Episode 3 | Transforming Research with AI: The Gentext Journey

The Transcript

Herdrapp (00:01.043)
🎙️ Welcome to Herding Founders, the show where we explore the challenges, lessons, and stories behind building startups and scaling ideas into impactful businesses.
I’m your host, Kevin Sims, co-founder of Herdr.io, a project management platform that empowers small teams to transform ideas into successful products with the help of AI. At Herdr, we’re all about making project management simpler, smarter, and more productive.
In today’s episode, I’m excited to be joined by Alex, founder of [Gentext], an AI-powered MS Word Add-in that helps students and academics generate accurate reports quickly… Together, we’ll dive into their journey of building Their Company, the challenges they’ve faced, and the strategies that have shaped their success.
So grab your headphones, get inspired, and let’s get into it!

Just kind of introduce yourself and just give us an idea of what Gentext is and how you kind of came about building that.

Alex (00:36.194)
Go. Thanks for having me, Kevin. So, Gentext is a Microsoft Word add-in, essentially AI pod to help students and academics write research papers right within the Microsoft Word interface. So obviously, everyone’s familiar with AI. One of the issues with AI is that it hallucinates information quite often. What we do is we force the AI model to go through a database of 200 million research papers to find

Herdrapp (00:38.898)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (01:05.678)
research citations that are accurate and then seamlessly integrated within your Microsoft Word document. That’s our primary product. We have a secondary product called Mental Note that’s geared towards mental health professionals. And what that helps mental health professionals do is write clinical notes within Microsoft Word. Overall, the way we look at our business is building

industry-specific vertical AI products that are focused on industry use cases. Our ultimate aim is essentially to ground AI models with industry databases and information so that it’s not making up information. And it also takes into account industry nuances while generating information.

Herdrapp (01:56.218)
Nice, nice. And so what kind of led you into, you know, what was the driving force behind like, you know, you going into AI specifically, like, you know, the business models that you’re kind of going after, like, I’m sure you might have kind of dabbled in maybe other startups, or is this kind of your first kind of, you know, business that you worked on? Like, what kind of drove you to kind of go down this path and that, you know, as far as going towards academic research papers?

Alex (02:22.38)
Yeah, sure. So I’m not a developer. I’m an economist by training. I have no development experience. I now have a fairly decent understanding of developmental architecture, but I don’t actually write the code. So once I saw what AI could do, right, and I guess me and the rest of the world, everyone had this Jack GPT moment when it came out. A lot of people were a bit skeptical and at that stage, I felt unnecessarily so where, you know,

Herdrapp (02:27.281)
Yeah, okay.

Herdrapp (02:33.672)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (02:44.068)
Yeah, right.

Alex (02:52.526)
I don’t know if you remember, but people go on Reddit and go like, you know, I asked AI this really simple question, like, know, ours are there, strawberry, it only tells me that they’re LED. And I was kind of like, Jesus, I don’t even believe that AI can, you know, write something that’s semi-cogent. And you could see that there was this leaps and bounds improvement in AI technology. I just had to get involved.

Herdrapp (02:57.785)
Right. Yeah.

Herdrapp (03:10.825)
You

Alex (03:20.174)
I was at the time working for a tech startup, as a director of strategic acquisitions, but I spent the vast majority of my career as an economist writing economic research papers. So, you know, it was almost instantaneous where I was like, you know, if I had this 10 years back, 15 years back when I was a junior economist, this would have been gold, right? Where you’re writing these research papers and it can actually find these citations that you’re trudging through and trying to find.

information to make your argument. One of the major drivers behind me building it on Microsoft Word was that I spent so much time in the Microsoft Office suite. I was aware of the fact that you could actually build add-ins to Microsoft Office. The vast majority of the world isn’t aware of this, largely just because you’d never actually have to do it. So once I realized that, was kind of like, okay, fine, I know how I’d like to

Herdrapp (04:13.341)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (04:17.89)
deliver this product, I just need to find a person to help me do that and that’s what got me started on this route.

