Digital Nexus Ep 42: Annie Liao, From Community to Company: Building AI Products That Actually Ship
What does it take to turn AI hype into shipped products? Annie Liao (Build Club / Relevance AI) joins us to unpack agentic workflows, community-led product discovery, and the mindset founders need to go from idea to MVP and revenue, fast.
Annie shares the playbook behind The Builders Club AI and her work at Relevance AI, including how to validate problems, run lightweight experiments, and use agentic patterns without creating black-box chaos. If you build, design, or lead AI products in Australia, this one’s for you.
Links:
https://www.buildclub.ai/
https://www.buildclub.ai/waitlist
In this episode you’ll learn
How to go from “cool demo” to a product customers will pay for (and what to kill early)
Agent vs agentic workflows: clear definitions, when to use each, and common failure modes
Community-led discovery: using a builder community to source problems, testers, and early adopters
Rapid validation: lean experiments, success thresholds, and “stop/iterate/scale” criteria
Designing controllable AI: transparency, evaluation, and guardrails that teams actually use
Founder operating cadence: weekly rituals that compound learning without burning out
GTM for AI tools: positioning, ICP focus, and the signals that you’ve hit early product-channel fit
Hiring the first 3 roles for an AI product team (and what to outsource)
Metrics that matter: activation paths, retained use, and qualitative proof you’re solving a real job
Australia’s AI ecosystem: where builders are winning now and what’s next
About Annie Liao
Annie is a community builder and operator behind Build Club (The Builders Club AI) and serves as Chief of Staff at Relevance AI. She sits at the intersection of community, product, and execution—helping teams turn AI capabilities into customer value.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:28 What is Build Club? Hackathon energy & projects
04:34 Annie’s path: UTS scholarship → Westpac → internal startup
05:08 Falling in love with tech: coding, PM, CRM build
08:19 Nov 2022 shift: GPT boom and the “build anything” moment
12:01 Founding story: After-hours at Aura Ventures → “Aura’s Build Club”
14:03 Community vs monetisation: mission to democratise AI learning
17:00 Joining Relevance AI (while growing Build Club)
21:35 SF vs Australia: risk culture, density & talent
25:53 How Australia can catch up (culture & ecosystem)
29:31 Enterprise agents: handover pain & the education gap
36:24 Bounty marketplace: matching AI builders with demand
41:01 Roadmap: AI matching, pricing benchmarks & starter templates
51:40 Rapid-fire: the tools we actually use
53:18 Build Club for enterprise: AI upskilling (waitlist)
53:47 Wrap-up & where to find Annie
#AI #AgenticAI #ProductManagement #Startup #UX #SydneyTech #BuildClub #RelevanceAI
Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi
SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus
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