November 19, 2025 • 34 mins
Stop waiting for the “right time.” Raj Singh—longtime builder, repeat founder, and now VP of Product at Mozilla—joins us to unpack how real momentum starts when you ship something imperfect and let the market reshape it. We dig into his path from early consumer apps to an acquisition by Mozilla and the creation of Solo, an AI-powered website builder designed specifically for service providers like tutors, therapists, coaches, and contractors.
Raj explains his “jello in motion” approach to product discovery, why you learn small things from small audiences and big things from big ones, and how AI turns non-technical founders into effective prototypers. Instead of chasing precision use cases on day one, he targets 95% problems where AI can draft, humans can edit, and outcomes improve fast. That’s the backbone of Solo: generate a credible first version of a site in seconds, then refine the copy, layout, and local signals to start winning leads.
We also explore the strategy behind making websites free, the legacy pricing that no longer fits modern cost structures, and how business model innovation can drive adoption when ad spend doesn’t. Raj shares practical growth tactics—programmatic SEO, AEO on trusted UGC platforms, product-led collaboration loops—and previews adjacent tools on the roadmap: automated bookkeeping, simple newsletters, and AI reception for missed calls. Finally, we zoom out to the browser’s comeback as AI-native search, agentic workflows, and synthetic content reshape how people use the web—and why Mozilla’s mission matters more than ever in that future.
If you’re a solopreneur or small business owner looking for leverage, or a builder stuck in “AI tourism,” this conversation will help you choose a current, prototype your vision, and start shipping. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s been sitting on an idea, and leave a review to tell us what you’re building next.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_02 (00:00):
If you start anything, you're already in the
top 1%.
Because 99% of people don't getpast an idea, right?
And the most common feedback Ihear when people have an idea
and they have it now, like, oh,how's it going?
Like, oh, I haven't made anyprogress or I haven't done
anything, is don't have time.
It's not the right time.
I don't really want to do ituntil I'm at this phase in my
(00:21):
life or this net worth or thismany kids or whatever, right?
And I always tell everyone, it'snever a good time.
Like, it's always the righttime.
SPEAKER_01 (00:31):
Welcome to Media Escape Insights from Digital
Changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock the secretsto success in an increasingly
digital world.
SPEAKER_00 (00:52):
We're recording this on a Friday afternoon.
So I think that Raj Singh and Iare both, you know, a little,
it's the end of the day,goodness the weekend, maybe a
little frazzled from all theother meetings we've had.
But I'm really excited to endthe week for me on a high note
and speaking to somebody who's atrue innovator, experimenter,
(01:12):
disruptor in the world of techand uh this digital ecosystem
that we live in.
So thank you for joining me onMedia Escape, Raj.
SPEAKER_02 (01:21):
Thanks, Sadika.
I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_00 (01:23):
Yeah.
So I I of course do want toshare a little bit about your
background, how you got startedin the world, and then now how
that took you to being VP ofProduct at Mozilla and some of
the great things that you'redoing for small businesses and
entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_02 (01:38):
Sure.
Yeah.
No, I so I've been, I guess thedoing term is builder, used to
be founder most of my career.
Actually, while in my master's,started my first little tech
company.
It didn't make it, but this wasit during the dot com crash.
And I never really looked back.
You know, I built a dating site,college dating before Friendster
sort of era, had a ringtonecompany that did really well
(02:00):
that you could buy at Walmartand Best Buy, live video
calendaring recipes.
I've had a mix of differentstartups over the career, over
my career.
Some have been venture backed,some have been bootstrapped,
which is now in vogue, sort ofuh primitives and roots.
I will say thematically, Igenerally just pursued my
passion.
So there have always beenpersonal pain points that I
wanted to solve.
Almost everything is for theconsumer, which ironically is
(02:22):
probably not the best path formaking a lot of money, but it's
a lot of fun because you knowyou're kind of building to solve
your own pain points and goingfrom there.
And kind of, you know, finishingthat sort of arc.
My last company, which is doinguh meeting summarization, which
is now kind of de facto in anyZoom call or Google Meets call,
but this is sort of ahead of thecurve, uh, was actually acquired
by Mozilla about three yearsago.
And so I'm now at Mozilla.
(02:43):
I am BP of product responsiblefor new products focused on
small business.
So that encompasses a range ofthings.
We have a website builder calledSolo.
We have other things that we'rebuilding as well.
And the reason we're reallypassionate about this segment is
sort of post-COVID, we could seethe macro trends around this
ownership economy, be your ownboss.
People want to have control overtheir time, work from home, et
(03:05):
cetera, et cetera.
And so this sort of freelanceris the fastest growing business
in the US and very much alignedwith sort of Mozilla's mission,
which is really aboutdemocratizing access and
enabling the underdogs.
We really wanted to build asuite of tools that could really
help the solo paneers so theycould focus on their passion and
not all of the grant work that'sinvolved behind the scenes.
SPEAKER_00 (03:25):
Yeah.
All of the grant work that youdid to build up each of your
companies, probably.
SPEAKER_02 (03:30):
Yeah, it's a grind.
SPEAKER_00 (03:32):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I love the fact that you talkabout you built each of these
consumer facing, which yes, B2Bcan be much more lucrative, but
uh B2C can be very lucrative aswell.
But you built these fordifferent pain points that you
had and things that you weretrying to solve for you and your
family and your friends, right?
And in these builds, you learneda lot of lessons along the way.
(03:56):
I'm sure.
Some you said were bootstrapped,some were venture-backed.
What was the difference makerbetween the whether one was one
or the other?
SPEAKER_02 (04:06):
You know, it's hard to there's a desire within the
tech community to look atsuccess and then break it down
into a series of repeatablesteps that resulted in that
success.
But very much like chaos theory,it's often not repeatable.
(04:26):
There is so much randomness andtiming and market and luck and
other factors involved that youknow many times I tried to look
back and say, okay, I could dobetter this time or I know what
to do this time.
But I will often find myselfsometimes making the same
mistakes.
Sometimes, you know, you realizepretty quickly that what worked
yesterday doesn't work today.
Certainly in B2B, we see repeatentrepreneurs within the same
(04:49):
domain just do it over and overagain.
But in some ways, they're notrepeating the product, they're
not necessarily even repeatingthe market, but they have all of
the contacts, which sort ofacceler accelerates the sales
motion.
But in consumer, you're prettymuch building new audience every
time, right?
And so instead of leaning on aRolodeck, you're leaning on
growth hacking.
(05:10):
And each time it's different,and each time the approach is
different.
So full circle, coming back toyour original question, you
know, early on, buildingBootstrap was more out of
necessity.
I didn't have the network orreach.
There was a time I was offeredVC money and I didn't take it
for my ringtone company.
I was offered an acquisition forboth my dating site and my
ringtone company.
I also didn't take it, right?
(05:30):
Maybe I should have.
I don't know.
These were seven digit kind ofuh numbers and I was 23 years
old, right?
But at that time that was a lotof money, right?
Today it's different.
Or it's relative.
Sorry.
I should probably be a littlebit more uh interested, uh
inclusive and comment.
SPEAKER_00 (05:44):
But let's let's also mention you do live in, you
know, the Silicon Valley area.
So you you're in an area that isvery expensive compared to most
of the country and certainlymost of the world.
SPEAKER_02 (05:55):
Sure.
Yeah, and then you know, later Iraised venture money.
And then, you know, it's funny,for a long time within the tech
community, raising venture moneywas associated with some sort of
validation.
It was like getting that badgeon your you know, Boy Scouts
uniform or, you know, whatwhatever you want to call it.
And it's kind of wild, right?
And so you sort of like, oh, I'mgonna raise venture money
(06:18):
because I'm supposed to raiseventure money when you don't
even necessarily need venturemoney.
And you know, and there doesbecome a little bit of a trap.
If you're a successfulentrepreneur, people want to
invest in you again, which meansyou're not being held to the
same bar or level of tractionthat you need to achieve to sort
of cross that milestone.
My perspective on all this hascompletely changed.
I think there was a phase whereI realized I was raising venture
(06:38):
money because people expected meto raise venture money, not
because I necessarily neededventure money, which is a little
bit counterintuitive.
But my perspective now is sortof going back and recognizing
that you need to have fun.
And I have a lot more fun when Icontrol my journey.
That doesn't mean I won't orwill not raise venture money
again in the future, but I'llcertainly be a lot more
(06:58):
intentional about it.
And if I choose to raise money,it's because I want to raise
money, not because people expectme to raise money or because I
think I need to build the nextbillion dollar thing.
You know, that's a very commonsecond-time founder trap.
You want to exceed your previousachievement.
And so therefore, you enteranalysis paralysis, and
sometimes you do worse, right?
And so you want to get back tosort of like, okay, am I having
fun?
Am I building something thatsolves a pain point for me?
(07:20):
And then I'll figure out if thisgets there or not.
But if it doesn't, that's okaytoo.
SPEAKER_00 (07:25):
How much research went into finding the right
audience after you've solved thepain point for yourself?