Herdrapp (04:25.361)
Yeah, you brought up a good point. You know, I hear a lot of, you know, people who start businesses and tech startups and, know, not everyone knows how to code. Right. And I think that’s a sentiment that a lot of people think when you’re building like a SaaS product, you have to be the one who knows how to code. But, know, you made a good point where you just kind of have to know how to navigate the landscape and. know, someone in your position, like how did you go about finding the particular person that you you could work with to build it? You know, lot of.

get up work and all these other different platforms and stuff like that. What kind of was your driving force to find the right person to work with pair with? Hopefully they understood your particular side of the research side and also the tech side as far as building the models and things like that.

Alex (05:13.634)
Yeah, no, great question. So I had one advantage which a lot of startup founders possibly don’t, which is I had significant work experience, so I had some personal savings that I was willing to put on the line. I was gonna put my money where my mouth is, right? So it’s something, I started the company when I was 35 years old. It may not have been possible when I was 21, right? So I recognized that difference. There was also the knowledge.

Herdrapp (05:26.419)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (05:35.763)
You

Alex (05:41.55)
factor in place where you’ve got 15 years of experience. And when you’re 21 and you come up with a startup idea, it’s usually something around social networking, dating, drinking, sort of like a life, right? Where it’s not boring stuff like, oh my God, citations are such a pain. And I spend hours doing that. So there’s value in industry professionals who spend a lot of time in any particular industry, right? Be it an accountant, a lawyer, an engineer or something who spent a lot of time in it.

Herdrapp (05:51.443)
Right.

Herdrapp (05:57.683)
Thank

Herdrapp (06:05.448)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (06:10.71)
And there’s probably like a pain point that you distinctly feel that is solvable using software, but you don’t actually recognize it. So it’s sort of like that these two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle where an industry professional probably knows what the problem is, but doesn’t know that it’s easily solvable using software. Whereas a software professional probably doesn’t know this problem exists. And if someone introduces him to this problem, he kind of goes like, wait, hold on, like you can just…

use this open source software for your work, right? And that’s it, you can solve this problem, right? A good example is most things around computer vision. I think most non-technical people don’t understand how good computer vision is currently, right? So they think about these problems and they give me something as simple as waste management where you’re like, there’s this stream of garbage coming through, right? And just pick out all the green bottles from that if that’s your use case. And I think a lot of non-

Herdrapp (06:42.931)
Yeah, right.

Alex (07:08.322)
technical people and when I say technical in this case, I software technical people don’t appreciate that. anyway coming back to my particular case, I Knew I had this problem which needed to be fixed I had a clear idea of how I wanted it fixed which is Microsoft Word and I knew nothing else about like I wouldn’t at that stage This is early 2023. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you The difference between front-end and back-end development right to my mind. Those are just all software about

Herdrapp (07:35.581)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (07:38.07)
So what I did was I reached out to a company called TopTal which focuses on high-end developers. Largely, the reason why I reached out to them as opposed to going on Upwork was I didn’t trust my judgment in terms of finding a developer, right? Because I know nothing about software development, so I can’t judge a person’s skills. So essentially, I outsourced that to this company called TopTal. In all fairness, I’d recommend

Herdrapp (08:04.093)
You said, you said top down? top. Okay.

Alex (08:05.826)
Top Tal. So T-O-P-T-A-L. I’d recommend them strongly. They’re quite expensive though because they’ve got this vetting process, et cetera. on that spectrum of, if you’re looking for a cheap developer, you’ll have to go to Upwork, but then you better know what you’re doing. I can probably go to Upwork today because I know a lot more, but probably at that time I couldn’t. Yeah, so.

Herdrapp (08:30.323)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (08:34.442)
met this great developer at that stage again, right? Just went in, developed the features in as much detail as I could. I used AI as well, where I described exactly what my problem was and said, hey, know, ChatGPT can help me. Like come up with a requirement that a software developer would actually understand. And it did a pretty good job of it, right? And came up with these requirements. And I sent that to the developer and the developer came back with a, hey, you know,

Herdrapp (08:45.235)
Right, exactly,

Alex (09:02.446)
I think you can totally do this. You know, if you’ve got Angular on the front end, C-Shop on the back end, blah, blah, blah. He was great in terms of just communicating. I think that’s an important aspect that a lot of non-technical founders actually discount, which is they kind of view developers as this black box cog, which is, you know, I send stuff to the guy and he’ll just send me the code back. opposed to, you know…

Herdrapp (09:26.867)
Right, yeah.

