and yet i use it all the time because it's just right there you know what i mean there's a simplicity to it that makes it ease of use but then also there it's just like clunky and clumsy and terrible now i signed up for twos twosapp.com and i would say like 15 seconds and i was using it immediately you know it's got a browser it uh syncs to your phone it's basically everything you love about like apple notes
Times 30 other ways that you're not using it, that you have opportunity to. So tell us really quick your favorite use cases and kind of where this idea came from. you know everything that you just said is just perfect as like a underhanded pitch because i think we personally as the founders of twos we're exactly like you i think a lot of other people out there are exactly like us In the capacity of, we use these productivity systems because they're either default as a part of our phone.
or because it's just what we were told to get used to as the first iterations of the iPhone were coming out. But the truth is, the idea that all of these apps are disconnected from one another is the biggest problem. that we're trying to solve with twos with twos it's not just your notes it's your reminders it's your calendar events it's your ai assistant now as i was telling you about with these with these categorizations that we do and so
With twos, the whole concept is writing things down. These individual pieces of your life. My favorite use cases tend to be when I have something I need to write down, whether it be a place that I'm going and having a meeting at or a restaurant that one of my friends recommends to me. Now we use LLMs to... Analyze that information and provide smart suggestions. So, for example, if I write down meeting at Starbucks on Tuesday at 2 p.m.
Then twos will help me add that event to my calendar with literally just tapping on the diamonds and saying add to calendar. But it will also get me directions to the Starbucks when it's time to leave. now you may be saying you know my calendar app also does that it says hey it's time to leave but It goes beyond that. It's the notes from that event. It's all of the things that you wrote down about that person beforehand.
It really is intended to be an all-in-one productivity system. And in the future, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Her, where he puts in the headset and then he just starts asking about his life. That's what we're going for. Right now, if you really want to create legit AI agents, a lot of people are talking about that. It's probably going to be about $20,000 to put something legit together.
But what you want to do is be thinking this way. So if you're like, okay, twos is going to like basically bridge the gap. For me, so that I'm accustomed to using this interface that as the price goes from $20,000 to $2, I'm already built in. I'm already there. Exactly. It's all of the data set from your personal life. that will become valuable once we are able to fully leverage AI. So the next feature that we're actually coming out with sometime in the next month will be chat with two.
And so now you're talking to someone who has over 150,000 things written down in twos from my dreams, my favorite foods, my favorite movies. I just write things down because, you know, as I'm busy and just have thoughts, I want to capture them so I can stop thinking about them. We're not relying on typical search anymore. You can just ask it.
Hey, I have a meeting with Ryan on Wednesday. You know, what do I need to bring up with him? Oh, you should talk to Ryan about AI because he loves AI. You should talk to him about his super cool glasses and his podcast studio. So that it won't make up any information. It will only rely on what you've already written down. So it really is a personal AI database.
And what we're trying to emphasize to people now is go ahead and start adopting it so that you can have that data from the day you start using it. And we'll only continue to build more features to make that information useful. This is really important. I think that people aren't recognizing is that the faster you can adopt some of these tools, that's when you have now a secondary memory timeline that begins. that when you start using it, and it has the fidelity of as much as you feed it.
you know soon enough everything will be recording at all times and we'll just have like a separate memory that we can tap into however which way we want to so it is really important that people get started quick now you guys have 20 000 users which is fantastic for a brand new company um how have you financed the project We were lucky to raise a pre-seed round that was led by Tampa Bay Ventures. So we're a Tampa Bay-based company, and Tampa Bay Ventures' whole principle is backing.
underrepresented geographical location founders. So since we're not in SF, since we're not in New York, we are in Tampa. We just felt so lucky to stumble on Tampa Bay Ventures and they funded us. effectively just to continue to do this full time. I quit my job in private equity. My co-founder quit his job with Google. And so that's what we've been doing ever since. Amazing. How much you raised?
We raised 400. Amazing. That's so cool, man. Congratulations. Thank you. And then, of course, you're a new company and you have 20,000 users. How's that translating to revenue? What does revenue look like right now? Revenue is give or take three to four thousand dollars a month and the reason uh we have actually two different revenue streams that we're super proud of
We have the standard optional subscriptions. So there are features within twos that are nice to have but not required. And then you can choose to either subscribe or pay for them a la carte because, you know, some people are. dealing with subscription overload as netflix continues to increase their monthly rates but the the really unique revenue model that we actually are just recently able to ascertain is affiliate revenue. So when people write things down that lead to a purchase through two.
So if you write down paper towels, we'll take you to Amazon or Walmart. If you write down book flight to Japan, then we link you to Expedia. We become the affiliate referrer for all of those purchases. So our goal is to get people to establish as much of a habit with writing things down as we can, such that then we give ourselves more opportunities to make their lives easier and then to just become a...
Tremendous. I have a challenge for the listeners. Now, the listener base of this podcast is probably 90% founders, I would say, founders and CEOs. And one pain point I know, because I work with founders all day long, that they know that they need to lead the marketing, founder-led marketing. They need content. They need to express themselves.
The first step when you're like, okay, I need to get on LinkedIn a little bit more. I need to get on X a little bit more. The first thing you need to do is find a home for your ideas.
so that when you're brushing your teeth or whatever you need a place that you can archive your idea you know so make twos this app for you if it's nothing but that it's just like okay you you think about the first time you got fired from you doing your paper route put that down there so you have a place where you can kind of show respect for all your ideas as they're coming. And I think people should do it. I'm going to start using twos for exactly this.
Well, so our core, our foundation is built on three things. speed ease and accessibility We literally want you to be able to capture those ideas as soon as you have them. It's why people write notes in the titles of their Apple Notes all the time because they can't open it fast enough to be able to capture that to-do or that reminder or that thought that they had. And so when it comes to organizing that information and using it.
That's where you can rely on twos. We actually tend to believe that our target market are busy people. People that have a lot of things going on at once. and founders fit really, really strongly into that category. There's slogan ideas, there's bugs that you run into, there's people that you're meeting. We literally are trying to build as seamless of a tool for humans for people i'm sure ryan are you familiar with notion at all 100 so people have complained to us
exasperatedly about how slow to load Notion is and like how it's much more of a database tool where if you're sitting down and you've got your four monitors, Notion is perfect for your databases. But when you're going on a walk and you meet the guy that you need to follow up with in order to raise your Series B round, you know, you're going to go to Apple Notes or you're going to text that to yourself. That's effectively what we're trying.
Brilliant. Joe, the half hour has gone so fast. Will you come back and talk to us again? Absolutely. And I also would love to connect you with my co-founder, ex-Googler, built all the AI into the tool. I'm sure that you guys can have a really intellectual conversation. Obviously, Ryan, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much for having me.
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