Because I have spoken to peoplein marketing who say you only
need to talk to five to seven ofyour best customers.
And I other people say, no, youhave to have enough scale so
that you're really making surethat you are talking to the
(07:45):
right people and that you'resolving the right problem.
SPEAKER_02 (07:48):
So I like to say, you know, when you have small
users, you learn small things.
And when you have big users, youlearn big things.
And I'm probably probably shoulduse large and I'm probably using
the wrong word, but but uh inany case, the point is you're
gonna learn interesting thingswith 10 people, but it's gonna
look dramatically different at amillion.
And I've been on both sides ofthat spectrum.
The way I typically approachwhen I build a new idea, I see a
(08:09):
pain point.
In some ways, I would say thatis probably some one of the
things I'm good at.
Like I just haven't I look atthings and things bother me.
Like I'm like, why was itdesigned like that?
I can make this better, right?
That you know, just to be clear,you might be good at one thing
and I'm not good at a wholebunch of other things, right?
So, and so I'll go out and say,you know what, can I can I solve
(08:30):
this?
Can I can I build somethingbetter for myself?
Right.
And then the question is, uhyes, I have a network, you know,
five, ten people I trust.
Like, what do you think aboutthis?
That journey, I pretty muchassume that it's not gonna look
the same, right?
Like you start at point A, italways ends up at point C.
I've never had the luck orsuccess to say that it was point
A and ended at point A.
(08:51):
It's gonna look completelydifferent as you start building.
And I actually call this processuh jello in motion.
So your jello is flying throughthe air and little bits are
falling off, but it's takingshape.
And you're leaning on your ownproduct intuition to you're
trusting your intuition.
You're basically you're you'retrusting your gut that you will
figure this out.
But the key thing is you want tomake sure at least you're
swimming along or with a macrotrend.
(09:14):
Like if the industry is moving acertain direction, you know,
let's say vibe as a modality inthe whole Gen AI era, you know,
whatever, like, and you'recoming back and saying, I'm
gonna do long-form writing orwhatever, right?
Like that's completelyhuman-authored.
That's very counter-trend,right?
And so that doesn't mean countertrend can't succeed, but I tend
to like to swim downstream, notupstream.
(09:34):
So my sort of approach is I, youknow, I want to solve this sort
of thing.
I'm swimming in the rightdirection.
Maybe it's leveraging, you know,some macrocultural trend or
whatever it is, like creatoreconomy, who knows, a small
business owner.
And then I bank that my ownintuition will guide me to
success, meaning it may not lookentirely like where I started.
It may look completelydifferent.
I might land somewhere else.
(09:55):
So, yes, I go test with five, 10people.
I'm getting different kinds offeedback that steers me in
another direction.
I like to talk to formeremployees of companies that I
think are competitors, right?
I like to talk to just generallysmart people that just love to
do uh two by two diagrams andmap every company in the
universe, right?
Like those are more of theanalyst types.
I like to talk to growthmarketers, think about how you
(10:16):
would drive growth in thiscategory.
So I talk to a range of folks.
Interestingly, I'm not generallyso worried about the technical
side of things because I prettymuch assume I can build it.
And in 2025, you can buildanything you want, right?
So that's sort of my approach.
And I always tell people youreally you're swimming in the
right direction to startswimming, and then you you bank
that you'll land in the rightplace.
SPEAKER_00 (10:37):
Nice.
Yeah.
A lot of people are don't havethe technical expertise, right?
That's something I rememberseveral years ago.
We talk about having thetechnical founder and the
non-technical founder, the ideaperson.
You are both of those people.
SPEAKER_02 (10:53):
You know, I don't write as much code as I probably
used to.
And so to call me at this point,to call me like your full stack
developer would be verymisleading.
I wish I had more time because Ido enjoy it, but it's very
difficult.
And one of the things is youneed a lot of flow time when
you're writing a document oryou're writing code, and when
you're doing like productmanagement or startup founder
(11:14):
kind of things, you're doing alot of high interruption tasks,
and that can become challengingto kind of stay focused and then
jump in and out.
All that said, you know, I thinkGen AI, and I may have talked
about this previously, hasreally unlocked like I call it
human potential or humancreativity.
And what I mean by that is allof these different people have
great ideas.
(11:35):
Like they want to build this newplumbing contraption, they want
to build this kind of business,they want to build an
application that solves this,they want to design this new
form of medicine.
I mean, who knows?
And they couldn't do it becausethey would have to go and find
fractional experts across arange of domains, but now they
can't because these LLMs areeffectively a pocket of PhDs.
(11:56):
And so they can now vibe youknow through chat and get to
some semblance of what they wantor what they want to build or
what it might look like.
It may not be the productionthing, but it's a prototype.
And if you think about that, ifyou reframe it and say the
objective is not to build thefinal product, but the objective
is to build something that Icould show people, a means of
(12:18):
communication, right?
Because telling people issometimes hard.
They don't understand whatyou're saying.
Slides maybe slightly better,but they might still not
understand what you're saying.
A document, hard to read,whatever, right?
But if you actually show them anexperience and they actually can
go through the experience, it'snot fully working, but they can
see the vision and where it'sgoing.
Now they have this new formcommunication medium, right?
(12:39):
They have a prototype as a formof communication.
It's a new form of a newartifact that they can create on
their own using LLMs or youknow, using Gen AI.
Now it'll be a lot easier to goin for them to sell their
vision, to go convince some ofthose fractional experts,
convince those with money,investors, whatnot, convince
various stakeholders that, hey,maybe you want to get involved
(13:00):
and help me build this.
You can see the vision and youcan see how great this could be,
right?
Because a lot of them strugglewith the storytelling.
And so much of fundraising isabout the narrative and telling
the story.
SPEAKER_00 (13:10):
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is so true.
Your company, Pulse, wasacquired by Mozilla.
SPEAKER_02 (13:16):
Yes.
SPEAKER_00 (13:17):
Um, you've been VP of product, but it does also
from other conversations we'vehad, and what I'd like to talk
about on this one is it's alsovery entrepreneurial because
you've been able to figure outwhat to solve and how to solve
it for people.
And a lot of those things thatas you were starting your
various companies, you may nothave been the expert at building
(13:37):
a website, the expert at thispart of the business, that part
of the business.
So now you're creating thisecosystem to make it more
democratic and easier for thesmall business and creator who
has that vision, but doesn'thave the budget, doesn't have
the tools, maybe knows how touse AI, but doesn't want to have
to go to five different things.
So, can you talk a little bitabout the, you know, acquisition
(14:01):
in terms of how did you decidewith Mozilla that what your role
would be, VP of product?
And then how did you design thatrole to still have fun and
levity and get to be thatcreator that you are while
bringing things that were reallyuseful to consumers?
SPEAKER_02 (14:17):
You know, some of this is a little bit of luck.
You don't plan for these thingsnecessarily.
And I do have this perspective,which is quite different to
where I was maybe 10 years ago,where you have a set of people
and you figure out theirsuperpowers.
And now the trick is can youposition everyone in the right
spot?
Well, whereas my previousmentality was this is what I
need, and I don't have it, so Ineed to replace this person or I
(14:40):
need to go up-level this personand get someone else, or what
whatever it might be, right?
And you can imagine how thatperspective is much more demand
side versus supply sidethinking, right?
So at Mozilla, interestingly, Ithink, you know, with the
acquisition, we were doingmeeting summarization, as I may
have mentioned earlier.
They had a product calledPocket, which was within the
browser, and they wanted to doarticle summarization.
(15:01):
So we had a, you know, my teamwas very sort of AI-centric,
built their own models, knew howto summarize content.
So that was kind of slotted in.
Now, within months, ChatGPT wasreleased, just goes to show how
important timing is.
And we knew this stuff wascoming.
And everyone's looking aroundthe table and are kind of like,
this is better.
Yeah, we're like, yeah, this isbetter, right?
And so you can imagine all ofthat sort of uh newfound
(15:22):
expertise, knowledge was notnecessarily as useful anymore,
right?
Because they they can now justtap an API.
So, you know, my role sort ofchanged.
They kind of moved me into whatthey call an EIR, uh
Entrepreneur in Residence withinMozilla.
They hadn't done this before.
This was really leaning on thefact that they knew I was a
zero-to-one kind of builder.
So they wanted to play on mystrengths.
My manager at the time uh wasrunning a new products uh kind
(15:45):
of organization.
And I'm now looking at ideasthat I think could make sense
for Mozilla, right?
And so during COVID, uh I was inthe Bay Area, schools were
closed for a long time, and kidswere many kids were stuck at
home.
And so I wanted to teach kidshow to play chess.
And so I went to WixerSquarespace, I don't recall, and
I just remember spending 45minutes and giving up, realizing
how difficult it was just tosimply build a website.
(16:06):
It's not that the tools aren'tsomewhat intuitive, it's just
there's so many options andthey're so complicated because
they're trying to be everythingto everyone, right?
And so I here I'm at Mozilla andI'm thinking about that problem.