Alex (09:31.646)
What’s in your mind is probably nebulous and what you are actually looking for is a developer who can probably take this very half-assed idea. I’m not sure if I could swear on your podcast. It’s like, you hey, I want to do this thing, right? They’re like, yeah, but have you thought about any of this other stuff? Right. And you probably haven’t just because you’re not a technical founder. And I think there’s great value in meeting a developer who can communicate. So.

Herdrapp (09:41.118)
no, you’re good. Yeah. I’m sure all the founders have had their moments. Yeah.

Alex (10:01.334)
It’s, think largely it was just, I got on a platform which only picks developers who were good at both communicating and good on the technical side. So got lucky that way. had a very clear idea of, look, maybe I don’t know what I’m doing. And I gave myself a six week timeline to essentially just spit out an MVP, right? Because I’d read about it on some blog or something like that. Build an MVP and see if someone wants to use it.

Herdrapp (10:21.085)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (10:26.099)
Yeah, right. Right.

Alex (10:31.598)
The developer agreed and went like, yeah, you know what? Let’s just do this. So we did it in six weeks, right? It built it out. It was an add-in, got it approved on the Microsoft App Store. And the tipping point was we threw it out there, right? And I had a paying subscriber within 24 hours and it just blew our minds. Like it was all like, it was just out there and someone found us. And at that stage, we were like,

Herdrapp (10:35.955)
Okay.

Herdrapp (10:58.932)
Bye.

Alex (11:00.512)
Okay, this is cool. And it kept slowly building. But as you can imagine, it was an MBP, right? So it’s a bit buggy and you know, there people who testing it out, et cetera. And I was curious enough to speak to my customers and say, you know, hey, you know, why do use it? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it, et cetera. And that directly influenced our future software development moving forward. anyway, that was a long-winded response to how we started.

Herdrapp (11:19.997)
Okay.

Herdrapp (11:26.46)
Okay.

No, no, no, you’re good. Yeah. You gave a good insights when round, basically what drove you to, you know, go after that company and obviously produce what you wanted. And now that you got this product, you know, kind of, you know, like you said, you just put it out there. You got a customer within 24 hours. and after talking to maybe some of those people, what’s the problem that you obviously you knew that was being solved, but are you gaining any more insights on around like,

why this is important for maybe college students, researchers or whatnot. What’s the biggest, has there been a shift in what you originally thought this was gonna be for versus now what it’s actually doing, any changes there?

Alex (12:14.51)
So I think the biggest shift is actually our secondary product, which is Mental Note. So different tweaks in terms of our UI, UI experience, adding multiple languages because we had lots of Latin Americans come on and ask us if we could have it in Spanish and people in the Middle East asking if we could do it in Arabic. So we just have it now in 10 different languages. But I think the biggest fundamental switch in how customer

Herdrapp (12:32.593)
Mm.

Alex (12:42.946)
conversations with customers changed how we think about the business is the mental health professionals, the Mental Note AI, which is our product for mental health professionals. What we started realizing is there were a few psychologists who were using GenTex significantly, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to us why they were using it, right? Because in my mind, I was sort of like, well, unless that’s a researcher.

in who happens to be a psychologist right and he’s doing both things at the same time. I can see why they’re using GenTex but otherwise I have no idea and this started slowly building out so I got in touch with a few of them. mean I tried to get in touch with one of the issues with reaching out customers is about 90 % of them don’t want to talk to you right. They’re like why the hell are you getting in touch with me but you occasionally get lucky and then you sometimes find some customers who

Herdrapp (13:12.947)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (13:30.931)
Yeah. You’re right.

Alex (13:39.758)
Constantly crib, but you kind of learn quite a bit from these guys me crib, right? And and there’s value in saying well some of these things look man I’m not gonna fix them for you just because you know, that’s such a niche case that we don’t want to go there But the psychologists were interesting because one of the psychologists was just upfront and she was like, okay Yeah, know I use it to write clinical notes. I was like, what’s a clinical note because I never heard of one before and essentially

Herdrapp (13:43.347)
Right. Exactly.

Herdrapp (13:55.239)
Yeah.

Alex (14:09.452)
what psychologists or mental health professionals do is they have a session, right? And the session is sort of like, I met Alex and he’s got this startup and he’s quite stressed and there’s a lot of anxiety. He’s not sleeping too well, but he’s euphoric, et cetera. And what they’ve got is roughly these rough notes. And then they’ve got to write these clinical notes, which come in very specific formats. So…

One of the most common formats is something called SOAP format. So that’s Statement Objective Assessment Plan. So that way, you can just track the person’s, the patient’s progress through multiple sessions and multiple providers. So it’s a multi-year process, et cetera. now this is one of those, it falls in the domain of documentations of which for anyone, right? Like everyone hates dogs.

Herdrapp (14:50.365)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (15:01.744)
Right. Yeah.

Alex (15:03.03)
Regardless of it, know software developers hate documentation. Guess what? So do psychologists so do engineers everyone hates documentation, right? So so it we we realize we were like, but my reaction to that is But this isn’t like fine-tuned for your use case like, know this I’m not even sure we were coming out with this and I was a bit hesitant and she’s just like we’re me off with I make it work like, you know, I was

Herdrapp (15:07.372)
Right.

Herdrapp (15:21.668)
near.

Herdrapp (15:31.027)
Yeah.

Alex (15:33.07)
I came out of that meeting going like this must be this massive pain point for some woman to just come in and go I’m gonna use this product even though it’s not built for me and you know but it still like solves 50 % of my problem and then I’ll work around it right and make it work. I’m like okay fine you know what there’s probably value in this and we went back we did a lot more research on it we found a database of you know public domain clinical notes

which has all personal details scrubbed out. Alex’s name isn’t there, his age is there, but it’s in a range, et cetera. But then you’ve got all your classic symptoms and the assessment plans, et cetera. And we trained an AI model on that. So we fine-tuned a model on that. Again, surprisingly easy. Once you’ve got the hard bit is getting the data and cleaning the data. But once you’ve got the data, it takes two days to fine-tune a model.

Herdrapp (16:08.925)
Yeah, right.

Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (16:29.747)
Okay.

Alex (16:29.858)
And you’re off to the races, right? Because then you’ve got this fine-tuned model and you can totally just… And then we have all of Gentex front-end and back-end architecture, right? So it’s essentially just plugging in a new model into it and saying, here’s the new use case. And that’s going pretty well as well. So, know, Gentex is still bigger, but Mental Note is growing faster than Gentex. And the truth is without Gentex, I would not have known about Mental Note because I would never have met the psychologist.

Herdrapp (16:42.596)
Dear Brode

Herdrapp (16:57.617)
Right.

Alex (16:59.554)
So that’s probably the most significant example I can think of, which is, yeah, customer discussions have actually significantly changed our route. And that influenced our plan to, we’re planning on launching a legal add-in in the future, connecting to all of US case law. So we’ve already started building out a vector database for it. Hopefully in the future, we’ll move across industry. Ideally, we’d like to be…

the guys who develop plugins across architecture, engineering, law, medicine, etc.

Herdrapp (17:31.89)
No, wow. Okay. Yeah. I get like, you know, I, kind of to a point there, you were just mentioning, as you’re building out the, you know, AI is booming, obviously, right? You know, everything’s, you know, wanting to, you know, model or every company is wanting it. What’s like the toughest challenge you face, you know, maybe as an entrepreneur, either building this, you know, has there been anything that you’ve overcome as far as like before?

I guess you can say like navigating the AI space, right? Like, is there like a, maybe like in that space too much going on? Like, do you feel like you’re in a position to grow and continue to explode as more companies use AI, more people continue to use it? What’s your kind of thoughts around that?

Alex (18:19.458)
So great point, right? And you’ve hit the nail on the head. One of the biggest issues is competition, obviously because the barriers to entry have come down so low that there’s so many competitors in the market. Differentiating yourself in that market is complicated. I personally feel that it makes more sense to niche down as much as possible because then you can’t be all things to all people. are, that’s what the big…

Herdrapp (18:29.235)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (18:40.339)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (18:47.498)
AI companies are right so it’s Jack JTT or you know Antropics, Jasper so Jasper actually is a very good example of it right where they’re big but they can’t grow any further just because and growth is kind of slowing down because they’re so big that they can’t niche down right unless they figure out you’re niching down right I think there’s value and so our plan essentially is to stay small nimble right

Herdrapp (18:49.435)
Right. Jasper and all those. Yeah, yeah.