And then I'm looking at Gen AI,and I've been in the AI space
for a long time, right?
I had a food logging company uhwhich became a recipe community
that was acquired.
(16:27):
I had a calendar app that was uhspun out of Stanford Research
Institute doing meetingpreparation.
So I was doing AI stuff.
I was the first.ai domain in2011.
So I was I've been doing AIstuff for a long time.
And I knew, you know, I couldtell immediately.
I'm like, AI is a 95% kind ofthing, meaning look for
experiences where it doesn'thave to be precise.
Because where it has to beprecise, it's much more
(16:48):
challenging.
It doesn't mean you can't getthere, but it's substantially
more investment, substantiallylonger time horizons, would
certainly not necessarily workin a large company and may
certainly definitely not work asa startup where you don't you
may not have the funding cycleor whatnot or time to sort of
get there.
And so you could see veryclearly that LMs are great at
writing content, right?
People are using it now toimprove their writing and write
(17:09):
posts and whatnot.
And I'm like, huh.
And writing doesn't have to be100% perfect, right?
Like you can edit it, right?
It generates a first draft andyou edit it.
So I'm thinking, can we marrythis with website creation,
right?
And that's how sort of theconcept of like, okay, now we
have an AI website builder.
And so then that the nextquestion comes like, who should
we go after?
So I'm looking, I'm looking atthe landscape, and I like to do
(17:31):
these two by twos where I'lllike plot like uh a particular
parameter on an X axis, like AIenabled or like no AI, like you
know, uh low-tech engineer mindor whatever.
You know, I use lots ofdifferent axes, I'll do like
dozens of these.
Uh ChatGP is great to likesuggest ideas of different ways
to think about these XY.
And I'm looking at the marketand I'm like, okay, you have
(17:53):
your general purpose websitebuilders, like the Wixes and
Squarespaces and whatnot.
And then you have thesee-commerce focused builders,
which is like an emerging, youknow, Shopify was obviously the
biggest one there, but there's awhole category of other ones
too, like WooCommerce, etcetera, et cetera.
And there's this bucket herethat's like called service
provider.
And I'm like, wow, this is likenot very busy or like relatively
(18:14):
nascent.
And these are people who bill bythe hour, right?
Your digital consultants, yourtherapists, your coaches, your
tutors, you know, all of thatsegment.
Your plumbers, et cetera, etcetera.
And so uh I'm thinking like,wow, there's a gap here.
What if we could do what Shopifydid to e-commerce, which was
completely written off manyyears ago, right?
And they kind of came from leftfield because the the the uh
incumbent website builders arelike, it makes no sense.
(18:36):
You would just use Wix forSquarespace, right?
But of course, now we see howbig the Shopify has become, the
behemoth they had they havebecome, which is amazing.
What if we do what Shopify hasdone within e-commerce, but for
the service provider segment?
And I'm watching or I'm readinguh Yahoo Finance, and they
popped up this bar graph andlike a video which showed that
the fastest growing business inthe US was the freelancer
economy, which made perfectsense because people want to own
(18:59):
their own business, own theirown time.
You know, time is of course thegreatest real estate.
So now I've got a concept, youknow, we've got uh Gen AI
marrying website building, whichcreates a very delightful
experience, a hook, build awebsite within seconds.
And now I have a segment I wantto go after, which is sort of
the the a service provider orthe small business owner, or
what we call the solopreneur.
And that's kind of how thosecame together.
(19:20):
And so then the last piece waslike, okay, how do I drive
growth?
Because I'm always thinkingabout distribution, especially
today.
It's so easy to create thesignal noise ratios just off the
chart.
So when I think of disruptionand insertion points, when I
think about like ways to drivegrowth, I'm looking for angles
of attack.
And this could be maybe you'refocusing on a specific
(19:41):
geography, this could be you'refocusing on a very specific type
of user, this could be, youknow, uh something unique with
the technology, whatever.
In this case, I looked atbusiness model as a means of
disruption.
And so as I started thinkingabout it, I was like, it's
interesting that every websitebuilder charges$10,$20 a month.
And I asked myself, why?
Like, why are they all pricedthe same?
(20:03):
Like this can't be price fixedacross the entire industry.
And I realized, much likeRobinhood, when you built a
website 20 years ago, youactually had to go get a
physical rec, like a server in abuilding.
You actually had to pay for anSSL certificate.
You actually bandwidth wasactually really expensive.
There was a reason it cost, youknow, X dollars a month because
(20:25):
there was all that physicallabor involved, right?
Just to make this work, as wellas just the cost of the
operations of running that wholedata center, et cetera.
But today, SSL certificates arefree and bandwidth costs are
negligible, right?
Like most websites get almost notraffic, right?
The small business restaurant,they maybe get a few hundred
visits a month, which you know,if you break down into sort of
(20:47):
Amazon egress costs, it might belike a penny a month or less,
right?
It's nothing because it's justsimple pages, right?
It's not video and YouTube andstuff like that, right?
So I'm like, wow, thesecompanies are just straight
arbitraging.
Like they're just all of it isjust gravy to them.
And it makes perfect sense.
If you look at Robinhood,they're like, why are you paying
a trader or like why are youpaying six, seven, eight dollars
(21:08):
a trade, which is a legacy modelwhen you used to have to call a
physical broker to make a trade,but now everything's online.
This is stupid that you'repaying for this.
This should be made free, right?
So here I am.
I'm like, you know what?
I'm gonna disrupt this wholebusiness.
I'm just gonna go after, I'mgonna compete with them in a way
they can compete.
I'm gonna make it free becausewe can do it.
There's almost no cost, right?
We we have 60,000, 70,000businesses on solo now, and
(21:32):
total monthly bandwidth costs islike less than$100 a month,
right?
Like it's insane.
And our total AI costs are lessthan$10 a month, right?
And so it's like, right, likeso, you know, this notion your
margin's my opportunity.
And I'm gonna figure out a wayto create a disruptive business
model.
And so I was looking at, youknow, Firefox Mozilla.
We have all this real estate.
We have the Firefox search bar.
(21:53):
Interestingly, people search forthings like plumbers in San
Jose, you know, dentists in NewYork.
I'm like, well, what if I givemy customers what they want,
which is growth, right?
Because the job to be done hereis growth.
They're a small business owner,they now want to grow.
That's why they're setting up awebsite.
And so this completed the arc ofthe story, right?
So now we have technology plusthis like opportunity that
(22:17):
created this delightfulexperience.
We have an audience we want togo after, which is the service
provider, which is a little bitmore nascent.
And we have a business modelapproach that was disruptive
that we bank could drivevirality.
And it's it's you know, I wouldsay it could be working better,
like we could be growing faster,but it's doing great.
SPEAKER_00 (22:33):
Yeah.
Wow, that's amazing.
I was gonna ask you how manypeople were on solo, and you
answered that.
How are you marketing it topeople?
SPEAKER_02 (22:42):
It's completely organic.
So there's no performancemarketing, right?
And a lot of it's word of mouth.
We did try some PLG, so that wehave some loops in the product
where you can invite otherpeople to edit your website, so
it's collaborative.
We do a lot of SEO hacking.
We have a programmatic blog,which I'm not particularly proud
of, you know, because it'sprogrammatic, but it's really
designed for Google.
It's not designed for endreaders, right?
(23:04):
We do a lot of stuff for AEO orGEO optimization.
So this is like AI chat, forexample.
They tend to overweight uh highauthority UGC domains.
So that means commenting onReddit, commenting on LinkedIn,
commenting on Quora, Wikipedia,basically sources where they're
most likely to think it'sactually authored by a human
versus AI slop.
So, you know, currently we'replaying with end-to-end
(23:26):
programmatic short form TikTokvideo creation.
So, you know, for social, tryingto grow grow through that
channel.
So we're trying differenttactics like any you know,
growth hacker, growth marketerwould.
And we'll see what sticks, whatdoesn't.
But you know, there's alsonatural inflection points as you
grow, your mailing list getsbigger.
There's more word of mouth,right?
And you kind of hit this sort ofpoint where you start seeing
some takeaway velocity.
(23:47):
And we're starting to see somereal step functions just in the
last three to six months withour domain authority, which is
great, which is overallimproving our search ranks.
SPEAKER_00 (23:55):
These are all tips that everybody should be really
listening to very close to.
So what is the next step aftercreating your website?
And and I have tested and playedwith this a little bit.
I'm gonna be definitely playingwith it some more, but you can,
you know, you have fonts, youhave colors, you have all kinds
of different layouts people canuse, and it's really beautiful.
SPEAKER_02 (24:18):
You know, a very common thing to do, rebuilding
anything is a day in the lifesort of exercise or like a
lifecycle kind of you know plotor whatnot.
And so we've interviewed at thispoint, we are connected with
hundreds, thousands of businessowners.
We know their pain points.
They might be paying anaccountant way too much money,
but they can't gather all theirreceipts together, they can't
(24:38):
gather gather all their incomebecause some's coming through
Venmo, some is coming throughStripe, right?