Herdrapp (19:04.797)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (19:08.549)
Exactly. Yeah, right.

Alex (19:17.07)
I don’t think the plan is to accelerate growth as fast as possible and, know, burn a lot of runway. We’ll be focusing on efficient growth. That’s why we’ve raised funds from Tiny Seed, which is an accelerator geared purely at software companies trying to build sustainable businesses as opposed to, you know, go big or go broke. So that’s the way we think about that aspect of the business. The flip side of this is obviously

Herdrapp (19:37.044)
Right. Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (19:45.448)
With a-

Alex (19:46.862)
customer acquisition is one of the biggest challenges, right? So I’m fairly confident, for example, if I had this magic wand where I put GenTex in front of every single person who uses Microsoft Word every day, we’d be huge, right? We’d have this great, but in this crowded space, right? Just getting your name out there and getting people to try it out because we’ve got, and I won’t claim to be like, you know, the solution for everyone, but there is a certain subsection of users who just love us, right? Because

Herdrapp (20:11.965)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (20:16.32)
it just fits their workflow perfectly. It’s sort of like, I don’t have to get out of Microsoft Word. I can work through a hundred page document. You can tell me exactly where everything is within this hundred page document. That’s amazing, right? For other people who don’t spend that much time in documents, I can see how it’s all like, eh, you know, that’s a bit of overkill. So ideally it’s just getting us in front of all the people who might get immense value from us.

is the big challenge, right? And that’s what we spend most of our time with right now. Essentially, is either product development, where we’re developing these new products for new users, or it is, now we’ve developed this product for this user. How do we get it out in front of a user where they actually try it out and go like, hey, you know what? I really like this. I prefer using this to a generic chatbot, and I want to use it.

Herdrapp (21:04.215)
Right, right. And so you touched on a point with the tiny seed investment and, you know, there’s a lot of founders who, but you know, kind of like how you mentioned you were able to kind of fund it earlier on yourself. But then on the investment side, what was kind of your reason for going with an investment? Like, was it because you were seeing traction and growth and you needed additional insights, mentorship?

for anyone out there that’s maybe looking to go that VC route, when did it kind of make sense for you in your company?

Alex (21:39.222)
Right, two points, two parts to this. One is of course acceleration, right? You just put more fuel to the fire when you see traction. So I wouldn’t, I don’t think I personally would have done it. And I talked about this earlier where, you know, I gave myself six weeks to build this and throw it out there and see if anyone wanted to use it. And if people didn’t want to use it, I wasn’t going to pursue it any further, right? But once I saw that, was sort of like, okay, fine, you know, probably need a bit more capital.

Herdrapp (21:55.24)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (22:06.53)
to put fuel to the fire and grow this and scale this. Having said that, I like the analogy of putting jet fuel in a Toyota Yaris, where if you put the wrong kind of fuel in, you’ll blow your enterprise up. so now I’m not saying, and this really depends on business models, it depends on risk appetites, depends on the individual running this.

Herdrapp (22:24.882)
Right.

Alex (22:36.436)
it venture capital funding makes sense for some people. For me, I sort of require and I still think it’s sort of the bare minimum to get us to sustainable profitability and growth. And what I mean by that is not just profitability, but enough profitability where we can reinvest in the business and keep growing the business at a fast pace. So tiny seeds mandate essentially just is identical to this where

Herdrapp (22:58.067)
Right.

Herdrapp (23:05.469)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (23:05.646)
fits that profile off. one thing which most startup founders don’t really realize, especially if you’re younger, is that the VC model is essentially predicated on the fact that one of their startup portfolio companies will become at least a unicorn, if not more. And we could talk about the dynamics of that for a really long time. I would recommend a book called Venture Deals by Brad Feld. So it’s this detailed

Herdrapp (23:28.369)
Yeah.

Alex (23:35.318)
Analysis and I think every founder should read it it was eye-opening right in terms of what a reason is looking for and what makes sense for them what doesn’t make sense for them and And not every founder necessarily wants to go down that route I definitely didn’t so I needed some capital to get us off to Profitability, but I’m not really interested in like burning through massive amounts of capital to be you know the next

Herdrapp (23:44.701)
Okay.

Alex (24:05.218)
big AI company that solves everything for everyone, right? I think there’s a space for vertical AI and that’s where we’d like to focus.