And then end of year taxes comeand they spend a whole Saturday
trying to pull it together.
Like, can we automate that forthem?
Can we automatically read youremail?
Can we automatically pull it alland use Gen AI to help annotate
it, right?
So that's a that's an area we'reyou know building a product in.
A lot of these small businessowners feel it's important to
(24:59):
re-engage their audience throughnewsletters and social media.
Can we build something there tohelp them with that?
Right.
Some of these sort of physicalblue collar workers can't really
pick up the phone half the time.
They get so many inbound leadsthrough Yelp or whatnot, they
need somebody else to pick uptheir phone.
Right now, they go and pay veryexpensive, you know, three,
four, five dollar a minute AIreceptionist services, or not
(25:21):
AI, but just human receptionistservices.
Can we enable that through AI?
Right.
So these are all different partsof the arc.
And there's a lot more.
And we're building in each ofthese different buckets, and we
have a bunch of things comingout soon, but that's the
insight.
SPEAKER_00 (25:36):
Yeah.
And that's brilliant.
I mean, one common thing I'vebeen talking to people about,
whether it's with podcasts orjust other conversations, is
that as small businesses andentrepreneurs, it's very tiring
to have to go to multiple sitesto get everything done that you
want to get done.
So consolidation seems to be oneof the names of the game,
(25:58):
particularly with all of thegenerative AI tools that are out
there.
How do you know which techstack?
I was even using an example of Ido have I have a Delphi.
I also use Hajen.
I also use synthesia becauseeach one of them can't do
exactly what the other ones cando for the use cases I need them
for.
SPEAKER_02 (26:16):
You know, the tooling is like a whole nother
universe.
I simply can't keep up.
I will see something, I'll playwith it, try to figure out what
might work for what I need.
I have limited time in terms oflike how much of the time I'm
doing the IC work versusdelegating.
So it depends.
It's case by case, but I do tryto get my hands dirty at least
once a day or twice a day.
(26:36):
You know, so it depends.
The key thing is there is astack you need to ask people
like what's the best stack touse right now, and then kind of
roll with it because there is alittle bit of a analysis
paralysis when it comes to thestack itself, where you're just
keep trying new tools and youdon't get anything done.
And it's uh it's a lot of what Icall AI tourism where you're
spending a lot of a lot of moneytrying all these different
(26:58):
things or a lot of trials uh tothe point where I think even
Stripe is releasing a newproduct because they have so
many people figuring out orgaming the free trials and
preloading on the credits thatit's causing, you know.
Many of these companies aren'tmaking money as it is, but it's
you know, it's creating morepressure.
So, but yeah, you know,internally at Mozilla, you know,
within new products, it's notnecessarily this way across all
(27:19):
of the org.
We give a lot of freedom forpeople to try different things.
We don't necessarily run themthrough a lot of our normal
security reviews and whatnot.
There is some obviously Pontiusbest practices, and we do
collect the name, we audit thenames of the tools and then
determine, oh, should we get abigger license for this or not?
But part of that is just theexperimentation that's required
to figure out what's going towork best to you know hook uh an
(27:41):
AI avatar to a screen share, touh, you know, an outro to then
stitch stitch together into aTikTok video.
SPEAKER_00 (27:49):
Yeah, but it's uh it does sound like you're creating
more and products to help solvesome of these issues as an
ecosystem.
So I do have to ask, you'regiving a lot of and you're
giving this away for free.
What's the monetization model?
SPEAKER_02 (28:04):
Oh no, we're gonna introduce subscription for sure.
It's not it's not a absolutely,and you know, we may even allow
a way for you to set budgets ifyou want ads each month against
the Mozilla Ad Network, right?
Within Firefox, you can promoteyour business that way through
through local search, which islike effectively the highest
intent way.
But no, this, you know, in theend, you know, we are a company.
We have to, we have to, we haveto make money.
(28:25):
We can't we can't keep it freeforever.
SPEAKER_00 (28:28):
Yeah, but you can offer a service, you can get a
lot of data.
Now you have what 60,000, 70,000businesses you said, yeah.
Using this tool, and they're theperfect, that's a perfect
ecosystem to try and test thecopy right.
SPEAKER_02 (28:45):
Yeah, we have an ecosystem we can sell to, right?
Because in some ways, thegreatest growth hack in 2025 is
building the mailing list.
So if you can build a a high,highly qualified mailing list,
that's an immense amount ofvalue.
And in many ways, that's exactlywhy repeat B2B entrepreneurs or
enterprise entrepreneurs buildin the same category over and
over again, because they alreadyknow all the buyers.
SPEAKER_00 (29:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, fantastic.
Sounds like you have a lot ofexciting things that you're
working on.
What continues to excite youabout the team, the work that
you do at Mozilla?
Because you did mention some,you know, I mean, it's as an
ethical company, there arecertain guardrails and things
that you try to putintentionally into the way that
(29:30):
you're designing.
So what continues to excite you?
And what do you see in thefuture with AI and this whole
tech journey that we're on?
SPEAKER_02 (29:38):
You know, I think right now I'm just super excited
by just the amount of untappedlike human creativity that's
just getting like unleashed.
Like it's just amazing.
Like everybody with an idea cannow express that idea in some
artifact that they couldn'tcouldn't before.
And I think that's all veryamazing.
I think Mozilla specifically.
(30:00):
Very interesting time.
You know, browsers hashistorically, at least the last
10, 15 years, been table stakes.
People don't think about it.
People don't, we if you took outthe brand, they might not even
know which browser they're in,right?
They're quite similar, all thesort of base use cases are
covered.
You know, innovation had slowed.
And now we're, you know, we'rehearing rumors, you know, or
(30:21):
perplexity, I think, haspublicly released a browser, at
least within a private groupcalled Comet.
We have Dia from Arc Browserthat was recently acquired, I
think, by Atlassian.
We have OpenAI that's beenrumored to be working on a
browser, right?
So you have like majorinitiatives from LLM companies
doing stuff with browsers.
You have a whole nother stack ofcompanies looking at screen
(30:42):
scraping and agentic workflows,like book me a flight, book me a
trip, right?
And that's running browsereffectively in a headless
manner, like in the cloud andkind of clicking through, right?
And then you have the future ofsearch, which you know, are
people gonna be consuming theweb?
You know, Google fine, I thinkGoogle has finally come out and
said that the web isdeteriorating.
I at least I read that, so Idon't that could be hearsay.
(31:02):
But but the notion that there ismore AI slop on the web, how
people are gonna consume.
Are they gonna be consuming justsynthetic content?
Are they gonna be visitingwebsites at all or everything's
through a chat interface?
Right.
So you have this culmination orthis combination of different
mega things going on that's allof a sudden made browser like a
really hot category again.
(31:24):
And so I think from a Mozillaperspective, it's super
interesting.
SPEAKER_00 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah.
Fantastic.
I can't wait to see what you'redoing in six months or three
months or whatever the next bigphase comes about.
What would you recommend,besides, of course, going and
starting a website oncellulist.ai, to anybody who's
listening who is looking attaking that leap into
entrepreneurship or they'vestarted to create their, you
(31:48):
know, craft their business, butthey just need that little jolt.
SPEAKER_02 (31:52):
You know, it used to be I have an idea and then they
never start, right?
Like I always tell people if youstart anything, you're already
in the top 1%.
Because 99% of people don't getpast an idea, right?
And the most common feedback Ihear when people have an idea
and they have it now, like, oh,how's it going?
Like, oh, I haven't made anyprogress or I haven't done
(32:14):
anything, is don't have time.
It's not the right time.
I don't really want to do ituntil I'm at this phase in my
life or this net worth or thismany kids or whatever, right?
And I always tell everyone, it'snever a good time.
Like it's always the right time,right?
And so I think, you know, Ithink in that process, in that
journey, if there's an itch, wewant to tap into that itch.
(32:37):
We want to see if it goessomewhere.
During that process or thatjourney, you might realize it's
just not really for you.
You know, you have an idea, butyou know, I'm not really, it's
not my thing.
Like I don't want to work thathard.
I don't want to feel that muchstress, you know, whatever it
is, who knows?
But for many, it'll be the mostsort of empowering experience
because you're gonna be like,wow, I'm in in control.
(32:59):
And all of a sudden you have toanswer all kinds of questions
you've never had to answerbefore.
Like, like, how should I designthis thing?
Usually I I may suggestsomething, but somebody else has
to make the answer.
Like, you know, there'ssomething very or like there's a
lot of freedom when you're in acompany, but you don't have to
make the final decision, right?
Somebody else makes the finaldecision.
It's life's a lot easier thatway.
But when it's your own thing,you got to make the decisions.
(33:19):
You're you own it, right?
And so I think my feedback tothose listening who are in that
state is to go for it.
Like, like you're there's notgonna be a better time, like and
see where it goes and just makesure you're swimming downstream
and at least and then trust yourinstinct will take you there.
SPEAKER_00 (33:35):
Fantastic.
Thank you so much, Raj, forcoming on Media Escape and
giving us some insights and someenergy.
If you've you know, you havedone uh so many different
things, you've started so manycompanies, exited, and you
continue to innovate and designand think about what issues need
to be solved.
SPEAKER_02 (33:56):
Thank you, Anika.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00 (33:58):
Fantastic.
Thank you to everybody who islistening to this episode or
watching it of Media EscapeInsights from Digital
Changemakers brought to you byUSC's Masters in Digital Media
Management Program.
I'm one of your hosts, AnikaJackson, and I'll be back again
with another amazing guest veryshortly.
SPEAKER_01 (34:14):
To learn more about the Master of Science and
Digital Media Managementprogram, visit us on the web at
dmm.usc.edu.
If you start anything, you're already in the
top 1%.
Because 99% of people don't getpast an idea, right?
And the most common feedback Ihear when people have an idea
and they have it now, like, oh,how's it going?
Like, oh, I haven't made anyprogress or I haven't done
anything, is don't have time.
It's not the right time.
I don't really want to do ituntil I'm at this phase in my
(00:21):
life or this net worth or thismany kids or whatever, right?
And I always tell everyone, it'snever a good time.
Like, it's always the righttime.
SPEAKER_01 (00:31):
Welcome to Media Escape Insights from Digital
Changemakers, a speaker seriesand podcast brought to you by
USC Annenberg's Digital MediaManagement Program.
Join us as we unlock the secretsto success in an increasingly
digital world.
SPEAKER_00 (00:52):
We're recording this on a Friday afternoon.
So I think that Raj Singh and Iare both, you know, a little,
it's the end of the day,goodness the weekend, maybe a
little frazzled from all theother meetings we've had.
But I'm really excited to endthe week for me on a high note
and speaking to somebody who's atrue innovator, experimenter,
(01:12):
disruptor in the world of techand uh this digital ecosystem
that we live in.
So thank you for joining me onMedia Escape, Raj.
SPEAKER_02 (01:21):
Thanks, Sadika.
I'm looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_00 (01:23):
Yeah.
So I I of course do want toshare a little bit about your
background, how you got startedin the world, and then now how
that took you to being VP ofProduct at Mozilla and some of
the great things that you'redoing for small businesses and
entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_02 (01:38):
Sure.
Yeah.
No, I so I've been, I guess thedoing term is builder, used to
be founder most of my career.
Actually, while in my master's,started my first little tech
company.
It didn't make it, but this wasit during the dot com crash.
And I never really looked back.
You know, I built a dating site,college dating before Friendster
sort of era, had a ringtonecompany that did really well
(02:00):
that you could buy at Walmartand Best Buy, live video
calendaring recipes.
I've had a mix of differentstartups over the career, over
my career.
Some have been venture backed,some have been bootstrapped,
which is now in vogue, sort ofuh primitives and roots.
I will say thematically, Igenerally just pursued my
passion.
So there have always beenpersonal pain points that I
wanted to solve.
Almost everything is for theconsumer, which ironically is
(02:22):
probably not the best path formaking a lot of money, but it's
a lot of fun because you knowyou're kind of building to solve
your own pain points and goingfrom there.
And kind of, you know, finishingthat sort of arc.
My last company, which is doinguh meeting summarization, which
is now kind of de facto in anyZoom call or Google Meets call,
but this is sort of ahead of thecurve, uh, was actually acquired
by Mozilla about three yearsago.
And so I'm now at Mozilla.
(02:43):
I am BP of product responsiblefor new products focused on
small business.
So that encompasses a range ofthings.
We have a website builder calledSolo.
We have other things that we'rebuilding as well.
And the reason we're reallypassionate about this segment is
sort of post-COVID, we could seethe macro trends around this
ownership economy, be your ownboss.
People want to have control overtheir time, work from home, et
(03:05):
cetera, et cetera.
And so this sort of freelanceris the fastest growing business
in the US and very much alignedwith sort of Mozilla's mission,
which is really aboutdemocratizing access and
enabling the underdogs.
We really wanted to build asuite of tools that could really
help the solo paneers so theycould focus on their passion and
not all of the grant work that'sinvolved behind the scenes.
SPEAKER_00 (03:25):
Yeah.
All of the grant work that youdid to build up each of your
companies, probably.
SPEAKER_02 (03:30):
Yeah, it's a grind.
SPEAKER_00 (03:32):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I love the fact that you talkabout you built each of these
consumer facing, which yes, B2Bcan be much more lucrative, but
uh B2C can be very lucrative aswell.
But you built these fordifferent pain points that you
had and things that you weretrying to solve for you and your
family and your friends, right?
And in these builds, you learneda lot of lessons along the way.
(03:56):
I'm sure.
Some you said were bootstrapped,some were venture-backed.
What was the difference makerbetween the whether one was one
or the other?
SPEAKER_02 (04:06):
You know, it's hard to there's a desire within the
tech community to look atsuccess and then break it down
into a series of repeatablesteps that resulted in that
success.
But very much like chaos theory,it's often not repeatable.
(04:26):
There is so much randomness andtiming and market and luck and
other factors involved that youknow many times I tried to look
back and say, okay, I could dobetter this time or I know what
to do this time.
But I will often find myselfsometimes making the same
mistakes.
Sometimes, you know, you realizepretty quickly that what worked
yesterday doesn't work today.
Certainly in B2B, we see repeatentrepreneurs within the same
(04:49):
domain just do it over and overagain.
But in some ways, they're notrepeating the product, they're
not necessarily even repeatingthe market, but they have all of
the contacts, which sort ofacceler accelerates the sales
motion.
But in consumer, you're prettymuch building new audience every
time, right?
And so instead of leaning on aRolodeck, you're leaning on
growth hacking.
(05:10):
And each time it's different,and each time the approach is
different.
So full circle, coming back toyour original question, you
know, early on, buildingBootstrap was more out of
necessity.
I didn't have the network orreach.
There was a time I was offeredVC money and I didn't take it
for my ringtone company.
I was offered an acquisition forboth my dating site and my
ringtone company.
I also didn't take it, right?
(05:30):
Maybe I should have.
I don't know.
These were seven digit kind ofuh numbers and I was 23 years
old, right?
But at that time that was a lotof money, right?
Today it's different.
Or it's relative.
Sorry.
I should probably be a littlebit more uh interested, uh
inclusive and comment.
SPEAKER_00 (05:44):
But let's let's also mention you do live in, you
know, the Silicon Valley area.
So you you're in an area that isvery expensive compared to most
of the country and certainlymost of the world.
SPEAKER_02 (05:55):
Sure.
Yeah, and then you know, later Iraised venture money.
And then, you know, it's funny,for a long time within the tech
community, raising venture moneywas associated with some sort of
validation.
It was like getting that badgeon your you know, Boy Scouts
uniform or, you know, whatwhatever you want to call it.
And it's kind of wild, right?
And so you sort of like, oh, I'mgonna raise venture money
(06:18):
because I'm supposed to raiseventure money when you don't
even necessarily need venturemoney.
And you know, and there doesbecome a little bit of a trap.
If you're a successfulentrepreneur, people want to
invest in you again, which meansyou're not being held to the
same bar or level of tractionthat you need to achieve to sort
of cross that milestone.
My perspective on all this hascompletely changed.
I think there was a phase whereI realized I was raising venture
(06:38):
money because people expected meto raise venture money, not
because I necessarily neededventure money, which is a little
bit counterintuitive.
But my perspective now is sortof going back and recognizing
that you need to have fun.
And I have a lot more fun when Icontrol my journey.
That doesn't mean I won't orwill not raise venture money
again in the future, but I'llcertainly be a lot more
(06:58):
intentional about it.
And if I choose to raise money,it's because I want to raise
money, not because people expectme to raise money or because I
think I need to build the nextbillion dollar thing.
You know, that's a very commonsecond-time founder trap.
You want to exceed your previousachievement.
And so therefore, you enteranalysis paralysis, and
sometimes you do worse, right?
And so you want to get back tosort of like, okay, am I having
fun?
Am I building something thatsolves a pain point for me?
(07:20):
And then I'll figure out if thisgets there or not.
But if it doesn't, that's okaytoo.
SPEAKER_00 (07:25):
How much research went into finding the right
audience after you've solved thepain point for yourself?
Because I have spoken to peoplein marketing who say you only
need to talk to five to seven ofyour best customers.
And I other people say, no, youhave to have enough scale so
that you're really making surethat you are talking to the
(07:45):
right people and that you'resolving the right problem.
SPEAKER_02 (07:48):
So I like to say, you know, when you have small
users, you learn small things.
And when you have big users, youlearn big things.
And I'm probably probably shoulduse large and I'm probably using
the wrong word, but but uh inany case, the point is you're
gonna learn interesting thingswith 10 people, but it's gonna
look dramatically different at amillion.
And I've been on both sides ofthat spectrum.
The way I typically approachwhen I build a new idea, I see a
(08:09):
pain point.
In some ways, I would say thatis probably some one of the
things I'm good at.