Herdrapp (24:08.902)
Right, right.

Herdrapp (24:16.413)
So, you know, as you kind of navigate some of the different space or, you know, things with GenTex, what’s, has there, you know, been like a mistake that you kind of maybe made earlier on, or even just even like in your entrepreneur journey, like whether it be like finding a business, like maybe GenTex wasn’t your first foray into entrepreneurship. What’s a mistake that maybe you made that you kind of either look back on and it kind of helped you get to where you’re at kind of now?

Alex (24:45.75)
Right, well, JetTex is my first business. In terms of just, the truth is there are many, many errors that happen all the time, right? And in some cases, it’s not even very clear if it’s an error. It’s all like, that probably didn’t work out as much as I’d like it to, right? One thing I can think of, which was a development failure essentially very early on, right? But that’s the MVP buggy stage, which is where…

Herdrapp (24:46.067)
How you counting?

Herdrapp (24:49.765)
Okay.

Herdrapp (25:03.214)
Yeah, yeah.

Alex (25:14.552)
we had multiple users have login issues, and something very fundamental that you think would be very simple, which is the single sign-on with Google and Microsoft. And the truth is, it can get quite messy with the backend, especially on different devices, et cetera. I didn’t quite appreciate that as a non-tech founder. And it caused quite a bit of grief for like, good people.

Herdrapp (25:24.221)
Yeah,

Herdrapp (25:35.793)
Yeah.

Alex (25:39.054)
to three weeks we had a fair amount of churn as a result where people were frustrated about you oh you know I’ve got this product but yeah I can’t log in or I log in inconsistently etc but excuse me having said that the vast majority of these mistakes are fixable and they’re reversible right so you can probably just update and have a new feature out there if it doesn’t work you can probably roll it back so it’s not the

Herdrapp (25:48.091)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (26:06.876)
Right, right.

Alex (26:08.846)
end of the line. think the biggest mistake which we haven’t really done to a large extent but I see a lot of other founders tend to do it is analysis paralysis. You’re trying to analyze everything as opposed to just throw something out there and see if it sticks. One of the issues with that, at least in my experience, that there’s no way to have 100 % perfect information.

If keep analyzing, that’s essentially what you’re looking for, right? You’re looking for 100 % information. And if you don’t actually take that risk, you lose out on the opportunity of serendipity, which in my case was the psychologist finding me and using it for something that I had no idea even existed, right? So there is value in testing something out, throwing it out there and seeing if it works. But…

Herdrapp (26:42.023)
Yeah.

Herdrapp (27:05.948)
Okay.

Alex (27:06.382)
Again, you know with mistakes it’s one of those things where ask me in two years and maybe I’ll like, you know, everything I told you about this was all crap and I was making a huge mistake while I was talking to you about it. So it’s just my experience.

Herdrapp (27:11.823)
Yeah. Right.

Herdrapp (27:19.185)
You

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I’m sure with being like an entrepreneur, your time is kind of everything. you know, what’s some kind of habits and things that you do to kind of keep yourself grounded? I’m sure you got family or friends or, you know, kind of things that, you know, might take you your mind outside of growing a business. Like what’s some kind of routines you kind of keep for yourself to kind of make sure you’re doing the right things?

Alex (27:48.438)
It’s a great question and to be honest with you I actually struggle with this right I struggle with the balance Honestly because so so for some background I’ve got a young child right so he’s three and As anyone with young children would know they’re very high energy very intense, you know, we’ll have a lot of time so it’s sort of like At least I personally constantly feel I’m

Herdrapp (28:00.755)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (28:07.372)
Yeah,

Alex (28:16.256)
not doing enough on all fronts, right? I’m not spending enough time with my kids or my wife, I’m not spending enough time with my parents. But while I’m spending time with them, I’m sort of like, I’m not spending enough time on my business or work. I wish I could say, hey, know, I do these, I wake up at 4 a.m. every morning and do a cold plunge and you know, that.

Herdrapp (28:22.631)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (28:26.451)
Right.

Herdrapp (28:37.123)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you always hear it.

Alex (28:40.374)
Usually it is, I’m woken up at 4am by a crying child who’s like, know, quite irate, you know, and then, and that kind of like, I wake up a bit groggy and trying to get some work done.

Herdrapp (28:44.372)
Right, that’s it.

Herdrapp (28:50.366)
I mean, that’s good. That’s good because you know what? I think sometimes in like the industry, like you get the influencers, right? They’re always like, I wake up at four and I go work out for two hours and then I do that. but you know, it’s like, you know, it’s good hearing realistically, you know, like you saying, like you have kids, you have family and you know, like there’s good to have balance. Like I have three kids myself and obviously I’m taking time out now to, you know, obviously you’re taking time out now to speak with me and you know, sometimes that time’s valuable.

so you know makes makes real good makes sense so

Alex (29:23.534)
Yeah, right, and you’ve got three kids, so it’s like, you know, more than I do, right? So it’s one of those things where you try to do the best you can, and very often I feel like, you know, I’m afraid of both ends. AI is actually amazing to help with this, where, know, essentially what I now try to do is try to reduce my cognitive load, if that makes sense, in terms of decision making.

Herdrapp (29:26.877)
Yeah.

Herdrapp (29:40.915)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (29:48.825)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.

Alex (29:52.17)
So say I’m at the crossroads in terms of what decision should I take? Should I try this marketing approach? I do cold emailing? Should I focus on ad spend? Should I do this, that? And now what I do is essentially I ask AI for its advice. And I’ve started delegating a lot of this to AI where it’s sort of like, look, here’s the information I have. This is what I’m struggling with. What are the pros and cons? And then it…

Herdrapp (30:12.52)
Yeah.

Alex (30:20.758)
helps you clarify that very quickly. I might say, right, you know, I don’t have to like pick up the phone and call my friend Kevin and see if he’s free and in the mind space of like, you know, helping me talk through this. I just discussed this with the AI model and then the AI model comes back and then I go, well, you know, I was thinking about it now that you’ve responded this way, I’d like to change that idea. And that’s great because it helps you clarify your thought process significantly quickly compared to any other way of doing it.

Herdrapp (30:30.131)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Alex (30:50.766)
And then at that stage I essentially very often just tell the air ball okay fine give it everything you know, right? What you dig in this situation, right? And they’d be like, well, I don’t know, you know, spend more time calling me Spend more time with the child or something like that, right? You know what? Thanks for making that decision for me on the flippin I Think we can do this because you know, we’ve actually made decisions before so we kind of know like, you know, you know

Herdrapp (30:55.892)
Give you every right.

You’re right.

Right.

Alex (31:19.758)
the quality of the decision making and we can go like that doesn’t make sense. I’m not so sure how what that says for our children right you know my son doesn’t know how to add but now you know someone asked him what’s three plus two why wouldn’t he go to an AI model and at that stage you’re kind of like okay you know you might because it exists but then what does that do for their development etc but but but that’s a

Herdrapp (31:22.203)
Yeah.

Herdrapp (31:29.381)
Yeah, no.

Right, yeah.

Herdrapp (31:47.059)
State development, right.

Alex (31:49.944)
That’s a non-startup question. That’s a dad question. I don’t know what the answer is to that.

Herdrapp (31:52.096)
Yeah, no, no, yeah. No, it’s good. Yeah. mean, so, you know, anyone that’s probably listening, I’m sure there’s, you know, people thinking about doing a startup and bootstrapping. Like what’s one piece of advice you would give to anyone that’s looking to just jump into the foray and, you know, start, you know, looking into a business or something. I know one of the things you kind of touched on earlier was you were, you were

You know, you did research papers and stuff like that. And I think sometimes people will try to navigate out of areas that they’re not maybe familiar with. Like, what’s some advice you would give someone looking for a fix?

Alex (32:32.138)
So the one advice I’d give, and honestly I wish I’d just done this earlier, like in my 20s, and I spent a lot of time in corporate environments, and there’s this sense of fear that you don’t know what you don’t know, and will I even be able to do this in opera? To a large extent, what I underestimated was the amount of help I was gonna get. So I touched upon this earlier where I said,

Herdrapp (32:38.631)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (32:51.629)
Yeah

Alex (33:01.654)
I didn’t know what the difference was between front end development and back end development when I had this idea. But it was amazing how many people were willing to help me out if I had that question. Like no one’s ever treated me like, know, that was a stupid question. Why would you ever ask that? I think a lot of the fears in our heads where we’re worried that we seem stupid to people or, you know, we sound stupid or say something stupid.