Like I just haven't I look atthings and things bother me.
Like I'm like, why was itdesigned like that?
I can make this better, right?
That you know, just to be clear,you might be good at one thing
and I'm not good at a wholebunch of other things, right?
So, and so I'll go out and say,you know what, can I can I solve
(08:30):
this?
Can I can I build somethingbetter for myself?
Right.
And then the question is, uhyes, I have a network, you know,
five, ten people I trust.
Like, what do you think aboutthis?
That journey, I pretty muchassume that it's not gonna look
the same, right?
Like you start at point A, italways ends up at point C.
I've never had the luck orsuccess to say that it was point
A and ended at point A.
(08:51):
It's gonna look completelydifferent as you start building.
And I actually call this processuh jello in motion.
So your jello is flying throughthe air and little bits are
falling off, but it's takingshape.
And you're leaning on your ownproduct intuition to you're
trusting your intuition.
You're basically you're you'retrusting your gut that you will
figure this out.
But the key thing is you want tomake sure at least you're
swimming along or with a macrotrend.
(09:14):
Like if the industry is moving acertain direction, you know,
let's say vibe as a modality inthe whole Gen AI era, you know,
whatever, like, and you'recoming back and saying, I'm
gonna do long-form writing orwhatever, right?
Like that's completelyhuman-authored.
That's very counter-trend,right?
And so that doesn't mean countertrend can't succeed, but I tend
to like to swim downstream, notupstream.
(09:34):
So my sort of approach is I, youknow, I want to solve this sort
of thing.
I'm swimming in the rightdirection.
Maybe it's leveraging, you know,some macrocultural trend or
whatever it is, like creatoreconomy, who knows, a small
business owner.
And then I bank that my ownintuition will guide me to
success, meaning it may not lookentirely like where I started.
It may look completelydifferent.
I might land somewhere else.
(09:55):
So, yes, I go test with five, 10people.
I'm getting different kinds offeedback that steers me in
another direction.
I like to talk to formeremployees of companies that I
think are competitors, right?
I like to talk to just generallysmart people that just love to
do uh two by two diagrams andmap every company in the
universe, right?
Like those are more of theanalyst types.
I like to talk to growthmarketers, think about how you
(10:16):
would drive growth in thiscategory.
So I talk to a range of folks.
Interestingly, I'm not generallyso worried about the technical
side of things because I prettymuch assume I can build it.
And in 2025, you can buildanything you want, right?
So that's sort of my approach.
And I always tell people youreally you're swimming in the
right direction to startswimming, and then you you bank
that you'll land in the rightplace.
SPEAKER_00 (10:37):
Nice.
Yeah.
A lot of people are don't havethe technical expertise, right?
That's something I rememberseveral years ago.
We talk about having thetechnical founder and the
non-technical founder, the ideaperson.
You are both of those people.
SPEAKER_02 (10:53):
You know, I don't write as much code as I probably
used to.
And so to call me at this point,to call me like your full stack
developer would be verymisleading.
I wish I had more time because Ido enjoy it, but it's very
difficult.
And one of the things is youneed a lot of flow time when
you're writing a document oryou're writing code, and when
you're doing like productmanagement or startup founder
(11:14):
kind of things, you're doing alot of high interruption tasks,
and that can become challengingto kind of stay focused and then
jump in and out.
All that said, you know, I thinkGen AI, and I may have talked
about this previously, hasreally unlocked like I call it
human potential or humancreativity.
And what I mean by that is allof these different people have
great ideas.
(11:35):
Like they want to build this newplumbing contraption, they want
to build this kind of business,they want to build an
application that solves this,they want to design this new
form of medicine.
I mean, who knows?
And they couldn't do it becausethey would have to go and find
fractional experts across arange of domains, but now they
can't because these LLMs areeffectively a pocket of PhDs.
(11:56):
And so they can now vibe youknow through chat and get to
some semblance of what they wantor what they want to build or
what it might look like.
It may not be the productionthing, but it's a prototype.
And if you think about that, ifyou reframe it and say the
objective is not to build thefinal product, but the objective
is to build something that Icould show people, a means of
(12:18):
communication, right?
Because telling people issometimes hard.
They don't understand whatyou're saying.
Slides maybe slightly better,but they might still not
understand what you're saying.
A document, hard to read,whatever, right?
But if you actually show them anexperience and they actually can
go through the experience, it'snot fully working, but they can
see the vision and where it'sgoing.
Now they have this new formcommunication medium, right?
(12:39):
They have a prototype as a formof communication.
It's a new form of a newartifact that they can create on
their own using LLMs or youknow, using Gen AI.
Now it'll be a lot easier to goin for them to sell their
vision, to go convince some ofthose fractional experts,
convince those with money,investors, whatnot, convince
various stakeholders that, hey,maybe you want to get involved
(13:00):
and help me build this.
You can see the vision and youcan see how great this could be,
right?
Because a lot of them strugglewith the storytelling.
And so much of fundraising isabout the narrative and telling
the story.
SPEAKER_00 (13:10):
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is so true.
Your company, Pulse, wasacquired by Mozilla.
SPEAKER_02 (13:16):
Yes.
SPEAKER_00 (13:17):
Um, you've been VP of product, but it does also
from other conversations we'vehad, and what I'd like to talk
about on this one is it's alsovery entrepreneurial because
you've been able to figure outwhat to solve and how to solve
it for people.
And a lot of those things thatas you were starting your
various companies, you may nothave been the expert at building
(13:37):
a website, the expert at thispart of the business, that part
of the business.
So now you're creating thisecosystem to make it more
democratic and easier for thesmall business and creator who
has that vision, but doesn'thave the budget, doesn't have
the tools, maybe knows how touse AI, but doesn't want to have
to go to five different things.
So, can you talk a little bitabout the, you know, acquisition
(14:01):
in terms of how did you decidewith Mozilla that what your role
would be, VP of product?
And then how did you design thatrole to still have fun and
levity and get to be thatcreator that you are while
bringing things that were reallyuseful to consumers?
SPEAKER_02 (14:17):
You know, some of this is a little bit of luck.
You don't plan for these thingsnecessarily.
And I do have this perspective,which is quite different to
where I was maybe 10 years ago,where you have a set of people
and you figure out theirsuperpowers.
And now the trick is can youposition everyone in the right
spot?
Well, whereas my previousmentality was this is what I
need, and I don't have it, so Ineed to replace this person or I
(14:40):
need to go up-level this personand get someone else, or what
whatever it might be, right?
And you can imagine how thatperspective is much more demand
side versus supply sidethinking, right?
So at Mozilla, interestingly, Ithink, you know, with the
acquisition, we were doingmeeting summarization, as I may
have mentioned earlier.
They had a product calledPocket, which was within the
browser, and they wanted to doarticle summarization.
(15:01):
So we had a, you know, my teamwas very sort of AI-centric,
built their own models, knew howto summarize content.
So that was kind of slotted in.
Now, within months, ChatGPT wasreleased, just goes to show how
important timing is.
And we knew this stuff wascoming.
And everyone's looking aroundthe table and are kind of like,
this is better.
Yeah, we're like, yeah, this isbetter, right?
And so you can imagine all ofthat sort of uh newfound
(15:22):
expertise, knowledge was notnecessarily as useful anymore,
right?
Because they they can now justtap an API.
So, you know, my role sort ofchanged.
They kind of moved me into whatthey call an EIR, uh
Entrepreneur in Residence withinMozilla.
They hadn't done this before.
This was really leaning on thefact that they knew I was a
zero-to-one kind of builder.
So they wanted to play on mystrengths.
My manager at the time uh wasrunning a new products uh kind
(15:45):
of organization.
And I'm now looking at ideasthat I think could make sense
for Mozilla, right?
And so during COVID, uh I was inthe Bay Area, schools were
closed for a long time, and kidswere many kids were stuck at
home.
And so I wanted to teach kidshow to play chess.
And so I went to WixerSquarespace, I don't recall, and
I just remember spending 45minutes and giving up, realizing
how difficult it was just tosimply build a website.
(16:06):
It's not that the tools aren'tsomewhat intuitive, it's just
there's so many options andthey're so complicated because
they're trying to be everythingto everyone, right?
And so I here I'm at Mozilla andI'm thinking about that problem.
And then I'm looking at Gen AI,and I've been in the AI space
for a long time, right?
I had a food logging company uhwhich became a recipe community
that was acquired.
(16:27):
I had a calendar app that was uhspun out of Stanford Research
Institute doing meetingpreparation.
So I was doing AI stuff.
I was the first.ai domain in2011.
So I was I've been doing AIstuff for a long time.
And I knew, you know, I couldtell immediately.
I'm like, AI is a 95% kind ofthing, meaning look for
experiences where it doesn'thave to be precise.
Because where it has to beprecise, it's much more
(16:48):
challenging.
It doesn't mean you can't getthere, but it's substantially
more investment, substantiallylonger time horizons, would
certainly not necessarily workin a large company and may
certainly definitely not work asa startup where you don't you
may not have the funding cycleor whatnot or time to sort of
get there.
And so you could see veryclearly that LMs are great at
writing content, right?
People are using it now toimprove their writing and write
(17:09):
posts and whatnot.
And I'm like, huh.
And writing doesn't have to be100% perfect, right?
Like you can edit it, right?
It generates a first draft andyou edit it.
So I'm thinking, can we marrythis with website creation,
right?
And that's how sort of theconcept of like, okay, now we
have an AI website builder.
And so then that the nextquestion comes like, who should
we go after?
So I'm looking, I'm looking atthe landscape, and I like to do
(17:31):
these two by twos where I'lllike plot like uh a particular
parameter on an X axis, like AIenabled or like no AI, like you
know, uh low-tech engineer mindor whatever.
You know, I use lots ofdifferent axes, I'll do like
dozens of these.
Uh ChatGP is great to likesuggest ideas of different ways
to think about these XY.
And I'm looking at the marketand I'm like, okay, you have
(17:53):
your general purpose websitebuilders, like the Wixes and
Squarespaces and whatnot.
And then you have thesee-commerce focused builders,
which is like an emerging, youknow, Shopify was obviously the
biggest one there, but there's awhole category of other ones
too, like WooCommerce, etcetera, et cetera.
And there's this bucket herethat's like called service
provider.
And I'm like, wow, this is likenot very busy or like relatively
(18:14):
nascent.
And these are people who bill bythe hour, right?
Your digital consultants, yourtherapists, your coaches, your
tutors, you know, all of thatsegment.
Your plumbers, et cetera, etcetera.
And so uh I'm thinking like,wow, there's a gap here.
What if we could do what Shopifydid to e-commerce, which was
completely written off manyyears ago, right?
And they kind of came from leftfield because the the the uh
incumbent website builders arelike, it makes no sense.
(18:36):
You would just use Wix forSquarespace, right?
But of course, now we see howbig the Shopify has become, the
behemoth they had they havebecome, which is amazing.
What if we do what Shopify hasdone within e-commerce, but for
the service provider segment?
And I'm watching or I'm readinguh Yahoo Finance, and they
popped up this bar graph andlike a video which showed that
the fastest growing business inthe US was the freelancer
economy, which made perfectsense because people want to own
(18:59):
their own business, own theirown time.
You know, time is of course thegreatest real estate.
So now I've got a concept, youknow, we've got uh Gen AI
marrying website building, whichcreates a very delightful
experience, a hook, build awebsite within seconds.
And now I have a segment I wantto go after, which is sort of
the the a service provider orthe small business owner, or
what we call the solopreneur.
And that's kind of how thosecame together.
(19:20):
And so then the last piece waslike, okay, how do I drive
growth?
Because I'm always thinkingabout distribution, especially
today.
It's so easy to create thesignal noise ratios just off the
chart.
So when I think of disruptionand insertion points, when I
think about like ways to drivegrowth, I'm looking for angles
of attack.
And this could be maybe you'refocusing on a specific
(19:41):
geography, this could be you'refocusing on a very specific type
of user, this could be, youknow, uh something unique with
the technology, whatever.
In this case, I looked atbusiness model as a means of
disruption.
And so as I started thinkingabout it, I was like, it's
interesting that every websitebuilder charges$10,$20 a month.
And I asked myself, why?
Like, why are they all pricedthe same?
(20:03):
Like this can't be price fixedacross the entire industry.
And I realized, much likeRobinhood, when you built a
website 20 years ago, youactually had to go get a
physical rec, like a server in abuilding.
You actually had to pay for anSSL certificate.
You actually bandwidth wasactually really expensive.
There was a reason it cost, youknow, X dollars a month because
(20:25):
there was all that physicallabor involved, right?
Just to make this work, as wellas just the cost of the
operations of running that wholedata center, et cetera.
But today, SSL certificates arefree and bandwidth costs are
negligible, right?
Like most websites get almost notraffic, right?
The small business restaurant,they maybe get a few hundred
visits a month, which you know,if you break down into sort of
(20:47):
Amazon egress costs, it might belike a penny a month or less,
right?
It's nothing because it's justsimple pages, right?
It's not video and YouTube andstuff like that, right?
So I'm like, wow, thesecompanies are just straight
arbitraging.
Like they're just all of it isjust gravy to them.
And it makes perfect sense.
If you look at Robinhood,they're like, why are you paying
a trader or like why are youpaying six, seven, eight dollars
(21:08):
a trade, which is a legacy modelwhen you used to have to call a
physical broker to make a trade,but now everything's online.
This is stupid that you'repaying for this.
This should be made free, right?
So here I am.
I'm like, you know what?
I'm gonna disrupt this wholebusiness.
I'm just gonna go after, I'mgonna compete with them in a way
they can compete.
I'm gonna make it free becausewe can do it.
There's almost no cost, right?
We we have 60,000, 70,000businesses on solo now, and
(21:32):
total monthly bandwidth costs islike less than$100 a month,
right?
Like it's insane.
And our total AI costs are lessthan$10 a month, right?
And so it's like, right, likeso, you know, this notion your
margin's my opportunity.
And I'm gonna figure out a wayto create a disruptive business
model.
And so I was looking at, youknow, Firefox Mozilla.
We have all this real estate.
We have the Firefox search bar.
(21:53):
Interestingly, people search forthings like plumbers in San
Jose, you know, dentists in NewYork.
I'm like, well, what if I givemy customers what they want,
which is growth, right?
Because the job to be done hereis growth.
They're a small business owner,they now want to grow.
That's why they're setting up awebsite.
And so this completed the arc ofthe story, right?
So now we have technology plusthis like opportunity that
(22:17):
created this delightfulexperience.
We have an audience we want togo after, which is the service
provider, which is a little bitmore nascent.
And we have a business modelapproach that was disruptive
that we bank could drivevirality.
And it's it's you know, I wouldsay it could be working better,
like we could be growing faster,but it's doing great.
SPEAKER_00 (22:33):
Yeah.
Wow, that's amazing.
I was gonna ask you how manypeople were on solo, and you
answered that.
How are you marketing it topeople?
SPEAKER_02 (22:42):
It's completely organic.
So there's no performancemarketing, right?
And a lot of it's word of mouth.
We did try some PLG, so that wehave some loops in the product
where you can invite otherpeople to edit your website, so
it's collaborative.
We do a lot of SEO hacking.
We have a programmatic blog,which I'm not particularly proud
of, you know, because it'sprogrammatic, but it's really
designed for Google.
It's not designed for endreaders, right?
(23:04):
We do a lot of stuff for AEO orGEO optimization.
So this is like AI chat, forexample.
They tend to overweight uh highauthority UGC domains.
So that means commenting onReddit, commenting on LinkedIn,
commenting on Quora, Wikipedia,basically sources where they're
most likely to think it'sactually authored by a human
versus AI slop.
So, you know, currently we'replaying with end-to-end
(23:26):
programmatic short form TikTokvideo creation.
So, you know, for social, tryingto grow grow through that
channel.
So we're trying differenttactics like any you know,
growth hacker, growth marketerwould.
And we'll see what sticks, whatdoesn't.
But you know, there's alsonatural inflection points as you
grow, your mailing list getsbigger.
There's more word of mouth,right?
And you kind of hit this sort ofpoint where you start seeing
some takeaway velocity.
(23:47):
And we're starting to see somereal step functions just in the
last three to six months withour domain authority, which is
great, which is overallimproving our search ranks.
SPEAKER_00 (23:55):
These are all tips that everybody should be really
listening to very close to.
So what is the next step aftercreating your website?
And and I have tested and playedwith this a little bit.
I'm gonna be definitely playingwith it some more, but you can,
you know, you have fonts, youhave colors, you have all kinds
of different layouts people canuse, and it's really beautiful.
SPEAKER_02 (24:18):
You know, a very common thing to do, rebuilding
anything is a day in the lifesort of exercise or like a
lifecycle kind of you know plotor whatnot.
And so we've interviewed at thispoint, we are connected with
hundreds, thousands of businessowners.
We know their pain points.
They might be paying anaccountant way too much money,
but they can't gather all theirreceipts together, they can't
(24:38):
gather gather all their incomebecause some's coming through
Venmo, some is coming throughStripe, right?
And then end of year taxes comeand they spend a whole Saturday
trying to pull it together.
Like, can we automate that forthem?
Can we automatically read youremail?
Can we automatically pull it alland use Gen AI to help annotate
it, right?
So that's a that's an area we'reyou know building a product in.
A lot of these small businessowners feel it's important to
(24:59):
re-engage their audience throughnewsletters and social media.
Can we build something there tohelp them with that?
Right.
Some of these sort of physicalblue collar workers can't really
pick up the phone half the time.
They get so many inbound leadsthrough Yelp or whatnot, they
need somebody else to pick uptheir phone.
Right now, they go and pay veryexpensive, you know, three,
four, five dollar a minute AIreceptionist services, or not
(25:21):
AI, but just human receptionistservices.