Herdrapp (33:16.423)
Yeah.

Alex (33:28.214)
But turns out most people are kind and nice and you know if you reach out to them and say hey you know I think you can help me out and I’ve got this question can you help me out? Some people may not respond but that’s not so much in my experience it’s not because you know they don’t want to respond it’s probably because they have a child who’s just woken them up for a year right? They’re just tired right? They just haven’t heard about you they won’t get around but most people actually are very helpful.

Herdrapp (33:48.096)
Yeah, right.

Alex (33:56.398)
I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect that kind of support and help. Because you think that you’re all on your own, which is true to some extent, but you’re also not. If you need the advice and you need help, people are there.

Herdrapp (33:59.166)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (34:12.881)
That’s good. Yeah. And you know, I was getting close to the end here. What’s kind of next for, you know, GenTex or your projects or whatever is on the horizon? Like what’s your kind of goals as far as your next step in entrepreneurship, like for the business, for yourself, which kind of

Alex (34:28.088)
So for now, we’re having a lot of fun just with the business. I plan on keeping this as lean as possible. I’ve got this internal metric in my head in terms of revenue per employee, which is sort of a really high number. And you go, OK, fine, let’s just try to grow this as much as possible. With the idea that we’ll take a decision at that stage, there’s some natural.

Herdrapp (34:32.007)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Herdrapp (34:39.65)
Yeah, yeah.

Alex (34:55.096)
Possibilities with a startup especially if it’s profitable, right? You know, you can either exit it or you could run this as a business which you know you Used to finance other businesses and you know go in for bigger bigger and bigger place They’ve been all permutations and combinations of this that have been done to be honest right now We’re just not there yet. So it’s hard to say

Herdrapp (35:10.216)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (35:20.974)
So at this stage, essentially get it up to a scale where those options become available to us, right? Where it’s either, you know, we’re big enough and now we can go acquire another company which is complimentary to us and then, you know, grow that business because of everything that we’ve learned in terms of marketing a product and grow that business further. That’s one option. The other option is be the company that sells to another company and, you know, which also be the same thing. So, but that…

Herdrapp (35:27.879)
Right.

Herdrapp (35:40.977)
Mm-hmm.

Herdrapp (35:46.38)
Yeah. Right.

Alex (35:50.092)
All of that’s much later on in our stage. It will take us a few years to get there.

Herdrapp (35:55.476)
Okay, so where can people follow you on your journey? You’re on social media. I know you got gentex.ai, is that correct? Yep.

Alex (36:02.606)
GenTekstar.ai, that’s our website. The Microsoft App Store is great. So it’s a store that most people don’t know about. And it’s an app marketplace, kind of like your iOS or Google Play Store. And we’re on the App Store. So we’re one of the most downloaded products on the store. But there are other add-ins as well, which help you out. Like there’s a YouTube add-in.

Herdrapp (36:07.407)
Okay, yeah, yeah.

Herdrapp (36:17.746)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (36:27.232)
other add-ins from Dropbox, et cetera, just to help you with your workflows. if actually more than GenTex, if I could get people on the Microsoft App Store, right? And just get them to know that. Just get them there because once they’re there, I know that they’ll find value, if not through GenTex or MentorMode, they’ll find value through the other products, right? In their workflow. But that’s where they can find us. We have a Twitter account, GenTex AI.

Herdrapp (36:37.849)
Yeah, no, right. Yeah, just get them there.

Alex (36:54.798)
I should probably be doing a lot more on social media, but I don’t. Right? So that’s probably one of the other things on my list of things to do in terms of, you know, just thriving engagement. But yeah, that’s where you’ll find us.

Herdrapp (36:59.41)
Okay.

Herdrapp (37:05.779)
Gotcha.

Okay. Well, yeah, you know, Alex, you know, I appreciate, you know, coming on today and just kind of giving some insights on your journey. And I’m sure a lot of people who are listening and probably get some good, you know, information that they can possibly hopefully use in their business startup. Again, thanks for coming on today.

Alex (37:25.602)
Cool, and thanks for the invite, Kevin. It’s been a pleasure. Lot of fun.

Herdrapp (37:28.68)
Yep.