Can we enable that through AI?
Right.
So these are all different partsof the arc.
And there's a lot more.
And we're building in each ofthese different buckets, and we
have a bunch of things comingout soon, but that's the
insight.
SPEAKER_00 (25:36):
Yeah.
And that's brilliant.
I mean, one common thing I'vebeen talking to people about,
whether it's with podcasts orjust other conversations, is
that as small businesses andentrepreneurs, it's very tiring
to have to go to multiple sitesto get everything done that you
want to get done.
So consolidation seems to be oneof the names of the game,
(25:58):
particularly with all of thegenerative AI tools that are out
there.
How do you know which techstack?
I was even using an example of Ido have I have a Delphi.
I also use Hajen.
I also use synthesia becauseeach one of them can't do
exactly what the other ones cando for the use cases I need them
for.
SPEAKER_02 (26:16):
You know, the tooling is like a whole nother
universe.
I simply can't keep up.
I will see something, I'll playwith it, try to figure out what
might work for what I need.
I have limited time in terms oflike how much of the time I'm
doing the IC work versusdelegating.
So it depends.
It's case by case, but I do tryto get my hands dirty at least
once a day or twice a day.
(26:36):
You know, so it depends.
The key thing is there is astack you need to ask people
like what's the best stack touse right now, and then kind of
roll with it because there is alittle bit of a analysis
paralysis when it comes to thestack itself, where you're just
keep trying new tools and youdon't get anything done.
And it's uh it's a lot of what Icall AI tourism where you're
spending a lot of a lot of moneytrying all these different
(26:58):
things or a lot of trials uh tothe point where I think even
Stripe is releasing a newproduct because they have so
many people figuring out orgaming the free trials and
preloading on the credits thatit's causing, you know.
Many of these companies aren'tmaking money as it is, but it's
you know, it's creating morepressure.
So, but yeah, you know,internally at Mozilla, you know,
within new products, it's notnecessarily this way across all
(27:19):
of the org.
We give a lot of freedom forpeople to try different things.
We don't necessarily run themthrough a lot of our normal
security reviews and whatnot.
There is some obviously Pontiusbest practices, and we do
collect the name, we audit thenames of the tools and then
determine, oh, should we get abigger license for this or not?
But part of that is just theexperimentation that's required
to figure out what's going towork best to you know hook uh an
(27:41):
AI avatar to a screen share, touh, you know, an outro to then
stitch stitch together into aTikTok video.
SPEAKER_00 (27:49):
Yeah, but it's uh it does sound like you're creating
more and products to help solvesome of these issues as an
ecosystem.
So I do have to ask, you'regiving a lot of and you're
giving this away for free.
What's the monetization model?
SPEAKER_02 (28:04):
Oh no, we're gonna introduce subscription for sure.
It's not it's not a absolutely,and you know, we may even allow
a way for you to set budgets ifyou want ads each month against
the Mozilla Ad Network, right?
Within Firefox, you can promoteyour business that way through
through local search, which islike effectively the highest
intent way.
But no, this, you know, in theend, you know, we are a company.
We have to, we have to, we haveto make money.
(28:25):
We can't we can't keep it freeforever.
SPEAKER_00 (28:28):
Yeah, but you can offer a service, you can get a
lot of data.
Now you have what 60,000, 70,000businesses you said, yeah.
Using this tool, and they're theperfect, that's a perfect
ecosystem to try and test thecopy right.
SPEAKER_02 (28:45):
Yeah, we have an ecosystem we can sell to, right?
Because in some ways, thegreatest growth hack in 2025 is
building the mailing list.
So if you can build a a high,highly qualified mailing list,
that's an immense amount ofvalue.
And in many ways, that's exactlywhy repeat B2B entrepreneurs or
enterprise entrepreneurs buildin the same category over and
over again, because they alreadyknow all the buyers.
SPEAKER_00 (29:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, fantastic.
Sounds like you have a lot ofexciting things that you're
working on.
What continues to excite youabout the team, the work that
you do at Mozilla?
Because you did mention some,you know, I mean, it's as an
ethical company, there arecertain guardrails and things
that you try to putintentionally into the way that
(29:30):
you're designing.
So what continues to excite you?
And what do you see in thefuture with AI and this whole
tech journey that we're on?
SPEAKER_02 (29:38):
You know, I think right now I'm just super excited
by just the amount of untappedlike human creativity that's
just getting like unleashed.
Like it's just amazing.
Like everybody with an idea cannow express that idea in some
artifact that they couldn'tcouldn't before.
And I think that's all veryamazing.
I think Mozilla specifically.
(30:00):
Very interesting time.
You know, browsers hashistorically, at least the last
10, 15 years, been table stakes.
People don't think about it.
People don't, we if you took outthe brand, they might not even
know which browser they're in,right?
They're quite similar, all thesort of base use cases are
covered.
You know, innovation had slowed.
And now we're, you know, we'rehearing rumors, you know, or
(30:21):
perplexity, I think, haspublicly released a browser, at
least within a private groupcalled Comet.
We have Dia from Arc Browserthat was recently acquired, I
think, by Atlassian.
We have OpenAI that's beenrumored to be working on a
browser, right?
So you have like majorinitiatives from LLM companies
doing stuff with browsers.
You have a whole nother stack ofcompanies looking at screen
(30:42):
scraping and agentic workflows,like book me a flight, book me a
trip, right?
And that's running browsereffectively in a headless
manner, like in the cloud andkind of clicking through, right?
And then you have the future ofsearch, which you know, are
people gonna be consuming theweb?
You know, Google fine, I thinkGoogle has finally come out and
said that the web isdeteriorating.
I at least I read that, so Idon't that could be hearsay.
(31:02):
But but the notion that there ismore AI slop on the web, how
people are gonna consume.
Are they gonna be consuming justsynthetic content?
Are they gonna be visitingwebsites at all or everything's
through a chat interface?
Right.
So you have this culmination orthis combination of different
mega things going on that's allof a sudden made browser like a
really hot category again.
(31:24):
And so I think from a Mozillaperspective, it's super
interesting.
SPEAKER_00 (31:27):
Yeah, yeah.
Fantastic.
I can't wait to see what you'redoing in six months or three
months or whatever the next bigphase comes about.
What would you recommend,besides, of course, going and
starting a website oncellulist.ai, to anybody who's
listening who is looking attaking that leap into
entrepreneurship or they'vestarted to create their, you
(31:48):
know, craft their business, butthey just need that little jolt.
SPEAKER_02 (31:52):
You know, it used to be I have an idea and then they
never start, right?
Like I always tell people if youstart anything, you're already
in the top 1%.
Because 99% of people don't getpast an idea, right?
And the most common feedback Ihear when people have an idea
and they have it now, like, oh,how's it going?
Like, oh, I haven't made anyprogress or I haven't done
(32:14):
anything, is don't have time.
It's not the right time.
I don't really want to do ituntil I'm at this phase in my
life or this net worth or thismany kids or whatever, right?
And I always tell everyone, it'snever a good time.
Like it's always the right time,right?
And so I think, you know, Ithink in that process, in that
journey, if there's an itch, wewant to tap into that itch.
(32:37):
We want to see if it goessomewhere.
During that process or thatjourney, you might realize it's
just not really for you.
You know, you have an idea, butyou know, I'm not really, it's
not my thing.
Like I don't want to work thathard.
I don't want to feel that muchstress, you know, whatever it
is, who knows?
But for many, it'll be the mostsort of empowering experience
because you're gonna be like,wow, I'm in in control.
(32:59):
And all of a sudden you have toanswer all kinds of questions
you've never had to answerbefore.
Like, like, how should I designthis thing?
Usually I I may suggestsomething, but somebody else has
to make the answer.
Like, you know, there'ssomething very or like there's a
lot of freedom when you're in acompany, but you don't have to
make the final decision, right?
Somebody else makes the finaldecision.
It's life's a lot easier thatway.
But when it's your own thing,you got to make the decisions.
(33:19):
You're you own it, right?
And so I think my feedback tothose listening who are in that
state is to go for it.
Like, like you're there's notgonna be a better time, like and
see where it goes and just makesure you're swimming downstream
and at least and then trust yourinstinct will take you there.
SPEAKER_00 (33:35):
Fantastic.
Thank you so much, Raj, forcoming on Media Escape and
giving us some insights and someenergy.
If you've you know, you havedone uh so many different
things, you've started so manycompanies, exited, and you
continue to innovate and designand think about what issues need
to be solved.
SPEAKER_02 (33:56):
Thank you, Anika.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_00 (33:58):
Fantastic.
Thank you to everybody who islistening to this episode or
watching it of Media EscapeInsights from Digital
Changemakers brought to you byUSC's Masters in Digital Media
Management Program.
I'm one of your hosts, AnikaJackson, and I'll be back again
with another amazing guest veryshortly.
SPEAKER_01 (34:14):
To learn more about the Master of Science and
Digital Media Managementprogram, visit us on the web at
dmm.usc.edu.
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